What did Donald Trump do today?

He "brought back Columbus Day."

After what was apparently a very tiring day for him attending the funeral of Pope Francis, Trump had no events on his calendar other than returning to the White House after spending the night at one of his resorts.

But he or someone with passwords to his private microblogging site made sure that he was still talked about today, with this post:

 
Columbus Day is still a federal holiday, and none of the "rules, dates, and locations" regarding its observance that Trump has any say in have changed. 

Trump has also taken credit in the past for "saving" holidays like Christmas, though he's never said how or from what.

Columbus's "reputation" derives from the uncontested fact that he enslaved, murdered, kidnapped, and as a colonial governor brutally repressed indigenous Caribbeans. He also tolerated the rape and torture of indigenous people by other colonizers, as well as the sexual enslavement of prepubescent girls. This was not simply the way of the world at the time: what Columbus did and encouraged Spanish settlers to do in the name of conquest and profit was horrifying even to his contemporaries.

Trump is correct that in recent years a great many places have chosen to remove monuments to Columbus. These were almost universally popular decisions, and contrary to Trump's assumptions about them, not taken as an insult by actual Italian-Americans, whose views about Columbus are indistinguishable from Americans as a whole. 

Trump has been obsessed with statues throughout his political career, to the point of tweeting about nonexistent laws regarding them. Lately, he has been insisting that most of the public money set aside for promoting the arts be redirected to a so-called "Garden of Heroes" he has personally been designing since his first term. He also cited the defense of statues commemorating Confederate heroes as one reason the white supremacist instigators of the deadly Charlottesville riots were "very fine people."

Statues of Trump himself are rare, but several do exist. One was commissioned by an aspiring politician who wanted to curry favor with him, and has been installed away from public view at a Trump golf course. Most of the rest are satirical, like the work installed on a Portland, Oregon street titled In Honor of a Lifetime of Sexual Assault.

Why does this matter?

• Americans are allowed to do things even if Donald Trump doesn't approve.

• Assuming he was fully recovered from the strain of travel, there were more important things for Trump to worry about today.

• Italian-Americans don't deserve to have Trump's feelings projected onto them.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He wondered out loud why he's not more popular with black voters.

This afternoon, Trump asked what appears to have been a genuine question in his mind.

Since Trump asked, there are several possible answers. One is that black voters understand perfectly well that for all Trump's talk of "record" economic numbers, there is nothing very unusual about them lately. As with many other economic indicators, the unemployment rate among African-Americans steadily recovered during the Obama administration from the bottom of the 2008 recession. 

Another possibility is that most black voters--like most American voters in general--are refusing to give Trump credit for economic "records" that haven't affected their bottom lines. Corporate profits and stock prices have gone up, but wage growth is flat--although Trump has tried to claim otherwise.

Finally, it's possible that black voters are weighing a static economic picture against the fact that Trump tried to keep black tenants out of his properties, ordered black employees off the floor of his casinos when he visited, assumed that a black reporter was the secretary for the Congressional Black Caucus, routinely lies about how popular he is with black voters, could not possibly know or care less about black history, can't promise there isn't videotape of him using racial slurs, said there were "some very fine people" among the white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting the removal of Confederate statues, left terrorist acts off a list of terrorism if they were committed by white Americans, thinks that if a Congressional district is represented by a black person it must be "crime infested," (or, alternatively, thinks that black Americans are "living in hell"), thinks that predominantly black countries are "shitholes," called for the execution of black teenagers for a crime they were proven to not have committed, publicly supports a conspiracy theorist who accuses black Americans of wanting "white genocide,"and trolls black athletes and insults their intelligence--among other things.

Why should I care about this?

• Presidents don't get to demand anyone's votes.

• It is not a bad thing that racism has political consequences.

• Whether or not Trump is willing to believe it, Kanye West is not a stand-in for every individual African-American.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He redefined racism to make himself the victim of it.

Last night, Spike Lee won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his film BlacKkKlansman. The film dramatizes the real-life story of a black Colorado Springs policeman who, in 1979, infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Lee read his acceptance speech from a piece of paper he brought with him to the stage. This is the speech in its entirety.

The word today is “irony.” The date, the 24th. The month, February, which also happens to be the shortest month of the year, which also happens to be Black History month. The year, 2019. The year, 1619. History. Her story. 1619. 2019. 400 years. 

Four hundred years. Our ancestors were stolen from Mother Africa and bought to Jamestown, Virginia, enslaved. Our ancestors worked the land from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night. My grandmother, Zimmie Shelton Retha, who lived to be 100 years young, who was a Spelman College graduate even though her mother was a slave. My grandmother who saved 50 years of Social Security checks to put her first grandchild — she called me “Spikie-poo” — she put me through Morehouse College and NYU grad film. NYU! 

Before the world tonight, I give praise to our ancestors who have built this country into what it is today along with the genocide of its native people. We all connect with our ancestors. We will have love and wisdom regained, we will regain our humanity. It will be a powerful moment. The 2020 presidential election is around the corner. Let’s all mobilize. Let’s all be on the right side of history. Make the moral choice between love versus hate. Let’s do the right thing! You know I had to get that in there.

Trump was apparently infuriated by this speech and deemed it both a personal attack on him and a "racist" one to boot.

The White House did not offer any explanation. But there are reasons Trump might have taken this personally. The movie depicts David Duke, a prominent Klansman and vocal Trump supporter who Trump pretended he didn't know in order to avoid having to denounce him during the 2016 campaign. (Trump's own father was once arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally.) And the film closes with a clip of Trump himself, praising "both sides" after a white nationalist rally in defense of Confederate statues led to the murder of an anti-racism protestor.

Other people of color who Trump feels are racist include former president Barack Obama, CBS journalist Bryant Gumbel, the writer Touré, PBS journalist Tavis Smiley, and black voters who preferred Obama to Mitt Romney in 2012. (The full list of people who Trump believes have victimized him with their racism is much longer.)

So what?

• Not supporting a president is not racism.

• Trivializing racism is.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He embraced GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie this morning and renounced him this evening.

Trump has been campaigning hard for Gillespie in recent weeks, and voiced a last-minute robocall this morning. He also mounted a spirited Twitter campaign, writing this morning:

Ralph Northam will allow crime to be rampant in Virginia. He’s weak on crime, weak on our GREAT VETS, Anti-Second Amendment... and has been horrible on Virginia economy. Vote @EdWGillespie today! @EdWGillespie will totally turn around the high crime and poor economic performance of VA. MS-13 and crime will be gone. Vote today, ASAP!

And within minutes of Democrat Ralph Northam being named the projected winner, Trump wrote this: "Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for."

It's true that Gillespie avoided appearing with Trump, whose approval rating in Virginia (43%) is not much better than it is nationally (mid-30s). But on the issues that Trump has been most vocal about--Confederate statues and the supposed threat of violent immigrant gangs--the normally moderate Gillespie practically reinvented himself to fit the Trump mold.

Why does this matter?

• There's no shame in backing a losing candidate, but there are shameful ways to react to a loss.

• It's bad if a president can only accept or acknowledge responsibility for good news.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He used racist language to make an empty threat to defend racists.

Two minutes before midnight on June 30, Trump was up and trying to stoke a culture war over monuments to the Confederacy.

This is an empty threat, although Trump may be hoping his shrinking voting base doesn't know it. 

Sen. Warren's amendment to the must-pass defense spending bill was adopted on a voice vote in committee, meaning that committee Republicans either mostly agreed, or wanted to avoid having their names attached to a "no" vote. 

The provision that would require the renaming of military facilities named for Confederate officers may yet be stripped through political horse-trading—although in that case, Trump weighing in only gives Warren more leverage over the actual substance of the bill.

Senior military officials are increasingly open to renaming the ten bases and various smaller facilities bearing the names of Confederate officers. But Trump has spent much of the last few weeks defending Confederate statues and place-names, in an attempt to draw attention away from his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy.

Trump's other contribution to Civil War history was putting up a brass plaque on one of his golf courses in Virginia commemorating a battle that exists only in his imagination. In the inscription, Trump pats himself on the back for having "preserved" the site of the fake battle.

Why should I care about this?

• Someone who paid someone else to write a book about negotiation should probably know better than to negotiate this way.

• Leaders with actual accomplishments don't generally try to start argument to distract from them.

• America's reckoning with racial issues isn't actually about Donald Trump.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to rewrite history on Charlottesville.

Yesterday, in his campaign announcement video, former vice-president Joe Biden brought up Trump's declaration that the white supremacists attending the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Biden—who Trump reportedly fears the most out of the enormous field of Democratic primary candidates—repeated Trump's words:

"Very fine people on both sides?” With those words the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it. And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.

Asked about it today, Trump went further than ever before in trying to erase his post-Charlottesville comments equating white supremacists and self-described neo-Nazis with the people protesting against them, one of whom was murdered when a "Unite the Right" rally attendee ran her down with his car.

Q Mr. President, do you still think there were “very fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville?  

TRUMP: Oh, I’ve answered that question. And if you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly. 

And I was talking about people that went because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee... People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.

Not everyone who opposes removing Confederate statues is a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist—but the "Unite the Right" rallygoers were, by their own admission.

At the rally, organizers and speakers said that Charlottesville was "run by Jewish communists and criminal n*****s." They chanted Nazi slogans like "blood and soil." On the subject of counterprotestors, organizer Chris Cantwell said, "We’re not nonviolent. We’ll fucking kill these people if we have to.” 

Secret Discord chat logs used by participants contained jokes about running counter-protestors over. Heather Heyer was murdered on the second day of protests when rallygoer James Fields ran her over with his car. Later, Cantwell said, "People die violent deaths all the time. This is part of the reason we want an ethno-state."

Trump's initial response was to try to shift the blame to "very violent" anti-Nazi protestors, while issuing a few vague tweets condemning violence in general. At the time, white supremacist groups applauded Trump's "both sides" response.

Why should I care about this?

• It shouldn't be this hard for a president not to defend white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He complained about "illegal" free speech.

Trump used Twitter today to complain about Twitter, apparently hoping for sympathy:

For the record: it is not "illegal" to say unflattering things about the president. And although it's not what Twitter does, it wouldn't be illegal for them to highlight people who did.

Trump is half-right, though: there are a lot of unflattering hashtags about him trending on Twitter. As of about 9:20 p.m. EDT, the following topics are trending:

Two baseball games, two trends referencing the very thing Trump is complaining about, and a neutral reference to the malaria drug that Trump gambled would solve the COVID-19 crisis for him. (It didn't.) 

Again, it is not illegal to tweet about any of these things, or to point out that people tweeted about them.

It wasn't the only fake law Trump decreed via tweet today. He also insisted that because of the "recently re-enacted... Statues and Monuments Act," anyone vandalizing federal property would spend a "MINIMUM TEN YEARS IN PRISON."

Vandalism has always been a crime, but no such law exists. Assuming he wasn't simply lying, Trump may be thinking of an executive order he recently signed authorizing surveillance of lawful protestors against Confederate monuments.

Why does this matter?

• Presidents don't get to just make up laws on the spot.

• No matter how much it upsets him, it's not a crime to say mean things about Donald Trump.

• Playing the victim isn't a great look for the single most powerful person on the planet.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He got sued for his domestic corruption while he brought his family's private business to China.

Trump has been revealing increasingly gaudy plans for his future presidential "library" in Miami, although by his own insistence, it won't actually have a library. Instead, Trump envisions it as a 50-story for-profit hotel atop a "presidential center" featuring giant golden statues of him. (These are not to be confused with the giant golden statue he's recently had installed at one of his golf courses.) 

Screenshot from AI-generated Trump video announcing the "library"

Presidential centers—that is, the bottom floors of Trump's proposed hotel—are privately-funded nonprofits. Trump, whose fraudulent New York charity was shut down and dissolved after he was caught using it for any number of illegal activities, has been using these kinds of entities as pay-for-access bribes, from his inauguration fund to the one for his pet "ballroom" project. 

But that isn't the corruption that got him sued today in Florida. Instead, it's the massive $300 million giveaway of valuable public land belonging to Miami Dade College that Trump-friendly governor Ron DeSantis and his handpicked college trustees has engineered in an apparent attempt to curry favor with him. Trump himself called it "the best block in Miami," and that's probably not far from the truth in economic terms. 

The parcel is almost certainly worth more than MDC's entire endowment. DeSantis's appointees sold it to Trump's presidential center for $10. Trump has always struggled to turn a profit with hotels, even with the help of decades of fraud to prop them up, to say nothing of his habit of forcing the US government to pay top-dollar rents to them. In spite of those illegal and gray-area advantages, he's famously bankrupted many of his hospitality properties while others strugglefra. But a hotel built on free land in a major tourist destination would have an enormous advantage over all other competition.

Trump didn't comment on the corruption lawsuit today: he was busy flying to China for a visit with its president, Xi Jinping. Traveling with him was his son Eric, a private citizen whose company is actively pursuing a deal with the Chinese government to build data centers in the United States.

Why does this matter?

• Corruption is always bad, even when Americans have gotten used to it from Trump. 

• When you have to buy the president's attention, only the corrupt and powerful will benefit.

What did Donald Trump do today?

He lied about what is and isn't a crime.

Since Democrats won control of the House, Trump's tweets have become noticeably more defensive, often explicitly taking on the tone of a criminal defendant. That was on display in this morning's Twitter offering:

“Democrats can’t find a Smocking Gun tying the Trump campaign to Russia after James Comey’s testimony. No Smocking Gun...No Collusion.” @FoxNews That’s because there was NO COLLUSION. So now the Dems go to a simple private transaction, wrongly call it a campaign contribution,.......which it was not (but even if it was, it is only a CIVIL CASE, like Obama’s - but it was done correctly by a lawyer and there would not even be a fine. Lawyer’s liability if he made a mistake, not me). Cohen just trying to get his sentence reduced. WITCH HUNT!

While many commentators had fun with Trump's search for a "smocking" gun, the real issue here is Trump's legal analysis. Last week, in issuing a sentencing recommendation for Trump's "fixer" Michael Cohen, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York said that Cohen had "acted in coordination with and at the direction of" Trump. The list of crimes that Trump has been implicated in by his own Justice Department, strictly because of his attempts to hide his extramarital affairs with hush money, include:

• making contributions in another person's name. Trump did this by "laundering" his hush money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels through Cohen. (52 U.S. Code § 30122)

• failure to report contributions. Trump is entitled to pay as much hush money to sex partners as he likes with his own money, but if he does that to influence the election, it is a self-contribution and must be reported, which he never did. (52 U.S. Code § 30104, (a)(6)(b)(i))

• soliciting illegal contributions. According to federal prosecutors, Trump ordered Cohen to pay Daniels an amount in excess of the limit that Cohen could make as an individual contribution to Trump's campaign. (52 U.S. Code § 30116) It is illegal under any number of federal statues to induce someone to commit a criminal act.

Trump's claim that such acts would be civil infractions—the equivalent of parking tickets—is wrong. Federal criminal penalties for all such acts exist (52 U.S. Code § 30109) and are routinely sought by prosecutors, when it can be shown that the candidates committing them did so knowingly and willfully.

Why is this bad?

• It's wrong to break the law in order to deceive voters.

• Presidents are not above the law.

• This is arguably the least serious indictable felony Trump is thought to have committed in an attempt to get elected.