We Resist: Day 218

Posted by Melissa McEwan at Friday, August 25, 2017
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One of the difficulties in resisting the Trump administration, the Republican Congressional majority, and Republican state legislatures is keeping on top of the sheer number of horrors, indignities, and normalization of the aggressively abnormal that they unleash every single day.

So here is a daily thread for all of us to share all the things that are going on, thus crowdsourcing a daily compendium of the onslaught of conservative erosion of our rights and our very democracy.

Stay engaged. Stay vigilant. Resist.

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Here are some things in the news today:

Earlier today by me: Trump Is the Ultimate Republican.

Oh look. Kellyanne Conway is talking again.


And she's not the only friend of Donald Trump's who is saying and doing supercool stuff!


So, everything is going great with the Trump administration! AS USUAL.

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Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan at Axios: Trump to Let House GOP Write His Tax Plan. Oh he's going to let them?! How magnanimous! The laziest president in all of human history is going to let someone else do all the work. Wow. "A senior source says Trump will sell this hard, in a way that he never did with health care." What magnificent discipline! I hope General Kelly is giving Donzo lots of cookies!

[Content Note: Nativism] Alice Ollstein at TPM: Trump Mulls Stripping Legal Status from 800,000 Young Immigrants. "Donald Trump is 'seriously considering' killing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, according to multiple reports. ...DACA has since 2012 extended legal status and work permits to more than 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Ending the program would make this population, known as the DREAMers, vulnerable to deportation."

(About a dozen states with Republican-controlled legislatures have been threatening to sue the federal government over the legality of DACA, but, sure, tell me again how Donald Trump isn't a fair representative of the party.)

Adrian Carrasquillo and Charlie Warzel at BuzzFeed: Pro-Trump Media Bristles as John Kelly Limits What Gets to Trump's Desk.
New White House chief of staff John Kelly is limiting the flow of information to Trump's desk, including holding out articles from far right and anti-establishment sources, BuzzFeed News has confirmed.

"I'm scared that the military complex is taking over the formerly populist White House," said Lucian Wintrich, who writes for Gateway Pundit, one of the websites in the pro-Trump sphere, which has trafficked in conspiracies in the past.

Longtime Trump adviser and occasional Infowars guest Roger Stone said Trump's "news summaries have been sanitized, which means no Infowars, no Daily Caller, no Breitbart. As such, his views are shaped by CNN and FOX News. He watches network news as well, which is almost antiquated. That's why he's so mad about the Russia investigation."

"He's controlling every article that passes through the West Wing right now," pro-Trump media personality Mike Cernovich, who has broken news on the administration but also propagated conspiracy theories in the past, said of Kelly. "This shuts out a lot of people."
On the one hand, I'm glad that Trump isn't dining on a steady diet of Alex Jones conspiracy theories. On the other hand, I don't think the solution to Trump's urge to dine on a steady diet of Alex Jones conspiracy theories is having one person be a gatekeeper to the news sources Trump digests. The solution is removing from office a president who doesn't have the sense to reject extremist rightwing media. None of us elected John Kelly. Why should we trust his estimation of what media the elected president should consume? This is just the best of many bad options; it isn't a good option. There's nothing good about any of this.

[CN: Transphobia] Ari Ezra Waldman at Towleroad: Trump's Transgender Military Ban Is Still Unconstitutional. "This proposed policy, if implemented using Trump's guidelines, would create a system that treats transgender service members unequally under the guise of 'deployability.' This means that the Defense Department will consider whether transgender persons can serve in a war zone, participate in exercises, live for months on a ship, and won't require medical attention or medication. Because the new policy will discontinue Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, which allowed transgender service members to transition while serving and allowed them to seek medical coverage for transitioning, it easy to see how very few transgender persons currently serving could qualify as 'deployable' under these terms." Vile garbage.

Aaron Rupar at ThinkProgress: Trump Completely Contradicts Himself within 11 Minutes on Twitter. "Eleven minutes after posting his tweet urging McConnell to [abolish the filibuster, which is] something he's already said he won't do — and that probably wouldn't save Trump's legislative agenda in the first place — the president reversed course entirely and posted another in which he claimed to have a historically productive first seven months in office." Sounds about right.

[CN: Eliminationist language; white supremacy] And finally, grab your tissues for this poor, persecuted white man. Breanna Edwards at the Root: An Arizona Man Is out of a Job after Posting about Plan to 'Drive Through' Trump Protesters. "James Cobo took it upon himself to post to the Protest Trump Downtown Phoenix page, writing, 'You are all pathetic. Cant wait to drive through. 4x4 with push bumper will be sweet in this crowd. I named my lifted truck 'trumper.'' But ya know, for as much trash as there is on the internet, it is still a useful resource, and so the social-justice powers used their tech skills, browsing to locate Cobo's employers to let them know exactly what kind of person they had working for them. Less than 24 hours later, an automotive-services store in Buckeye, Ariz., West Valley Tires, posted a Facebook post of its own, blasting the comment and saying that that individual was no longer affiliated with the shop." Sad trombone!

What have you been reading that we need to resist today?
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