Monday, July 06, 2020

White House Claims Trump, Who Is Currently Strongly Defending Confederate Monuments, Has Absolutely No Opinion About The Confederate Flag

The Trump administration was gaslighting the US months ago, but they have gone so far in that direction, they have broken through to the other side. Extreme gaslighting has flooded the engine of the country's minds.

I can't imagine how anyone other than the cult's thirstiest koolaid drinkers are taking what is coming out of the White House seriously. (But I've been wrong before.)
As a raving, tapioca-brained maniac once sputtered: "Truth isn't truth."

Two WaPo headlines from Monday:

"McEnany Defends Trump's View On Confederate Flag By Claiming He Doesn't Have One"
Toluse Olorunnipa, July 6, 2020:
After multiple attempts to explain why President Trump appeared to defend the Confederate flag while attacking the only top black driver in NASCAR on Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany settled on arguing that Trump was speaking only in the abstract.

"The president has made clear he was not taking a position one way or the other in that tweet," McEnany said Monday when asked for an unequivocal stance on the Confederate flag.

As institutions across the country, from NASCAR to the state of Mississippi, take steps to remove Confederate imagery and other symbols of racism from the public square, Trump and his White House allies are struggling to mount a defense of increasingly antiquated views. Their latest argument is that Trump — who has expressed views on topics from "Saturday Night Live" to horse racing controversies to the weekend lineup at Fox News — is opinion-less about the Civil War's most controversial symbol.
"McEnany Butchers Her Defense Of Trump's Bubba Wallace Tweet"
Aaron Blake, July 6, 2020:
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was pressed Monday on President Trump's tweet that NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace should have "apologized" for his handling of an incident in which a noose-like rope appeared in his garage at a race.

In the process, though, McEnany misstated several key facts about the situation and offered an implausible argument for Trump's motivation to tweet it. ...

McEnany went on to claim that the FBI said something that it did not state. "And in fact," McEnany said ... "it was concluded by the FBI that this was, quote, 'not an intentional racist act' — for clarity." That quote does not appear in the FBI's statement on the matter. ...

McEnany's most strained defense of Trump on this count, though, pertained to the last portion of Trump's tweet. ... "That," Trump said, referring to the Wallace situation, "& Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!"

The "Flag decision" was an obvious reference to NASCAR's recent decision to ban the Confederate flag at its events — a significant moment in the history of the flag in the United States, given its prevalence at NASCAR events.

To hear McEnany tell it, though, Trump wasn't necessarily expressing support for the Confederate flag — despite his recently expressing support for keeping Confederate monuments. He was merely stating a fact about NASCAR's ratings, apparently.

"I spoke to him this morning about this, and he said he was not making a judgment one way or the other. ... The president said he wasn't making a judgment one way or the other. ... The president was noting the fact that, in aggregate, this notion that NASCAR men and women who have gone and who are being demeaned and called racist and being accused, in some venues, of committing a hate crime against an individual, those allegations were just dead wrong."

So the president was just tweeting about the banning of a flag hurting someone's ratings ... because he was just stating a fact? That seems a conspicuous inclusion — especially given Trump's recent track record on commemorating the Confederacy.

It's also extremely conspicuous for the White House press secretary to completely misstate what the FBI and NASCAR actually said about the larger portion of his tweet — the one she argued was actually the important part.
I actually expect this to be true very soon:


Trump has also prevented Dr. Anthony Fauci from being interviewed on television for the past three months.

Global Times, the Chinese state-controlled newspaper, describes the COVID-19 pandemic as a "U.S. epidemic" and warned that Trump's failures pose a threat to the rest of the world. An editorial published on Friday stated (quite accurately) that the US outbreak is "completely out of control". Two days ago, Trump claimed his administration had "made a lot of progress" controlling the virus, but on that day, the seven-day rolling average of new cases set a record for the 26th straight day.

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