Tag: Charlottesville
A Stomach-Turning Percentage of Republicans Agree with Trump’s Handling of Charlottesville
The following article by Kali Halloway was posted on the AlterNet website August 17, 2017:
A new poll indicates the GOP’s rank-and-file still have the president’s back.
An overwhelming majority of Republicans think Donald Trump’s response to the horrifying events in Charlottesville is right on the money, according to a new CBS poll. The survey found that 67 percent of GOP voters say they approve of Trump’s response to the attacks, while 82 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Independents say they disapprove. The survey was conducted during a time span stretching from Monday night to Wednesday.
Asked specifically about Trump’s speech Tuesday in which he declared that racist neo-Nazis are as problematic as those who oppose them, most Republicans said they agreed with the president’s statements. Nearly 7 in 10 GOP voters, 68 percent, said that “Trump’s description of who’s to blame” is correct, while only 21 percent disagreed. Eighty-three percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Independents said that Trump was off the mark in suggesting “both sides” are equally culpable in the violence in Virginia this weekend. Continue reading “A Stomach-Turning Percentage of Republicans Agree with Trump’s Handling of Charlottesville”
The Incredible Shrinking President
The following column by Robert Schlesinger was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website August 18, 2017:
Charlottesville doesn’t figure to arrest Trump’s declining poll numbers with his base.
How low can President Donald Trump go? I don’t mean in the moral context but rather the colder calculus of public approval and political power. After this week’s enraging equivocation about white supremacists rallying in Charlottesville, Virginia we may find out.
Trump already seems intent on testing the lower boundaries of his support. As of Thursday afternoon, his job approval rating was a hair under 39 percent, according to HuffPost’s average of surveys and had been beneath 40 percent for three weeks. He’s never approached 50 percent approval and he’s had majority disapproval for five months and counting. Nothing he’s done in his seven months in office, or this week especially, could lead one to believe that he is trying to augment that figure. Instead he seems more interested in rallying his hardest-core supporters, everyone else be damned. Continue reading “The Incredible Shrinking President”
A Nazi salute, KKK hoods and Trump: Magazine covers after Charlottesville are jarring
The following article by Callum Borchers was posted on the Washington Post website August 17, 2017:
President Trump collects magazine covers, but he probably won’t want to keep these.
The latest from the Economist depicts the president bellowing into a white, conical megaphone — with eye holes that lend the appearance of a Ku Klux Klan hood. The clear implication is that Trump has amplified the message of white supremacists by failing to treat them as any more blameworthy than the counterprotesters with whom they clashed in Charlottesville last weekend. Continue reading “A Nazi salute, KKK hoods and Trump: Magazine covers after Charlottesville are jarring”
Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity’
The following article by David Nakamura was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2017:
A major Jewish political coalition that has long supported President Trump and stood by him through other controversies broke with him on Wednesday over his response to events last weekend in Charlottesville, imploring him to more forcefully reject Nazis and other white supremacist groups.
The Republican Jewish Coalition called on Trump to “provide greater moral clarity in rejecting racism, bigotry, and antisemitism,” in a joint statement from Chairman Norm Coleman and executive director Matt Brooks.
The one paragraph statement represented another sign that Trump’s supportive comments of some participants in the Unite the Right rally over the weekend has fractured political support from some of his closest allies. Trump’s business manufacturing advisory council disbanded Wednesday after a number of chief executives and other members announced their resignation in protest of his remarks, and some high-profile Republican leaders on Capitol Hill criticized the president. Continue reading “Republican Jewish Coalition breaks with Trump on Charlottesville, asks for ‘greater moral clarity’”
President Trump’s false claim that counterprotesters lacked a permit
The following article by Glenn Kessler was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2017:
President Trump first asked reporters to define the “alt-right,” before saying members of the “alt-left” were also to blame for violence in Charlottesville, while taking questions from reporters on Aug. 15 at Trump Tower in New York. (The Washington Post)
“You had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent. . . . You had a lot of people in that [white nationalist] group that were there to innocently protest and very legally protest, because you know — I don’t know if you know — they had a permit. The other group didn’t have a permit.”
— President Trump, remarks during a news conference on infrastructure, Aug. 15, 2017
In blaming both sides for the violence in Charlottesville that left one person dead, President Trump twice asserted that the people protesting white supremacists and neo-Nazis lacked a permit, unlike the groups that gathered to protest the possible removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Continue reading “President Trump’s false claim that counterprotesters lacked a permit”
Trump’s isolation grows in the wake of Charlottesville
The following article by Abby Phillips was posted on the Washington Post website August 17, 2017:
President Trump has become more isolated than ever from the Republican Party, world leaders and the business community that once cautiously embraced him — a fissure that was growing for weeks but turned into a chasm following his response to the racist violence in Charlottesville last weekend.
Trump had to disband two corporate advisory councilsafter a slew of chief executives resigned from the panels. They criticized the president for blaming both white supremacists and counterprotesters for the melees that led to the death of a 32-year-old woman. Republicans continue to distance themselves from Trump as they call on him to more forcefully condemn the racist groups that gathered for the Unite the Right rally. And foreign officials lined upthis week to make clear that they strongly disagree with Trump’s view of the events in Charlottesville.
Continue reading “Trump’s isolation grows in the wake of Charlottesville”
Joint Chiefs Denounce Racism After Trump’s Comments
The following article by James Doubek was posted on the NPR website August 17, 2017:
Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — high-ranking military officials who advise the president — appeared to distance themselves from President Trump by publicly condemning racism in the aftermath of Trump’s comments about the attack in Charlottesville.
Trump has blamed “both sides” for the violence.
Five of the country’s top uniformed leaders — of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and National Guard — have all sent tweets critical of “racism,” “hatred” and “extremism,” after a man who reportedly expressed admiration for Nazism allegedly drove a car into a crowd of people protesting against white supremacy Saturday. One woman, Heather Heyer, was killed, and 19 other people were injured.
Continue reading “Joint Chiefs Denounce Racism After Trump’s Comments”
‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues
The following article by Gene Lyons was posted on the National Memo website August 16, 2017:
Watching the Charlottesville spectacle from halfway across the country, I confess that my first instinct was to raillery. Vanilla ISIS, somebody called this mob of would-be Nazis. A parade of love-deprived nerds marching bravely out of their parents’ basements carrying TIKI torches from Home Depot.
The odor of citronella must have been overpowering. Was this an attack on the campus left or on mosquitoes?
“Blood and soil!” they chanted. “Jews will not replace us!”
Jews?
Had Jews somehow prevented these dorks from getting laid?
Deeply offensive, but also deeply ridiculous. The iconography of the torch-lit parade was straight out of Triumph of the Will, Leni Reifenstahl’s epic film glorifying Hitler. Deliberately so. These Stormfront geeks get off on trying to frighten normal people with Nazi imagery. Continue reading “‘Unite The Right’ Rally Had Nothing To Do With Statues”
p Trump’s business advisory councils disband as chief executives repudiate president over Charlottesville views
The following article by Damian Paletta and Jena McGregor was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2017:
President Trump’s relationship with the American business community suffered a major setback on Wednesday as the president was forced to shut down his major business advisory councils after corporate leaders repudiated his comments on the violence in Charlottesville this weekend.
Trump announced the disbanding of the two councils — the Strategy & Policy Forum and the Manufacturing Council, which hosted many of the top corporate leaders in America — amid a growing uproar by chief executives furious over Trump’s decision to equate the actions of white supremacists and protesters in remarks Tuesday at Trump Tower.
But those groups had already decided to dissolve on their own earlier in the day, a person familiar with the process said. JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, a member of the “Strategy & Policy Forum,” told employees in a note on Wednesday that his group decided to disband following Trump’s bizarre press conference on Tuesday, in which he appeared to show sympathy for some of the people who marched alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville. Continue reading “p Trump’s business advisory councils disband as chief executives repudiate president over Charlottesville views”