Trump's Shocking Recklessness

[babylonsister]

Trump's Shocking Recklessness

The president’s latest comments shouldn’t be surprising—but his deliberate inflammation of tense situations is no less stunning.

James Fallows Sep 24, 2017 Politics


During last year’s presidential campaign, I conducted a running feature called the “Trump Time Capsule.” Its purpose was to chronicle the things Donald Trump said or did that were entirely outside the range of previous presidents or major-party nominees. This, in turn, was meant to lay down a record of what was known about this man, as the electorate decided whether to elevate him to presidential power.

By the time the campaign ended, the series had reached installment #152. Who Donald Trump was, and is, was absolutely clear by election day: ignorant, biased, narcissistic, dishonest. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in our current issue, everyone who voted for him did so with ample evidence about the kind of person they considered the “better” choice, or even as a minimally acceptable choice for president. Almost nothing Trump has done since taking office should come as a surprise.

But numerous things Trump has done are objectively shocking, in the sense of further violating the norms of the office and the historic standards the previous 44 incumbents have observed. (Among the things the Trump era has taught us: the difference in nuance between shock and surprise. Donald Trump in office has delivered a nonstop series of shocks, no one of which can really be considered a surprise.)

The past 36 hours have brought two dramatic and destructive illustrations, in which Trump has recklessly done great damage in areas where even the most flawed of his predecessors felt some constraint. They are his unmistakably race-baiting attacks on athletes as widely popular as Steph Curry and LeBron James, and as controversial as Colin Kaepernick, who have in common the fact of being black; and his unmistakably war-mongering latest set of tweeted insult-threats against North Korea and its leader.

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Race Baiting

Since everyone from the sports pages to the political pages is pointing out what’s wrong with Trump’s “get that son of a bitch off the field!” comments in Alabama, obviously aimed at Kaepernick, and his follow-up Twitter war with Steph Curry, let me focus on what is unusual about it.

more...

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/09/trump-kaepernick-north-korea/540921/

[samnsara]

1. text RESIST to 50409 and send a fax to your state congress to...

..start impeachment proceedings immediately! I'm sending them hourly. But of course, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell are my Senators so they are on it already.