Trump's Appeal to His Base: I Share Yor Hate

While it is not an excuse for failing to meet the expectations of the Founding Fathers that citizens be well informed and educate themselves on issues of the day, many Americans are finding themselves exhausted from the daily barrage of lies, disinformation and calls to hatred emanating from the Trump White House and other minions of the Trump/Pence regime. Yes, it is exhausting even for those of us who are political junkies, but paying attention to and resisting against the false propaganda issuing from Trump, his amoral Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Fox News is a civic duty. Looking away, burying one's head in "personal matters," stating that one "doesn't like politics," or engaging in the pretense that one is "too busy," are not portraits in courage or morality, but rather is akin to what the "Good Germans" did during Hitler's rise. A column in the New York Times argues that if one needs to find a means to energize their resistance to the moral abomination that is the Trump/Pence regime. then look at Trump's underlying message to his base.  It is all abut hate and animus towards those who are not far right white evangelicals or the obscenely wealthy. Trump's siren call to his base is hatred towards non-whites, gays, non-Christians, and those unwilling to reestablish unfettered white privilege. Grotesquely, white evangelicals have bought into this message without reservation.  Here are column excerpts:

In Trump’s America people are understandably experiencing news fatigue. There are torrents of it on multiple streams. There is outrage after outrage. It is often overwhelming.

That’s the plan, I suspect. Trump is operating on the Doctrine of Inundation. He floods the airwaves until you simply give up because you feel like you’re drowning.  And unfortunately, it’s working. A Pew Research Center report released Tuesday found that nearly seven in 10 Americans “feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days.”

Fighting this fatigue is the real test of a person’s resolve, including mine.

I remember the episode that first revealed to me the darkness at Trump’s core, and I am renewed.

On an April night nearly 30 years ago, a young investment banker was beaten and raped when she went for a jog in Central Park. The attack left her in a coma. She happened to be white. Five teenagers arrested for the crime — four black and one of Hispanic descent — went to trial. As this newspaper reported at the time, they were “in what the police said was part of a marauding spree by as many as 30 youths in the northern end of the park” that night.

After being questioned for hours, the defendants gave false confessions that conflicted with one another, and those confessions were captured on video. As The New York Times pointed out in 2002: “The defendants in the jogger case were put on camera after they had been in custody, in some cases, for as long as 28 hours.”

As one of the five wrote in 2016 in The Washington Post: “When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours. Under duress, we falsely confessed.”

A few days after the attack, long before the teenagers would go on trial, Donald Trump bought full-page ads in New York newspapers — you may think of this as a precursor to his present-day tweets to a mass audience — under a giant, all-caps headline that read: “Bring Back the Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!”

The boys would be convicted even though the physical evidence in the case was inconclusive. When one of the teenagers was led away in handcuffs, he yelled at the prosecutor: “You’re going to pay for this. Jesus is going to get you. You made this … up.”

After serving up to 13 years in prison, the boys were proven right: Another man confessed to the crime and his DNA matched that at the scene of the crime.  The boys, then men, had their convictions overturned, were freed, and eventually reached a multimillion-dollar settlement with the city over their wrongful convictions.

How did Trump respond after having called for them to be put to death? In true Trump fashion, he refused to apologize or show any contrition whatsoever.

[I]t is the language in the body of Trump’s 1989 death penalty ad that sticks with me. Trump wrote:

“Mayor Koch has stated that hate and rancor should be removed from our hearts. I do not think so. I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.”

That to me is the thing with this man: He wants to hate. When Trump feels what he believes is a righteous indignation, his default position is hatred. Anyone who draws his ire, anyone whom he feels attacked by or offended by, anyone who has the nerve to stand up for himself or herself and tell him he’s wrong, he wants to hate, and does so.

This hateful spirit envelops him, consumes him and animates him.

He hates women who dare to stand up to him and push back against him, so he attacks them, not just on the issues but on the validity of their very womanhood.

He hates black people who dare to stand up — or kneel — for their dignity and against oppressive authority, so he attacks protesting professional athletes, Black Lives Matter and President Barack Obama himself as dangerous and divisive, unpatriotic and un-American.

He hates immigrants so he has set a tone of intolerance, boasted of building his wall (that Mexico will never pay for), swollen the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and attacks some as criminals and animals.

He always disguises his hatred, often as a veneration and defense of his base, the flag, law enforcement or the military. He hijacks their valor to advance his personal hatred.

So I remember that. I center that. I hear “I want to hate” every time I hear him speak. And I draw strength from the fact that I’m not fighting for or against a political party; I’m fighting hatred itself, as personified by the man who occupies the presidency. That is my spine stiffener.

Pause for a moment and think about Trump's policy of brutality and force separation of immigrant families, his demagoguery against black NFL players, his attempts to ban Muslim immigrants, and his regimes rigorous attacks on LGBT civil rights protections and all are united by a single motivation: hatred of others who are different due to skin color, language spoke, religious faith or sexual orientation. Hatred is what unifies Trump with his base and, if one opposes hatred and bigotry, then one must oppose the Trump/Pence regime and its enablers and sycophants within the GOP.  If one is a moral and decent person, one must resist. 

New Poll: Hillary Clinton Holds 12 Point Lead

A new ABC poll has more bad news for Donald "Grab them by the pussy" Trump and the Christofascist leaders and white supremacists who are supporting him.  The poll shows Hillary Clinton with a 12 point lead nationally.  Much of Trump's decline stems from self-inflicted wounds, including his attacks on women and statement that he might not accept the election results if he loses. Damage has been especially pronounced, but even a majority of men find Trump's attitude toward women unacceptable.  Here are some of the poll findings:

Hillary Clinton has vaulted to a double-digit advantage in the inaugural ABC News 2016 election tracking poll, boosted by broad disapproval of Donald Trump on two controversial issues: His treatment of women and his reluctance to endorse the election’s legitimacy.
 Likely voters by a vast 69-24 percent disapprove of Trump’s response to questions about his treatment of women. After a series of allegations of past sexual misconduct, the poll finds that some women who’d initially given him the benefit of the doubt have since moved away.

Fifty-nine percent of likely voters, moreover, reject Trump’s suggestion that the election is rigged in Clinton’s favor, and more, 65 percent, disapprove of his refusal to say whether he’d accept a Clinton victory as legitimate. Most strongly disapprove, a relatively rare result.

All told, Clinton leads Trump by 12 percentage points among likely voters, 50 to 38 percent, in the national survey, her highest support and his lowest to date in ABC News and ABC News/Washington Post polls. 

The results mark a dramatic shift from Clinton’s +4 points in the last ABC/Post poll Oct. 13. That survey was conducted after disclosure of an 11-year-old videotape in which Trump crudely described his sexual advances toward women, but before the events that have followed: A series of women saying he sexually assaulted them, which Trump has denied; his continued refusal to say whether he’d accept the election’s legitimacy; and the final debate, which likely voters by 52-29 percent say Clinton won.

The previous ABC/Post poll found a sharp 12-point decline in enthusiasm for Trump among his supporters, almost exclusively among those who’d preferred a different GOP nominee. Intended participation now has followed: The share of registered Republicans who are likely to vote is down 7 points since mid-October.

Vote preference results among some groups also are striking. Among them:

• Clinton leads Trump by 20 percentage points among women, 55-35 percent. She's gained 12 points (and Trump's lost 16) from mid-October among non-college-educated white women, some of whom initially seemed to rally to Trump after disclosure of the videotape.

• Clinton has doubled her lead to 32 points, 62-30 percent, among college-educated white women, a group that’s particularly critical of his response to questions about his sexual conduct. (Seventy-six percent disapprove, 67 percent strongly.)

• That said, Clinton's also ahead numerically (albeit not significantly) among men, 44-41 percent, a first in ABC News and ABC/Post polling.

[T]he results show damage to Trump across groups on the issue of his sexual conduct. While 71 percent of women disapprove of his handling of questions about his treatment of women, so do 67 percent of men. And 57 percent overall disapprove “strongly” – 60 percent of women, but also 52 percent of men. 

[O]ne in three Republicans – 34 percent – disapprove of Trump’s refusal to say whether he’d accept the election’s outcome if Clinton won. That jumps to 65 percent of independents and, again, 91 percent of Democrats. Not only do 65 percent overall disapprove, but 53 percent feel strongly about it.

Norfolk Was Part of 1970's Federal Discrimination Suit Against Trump

One thing that came up so far during the presidential debate is Donald Trump's racist track record which dates all the way back to the 1970's both in New York City and here in Norfolk, Virginia. Trump tried to blow the matter off, but the past behavior is in keeping with Trump's current raging racism and propensity to pander to white supremacists.  A piece in the Virginian Pilot looks at Trump's discrimination against black Americans here in Hampton Roads, Virginia.  Yes, the Trump companies settled the matter under a settlement that included regular monitoring of rental practices for a number of years.  Here are highlights:

Forty-five years ago this summer, a Mrs. Jones walked into the office of the Oakdale Apartment complex near Wards Corner. The morning newspaper had carried an ad for the rental units, which were owned by Trump Management. The company president was a New York businessman, Donald Trump, according to a federal court filing.

No vacancies, the apartment manager told Mrs. Jones. A unit might come available in a month. Jones and her husband could fill out an application, if they wished.

Shortly after Mrs. Jones left the office, Ellis and Klara James entered and similarly asked about renting an apartment. The manager offered them one immediately and said they could move in the following week.

The difference between the couples: The Joneses were black, and the Jameses were white.

The July 1971 incident, described in federal court papers, was one of numerous examples of “testing” by an organized group of open-housing activists. They had been battling for years against discriminatory practices in Hampton Roads that blocked blacks and Filipinos from renting or buying homes in what some viewed as whites-only neighborhoods.

The long-ago incident might have been forgotten except that it resurfaced in this year’s presidential campaign. The New York Times revisited the case in an Aug. 27 report that noted the Justice Department sued Trump Management in 1973, accusing the firm of discriminating against blacks. The now Republican presidential candidate was its president and his father, Fred Trump, its chairman.

The second Norfolk incident, according to a filing in the housing lawsuit, involved Richard Foard, a black man assigned to Norfolk Naval Station.

Foard told the FBI he had attempted in June 1973 to rent a two-bedroom unit at Ocean Air Apartments in Ocean View after learning about it from a white man, who had just rented an apartment.

Ocean Air’s rental office declined to show Foard a model apartment and told him to come back in a month or two if he wanted to fill out an application, the court document said.

The new reports about the past litigation come to light at the same time Trump has been attempting to persuade more blacks to vote for him, arguing he can do more to address issues affecting African Americans than Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 

The Trumps signed a consent decree two years after the suit was filed that did not include any admission of guilt. It did include stipulations that the company file with the federal court regular reports for several properties, including the two apartment complexes in Norfolk, listing the number of people by race seeking housing.

The two Norfolk properties cited in the suit were among several in Hampton Roads owned by Fred Trump and the family firm. Trump’s real estate holdings in the region date to World War II.