But Kelly did not even deny Wilson’s basic claim, i.e., that Trump said some variation of “He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”.. But it’s not clear why Kelly had to go out of his way to suggest that the congresswoman was exploiting Johnson’s death, suggesting for good measure that he was so angry that he walked among the graves of fallen soldiers to cool down, and then launching into a sermon about how basic decency and traditional values are dead. “When I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” Kelly said, adding that “women were sacred.”It’s odd to invoke the “sacredness” of women while defending Trump, whom multiple women have accused of sexual assault and who has repeatedly and very publicly denigrated women in horrifying ways, but Kelly is of course not responsible for Trump’s actions. What is worse is the sleight of hand Kelly used to align Trump culturally and morally with the military and the families of the fallen while casting the congresswoman as belonging to a kind of cultural category that, in the minds of people of Kelly’s generation,.. which came of age during the country’s searing divisions over Vietnam, is characterized by empty, valueless showboating and doesn’t have sufficient respect for the military and the ultimate sacrifice made by fallen soldiers and their loved ones... Whatever the truth about Wilson’s motives, the decision as to who listened in on the call was a personal one made by the next of kin. And Kelly should respect that. Instead, he helped Trump play the aggrieved party. But in this case, Trump apparently botched the call to a family. He should have known that he might be placed on speakerphone. (When you were a “kid growing up,” surely men took responsibility for their actions, right, John?)
Donald Trump defends Roger Ailes, casts suspicion on his accusers
Donald Trump this weekend defended longtime friend Roger Ailes, the ousted chief executive of Fox News who is accused of sexually harassing at least two dozen women. Trump also questioned the motives of some of the women.
.. “I can tell you that some of the women that are complaining, I know how much he’s helped them, and even recently. And when they write books that are fairly recently released, and they say wonderful things about him. And now, all of a sudden, they’re saying these horrible things about him,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Saturday evening. “It’s very sad because he’s a very good person. I’ve always found him to be just a very, very good person. And, by the way, a very, very talented person. Look what he’s done. So I feel very badly.”
.. Trump added that “a lot of people are thinking he’s going to run my campaign,” but he wouldn’t say whether those people were correct.
Bill Mitchell Breaks the Internet
The once obscure online radio host now leads Trump’s army of Twitter pundits.
.. Donald Trump’s unconventional candidacy has dragged together a ragtag band of boosters, a new celebrity subclass born out of online obscurity. Bill Mitchell, online radio upstart and Trump’s unofficial Twitter mascot, is its king... And despite an appearance of self-parody, he is genuinely devoted to Donald Trump’s candidacy... His Twitter following ballooned from 124 (per his recollection) to over 96,000. In February, MIT Media Lab ranked him the top ordinary citizen influencing the election—number 26, after politicians and media networks... attracted the attention of conservative talk radio hosts, who began booking him as a frequent guest... Mitchell’s decades working as an executive recruiter honed his communication skills, he told me. And being a bachelor left him enough time to obsess over his favorite news sites, Breitbart and the blog of Gateway Pundit.. His mother was a public-speaking professor, and he loved musical theatre as a child... Would he consider a career with Trump TV? “If they ask me!” he says.. Trump surrogates—ones Mitchell swore I would recognize but declined to name—call him for one-liners before their television appearances. They’ll use his “zingers,” and he gets no credit, happy just to do his part... Trump detractors who find Mitchell ridiculous fail to comprehend his rhetorical style. “They don’t understand that I quite often speak in symbolism,” he explained... Mitchell’s detractors in the Clinton campaign are mainly robots, he claims. If they’re stormtroopers, Mitchell analogizes, “[Trump is] like Han Solo. Han Solo started out a smuggler, ended up being galactic hero, you know.”
Sinister figures lurk around our careless president
With eyes wide open, Mike Pence eagerly auditioned for the role as Donald Trump’s poodle. Now comfortably leashed, he deserves the degradations that he seems too sycophantic to recognize as such. He did Trump’s adolescent bidding with last Sunday’s preplanned virtue pageant of scripted indignation — his flight from the predictable sight of players kneeling during the national anthem
.. No unblinkered observer can still cling to the hope that Pence has the inclination, never mind the capacity, to restrain, never mind educate, the man who elevated him to his current glory.
.. no one can have sustained transactions with Trump without becoming too soiled for subsequent scrubbing.
.. Hell is truth seen too late
.. instinct to pander to those who adore him as much as he does
.. they are impervious to the Everest of evidence that he disdains them as a basket of gullibles.
.. He gives his gullibles not governance by tantrum, but tantrum as governance.
.. The faux nationalists of the “alt-right” and their fellow travelers such as Stephen K. Bannon, although fixated on protecting the United States from imported goods, have imported the blood-and-soil ethno-tribalism that stains the continental European right.
.. Trump’s election has brought back to the public stage ideas that a post-Lincoln America had slowly but determinedly expunged.
.. the alt-right sees society as inevitably “a zero-sum contest among fundamentally competing identity groups.” Hence the alt-right is explicitly an alternative to Lincoln’s affirmation of the Founders’ vision. They saw America as cohesive because of a shared creed.