Donald Trump has a penchant for labeling particular people. It might strike some as just another insult for a petulant urchin of a man who insults everyone with whom he takes issue. But I believe that the nature of his insults to specific kinds of people says something more about the character and nature of the man, something of which he may or may not be aware.
I believe that the fact that he so often attacks the intellectual capacity of women and minorities exposes a racial and gender bias, one that has a long history and a wide acceptance.
.. Hover over the irony here: The man trying to help at-risk children by opening doors for them was being attacked by the man who has put children at risk by locking them in cages.
.. Trump repeated the sobriquet he has assigned to California Representative Maxine Waters, calling her, “Very low I.Q. low. Low I.Q.”
.. review of the many insults Trump has spouted since he declared his candidacy finds that although he has called many people dumb, or dummies or low I.Q., the targeting of that particular insult at women, including minority women, occurs with curious frequency and is often a singular line of attack against them, rather than one of many.
He has called MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski “dumb as a rock,” “low I.Q.,” and “crazy and very dumb.”
He has called HLN anchor S.E. Cupp and political commentator Ana Navarro “two of the dumbest people in politics,” and has called Cupp “one of the dumber pundits on TV.”
He has called Republican consultant Cheri Jacobus “really dumb” and “a real dummy.”
He has called Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin “one of the dumber bloggers.”
He has said of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that she “has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me.”
He has said of the journalist Mary Katharine Ham that she “isn’t smart enough to know what’s going on at the border.”
He has called the Forbes writer Clare O’Connor a “dummy” multiple times.
He has said that Maria Cardona made Morning Edition contributor Cokie Roberts look “even dumber” than he believed she was on a news show.
He has called Arianna Huffington, founder of HuffPost, a “dummy.”
.. I read in these comments an overt misogyny that has long existed in this country and the world, one that seeks to undercut the seriousness and cerebral capacity of women, to render them as emotionally unsuitable for deep deliberative analysis.
.. This is the very same argument that people have used to deny women’s suffrage and prevent access to full political participation.
.. Most people, male and female alike, believed that women were biologically unfit for politics. According to one orator at a mass meeting in Albany, New York, ‘A woman’s brain involves emotion rather than intellect, [which] painfully disqualifies her for the sterner duties to be performed by the intellectual faculties.’
.. ‘Housewives!’ announced a Massachusetts journal, ‘You do not need a ballot to clean out your sink spout.’ ”
And yet, 170 years on, we have a president of the United States questioning women’s intelligence.
.. “Women have scored higher than men in intelligence testing for the first time since records began.”
Invisible no more: How advising programs are finding new talent for top colleges
But a growing movement of nonprofit talent hunters and advisers is seeking to raise the ambitions of disadvantaged students and connect them with premier colleges, attacking a widespread problem researchers call “undermatching.” Some are helping eye-catching numbers of students land at colleges with low admission rates, including Georgetown University in Washington.
.. Most disadvantaged students with strong academic credentials “just don’t get why it is that they should be interested in applying to a selective college,” said Caroline M. Hoxby, a Stanford University economist. They take one look at the sticker price of private colleges, often exceeding $60,000 a year, and write them off. They don’t realize financial aid can put schools with small class sizes and high graduation rates within their reach. Instead, Hoxby said, these students focus on community colleges or others they see as accessible, inexpensive and convenient.
.. in a 2012 study that at least 25,000 low-income students a year, and probably 35,000, rank in the top 10 percent on SAT or ACT admission test scores and have at least an A-minus average. Most of them, Hoxby and Avery found, do not apply to any selective college — rendering them effectively invisible to admissions officers.
.. The Hoxby-Avery study rang alarms. It suggested selective colleges were overlooking legions of deserving students.
Trump’s successes are thanks to Republicans. His failures are thanks to Trump.
Vice President Pence’s obsequiousness at a recent Cabinet meeting — “Thank you for seeing, through the course of this year, an agenda that is truly restoring this country. . .” and on, and on — might be appropriate at a Communist Party Central Committee meeting or at a despot’s birthday party.
.. The divestment of self-respect is a qualification for employment in the Trump administration. Praising the Dear Leader in a Pence-like fashion seems to be what the Dear Leader requires — not in the way we might need dessert after dinner, but in the way an addict needs drugs.
.. President Trump divides the world into two categories: flunkies and enemies. Pence is the cringing, fawning high priest of flunkiness
.. Any Republican president from the 2016 primary field would have appointed conservative judges, continued the offensive against the Islamic State, and cut taxes and regulations. (He or she would also, in all likelihood, have succeeded at an Obamacare replacement.)
.. Trump spent the political capital of his first year — the highest it will ever be — on a few, generic GOP goals.
- .. Trump has tried to undermine the credibility of important institutions — the courts, the FBI, intelligence agencies, the media — that check his power and expose his duplicity.
- He has used his office (and Twitter account) to target individual Americans for harm without due process.
- He attacks the very idea of truth in a daily torrent of despicable lies.
- The moral authority of the presidency is in tatters.
- He has made our common life more vulgar and brutal, and complicated the moral education of children.
- Racists are emboldened and included in the GOP coalition.
- He has caused a large portion of Republicans to live in an alternate reality of resentment and hatred,
- which complicates the possibility of governing and is likely to discredit the party among the young, minorities, women and college-educated voters for decades to come.
.. Almost all of Trump’s accomplishments are the work of traditional Republican policy staffers and congressional leaders. Almost all of Trump’s failures are functions of his character. And that isn’t going to change.
Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis Opens Door for China to Regain Influence
Myanmar’s top leaders visit Beijing amid strengthening ties
For years China helped prop up Myanmar’s economy when it was ruled by a military junta. But ties between the two countries soured when Myanmar’s generals began introducing democratic overhauls in 2011, ultimately leading to the election of Ms. Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner ..
.. Chinese hydropower project was put on hold, and Japanese and Western investment began trickling into the country to displace Beijing from its role as Myanmar’s sole benefactor.
Now, China is regaining some of its lost influence. It is trying to revive stalled projects, including the hydroplant, and get access to Myanmar’s Indian Ocean coast through a $7.3 billion port and pipeline project.
.. China’s diplomatic and commercial moves are a part of President Xi’s trillion-dollar “Belt and Road” plan to build infrastructure and deepen trade ties across Eurasia. It will also lessen China’s dependence on oil shipped through the narrow and easily blocked Strait of Malacca.
.. The cost for the Rohingya, though, is that under the China-brokered repatriation deal, there might be little international supervision of how they are treated should they choose to return to Myanmar.
Among other things, Myanmar plans to bar Rohingya from the lands they farmed before the purges. It instead intends to settle them in “model villages,” which the U.N. has described as little better than internment camps.