President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

She messed with the bull. She gets the horns.

 

Trump wishes his fingers were that long.

 

Based on what?

 

Look, again, some of the ways Trump handles things I don't support, wouldn't recommend, and won't defend.

The thing is, this is Trump. We shouldn't be surprised by it. He thinks it works for him, and in total, it probably does.

If he wasn't this combative, he probably doesn't win the primary and/or the general election.

But, yes, we have a dispute over how a grieving widow, who I think was literally on her way to pick up her husband's remains, interpreted the tone of voice of someone, who she's never spoken to before, in her moment of grief.

I fully believe she thought his tone was callous and/or disrespectful.

But, instead of the congresswoman calling the WH, she accused him of deliberately being disrespectful. She passed along one phrase, out of context, from the conversation, and the press ran with this as evidence that Trump was in fact disrespectful.

It's absurd.

That the President lashes out at criticism is not an excuse for the press to assume the worst in every circumstance, or to draw conclusions from a conversation based on one snippet of it, in which we can't discern the tone.

 

And an isolated incident, no less!

 

Who's facing criminal charges besides the folks who were working for Ukraine, well prior to the campaign?

Maybe Flynn, but his charges won't be related to the campaign either.

The only campaign related charges we might see are going to be against the folks at Fusion GPS and will involve the fake dossier.

 

Routinely disrespectful doesn't mean always disrespectful.

 

It's been easy to lose track of this story, but trying to unspool it, it seems like the alleged phrase (Hi @franticscribe!) that initially set Wilson and Johnson off was not "He knew what he was signing up for," but, "I guess." And this is interesting, because it seems that just about everyone - self included - zeroed in on, "He knew what he was signing up for" as the offending phrase, when even Wilson and Johnson don't seem to be expressing that the phrase, in isolation, is necessary disrespectful.

I can't tell if that is supposed to be a verbatim quote, or Wilson's representation of Trump's tone.

Fallen soldier’s mother: ‘Trump did disrespect my son’

On Tuesday, Wilson told The Washington Post that Trump had told Johnson’s widow, “He knew what he was signing up for, but I guess it hurts anyway.”

“He made her cry,” Wilson said.

 

This is the equivalent of Old Tony and Devil thinking that Steven Avery of Making a Murder fame was guilty in the one murder, because of his previous actions -- or that we might as well lock him up in this case, even if we don't have the evidence because he's a bad guy.

It becomes a self-fulling prophesy. Trump must be in the wrong in every circumstance because we believe he was in the wrong in every previous circumstance, and we no longer need evidence to convince us of his wrongfulness in the current situation. And, each passing incident, in with a judgement was rendered without evidence, serves as evidence in the next incident.

 

Well, that was succinct compared to what I said.

 

Zealotry in the pursuit of removing a mentally ill man from the office of the Presidency is no vice.