An epic Twitter thread that explains Trump and his insane press conference
By Walter Einenkel at Daily Kos
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/15/1690015/-An-epic-Twitter-thread-that-explains-Trump-and-his-insane-press-conference
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Unpopular President Donald Trump’s inability to even handle the simplest, and most obvious, of public relations problems over the past few days has brought back forward the stark reality—he’s a mental midget. Vox’s Dave Roberts put together a Twitter thread that is worth the read as it very articulately breaks down the clear mechanics of what we all saw today during that fiery bus crash that was Trump’s press conference.
(see link)
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= new reply since forum marked as read
...if we grant the author's premise that, in Trump's mind, it's all an unnuanced matter of "my people" versus "their people," how did the neo-Nazis and white supremacists get to be "his people" in the first place?
Look, I can easily imagine Trump as a political cypher seeking only his own self-aggrandizement, and being willing to sign on to any platform that would best do that. (It's instructive to remember that Trump was a Democrat for much of his life and that, indeed, during the depths of the Reagan administration, there was some hope that he would emerge as our standard-bearer; a successful businessman with a potential center-left agenda who could break the conventional-wisdom link between success and Reaganism.) So why did he wind up where he did?
The clue comes in the form of the issue which catapulted him into political prominence: birtherism. Trump was one of the first to latch onto that particular hobbyhorse (and at a time where such a position would seem to do him no political good) and doggedly rode it well past the point when anyone else took it seriously. And what was the sentiment behind birtherism? Put simply, disbelief that an African-American man could ever legitimately have become President of the United States.
I would submit that, if we postulate that the one dominant thread in Trump's personality that drove him toward his choice of "my people" was deep-seated racism, we'll find there's much to support it. After all, Trump's first foray into open political involvement came with his newspaper ad demanding the death penalty for the alleged Central Park attackers (black/Latino men accused of assaulting and raping a white woman). It's telling that, years later, he refuses to disavow that position even though the accused were later fully exonerated; indeed, he still maintains they are guilty, despite having been cleared by DNA evidence. Also, there's the passage in his autobiography where he states he isn't comfortable with blacks (instead of Jews 
) handling his money. And there's the matter of his father's participation in KKK events...
So, I would say that, while there's probably some unthinking, reflective "us against them" factors to Trump's behavior today, evidence would seem to suggest that Trump is an inherent racist with views on the subject only differing from those who marched with tiki-torches by the degree of zeal, rather than any ideological gap. Trump may view matters through the lens of "us versus them," but, make no mistake, it's clear that his own prejudice drove him to choose "my people."
