Eps 1319: What Donald Trump Can Teach You About Flying Fish
— The too lazy to register an account podcast
| Host image: | StyleGAN neural net |
|---|---|
| Content creation: | GPT-3.5, |
Host
Tracy Bryant
Podcast Content
As a former White House chief of staff, I can very well imagine not sitting directly behind the president and describing to him how he walked through history in front of the star-spangled wall in the CIA lobby, what kind of behavior he reflected in that sacred place of the intelligence business. I think when you take on the responsibility of being president of the United States, you have to learn from the people around you in order to be guided. I remember when President Obama went to Obama, he was careful not to do so in a way that many people were excited about because this was the first time a president had gone there and not to say anything political or undermine that particular moment.
The usual way in Washington to take a joke during this year's White House correspondents is to hold up the chin up and pretend at least to have a sense of humor, even if you cry on your pillow at night. The president used the dinner to ridicule himself before an audience of journalists, lobbyists, government officials and people he wanted to respect at the time. He's been to the same place before and given political speeches at his political rallies and campaigns, so there's no shock there.
It is unusual in the past for American presidents to criticize their successors in the months before they leave office. But he delivered a sharp rebuke, calling the first months of the new administration a failure because of Biden's approach to immigration and the border. I can tell you that election night was fun, except intoxicating and humiliating.
For the first time since leaving office, former President Donald Trump called for Republican unity Sunday, while he exacerbated intra-party divisions, attacked other Republicans and spread lies about the election in a speech that clearly indicated that he intends to remain a dominant political force. In his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump was hailed as a homecoming hero as he blew up his successor, President Joe Biden, trying to lay out a vision for the future of the Republican Party, which revolves around him after his defeat in November. Trump is the new first president whose entire political existence depends on having a black president.
That elegant detachment, attributed to Donald Trump as president more than any other, highlights this terrible legacy. The extent of Trump's commitment to whites is only surpassed by the depth of public disbelief in white power. It's not enough to say that Trump is a white man like anyone else who became president.
When his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, he demanded college grades from presidents and offered $5 million in exchange, insisted that Obama was not smart enough to attend an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir Dreams from My Father was written by a white man named Bill Ayers.
Barack Obama conveyed to blacks the grim message that anything is possible when we work with whites. We have brought good ideas from both sides to show the American people who we are and what we are sending. This law will not fix everything that is hurting our health care system, but it will move us in the right direction.
It is not socialism, as the other side wants to call it, but market fundamentalism. We live in a binary age, in which one is either for one or against the other. It has been twenty-five years, and the orthodoxy of the Republican Party has always revolved around market fundamentalism.
In 2016 and 2017, Trump released and appointed a list of possible Supreme Court justices that were acceptable to both wings of the Republican party - evangelicals and libertarians. He chose Mike Pence, an evangelical Christian with strong support from the Koch brothers and other Republican major donors as his running mate. As president, Trump issued a series of executive orders endorsed by evangelicals, including the repeal of a provision of the Affordable Care Act that required health care providers to provide birth control to pregnant women.
As the number of posts ran into the thousands, it became clear that most commentators were not from Houston, let alone the western United States. Monday they came from as far away as Texas, Buffalo, New York, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Atlanta, Georgia and Temecula, California. And, as in most cases in these districts, the bottom forty percent of income tend to vote Democratic.