Staying next to the heater
The White House on Monday confirmed that President Donald Trump will not visit Arlington National Cemetery on Veterans Day.
According to Washington Post correspondent Josh Dawsey, the White House announced “a lid” on presidential movements at 10 a.m. ET, meaning the president is not scheduled to leave the White House for the remainder of the day.
But isn’t he the president who never stops talking about “our great military” and how much he loves the military and how awesome “our great military” is and doncha wish you had one like it? Yet he can’t even tear himself away from the tv to go do a respect on the day set aside to honor veterans?
Oh and also? Don’t count their votes.
Early Monday morning, after returning from a European commemoration of the end of World War I and as Americans awoke to observe the Veterans Day holiday, President Trump announced a bold new strategy: refusing to recognize the votes of U.S. service members stationed overseas.
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” the commander in chief tweeted. “An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
Trump, who has long argued without evidence that there was widespread voting fraud in the election that he won in 2016, was riffing off the tune played by Scott, Florida’s sitting governor, who leads his race to unseat incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by less than 13,000 votes out of nearly 8.2 million votes counted. The slow pace of counting mail-in votes, particularly in urban (and blue-leaning) counties such as Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, has led Scott to claim on Fox News — against the opinion of Florida’s top law enforcement agency — that “Sen. Nelson is trying to commit fraud to win this election.” What evidence does Scott have? None, other than that the offending South Florida counties “came up with 93,000 votes after election night. We still don’t know how they came up with that.”
Oh but we do know.
As it happens, we do know where those votes came from: Among other sources, many of the ballots that arrive after Election Day are cast by military service members, contractors and dependents deployed overseas.
Well then they should have mailed them sooner! Losers.
It’s raining in DC.
It wasn’t raining in DC.
From about a mile south of the cemetery, it’s been overcast all day but hasn’t started raining yet.
Unforced errors like this are why I resist the notion that Trump is some political genius. At the beginning of his term, the media couldn’t wait to declare that Trump was “presidential” and praise him for not shitting himself in public. He regularly passes up opportunities like this to shore up some of his supporters.
There’s a tendency to overrate the political genius of every winning candidate and/or his campaign manager. Karl Rove was supposedly a huge political genius just for pulling off the 2000 “victory” and then barely managing to get Bush re-elected in ’04. Then Obama’s team were supposedly brilliant for using technology to track voters and target campaign ads, etc. I’m still trying to figure out how many people simultaneously believe that Hillary was the Worst Candidate Ever and that Trump was a genius for beating her. (Bill Clinton went from being considered a droning bore at the ’88 convention to the “comeback kid” political genius in ’92, then stumbled through a rough start to his presidency and being viewed as a fluke, then a genius again in ’96. By 2008 he was a liability in Hillary’s campaign, then became Obama’s Secretary of Explaining Stuff in ’12, and then a liability again in ’16. It’s dizzying.)
I give Trump credit for figuring out (either explicitly or just as a matter of instinct) three things:
1. GOP voters weren’t satisfied with just the occasional dog whistle — they wanted full-on nationalism/racism/culture war. Jeb, Cruz, Rubio, etc. had no effective way to rebut Trump on most issues because they all at least pretended to have the same position as Trump, just in a watered-down, mealy-mouthed way. So they all looked like weaselly politicians rather than principled leaders, with their harumphing about how they’re tough on immigration too, honest, but some immigrants are nice people too.
2. The media can be gamed. Whatever the reporters and on-air talent believe personally, the producers and executives are chasing ratings like everybody else, and if you give them ratings gold, they’ll keep giving you free publicity. And the “both sides are at fault” false equivalency allows you to get away with all sorts of lies without being effectively called on it.
3. If you refuse to apologize, your base thinks you’re tough, and the media eventually gives up. They aren’t going to run a story on “Day Sixty-Three of Trump’s refusal to apologize for [whatever]”
Even those three things weren’t original ideas of his. Hell, #3 is right out of the Roy Cohn playbook, and people had been warning about #1 for years.
They had another liability in that area that prevented them from going full-on Trump, and which they certainly didn’t want to play up with the Republican base – their own history. Cruz and Rubio, children of immigrants. Jeb – a Hispanic wife. They were red meat for Trump, and if they had tried to push him too hard, he would have played that more than he did. Little Mario might have become some racist nickname. Lyin’ Ted might have become a racist nickname. And it was very evident that the Trump campaign had no problem going after wives.
To be truthful, I have not seen a White House statement say that Trump skipped visiting Arlington National Cemetery today because of rain. I see some news that says so, but I have not seen the news cite a White House source.
I live in Arlington, and I spent this afternoon outside doing yard work. Across the street from me, the contractors tearing up the sidewalk put in a full day’s work. We all knew it wouldn’t rain until later. The rain still isn’t here; it will get here from the southwest about 5 pm.
The Raw Story article says, “Weather.com forecasted a 100 percent chance of rain at Arlington National Cemetery on Monday.” That may be true, but that doesn’t mean Trump skipped the Cemetery because of it.
I’m disappointed by the news on this item.
What was he afraid of? More rain? He seems like some Coward in Chief. Does he cringe in fear of his shadow?
Melting, melting.
So, Dave, that would mean he skipped it for no good reason (not that a little rain is a good reason, but for no reason at all?)
That rainwater comes from the oceans and enters America illegally. It’s a full-on invasion, I tells ya.
AofS
How does Trump get away with it? It’s inconceivable than an Australian PM, or a UK PM would find some excuse not to attend our version of veteran’s day.
The US seems such a highly militarised society, Trump’s behaviour is amazing.
It’s raining pretty hard now. Probably just as well that he didn’t take the risk. (@Dave Ricks, hi neighbor.)
Maybe he just didn’t want to. Why should he? It’s not about him.
Sorry about getting the rain part wrong. Maybe it was wishful thinking – we’re not getting nearly enough rain here, after a hideously dry and smoky summer that started in April.
Ophelia, just say the word, and I’ll send you a bit of snow. We had a decently rainy summer, so we might be able to spare some (though I do hate to give up my snow, anything for a friend).
RJW, considering the fact that in the space of two days he’s managed to insult the military and firefighters; and since both the military and first responders are traditionally politically right-leaning, I have no idea how he continues to get away with it. I suspect that even if the mid-terms had come after Armistice Day and his comments about the wildfires, it would have made little difference to the outcome.
AoS, considering that during the 2016 election cycle, he called a former Vietnam POW and respected veteran a coward, I think you’re right.
Screechy Monkey: All excellent points, especially on the things that Trump (or at least his campaign) managed to exploit. I’d expand #3 to a general indictment of the media’s short attention-span. It’s not just outrages that he should apologize for, but also a general unwillingness to discuss an event in any terms but the most current. This tends to rob any analysis of context, keeping it on the most superficial level, and thus makes it harder to establish an actual picture of the man’s psyche. They might very well be willing to report, “Trump said something outrageous,” and more recently, even go so far as to say, “Trump lied today.” But they never seem willing to report, “Trump told his 5th lie of the week, and 27th this month, and by the way, here’s where you can find the list.”
Because Trump is about 6 years old;
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/13/trump-macron-eu-army-german-second-world-war
You are far too generous in your estimate, Freemage.
http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/