Trump Called White Supremacists "My People"

Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s upcoming tell-all book "Peril" - which is available on September 21st - contains many new and frightening accounts of just how dangerous and deranged Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenfuhrer was/is and the threat the man continues to pose to America and the world. Woodward and Costa interviewed more than 200 people at the center of the turmoil that was the Trump White House in its final days and compiled more than 6,000 pages of transcripts—and what Amazon describes as "a spellbinding and definitive portrait of a nation on the brink."  The take aways include (i) Trump should never, ever hold power again and (ii) those who support him are equally unhinged and/or open racists and, I'm sorry to say about my Republican "friends" morally bankrupt.  A willingness to close one's eyes to the reality of the Trump regime all so one can enjoy lower taxes is the height of moral depravity. A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the shockingly racist aspects of the Trump White House and Trump's embrace of white supremacists (the fear he might launch a nuclear war needs a whole separate post).  Decent, moral people should be repulsed by Trump and everything he stands for.  Here are article highlights:

The man [Donald Trump] is and always has been an out and out racist, and while the examples to back this up are too numerous to mention, just a small sampling includes calling for the execution of five Black and Latino teenagers; telling four congresswoman of color to “go back” to the “totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” when three-quarters of the group “came from” the U.S.; helping start an entire movement around the lie that the country’s first Black president wasn’t born here; and describing Baltimore, whose population is majority Black, as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” where “no human being” would “want to live.” But wait, you say, what about the time he banned travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim nations? Or called Mexicans rapists and criminals? Or pardoned a guy a U.S. Department of Justice expert said oversaw the worst pattern of racial profiling by a law enforcement agency in U.S. history? Or threw an absolute shit fit over the removal of statue of a Confederate general who thought Black people should be white people’s property, insisting said general was one of the greatest military leaders of all time? Obviously, if we were to include everything, we‘d be here all day.

So while it’s not at all surprising, it’s nevertheless extremely disturbing to learn that back in August 2017, not only did Trump praise a group of white nationalists and neo-Nazis and claim it had some very fine people among it, he referred to said group as “my people” while arguing with then House Speaker Paul Ryan over his remarks.

Per HuffPost:

Donald Trump flipped out at then House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for condemning white supremacists after the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a new book claims. Ryan responded to Trump’s infamous “both sides” rhetoric about the violence at the gathering with a tweet calling white supremacy “repulsive.” Trump was apoplectic with Ryan over his comment, according to excerpts from The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s upcoming tell-all Peril that Insider published Wednesday.

Trump phoned Ryan and screamed about him not being “in the foxhole with me,” according to the book. Ryan reportedly told Trump he had “a moral leadership obligation to get this right and not declare there is a moral equivalency here.”

“These people love me. These are my people,” Trump raged at Ryan in response. “I can’t backstab the people who support me.” Ryan noted the presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Trump admitted there were “some bad people.”

“I get that. I’m not for that. I’m against all that,” he reportedly said. “But there’s some of those people who are for me. Some of them are good people.”

In other Ryan-related revelations from Peril, Woodward and Costa report that in the wake of the 2016 election, the Republican from Wisconsin began to study Trump like a science experiment in the hopes of figuring out how to work with him. Per Insider:

Ryan, realizing that he would have to work with Trump, started researching how to deal with someone who is “amoral and transactional,” the book says. A wealthy doctor in New York, who was also a Republican donor, contacted Ryan later and told him, “You need to understand what narcissistic personality disorder is,” according to the book. . . . The book said that “Ryan studied them for weeks, convinced Trump had the personality disorder.”

Woodward and Costa do not say if Ryan subsequently started reading up on sociopaths and lunatics, but one would think that would be the natural progression of his research.