Liberal Forum

Trump ‘pivots’ 360 degrees, back into the mud....By Eugene Robinson

Donald Trump’s “pivot,” desperately hoped for by sane Republicans, was over before it began. He couldn’t pretend to be inclusive and statesmanlike for two days in a row if his life depended on it.

Anyone who doubts this should only consider Trump’s idea of an appeal to African American voters: “What do you have to lose by trying something new like Trump? What do you have to lose? You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

That’s right, black Americans. The Republican candidate for president says you live Hobbesian lives of misery and despair, with no options, no prospects, no joy, no hope. Oh, and he wants your vote.

For the record, sigh, let me take a minute to unpack the stunning ignorance in that ostensible pitch for African American votes, which Trump made Friday before a virtually all-white audience in Michigan.

The black poverty rate is about 27 percent. That’s far too high — the poverty rate for whites is about 10 percent — but the fact is that most African Americans lead comfortable middle-class lives.

The black unemployment rate is about 9 percent — again, too high, but nothing like the impression Trump seeks to give.

And his claim of 58 percent black youth joblessness is an out-and-out lie.

The only way he can arrive at that figure is to include all black people between 16 and 24, including those who are attending high school.

If you calculated white youth unemployment that same way, it would be nearly 50 percent. But it’s ridiculous to count as unemployed a bunch of kids who, you know, have to do their chemistry homework.

Does Trump have the faintest clue what black America is really like? From the evidence, no.

But I can’t believe he actually thinks he has a chance of winning significant African American support, given the way he has insulted President Obama, dismissed the issue of police violence and acquiesced in support from the white-supremacist fringe.

Trump has registered as low as 1 percent or 2 percent among black voters in national polls — and his remarks last week probably cost him support.

Instead, he must have been seeking to appeal to white voters who can’t bring themselves to vote for him because of the racist tone of his campaign. Message: I care about African Americans, even if it’s pretty obvious that I don’t know very many.

Hey, at least it worked with Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s new campaign manager. “I’m white,” she said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “I was very moved by his comment.”

The desire to convince whites he is not a flaming bigot may also be why one of the pillars of Trump’s campaign — the promise to round up and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants — has suddenly gone wobbly.

If elected, Trump could never actually carry out such a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing.

But antipathy toward Latinos who are “flooding” across the border, allegedly to take Americans’ jobs and commit horrible crimes, is a central tenet of Trumpism.

I thought Trump would have to stick with this paranoid revenge fantasy throughout the campaign — until Conway said Sunday that the final policy on forced deportation is “to be determined.”

The previous day, in a meeting with a group of Hispanic advisers, Trump reportedly said he could consider a procedure in which at least some undocumented men and women could obtain legal status without first going back to their home countries.

But Monday, Trump said that “I’m not flip-flopping” on immigration — yet declined to give any specifics on what his position now is.

Poor Conway had better get used to explaining what her candidate must have meant as opposed to what he actually said. She also should get accustomed to the fact that Trump will frequently make her into a liar. “

He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she said Sunday — but then Trump took to Twitter. Within hours, he had slung a personal insult at a regular guest on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (not me).

And Monday morning, he lobbed even nastier personal insults at the show’s co-hosts. Whatever, Donald.

Trump’s pivot turned out to be a 360-degree pirouette: back into the mud, where he feels most at home.

I’ve said it before: Trump is not going to change. No matter how many times he reshuffles his campaign, he is who he is. It’s delusional to pretend otherwise.

The GOP’s Trumpian deflation

Donald Trump. Would that it were unnecessary to mention his name except, say, as a Viagra pitchman.

Despite such casting perfection, this isn’t intended as a metaphor for the man, though it is for the GOP. Cue sound of balloon losing vigor. The erstwhile party of Lincoln has rendered itself impotent by its clammy-handed embrace of the sad clown who made everybody laugh — for a while.

But the enchanted evening Republicans fantasized when they nominated the biggest goofball ever to enter the Oval Office sweepstakes is over.

The clock has struck midnight, the carriage is ablaze; the golden-haired prince is a bloated chimney sweep ranting at rooftops. The party’s footmen, blind mice begging for scraps of mercy, scatter in search of cover.

Even Rep. Mark Sanford, the disgraced former governor of South Carolina, took to the quill, writing in a New York Times op-ed that he might no longer support Trump if he doesn’t produce his tax returns. Knowing with 99 percent certainty that this won’t happen, Sanford has carved a tiny escape hole in the baseboard for himself.

At the same time, talk radio hustlers who’ve more or less directed the GOP platform the past two decades or so, beginning with the Clinton administration, seem to be coming undone, floundering in the full-circleness of their anti-Clinton credo.

Rush Limbaugh recently dissolved into a fit of giggles as he tried to pronounce the stupidity of Trump’s “softening” on immigration.

“Poor Ann,” he rasped, referring to Ann Coulter’s new book, “In Trump We Trust.”Anti-amnesty Ann, now on what she says may be the shortest book tour ever, has had to dial back her support for the GOP nominee if he doesn’t return to his hard-line deportation promise.

Quelle situation! The very “policy” undergirding Trump’s campaign suddenly became a negotiable talking point. Draconian Trump suddenly became Care Bear Trump: We need to be fair and maybe some should stay, he said.

Then, just as suddenly — feeling the heat from his courtiers — he was back to dear old Draco. But of course he’s going to send them all back. Then, when they come back legally, if they do, they’ll have to pay taxes.

Because every ordinary billionaire does?

Trump was never going to build a wall, this columnist wrote. He was never going to deport 11 million people, she said.

How exactly does one do this without sending armed forces to arrest Madre in the kitchen and Padre on the phone while their citizen-children watch in horror?

Think back to the 2000 image of Elian Gonzalez’s “rescue” by masked, armed men, brought to you by the Clinton administration, let the record show.

For many of us scribes, Trump’s true nature and character were obvious from the start, not to mention 20 years before that.

No degree of fleeting niceness (which, ahem, I gamely recognized in a recent column written for sport in response to a challenge) was going to make Trump less repugnant or more appealing for long.

Predictably, he couldn’t sustain it. A person can only fake who he is for so long before the interior self emerges.

Trump’s nice side, you can be certain, isn’t what appeals to members of the Ku Klux Klan or other white nationalist groups who find his ideas in sync with their own.

Trump’s calling Hillary Clinton a bigot when he is the bigots’ candidate should be viewed as the last gasp of a desperate nominee with no one left to insult. African Americans, previously ignored, are now in the sights of the flaming eye of Sauron.

This dark fairy tale was bound to end, if later than many expected. Sure, droves will vote for Trump no matter what — and we’ve learned that no-matter-what has elastic boundaries.

His fans aren’t crazy or stupid, one is bound to say, and may justify their votes with concern for the future composition of the Supreme Court or for some variation of Trump’s shifting immigration policy.

But the truth is, most will be voting against Clinton, whom they dislike with such ferocity that they’d rather vote for Mickey Mouse — or even Donald Trump, master puppeteer and ringmaster of the Freakiest Show on Earth.

Trump and Limbaugh admit that GOP voters want racial resentment, not policy

It should have been the last episode of the The Rush Limbaugh Show — the big reveal with the “surprise” ending everyone saw coming.

On Monday, Rush explained why he didn’t consider Trump’s decision to de-emphasize deportations in his immigration “policy” a flip-flop.

“This is going to enrage you,” he told a caller, who was enraged by Trump’s perceived flip.

“You know, I could choose a path here to try to mollify you, but — I never took [Trump] seriously on this.”

You mean it’s all a big con?

Trump made firm vows to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants a key rallying cry of his campaign as he bashed his Republican competitors for embracing “amnesty.”

And now he’s just backing away from those sacred vows like they’re contractors trying to collect the cash he owes them?

Not really, he’s only pretending to “soften” on the issue, as The Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent points out, or “harden” — depending on the audience.

So Trump’s new “policy” is mass deportations without talking about “mass deportations.”

The same policy, changed words.

That should be a relief to Limbaugh, who seemed to take Trump very seriously on this subject late last year, as Allahpundit points out on the Hot Air blog.

But he’s already given up the game — it isn’t about policy at all.

It’s about channeling frustrations that you nurture by avoiding actual policies.
[....]
The GOP isn’t selling policy. It’s selling resentment, resentment that racializes spending and labor unions as things that only help “them” to justify cutting taxes and obligations for the rich and their corporations.

If you can get the mass of voters to worry about brown people more than anything, they’ll ignore the guys at the top drinking our milkshake in the form of all the income gains of the last century.

The GOP primary turned out to be a contest of who could best become the personification of the GOP base’s resentment.

Trump won.

Donald Trump's question and answer at black church has already been scripted.

Donald Trump is trying to flip the script on his miniscule support among minorities, but will need to memorize his lines for an upcoming appearance.

The candidate’s visit to a largely black church in Detroit will see him participate in a pre-written question and answer session with the pastor, according to documents seen by The New York Times.

Trump’s Saturday trip to Great Faith Ministries is not on his current schedule, and the canned conversation between the GOP nominee and Bishop Wayne T. Jackson is not open to the public or media.

Their exchange has already been written, according to The Times, with a cadre of aides devising Trump’s answers on questions about police brutality toward black men and boys.

Misty » 02 Sep 2016 5:00 pm » wrote: **** coward.

Misty » 05 Sep 2016 12:17 pm » wrote:This is what Trump said in 2014.
Now trying to win the African-American vote.



Some responses:



Why is he Tweeting at 3:00 AM?

Inglorious Bastard » 05 Sep 2016 12:47 pm » wrote:sad truth...he is 101 percent correct

Inglorious Bastard » 05 Sep 2016 12:47 pm » wrote:you actually post to trump's actual twitter accnt?????????????????????????????????????????????..ohhhh c'mmmmmoooonnnnnnnnnn

Misty » 05 Sep 2016 12:58 pm » wrote: So you also judge all blacks based on the actions of one?
BTW, have you checked out Obama's approval rating lately?

Which is more ridiculous....that I post to his account once in a while, or that a man running for POTUS compulsively posts on Twitter day and night and gets into Twitter wars with people?

HRC was right: "A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons."

Inglorious Bastard » 05 Sep 2016 1:20 pm » wrote:i never considered him a black man....he was conceived in a white womb.....fed by a white woman in that womb...and a white womb squirted that disaster out
only a tiny sperm burp is he.....and that was one of the worst sperm cells in history

Misty » 05 Sep 2016 2:45 pm » wrote:Trump would like us to forget that he was ever a Birther.
He blames the media for his not wanting to talk about it.






Donald Trump 'would love to' talk about birtherism. Here's why he doesn't.