Three Amigos: Trump, Steve King and Pat Buchanan
by digby
I'm guessing that Stephen Miller is passing along right-wing xenophobic screeds from anti-immigrant web-sites to buck him up as the shutdown carries on:
Check this out:
The sad reality is that Trump was being a phony then but not now. How do we know this? Because he's always been a racist piece of work going back to the 70s.
And then there's congressman Steve King, the man who told the the New York Times this week that he can't understand why white supremacy has such a bad reputation. Adam Serwer has a must-read piece in the Atlantic about all this:
In 2014, as Trump was mulling a run for president, he made an appearance in Iowa with King, calling him “special guy, a smart person, with really the right views on almost everything,” and noting that their views on the issues were so similar that “we don’t even have to compare notes.”
Little has changed. The president has defended white nationalists; sought to exploit the census to dilute the political power of minority voters, described immigration as an infestation, warning that it was “changing the culture of Europe;” derided black and Latino immigrants as coming from “shithole countries,” while expressing a preference for immigrants from places like “Norway;” and generally portrayed non-white immigrants as little more than rapists, drug dealers, and murderers at every opportunity.
Unlike King however, the president has the authority, by himself, to make his views into policy. From his travel ban to his child-separation policy to his revocation of protections for immigrants brought here as children, he has pursued discriminatory policies with a commitment he has shown for few other campaign promises. Even now, the federal government remains shut down, its workforce denied payment for their labor, all in pursuit of the construction of a taxpayer-funded symbolic monument of disapproval towards immigrants of Latin American descent.
As if to remind the world of his similarity to King, on Sunday night, Trump tweeted a column from Pat Buchanan arguing that the president should seize executive power and build the wall without approval from Congress, warning that unless he does so, “the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist.” Such a barrier is made necessary, Buchanan argues, because of the increasing diversity of the United States, which he portrays in apocalyptic terms. “The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes—the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America—the more dependably Democratic it will become,” he argues in the same column. “The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.”
This genetic determinism—that the sovereignty of America’s white people is threatened by the presence of non-white people—is the logic of white nationalism.
Trump's big on genetic determinism:
Trump lamented the fact that “I haven’t actually left the White House for months,” except for a quick trip to Iraq. He failed to mention trips for golf, campaign rallies, the G20 summit and visits to California fire scenes, among other events.
“I’m a worker,” Trump said.
Asked by Pirro what makes him such a great fighter, he responded: “Good genes.”
Update: Just FYI one the inane "I'm a a worker" comment. He spends most of his time in the White House watching TV. They have to carve out "executive time" for him every day because he doesn't show up for work. The last month he's been stuck in the White Houe and he's crying like a little baby. He misses his golf:
How many times has Trump played golf as President of the United States? Since taking office on Jan. 20, 2017, Mr. Trump has reportedly been on the grounds of his golf courses or played golf elsewhere 167 times since becoming President, and that's as of Nov. 25, 2018.
The cost of Trump's golf rounds to the American taxpayer varies by round and course, but it has totaled so far in the tens of millions of dollars.
He previously was on pace to visit his golf clubs more than 650 times in an eight-year presidency. However, his pace as of Aug. 6, 2018 now indicates Trump would spend as much as 745 days of his presidency at a golf course if he wins a second term and serves both terms to completion.
Trump has spent nearly 25 percent of his days in office at one of his golf properties for some portion of the day. There have been days where Trump has visited one of his golf clubs and not played golf. He made a 40-minute visit to his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., and he has made a three-day visit to Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., to watch the 2017 US Women's Open, unfolding at that club. Trump spent a 17-day "working vacation" at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., in August, which meant all of those days count as days on his golf courses, even though he didn't necessarily play golf on all of those days.
.
