Trump defends treasonous Confederate traitors over funding Defense Dept.

The last president of the Confederacy, Donald J. Trump, is threatening to veto the Defense Authorization Act to defend long-dead Confederate traitors who committed treason against the United States:

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump claimed, ridiculously, that the names are somehow part of the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans.

Tuesday night, President Trump, using a racial slur, threatened to veto the Defense Authorization Act if it includes language to change the names of military bases named for Confederate generals.

The Washington Post reports, Trump vows to veto $740 billion defense bill if Confederate-named military bases are renamed:

President Trump reaffirmed late Tuesday that he would veto this year’s proposed $740 billion annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases named for Confederate military leaders, his strongest rebuke against the measure amid a national reckoning over systemic racism.

Shortly before midnight, the president echoed his previous pledge to “not even consider the renaming” of military bases as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, pushing back against a provision that would change the names of 10 bases named after Confederate generals as well as remove Confederate likenesses, symbols and paraphernalia from defense facilities nationwide within three years.

He voiced his frustration over the provision in a late-night tweet slamming Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the amendment’s sponsor whom the president regularly calls “Pocahontas” in jeering reference to her claims of American Indian heritage.

The measure, which was approved last month in a voice vote by the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee, has become a flash point at a time when nationwide protests over racial injustice and police brutality continue in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day.

Let’s put this in the “how many ways can @realDonaldTrump show he is a racist” folder. It’s getting thick.

Also, the following have removed displays of the confederate flag:@USMC@USNavy@USForcesKorea
NASCAR
Mississippi

Trump is on the wrong & racist side of history. https://t.co/PtZlveNiRn

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) July 1, 2020

[T]he debate in the Senate this week has shifted attention toward the push to remove the names of the Confederate officials that are front and center on some of the nation’s most recognizable military bases.

Democrats and critics have been quick to challenge the president on the issue, and it was no different on Tuesday. Trump’s previous suggestion he would veto the defense bill over the renaming of the military bases drew criticism earlier on Tuesday from Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). In a news conference, Schumer said the provision sponsored by Warren would remain in this year’s NDAA, no matter what the president proclaimed.

“I dare President Trump to veto the bill over Confederate-base naming,” Schumer said to reporters. “It’s in the bill. It has bipartisan support. It will stay in the bill.” He added, “I think the bottom line is what’s in the bill will stay in the bill.”

Without Trump vetoing the entire defense bill, stripping the amendment from this year’s NDAA remains highly unlikely. Opponents of the base-renaming amendment are not expected to be anywhere close to the 60 votes needed to remove it from the bill.

“There are definitely not 60 votes to remove that provision, which is already in the bill, and I don’t think there are 50,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted early Wednesday.

Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has suggested a final vote on the chamber’s bill would take place before the Fourth of July holiday. As The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian reported, Republican support for the provision suggests it will survive any potential challenges on the Senate floor this week.

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Trump potentially vetoing the entire bill — a “must-pass” piece of bipartisan legislation — could trigger other consequences. The Post’s Felicia Sonmez and Paul Kane noted last month how vetoing this year’s proposed $740 billion NDAA could result in no money for research related to the coronavirus pandemic, no 3 percent pay raise for troops, and no funding for new aircraft or ships, among other items.

The president’s vow came hours after Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) signed a bill that would remove the Confederate battle emblem from Mississippi’s flag, which had been the last state to feature the symbol on its flag. At a ceremony on Tuesday, Reeves said removing the Confederate symbol was “not a political moment to me but a solemn occasion to lead our Mississippi family to come together and move on.”

The state of Mississippi joined the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and NASCAR as entities that have recently removed displays of the Confederate flag. The trend was not lost on Trump critic Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York before being fired by the president in 2017.

“Read the room,” he said.

Last week, Trump Issued An Executive Order Targeting Vandalism Against Monuments:

President Trump issued an executive order on Friday that instructed federal law enforcement authorities to prosecute people who damage federal monuments or statues and that threatened to withhold funding from local governments that fail to protect their own statues from vandals.

The order, which Mr. Trump announced on Twitter, comes as he seeks to seize on a cultural divide in the United States during his re-election campaign, suggesting that Democrats are waging an assault on the nation’s history.

“Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust,” Mr. Trump writes in the order, which is titled, “Protecting American Monuments, Memorials and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence.”

The order adds: “Key targets in the violent extremists’ campaign against our country are public monuments, memorials and statues” [of long-dead Confederate traitors who waged a war of treason against the United States in defense of slavery.]

But wait, there’s more!

Also Tuesday night, Trump posted a message that said “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!” Oh, those are white nationalist code words.

Mediaite reports, Why Are People Tweeting About Trump, ’14 Words,’ and White Supremacy?

Though the theories are unsubstantiated, many Twitter users keyed in on the resemblance of the tweet to what the ADL calls “the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world.”

“14 Words” is a reference to that slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The slogan was coined by David Lane, a member of the white supremacist terrorist group known as The Order (Lane died in prison in 2007). The term reflects the primary white supremacist worldview in the late 20th and early 21st centuries: that unless immediate action is taken, the white race is doomed to extinction by an alleged “rising tide of color” purportedly controlled and manipulated by Jews.

Because of its widespread popularity, white supremacists reference this slogan constantly, in its full form as well as in abbreviated versions such as “14 Words”, “Fourteen Words,” or simply the number “14.”

* * *

A few weeks ago, there was another theory that white supremacist themes were being pushed in a Facebook ad buy:

According to the ADL, “1488” is also well-known among white supremacists:

1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the “14 Words” slogan: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” The second is 88, which stands for “Heil Hitler” (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs. As such, they are ubiquitous within the white supremacist movement – as graffiti, in graphics and tattoos, even in screen names and e-mail addresses, such as aryanprincess1488@hate.net.Some white supremacists will even price racist merchandise, such as t-shirts or compact discs, for $14.88.

The symbol is most commonly written as 1488 or 14/88, but variations such as 14-88 or 8814 are also common.

The reactions are mainly premised on the unsubstantiated idea that someone in Trump’s orbit is composing these messages for him, not that Trump himself is steeped in knowledge about neo-Nazi numerological codes.

Trump himself posted a video over the weekend in which a supporter of his repeatedly shouts “White Power!”, before deleting the message several hours later.

Video NSFW.

Seniors from The Villages in Florida protesting against each other: pic.twitter.com/Q3GRJCTjEW

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) June 27, 2020

NBC News adds, Trump promotes video showing apparent supporter shouting ‘white power’ (excerpt):

The president has a history of problematic retweets dating back years. He promoted an account with the handle “WhiteGenocideTM” during the 2016 campaign, and in recent months he has increasingly retweeted accounts supporting or promoting the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Trump has also been accused of appearing sympathetic to white supremacists. In 2017, Trump said a group of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, included “very fine people.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, tweeted that Trump had “shared a video of people shouting ‘white power’ and said they were ‘great.’ Just like he did after Charlottesville.”

“We’re in a battle for the soul of the nation — and the president has picked a side,” Biden added. “But make no mistake: it’s a battle we will win.”

Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., said “there’s no question he should not have retweeted it.”

“He should just take it down,” Scott said, adding that he thinks the video is “indefensible.”

Trump later took down the tweet, but has yet to issue any statement condemning the “white power” hate speech of his supporters.

Also this week, Reddit And Twitch Ban Trump Content For Encouraging Hate:

Both Reddit and Twitch have banned content related to President Donald Trump for violating their rules against encouraging hate.

* * *

Twitch says that the suspension of Trump’s channel will be temporary, but this makes four social media companies including Twitter and even Facebook has taken action against Trump’s hate speech and posting of false and misleading information.

As Trump wades deeper into racist and divisive speech, social media companies are under increasing pressure from both users and advertisers not to turn a blind eye toward Trump’s tactics.

Republicans won’t stand up to Trump, but he isn’t going to get a free pass to use social media to poison the electorate in 2020.

The American people are speaking and social media companies are being forced to take action to reject Trump’s hate speech.

Trump’s Twitter feed reads like a local crime blotter as he stokes a culture war: “As the country convulses from incidents of police killings, mass protests and a rapidly spreading pandemic that has led to double-digit unemployment, the president seems most intent on inflaming an already burning culture war, using his Twitter feed to focus on vandalism by protesters and the well-being of [Confederate] statues that have been targeted.”

Greg Sargent of The Post explains, The latest excuses for Trump’s ‘white power’ tweet reveal his weakness (excerpt):

The answer, I think, exposes a weakness in Trump’s reelection effort. With nearly 125,000 Americans dead and cases spiking again from a pandemic that Trump horribly mismanaged, and amid the most pronounced civil upheaval in a half century, Trump’s propagandists want to convert disorder to his advantage.

That’s obvious enough. But the true nature of it is often shrouded in euphemisms — Trump is “stoking division,” or “throwing a match on gasoline,” or some such phrase, which implies Trump is a passive bystander to societal conflicts that he’s merely cheering on for cynical purposes.

It’s much worse than that. Trump and his propagandists are actively trying to engineer violent civil conflict, by signaling to white Americans that they are under siege in a race war that they’re losing.

The rub is that this signaling requires actually saying this in one form or another. And that forces Trump and his propagandists into a position where they must be cagey about his actual intended meanings when he does things like tweet out supporters yelling “white power.”

Trump and his propagandists want a lot of white Americans to think they need to take sides in a race war. They are expressly using the state to feed this impression: Trump and his top law enforcement and national security officials have repeatedly placed the imprimatur of the government on a profound falsification of the true nature of the protests to do so.

But even the very need to get dragged to the point of condemning the “white power” sentiment is itself a signal in this regard. It’s a wink. It says: We have to be politically correct about this — double wink — but we understand why you feel this way.

McEnany gave away the game on “Fox & Friends,” saying this:

His point in tweeting out that video was to stand with his supporters, who are oftentimes demonized, so he took it down but he does stand with the men and women of The Villages.

The “demonized” ones, the victimized ones, are his supporters! This trades on a narrative Trump has long employed, as Adam Serwer has detailed, in which Trump signals to supporters that “they are the true victims of discrimination” and see criticism of Trump’s racism “as an affirmation of their own victimhood.”

We know Trump does not like such retreats. After Trump uttered his “many fine people” comment about white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, his advisers got him to offer conciliatory remarks. But Trump then raged that this shift made him look “weak.”

In other words, racial strife is good for Trump, as former adviser Stephen K. Bannon has tacitly admitted. Recall, too, that Trump’s campaign provocatively scheduled a rally on Juneteenth on the site of some of the worst racial violence in our history, but did not change the date until after days of criticism.

And Trump has repeatedly tarred protests with “racist tropes,” from tweeting out videos of blacks attacking whites to calling protesters “THUGS” to threatening to unleash “vicious dogs” on them, evoking violence against civil rights protesters in the 1960s.

The big problem here for Trump, however, is that much of white America is rejecting all of this. As Ron Brownstein exhaustively shows, recent polling shows that educated whites in particular see Trump’s race-war-mongering as a destructive and destabilizing force, which makes efforts to exploit disorder to portray Trump as “strong” look like an even greater failure.

Trump and his propagandists are constantly looking for that sweet spot, in which they’re energizing hard-core supporters by telling them they’re the victims in a race war while retreating just enough from this suggestion to avoid further alienating the white voters he’s already driven away and badly needs back.

But, as the latest ham-handed equivocation coming from the White House demonstrates, and as the slide in Trump’s poll numbers even amid the protests has shown, it’s a weak position from which to run for reelection.

Donald Trump is George Wallace in his prime on steroids. But even George Wallace repented his segregationist racial hatred late in his life and asked for forgiveness. Donald Trump remains an unrepentant raging racist.

UPDATE: Damn these guys work fast! This morning the Lincoln Project put up a new ad, challenging Americans to answer a basic question: Which Side Of History?”  It contrasts the historic actions of Mississippi with the ongoing racism and White Nationalism of Donald Trump.