It is difficult to imagine anyone defending the destruction and disruption.
Butt ... they do.
- LexusLover
- 06-27-2020, 02:57 PM
- oeb11
- 06-27-2020, 03:22 PM
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ox...r-to-students/
Snopes determined the :
‘Dear Scrotty Students’ Letter to Oxford University Students
A letter purportedly from Oxford University's chancellor to students protesting a statue of Cecil Rhodes did not originate with the university.
However, Oxford University’s chancellor, Chris Patten did argue against the removal of the Rhodes statue during an appearance on the Today program on BBC Radio 4 in January 2016, his language was far tamer than the openly racist rhetoric employed in Breitbart’s fictional letter:
It would have been wonderful to have the Breitbart missive endorsed by by the university to counter race-baiting protests - but even Princeton University decided to remove Woodrow Wilson due to "offended students" and others protests.
Question - what do history books write about the presidency when Woodrow Wilson and US grant ( who by the way was an abolitionist and spearheaded the right to vote for Blacks.) When history is no more - our culture and civilization and representative democracy are also no more.
Ulysses S. Grant evolved in his views and gradually came to support black voting rights. He acknowledged in his Personal Memoirs that he initially supported the idea that African Americans would first experience “a time of probation, in which the ex-slaves could prepare themselves for the privileges of citizenship before the full right would be conferred.” The actions of President Andrew Johnson worried Grant, however. Grant believed that Johnson’s lenient amnesty policies towards former Confederates had emboldened them, leading to possible future conflict between the sections. “The Southerners had the most power in the executive branch, Mr. Johnson having gone to their side,” Grant argued. By 1868 it became clear to Grant that African Americans were the most loyal Southerners to the Union and in need of additional protection. By vesting black men with voting rights, it provided stability to the country moving forward. “While strongly favoring the course that would be the least humiliating the people who had been in rebellion, I had gradually worked up to the point where, with the majority of the people, I favored immediate enfranchisement [for African Americans],” Grant argued.
The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. It states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
OBLM movement has as one of its Marxist objectives the destruction of history, and starting a new marxist government from a burned, ruined ground.
These are the agitators, enablers, and fomentors of rioting, looting, and destruction.
"He who knoweth not history, Is condemned to repeat It" - loosely phrased.
The anti-Trump hatred has evolved into a hatred for the Constitution and rule of law - in favor of a Marxist totalitarian state - which is the objective of the OBLM leadership - and are using the fear of being labelled racist to bully all America into submission.
Time to stand up and tell the Marxists to take their own Racist hatred of anything not their own color and beliefs - and go stuff it.
By force to liberate cities from the tyranny of terrorism -if necessary - and given the DemLib mayors/governors attitudes - it is necessary.
Snopes determined the :
‘Dear Scrotty Students’ Letter to Oxford University Students
A letter purportedly from Oxford University's chancellor to students protesting a statue of Cecil Rhodes did not originate with the university.
- Published 12 April 2016
However, Oxford University’s chancellor, Chris Patten did argue against the removal of the Rhodes statue during an appearance on the Today program on BBC Radio 4 in January 2016, his language was far tamer than the openly racist rhetoric employed in Breitbart’s fictional letter:
“But if people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history, if they are not prepared to embrace all those values which are contained in the most important book for any undergraduate, Karl Popper’s Open Society, if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere. But I hope they will embrace those issues and engage in debate.”The protests, which have developed into an international movement, are real and ongoing. However, the circulating letter that’s alleged to be from Oxford University’s chancellor is fake, and first originated as a satirical op-ed piece written by a London-based contributor to Breitbart.com.
Patten styled the objections to Rhodes as along the lines of the “safe spaces” policies adopted on many university campuses in Britain and the US, which critics have said are used to suppress debate on a range of issues.
“That focus on Rhodes is unfortunate but it’s an example of what’s happening in American campuses and British campuses,” Patten said. “One of the points of a university – which is not to tolerate intolerance, to engage in free inquiry and debate – is being denied. People have to face up to facts in history which they don’t like and talk about them and debate them.”
He added: “Can you imagine a university where there is no platform? I mean a bland diet of bran to feed people, it’s an absolutely terrible idea. If you want universities like that you go to China where they are not allowed to talk about western values, which I regard as global values. No, it’s not the way a university should operate.”
- Published 12 April 2016
It would have been wonderful to have the Breitbart missive endorsed by by the university to counter race-baiting protests - but even Princeton University decided to remove Woodrow Wilson due to "offended students" and others protests.
Question - what do history books write about the presidency when Woodrow Wilson and US grant ( who by the way was an abolitionist and spearheaded the right to vote for Blacks.) When history is no more - our culture and civilization and representative democracy are also no more.
Ulysses S. Grant evolved in his views and gradually came to support black voting rights. He acknowledged in his Personal Memoirs that he initially supported the idea that African Americans would first experience “a time of probation, in which the ex-slaves could prepare themselves for the privileges of citizenship before the full right would be conferred.” The actions of President Andrew Johnson worried Grant, however. Grant believed that Johnson’s lenient amnesty policies towards former Confederates had emboldened them, leading to possible future conflict between the sections. “The Southerners had the most power in the executive branch, Mr. Johnson having gone to their side,” Grant argued. By 1868 it became clear to Grant that African Americans were the most loyal Southerners to the Union and in need of additional protection. By vesting black men with voting rights, it provided stability to the country moving forward. “While strongly favoring the course that would be the least humiliating the people who had been in rebellion, I had gradually worked up to the point where, with the majority of the people, I favored immediate enfranchisement [for African Americans],” Grant argued.
The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. It states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
OBLM movement has as one of its Marxist objectives the destruction of history, and starting a new marxist government from a burned, ruined ground.
These are the agitators, enablers, and fomentors of rioting, looting, and destruction.
"He who knoweth not history, Is condemned to repeat It" - loosely phrased.
The anti-Trump hatred has evolved into a hatred for the Constitution and rule of law - in favor of a Marxist totalitarian state - which is the objective of the OBLM leadership - and are using the fear of being labelled racist to bully all America into submission.
Time to stand up and tell the Marxists to take their own Racist hatred of anything not their own color and beliefs - and go stuff it.
By force to liberate cities from the tyranny of terrorism -if necessary - and given the DemLib mayors/governors attitudes - it is necessary.
- friendly fred
- 06-27-2020, 03:34 PM
- friendly fred
- 06-27-2020, 03:37 PM
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ox...r-to-students/The leftists are definitely trying to destroy the beloved America that defeated the Nazi's in WWII, fought a brutal war to end slavery, and voluntarily gave the right to vote to black men.
Snopes determined the :
‘Dear Scrotty Students’ Letter to Oxford University Students
A letter purportedly from Oxford University's chancellor to students protesting a statue of Cecil Rhodes did not originate with the university.
It is fictional from Breitbart.
- Published 12 April 2016
However, Oxford University’s chancellor, Chris Patten did argue against the removal of the Rhodes statue during an appearance on the Today program on BBC Radio 4 in January 2016, his language was far tamer than the openly racist rhetoric employed in Breitbart’s fictional letter:“But if people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history, if they are not prepared to embrace all those values which are contained in the most important book for any undergraduate, Karl Popper’s Open Society, if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere. But I hope they will embrace those issues and engage in debate.”The protests, which have developed into an international movement, are real and ongoing. However, the circulating letter that’s alleged to be from Oxford University’s chancellor is fake, and first originated as a satirical op-ed piece written by a London-based contributor to Breitbart.com.
Patten styled the objections to Rhodes as along the lines of the “safe spaces” policies adopted on many university campuses in Britain and the US, which critics have said are used to suppress debate on a range of issues.
“That focus on Rhodes is unfortunate but it’s an example of what’s happening in American campuses and British campuses,” Patten said. “One of the points of a university – which is not to tolerate intolerance, to engage in free inquiry and debate – is being denied. People have to face up to facts in history which they don’t like and talk about them and debate them.”
He added: “Can you imagine a university where there is no platform? I mean a bland diet of bran to feed people, it’s an absolutely terrible idea. If you want universities like that you go to China where they are not allowed to talk about western values, which I regard as global values. No, it’s not the way a university should operate.”
- Published 12 April 2016
It would have been wonderful to have the Breitbart missive endorsed by by the university to counter race-baiting protests - but even Princeton University decided to remove Woodrow Wilson due to "offended students" and others protests.
Question - what do history books write about the presidency when Woodrow Wilson and US grant ( who by the way was an abolitionist and spearheaded the right to vote for Blacks.) When history is no more - our culture and civilization and representative democracy are also no more.
Ulysses S. Grant evolved in his views and gradually came to support black voting rights. He acknowledged in his Personal Memoirs that he initially supported the idea that African Americans would first experience “a time of probation, in which the ex-slaves could prepare themselves for the privileges of citizenship before the full right would be conferred.” The actions of President Andrew Johnson worried Grant, however. Grant believed that Johnson’s lenient amnesty policies towards former Confederates had emboldened them, leading to possible future conflict between the sections. “The Southerners had the most power in the executive branch, Mr. Johnson having gone to their side,” Grant argued. By 1868 it became clear to Grant that African Americans were the most loyal Southerners to the Union and in need of additional protection. By vesting black men with voting rights, it provided stability to the country moving forward. “While strongly favoring the course that would be the least humiliating the people who had been in rebellion, I had gradually worked up to the point where, with the majority of the people, I favored immediate enfranchisement [for African Americans],” Grant argued.
The 15th Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. It states that “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
OBLM movement has as one of its Marxist objectives the destruction of history, and starting a new marxist government from a burned, ruined ground.
These are the agitators, enablers, and fomentors of rioting, looting, and destruction.
"He who knoweth not history, Is condemned to repeat It" - loosely phrased.
The anti-Trump hatred has evolved into a hatred for the Constitution and rule of law - in favor of a Marxist totalitarian state - which is the objective of the OBLM leadership - and are using the fear of being labelled racist to bully all America into submission.
Time to stand up and tell the Marxists to take their own Racist hatred of anything not their own color and beliefs - and go stuff it.
By force to liberate cities from the tyranny of terrorism -if necessary - and given the DemLib mayors/governors attitudes - it is necessary. Originally Posted by oeb11
- oeb11
- 06-27-2020, 03:42 PM
Agreed-FF
Their hero is Uncle Joe (Stalin).
If biden is elected - get ready to move out , or be killed .
The marxist revolutionaries will have won.
Their hero is Uncle Joe (Stalin).
If biden is elected - get ready to move out , or be killed .
The marxist revolutionaries will have won.
- eccieuser9500
- 06-27-2020, 03:55 PM
We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed.That's all that was needed to be written.
Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you. Originally Posted by pocadot1959
So you have proven how stupid you can be. Big deal. As if this post represents Oxford's position. Look who the first respondent is. A person who represents everything bad about Texas. A person who exemplifies every worst trait a Texan can have. He is stupid, racist, uneducated, opinionated, resistant to new information, and believes anything shouted at him. He has but 2 redeaming qualities. One is he left Austin while under indictment for banned topic and the other is he pays taxes every few years.
As far as Oxford goes, get back to us when you have their official response and not your own douche-baggian version.
Now take a hike. Originally Posted by Munchmasterman
- dilbert firestorm
- 06-27-2020, 04:01 PM
ho hum.. fake letter. but it is something oxford should have said to the 2 cancel culture idiots.
- eccieuser9500
- 06-27-2020, 04:05 PM
Surviving Autocracy
One of Trump’s three rallying cries on the campaign trail – one of the three apparent components of making America great again – was “Drain the swamp” (the other two were “Lock her up” and “Build that wall”). It may have sounded like a call to battle against corruption, but it was in fact a declaration of war against the American system of government as currently constituted.
The Trump campaign ran on disdain: for immigrants, for women, for disabled people, for people of colour, for Muslims – for anyone, in other words, who isn’t an able-bodied white straight American-born male – and for the elites who have coddled the Other.
Contempt for the government and its work is a rhetorical trope shared by the current crop of the world’s antipolitical leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. They campaign on voters’ resentment of elites for ruining their lives, and they continue to traffic in this resentment even after they take office – as though someone else, someone sinister and apparently all-powerful, were still in charge, as though they were still insurgents. The very institutions of government – their own government now – are the enemy. As president, Trump went on to denigrate the intelligence services, rage against the justice department, and issue humiliating tweets about officials in his own administration.
For his cabinet, Trump chose people who were opposed to the work, and sometimes to the very existence, of the agencies they were appointed to lead. His pick for the Environmental Protection Agency,Scott Pruitt, had, as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA 14 times for what the state alleged was regulatory overreach. For Health and Human Services, Trump nominated Georgia congressmanTom Price, who said that he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. For attorney general, Trump’s choice wasJeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was once denied a judgeship and was an outspoken opponent of civil rights law. Trump’s choice for energy secretary, former governor of TexasRick Perry, had, during the Republican primary race in 2011, promised to abolish the Department of Energy.Betsy DeVos, Trump’s choice for secretary of education, was a consistent foe of public education.
Trump’s cabinet picks lied and plagiarised their way through their confirmation hearings. Six weeks after Trump took office, the investigative journalism foundation ProPublica compiled a list of lies told to the Senate by five of Trump’s nominees: Pruitt, DeVos,Treasury pick Steve Mnuchin, Price and Sessions.
Lying to Congress is a criminal offence. It would also, in other historical periods, be a disgrace. Why would the nominees to some of the nation’s highest offices lie, and lie in ways that were easy enough to catch and document? Why wouldn’t they? They weren’t merely parroting the behaviours of their patron, who lied loudly, insistently, incessantly; they were demonstrating that they shared his contempt for government. They were lying to the swamp.
A close cousin of contempt for government is disdain for excellence, also shared by a number of contemporary autocratic leaders – whose antipolitical politics are also distinctly anti-intellectual. As president-elect, Trump opted to take intelligence briefings just once a week rather than daily or almost daily, as had been the custom. He explained why: “I’m, like, a smart person.” Like a pouty eighth-grader, he added: “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” If something should change in the world, he said, the intelligence chiefs could find their president and inform him. Trump was perhaps the first American president who seemed not at all impressed by the burden of responsibility of his office: he had no regard for his predecessors, or for the job, and its demands annoyed him.
Much was said following the election about the probability of Trump – the buffoon, the vulgarian, the racist – becoming “presidential”. The underlying assumption was that as president, Trump should develop some reverence for the office he would now hold, and for the system at the pinnacle of which the electoral college had placed him. This assumption – this misplaced hope – ran counter to the essence of the Trumpian project. On January 20, 2017, the nation saw that it wasinaugurating a presidentlike no president before him: a president who viewed the government with contempt.
Autocrats declare their intentions early on. We disbelieve or ignore them at our peril. Putin, for example, had made his plans apparent by the end of his first day in office: a series of spare statements and legislative initiatives, along with a police raid, showed that he was going to focus on remilitarising Russia, that he would dismantle its electoral institutions, and that he would crack down on the media. His autocratic attempt – the buildup to actually wielding autocratic power, throwing opponents into jail, controlling media, and eviscerating any political power outside his office – took three or four years, but he had made his objectives clear from the start. Trump was also broadcasting his intentions: during the campaign and again on the first day of his presidency.
For 24 hours, Trump not only trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power; he made a spectacle of doing so. He defiled the inauguration with a speech that was mean and meaningless and alsobadly written, pitched to the basest level of emotion and intelligence. “We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon” was how he summed up the American foreign policy legacy. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost” is how he summed up the work of all the men and women who had come before him, in effect the entire political history of the country, which he now declared to be over: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Having dismissed the political past, he offered, by way of a vision for the future, a fortress under siege: a walled country that puts itself first, convention and consideration for others be damned.
In his small-mindedness and lack of aspiration, Trump curiously resembled Putin, though the origins of the two men’s stubborn mediocrity could not be more different. Aspiration should not be confused with ambition – both men want to be ever more powerful and wealthy, but neither wants to be, or even to appear to be, better. Putin, for example, continuously reasserts his lack of aspiration by making crude jokes at the most inappropriate times –as when, during a joint appearance with German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, he compared EU monetary policy to a wedding night: “No matter what you do, the result will be the same,” he quipped, his way of lightly covering up the “you get fucked” punch line. (The German chancellor was captured cringing on video.)
Trump marked his first moments in office by wielding power vengefully: the head of the DC national guard lost his job at noon, as did all US ambassadors around the world – just because they all serve at the pleasure of the president, and the incoming president liked firing people. Between festivities, Trump signed an executive order to beginundoing his predecessor’s singular achievement, the Affordable Care Act. He had the White House website swept clean of substantive content on climate policy, civil rights, health care and LGBT rights, took down the Spanish-language site, and added a biography of his wife that advertised her mail-order jewellery line. At the same time, as the new president moved through the day, he repeatedly turned his back on his wife. He immediately degraded the look of the Oval Office by hanging gold drapes.
At one of the inaugural balls, Trump and vice-presidentMike Pencecut a great white cake with a sword. The cake, as it turned out, was a knockoff of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design, even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may have been the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brought was plagiarised, and most of it was unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended.
Three years to the day after the inauguration, the first person in the United States,a man in Washington state, was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, starting the symbolic clock on the Trump administration’s inaction in the face of a deadly pandemic. While all American presidents wield the power to save and destroy lives, only in times of peril – during wars, natural disasters, and epidemics – is that power wielded so immediately, and with such devastating effects.
Trump maintained his disdain for government and his contempt for expertise. He ignored intelligence briefings in which he was warned about the threat of mass deaths. He ignored the public pleas of epidemiologists, including his own former top officials writing inThe Wall Street Journal. On television and on Twitter, he dismissed fears about the coronavirus as a “hoax” and promised, “It’s going to be just fine”. In the first half of March, when the looming disaster was coming into focus,Trump visited the Centers for Disease Control, wearing a red “Keep America Great” cap, and bragged: “I like this stuff, I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” Standing in a lab, facing the cameras, Trump claimed that anyone in the United States who needed to be tested for Covid-19 would be able to get the test. Everything he said was a lie.
He lavished praise on himself for acting decisively, but he resisted taking action such as invoking theDefense Production Act, to compel companies to turn their facilities over to manufacturing essential equipment, which could have displeased the heads of large corporations. Instead, he trafficked in false hopes and even the promise of fake remedies. This left experts either to try to correct Trump in real time, asDr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to do, at great personal risk, or to neutralise him, as the coordinator of his coronavirus task force,Dr Deborah Birx, tried to do, at great cost to her reputation as a public health specialist. As the death toll climbed, Trump’s lack of aspiration took on grotesque dimensions. He did not seem cowed by catastrophe, or scared by it: he could barely be bothered to notice it. At moments, he would seem grave, even referring to himself as a “wartime president” but almost immediately he would be distracted by his real and permanent concerns: adulation and money. Nothing and no one else mattered.
Masha Gessen
One of Trump’s three rallying cries on the campaign trail – one of the three apparent components of making America great again – was “Drain the swamp” (the other two were “Lock her up” and “Build that wall”). It may have sounded like a call to battle against corruption, but it was in fact a declaration of war against the American system of government as currently constituted.
The Trump campaign ran on disdain: for immigrants, for women, for disabled people, for people of colour, for Muslims – for anyone, in other words, who isn’t an able-bodied white straight American-born male – and for the elites who have coddled the Other.
Contempt for the government and its work is a rhetorical trope shared by the current crop of the world’s antipolitical leaders, from Vladimir Putin to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro. They campaign on voters’ resentment of elites for ruining their lives, and they continue to traffic in this resentment even after they take office – as though someone else, someone sinister and apparently all-powerful, were still in charge, as though they were still insurgents. The very institutions of government – their own government now – are the enemy. As president, Trump went on to denigrate the intelligence services, rage against the justice department, and issue humiliating tweets about officials in his own administration.
For his cabinet, Trump chose people who were opposed to the work, and sometimes to the very existence, of the agencies they were appointed to lead. His pick for the Environmental Protection Agency,Scott Pruitt, had, as attorney general of Oklahoma, sued the EPA 14 times for what the state alleged was regulatory overreach. For Health and Human Services, Trump nominated Georgia congressmanTom Price, who said that he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid. For attorney general, Trump’s choice wasJeff Sessions, an Alabama senator who was once denied a judgeship and was an outspoken opponent of civil rights law. Trump’s choice for energy secretary, former governor of TexasRick Perry, had, during the Republican primary race in 2011, promised to abolish the Department of Energy.Betsy DeVos, Trump’s choice for secretary of education, was a consistent foe of public education.
Trump’s cabinet picks lied and plagiarised their way through their confirmation hearings. Six weeks after Trump took office, the investigative journalism foundation ProPublica compiled a list of lies told to the Senate by five of Trump’s nominees: Pruitt, DeVos,Treasury pick Steve Mnuchin, Price and Sessions.
Lying to Congress is a criminal offence. It would also, in other historical periods, be a disgrace. Why would the nominees to some of the nation’s highest offices lie, and lie in ways that were easy enough to catch and document? Why wouldn’t they? They weren’t merely parroting the behaviours of their patron, who lied loudly, insistently, incessantly; they were demonstrating that they shared his contempt for government. They were lying to the swamp.
A close cousin of contempt for government is disdain for excellence, also shared by a number of contemporary autocratic leaders – whose antipolitical politics are also distinctly anti-intellectual. As president-elect, Trump opted to take intelligence briefings just once a week rather than daily or almost daily, as had been the custom. He explained why: “I’m, like, a smart person.” Like a pouty eighth-grader, he added: “I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.” If something should change in the world, he said, the intelligence chiefs could find their president and inform him. Trump was perhaps the first American president who seemed not at all impressed by the burden of responsibility of his office: he had no regard for his predecessors, or for the job, and its demands annoyed him.
Much was said following the election about the probability of Trump – the buffoon, the vulgarian, the racist – becoming “presidential”. The underlying assumption was that as president, Trump should develop some reverence for the office he would now hold, and for the system at the pinnacle of which the electoral college had placed him. This assumption – this misplaced hope – ran counter to the essence of the Trumpian project. On January 20, 2017, the nation saw that it wasinaugurating a presidentlike no president before him: a president who viewed the government with contempt.
Autocrats declare their intentions early on. We disbelieve or ignore them at our peril. Putin, for example, had made his plans apparent by the end of his first day in office: a series of spare statements and legislative initiatives, along with a police raid, showed that he was going to focus on remilitarising Russia, that he would dismantle its electoral institutions, and that he would crack down on the media. His autocratic attempt – the buildup to actually wielding autocratic power, throwing opponents into jail, controlling media, and eviscerating any political power outside his office – took three or four years, but he had made his objectives clear from the start. Trump was also broadcasting his intentions: during the campaign and again on the first day of his presidency.
For 24 hours, Trump not only trampled on some of the most hallowed public rituals of American power; he made a spectacle of doing so. He defiled the inauguration with a speech that was mean and meaningless and alsobadly written, pitched to the basest level of emotion and intelligence. “We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon” was how he summed up the American foreign policy legacy. “For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost” is how he summed up the work of all the men and women who had come before him, in effect the entire political history of the country, which he now declared to be over: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Having dismissed the political past, he offered, by way of a vision for the future, a fortress under siege: a walled country that puts itself first, convention and consideration for others be damned.
In his small-mindedness and lack of aspiration, Trump curiously resembled Putin, though the origins of the two men’s stubborn mediocrity could not be more different. Aspiration should not be confused with ambition – both men want to be ever more powerful and wealthy, but neither wants to be, or even to appear to be, better. Putin, for example, continuously reasserts his lack of aspiration by making crude jokes at the most inappropriate times –as when, during a joint appearance with German chancellor Angela Merkel in 2013, he compared EU monetary policy to a wedding night: “No matter what you do, the result will be the same,” he quipped, his way of lightly covering up the “you get fucked” punch line. (The German chancellor was captured cringing on video.)
Trump marked his first moments in office by wielding power vengefully: the head of the DC national guard lost his job at noon, as did all US ambassadors around the world – just because they all serve at the pleasure of the president, and the incoming president liked firing people. Between festivities, Trump signed an executive order to beginundoing his predecessor’s singular achievement, the Affordable Care Act. He had the White House website swept clean of substantive content on climate policy, civil rights, health care and LGBT rights, took down the Spanish-language site, and added a biography of his wife that advertised her mail-order jewellery line. At the same time, as the new president moved through the day, he repeatedly turned his back on his wife. He immediately degraded the look of the Oval Office by hanging gold drapes.
At one of the inaugural balls, Trump and vice-presidentMike Pencecut a great white cake with a sword. The cake, as it turned out, was a knockoff of President Obama’s 2013 inaugural ball cake. Obama’s was created by celebrity chef Duff Goldman. Trump’s was commissioned from a decidedly more modest Washington bakery than Goldman’s, and the transition-team representative who put in the order explicitly asked for an exact copy of Goldman’s design, even when the baker suggested creating a variation on the theme. Only a small portion of Trump’s cake was edible; the rest was styrofoam (Obama’s was cake all the way through). The cake may have been the best symbol yet of the incoming administration: much of what little it brought was plagiarised, and most of it was unusable for the purpose for which presidential administrations are usually intended.
Three years to the day after the inauguration, the first person in the United States,a man in Washington state, was diagnosed with the novel coronavirus, starting the symbolic clock on the Trump administration’s inaction in the face of a deadly pandemic. While all American presidents wield the power to save and destroy lives, only in times of peril – during wars, natural disasters, and epidemics – is that power wielded so immediately, and with such devastating effects.
Trump maintained his disdain for government and his contempt for expertise. He ignored intelligence briefings in which he was warned about the threat of mass deaths. He ignored the public pleas of epidemiologists, including his own former top officials writing inThe Wall Street Journal. On television and on Twitter, he dismissed fears about the coronavirus as a “hoax” and promised, “It’s going to be just fine”. In the first half of March, when the looming disaster was coming into focus,Trump visited the Centers for Disease Control, wearing a red “Keep America Great” cap, and bragged: “I like this stuff, I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said: ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” Standing in a lab, facing the cameras, Trump claimed that anyone in the United States who needed to be tested for Covid-19 would be able to get the test. Everything he said was a lie.
He lavished praise on himself for acting decisively, but he resisted taking action such as invoking theDefense Production Act, to compel companies to turn their facilities over to manufacturing essential equipment, which could have displeased the heads of large corporations. Instead, he trafficked in false hopes and even the promise of fake remedies. This left experts either to try to correct Trump in real time, asDr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tried to do, at great personal risk, or to neutralise him, as the coordinator of his coronavirus task force,Dr Deborah Birx, tried to do, at great cost to her reputation as a public health specialist. As the death toll climbed, Trump’s lack of aspiration took on grotesque dimensions. He did not seem cowed by catastrophe, or scared by it: he could barely be bothered to notice it. At moments, he would seem grave, even referring to himself as a “wartime president” but almost immediately he would be distracted by his real and permanent concerns: adulation and money. Nothing and no one else mattered.
Masha Gessen
- oeb11
- 06-27-2020, 04:41 PM
Vote Biden - 9500- You will have an AK in your face within the four years.
- friendly fred
- 06-27-2020, 08:25 PM