Archive for the ‘Donald Trump’ Category

Donald Trump May Only Be the Beginning of the Era of Celebrity Politicians – Daily Beast

Americans love celebrities. Americans hate politicians.

Those sentiments gave us Donald Trump, fresh from the set of The Apprentice, and proudly unschooled in the art of politics. The sheer entertainment factor of his presidency has everyone on the edge of their seats waiting for the next episode.

Hes opened the door to other celebrities with an urge for elective office. Kid Rock is toying with a Senate bid in Michigan. Cynthia Nixon of Sex in the City fame is floating a possible challenge to New York Governor Cuomo in next years Democratic primary. And Michael Moore from his perch on Broadway with a new show says Democrats should nominate Tom Hanks for president in 2020.

Its not crazy to detect a rising trend of celebrity as a credential for entering politics at a very high level, says Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, but its not a sufficient codicil for political success, or even a necessary codicil.

Its also a mistake to see Trump simply as a celebrity, says Galston. Celebrity was the platform on which he built his campaign, but he ran on trade, immigration, and an America First foreign policy. He didnt say vote for me, Im a celebrity; he said vote for me, I happen to be a celebrity with ideas and feelings that match your own. Not a bad idea to have me on your side.

Celebrity has always been a big advantage in terms of name recognition, thoughat least until recentlycandidates needed a certain degree of credibility. Ronald Reagan was president of a union, the Screen Actors Guild. Arnold Schwarzenegger chaired the Presidents Council on Physical Fitness. Even Trump could claim hes run an international business.

For someone like Kid Rock, this is the new generation, says Jack Pitney, professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College. Youre inviting voters to express an attitude rather than choose a qualified public servant.

Kid Rocks Senate page says hes beyond overwhelmed with response from community leaders, D.C. pundits, and blue collar folks tired of the extreme left and right bullshit. He says hell hold a press conference in the next six weeks or so, and that if he decides to throw his hat in the ring for the Senate next year, believe me it will be game on mthrfkers.

The McCain campaign in 2008a long ago, perhaps simpler timetried to get its game on by attacking Barack Obama as a celebrity candidate with an ad that cut between Obama before a huge crowd in Berlin and shots of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as a female narrator confides, Hes the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?

Obama strategist David Axelrod recalled the strategy behind the ad as a kind of jujitsu to try and turn the outsized interest and energy he was attracting against him.

That failed, Axelrod said in an email, not only because Obama was a serious person who had thought deeply about the issues and sealed the deal with his performance in the first debate, but, also because McCains nomination of Sarah Palin really robbed him of his standing to launch the undeserving novice argument against Obama.

The ad did strike a nerve, just not the one McCain wanted. Hilton, the hotel heiress whose parents helped bankroll McCain, had a clever comeback. Hey, America, Im Paris Hilton and Im a celebrity too, she said in her own spoof ad posted days later. Only I am not from the olden days and I am not promising change like that other guy. I am just hot.

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But then that wrinkly, white-haired guy used me in his campaign ad. Which I guess means I am running for presidentso thanks for the endorsement, white-haired dude. And I want America to know that I am, like, totally ready to lead.

The idea of a wrinkly, white-haired guy from outside of Washington running the country is nothing new, with voters and pundits talking for decades about having a CEO as commander in chief. Ross Perot had a good run in 1992 with his charts, infomercials, and warnings of a giant, sucking sound if NAFTA became law. Three-term New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg encouraged endless talk of a run of his own, before deciding in each of the last three elections that there was no way for him to win a campaign.

Lee Iacocoa, the president of Ford and then-chairman of Chrysler, had a familiar-sounding rant in his 2007 book, Where Have all the Leaders Gone?:

Am I the only guy in this country whos fed up with whats happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. Weve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state over a cliff, weve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we cant even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, Stay the course. Stay the course? Youve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. Ill give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

Now, the bums have been thrown out, the bar for a president lowered, and its not going well at all so far for President Trump.

Going forward, he will raise the bar, says Bob Shrum, a veteran consultant of Democratic presidential campaigns. Our experience with Trump means that if a celebrity runs, they better instill confidence that theyre competent, responsible, know what theyre talking about and wont embarrass us.

Shrum added that, Business people get a little bit of a pass on what they can do, and he might change that too.

Axelrod agrees, writing in an email: Certainly, celebrity is valuable in an environment in which its hard to break through and traditional politicians are held in such low esteem. Trump proved that with his march to the White House [as] the best known and least experienced person to run and win. But Trumps ascent, and subsequent problems, may well make celebrity candidacies harder for the foreseeable future, if people come to value experience more.

Fixating on any single credential as the magic formula can backfire. John Kerry stood before the Democratic Convention in 2004 to accept the nomination and said, Reporting for Duty. He wagered that his distinguished service in Vietnam would help him vanquish an incumbent president. Instead, his war record was turned against him, and the veterans he wanted to win over pilloried him for turning against that war.

Kerry learned then as Trump is discovering today that when you lean hard on something, it better be really strong. You cant just bring up a piece of your history, not with Special Counsel Mueller rifling through financial records of real estate deals never meant to see the light of day.

Its too soon to know how this turns out for Trump, but its already clear that running the country is not the same as running a business or basking in the celebrity of a reality TV show.

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Donald Trump May Only Be the Beginning of the Era of Celebrity Politicians - Daily Beast

The Donald Trump and Michael Flynn of the Cold War – POLITICO Magazine

Michael Flynn was back in the headlines earlier this month, as special counsel Robert Mueller asked the White House for any documents on the former national security adviser. Flynn, who had to step down from his position in the wake of revelations that he had discussed lifting U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador, has been a continued source of scandal for the Trump administration. And yet, reports claim that President Donald Trump has been pining for his former adviser. The two, after all, are kindred spirits, who bonded over lock her up chants and the supposed threat posed by Islam and attacks on establishment leaders in both parties for failing to understand what they consider the true dangers to the homeland.

Though the flamboyant businessman and the former general may seem like an unlikely pairing, their alliance draws on the style, ideas and worldviews of another partnership between a businessman-turned-politico with a flair for sales and conspiracy theories and a hard-line general who spied threats under every rockone that took place decades ago.

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John Birch Society founder Robert H.W. Welch Jr. and Army General Edwin A. Walker were two of the most notorious anticommunists of the Cold War era. Both Welch and Walker, like Trump and Flynn, embraced conspiracy theories that anti-American forces had infiltrated the highest levels of government and media. Their informal alliance rested on a shared view that corrupt elites had rendered the country defenseless. And their association raised liberal fears that a dictator would seize control of the White House. In fact, the New Republic published a series of fictional news reports in 1961 imagining Walker leading a military coup and installing a military junta in the White House. In the narrative, Walker, the temporary president, appoints Welch as head of a Subversive Activities Control Board and taps a rogues gallery of right-wing businessmen, media moguls and arch-segregationists to other key posts.

Look, and youll see in Welch and Walker some of the strains that reappear in Trumpism today.

***

Welch, a blue-eyed, balding candy manufacturer, became Americas most visible political extremist in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born on a farm in North Carolina in 1899, Welch graduated from the University of North Carolina at 16 and attended Harvard Law School before dropping out to launch a fudge-making company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Welch was mired in debt during the Great Depression, his company folded, and he joined his brothers already established candy-making business, the James O. Welch Company, as a sales manager. Welch spent decades selling Pom-poms and helping to turn the company into a multimillion-dollar operation. His first book, The Road to Salesmanship, published in 1941, offered business primers on the art of the sale.

While the marketing skills Welch honed early in life would help bring him to national political prominence, his ideological awakening didnt come until the postwar years. During the early Cold War, the businessman began to see an American system that had lost touch with its founding principles. In his view, the rising power of the welfare state was destroying the individualist ethic that had once made the United States a beacon of freedom. Caught up in the anti-communist tide washing over postwar politics, Welch used his status as a successful candy manufacturer to give talks about the Red threat in public. We are throwing away [the country we had] for a phony security and a creeping collectivism, warned Welch in one speech. On visits to England in the late 1940s, Welch recoiled at the state socialism he saw there, and cautioned American audiences upon his return against let[ting] ourselves be infected by such diseases as socialism and communism and other ideological cancers as Western Europeans had.

Welchs wealth and public profile rose as his anticommunist fervor intensified. Politicians began to solicit his endorsement to boost their campaigns in Massachusetts. He delivered rousing talks to political audiences and recruited volunteers to aid his chosen candidates. In 1950, Welch even ran for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts as a Republican, his lone try for elective office. He was badly defeated, and he began to nurse the sort of grievances and aching sense of betrayal by the establishment that have infused Trumps short-lived political career.

In Welchs eyes, the progressive era was the culprit. President Woodrow Wilsons agenda had put this nation on its present road to totalitarianism, he said. He fingered federal agencies, global financiers and elite-run international institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations as the insiders that were conspiring to destroy the nations founding virtues of free enterprise and individual liberty. He saw the assault on the American way of life intensify in 1952, when the Republican establishment deprived Sen. Robert Taft of the 1952 presidential nomination and handed it to Dwight Eisenhowerthe dirtiest deal in American political history, Welch called it. In 1954, when the Eisenhower administration and American liberals destroyed anti-communist firebrand Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Welch despaired. These moments ignited what D.J. Mulloy, in The World of the John Birch Society, called Welchs career in conspiracism.

Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, poses at his Belmont, Mass., headquarters, from which he directs the affairs of the militant and conservative organization, April 18, 1963. | AP Photo

Serving on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers in the 1950s, Welch grew close to like-minded conservative business leaders, turned away from the candy business and became an author and advocate. In the early to mid-1950s, Welch helped forge a burgeoning world of conservative organizing. He marshaled his skills as a marketer and pamphleteer to burnish his image as an anti-communist visionary speaking impolite truths to Americas sleepwalking political establishment. His goal was to open peoples minds to the grave communist dangers that sought the destruction of our own liberty, as the New York Times characterized one of his early arguments. That there are more communists and communist sympathizers in our government today than ever before seems to me almost a certainty, Welch declared. As Jonathan Schoenwald reveals in A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism, Welch persuaded conservative publisher Henry Regnery to publish a 30,000-word letter he had penned as a short book, May God Forgive Us, in 1952, and then established a Welch Letter Mailing Committee that urged potential buyers to pick up his book and learn from its revelations. Welchs marketing strategy, Schoenwald wrote, was a stroke of political genius.

In 1954, Welch published The Life of John Birch, in which he depicted the Baptist missionary who was killed by Chinese communist troops just days after the end of World War II as the first victim of the communist war on free people. William F. Buckley would ultimately distance the conservative cause from Welchs most outlandish conspiracies, but in the mid-1950s the founder of National Review praised Welch as the author of two of the finest pamphlets this country has read in a decade. Welch fixed his ire on establishment politicians who, he charged, had intentionally assisted the communists in their quest to destroy American life from within.

In 1958, Welch was sending his friends another book-length manuscript, The Politician, promulgating his most incendiary charge yet: that Eisenhower was a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy. Welch justified his allegation by claiming his goal was simply to inform a limited number of patriotic friends of mine what I personally believed about the present situation, why I believed it, and what I personally was trying to do about it as just one patriotic American who was greatly concerned. In later self-defenses, Welch glowingly cited the 95 percent of well-informed, influential readers who completely agree with my conclusions.

That same year, just as The Politician was generating enthusiasm among some of Welchs allies, Welch invited 11 sympathetic businessmen to a home in Indianapolis where over two days they listened raptly as he talked for roughly 13 hours about the domestic communist peril. By the time Welch was finished, he had established the John Birch Society, or JBS, to organize grass-roots anti-communists to educate the public and halt the spread of communism in the United States. Welch adopted a top-down, autocratic approach to the organization (Democracy is merely a deceptive phrase, a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud, he said in justifying his iron grip). He drew on his salesman skills, concentrated decision-making power in his own hands and helped recruit an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 members. Many of them became devoted to direct political action and raising awareness in their communities about the communist dangers lurking within.

Welchs Ike-is-Red bombshell exploded in the public conscience in the early 1960s. Numerous moderate and liberal politicians of both parties, as well as journalists, excoriated Welchs charge as the ravings of a right-wing crackpot. Still, some anti-communists praised Welchs revelatory book as the kind of truth-talk desperately needed in order to win the Cold War. By 1961, Welchs thesis, and the John Birch Societys growing visibility, made him and his members the leading national symbol of right-wing extremism in the eyes of countless critics.

***

Just as Welchs star burned hotter, a second scandal ensnared the JBS. The Overseas Weekly, a privately owned tabloid read by U.S. soldiers, reported that General Edwin Walker, who commanded the Armys 24th Infantry Division based in West Germany, had established an education program designed to instruct his men in the teachings of the John Birch Society and the true nature of the communist enemy. Welchs The Life of John Birch appeared on Walkers recommended reading list. Further, the Weekly charged, Walker, a Silver Star-winning World War II and Korean War veteran, had identified Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt as definitely pink. (Why he singled them out wasnt clear.)

President John F. Kennedy asked the Army to investigate, and in June 1961, the Defense Department reassigned Walker and admonished him for having made derogatory remarks of a serious nature about certain prominent Americans, the American Press, and TV industry and certain commentators, which linked the persons and institutions with Communism and Communist influence. Rather than accept his reprimand, Walker resigned from the service. He wanted, he explained, to be free from the power of little men who punish loyal service, and devoted himself to educating citizens about the scope of the communist threat.

Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker, former commander of the 24th Infantry Division in West Germany, poses in his quarters in Heidelberg, Germany, Sept. 7, 1961. Walker, listed in an official Army report as a member of the militantly conservative John Birch Society, received an official reprimand after an investigation of a troop education and indoctrination program he sponsored. | Kurt Strumpf/AP Photo

Walker, at least initially, became a hero to countless conservatives. The way they saw it, he had short-circuited his distinguished military career to speak the truth about communist infiltration in key sectors of American government. One California congressman and JBS member defended Walker on the House floor: Since when is it wrong to advance the cause of Americanism?

Newsweek put Walker on its cover in 1961 with the headline, Thunder on the RIGHT, above a description that labeled Walker a new crusader. The former general quickly rose to Welch-like fame, as the two became seen as anti-communist heroes in the eyes of many conservativesand right-wing fanatics in the eyes of liberals. The businessman and the general did not actually have a personal relationship, but they did feed off of each other and, together, inspired roiling debates about the direction of the conservative movement and how best to fight the communist threat.

Welch and Walkers shared abhorrence of civil rightstheir mutual conviction that communists were behind the drive to topple Jim Crowprovided another source of their alliance-building. After being arrested for leading pro-segregationist riots at the University of Mississippi in 1962, Walker was surrounded by rabid supporters upon his return home to Dallas. Their signs said Welcome Walker and Walker for President, 64; one well-wisher hoisted a Confederate flag. A year later, Welchs JBS published The Invasion of Mississippi, a pro-Walker, segregationist defense of the Walker-led riots at Ole Miss. When Walker embarked on a speaking tour in 1963 to rail against the communist conspiracy in the United States, Welch and his fellow JBS leaders urged their members to support Walkers crusade. Members recruited citizens to attend Walkers speeches and helped with logistics.

The generals extremism deepened rapidly. In April 1962, after delivering rambling congressional testimony denouncing Secretary of State Dean Rusk as part of an apparatus devoted to selling out the United States, he punched a reporter in the face. In 1963, he denounced Kennedys brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, as little stupid brother Bobby. Walker also conspiratorially implied that the government had tried to assassinate him, stating they had to [arrest and] get rid of me because I knew too much about Mississippi. (Seven months before John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, according to the Warren Commission, Lee Harvey Oswald tried to assassinate Walker, firing a single shot into his Dallas home that came within about an inch of Walkers head.)

Up until then, much of the conservative press and political class either supported Walkers crusade or remained relatively silent about his controversial views. In 1961-1962 GOP leaders decided that remaining silent [on the Walker case] was preferable to drumming out the extremists in an ugly public purge, Schoenwald writes. But eventually, some of the most conservative leaders had to repudiate Walkers descent into fanaticism: Even JBS quelled its support as the general became more unhinged.

As Walkers anticommunist career fizzled, Welchs remained an inflection point for conservative activists, Republican leaders and liberals. Some conservatives who were striving to become politically more viable, including Buckley and Ronald Reagan, denounced Welchs theories as too extreme. But many of the same conservatives benefited from JBS members fundraising and organizing support. Some of the muscle that powered conservative politicians in the 1960s was supplied by Welchs followers.

History, of course, is a flow rather than a pattern or a cycle. But if we are searching as we should be for some of the seeds that flowered into Trumpism, the short-lived radical ascendance and the shared flow of ideas that defined Welch's and Walkers informal partnership isnt a bad place to start.

In Trump's and Flynns shared conspiracies about the power of Muslim extremists and illegal immigrants within the United States; their jaundiced views that Republican and Democratic insiders have rigged the system to favor global and coastal elites; their faith that only fearless, politically incorrect leaders can restore American greatness; and in the sheer temerity of their racial provocations (Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL, Flynn tweeted; a judge overseeing a Trump University case was biased due to his Mexican heritage, Trump charged), we see that Trumpism owes an unwitting debt to the Welch-Walker alliance. The partnership anticipated the paranoia, distrust of elites and hard-right vision of an America unfettered by such nefarious values as liberal pluralism, the welfare state and the liberal internationalist order. It may have taken decades for them to achieve a small measure of political vindication, but in Trumps ascendance, Welch and Walkers radicalismdecades after the Cold War endedhas found some unlikely champions in the Oval Office.

Matthew Dallek, an associate professor at George Washington Universitys Graduate School of Political Management, is author, most recently, of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security.

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The Donald Trump and Michael Flynn of the Cold War - POLITICO Magazine

Report: Donald Trump Suspects Chief Strategist Steve Bannon of Leaking to the Press – Vanity Fair

By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

The Trump White House has been reshuffling, ousting, and replacing its staff since even before Donald Trump took office. And while its most recent purge saw the removal of semi-newish faces like former chief of staff Reince Priebus and press secretary Sean Spicer, even the old faithful may not be immune.

According to a Sunday report by Axios, Trump thinks that Steve Bannon, a senior adviser and key campaign architect, might be the source behind recent leaks targeting National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. The stories have been pushed especially hard by Breitbart, the alt-right web outlet for which Bannon served as executive chairman before joining Trumps campaign. Sources told Axioss Jonathan Swan that its odd that Bannon hasnt done anything to stop the McMaster hit pieces, since he once ran the site, and noted that when the media reported that Bannon was engaged in a quiet turf war with Priebus, the two went to great lengths to prove their friendship.

Thus far, Bannon has been on the winning side of such internal debates like the presidents withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and getting aggressive with China. But he and McMaster have completely opposing worldviews, and newly appointed Chief of Staff John Kelly was reportedly horrified at the conservative media campaign against McMaster.

While speaking with Chuck Todd on NBCs Meet the Press, McMaster couldnt answer, definitively, whether he and Bannon can work alongside each other in the White House.

When Todd asked, point-blank, about his working relationship with Bannon, McMater answered, I am ready to work with anybody who will help advance the presidents agenda, and advance the security, prosperity of the American people. When Todd asked if he thought Bannon does that, McMaster again went for the diplomatically vague approach.

I believe that everyone who works in the White House, who has the privilege, the great privilege every day of serving their nation, should be motivated by that goal.

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Report: Donald Trump Suspects Chief Strategist Steve Bannon of Leaking to the Press - Vanity Fair

Is Donald Trump stubborn, stupid, or simply racist? – The Boston Globe

A chalk tribute to Confederate General Robert E. Lee remained on the sidewalk in Charlottesville the day after the Unite the Right rally erupted in lethal violence.

In America, there are a mere handful of groups that politicians can criticize with relative impunity members of the Islamic State, Communists, and of course Nazis.

Yesterday, however, after neo-Nazi groups marched in Charlottesville, Va., and a terrorist attack took the life of a young woman and injured 19 others, Donald Trump took the ball to the hoop and missed an uncontested layup.

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Rather than condemning these groups he took an uncharacteristically muted approach decrying what he called this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, as if those bedecked in Nazi regalia and chanting racist and anti-Semitic slogans exist on the same moral plain as those protesting such hatred.

The same man who has ruthlessly attacked Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a Gold Star mother, the cast of Hamilton, Meryl Streep, and the department store chain Nordstrom chose to hold his tongue when it came to singling out white supremacists.

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All of this is hard to square with Trumps campaign-era statement that he is the least racist person you ever met. Even racist people condemn Nazis.

H.R. McMaster, President Trumps national security adviser, said that anytime that you commit an attack against people to incite fear, it is terrorism.

To many observers this is an indication of Trumps reluctance to upset his political base namely the racist, xenophobic white voters who helped propel him to the White House. Surely thats a possibility.

Maybe Trump simply is being stubborn. Like a petulant adolescent, the more people push Trump to do something, the more he gets his back up and remains silent.

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But perhaps there is another more basic explanation for Trumps reticence hes a racist.

Certainly, theres plenty of evidence to back up that notion. After all, he ran for president on a clearly racist political platform that targeted undocumented immigrants largely Hispanic and called for a ban on all Muslims entering the country, which he has tried to enact as an executive order. As president he has regularly taken to Twitter to condemn terror acts by jihadist groups, while remaining silent in the face of attacks against Muslims in the United States like the firebombing of a mosque in Minnesota.

This is a candidate who refused to condemn the neo-Nazi leader David Duke and only later did so half-heartedly. After his campaign tweeted out an attack on Hillary Clinton with anti-Semitic overtones, he defended it. In fact, his closing campaign ad featured several prominent Jewish protagonists and contained a host of anti-Semitic dog whistles.

He surrounds himself with advisors like Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Sebastian Gorka, and Jeff Sessions who have documented histories of racist and anti-Semitic views. He regularly attacks Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren by calling her Pocahontas. He is a birther who regularly questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States.

In his short-lived campaign for the White House in 2011 he regularly used faux Asian accents to belittle and demonize China and South Korea for allegedly ripping off Americans. Back in 1989 he ran a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for the death penalty for five young African-American men convicted in a brutal attack on a female jogger in Central Park (they were later exonerated). In the 1970s he was sued by the federal government for refusing to rent apartments in his housing developments to African-Americans.

Keep in mind: This is just a small sampling. When one considers Trumps rather lengthy track record of racism, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia it begs the question: Why are people so quick to view this as mere political calculation and not the articulation of Trumps own personal views?

Granted, many pundits and political observers find it difficult to call the president of the United States a racist even though that word describes plenty of previous US presidents (Im looking at you, Woodrow Wilson). To call the president a bigot is also to implicitly suggest that the 62 million people who voted for Trump, while perhaps not personally racists, were unbothered by the unambiguous racist agenda of the man they elected president.

Whatever the reason, heres one thing we can say with certainty: As politicians from both sides of the political aisle condemned the hatred and bigotry on display by a bunch of neo-Nazi thugs in Charlottesville, our president couldnt find the words to join them.

Whether you want to call that political calculation, stubbornness, or an insight into Trumps darkened soul is up to you. But where we should all be able to agree is that a man who cannot condemn Nazis and white supremacists is not fit to be president of the United States.

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Is Donald Trump stubborn, stupid, or simply racist? - The Boston Globe

Donald Trump is loyal — until he’s not – CNN

It's at least half true.

Trump reiterated his philosophy on the matter a few years ago: "I'm loyal to people who've done good work for me."

"Good work" is, of course, a subjective means of measuring one's service to Trump. But it's a telling line mostly because of the subtext, which suggests Trump is indeed willing to repay subordinates who advance his interests with loyalty -- but only up to a point. When the "good work" ends or hits a snag, as we've seen over the past seven months and during the campaign before that, Trump's backing tends to do the same.

The President's recent treatment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who narrowly failed to deliver the needed GOP votes to repeal Obamacare, is the most immediate illustration of Trump's fickle fealty.

In fairness, McConnell helped load himself into the barrel when he criticized Trump, albeit mildly, during a Monday speech to a Rotary Club in Kentucky.

"Our new President, of course, has not been in this line of work before," McConnell said. As it applies to the legislative process, he added: "I think (Trump) had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process."

The nuance there, that cautious caveat, did not land well with the White House. Trump has now spent the better part of the week assailing the top Senate Republican on Twitter and in remarks to reporters during what's been a news-making vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

On Thursday, he pointedly refused to back McConnell, suggesting what remains of his faith in the majority leader will turn on future performance.

"I'll tell you what, if he doesn't get repeal and replace done, and if he doesn't get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn't get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure, he doesn't get them done, then you can ask me" again if McConnell should give up his post, Trump said.

Trump and Priebus, then the Republican National Committee boss, had an up-and-down relationship during the 2016 primaries. Despite leading in the GOP polls for months before the first ballot was cast, the party establishment (and many in the media) doubted Trump's viability, and whether he could sustain his popularity, once the contests kicked off.

Priebus, though, was clear on Trump's potential -- either to win or damage the eventual nominee's chances in November by going a third party route. There was drama over a loyalty pledge, which Trump signed, then waffled on, but ultimately honored, if only because his frontrunner status rarely wavered.

Whatever his misgivings, Priebus never intervened and eventually (technically) joined Trump's inner circle. His bald-faced backing cleared the way for other Republicans climb aboard.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie wasn't always quite so unpopular in his home state. His decline began well before he left the Republican presidential primary last year, but it's hard to imagine his decision to immediately throw his allegiance to Trump did much to reverse the slide.

Christie backed Trump before it was perceived as a political imperative. His precise motives in endorsing Trump are still not entirely clear. The theories range from vengeance against other more mainstream candidates like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio to strategic angling for future employment, or some combination of those and more.

The attorney general, before he was attorney general, was a US senator from Alabama. He was also the first active member of that august body to endorse Trump during the GOP primary. When the "Access Hollywood" tape threatened to upend Trump's campaign, and some Republicans began to make for the exits, Sessions stood firm: "This thing is overblown," he told Fox News. "Everybody knows that Trump likes women."

As with McConnell, Trump didn't hesitate to air his ire on social media and in a memorably caustic interview with The New York Times.

"So why aren't the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?", Trump, in his role as pundit-in-chief, tweeted on the morning of July 24.

Sessions has managed to hang on mostly because he refused to resign and his old friends in the Senate made it clear Trump would not be able to quickly install a replacement if Sessions was fired.

Asked this week about their relationship, Trump offered a bright, shining endorsement.

For now.

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Donald Trump is loyal -- until he's not - CNN