Greg Sargent ponders Donald Trump’s reluctance to denounce white nationalism today, and concludes that (a) Trump doesn’t want to risk his support among racists, (b) he doesn’t recognize that he has any particular public obligations as president, and (c) he can’t stand to give in to critics who are pressuring him. Plus this:
Joshua Green’s new book on Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon reports that in August 2016, as Hillary Clinton elevated the issue of white nationalism to national prominence with a major speech, the Trump campaign internally decided not to go too far in renouncing it. Bannon told Green: “We polled the race stuff and it didn’t matter.”
Now that’s a moral compass for you. They polled “the race stuff” and then decided they had no special need to oppose racism. So they didn’t. A real profile in courage, our president.
Having spent several hours on Friday night figuring out how to set my camera to catch a meteor streak from this year’s Perseid shower, I went back out Saturday night to try again. It was a lot easier this time. I had the best exposure already set and had already figured out how to get the camera to take continuous pictures. All I did was aim, press the shutter button, and then sit back and relax.
The night sky was darker on Saturday because I went out earlier, before the moon rose, but that also meant fewer meteors. I only saw one, but I wasn’t really watching closely most of the time. When I got home, I went through the 180 exposures the camera had taken, and found nothing. But then I went through them again, more slowly, and it turns out I got one after all. It’s a pretty faint streak, even with a bit of image processing, but it’s there.¹ It’s not much, especially for you folks who live in the desert or some other dark region and see meteors all the time, but it’s pretty good for us city dwellers.
(Note to fellow city dwellers: those little dots in the picture are “stars.” They are either pinpricks in the celestial sphere that separates us from the endless bonfire of the gods, or humongous balls of invisible gas that supposedly release vast amounts of energy by being converted into a different invisible gas. It all depends on which of those explanations you find most plausible.)
And why is the tree in the foreground so bright? Because lots of people had the same idea I did, and rolled by in their trucks and SUVs to look for good meteor-watching spots. Whenever one approached, its headlights lit up the trees, and it just happened that one did that during this exposure. I have several others with the tree lit up in yellow, red, and other colors depending on what kind of headlights the truck had. I swear, some of them were lit up like Christmas trees.
¹Why so faint? It was a five-second exposure, but meteors streak by in about a quarter of a second. Even though the meteor is fairly bright, that’s just not enough time to capture very many photons. It’s times like this that I wish I had one of those cameras that went up to ISO 3 million.
President Donald Trump bowed to overwhelming pressure that he personally condemn white supremacists who incited bloody demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., over the weekend — labeling their racist views “evil” after two days of equivocal statements.
“Racism is evil,” Mr. Trump said. “And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the K.K.K., neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
Trump refused to explicitly condemn neo-Nazis and white nationalists for two days, and there’s no question that his fans got the message: “He didn’t attack us. He just said the nation should come together,” wrote the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin. “No condemnation at all. When asked to condemn, he just walked out of the room. Really, really good. God bless him.”
Today Trump grimly recited a prepared text from a teleprompter, but did so under such obvious pressure that his white nationalist fans understand he’s just playing a role. This is exactly the way he handled the David Duke controversy last year: weasel words for a couple of days, followed by an obviously insincere condemnation under heavy pressure. Now, of course, it’s time to move forward, let the healing begin, and stop arguing about who killed whom. While we’re at it, though, you may be sure that Trump is making absolutely sure that his white supporters understand that nothing has really changed:
AM radio is already the exclusive preserve of right-wing agit-prop. Is broadcast TV next? The New York Times reports today on the coziness between Sinclair Media and President Trump’s new head of the FCC. Their first tête-à-tête came before Trump was even inaugurated:
The invitation from David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair, went to Ajit V. Pai, a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission who was about to be named the broadcast industry’s chief regulator.
….Within days of their meeting, Mr. Pai was named chairman of the F.C.C. And during his first 10 days on the job, he relaxed a restriction on television stations’ sharing of advertising revenue and other resources — the exact topic that Mr. Pai discussed with Mr. Smith….It was only the beginning. Since becoming chairman in January, Mr. Pai has undertaken a deregulatory blitz, enacting or proposing a wish list of fundamental policy changes advocated by Mr. Smith and his company. Hundreds of pages of emails and other documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal a rush of regulatory actions has been carefully aligned with Sinclair’s business objectives.
If Sinclair’s deal to merge with Tribune Media is approved, Sinclair will own one out of every six commercial TV stations in the country:
A review of Sinclair’s reporting and internal documents shows a strong tilt toward Trump. Sinclair gave a disproportionate amount of neutral or favorable coverage to Trump during the campaign while often casting Clinton in an unfavorable light.
….A “must-run” email from Washington managers to stations on Sept. 13 read this way: “DESCRIPTION: Why did Hillary Clinton struggle with disclosing her medical diagnosis? She has been repeatedly faced with previous questions of trust. Can a president lead with so many questions of transparency and trust?”
Another, from Sept. 8: “DESCRIPTION: Hillary Clinton showed up to talk about the responsibilities of being a leader at the commander-in-chief forum and the first question she took from the audience was about the email/server debacle. Clinton has repeatedly admitted it was a mistake, but 18 months since the first story broke and she’s still in the mode of damage control.”
An October “must-run” story was a report about conservative activist James O’Keefe’s “sting” video in which two Democratic-affiliated contractors who were surreptitiously recorded discussed disrupting Republican events and mused about a voter-fraud scheme. Another, on Sept. 9, was titled “Donald Trump Reflections of 9/11,” which also included a package in which Ivanka Trump discussed what she would do in a Trump administration. In early September, it pushed “Women for Trump,” a feature about Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara and another woman who was campaigning for him.
There were no equivalent “must-run” stories examining Trump’s refusal to release his medical or tax records or about questions surrounding his charitable foundation.
Fox News (cable news), Sinclair (broadcast TV), and Clear Channel (AM radio) are essentially state media in the Trump era. That’s a mighty useful thing for a demagogue to have.
This outrage is not aimed at white nationalists in Charlottesville. It’s aimed at a black CEO who resigned from a presidential council to protest Trump’s unwillingness to condemn white nationalists in Charlottesville. Is anyone surprised?
Ivanka Trump has explicitly condemned the white nationalists in Charlottesville: “There should be no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazis.”
Mike Pence has explicitly condemned the white nationalists in Charlottesville: “We will not tolerate hatred and violence of groups like white supremacists, the KKK and neo-Nazis. These extremist fringe groups have no place in the American debate.”
H.R. McMaster has explicitly condemned the white nationalists in Charlottesville: “We cannot tolerate, obviously, that bigotry, that hatred that is rooted in ignorance, ignorance of what America stands for, what America is.”
Jeff Sessions has explicitly condemned the white nationalists in Charlottesville: “The violence and deaths in Charlottesville strike at the heart of American law and justice. When such actions arise from racial bigotry and hatred, they betray our core values and cannot be tolerated.”
A White House spokesman has explicitly condemned the white nationalists in Charlottesville: “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry and hatred and of course that includes white Supremacists, KKK, neo-nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.”
The only person who’s been unwilling to explicitly and personally condemn the neo-Nazis and white nationalists in Charlottesville—as opposed to condemning generic violence and bigotry “on many sides”—is President Donald Trump:
WH staff told Trump they had to put out a statement, but couldn’t prevail on him to say it himself, in the first person. A revealing moment. https://t.co/c0jlDF2etJ
Back in the day, there was a bit of bloggy conversation about whether Donald Trump might actually be a less destructive president than, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. The case against that was pretty simple:
He’s a serial liar. He’s a demagogue. He’s a racist and a xenophobe. He appeals to our worst natures….He’d appoint folks who make Michael Brown look like Jeff Bezos. He would deliberately alienate foreign countries for no good reason….And while that volatile personality of his probably wouldn’t cause him to nuke Denmark, you never know, do you?
This week we’ve seen both of his two most serious flaws in action. Resurgent neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who take Trump as their inspiration and role model, invaded Charlottesville and produced exactly the violence and mayhem you’d expect. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio had no problem denouncing these racist thugs. But Trump, as he did before with David Duke, refused to clearly and explicitly condemn them. He offered only his usual weasel words, which gave him plausible deniability but refrained from risking his reputation as the champion of white America. “Nobody in media/politics can legitimately claim they didn’t know that Trump plays footsie with white supremacists,” says my boss today, and then lays out MoJo’s extensive coverage of exactly this over the past two years. You should read it if you have even the vaguest thought that maybe Trump isn’t quite as toxic and ugly as I’m suggesting.
At the same time, he’s been engaged in a childish war of words with North Korea. This is not just idiotic, since Trump is making threats he knows he won’t carry out, but recklessly dangerous. It’s exactly the kind of thing that, with the right push, could escalate into Kim Jong-Un doing something foolhardy and then Trump responding in kind. The odds of this turning into a nuclear exchange are low. Maybe 1 percent or so. But with any other Republican the odds would be 0 percent.
Trump needs to go. The sooner Republicans figure this out, the better off we’ll be. Mike Pence may have sold his soul by signing up with Trump—and as president he’d unquestionably be bad for everything I care about—but Donald Trump is a disgrace, and a dangerous one. His 15 minutes should have been up long ago.
This morning, mostly in passing, I mentioned that I couldn’t quite tell exactly who Donald Trump was condemning in his tweets about last night’s march by white nationalists in Charlottesville. I’ve been out all day since then and just got home. The first thing I read about were the deaths and injuries in today’s march: one woman was killed by a car that rammed into the crowd; two police officers died in a helicopter crash; and dozens more were injured. And what does our president have to say about that?
We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.
And this:
This is the White House’s only response to my asking three times if the President condemns white supremacists pic.twitter.com/6YLUrrRLOM
Can you figure out what’s wrong with this picture?
Answer: it was taken at 1 in the morning by moonlight. Isn’t that amazing? You’d think it was taken at sunrise.
And what was I doing snapping pictures at 1 in the morning? I was meteor watching, something I’ve never done before. Perseids, to be precise. To my surprise,¹ I saw several meteors, including a couple of very nice ones. However, my goal was to get a picture of meteors, and I failed miserably at that. Also, I had bad luck. I initially adjusted my camera settings for a long shutter speed, and several meteors streaked across the sky during this session. However, none of them showed up in the images.
So then I re-adjusted my settings to be more meteor-friendly (I think), and naturally there were no meteors. Finally, as I went back to my car, a really nice meteor streaked by, and this got me all excited again. So I took a bunch more pictures. But no meteors.
Hmmph. The good news is that I learned what I think I need to do. Maybe I’ll go out again tonight. The moon is coming up later, and if I go out an hour earlier I should have a pretty dark sky to work with. I also think I can get my camera to take pictures automatically with no manual intervention from me. Gotta check out the instruction manual about that.
Anyway, if I give it another try and have any success, you’ll be the first to know.
¹Why was I surprised? I guess because I’m a city boy and I’ve never seen a meteor before. Deep inside, I’m not sure I believed they’d really show up until I saw one myself.
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