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Here was Donald Trump vomiting words at the Wall Street Journal on Thursday:
“I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. I have relationships with people. I think you people are surprised.”
He wouldn’t tell those surprised people if he’s, you know, talked with Kim. Asked about his “sometimes combative” tweets, in which he’s mocked the North Korean leader as “little rocket man” and boasted about how his nuclear button is bigger (all the better to press with tiny hands, I guess), Trump replied:
“Sure, you see that a lot with me and then all of a sudden somebody’s my best friend. I could give you 20 examples. You give me 30. I’m a very flexible person.”
Speaking of “flexible,” here was Trump Tuesday in the cabinet room along with lawmakers from both parties trying to strike a comprehensive immigration deal: “This should be a bill of love. Truly, it should be a bill of love and we can do that.”
And Trump two days later in a private Oval Office meeting with some of the same lawmakers, as first reported Thursday by the Washington Post: “Why are we having all these people from s–thole countries come here?” And: “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”
Three weeks after the New York Times reported and the White House strenuously denied that the President said Haitians “all have AIDS” and Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after seeing America, the administration let the Post story until Trump Tweeted Friday morning that he’d used “tough” language but hadn’t said “take them out” or “anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country.” (Later, a “source familiar with the meeting” told CNN’s Jake Tapper that the shithole comment referred to African nations, not Haiti.)
Trump followed that tweet, which came minutes after a “Fox & Friends” host said on air that he should walk back what he’d said, with a threat: “Probably should record future meetings — unfortunately, no trust!”
“Not true,” Sen. Dick Durbin, who was in the room, said of Trump’s belated partial denial. The President said “things which were hate-filled, vile and racist,” said Durbin, “and he said them repeatedly.”
“I cannot believe that, in the history of the White House in that Oval Office, any President has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday,” added Durbin, who’s evidently never gotten around to listening to President Richard Nixon’s recordings.
*****
One way that Trump is completely inflexible: He loathes germs and the people who spread them, particularly women and foreigners.
He once called not contracting an STD while sleeping around New York his “personal Vietnam,” with women’s vaginas as “potential landmines”: “They say that more people were killed by women in this act than killed in Vietnam, okay.” He finds shaking hands “barbaric” and only eats well-done meat.
And it was his fear of dark outsiders quite literally infecting America that first led Trump to call for a travel ban.
That was back in 2014, as Republicans nationwide stirred fears about an Ebola outbreak in West Africa to score political points here ahead of our midterm elections.
Sen. Rand Paul — a physician! — said, falsely, “We have physicians and health workers who are catching it who are completely gloved down.” Sen. Ron Johnson speculated bizarrely about ISIS fighters infecting themselves and then flying here to spread the disease. Perhaps neither of them had gone as far as Wikipedia to learn that the disease is only infectious when someone with it is uncontrollably vomiting and voiding their bowels.
Sen. Thom Tillis demanded “the White House should immediately ban travel from Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea to contain the spread of Ebola.”
In fact, there were no direct flights between the U.S. and any of those countries, but all this fake news worked wonders for the party: By mid-October, when it turned out the outbreak in West Africa had already peaked, two in three Americans said they were concerned with an Ebola outbreak here.
In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie had an American nurse flying into Newark after volunteering in Sierra Leone detained at Newark airport and then quarantined in a tent outside of a city hospital. The nurse, who said she was perfectly healthy and had already tested negative for the disease twice, sued after being held in “prison-like conditions.” Christie insisted, against all evidence, that she’d been “obviously ill.”
*****
From June to October, Republicans jousted to outdo each other in calls for strength and safey, playing up bogus fears and mocking the medical professionals and Democrats led by Obama, whose supposed weakness was supposedly valuing the lives of Africans above those of Americans. And Trump — who’d remade himself as our birther-in-chief, insisting that Obama had in fact been born in Africa, just like his dad — saw the fear wave getting ahead of him and raced to get back on top.
So he set out to scream about the coming plague, and how our Manchurian, not-Amurcan and secret Muslim President was exposing us to it by putting Africa first.
Here’s a selection from his Ebola Tweets, including his first and final one, which came as fear had subsided in November, and just after it had served its election-year purposes for the GOP:
July 31: “Ebola patient will be brought to the U.S. in a few days — now I know for sure that our leaders are incompetent. KEEP THEM OUT OF HERE!”
Aug 1: “The U.S. cannot allow EBOLA infected people back. People that go to far away places to help out are great-but must suffer the consequences!”
Aug 2: “The U.S. must immediately stop all flights from EBOLA infected countries or the plague will start and spread inside our ‘borders.’ Act fast!”
Sept 16: “Can you believe that the U.S. will be sending 3000 troops to Africa to help with Ebola. They will come home infected? We have enough problems”
Sept 19: “Why are we sending thousands of ill-trained soldiers into Ebola infested areas of Africa! Bring the plague back to U.S.? Obama is so stupid.”
“Here we go! I stated long ago that we should cancel all flights from West Africa. Now we have Ebola in U.S., AND IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE!”
Oct 2: “Ebola is much easier to transmit than the CDC and government representatives are admitting. Spreading all over Africa-and fast. Stop flights”
“The Ebola patient who came into our country knew exactly what he was doing. Came into contact with over 100 people.Here we go-I told you so!”
Oct 4: “Something very important, and indeed society changing, may come out of the Ebola epidemic that will be a very good thing: NO SHAKING HANDS!”
Oct 7: “Despite the ever increasing Ebola disaster, Obama refuses to stop flights from West Africa.It’s almost like he’s saying F-you to U.S. public”
Oct 12: “I don’t know if President Obama isn’t stopping the flights from Ebola torn West Africa because he is stubborn, stupid, or just doesn’t care!”
Oct 13: “As ISIS and Ebola spread like wildfire, the Obama administration just submitted a paper on how to stop climate change (aka global warming).”
Oct. 19: “Do you believe Obama just said that America would be “less safe” with a travel ban from West Africa.This is the thinking of a total mad man!”
Oct. 22: “If there is one more Ebola case in the U.S., a full travel ban will be instituted. This common sense move should have been done long ago!”
Oct 28: “All the governors are already backing off of the Ebola quarantines. Bad decision that will lead to more mayhem.”
Nov 10: “A single Ebola carrier infects 2 others at a minimum. STOP THE FLIGHTS! NO VISAS FROM EBOLA STRICKEN COUNTRIES!”
*****
The man who wrote all that is our President now. One who didn’t even need a health panic to enact a travel ban, and may well do worse when the next panic or crisis comes. One who’s already rescinded deportation protections for nearly 60,000 Haitians and nearly 200,000 Salvadorans, so that people who have worked hard and built lives here over years and decades can either go underground or get out.
And who now leads the CDC and presumably the world response to the next infectious outbreak that may well come from one of those “shitholes” he’s sending those people back to, outside of what this raving bigot hopes will be an impermeable and antiseptic wall.
harrysiegel@gmail.com