Keep Talking, Trump

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/trump_s_phoenix_speech_was_awful_he_should_keep_talking.html


Aug. 23 2017 11:31 AM
Keep Talking, Trump
No one is better at exposing the president for the hateful fraud that he is than Trump himself.
By William Saletan


One thing you discover as a parent is that what you do is more important than what you say. If you curse at drivers, your kids don’t learn that drivers are stupid; they learn to curse. If you hit your kids, they don’t learn that it’s wrong to do what you hit them for; they learn that it’s OK to hit.

The same is true of being president. At a rally last night in Phoenix, President Trump talked about unity, selflessness, racial healing, and the rule of law. Then he made clear that he doesn’t believe in any of these things.

“Our movement is a movement built on love. It’s love for fellow citizens,” said Trump. He went on: “We are all on the same team. We are all Americans.” Then Trump spent most of the speech attacking his teammates. Twelve times, he called the media “dishonest,” “crooked,” or “sick.” “They’re bad people,” he concluded. “And I really think they don’t like our country.” He derided “all of the Democrats in Congress” (“They obstruct, that’s all they do”), Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake (“Nobody knows who the hell he is”), TV pundits (“lightweights … that nobody ever heard of”), CNN (“pathetic”), and executives who have withdrawn from White House business councils to protest Trump’s remarks about Charlottesville, Virginia (“I remember the ones that did”). In a gesture that echoed his mockery of a disabled reporter, the president lowered a hand to ridicule the shortness of “little George Stephanopoulos.”

snip//

To Trump, it’s all a script. He had a checklist of magic words to deliver after Charlottesville, and he delivered them. The whole thing was about nailing his lines. (For the Arizona crowd Tuesday night, Trump edited the script, deleting the phrase “on many sides,” which he had ad-libbed twice in his initial remarks about Charlottesville to deflect blame from the white supremacists.) The idea that the president’s remarks in such a crisis were supposed to be for and about other people, not for or about him, seems beyond his comprehension.

During the campaign, cable networks used to air Trump’s rallies in their entirety. After he got elected, they took a lot of blame for that. The argument was that they had helped him spread his message (and, in fact, MSNBC did not air his full speech last night). But since his election, in focus groups, Trump’s behavior has worn poorly. Persuadable voters—or, more precisely, the dissuadable voters who initially put Trump in office—are often repelled by his displays of spite, ego, and volatility. We don’t need Don Lemon to expose what Trump really is. We just need Trump to keep talking.

[BigmanPigman]

1. Keep talking and tweeting...more ammo to impeach him

or use the 25 Amend.

[safeinOhio]

2. I keep saying

You haven't seen any thing yet.