Tag: WHITE

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Maddow On Why The Trump-Stormy Daniels Affair Is A Big Deal

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Former Porn Star Stormy Daniels recently appeared to testify at former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial currently playing out in Manhattan, New York. As was expected, a lot of juicy details came out of her testimony, some previously known by the public, and others totally new. Trump’s supporters have predictably sought to downplay, even totally disregard Daniels’ testimony, but as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow recently said on her colleague Nicolle Wallace’s show, we cannot/must not forget the fact that the person at the heart of this sordid affair, is someone who could potentially end up as U.S. president again. Put another way, this is, as Maddow would put it, “a big freaking deal”.

Maddow said(5:55): “The very big picture here is, we are thinking seriously as a country, about putting somebody back in the White House, who mounted a violent effort to overthrow the government the last time that he was voted out, who says that parts of the constitution should be terminated, who says he wants to put the U.S. military in American cities, he wants to build camps for tens of millons of people. That’s what we’re thinking about doing. There’s like this huge yikes factor when it comes to him.”

Maddow adds(6:43): “On top of the scariness about what he’s offering us as a political figure, on top of his likely criminal liability in his multiple criminal trials, we also then just get this yuck factor stuff[with the porn star].”

Maddow then lists the yucky stuff

  1. “She’s doing a porn company promotion at a golf tournament.”
  2. “His infant son is four months old.”
  3. “He has his bodyguard ask her if she’d like to have dinner, so she goes to his room. There is no dinner. He’s wearing satin pajamas. She says get dressed.”
  4. “He tells her I’ll get you under my reality competition TV show and I will help you cheat at it. I’ll give you advance notice on the challenges on the show, and that will help you.”
  5. “He tells her me and my wife don’t sleep in the same room.”
  6. “He asks her when she was last tested for sexually transmitted diseases.”
  7. “He tells her she reminds him of his daughter.”
  8. “She goes to the bathroom, she comes out of the bathroom, and he’s stripped down to his underpants.”
  9. “She tries to leave, and he steps between her and the door. She doesn’t want to do it. She says she doesn’t feel threatened but he says to her, I thought you were serious about what you wanted. If you ever want to get out of that trailer park…”
  10. “They have sex. She’s not into it. He does not wear a condom. That is particularly concerning to her, and he should know that it is because she has just explained to him about her work in the adult film industry.”
  11. “They meet several more times, he makes more sexual advances, they never have sex again, and ultimately it is only when he finally says no, I’m not putting you on my TV show, that she stops picking up his calls.”

Maddow then bottom lines it perfectly saying, “[President]Jimmy Carter almost lost in 1976 because he said he had committed lust in his heart, but this is who we are thinking about putting back in the White House right now, along with what he has threatened to do to the country, in part out of anger for the criminal liability that he has brought on himself by trying to cover up things like this, behavior like this, character like this.”

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Is MAGA Trumpism A Form Of Political Religion?

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An interesting segment on MSNBC’s Alex Wagner Tonight (01/1624) show delved into the strange daliance between Evangelical Christians(predominantly White), and the politics of former President Donald Trump, often referred to as Trumpism, or MAGA Trumpism. The alliance between these two strange bedfellows has led many to question whether MAGA Trumpism has become some sort of political/civil religion.

The MSNBC segment came against the backdrop of Trump’s massive win in the Iowa Republican presidential primary, and specifically, his command of the White Evangelical vote, which polls placed at 53%. Back in 2016, when Trump first ran for president, he only received 21% of the White Evangelical vote in Iowa, a clear sign that he has now consolidated the White Evangelical vote in Iowa, and arguably nationwide.

Host Alex Wagner posed this question to her guest, Author Tim Alberta, who’s also a staff writer at The Atlantic (2:07): “I wonder in your estimation, what it means to be an Evangelical in this country, at this moment?”
Tim Alberta responded in relevant part: “We are beginning to flirt with this territory where definitionally speaking, Evangelicalism has far more to do, at least in the perception of the greater public, with political engagement, partisan political identification, than it does with any particular theology or any real religious conviction, and if you take it a step further, if you look at the exit polling, if you look at some of the social science around this, if you look at the fact that during Donald Trump’s presidency, more and more of Donald Trump’s supporters were self-identifying as Evangelicals even though they were simultaneously attending Church less and less often, I think one might reach the uncomfortable conclusion that perhaps the best definition now for what it means to be an Evangelical, is to be a conservative White Republican Trump supporter, and that is a tragedy on any number of different levels, but I think most profoundly, it’s a tragedy for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Host Alex Wagner then interjected with this profound question (3:50): “If the Gospel is no longer part of the equation, what is it replaced by…do you think MAGA-ism has become a placeholder for a certain kind of religion?”

Tim Alberta: “Yes…I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, the Evangelical community is large, it’s huge, and it’s complicated…but…we are reaching a place where we are being confronted with some uncomfortable realities about what it means to be a part of the Evangelical movement and frankly, where the line blurs between sort of religious identity and political identity, and is there a merging of the two, and frankly I think that there’s always a danger in politics…of sort of turning political conviction into religious conviction, or worshipping at a certain altar that is not an altar to God, but is an altar to political idolatry or to political identity. That is a danger that has always been there, but it is I think uniquely dangerous in this moment, and to be clear…we have examples from the not so distant past, of a sort of political religion, or at least a civil religion, supplanting, competing with actual religion, and I don’t think that we’re all that far removed from that in this country now, looking at just what happened…in Iowa.”

To conclude the segment, Tim Alberta floated this interesting scenario, which gets right to the fallacy of the Evangelical-MAGA Trumpism alliance. He said (8:19): “If during Barack Obama’s presidency, or while he was running for president, if you had heard him talking with, or promoting a video saying that he was a shepherd to all of mankind, the Evangelical movement would have been up in arms [and rightly so], I mean this is heretical, this is blasphemous and yet, Donald Trump seems to get a pass time and time again for doing these things that no other politician, Republican or Democrat frankly, would get a pass for doing, and we should ask ourselves why. If the answer does not at least start to flirt with this terrain of civil religion, or political religion, then I think that we’re not being honest with ourselves, and if we are being honest with ourselves, if we are willing to engage with the very uncomfortable topic around what happens when Trumpism becomes civil religion in this country for millions of millions of people, and what that might imply moving forward, then we are doing a disservice to our prularistic democracy.”

Bottom line folks, we’ve always operated on the separation of church and state doctrine, and have for decades, shunned foreign theocracies like the ones in Afghanistan and Iran. Author Tim Alberta is absolutely correct when he says, we need to be honest with ourselves, and admit that there is no difference between the Evangelical-MAGA dalliance in the American political scene, and the theocracies in Iran and Afghanistan. Simply put, we need to make a decision as to whether we want to continue with the separation of church and state doctrine, or whether, that time-honored tradition has also been sacrificed at the altar of MAGA Trumpism.

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NYT’s Maggie Haberman Ensnared In Feud Over Trump Inaugural Funds

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Melania Trump with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff

In case you missed it, the Trump inaugural saga has taken a new, and very interesting twist lately, with now Twitter-active Stephanie Winston Wolkoff taking a direct shot at Maggie Haberman and Ken Vogel of the New York Times(NYT), as being part of the plot to throw her under the bus.

You’ll remember that after the bombshell revelation that a staggering $40 million of Trump’s inaugural funds had mysteriously disappeared, there was an effort by Trump’s allies to pin the blame on then First Lady Melania Trump’s Senior Advisor Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. Stephanie Wolkoff talked about this effort to throw her under the bus at an appearance on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show on September 1, 2020.

In the interview, a visibly upset Stephanie Wolkoff told host Maddow, that then First Lady Melania Trump basically told her she had to be the fall person for the Trump inaugural scandal. Wolkoff specifically said, “Melania and the [Trump]White House had accused me of criminal activity, then publicly shamed and fired me, and made me their scapegoat. At that moment in time, that’s when I pressed record. She was no longer my friend, and she was willing to let them take me down, and she told me herself, that this is the way it has to be. She was advised by the attorneys at the White House that there was no other choice because there was a possible investigation into the presidential inauguration committee….At first I really did think maybe she would come to my aid? Maybe she would tell the truth? She turned her back, she did. She folded like a deck of cards., and I’m shocked she did it.”

This 05/23/2021 tweet however, shows that Stephanie Wolkoff is not only going after Trump and his allies in her effort to set the record straight regarding Trump’s inaugural, she’s also calling out NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Ken Vogel, as being part of the plot to destroy her. This, if proven, could turn out to be a huge scandal unto itself, given the fact that many liberals still blame the New York Times for Trump’s ascension to the White House. Specifically, many liberals believe NYT’s excessive coverage of the “email scandal”, weakened Hillary Clinton’s campaign during the final stretch of the 2016 campaign.

There’s no other way any reasonable person can interpret Stephanie Wolkoff’s tweet other than NYT’s Haberman and Vogel were doing Trump’s bidding when they wrote the referenced piece. This is especially so considering Wolkoff’s invocation of “SETUP. COVERUP. TAKEDOWN” in her tweet. For the record, accusations of “access journalism” against then White House reporter for the New York Times, Maggie Haberman, persisted throughout Trump’s presidency. Stephanie Wolkoff is not the first person drawing that inference.

Bottom line folks, Yours Truly is not accusing Maggie Haberman or Ken Vogel of any wrongdoing. By all accounts, these are serious journalists, who exhibit a high level of professionalism(my personal opinion). What Yours Truly is simply pointing out, is what any reasonable person presented with Stephanie Wolkoff’s recent tweet would conclude, and that is, Haberman and Vogel were in on the plot by Trump’s allies to throw her under the bus. It would be in everybody’s interest, especially Wolkoff who suffered greatly as a result of the Trump inaugural saga, if Haberman, Vogel or even the New York Times management, addressed this issue.

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Kushner Nixed National Testing Strategy Because he Thought Covid-19 Would Only Ravage Dem States

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A troubling Vanity Fair report says that at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner cobbled together a team which actually managed to come up with a decent national testing strategy for covid-19. Shockingly however, instead of the plan being rapidly deployed nationwide to curb the spread of the deadly virus, Kushner and some White House political operatives decided it would be politically advantageous for Trump, if they shelved the testing plan because the virus at that time was only ravaging blue/Democratic states like New York.

As unbelievable as this sounds, Kushner and the White House operatives believed it would be politically advantageous for Trump if they let people die in blue/Democratic states because they could turn around and blame Democratic Governors for incompetence in the run up to the November elections. The author of the Vanity Fair piece, Katherine Eban, told CNN’s Erin Burnett;“There was a shared feeling which turned out to be spectacularly wrong, that the virus was receding, it was going to be under control, and at the time it was just the blue states where the virus was surging. So the idea was, why go through all the effort to surge up a national plan? It wasn’t going to have political resonance, and if there was a political response that was needed, the blue state Governors could just be blamed..”

You’ll remember a recent Washington Post piece which said Trump, who had previously downplayed the seriousness of covid-19, even calling it a hoax at one point, changed his attitude towards the deadly virus only after senior White House officials presented him with data and maps showing that the virus is beginning to ravage “our people”–Trump’s base of rural White voters in Republican states. This means Trump’s bungled covid-19 response, which has led to more than 150,000 deaths so far and counting, is not only the result of a callous political decision by his son-in -law Kushner, but also the administration’s deep seated racism towards communities of color who Trump considers not “our people”, and who data has consistently shown to disproportionately bear the brunt of covid-19, both in infection rates and deaths. A sad state of affairs indeed.

Bottom line folks, as it currently stands, the coronavirus pandemic is arguably one of the biggest crisis ever to befall the United States, especially if you consider the fact that it has claimed more than 150,000 lives in the U.S. in less than six months, led to levels of unemployment most of us have never witnessed in our lifetimes, dealt a severe blow to the U.S. economy leaving economic giants such as the airline industry teetering on the brink of collapse, changed the manner and format of our beloved professional sports leagues, just to mention but a few. Reasonable people will agree that given the seriousness of covid-19, the American public is totally justified in expecting that the Trump administration, without regard to partisan politics or race, will spare no resources, and do everything in it’s power to fight the deadly coronavirus pandemic. Sadly, the Vanity Fair piece saying Kushner shelved a covid-19 national testing strategy for political reasons, and the Washington Post piece saying Trump has not been serious about the pandemic because it’s not ravaging “our people”, prove beyond any reasonable doubt that partisan politics and racism are guiding Trump administration’s covid-19 response. All Americans of good conscience must loudly rebuke this immoral and callous disregard for people’s lives. We owe that to the families of the 150,000-plus people who have needlessly succumbed to covid-19.

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