Replies to post #349158 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Trump seeks to claim the mantle of history in fiery Mount Rushmore address

"Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Shithole Country’ He Fears
The president’s mindless nationalism has come to this: Americans are not welcome in Europe or Mexico."

The president’s speech, part of a July 4 weekend celebration, comes after weeks of protests against racism and police brutality that have forced broader discussions over America's monuments.


President Donald Trump stands on stage before he speaks at the Mount Rushmore National Monument on Friday. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon

By JORDAN MULLER
07/04/2020 12:16 AM EDT

President Donald Trump on Friday issued a fiery condemnation of a "left-wing cultural revolution" he said is mounting a "radical assault" on American democracy in a speech steeped in historical hyperbole delivered against the stunning backdrop of Mount Rushmore on the observed Fourth of July.

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities,” Trump said. “They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive.”

"Make no mistake, this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American revolution. And in so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, hunger and lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery and progress."

The president’s speech, scheduled as part of a July 4 weekend celebration at the South Dakota memorial, comes after weeks of nationwide protests against racism and police brutality that have forced broader discussions over monuments to racist historical figures.

It was a divisive address that stood in stark contrast to a weekend holiday celebrating national unity across a country also riven by a deadly pandemic.

"The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities that are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable results of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism and other cultural institutions," Trump said.

Although health experts have slammed .. https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/07/03/mount-rushmore-trump-coronavirus-doctor-sot-ip-vpx.cnn ..
Trump for holding the event amid a nationwide surge in coronavirus cases, he did not directly refer to the virus or the country's daily record-setting case toll.

Kim Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. and a top Trump campaign official, tested positive for coronavirus ahead of the president’s speech in South Dakota on Friday, POLITICO confirmed.

Guilfoyle, who traveled to Mount Rushmore to attend the event, was not in contact with the president and did not travel on Air Force One. The New York Times first reported .. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/politics/kimberly-guilfoyle-trump-campaign-coronavirus.html?referringSource=articleShare .. Guilfoyle had tested positive.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem said .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-mount-rushmore-fireworks/2020/07/03/af2e84f6-bd25-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html .. the roughly 3,700 people who attended the event did not need to wear masks or social distance. Like attendees of the president's June rallies in Tulsa, Okla., and Phoenix, Ariz., thousands crammed shoulder-to-shoulder to listen to Trump’s speech, his third campaign-style event since the beginning of the pandemic.

The event also featured fireworks and a flyover by Air Force One, Marine One and military aircraft.


President Donald Trump speaks at Mount Rushmore. | AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Trump has come under fire for speaking at Mount Rushmore, a national landmark honoring Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln with a history that has been scrutinized amid the nationwide protests.

Native American groups — who consider the land on which the monument was built sacred .. https://apnews.com/50f6bdb9e2fd2349bb39b99c1250b093 — staged protests outside, clashing at times with the National Guard.

“The president needs to open his eyes. We’re people, too, and it was our land first,” Hehakaho Waste, a spiritual elder with the Oglala Sioux tribe, told the Associated Press.

Demonstrators recently have torn down monuments to Confederate generals, colonial figures and slaveholders nationwide, prompting the president to sign an executive order calling for jail time for protesters who damage monuments. Noem pledged last week to resist any attempt to alter or remove Mount Rushmore, a call echoed by the president in his address.

white house
'Complete disaster': Trump's fraught ties with Native Americans on display at Mount Rushmore
By ANITA KUMAR
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/03/trump-mount-rushmore-347982

Colleges have renamed schools https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/27/princeton-removes-woodrow-wilson-name-342130 .. dedicated to patrons with histories of racism, and brands like Aunt Jemima .. https://preview.houstonchronicle.com/dining/food-brands-consider-name-logo-changes-amid-15376649 , Disney .. https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/25/media/splash-mountain-disney/index.html , and the Washington Redskins .. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/03/washington-redskins-team-name-review-348521 .. have announced plans to consider dropping racist logos and imagery.

But to Trump, many such protests and statements seem a challenge to his styling of himself as a "law and order" president tasked with upholding the nation's "splendid heritage."

"And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing. Our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled, and the nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out the history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children," he said.

"Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies. All perspective is removed, every virtue is skewed, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history urged in the record is disfigured beyond all recognition."

Before leaving the stage, Trump announced he would sign an executive order to establish a “national garden of American heroes” featuring the building and rebuilding monuments and statues of "historically significant Americans."

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/04/trump-mount-rushmore-speech-348618

Since Trump creates his own realty by repeatedly lying it's not surprising he sees an objective look at history as a web of lies.

Truth becomes "radical" in Trumpism Trumpspeak (TT).

[fuagf]

Had forgotten - The Trump Administration Contradicts Itself on Putin’s Offer

"Trump Is Turning America Into the ‘Shithole Country’ He Fears
The president’s mindless nationalism has come to this: Americans are not welcome in Europe or Mexico."

The White House and U.S. State Department had very different answers to Russia’s request to interview 11 Americans.

Krishnadev Calamur
July 19, 2018


Carlos Barria / Reuters

Updated at 1:53 p.m. ET

President Trump’s news conference .. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/trump-putin/565238/ .. Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin has quickly become the sort of gift that keeps on giving: The focus, initially, was on Trump saying he believed Putin’s assertion that Russia didn’t interfere in the 2016 presidential election over U.S. intelligence assessments that it did. Now, the question is just how seriously the Trump administration is considering what the president called an “incredible” offer from Putin.

Putin apparently made that offer during the more than two-hour one-on-one meeting between the two men, who were accompanied only by their translators. According to Putin’s own account in a news conference in Helsinki, as well as later Russian accounts, the offer involved allowing Robert Mueller, the special counsel, to interview 12 Russian intelligence officials indicted in the U.S. last week as part of the investigation into Russia’s election interference in 2016. In exchange, the U.S. would allow Russian officials to question 11 prominent Americans, including Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, for what Putin alleges to have been illegal activities—allegations the U.S. firmly denies. How the Trump administration plans to respond to this “incredible” offer depends, as such things often do, on who you ask—and when.

At the White House, Sarah Sanders, the spokeswoman, said Wednesday: “There was some conversation about it, but there wasn’t a commitment made on behalf of the United States. And the president will work with his team, and we’ll let you know if there’s an announcement on that front.” Moments later, at the State Department, Heather Nauert, the spokeswoman there, had an unequivocal response when she was asked about the Russian offer: “The overall assertions that have come out of the Russian Government are absolutely absurd,” she said.

At issue in addition to McFaul, whom Russian officials targeted for harassment .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/11/feature/putin-needed-an-american-enemy-he-picked-me/?utm_term=.95c75d711e3b .. during his tenure as ambassador, is the case of William Browder, a U.S.-born investor who now lives in the U.K. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, died in a Russian prison under suspicious circumstances after exposing a large-scale tax fraud involving Russian government officials. Browder thereafter became a staunch Kremlin critic and a driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that sanctions Russian government officials involved in human-rights abuses. Putin, during his news conference in Helsinki with Trump, said Russia has “an interest in questioning” Browder over tax issues. A day later, Tuesday, the Russian Prosecutor General’s office released a list .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/11/feature/putin-needed-an-american-enemy-he-picked-me/?utm_term=.95c75d711e3b .. of Americans it wanted extradited to Russia: They included McFaul, another Kremlin critic and champion of civil-society institutions in Russia, as well as officials from the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

“We do not stand by those assertions that the Russian government makes,” Nauert said Wednesday. “The prosecutor general in Russia is well aware that the United States has rejected Russian allegations in this regard.”

Speaking Thursday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe ..

Amb. @McFaul reacts to the Trump WH not rejecting Russia’s request to question him pic.twitter.com/1RMzygTSVz

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) July 19, 2018

, McFaul called the White House’s response “lamentable.”

“When the White House was given the opportunity to categorically reject this moral equivalency between a legitimate indictment with lots of data and evidence to support it from Mr. Mueller with a crazy, cockamamie scheme with no relationship to facts and reality whatsoever, the White House refused to do that,” he said.

On Thursday, Sanders in a statement stated the White House’s position: “It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it. Hopefully President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt.”

The United States does not hand over former or serving government officials for questioning to foreign powers—even if these officials were found guilty of crimes by courts in allied countries (which McFaul was not, and Russia most certainly is not). One reason for this is that what may be legal in the United States may be illegal elsewhere. A relatively recent example of this is the case of more than two dozen CIA officials who were convicted in absentia by an Italian court for their role in the abduction in 2003 of a radical Egyptian cleric in Milan. The abduction was part of the Bush administration’s policy of extraordinary rendition employed to seize terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Those suspects weren’t handed over to Italy, where the practice was illegal. The one CIA officer who was arrested had moved to Portugal where she was detained. (She has since been freed .. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/01/517916196/italy-grants-partial-clemency-to-ex-cia-officer-over-extraordinary-rendition . Many others in the case were pardoned.)

By declining to unequivocally rule out granting a foreign country—in this case Russia—access to U.S. officials, the White House sets not only a dangerous precedent, but also a culture of uncertainty for those serving the United States. And this in many ways suits Putin’s agenda. Just as Trump berates what he calls “fake news,” denies remarks he has made in public, and repeats demonstrably false assertions, one of the Russian leader’s most effective tools is to cast doubts in the West about the efficiency of its own governments and institutions.

“Under no circumstances can the US government permit, or even contemplate, making those who have served the US government faithfully available to the spurious ‘investigations’ of our adversaries,” Dan Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, said Wednesday on Twitter ..

6. Under no circumstances can the US government permit, or even contemplate, making those who have served the US government faithfully available to the spurious "investigations" of our adversaries. They owe it to past, current, and future US officials to uphold that principle.

— Dan Shapiro (@DanielBShapiro) July 18, 2018

.. when news about McFaul’s inclusion on the list became public. “They owe it to past, current, and future US officials to uphold that principle.”

If Sanders’s initial remarks had been isolated, the fallout from them might have been more limited. But they are part of a broader pattern in this administration, which often contradicts itself on key elements of its own domestic and foreign policy, with the president saying one thing and his Cabinet officials and aides later trying to clarify what he meant. Just this week, Trump said he took Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies. Amid the furor, he tried to reverse himself .. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/trump-russia-putin/565436/ , but his comments only added to questions about what he truly believes .. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/trump-russia-hack/565445/ .

At first Trump said he’d misspoken in Helsinki when he said: “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” In Washington, reading from a printed statement, he said Tuesday: “The sentence should have been, ‘I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be Russia,’ sort of a double negative. So you can put that in, and I think that probably clarifies things pretty good.” And then he added: “I accept our intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place. Could be other people also. There’s a lot of people out there.”

“We certainly believe that we are taking steps to make sure they can’t do it again,” Sanders said Wednesday. “Unlike previous administrations, this President is actually taking bold action and reform to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But he does believe that they would target, certainly, U.S. elections again.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/trump-mcfaul/565565/