So the official White House transcript and video of the press conference in Helsinki has been doctored to remove a part of a question, asking whether Putin wanted Trump to win the election and directed his officials to help him do that. The edit of the material makes it seem like the first part of the question wasn’t asked, which changes the entire implication of the question. Now, one could argue that in the transcript, this omission could be the result of trying to catch several people talking at once, but the fact that the White House edited it out of the official video as presented by the White House, and even placed on YouTube, is…well it’s disturbing. To consciously edit out that portion shows intent to omit a telling admission from Putin and his government, especially in light of Trump’s recent, very public claim, that Russia did not want Trump in office. Beyond the possible legal implications (I mean, it’s an official government release, and there are specific laws not only regarding the handling of government documentation, but White House and presidential documentation specifically), it shows an alarming willingness to attempt to establish history as something other than what actually happened, and that should alarm EVERYONE. Trump lying is one thing. Trump giving the order for the official record in every capacity be altered to fit those lies is Orwellian in it’s scope.
The San Diego Comic Convention has come and gone, and all the new movie and tv previews are hitting the internet. And I felt like when I was watching the previews for shows like the Walking Dead and Titans…that fiction was feeling less strange than reality. Honestly, if it turned out that there actually ARE Lizard People are running the government and that Donald Trump was one, or that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan have been turning Congress into an undead, zombie horde, echo chamber of yes men, that would be less surprising than ANYTHING I saw in the Aquaman trailer. If 5 years ago, I pitched the actual events of the Trump presidency to AMC as their new Breaking Bad, I’d be a wealthy man right now.
Oh Donald. Donald, Donald, Donald! It is truly a bold move to come out and suggest that the Russians would be meddling in our midterms, but they would be interfering on behalf of the Democrats. I mean, honestly, it’s hilariously stupid, and I have to imagine that even your base will have to do some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to follow you on that logic, but I know they’ll get there. They manage to follow you no matter where you go. But this one has the sort of Donald Trump flair that we’ve come to know and hate. It’s truly a “You” move. Suggesting that Russia for some reason wants you and yours out of the picture is delightfully stupid. Putin has said, very vocally, only days ago, how happy he is to have you doing what you’re doing. You say you’re the toughest President on Russia, but the reality is you watch the government around you be tough on Russia, and complain that they’re destroying your budding relationship with a monster. But keep trying to make your sell. I mean, it’s actually even kind of devious on your part. If, by some magical miracle, the Dems have their blue wave, and knock it out of the park during midterms, you’ve started early in building your conspiracy!
Trump is angrily calling out yet another fascist regime with Nuclear capabilities and threatening them with hellfire. This week it was an angry all caps tweet telling Iran not threaten the US or else! One wonders if that’s part of his plan when dealing in these situations. I mean, this fire and brimstone approach was how he started with North Korea, and look how that turned out! And by that, I mean how Trump wants you to think it turned out, because he wants you to think it was an unqualified victory as opposed to the total mess that more accurately reflects reality. Who knows, with any luck, 6 months from now, Trump will be calling Rouhani a total sweetheart and assuring us all that their increase in weapons production does not mean he screwed up negotiations!
Jason Spencer is a Georgia State Representative in the Georgia House of Representatives. A highly conservative Republican, he has a bit of a history in saying some provocative things. No doubt knowing that Spencer had some pretty deplorable views, Sacha Baron Cohen, the man responsible for getting famous celebrities and political figures to expose their most base views as characters like Borat, Ali G, and Bruno, brought him onto his newest show to hopefully provoke an intense reaction out of Spencer. In the bit, thinking he was involved in a training video by an Israeli soldier, Spencer gleefully exposed his rump while shouting racial and homophobic epithets. Now, Spencer is claiming he was stricken by fear due to a previous exposure to terrorism and felt uncomfortable shouting those words…but if you watch the segment, that look of unadulterated joy at saying disgusting and bigoted phrases in a space he thought was going to be an echo chamber is hard to miss. Now, obviously he wasn’t the only person taken in by Cohen and his act. And indeed, many of the more conservative people Cohen has featured while in character, have loudly proclaimed that he tricked them into saying such unsavory and terrible things.
But the fact is that if your gut reaction to someone encouraging you to say something racist or homophobic is anything other than something along the lines of “No, I would not feel comfortable with that,” than you kind of lose your right to complain about someone showing the world your willingness to do such things.
I admittedly don’t know much about French President Emmanuel Macron, but he pulled a great line on Trump and even if It turns out he kicks babies for fun, I’ll still find myself having a bit of admiration for the guy. You see, by all accounts, while Trump was asking Macron to help convince the EU to the trading table as opposed to retaliatory tariffs against the US, Macron validated those actions by regurgitating the Art of the Deal back at Trump, which…I mean it’s the classiest, most elegant burn I could ever imagine. I don’t know that I could have ever thought to do that, and I have to wonder how Trump responded to that. Because I honestly don’t know how that confrontation ended, which is the real tragedy.
The frustrating thing about Donald Trump’s base at this point is that there is literally nothing he can do or say that they won’t either try to explain away or rationalize about why it’s not so bad. Trump’s base is now pro-Putin, where even 3 years ago, such an idea would have been disgusting to them. Trump gets to be racist, screw over our farmers and factories, roll back regulations to protect the environment and people, and any negative reaction to that gets relegated to liberals overreacting or misunderstanding the issue and fake news. The deep level of entrenchment is worrying and makes you wonder how they found themselves there. How much of it is out of spite? Are those of us who wholesale condemned those who voted for Trump in the first place responsible for this behavior? Even in part? I don’t know the answer, but it certainly makes me think about what it takes to put someone in that place. Could it happen on the opposite side of the spectrum somewhere down the line?
So I’ve been really trying to process how Trump plays to this Russia backlash. Obviously it’s a big deal when even some of his most ardent supporters are really turned off by his rhetoric. And publicly siding with Russia regarding the election meddling was kind of a shocker. GOP stalwarts were essentially calling his behavior treasonous. It was bad. So when he walked back his statements the next day only by suggesting that when he said “would” instead of “wouldn’t” when saying he didn’t know why it would be Russia who interfered, it was a total slip of the tongue…well I expected such a blatant lie not to work as well as it did. I mean it wasn’t just one switch up of “would” and “wouldn’t”. He went on several diatribes on Monday, both in his initial statement, in his Hannity Interview and his Tucker Carlson interview, shoring up the position that he didn’t have faith in his intelligence community, that he thinks Putin is great, and that Putin’s word holds more water. The idea that he could simply claim this was a slip of the tongue issue is a lie, for no other reason than that it literally contradicts 24 hours of statements to the contrary. Yet, GOP congressmen, apologist pundits, and generally everyone who had this moment of clarity regarding who Trump is, immediately seemed to say “That makes sense” and went back to calling the liberals a bunch of liars distorting the truth. And the world around us all collectively sighed…
Trump isn’t feeling the love in England right now. In fact, according to him, he downright feels unwelcome there. Who would have figured that? But as it turns out, even Trump can take a hint if you throw enough protestors and a literal blimp of him as a giant whining baby at him. Overall, it was a pretty rough weekend for Trump, with the hacker indictments directly mentioning him as inciting the DNC hack, dog whistling White Supremacists across Europe, and just tons of uncomfortable encounters with leadership, and I expect he was planning of things slowing down once he arrived at his resort in Scotland. After all, the people of Scotland totally love Trump, right?
Mind the Exit 