Category: Gaffe

An unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator; a blunder.

Trump Asked a Black Reporter If the Congressional Black Caucus Are “Friends of Yours”

President Trump’s press conference Thursday had many unbelievable moments. But one of the most shocking was an exchange in which Trump asked a black reporter to set up a meeting for him with the Congressional Black Caucus, and asked if the caucus members were “friends” of hers.

April Ryan, the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks in Baltimore, asked Trump whether he would include the Congressional Black Caucus in conversations about his “urban agenda” for the “inner city.”

But Ryan used the abbreviation “CBC” for the Congressional Black Caucus at first — and Trump didn’t appear to know what she was referring to.

“Am I going to include who?” he asked.

Ryan clarified: “Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus — ”

“Well, I would,” Trump interrupted. “I tell you what, do you want to set up the meeting? Do you want to set up the meeting?”

“No, no, no, I’m just a reporter,” Ryan said.

“Are they friends of yours?” Trump asked.

Ryan replied, before Trump cut her off again, “I know some of them, but I’m sure they’re watching right now — ”

“I would love to meet with the Black Caucus,” Trump said. “I think it’s great, the Congressional Black Caucus, I think it’s great.”

As it turns out, the CBC asked Trump for a meeting weeks ago and never heard back:

Trump seems to have assumed that just because Ryan was black and asked a question about the CBC, she would know the caucus members personally and be able to set up a meeting with them. Trump’s question also reveals a basic ignorance of how reporters do their job.

As my colleague Jenée Desmond-Harris has explained, Trump has a big problem with racially stereotyping black people. He seems almost incapable of mentioning black Americans without also mentioning the “inner city,” which he strictly describes as a blighted, crime-ridden hellscape. But that association is not only racist stereotyping — it also doesn’t reflect how black Americans really live.

(h/t Vox)

 

Sean Spicer Retweets An Onion Article That Says He Lies For a Living

Last night, Sean Spicer retweeted a video from satirical news publication the Onion. “You nailed it,” Spicer tweeted, along with the video which listed “Five Things to Know About Sean Spicer.” Except it seems like maybe Spicer — who remember, as White House Press Secretary, is partially in the business of watching videos and reading tweets — didn’t watch the video or read the Onion’s tweet as carefully as he could have … since they declare Spicer’s “role in the Trump administration will be to provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation.”

The video’s “things to know” also include Spicer’s former role as a senior correspondent for NPR (false), his “defensive” speaking style (slightly less false), and his questionable pocket squares (style is subjective, I guess). Thing-to-know number four is “whether or not Spicer has ever knowingly lied to the press.” “One’s own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of one’s experience,” the Onion explains in its answer.

To quote Sean Spicer, “nailed it.”

(h/t New York Magazine)

 

 

Trump Will Consider ‘Day One’ to Be Monday, Not His Inauguration

Donald Trump will be inaugurated on Friday, but he’ll consider his first day on the job to be Monday.

The detail emerged after he sat down with British and German journalists over the weekend and offered up his thoughts on a wide range of topics.

“I mean my day one is gonna be Monday because I don’t want to be signing and get it mixed up with lots of celebration,” he said.

One of the first orders Trump said he’ll sign will cover “strong borders.”

The Times of London published the interview on its website Sunday, and CBS News posted part of the interview online.

(h/t The Boston Globe)

Trump Calls African-American Neighborhoods ‘Ghettos’ With ‘So Many Horrible Problems’

First they were “inner cities” – now they’re just “ghettos.”

Donald Trump once again appeared to equate an entire ethnicity with a socio-economic segment as he, during a campaign rally in Ohio on Thursday, pledged to “work with the African-American community” to solve the problem of the “ghettos.”

“And we’re going to work on our ghettos, are in so the, you take a look at what’s going on where you have pockets of, areas of land where you have the inner cities and you have so many things, so many problems,” Trump rambled to a mostly white audience in Toledo, appearing to catch himself using the politically tabooed word. “So many horrible, horrible problems. The violence. The death. The lack of education. No jobs.”

“Ghetto” is generally not used by public officials as it’s considered an outdated, insensitive word for struggling urban areas.

Trump has previously been rebuked for associating African-Americans – who comprise roughly 13% of the total population – with the words “inner cities.”

The Republican nominee has recently launched outreach efforts directed at black voters, but appears to have failed severely as polls have shown that less than 1% of African-American voters are going to punch in his name on the ballot.

At another point during the Toledo rally, Trump seemed to question the necessity for democracy.

“What a difference it is. I’m just thinking to myself right now – we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump, right?” he said in front of the roughly 2,800 rally attendants, comparing his presidential bid with Hillary Clinton’s.

Trump, meanwhile, is doubling down on past remarks about the election being “rigged” – an insinuation that political experts claim could have very real and very violent consequences.

(h/t New York Daily News)

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CNN Go

Trump: ‘We Should Just Cancel the Election’ and Declare Me the Winner

Donald Trump, trailing his opponent in key battleground states polls less than two weeks from Election Day, said Thursday he’d like to “cancel the election” and be declared the winner.

“Just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump,” the Republican presidential nominee said during a rally here on Thursday.

“Her policies are so bad. Boy, do we have a big difference,” he added of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

The apparently lighthearted comment falls against the backdrop of Trump’s repeated and serious questioning of the legitimacy of the presidential election in recent weeks as he has tumbled in the polls.

Trump has called the election “rigged,” argued that the media and establishment politicians are conspiring to sink his campaign and warned supporters that the presidency could be stolen from them due to voter fraud — instances of which are extremely rare.
Trump is trailing Clinton in national tracking polls and in key battleground states, and its unclear how Trump can amass the Electoral College votes needed to win the presidency if polls hold where they are through Election Day.

Trump’s comments about the election also came as he mocked Clinton as “low energy” for the second time in as many days, even polling the crowd to ask them if they think Clinton or his GOP primary foil Jeb Bush is more “low energy.”

“Who is more low energy, Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton?” Trump asked the crowd, re-upping a question he said Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asked him earlier in an interview airing Thursday evening.

“Hillary!” replied most of the crowd.

Trump had repeatedly mocked Bush, the very early favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination, as “low energy” during the primary contest and has repeatedly argued that Clinton does not have the “strength or stamina” to serve as president. On Thursday, he referred to her as “very low energy.”

(h/t CNN)

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Insensitive Trump Jokingly Courts the Terminally Ill Vote

Speaking at a rally in Nevada, Donald Trump has urged the terminally ill to vote for him.

“I don’t care how sick you are,” the Republican nominee said.

“I don’t care if you just came back from the doctor and he gave you the worst possible prognosis, meaning it’s over. Doesn’t matter. Hang out till November 8. Get out and vote.”

He continued: “And then, all we’re gonna say is, ‘We love you and we will remember you always.’ Get out and vote.”

If it helps you gauge how serious Trump was, it’s worth considering that he also remarked “I say kiddingly, but I mean it” at the time. Make of that what you will.

(h/t BBC)

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Trump’s Comments On Intelligence Briefings ‘Astonish’ Former Intel Officials

During last night’s Commander-in-Chief forum, Donald Trump made it sound as though the intelligence officials who have been briefing him haven’t hid their disdain for President Obama.

Asked by NBC’s Matt Lauer whether anything he learned during his first two briefings shocked him, Trump said “Yes, there was one thing that shocked me.”

“What I did learn is that our leadership — Barack Obama — did not follow what our experts… said to do,” Trump said. “I was very, very surprised in almost every instance. And I could tell — I am pretty good with the body language — I could tell they were not happy our leaders did not follow what they were recommending.”

Three people who have worked in the intelligence community told ThinkProgress Trump’s comments are both unusual and implausible.

Paul Pillar, a former high-ranking CIA analyst who worked for 28 years in the intelligence community, said he “can’t remember any time where a candidate has said anything about” an intelligence briefing publicly.

“The proper, standard thing for any candidate to do would be to say nothing about it — to at most acknowledge a briefing happened,” he added. “It’s quite out of order to start talking about body language.”

Pillar views Trump’s remarks as crossing a line.

“This is a courtesy provided by the intelligence community to the candidate to help keep them as smart as possible on things the agencies are following, and to turn it around and try and take electoral advantage of it by reading something into it, like [officials] not liking what the current administration is doing, is simply not in order,” he said, adding he’d “be very, very surprised any intelligence analyst would indicate anything about pleasure or displeasure with current policies.”

Pillar’s sentiment was seconded by Bruce Riedel, senior fellow and director of the Brookings Institute Intelligence Project.

“I don’t know of any precedent,” Riedel wrote in an email. “It’s also questionable that intelligence briefers would criticize policy decisions even by body language.”

Alan Makovsky, senior national security fellow at the Center for American Progress and a former senior staff member on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, characterized Trump’s remarks as “astonishing.” (ThinkProgress is an editorially independent part of CAP.)

“Speaking as a former member of the [intelligence] community, I think it would put a cloud over the careers of the briefers if people took Trump’s comments seriously,” he said. “If the body language stuff was believed by their superiors, it’d be the last briefing they ever got.”

During a press conference today, Hillary Clinton characterized Trump’s comments as “totally inappropriate and undisciplined,” adding she’d “never comment on any aspect of an intelligence briefing that I received.”

The Washington Post reports that during his first briefing on August 17, Trump was accompanied by Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) and retired U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn.

“Trump and Christie listened politely but Flynn repeatedly interrupted the briefers and disparaged their work, according to former officials familiar with the matter,” the Post reports.

(h/t ThinkProgress)

Reality

Retired Col. Steve Ganyard told ABC News the intelligence community was ‘quite upset‘ over Donald Trump’s comments and he “crossed a line.”

Trump placed officers in a terrible situation. Active military is forbidden against wading into political matters, so it would be impossible for the briefers to defend themselves. These people spend years training their bodies to not betray their thoughts. If the body language stuff was believed by their superiors, it’d be the last briefing they ever got.

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Trump sparks outrage with tweet about Dwyane Wade’s cousin’s death

Instead of initially offering condolences, Donald Trump looked ahead to Election Day when reacting to news that Chicago Bulls star Dwyane Wade’s cousin had been killed. Nykea Aldridge, a mother of four, was reportedly caught in the crossfire while pushing a baby stroller in Chicago’s South Side on Friday.

“Dwayne Wade’s cousin was just shot and killed walking her baby in Chicago. Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!” the GOP nominee tweeted Saturday morning.

Trump later updated his tweet with the correct spelling of Wade’s name but left the rest of the message intact. Then, four hours after sparking the initial firestorm, he posted another tweet offering his sympathies to the basketball player’s family.

Trump has been making direct appeals to black voters in recent weeks. Last week, he held a rally in the predominantly white suburb of Dimondale, Mich., and asked the African-American community what they had to lose by supporting him.

“You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed,” Trump said. His stereotype of African-American neighborhoods was widely criticized as offensive.

(h/t Yahoo News)

Trump Faces New Backlash Over Pitch to Black Voters

On the heels of another staff shakeup, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was facing a new backlash – this time for his attempt to get black voters to vote for him in the November election.

At a campaign rally near Lansing, Michigan, on Friday, Trump asked what African-Americans have to lose by voting for him.

CBS News correspondent Errol Barnett reports it was supposed to be a day for a clean slate, but Trump’s latest attempted outreach to a larger voting bloc was called ignorant and heavy-handed by his critics.

“Look how much African-American communities have suffered under Democratic control. You’re living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs. To those I say the following: What do you have to lose?”

Speaking from a predominately white suburb in Michigan. Trump tried to increase his support from African-American voters, which according to a recent Pew survey favor Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee by an 83-point margin.

“You’re living in poverty,” Trump said. “Your schools are no good. You have no jobs – 58 percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Moments after the speech, Clinton responded with a tweet.

(h/t CBS News)

Reality

Trump’s comments seem to be the result of him trying to correct his incredibly low numbers with black voters in recent polls. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed 91 percent of black voters favoring Clinton in comparison to one percent of black voters favoring Trump. At a rally in June, Trump showed he was in touch with black voters by singling out a black man in the crowd and calling him “my African American.”

Trump has also come under criticism from delivering his message to predominantly white cities while neglecting to entertain meeting with African American organizations like the NAACP.

Trump has a curious habit of reiterating the thoughts of white supremacists on social media, particularly when they are being complimentary toward him. When these presumed supporters are revealed to be racists, Trump has not removed his retweets (in some cases from the same user) or apologized for the presumed oversight.

Also, allegations of racism have dogged Trump’s campaign from the beginning, when he said undocumented Mexican immigrants were “rapists” during his announcement speech last June. And while Trump has offended Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, Arab-Americans and Native Americans in the past, his transgressions as far as the black community is concerned could be even more costly come November.

For example, Donald Trump said in July he believes the Black Lives Matter movement has in some cases helped instigate the recent killings of police officers, and suggested he might direct his future attorney general to investigate the civil rights activist group. Trump also called the group a “threat” and accused the group of “essentially calling death to the police.”

African American Unemployment at 58%

Donald Trump has claimed several times that 58 percent of African-American youths are unemployed — more than double the government’s monthly breakdown.

According to BLS numbers, last month’s unemployment rate among 16-to-19-year-old black Americans was 25.7 percent, adjusted seasonally.

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Trump Suggests ‘Second Amendment Person’ Could Stop a President Clinton

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump appeared to joke about the possibility that Hillary Clinton could be shot in remarks at a campaign rally Tuesday in Wilmington, N.C.

Trump was discussing the possibility that Clinton, the Democratic nominee, would be able to appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court if she wins the race for the White House.

He then said that there was nothing that could be done in that scenario, before mentioning “Second Amendment folks.”

“Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” Trump said to boos from the crowd.

“By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” he then added.

“Though the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”

The Clinton campaign responded with a statement, with campaign manager Robby Mook saying: “This is simple — what Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.”

Democrats pounced on the comments, with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) tweeting that the Secret Service must investigate Trump’s “threat,” while progressive group MoveOn released a statement calling on Republicans to reject Trump’s campaign in response.

A spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service said it was aware of the comments.

The Trump campaign downplayed the controversy in a statement attacking the “dishonest media.”

“It’s called the power of unification – 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power,” Jason Miller, a top Trump aide, said in the statement.

And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won’t be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.”

Trump has repeatedly used Supreme Court vacancies as a key cudgel against Clinton and a way to convince wary Republicans to jump onto his campaign.

Clinton staff began to respond on Twitter, with spokesman Ian Sams blasting Trump’s “new level of unacceptable behavior.”

Justin Barasky, the spokesman for the pro-Clinton super-PAC Priorities USA sent the clip out to reporters with the comment “THIS IS NOT OK.”

The comment comes just one day after Trump sought to reset the controversy dogging his campaign with a highly-touted and scripted economic speech.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

If Donald Trump tries to claim the comment was meant to be humorous then someone needs to tell him speech like this is not a joke.

In 2011, Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot outside a Tucson Safeway, by Jared Lee Loughner. Congresswoman Giffords was featured on Sarah Palin’s infamous ‘crosshairs’ map, which targeted legislators who voted for Obama’s health care bill.

While no connection had been made between this graphic and the Arizona shooting, war rhetoric like Trump and Palin’s has been linked to incitement to violence.

Watching the intention of the comment is clearly a dog-whistle to the NRA and other gun rights activists who hold an insurrectionist view of the Second Amendment, that it is the ‘ultimate check against government tyranny.’

If that was not the case, then why did the crowd laugh?

The Trump campaign’s statement that the comment was about unification, and gathering enough votes to beat Hillary Clinton in November is absolutely absurd. A simple look at Trump’s quote shows he was talking about after November, should a President Clinton try to pick Supreme Court judges there is nothing you can do, except for the “Second Amendment people.”

Donald Trump also clearly misrepresented Hillary Clinton’s position on gun control. She has never advocated for repealing or abolishing the Second Amendment.

Clinton has called for stronger background check requirements to keep guns out of the hands of “people we all agree shouldn’t have them — domestic abusers, violent felons, and dangerously mentally ill people,” all the while affirming her support for the right to bear arms.

Update

Thanks Fox News host Sean Hannity for helping me answer this controversy with your leading question! You’re a fair and balanced “journalist.”

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