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 –

Merkel says no, she’s not going to Trump’s party.

“The federal chancellor thanks President Trump for his invitation to the G7 summit at the end of June in Washington. As of today, considering the overall pandemic situation, she cannot agree to her personal participation, to a journey to Washington,” German government spokesman Steffen Seibert told POLITICO Friday.

…

Merkel’s refusal to attend the summit in person risks scuppering Trump’s attempts to present the gathering as a landmark moment drawing a line under the lockdowns and travel bans imposed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

You know what else risks scuppering that? The coronavirus pandemic. It hasn’t gone anywhere, so drawing a line under the lockdowns and travel bans would be incredibly stupid.

Trump canceled the summit in March due to the crisis and said he would host a videconference instead. But in a tweet on May 20, he said he might reschedule the summit, proclaiming, “It would be a great sign to all — normalization!”

But, again, the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere, so normalization isn’t possible. He can say the word all he likes, but it doesn’t change the reality.

“The president thinks no greater example of reopening in this transition to greatness would be the G7, and G7 happening here,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Tuesday. “We will protect world leaders who come here, just like we protect people in the White House,” McEnany added. “So we want to see it happen. We think it will happen. And, so far, foreign leaders are very much on board with the idea.”

Except they don’t protect people in the White House.

But Merkel, who is a research scientist by professional training, has said that she believes June is still too soon to hold large gatherings given that the virus is still circulating, and experts are urging continued vigilance and social distancing, even as economies begin to open up again.

Officials aware of the transatlantic discussions said Trump was furious over Merkel’s reluctance to attend the summit and on Thursday he phoned French President Emmanuel Macron in a pique.

He doesn’t do pique. He does full-on rage tantrum, not pique.

Trump didn’t say a word about George Floyd at his “press conference” (the one at which he took no questions) today, but he did say he was yanking the US out of the WHO.

US President Donald Trump has announced that he is terminating the country’s relationship with the World Health Organization (WHO). The president has accused the WHO of failing to hold Beijing to account over the coronavirus pandemic. “China has total control over the World Health Organization,” the president said while announcing measures aimed at punishing Beijing.

…

More than 102,000 people in the US have lost their lives to Covid-19 – by far the biggest death toll in the world.

And that’s…the WHO’s fault.

A couple of thoughts related to the police murder of George Floyd and the protests in response:

Both women are former prosecutors.

Originally a comment by Seth on As a fact not as a statement.

This is the real Doublespeak, of course; not a statement meant to instill contradictory beliefs in the speaker’s mind and thus induce a fugue of passive acceptance of Big Brother, but rather an obvious smokescreen meant to gaslight anyone who takes the plain reading seriously. I foresaw this excuse immediately when I glanced at your previous post. The interpretation being in this case that Trump is a very poor and disorganized speaker who obviously meant that when looting (or really any kind of civil disobedience) occurs, violence often follows (by and upon the looters/disobeyers themselves, obviously), and the government should step in to prevent the looters/disobeyers from harming one another. Of course, even this interpretation is fascist and implicitly racist, not to mention supremely insulting to Trump besides, but it’s rather different from an explicit threat to unleash the violence of the state on peaceful protesters, and this interpretive gap is precisely large enough to drive trollish outrage which Trump’s people will now take.

The cycle is quite simple, and doubtless obvious to you, but it bears spelling out explicitly: Say something horrendous but which could, when interpreted very generously, be taken not-quite-as-offensively; dare anyone to take offence; scream to high heaven how you’re being persecuted and misconstrued when offence is indeed taken; claim persecution and victimhood; feel smugly superior; repeat.

They will do this every time. And every time you do not give them the benefit of every doubt, every time you do not extend them the most generous interpretation imaginable, they will insist it’s because you’re an insipid knave who has had it out for them from the start and they shouldn’t have to listen to the likes of you.