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Thread: Racist, Con Man, Cheat

  1. #1
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    Default Racist, Con Man, Cheat

    An Interlude of Moral Clarity
    Michael Cohen’s testimony was a reminder that this presidency isn’t normal.

    “A Racist … A Con Man … A Cheat.” Those were the words etched in the chyron as Michael Cohen testified. Yet that litany somehow fails to do justice to Cohen’s moral portrait of Donald Trump.

    At the beginning of this presidency, the great fear was “normalization.” The shock of Donald Trump’s election, this theory held, would eventually dissipate. Once he sat behind the big desk, surrounded by oil paintings and heavy curtains, he would be bathed in the incantatory power of his office. The nation would absorb the shock of his misogyny, racism, venality, and dangerous vainglory, and then move on. Perhaps the fact that normalization has slipped from discourse is evidence that there was something to this fear.

    Cohen, unabashedly self-servingly, describes his own time with Trump as a microcosm of this same experience. In his telling, Trump’s morality drags down everyone surrounding him, so that a “good person” like Cohen ends up committing terrible misdeeds. “Lying for Mr. Trump was normalized, and no one around him questioned it.”

    Normalization is hard to resist. Knowing that the man who controls the nuclear arsenal and directs the surveillance state is unguided by an ethical framework and has a boundless capacity for petty cruelty can make it hard to shut one’s eyes at night. So despite the wildness of Trump’s tweets and the harshness of his policies, the mind inevitably suppresses what it knows about his character so that it isn’t overwhelmed by anxiety.

    Nothing in today’s testimony brings the nation directly closer to the impeachment of the president. But Cohen’s testimony provided one of those interludes of clarity that violently dislodges the tendency toward normalization. When a congresswoman asked Cohen, “What do you think [the president] can do to you?,” he replied, “A lot,” and added, “I have fear.” Once again, it’s hard not to feel a little like Cohen.

    What I found most profitable in his testimony were the little details about Trump he captures—the casual ease with which the president disparaged the intelligence of his own son or those who served in Vietnam. Trump, Cohen claims, gave the order to pay firms to rig internet straw polls on the Drudge Report and CNBC on the eve of the presidential contest. This is not the behavior of someone with a deep faith in democracy.

    Or take Cohen’s description of Trump’s racist remarks. While there’s little surprise in the revelation, it’s bracing to hear Trump’s language. Driving through a neighborhood in Chicago, he allegedly told Cohen “that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.” In Trump’s moral universe, it’s fair to judge an entire race for not showing him sufficient political love. These anecdotes capture the president’s dangerously precarious ego and a vanity that knows no bounds.

    Vanity seems to be at the core of the Russia scandal, at least as far as we can now describe it with any confidence. When the founders of the republic wrote about corruption, they worried that a leader would confuse his own interests with the nation’s. That’s precisely how Cohen describes Trump’s view of Moscow.

    According to Cohen, Trump had no expectation of victory in the presidential race. Instead, he treated his campaign as a giant infomercial aimed at the Russians, whose cooperation he needed for Trump Tower Moscow to proceed. He spent months fawning over Vladimir Putin, publicly apologizing for the abuses of his regime and begging for improved relations, as he tried to firm up the deal. In other words, the current trajectory of American foreign policy began as an effort to make a fortune. These were real financial interests that the president lied about, blatantly and constantly. Whatever else we discover through Robert Mueller’s investigation, that’s a historic scandal in itself.

    In attempting to tear down Cohen, his Republican questioners set a litmus test that their primary client will never be able to survive. They said that the nation shouldn’t waste its time on a man with a demonstrable pattern of lying; they said that we should never pay any heed to someone so intent on profiting from publicity. As they fulminated, I revised the chyron in my head: A Racist … A Con Man … A Cheat … A President.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...-cheat/583795/

  2. #2

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    Quote Originally Posted by Panshot View Post
    Driving through a neighborhood in Chicago, he allegedly told Cohen “that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.”
    That's the primary reason he ran as a Republican, because he knew the Democrats were too smart to nominate him, but stupid white folks would. Unfortunately, he was correct.

    John
    Last edited by John Harper; 02-28-2019 at 08:10 AM.

  3. #3

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  4. #4

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    Quote Originally Posted by John Harper View Post
    That's the primary reason he ran as a Republican, because he knew the Democrats were too smart to nominate him, but stupid white folks would. Unfortunately, he was correct.

    John
    John,

    I saw this article written about Trump 20 years ago.

    Trump said, "If I would ever chose to run for President" I would run as an Republican. With the help of Fox News, I could say anything and their viewers are so dumb they would believe anything I said!

    Donald Trump in 1998
    Last edited by etucker1959; 02-28-2019 at 12:38 PM.

  5. #5

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    Wow, another ignorant statement by someone accusing someone else of being "racist" because they don't support their viewpoint. Welcome to the club there's lots of you types around, a dime a dozen. This is known as TDS, you are inflicted.



    Quote Originally Posted by John Harper View Post
    That's the primary reason he ran as a Republican, because he knew the Democrats were too smart to nominate him, but stupid white folks would. Unfortunately, he was correct.

    John

  6. #6

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    Quote Originally Posted by steelhead View Post
    Wow, another ignorant statement by someone accusing someone else of being "racist" because they don't support their viewpoint.
    That's an emboldened statement right there Mr. Plate. So apparently, you DO support all of this then:

    • Trump’s real-estate company tried to avoid renting apartments to African-Americans in the 1970s and gave preferential treatment to whites, according to the federal government.

    • In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he argued they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.

    • He began his 2016 presidential campaign with a speech disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”

    • In December 2015, Trump called for a “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” including refusing to readmit Muslim-American citizens who were outside of the country at the time.

    • Trump said a federal judge hearing a case about Trump University was biased because of the judge’s Mexican heritage.

    • In June 2017, Trump said 15,000 recent immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS” and that 40,000 Nigerians, once seeing the United States, would never “go back to their huts” in Africa.

    • At the White House on Jan. 11, Trump vulgarly called for less immigration from Haiti and Africa and more from Norway.

    • He spent years suggesting that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Kenya, a lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.

    • Trump falsely claimed that President Obama “issued a statement for Kwanzaa but failed to issue one for Christmas.”

    • He is quick to highlight crimes committed by dark-skinned people, sometimes exaggerating or lying about them (such as a claim about growing crime from “radical Islamic terror” in Britain). He is very slow to decry hate crimes committed by whites against dark-skinned people (such as the killing of an Indian man in Kansas last year).

    • He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.

    • He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.

    • He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., last August “very fine people.”

    • Trump endorsed and campaigned for Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who spoke positively about slavery and who called for an African-American Muslim member of Congress not to be seated because of his religion.

    • At a June 2016 campaign rally, Trump pointed to one attendee and said: “Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him.”

    But of course, "FAKE NEWS!" "Witch hunt!" "Deep state!", or you're just used to hanging out with people who normalize this type of behavior, which is my guess.

  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by steelhead View Post
    Wow, another ignorant statement by someone accusing someone else of being "racist" because they don't support their viewpoint. Welcome to the club there's lots of you types around, a dime a dozen. This is known as TDS, you are inflicted.
    Stoolhead,

    Ignorance seems to be your forte, not mine.

    John

  8. #8

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    Quote Originally Posted by John Harper View Post
    Stoolhead,

    Ignorance seems to be your forte, not mine.

    John
    Mr. Harper,

    You'll notice he skedaddled from this thread after I posted my long list of items.

    You'll also notice that while he attacks the "fake news," StoolPlate will not give us one media outlet that he uses to get his news, because "my bigoted friend's Facebook feed" would probably get him scorched.

    One simple question, and he has yet to answer it.

    And we'll get a StoolPlate Deflection® in 3...2....1.....

  9. #9
    Join Date
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    Cohen is not capable of telling anything truthfully. Another example of scum lawyer. When things are good he loves Trump. Made millions with him. Best buddies. When things go south he sings like a canary. Trash. Cant believe anything he says. Good or bad. You certainly cannot take him seriously on any subject.

  10. #10

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    Quote Originally Posted by bmachale View Post
    Cohen is not capable of telling anything truthfully. Another example of scum lawyer. When things are good he loves Trump. Made millions with him. Best buddies. When things go south he sings like a canary. Trash. Cant believe anything he says. Good or bad. You certainly cannot take him seriously on any subject.
    That argument works, but it's a shame that of all the bullet points that I posted, not one had ANYTHING to do with Michael Cohen.

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