Bunker Don had his third bad night.

Multiple fires broke out near the White House late on Sunday evening, as angry protesters gathered in Washington DC for the third night in a row following the death of George Floyd.

Bunker Don’s insistence on pouring gasoline onto the fire probably hasn’t helped. If the only response to a protest against racist murder-by-cop is “WE WILL SET THE DOGS ON YOU” then people aren’t going to shrug and say ok.

There was an 11 pm curfew.

When 11pm came, the police line in front of the White House advanced with tear gas rounds across Lafayette park clearing out the protesters, with intermittent sprints.  An area of a few blocks around the White House was thick with smoke. A fire was started in the basement of St John’s church, which since 1816 has been the “Church of the Presidents”. Every president from James Madison on has worshipped there. The DC Fire Service got there quickly and are reported to have put it out. 

Around the corner, however, a few protesters smashed the plate glass window front of the AFL-CIO Union federation headquarters and someone started a fire in the lobby. A couple of bystanders tried to dissuade them, shouting that the “unions are on our side” but to no avail. 

I wondered about that – I went in there once, when I was walking around DC the day before Women in Secularism. There’s some good labor iconography in there. I was in the Teamsters once upon a time.

On Sunday it was reported that Donald Trump, his wife, Melania and son Barron, had been taken down to the White House bunker at the height of the protests on Friday and then brought back up as the crowds dispersed.

Maybe if Bunker Don didn’t insist on making himself the enemy of the people…

With all that’s going on, Trump has stayed locked in with his Twitter. Not for him the address to the nation filled with compassion and a sense of justice.

That was by design. Trump and some of his advisers calculated that he should not speak to the nation because he had nothing to say, according to a senior administration official. He had no tangible policy or action to announce, nor did he feel an urgent motivation to try to bring people together. So he stayed silent.

It’s nice to know that he specifically did not feel like trying to bring people together, so decided to rage at us on Twitter instead.

The United States is visibly, painfully broken by the unprecedented confluence of health, economic and social crises, any one of which alone would test a president. It was extraordinary then to hear some in the public arena suggest Sunday that this president ought stay in the background, arguing that Trump lacked the moral authority and credibility necessary to heal the country.

Extraordinary but not extraordinary. Of course he lacks the moral authority to heal the country. All he has is hatred and rage and contempt and yet more rage. That’s it. He hates everything that’s not force and domination and cruelty.

It is an open question, too, whether Trump aspires to unite. There is ample evidence that he does not, as he built a political strategy around pitting groups against one another and declaring winners and losers.

In other words it’s not an open question; it’s all too obvious that constant war is all he aspires to, with him holding all the cards and punishing people at will.

“The rioting in the streets has put an exclamation point on what this president cannot do: To bring people around and say we are all in this together,” said Tom Rath, a longtime Republican official and former attorney general in New Hampshire. “On his automatic transmission, there is one speed. It is not conciliate. It is not comfort. It is not forge consensus. It is attack. And the frustration right now is that nobody is in charge. Anarchy rules.”

That’s exactly right. Attack is all he knows. It’s as if some acid has eaten away the rest of his brain and only the bit that wants to fight (but safely, from behind Twitter and those vicious dogs) is left.

Trump’s record of racially insensitive and sometimes outright racist comments over the years has led many Democrats and even some Republicans to conclude that he does not fully comprehend the nation’s history of racism and the corresponding tensions that live on today.

Ya think??? Of course he doesn’t; he doesn’t have the faintest clue, and doesn’t give a rat’s ass that he doesn’t. He’s a vulgar brainless sack of effluent and he fully comprehends nothing.

David Greenberg, a history professor at Rutgers University, said past presidents at moments of national crisis, whether George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or Bill Clinton after the Oklahoma City bombing, have instinctively shifted their message and tactics in an effort to heal.

“Most presidents have found a way to rise to the occasion, even if it meant swallowing hard and suppressing some of their own anger and frustration,” Greenberg said. “There’s no mystery that Trump is not sticking to the normal presidential script here.”

Hur hur. Misogyny? Us?? Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Funny what a lot these “activists” have in common with Trump – the hatred of women, the slavering over projected violence, the contempt for women, the longing to see snarling dogs tear people to bits…

They all wish Trump would stop talking.

The President tweeted on Saturday that if protesters breached the White House’s fence, they would “have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.” And he called on Democratic officials to “get MUCH tougher” or the federal government “will step in and do what has to be done, and that includes using the unlimited power of our Military and many arrests.”

On Sunday, Trump tweeted his thanks to the National Guard and the job they did in Minneapolis Saturday night before calling for the National Guard to be used in “Other Democrat run Cities and States.”

…

Elected officials on both sides of the aisle said on Sunday that the President should instead focus on unifying the nation or decline to address the country at all.

“He should just stop talking,” said Democratic Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper. “He speaks and he makes it worse.”

“It’s sort of continuing to escalate the rhetoric,” added Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on CNN. “I think it’s just the opposite of the message that should have been coming out of the White House.”

You mean he shouldn’t keep screaming about how much he hates us and would like to see us torn to pieces by dogs?

I’d love to know more about the advisers telling him why not to tweet. Anyway sure enough, he’s pouring gasoline on the fire with all the strength in his thumbs.

What kind of GREATNESS does he have in mind, exactly? White supremacist GREATNESS? Golden combover GREATNESS? Grab them by the pussy GREATNESS? Corruption in government GREATNESS?

The tweet is unavailable because Twitter removed it.

The tweet is unavailable because Twitter removed it.

Trump retweeted:

The president is screaming for MORE POLICE VIOLENCE MORE MORE MORE

These guys are so lucky to live at this hour – when suddenly misogyny is the most progressive thing on the menu, as long as you can shield it with the pretense of “transphobia.” Ten years ago it just would not have been cool to call a female novelist one of the 5 worst people on Twitter, but now it makes you…well it makes you a misogynist shit, but Craig Gallagher seems not to realize it.

Karen Tumulty in the Post yesterday:

It’s a good thing Donald Trump wasn’t president during the civil rights movement. Judging by his tweets, Trump would have been tempted to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the notorious Alabama public safety commissioner.

Tempted shmempted; he would have done it.

Nearly six decades later, the man who sits in the White House is channeling his inner Bull Connor, unable to contain his eagerness to see play out on his own front lawn the vile tactics that Connor employed against civil rights marchers. In a giddy tweetstorm on Saturday morning, Trump let loose about how excited he would have been to see protesters who showed up across the street in Lafayette Square “really badly hurt” by “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.”

…

“Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action,” Trump wrote. He added a quotation, one the president presumably wants us to believe he heard from someone who manages the White House security force: “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and . . . good practice.”

To suggest that the agents are “just waiting for action” against their fellow citizens impugns both the professionalism and the humanity of the Secret Service. But it very much fits in the worldview of a commander in chief who has excused war crimes by members of the U.S. military with the claim that they are trained to be “killing machines.”

And who wets himself every time he types “sir” in a tweet.

What a president should be doing at this moment is trying to calm the country and bring it together, not fantasizing about how glorious it would be to witness bloodshed just outside his doorstep. Trump was so thrilled that he thinks a celebration is in order: “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”

Half the people I know are hitting a wall of despair right now.

Trump has given up on doing the G7 meeting in June so now his red-hot plan is to hold the G19 or something in September so that he can invite Russia. The slight problem there is that the rest of the G7 doesn’t want to invite Russia. At all.

Trump’s new plan, outlined to reporters on Saturday, is to host an expanded G7 meeting including Russia, Australia, South Korea and India, dedicated to building an alliance against China. The plan is likely to be controversial because Russia has been banned from western-led summits since Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and is not seen as a natural ally in the defence of human rights in Hong Kong.

Or anywhere else. Putin isn’t a human rights kind of guy. Neither, of course, is Trump, so that’s awkward.

The G7 brings together the US, Japan, France, Germany, the UK, Canada and Italy.

Justifying the cancellation of the June meeting and his proposed new format, Trump said the group’s current makeup was “very outdated” and does not properly represent “what’s going on in the world”. 

There’s some truth in that, but probably not in the sense Trump had in mind. The US is not currently a good fit with the other G7 countries, because we have a corrupt incompetent authoritarian criminal as head of state.

The Guardian notes that Trump isn’t altogether the ideal person to be president at a moment when systemic racism is in the spotlight.

Trump, who forged his political identity in racist conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace, has proved unable to articulate the accumulated pain of black Americans over 400 years of slavery, segregation and police brutality, now exacerbated by a pandemic that has taken a disproportionate toll on communities of colour. Instead he has resorted to a series of tweets that critics found divisive, inflammatory and self-serving.

As if it even occurred to him to try to articulate the accumulated pain of black Americans over 400 years of slavery, segregation and police brutality. Ever. In his entire life.

With an election less than six months away there are fears that Trump, who ran on the slogan “Make America great again”, is motivated more than ever by what plays to his support base, encouraging him to pour fuel on the fire of racial division with a law-and-order crackdown.

Ya think? It’s not fears, it’s certainty. Of course that’s what he’s going to do.

In such a dark hour, an American president might be expected to address the nation. Trump had no such plans on Sunday. David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W Bush, told CNN: “Well, that’s good, this president’s shouldn’t speak because what could he possibly say?

“He’s already spoken. He’s already conjured up the image of dogs attacking protesters, one of the most powerful anti-civil rights images this country has. That’s what’s on his mind. He’s identifying with the people who unleash dogs on protesters.”

It’s good that he’s not speaking, but it’s bad that it’s good that he’s not speaking. It’s bad that his speaking would make everything even worse; it’s bad that he’s incapable of speaking well, thoughtfully, generously, empathetically, as if he gave a damn…any way that would do some good. It’s very bad that he can no more do that than he can fly.

Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, told CNN’s State of the Union: “He should just stop talking. This is like Charlottesville all over again. He speaks, and he makes it worse. There are times when you should just be quiet. And I wish that he would just be quiet.”

Being quiet is another thing he can’t do. It’s a long list.

Adding a few more because the venom dressed up as feisty girly sass is remarkable.

I particularly despise that theft of the “white people” trope as if racism were somehow linked to seeing men as men even if they wear pink skirts and makeup. Trans ideology is not a partner or cousin or ally of anti-racism, and pretending it is is gruesomely appropriative.

But nobody is denying the existence or the rights of trans people. Nobody.

A Twitter account that claims to be a bookshop for women…

I wonder why Rowling blocked this bookshop for women.

Oh. I guess that’s why. Claims of the “she doesn’t believe trans people should have rights” type – lies, in short. Possibly also the illiteracy – “on accident” “what if that child was trans” – two in just one sentence.

What “believes”? What are these terrible believes she holds that show she has no heart and are such a heartbreak? That men are not women. How could she possibly come to hold such a believe?

Well, no, not truth. Lies, actually. LIES TO POWER. That’s useful how, exactly?

Not a women’s bookshop at all.

Meanwhile

President Trump moved to protect regulations issued by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that restrict federal student loan forgiveness in a veto issued Friday night. Several veterans’ groups have argued that the rules, which make it more difficult for student borrowers to prove that a college defrauded them, will harm former service members cheated by for-profit colleges, the New York Times reports.

In other words, for-profit colleges, which are a scam to begin with, have won a victory over the students they cheat. Of course Trump is down with that: he’s one of the scammers. Remember Trump “University”? Which was in no way a university, and took people’s money for very nearly nothing?

Trump said the vetoed legislation “sought to reimpose an Obama-era regulation that defined educational fraud so broadly that it threatened to paralyze the Nation’s system of higher education.”

Utter bullshit. The US system of higher education doesn’t depend on for-profit not-universities, and most of them are fraudulent and worthless. They exist to enrich the scam artists who own them, and for no other reason.

That’s not the only mud Harrop threw at Rowling today.

How insensitive.

Aw, poor DOCTOR Adrian Harrop has had to apologize to JK Rowling.

Rowling raises an eyebrow.

He’s not a bully, he’s not he’s not he’s NOT. He’s just inthenthitive.

What did he say?

Replying to @StandWithMaya

Jimmy Saville was the UK’s most popular children’s entertainer at the height of his career, & one of the most famous men in the country. working with how you’re framing JKR, I suppose you’d have gladly given him unsupervised contact with your kids – or have I misunderstood you?

Sure, just insensitive, not libelous at all.

He said that??

He said it.

The Guardian on Trump’s repulsive excitement about the vicious dogs and big big guns all ready to massacre protesters:

Donald Trump has praised the US Secret Service for confronting protesters who massed outside the White House on Friday night, tweeting that had any of the crowd breached the fence, they “would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen”.

…

On Friday night, as protests reached the White House gates, Trump turned back to incendiary tweeting, electioneering on the back of protests, riots and looting in cities across the US.

Outside the White House, people hurled bricks, bottles and other objects at Secret Service and US park police officers in riot gear behind barricades.

…

Trump said he watched the events from the White House and that the Secret Service did a “great job”.

The president added: “They let the ‘protesters’ scream and rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them.”

He had to mop up a lot of drool after that one.

Without evidence, the president claimed the protesters were “professionally” organized but had failed to breach the White House perimeter.

“If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least,” Trump tweeted.

He wishes it had all played out while he watched.

In subsequent tweets, the president again claimed without evidence the protest was “professionally managed” and involved “organised groups”. The protesters, he said, “had little to do with the memory of George Floyd. They were just there to cause trouble … Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”

He’s trying to arrange a confrontation…a Reichstag fire.

It’s not the first time. Reuters February 2016:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump admires the late Douglas MacArthur and George Patton, both World War Two generals. They were winners, unpredictable, and not especially nice guys, he says in campaign speeches. But Trump’s pledge to imitate their styles sets modern-day military experts on edge.

…

The candidate’s spokeswoman Hope Hicks said Trump made a habit of citing the two World War Two figures to “emphasize the need to strengthen the U.S. military, talk less and do more to protect America.”

Talk less! Nobody talks more than Trump. Trump literally never shuts up.

But hey – the movie.

There are scholar presidents, and presidents who don’t read much, and then there is President-elect Donald Trump, who has said he has no time for books at all. But he does enjoy a few historically themed movies—one of which is Patton, George C. Scott’s 1970 embodiment of the World War II general. Patton is one of the very few role models Trump held up during his campaign; he frequently rued the fact that the military lacked modern-day Pattons, and when he picked retired Marine Gen. James Mattis as his defense secretary, Trump proclaimed Mattis “the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton.”

In other words he looks more like George C. Scott than any of the others.

Speaking of Scott, that’s who really should be Trump’s ideal general – General Buck Turgidson.

How about this one? Do we agree that this is fascist?

McArthur and Patton…what is it that they have in common? Oh yes – being busted.

Let’s hear some praise for Lieutenant Calley now, and how about that fabulous General Dyer?

The worship of STRENGTH is fascism.

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones says Minneapolis is Trump’s campaign dream.

Rioters in the city were “THUGS,” he wrote, and he proposed sending in the National Guard to “get the job done right.” In a tweet so depraved that Twitter appended a disclaimer, he quoted an infamous 1960s Miami cop: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Trump’s comments weren’t just those of a head of state addressing unrest in a major city. They were also the words of a candidate for reelection who believes that what happens in Minnesota could make or break his chances this fall. The president has made repeated campaign stops in the state over the last four years; in threatening violence against protesters, he was sticking to a longstanding strategy. Trump believes that by attacking the state’s largest city and casting its residents as radical refugees and “thugs”—by driving a huge racist wedge between the Twin Cities and all the rest—he can flip the state he lost by the smallest of margins in 2016.

And, bonus, he really loves doing it. It’s cynical and fun; win win!

Trump’s campaign in Minnesota, now as ever, is rooted in white grievance and fear and what he calls “law and order,” by which he means targeting immigrants and people of color for abuse—by pinning all that’s gone wrong on blue cities and the people who live there.

The campaign is going to be an absolute nightmare.

So Nicola Spurling deleted that defamatory tweet, and then reiterated the ideology.

“Children must be accepted for who they are, not told that who they are is wrong.”

But who is it that actually tells children that who they are is wrong? Who is it that refuses to accept them for who they are?

Spurling of course is claiming that it’s people who don’t believe the trans ideology, but that relies on a very peculiar understanding of the phrase “who they are.” It relies on taking fantasy as the truth of who people are, while treating the physical reality of who they are as an illusion.

In short it flips everything.

When I was a child I projected myself into a great many fictional characters from books and movies and tv shows. I would live my life while pretending to be other people for much of the time, while always knowing perfectly well it was pretending. Imagine if the adults had asked me who I was at that moment and then said that was who I really was – imagine the traffic jam.

There is no magical spiritual “who we are” that is not just separate from but the opposite of what our bodies determine we are. We are our bodies; our bodies are we. We are also our histories and our social situations. If we were born white and middle class we don’t get to say that who we really are is black and working class. We can say we feel more affinity for the black working class than the while middle class, but we can’t then try to leverage that into mandatory acceptance from the black working class. It’s funny how woke people would instantly agree to that while still feeling so very empowered to tell women the opposite.

Or, more succinctly –