Category: Gaffe

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

Trump Used the Phrase ‘My Military’ – Defense Community Not Amused

President Donald Trump ruffled some feathers on Thursday with his choice of words when describing an overseas military operation.

The comments came when a White House press pool reporter asked Trump if he had personally authorized the deployment of the 21,000-pound bomb that was dropped on an ISIS tunnel complex.

“Everybody knows exactly what happened. What I do is I authorize my military,” Trump said. “We have the greatest military in the world and they’ve done a job as usual. So we have given them total authorization.”

The phrase “my military” stuck out to members of the defense community, some of whom did not appreciate Trump’s use of the possessive pronoun. Chief among them was Leon Panetta, a former defense secretary and CIA director who served under President Barack Obama.

“When it comes to the military, the military belongs to the country. Our defense system belongs to the country. And it’s not the president’s military, it’s the military of the United States of America,” Panetta said on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”

“He has responsibility obviously, as commander in chief, to be able to make decisions with regards to our military. But I think if you ask the men and women in uniform who they are responsible to, I think their answer would be, ‘We’re responsible to the United States of America.'”

(h/t Business Insider)

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Sean Spicer Causes Uproar With Hitler Gaffe

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer came under fire Tuesday after saying that Adolf Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons” against his own people like Syrian strong man Bashar Al-Assad.

He later sought to clarify his remarks in three separate statements.

Spicer, speaking from the White House podium at the daily press briefing, said that Hitler, whom he called “despicable,” did not use “the gas on his own people the same way Assad used them.”

The outrage on social media was swift, with reporters and public figures blasting Spicer’s comments — and saying they were particularly offensive coming during the Jewish holiday of Passover.

The Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect called on President Donald Trump to can Spicer.

“Sean Spicer now lacks the integrity to serve as White House press secretary, and President Trump must fire him at once,” Steven Goldstein, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum used Spicer’s gaffe as a moment to remind of the horrors of the Holocaust.

At the briefing, Spicer pointed out that Assad dropped chemical weapons in the “middle of towns.”

U.S. officials said the Assad regime used Sarin in strikes on the Syrian people in a deadly attack last week that prompted U.S. military strikes in retaliation.

Nazis murdered Jews in gas chambers during the Holocaust by the millions with the use of chemical gas agents like Zyklon B.

Spicer acknowledged that Hitler did bring gas “into the Holocaust centers…I understand that.”

He later sought to clarify his remarks in multiple statements and said he was not trying to diminish the Holocaust.

“In no way was I trying to lessen the horrendous nature of the Holocaust,” Spicer said in his third attempt at clarification. “I was trying to draw a distinction of the tactic of using airplanes to drop chemical weapons on population centers. Any attack on innocent people is reprehensible and inexcusable.”

(h/t NBC News)

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Betsy DeVos Press Release Celebrates Jim Crow Education System as Pioneer of “School Choice”

Donald Trump met Monday at the White House with the leaders of a number of historically black colleges and universities. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos commemorated the meeting with one of the more bonkers statements you will ever see a 21st century politician make, somehow twisting an attempt to bring up her pet issue of school choice into praise for the segregated higher education system of the Jim Crow South:

First of all, it sounds like a seventh-grader wrote this, which is perhaps what happens when you put someone who has never really had a real job in charge of the Department of Education. Second, this official 2017 federal government press release celebrates legal segregation (!!!) on the grounds that the Jim Crow education system gave black students “more options,” as if there was a robust competition between HBCUs and white universities for their patronage. (When black Mississippian James Meredith chose the “option” of enrolling at the University of Mississippi in 1962, a massive white mob formed on the campus; two people were shot to death and hundreds injured in the ensuing battle/riot, during which federal marshals came under heavy gunfire, requiring the ultimate intervention of 20,000 U.S. soldiers and thousands more National Guardsmen.)

DeVos is delivering the keynote address Tuesday at an HBCU event at the Library of Congress. Should be interesting.

(h/t Slate)

 

Trump Cited a Nonexistent Incident in Sweden

President Donald Trump cited a nonexistent incident in Sweden while talking about the relationship between terror attacks and refugees around the world during a rally in Melbourne, Florida, on Saturday.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden … Sweden … who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening Brussels, you look at what’s happening all over the world,” Trump said.

No incident occurred in Sweden on Friday night.

However, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran an interview on Friday night’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz, who presented a clip from a new film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden. The segment went on extensively about a supposed crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrant populations.

Crime rates in Sweden have stayed relatively stable, with some fluctuations, over the last decade, according to the 2016 Swedish Crime Survey.

This isn’t the first time that there has been a correlation between Trump’s statements and programming on cable news, of which he is a noted fan.

In late January, Trump tweeted about gun violence in Chicago shortly after after an “O’Reilly Factor” segment on the same topic, which cited the same statistics and even used the word “carnage,” a recent favorite noun of Trump’s.

In February, Trump declared in a tweet that he was calling “my own shots” in his administration shortly after MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough asked on air whether Trump’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, was “calling the shots” in the White House.

(h/t Business Insider)

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0tSLV3GGQc

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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