It took him three tries to spell “heal” correctly.

Aide: Sir, typo
Trump: Fixed it
Aide: No still there, "heel"
Trump: Yea, heel!
Aide: You mean "heal"
Trump: No I dont
Aide: Gimme your phone pic.twitter.com/uwzo8kzKKP

— maura quint (@behindyourback) August 19, 2017

Moral apologist for white supremacists & KKK calls on country to "heel" since it has been divided for "decade." What an eloquent statesman. pic.twitter.com/2p3c6n4lDi

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 19, 2017

Also, this “our great country has been divided for decade” thing – what does he think he means? This is a guy who makes a huge point of playing only to his “base” while treating the rest of us, the large majority, as if we were criminals and traitors. It’s a guy who did more to amp up divisions than any presidential candidate most of us have ever seen. He wants us divided. He likes it like that.

Plus he can’t spell “heal.”

Via the Post:

Don is a no-show for the Kennedy Center awards this year, and he’s not throwing the usual White House party to celebrate it, either.

Past presidents and first ladies have hosted a reception for those given awards at the White House before the gala at the nearby Kennedy Center and sat with them at the televised event.

Two of the five stars due to receive the awards in art, music, dance, film, television and culture on 2 December, TV producer Norman Lear and dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, had already indicated they would boycott the reception the next day at the White House.

De Lavallade said: “In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House.”

“Morally caustic” – that’s a good characterization.

Jimmy Carter, George HW Bush and Bill Clinton have all failed to attend due to presidential duties, but never due to a boycott by those being given awards.

Barack Obama received a standing ovation at last year’s event, held just after Trump’s election but before his inauguration. But there was unease among the arts community about whether they would turn up in 2017 if the new president was in attendance.

The Kennedy Center confirmed that this year’s White House reception would now not take place, although the awards themselves and gala celebration would still happen. The Center respected the president’s decision, which had ensured the gala “remains a deservingly special moment for the honorees”, chairman David M Rubenstein and president Deborah F Rutter said in a statement. “We are grateful for this gesture.”

Oh, that’s got to sting. That’s a frank “thank you for staying away.”

Trump ignited the most serious controversy over racism since his election campaign this week, with Republicans, business leaders, charities, sports stars and artists all denouncing him after he suggested that neo-Nazis whose protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, led to the death of a 32-year-old woman were morally equivalent to the anti-fascist activists opposing them.

The entire membership of the president’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities, appointed by Barack Obama, resigned on Friday in a letter that featured an acrostic spelling out the word “RESIST”.

I missed that when I blogged it yesterday. First letter of each paragraph.

The statement by the White House press secretary announcing the Trumps would not take part did not mention Charlottesville. But it said: “The president and first lady have decided not to participate in this year’s activities to allow the honorees to celebrate without any political distraction.”

And since that explanation is unprecedented, it means they’re admitting there’s something special about this particular “political distraction.” What could that be? Could it be something to do with the fact that most people don’t like seeing the US president flattering white supremacists and abusing people who oppose them?

Charities are ditching Mar-a-Lago.

The Cleveland Clinic, the American Cancer Society, and the American Friends of Magen David Adom all said on Thursday that they wouldn’t hold their 2018 galas at the resort. The organizations have held their annual events at Mar-a-Lago for several years.

On Friday, the American Red Cross and the Salvation Army said they would not host their events at Mar-a-Lago either. The Red Cross said in a statement that “it has increasingly become a source of controversy and pain for many of our volunteers, employees, and supporters.”

Susan G. Komen, the breast-cancer organization, also on Friday said it would not host its gala at the resort, according to The Washington Post.

It’s only pocket change though.

The events can net between $100,000 and $275,000 for the resort, The Post reported.

Big deal. He still owns that hotel a few blocks from the White House. He won’t even notice the dent in Mar-a-Lago profits.

Trump said at that scarifying q and a on Tuesday that the counter-protesters didn’t have a permit. He was lying.

“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. . . . You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
— President Trump, remarks during a news conference on infrastructure, Aug. 15, 2017

In blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville that left one person dead, President Trump twice asserted that the people protesting white supremacists and neo-Nazis lacked a permit, unlike the groups that gathered to protest the possible removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

But that’s turned out to be false, according to documents and interviews obtained by our Washington Post colleague Justin Wm. Moyer.

Walt Heinecke, a professor at the University of Virginia, told Moyer that he received a “special events certificate of approval” for events at McGuffey Park and Justice Park — sites blocks from Emancipation Park, where white nationalists had a permit for a Saturday rally.

Fourth Street, where Fields slammed his car into all those protesters, runs alongside Justice Park.

But anyway they didn’t need permits.

Charlottesville spokeswoman Miriam I. Dickler told Moyer that only one permit was issued for Emancipation Park — the one received by white nationalists staging the “Unite the Right” rally. However, counterprotesters did not need permits to protest that rally, she said.

“Please bear in mind that people do not need a permit to enter a public park, even when another event is scheduled to take place there, nor are they required to have one to be on streets or sidewalks adjacent to or outside the park,” Dickler said in an email.

Trump also said the fascists at U-Va Friday night protested “very quietly.” Not so much.

On Friday night, about 250 white nationalists carrying torches marched and chanted anti-Semitic slogans on the U-Va. campus, where they encountered about 30 students who had locked arms around the base of a statue of Thomas Jefferson, according to a Washington Post timeline. Brief clashes took place, resulting in some injuries. U-Va. allows access to open spaces, and so permits were not required for such marches, according to a statement by U-Va. President Teresa A. Sullivan condemning the “intimidating and abhorrent behavior displayed by the alt-right protestors.”

Carrying torches (yes even tiki torches from Wal-Mart) chanting “Jews will not replace us” is not “very quietly.”

The Pinocchio Test

President Trump twice claimed that counterprotesters lacked a permit to demonstrate in Charlottesville. But they did have permits for rallies on Saturday — and they did not need one to go into or gather near Emancipation Park, where white nationalists scheduled their rally. No permits were needed to march on the U-Va. campus on Friday night. The president earns Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

 

The arts and humanities commission.

The remaining members of a presidential arts and humanities panel resigned on Friday in yet another sign of growing national protest of President Trump’s recent comments on the violence in Charlottesville.

Members of the President’s Committee are drawn from Broadway, Hollywood, and the broader arts and entertainment community and said in a letter to Trump that “Your words and actions push us all further away from the freedoms we are guaranteed.”

“Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville,” the commissioners wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Friday morning. “The false equivalencies you push cannot stand. The Administration’s refusal to quickly and unequivocally condemn the cancer of hatred only further emboldens those who wish America ill. We cannot sit idly by, the way that your West Wing advisors have, without speaking out against your words and actions.”

The commission was established by Reagan in 1982.

Members of the commission are Obama-era holdovers, including the actor Kal Penn, a longtime Barack Obama supporter and former White House staffer; director George C. Wolfe; painter and photographer Chuck Close; Jill Udall, the former head of cultural affairs for New Mexico and the wife of Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.); and entertainment executive Fred Goldring, who helped produce the “Yes We Can” video with musician Will.i.am in support of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Another commissioner, talent manager and producer Eric Ortner, explained that the group is quitting because, “Our job is to protect those who tell America’s story, we wanted to be on the right side of history.”

Some of the members had already quit right after the election, but others stayed on pending replacements.

Never mind, Trump still has his beloved “base.”

Speaking of beautiful statues that are causing Donald Trump to mourn and pine when they are moved from one spot to another, a couple of Facebook friends have been reminding us of some that were demolished altogether decades ago. They adorned what was then Bonwit Teller at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in Manhattan.

At the very top of the facade were limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing. The architects were Whitney Warren and Charles Wetmore, super-traditional Beaux-Arts designers of mansions and clubs — a puzzling choice for a such an outré building. In time the reliefs would become a Bonwit Teller signature.

Beginning in the 1960s, a series of corporate takeovers changed the face of retailing. Bonwit’s was sold several times, and it lost the luster that Bergdorf, in particular, was able to retain. Although some ancillary stores survived until 2000, Bonwit Teller closed its store at Fifth and 56th in 1979.

That was good news for Donald Trump, who acquired the old Bonwit’s building and began demolition in 1980. He had promised the limestone reliefs of the dancing women to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which wanted them for its sculpture collection, although the offer was conditional on his being able to remove them. But suddenly workmen jackhammered them to bits.

This act was condemned by, among others, The New York Times, which said: “Evidently, New York needs to make salvation of this kind of landmark mandatory and stop expecting that its developers will be good citizens and good sports.”

The Trump organization replied that the two-ton panels were “without artistic merit,” that saving them would have delayed construction for months and cost $500,000.

Plus they weren’t Confederate generals or General Pershing or Mussolini, so you know, who cares.

Ok, here’s a new low. Trump has tweeted that we should commit a war crime to stop terrorism. (Joke’s on him: war crimes are terrorism.)

President Donald Trump appeared to cite an apocryphal story about an American general executing dozens of Muslim prisoners in the Philippines and defiling their bodies with pig blood in the wake of a deadly terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, Thursday.

After first condemning the attack and offering the United States’ support, the president said to “study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught,” an apparent reference to a debunked legend about World War I-era General John J. Pershing that Trump repeatedly recounted in his speeches on the campaign trail.

Study what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 17, 2017

The story about Pershing is apocryphal, but Trump apparently believes it. (Now there’s a surprise.)

“He took fifty bullets, and he dipped them in pig’s blood,” Trump said at a rally in South Carolina in February 2016. “And he had his men load his rifles and he lined up the fifty people, and they shot 49 of those people. And the fiftieth person he said ‘You go back to your people and you tell them what happened.’ And for 25 years there wasn’t a problem, okay?”

Historians says there’s no evidence for that.

Trump said at the time the moral of the story was: “We better start getting tough and we better start getting vigilant, and we better start using our heads or we’re not gonna have a country, folks.”

And by “tough” he means we’d better murder a bunch of people as an example and defile them for good measure and then tell their friends at home we did it. A war crime; a deliberate calculated war crime meant to instill terror.

Trump’s tweet came hours after a car crashed into a crowd in Barcelona, Spain. Authorities there have labeled the incident a terrorist attack and taken a suspect into custody.

In addition to celebrating what would be tantamount to a war crime, Trump’s claim that such tactics ended terrorism is also inaccurate. The unrest he cited continued long afterwards and was rooted in conflict over colonial rule.

Ok but it would be so much fun.

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256679833227264

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898256839749414912

https://twitter.com/ezlusztig/status/898257036592390144