30 November 2017 - Donald Trump's Open Racism
There’s no hiding from Trump’s bigotry
Ishaan Tharoor (The Washington Post, 30/11/2017)
President Trump has repeatedly made a show of flouting convention on his Twitter feed, spouting off falsehoods and occasionally pandering to or amplifying once-fringe voices. In that light, a string of retweets he made Wednesday morning could be considered par for the course. They shouldn’t be.
In between tweets bashing media organizations that report stories he doesn’t like, Trump retweeted three videos from the Twitter account of Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of Britain First, an obscure far-right outfit widely considered to be a hate group. Fransen herself faces charges of “religiously aggravated harassment” after she shouted slurs at a hijab-wearing woman walking with her children last year.
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Retweeting the Far Right
This is generally sound advice. It gets difficult to follow, though, when the president's latest morning fusillade of incendiary tweets is a series of video clips from a far-right, virulently anti-immigrant UK political group that purport to show, sans context, a "Muslim migrant" assaulting a white kid on crutches, and an "Islamist mob" dropping someone off a roof and then beating them to death.
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Competency
Stephen Collinson (CNN, 30/11/2017)
Yet the President of the United States is raising new questions about his temperament, his judgment and his understanding of the resonance of his global voice and the gravity of his role with a wild sequence of insults, inflammatory tweets and bizarre comments.
On Wednesday Trump caused outrage and sparked fears of violent reprisals against Americans and US interests overseas by retweeting graphic anti-Muslim videos by an extreme far right British hate group. Earlier this week he used a racial slur in front of Native American war heroes. He's attacked global press freedom, after cozying up to autocrats on his recent Asia tour.
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Sanity
Tina Nguyen (Vanity Fair, 29/11/2017)
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