The Lion King Excuse Does Not Make the Racist Donald Trump Post Any Better
Source: News and Politics - Slate Magazine · Bias: Left
Summary
Critics and Republican lawmakers alike have condemned a social media post by President Trump targeting the Obamas, calling it one of the most racist acts from the White House.
The Lion King Excuse Does Not Make the Racist Donald Trump Post Any Better
Left
Critics and Republican lawmakers alike have condemned a social media post by President Trump targeting the Obamas, calling it one of the most racist acts from the White House.
By now, basketball fans know that LeBron James has informed the Los Angeles Lakers that he will not be re-signing with them in free agency this offseason, and will instead find a new team to end his legendary NBA career with.
Racism is an act of self-destruction, warns podcaster Wajahat Ali and independent reporter Joy Ann-Reid. But that destruction extends to everything around them when they manage to grab the levers of power.“I mean there's a big hole in the White House. The lawn where they built that ugly UFC ring is now brown. They've destroyed the Jackie Kennedy garden. [President] Donald Trump is supposed to be a builder but he physically destroyed D.C.,” said Reid. “And then that the poor pathetic little fair that he had, his little world's fair with the fake arch made of plastic. And they painted it. America right now is a laughingstock. I think we created 57,000 jobs last month. That is sad. It's a sad birthday.”But this is the mess that comes of a nation that “refused to acknowledge and uproot its dark sin of white supremacy,” said Ali. “We whitewashed our history books, made heroes of racist traitors, and decided to elect the most incompetent, corrupt vulgarian after electing the first Black president.”“Refusing to learn our lesson, we re-elected Trump, even though we could have had a competent Black woman as President. Now? America is turning into a s——hole,” Ali lamented. “Just look at the Reflecting Pool as a tragic example of our downfall. Take a trip to Washington, D.C., and see the absolute mess that is the White House. Our infrastructure is collapsing, our economy is ailing, and our public health is deteriorating. Measles, death, gun violence, and suicide are on the rise. But it doesn’t matter. White supremacy will destroy everything, including itself, instead of sharing power. It will burn everything down.”“The right wing is not satisfied with just having physically destroyed the country,” said Reid. “[They] destroyed the morale of the country on our birthday where we're sad and pathetic and can't even pull off a world's fair.”The Supreme Court, meanwhile, barely protected birthright citizenship with a six-to-three vote when all the justices had to do was read the Constitution and see that if you're born here, you're a citizen, said Ali.With the war on birthright citizenship and MAGA cries to sterilize brown immigrants, Reid said MAGA and Trump are laboring for a very specific kind of America.“If they were successful at removing everyone who looks like you and me — all the Blacks, all the browns, all the Muslims all the AAPI, all the Latinos — if they got their way, you know what America would look like? It would look like Trump’s pathetic American state fair,” said Reid. “That was a place where there were no Blacks. There were no gays. There were no brown people. It was just MAGA white folks. The one’s who weren’t broken by [Trump’s] economy, who could afford to get on a plane or drive to DC with these gas prices. It was an estimate that the first day was like a 1,000 people — only tens of MAGA could even afford to go there. … [because] they are the poor. They are broke. They're bored. And they're boring.”“There was no musical entertainment,” Reid raged. “That cultural anti-phenomenon that we saw at that pathetic Trump celebration supposedly of America’s birthday and Donald Trump — that is what's left when you get rid of all of us. If you really get rid of people of color then American culture is like sad Europe.”“Like a crusty, crusty mayo sandwich that has been left in the sun for two days,” added Ali.“One-hundred percent,” confirmed Reid. “You'd get no Janet Jackson, no Michael Jackson, no Prince, no Whitney Houston, no Aretha Franklin, no jazz, no gospel, no hip-hop. What do you actually have? What is your culture? What is this white culture that you're trying to preserve at all costs, at the cost of your own economy?”Ali added that even MAGA doesn’t like MAGA America.“When they move to the Southern states where do they move to when they move to Texas? Austin! When they move to Tennessee, they move to Nashville,” said Ali. “Even MAGA influencer] Nick Fuentes was like ‘yeah, I don't want to really move to a red state. So, they know that their mayo sandwich is s——. They know their potato salad sucks. They know their chicken is dry and has no spice. They know that they're bland and pasty and that they have no culture and no rhythm.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller kept up his attacks on birthright citizenship with a far-fetched hypothetical on Friday, and critics lined up to ridicule it.Days after the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling that struck down President Donald Trump's executive order, Miller posted on X that if you believe a foreign government could sail a hospital ship to the edge of US waters, "deliver a hundred babies to foreign moms, then promptly sail back," and that each child "is American for life, you don't believe in nationhood at all." The rant echoed the birth-tourism case he made on Fox News, where he floated a "hard look" at barring pregnant women from the country.Miller's post predictably led to quick backlash. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger asked sarcastically, "What about our hospital ship that we sent to Greenland? It happened right?" Bulwark journalist Sam Stein quipped, "Well. When you put it that way." Internet personality Damin Toell pointed out that under the 1898 Wong Kim Ark precedent, and still after this week's ruling, babies born aboard foreign government ships in US waters are already exempt from birthright citizenship.Others flipped Miller's logic back on him.National security journalist Marcy Wheeler called his "perverted little fantasy" no more real "than it was for the century and a half since birthright citizenship was codified." Academic Alonso Gurmendi argued that "any citizenship rule can be made to sound absurd like this." And journalist Zaid Jilani went furthest, sarcastically asking: "What if a mom catapults over the US Mexico border and from 500 feet in the air pops a baby out, ties a parachute to it and lets it fall gently to the ground. Does that baby deserve citizenship, lib?"The administration has vowed to keep fighting, though some analysts say the ruling nearly went the other way. Independent estimates put actual birth tourism at a tiny fraction of U.S. births.
First lady Melania Trump gave Congress a private deadline to pass her signature foster care bill, and she is pursuing it largely outside the usual White House channels, according to a new report in Politico. At a bipartisan roundtable with the House Ways and Means Committee in April, the first lady publicly called foster care legislation a "moral imperative." Then, behind closed doors, she set a target, Rep. Jason Smith (R-MO) told the outlet: "I want this on Donald's desk by the August recess." The Fostering the Future Act, which expands housing, education and workforce help for young people aging out of foster care, passed the House unanimously.The Senate has not moved it out of committee, and lawmakers are set to leave Washington around Aug. 10. At a White House picnic the day the House passed the bill, both Trumps urged the Senate to hurry. "Hopefully, it will quickly pass in the Senate," the president said. He has not publicly pressed senators since.The deadline reflects a first lady who increasingly operates on her own track. Her office, not the State Department, has led her effort to reunite children displaced by the Russia-Ukraine war, negotiating directly with Moscow and Kyiv, the White House said. She has also shown a willingness to diverge from the administration's message. She broke with the White House on Epstein, calling for survivors to testify as the president's team tried to move past the scandal, and last week put her own spin on a Supreme Court ruling her husband celebrated, voicing support for the LGBTQIA+ community.A recent book recounted how she resisted Trump's overhaul of the White House grounds and lost.
President Donald Trump pardoned six people who he said were sentenced or in prison for “fixing their car,” a day before the US celebrates 250 years of independence on July 4.
President Trump hasn't committed to a firm number of people who will receive clemency — he's scheduled to have a meeting on pardons Friday afternoon, sources said.
