He’s a deranged animal
Trump tells more vicious disgusting lies about Obama.
President Trump falsely asserted on Monday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, and other presidents did not contact the families of American troops killed in duty, drawing a swift, angry rebuke from several of Mr. Obama’s former aides.
That’s a foul thing to say, especially for that puffed-up bladder of a man who insulted the parents of a Muslim soldier killed in action in Iraq during the campaign.
I’m so sick of malicious lies. People have been telling malicious lies about me today so I’m in a filthy mood, but I’m sick of them anyway. Malicious lies ruin everything.
Trump was asked why he hadn’t said anything in public about four soldiers killed in an ambush in Niger last week.
Mr. Trump said he had written personal letters to their families and planned to call them in the coming week.
“If you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls,” Mr. Trump said during a news conference in the Rose Garden with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. “A lot of them didn’t make calls. I like to call when it’s appropriate.”
Mr. Trump’s assertion belied a long record of meetings Mr. Obama held with the families of killed service people, as well as calls and letters. Mr. Obama regularly traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to greet the caskets of troops, a ritual that began early in his presidency before he decided to deploy 30,000 troops to Afghanistan.
“This is an outrageous and disrespectful lie even by Trump standards,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama, posted on Twitter. “Also,” Mr. Rhodes added, “Obama never attacked a Gold Star family.”
Precisely.
Another former aide put it even more forcefully.
that's a fucking lie. to say president obama (or past presidents) didn't call the family members of soldiers KIA – he's a deranged animal.
— alyssa mastromonaco (@AlyssaMastro44) October 16, 2017
When Mr. Trump was pressed a few minutes later about his claim about Mr. Obama, he waffled.
“I don’t know if he did,” the president said. “I was told he didn’t often, and a lot of presidents don’t. They write letters.”
“President Obama, I think, probably did sometimes and maybe sometimes he didn’t,” Mr. Trump continued. “That’s what I was told. All I can do is ask my generals.”
The lying rat.
“I was told he didn’t by the clever man in my head” said the negative-figure IQ’d president.
He didn’t go it!
Yes, he did.
Well, yes. But not very often.
And there he is again with the my generals. How long before the tinpot fucking dictator starts stepping out in his own faux uniform with all the gold braid and milk bottle-top medals?
I realise that this has never come to Trump’s notice but Presidents, their senior aides and cabinet members write books which a little later will be among the sources for historians. I expect the highly literate Obama administration will produce a good shelf-full in the next decade. Trumpdom not so much.
We have only months to wait for the accounts of both Mr and Mrs Obama. Then what will he do?
Hang on, I thought referring to people, any people, as “an animal” (deranged or not) was totally unacceptably othering and/or dehumanising.
Did that change? Or is it only suitably metaphorical when we do it, but literally dehumanising when they do it?
@Karellen I think the idea is that referring to categories of people (Jews, Blacks, disabled people, Tutsis) as animals historically leads to us treating/being treated like animals. Doing that, or referring to someone as an animal because of her/his membership in a despised category, would be bad. Calling a particular person an animal because of his actions rather than his membership in a despised category can be descriptive of that particular person.
guest, Karellen – in point of fact, I hate that myself, for different reasons. It tends to obscure the fact that we, humans, actually ARE animals, and attempts to set us so far apart from the rest of the species that we become, in a sense, demigods. As a biologist, I am careful to use the phrase “humans and other animals”, and as far as referring to someone as an “animal”, I think that is bad because it gives more strength to those anti-evolutionists who proclaim that “if you tell kids they’re animals, they’ll behave like animals”. Yes, they will. Because no matter how they behave, that is animal behavior. And it also gives the impression that there is something wrong with the way ‘animals’ behave. There are dangerous animals and scary animals, but their behavior isn’t wrong, it’s simply normal for them and harmful to us, because their instinct is their own preservation.
In short, just a semantic complaint, but, well, someone needs to say it sooner or later. Yes, Trump is an animal. As I am an animal. As you are an animal. And we need to reclaim that designation proudly, and cease using it to denigrate other people. There are many wonderfully descriptive phrases that could apply to Trump, we don’t need this one.
@iknklast–I completely agree with you (also cf conversation about ‘meatbags’)–but I think when we describe someone as an ‘animal’ what we’re doing is saying ‘I believe it’s OK to treat x like an animal’ (which is generally not a good thing for the animal–at the very least, we’re constraining their behaviour and controlling their environment). And generally we’re calling to mind how we treat the specific animal in question–what do most people do to snakes, cockroaches, insects?
Incidentally the distinction I describes explains why we feel differently about calling W Bush a monkey vs calling Barack Obama a monkey.
I used Mastromonaco’s angry blurt for the title. No, I don’t use “animal” as an epithet myself, mostly because it feels so imprecise. As a quondam zookeeper I have some acquaintance with a lot of kinds of animals, and Trump doesn’t remind me of them. But I used Mastromonaco’s angry blurt because it was an angry blurt – it conveyed the feeling of gut-level outrage that Trump’s disgusting lie caused. No, I don’t think that qualifies as hypocrisy or it’s “only suitably metaphorical when we do it, but literally dehumanising when they do it.” Thanks for the thought.