Summations Only

Sorry, I missed that one. It's not my country, I just have family connections.Trump has appointed a new ambassador to Czech Republic as well. He's not on the news because he's much more circumspect; and has said nothing controversial or offensive. He's diplomatic, which you'd expect a diplomat to be.It can't be that simple, though, because this is Trump. He was one of the guys who arranged the Watergate break-in. He held the US attorney-general's wife hostage in a hotel room. And now he's a US ambassador. You couldn't make this shit up.

Trump's most recent punch-self-in-nose crisis (I'm talking about his denigrating comments about El Salvador, Haiti and Africa) raises the question, "Why is Trump doing this, and why is the Republican Party, especially Republican members of Congress, acting as enablers?"The answer is demographics. Minorities tend to vote Democratic, and by 2040 minorities will be the majority group in the US. This Republican crisis looms large on their horizon because it means the end of their political domination at the local, state and federal level. There's also a component that wishes the country to remain as they see it, predominantly and dominantly white.So they are fighting this impending change by all available means. They're gerrymandering election districts. They're restricting the rights of minorities to vote. They're deporting as many immigrants as they can (children of immigrants are citizens). And they're attempting to close the doors to immigration from as many countries of minority races as possible.Trump today tweeted, "America First!" as a rebuttal, as if immigrants were not a strength of American character. Nothing puts America first more than insuring a steady inflow of new energy and ideas by keeping the doors open to immigration, especially from countries burdened by hardship. We don't need an influx of professionals and Masters and PhDs but of the poor and indigent and uneducated who will do the same as immigrant populations before them: work hard, improve their lot, and thereby improve the country.We also don't want to halt what has been termed chain migration, because separating and breaking up families makes success harder.Trump has been defended by some as just speaking the plain truth, saying what many are thinking but fear saying out loud. Conservative commentator Tomi Lahren said, "If they aren’t shithole countries, why don’t their citizens stay there? Let’s be honest. Call it like it is." This attitude ignores that the motivation to emigrate is from regions of distress, not from regions of prosperity and stability like Norway, a country Trump endorsed. It also flies in the face of the concept of the American melting pot and of the American ideal of showing compassion toward those in distress, which is why the El Salvadorans (earthquake) and Haitians (earthquake, too) are here. But most importantly it evades the true meaning of Trump's words, which is that if these are shithole countries then their people are shithole people, and shithole people shouldn't be allowed in.The realization that immigrants are a benefit, not a threat, comes hard for some. This country has had recurring difficulties living up to the ideal of welcoming immigrants (never more deplorably than in the years leading up to WWII when we made immigration by Jews from eastern Europe extremely difficult), showing that recognition that immigrants bring great benefits only comes with difficulty. The tendency to feel threatened is great, especially and legitimately by those in the least skilled professions where new immigrants are most likely to compete for jobs. These issues must be faced forthrightly, and frequently they're not.This isn't the first time the country has had the discussion of who and how many should be allowed in, and this is a discussion we should have, but it *is* the first time we've had such a vicious, acrimonious and callous racist-in-chief.The Washington Post just ran an editorial that uses this recent example of Trump shooting himself in the foot to make the point that Trump is his own worst enemy. Here are some excerpts:

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Trump does more damage to himself than his opponents ever manage to do

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As the New Year heads to its third week, President Trump remains on a personal, political losing streak. None of his opponents not the Democrats, not the Never Trumpers, not any of the others can damage him as badly as he hurts himself.
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...the conversation around the presidency the conversation at times forced by the president involved topics that were alternately disquieting and shocking, from questions about his mental fitness and stability to serve as president (which he helped to elevate with tweets) to the racist and vulgar comment he made about African and other nations in a private meeting.

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Together they reinforce a portrait of a president who doesn’t appear to understand or appreciate the importance of the immigrant experience, often lacks clarity of his own views or the details of issues he is negotiating, and who projects an image that regularly flies in the face of standards long applied to those who occupy the Oval Office.
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Through the course of the 2016 campaign, he attacked Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. He attacked a federal judge born in the United States of Mexican heritage, a judge who happened to be overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University. He got into a fight with a Gold Star family, who happened to be Muslim and whose son was killed in the Iraq war, after they used the platform of the Democratic National Committee to criticize his campaign proposal for a ban on Muslim immigration.
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Now he has used a horrible vulgarity to denigrate nations whose immigrants to the United States have made valuable contributes to the country. He compounded his dismissal of those countries by asking why the United States country cannot take more immigrants from places like Norway, which happens to be predominantly white.

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Condemnations came quickly from different parts of the political spectrum. A United Nations human rights spokesman said there was no other word than racist to describe Trump’s comment. The episode once again left the president politically isolated, save for those who either agree with him or are willing to set aside their discomfort, as many voters did when he was elected.
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His response to events that go against him is to lash out by declaring that the processes of our democratic system are rigged or broken. His perspective on democratic governance is viewed almost entirely through the lens of whether he, personally, is winning or losing.

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For some Trump advisers and for many Republican elected officials, there is not an almost automatic reaction to turn away when things like this occur, either to pretend what happened did not happen or to dismiss them as a president blowing off steam, like somebody ranting in a bar.

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The consequences are far greater. As these kinds of comments pile one on top of another, they define the Trump presidencyand in the eyes of much of the world the current state of United States and the Republican Party itselfas much as the policies he and party leaders are pursuing.

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--Percy

Yes. I should have noticed that you were not from the Netherlands. Ineptitude is not a strategy. I suspect that Trump did not know all of that stuff. Let's remember that Trump appointed a man to be a federal district court judge who had no idea how to conduct a trial.

Well said! Before seeing your message I posted Message 1682, and I think it echoes many of the things you say.--Percy

You need to understand there are alternat facts.Trump is for Americans not furriners.

If NoNukes was talking about the article that was posted about the news conference introducing the new American ambassador to the Netherlands (why isn't "the" capitalized?), it's in Message 1583.--Percy

Trying to answer my own question about why the "the" in the Netherlands isn't capitalized, I found some very interesting information. First this from What's the Deal with the Netherlands?:

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The people, language, and culture are called "Dutch." While the country's capital is Amsterdam, its government is located in The Hague. The article "the" is not capitalized in "the Netherlands" (though it always is in "The Hague"). The country's name is plural in form but grammatically singular.

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The capital is in one city while the government is in another? That seemed strange, so I looked up "capital" at Dictionary.com, whose definition is basically the same as the one at Oxford Living Dictionaries:

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The city or town that is the official seat of government in a country, state, etc.

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But then I used the dictionary feature on my Mac and got a different definition. I don't know what dictionary it uses:

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The most important city or town in a country or region, usually its seat of government and administrative center.

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So that's why it's not a contradiction that Amsterdam is the capital while The Hague (where "the" *is* capitalized) is the seat of government.Concerning why "the" isn't capitalized in the Netherlands, I found this at Language Matters: Capitalization - Look at it Case by Case:

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In relation to place names, the article the should only be capitalized for The Gambia and The Bahamas and not for the Netherlands or the Philippines.

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But that still doesn't explain why.The "the" in the Czech Republic isn't capitalized either.Ah, found another website (The Netherlands, the Netherlands or Netherlands?), this seems to be the most relevant part:

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It is not officially The Netherlands

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Two countries have The as an official part of their English names: The Gambia and The Bahamas. This is not the situation for the Netherlands, even though the article is considered to be part of the name.

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Why has the article not been formally integrated into the country’s English name? In the end, the answer may just be that that Netherlands is not an English-speaking country, so it has not felt the need to take any formal step with regard to its English name. The Gambia and The Bahamas are English-speaking, so they have done this. It may also be the case that the Dutch don’t feel any particular urge to clarify this point. They call their country just Nederland. The Dutch equivalent (De Nederlanden) is not used in modern Dutch to refer to the Netherlands.

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--Percy

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The answer is demographics. Minorities tend to vote Democratic, and by 2040 minorities will be the majority group in the US. This Republican crisis looms large on their horizon because it means the end of their political domination at the local, state and federal level. There's also a component that wishes the country to remain as they see it, predominantly and dominantly white.

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I did not speak about the politics in my post. What I will say, is that I don't see any reason to distinguish between the folks fearing how minorities will vote from the rest of the racists, particularly if their reaction to reality is to stop minorities from voting or to stop folks from coming to this country. And yes, I understand exactly how harsh that sounds. I understand that my remarks apply to some folks who post here. I don't believe most folks, or even most Republican voters are racist. But the prevalence of racism is a bit higher than most folks can comfortably admit.I'll note here that the meeting with Trump was intended to feature just two folks, Senators Durbin and Graham who had been working with a bipartisan group to come up with an immigration proposal. Trump invited several other Republican "immigration hardliners" to join Grahan and Durbin because it was Trump's intent to torpedo the effort. Well, mission accomplished.Republican Lindsey Graham spoke up at the meeting after Trump's remarks. Durbin did as well, and he also was willing to confirm the reports of Trump's offensive remarks. Cudos to those folk. Two of the Republicans hardliners that attended now claim they "don't recall" what Trump said and the others are silent.Expect to hear more folks who are proud to have a president who isn't PC and uses locker room talk. Most of those folks are not racists. But that also is not what the real point is.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

From Fox News: MLK's Niece: 'Outrageous' That Critics Are 'Unjustly' Calling Trump RacistMartin Luther King's niece is defending Trump against charges of racism? Checking her Wikipedia page, she's a Fox News Channel contributor and a Republican.Go figure.--Percy

And one of his nephews as well. But his defense is the faintest of praise...https://www.essence.com/...jr-nephew-donald-trump-not-racist

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But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s nephew says Trump is not racist just racially ignorant.

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I don’t think Present Trump is a racist in the traditional sense as we know in this country, King’s nephew Isaac Newton Farris Jr. told CNN on Friday. I think President Trump is racially ignorant and racially uninformed. But I don’t think he is a racist in the traditional sense.

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This Saturday Trump will have been in office one year, and in honor of that upcoming anniversary CNN describes the first year of Trump in the opinion piece The exhausting first year of Donald Trump's presidency. I'm going to quote the first few paragraphs, but most people will want to read the whole thing. One cannot keep in one's mind at one time all the outrageous actions and tweets of the past year because memory, for most of us, doesn't work that way, so this article accomplishes it for you succinctly and economically:

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It will be impossible to adequately explain in decades to come just what it was like to be alive in the exhausting first year of Donald Trump's presidency.

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From the moment he trampled the unifying conventions of the inaugural address by decrying "American carnage," Trump shattered political normality, tearing at racial and societal divides, the limits and decorum of his office, even raising doubts about his fidelity to the nation's founding values.

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Trump is like a raging storm that never blows itself out, as his early morning Twitter rants injected into the nation's central nervous system trigger outrages that obliterate traditional political debate and make days feel like weeks, weeks feel like months and months feel like years.

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--Percy

When Trump says, "I am not a racist," it brings back memories of Nixon's, "I am not a crook." But Nixon was a crook, and Trump is a racist. The New York Times today ran an opinion piece titled Trump Is a Racist. Period. Best excerpt is a quote by James Baldwin: I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.AbE: Also from the New York Times is this opinion piece documenting the history of Trump's racism: Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List--PercyEdited by Percy, : AbE.Edited by Percy, : Formatting.

Trump's recent remarks on race remind me of his remarks on abortion during the campaign. Trump apparently wasn't all that up on what the real Republican platform on abortion at first. So when pressed on the issue he indicated that he favored jailing women who got abortions. After learning that he was out on that limb by himself, he later backed off of those remarks.I think Trump made a similar error last week. I imagine that groups like FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) and CIS (Center for Immigration Studies) were absolutely appalled to hear Trump sheet, uh, I mean veneer, off their agendas. Perhaps some unintended good will come from Trump's remarks.Trump's current stance is to deny having made the comments while blaming Democrats for killing off DACA. However, his denials come after a weekend of folks making defenses of those same remarks. I don't see how you can have it both ways. But his denials will certainly provide some cover for those folks who are willing to overlook just about anything.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

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Trump's current stance is to deny having made the comments while blaming Democrats for killing off DACA. However, his denials come after a weekend of folks making defenses of those same remarks. I don't see how you can have it both ways.

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They have always been at war with Eastasia.

Republicans are apparently not only willing to support Trump if it helps further their own agenda, they're even willing to lie for Trump. Never was this more evident than on Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation when Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who was at the Oval Office meeting with Trump, not only denied hearing the president refer to El Salvador, Haiti and Africa as "shithole countries," he even denied that Trump had expressed the sentiment at all. He repeatedly iterated his own position that immigration should be merit based and claimed that Trump was actually expressing that position, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Cotton went further and accused Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) of misrepresenting Trump's words and of having a history of misrepresentations. See Sen. Tom Cotton says Trump's words, sentiments on immigration were misrepresented.Another Republican meeting attendee, Senator David Perdue (R-GA) is also denying that Trump used the "shithole countries" term. He called it a "gross misrepresentation."Another Republican meeting attendee, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen also denied Trump used the term, saying that she didn't recall Trump using "that exact phrase."What turns these Republicans into liars for Trump? Have they no honesty and integrity? Do they think that "playing politics" is a license for lying, that it doesn't measure their character?Some Republicans are honest. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), another meeting attendee, stated that Trump's comments as reported in the media were essentially accurate.--Percy