Barbra Streisand - The Fake President // A New Warsaw Pact By Jamelle Bouie
There’s a narcissistic
fraud in the White House. An angry, hollow, vindictive man is running the
country. What bottomless emotional need does he have for acclaim? It is hard to
know where his rampant narcissism ends and serious mental problems ensue. He
lies prodigiously and for no reason except he obviously has an unclear vision
of what the truth is.
Is his narcissism the
driving force behind his lies? Look no further than the lobbies at seven
of his golf courses, where he has hung fake Time Magazine
covers with made-up headlines of effusive praise for himself. What a bizarre
intersection between vanity and fraud. That is a president whose cabinet
officials obsequiously offer tribute to his greatness while cameras roll. What
is next, Dear Leader... a new haircut?
Trump has lied so much
there was a New
York Times article listing just the lies he’s told since
taking the oath of office. This is to say nothing of the lies told repeatedly
on the campaign trail and the ones he used to sell investors before bankrupting
six business deals. He tells us he is very rich, but disregards the
Constitution to enrich himself and his family. The chief government ethics
officer just
quit over it... read more:
A New Warsaw Pact By Jamelle Bouie
Thus far, Donald Trump
has governed as a typical Republican president, with the usual suite of tax
cuts, deregulation, and conservative nominees for the federal bench. The
difference is that unlike his predecessors, Trump isn’t rooted in the tenets of
conservativism. Indeed, as a man of id and impulse, it’s hard to say he’s
rooted in anything. To the extent that he does have an ideology, it’s a white
American chauvinism and its attendant nativism and racism. It was the core of
his “birther” crusade against Barack Obama - the claim that for reasons of blood
and heritage, Obama couldn’t be legitimate - and the pitch
behind his campaign for president. Trump would restore American greatness by
erasing the racial legacy of Obama’s presidency: the Hispanic immigration,
the Muslim refugees, the black protesters.
This is the reason
Trump’s campaign attracted, and his administration employs, men like Jeff
Sessions, Stephen Bannon, and Stephen Miller. Sessions, a staunch opponent of
federal civil rights enforcement and proponent of radical immigration
restriction. Miller, his protégé, whose young career is marked by the same
contempt for racial pluralism. Bannon, an entrepreneur with intellectual
pretensions whose literary touchstones include virulently racist propaganda, and who brought that
sensibility to Breitbart, a news website where “black crime” was a vertical and
writers churn out stories on dangerous Muslims. Each shares
a vision of a (white) America under siege from Hispanic
immigration to the South and Islam to the East. All three are influential in
the Trump White House as strategists and propagandists, taking the president’s
impulses and molding them into a coherent perspective. That is the key
context for President Trump’s recent remarks in Warsaw, Poland, where he made
a defense of “Western civilization.”.. read more:
