Wednesday, August 7, 2019

“Tearing America apart”

In The New Yorker, John Cassidy writes that “Donald Trump and lax gun laws are tearing America apart”:

Let us not kid ourselves: in many ways, the United States was failing before Donald Trump took his famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower. . . .

But what the United States didn’t have, until January, 2017, was a President whose personal instincts and political strategy drive him to inflame the country on a daily basis.
The president of the United States, the ostensible leader of the free world, is a liar, a misogynist, a predator, a white supremacist. I’d say send him back: but where to? We have no time machines. Better: vote him out. After which, I fear, he’ll be sowing hatred and division from the toxic (and Russia-friendly) One America News Network.

[And why is Trump smiling in the posed photographs from Dayton? And why are the people around him smiling? Did the president question doctors and nurses and first responders about the traumatic injuries that assault weapons inflict on the human body? Did he talk to members of law enforcement about the danger such weapons pose to them? And to shooting victims in the hospital: “You had God watching.” Was a divinity picking winners and losers early Sunday morning? I have no more words.]

comments: 4

Pete said...

I’m sure that Queens doesn’t want him back. And deporting him to Germany or Scotland would be devastating for international diplomacy.

zzi said...

"Listen, don't mention Chicago! I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it all right."

Michael Leddy said...

Ah, I see what you did there. At least I think I do. You’re spoofing Fawlty Towers and using “Chicago” to signify crime? And you think Barack Obama should be or should have been sent back there? I think that might be what you mean. If I were reading that sentence in a student’s essay, I’d write in the margin Explain?

Michael Leddy said...

@Pete: I should have remembered this last night: a 2015 Times article about Trump’s old neighborhood.