A sensitive conversation in the Oval Office
The Times shares a disgusting little vignette of life with “President” Trump:
Late to his own meeting and waving a sheet of numbers, President Trump stormed into the Oval Office one day in June, plainly enraged.
Five months before, Mr. Trump had dispatched federal officers to the nation’s airports to stop travelers from several Muslim countries from entering the United States in a dramatic demonstration of how he would deliver on his campaign promise to fortify the nation’s borders.
But so many foreigners had flooded into the country since January, he vented to his national security team, that it was making a mockery of his pledge. Friends were calling to say he looked like a fool, Mr. Trump said.
No foreigners, god damn it! We don’t want all these stinkin foreigners stinkin up our beautiful country with all its beautiful golf courses and Luxxury High Righzez. Our country is for not-foreign white people with beautiful golden hair.
Then he started reading from the doc, which listed how many dastardly foreigners had received visas to come into the beautiful US in 2017.
More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.
Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.
Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.
That’s the president of the US. That’s the squalid reality we’re living in. Everybody’s meanest ugliest racist uncle is the president.
Kelly and Tillerson tried to explain that many of the visas were just temporary ones for visits, but then Kelly and Miller turned on Tillerson, blaming him for all these filthy foreigners, causing him to blow a gasket.
It’s a miracle they haven’t melted us all down for soap yet.
Tempers flared and Mr. Kelly asked that the room be cleared of staff members. But even after the door to the Oval Office was closed, aides could still hear the president berating his most senior advisers.
For not moving quickly enough on the ethnic cleansing.
The meeting in June reflects Mr. Trump’s visceral approach to an issue that defined his campaign and has indelibly shaped the first year of his presidency.
It reflects everything – his “visceral” racism and general loathing for people he sees as inferiors, his rage and hatred and lack of control, his grandiosity and cluelessness about the extent of his power, his hideous urges, his authoritarianism, his filthy temper – his thoroughgoing badness on every dimension.
Seizing on immigration as the cause of countless social and economic problems, Mr. Trump entered office with an agenda of symbolic but incompletely thought-out goals, the product not of rigorous policy debate but of emotionally charged personal interactions and an instinct for tapping into the nativist views of white working-class Americans.
But mostly of his own hateful malevolent nature. He boils with loathing, and it bursts out of him all the time (think April Ryan and that press conference and the way he spoke to her). He’s that mean drunk at the bar who empties the room.
Those who know Mr. Trump say that his attitude toward immigrants long predates his entry into politics.
“He’s always been fearful where other cultures are concerned and always had anxiety about food and safety when he travels,” said Michael D’Antonio, who interviewed him for the biography “The Truth About Trump.” “His objectification and demonization of people who are different has festered for decades.”
He thinks they’re dirty. He’s that literal-minded. That’s what all the gold is about, maybe – purity and Cleanness, along with Expense. Gold people are white and clean, and poor people are brown and dirty.
Happy holidays.
The literal mind of an angry toddler. It’s hard to decide how to feel from moment to moment. I hate him with such a white hot passion I fantasize about smacking him around. Then I’m utterly terrified of what he’s going to do before someone can stop him. And god, I hate him.
My fantasy is more about having him tied down in a chair and we all get to explain to him slowly and carefully exactly what is wrong with him.
Very slowly.
I daydream about the trial discovering that virtually all his wealth is based on money laundering and having it stripped from him, and then he gets exiled to whichever nation he hates the most, penniless.
I like the first half of Holms’ idea. But we have to keep him here. Firstly, because I’m sure the good people of literally every country in the world have done nothing to deserve being inflicted with his infection and secondly because I would really like him to experience just what it’s like to be poor in this country.
Going back to Ophelia’s post – 3 of the 5 people who work for me are both immigrants and people of color and I worry about them constantly. I’m an immigrant too, but I’m white and British, so I’m the “right kind” of immigrant (as I was once “informed” at the check out of a Home Depot in Baltimore). Since Trump was elected, the racists have become emboldened and I fear for their safety.