DONAD TRUMP HAS NO CLUE ABOUT AMERICA'S REAL ISSUES

…Disney’s Princess Pocahontas

 

Trump continues to offer has racial slurs against Senator Warren and the Trump University Judge.

 

Donald Trump is continuing to call the Senator of Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren: ­“Pocahontas”.  This is causing many of the Republican politicians to cringe as Trump continues to use racist slurs against his opponents from the liberal Senator to the federal judge in the Trump University lawsuit.

 

OK, for those that don’t understand the “Pocahontas” name-calling, this is Trump’s stab at the senator because the senator has said she grew up amid family stories about her Cherokee lineage.  The native American connection to the senator has not been confirmed, but Trump continues to go after his opponents with personal insults instead of dealing with the real issues. 

 

Actually, as the GOP’s Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell has even said: “Trump doesn’t seem to know very much about the real issues”, so personal insults are all that Donald Trump is left to deal with today.

 

It was a difficult time for Senator Cory Gardner when he was caught in an elevator with a national reporter. This was right after Donald Trump had just referred to Sen. Warren as ­“Pocahontas”, and the Republican freshman senator from Colorado was struggling in figuring out how to respond.  “I think people need to be treated with respect, and that’s what we’ve demanded from everyone,” he finally offered.

 

When asked if Trump’s comment was racist?  Gardner clammed up.  He politely then referred any further questions to his press secretary.  Gardner is just one of the Republicans that is trying to stay away from his own party’s presumed presidential nominee.

 

So, this is the way it goes for most Republicans on Capitol Hill.  They are  forced to deal with provocative comments by their presumptive presidential nominee.

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“You’d better get used to it,” said Republican pollster Whit Ayres, a strong Trump critic. “This is your life for the next five months.”

 

When Senator Warren Tweeted that Trump was a “thin-skinned, racist bully”, Trump just had to respond with his own vicious Tweet.

 

“Pocahontas is at it again!” Trump wrote in one Tweet. “Goofy Elizabeth Warren, one of the least productive U.S. Senators, has a nasty mouth.”

 

Both Senator Warren and Vice President Joe Biden had recently had public speeches that went after Trump’s racist attacks on the Trump University District Judge.

 

After Trump’s Tweet against Senator Warren, others had Tweeted to Trump that he should delete his Twitter account.  And Senator Warren later Tweeted, “No, seriously — Delete your account.”

 

But instead, Trump Tweeted that he would only apologize to the real Pocahontas, not to Senator Warren

 

Trump always has to respond when he is attacked in any way.  He began going after Warren’s ancestry earlier this year, responding to the senator’s repeated slams at Trump as a “loser” and a “bully”. “Who’s that, the Indian?” Trump said at an earlier news conference when he was asked about Senator Warren’s negative comments. “You mean the Indian?”

 

Trump’s swipes at Warren have intensified as the senator has emerged as one of his fiercest adversaries.  On Thursday, she endorsed presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, and the two women met privately to discuss how to work together on the campaign.

 

All of this started over Trump’s repeated criticism of US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel for Trump’s claim that the judge was biased and unfair on the Trump University case because of his Mexican heritage.

 

That claim drew a major storm of denunciation, including a strong one from the Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R-WI), who called it “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”

 

It has become obvious that the average Republican really doesn’t know how to deal with Trump’s racist comments.  It just confirms how confused they are about their own nominee.

 

The head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS.), had the gall to say about Trump’s “Pocahontas” name for the senator, ”Oh, I think it’s done in good humor.”

 

And Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is normally a ferocious Trump foe, was similarly being bazaar in saying.  “It’s pretty funny, I thought,” Graham said. “But, I think what he said about the judge was racist. When you’re talking about a politician, you got to be able to take a joke. . . . If this bothers you, you need to get out of politics.”

 

But it was only a small number of Republicans that had that attitude.

 

Most of the other Republicans were highly concerned.

 

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who is up for re-election and he is in a very difficult race.  But his state also has one of the highest proportions of Native Americans in the country.  The senator also chastised Trump.  “I just don’t engage in personal insults, and that is a personal insult,” he said.

 

Representative Tom Cole (R-OK), who is a member of the Chickasaw tribe and one of only two Native Americans currently in the House.  “He needs to quit using language like that,” Cole said “It’s pejorative , and you know, there’s plenty of things that he can disagree with Elizabeth Warren over, this is not something that should, in my opinion, ever enter the conversation. . . . It’s neither appropriate personally toward her, and frankly, it offends a much larger group of people. So, I wish he would avoid that.”

 

But it didn’t stop there.

 

The former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney had his “Ideas Summit” last week in Park City, Utah.  Romney told CNN that he was worried Trump’s language could lead to “trickle-down racism” in the country.

 

The “Pocahontas” line spurred chatter at that Park City event and some of the attendees said they were “aghast at Trump’s many race-based lines of attack”.  Even Romney’s 2012 chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, has vowed not to vote for Trump.  Stevens said the candidate’s use of “Pocahontas” to attack Warren was both racist and inappropriate.  “If you said that in a sixth-grade class, the teacher would tell you, ‘Don’t say this,’ ” Stevens said.

 

Stevens continued with, “This is a sick guy, and Americans are not longing for a president who’s going to go out and use ethnic slurs against people.  It’s amusing in the same way telling dirty jokes around a frat house can get laughs, but most people grow out of that. It’s just childish.”

 

But Trump says he will keep using the “Pocahontas” line.  His explanation: “Because she is a nasty person, a terrible US Senator, and it drives her crazy.”

 

Trump even went as far to say, “The Republicans should find it offensive that she scammed the system by faking her heritage, not that I am unafraid to point that out.” His spokeswoman, Hope Hicks said, “Actually, Goofy Elizabeth, her other Trump nickname, is far worse.”

 

What is interesting about the real story of Pocahontas is that the real one was the daughter of a Powhatan chief who was kidnapped by the English in 1613. She later converted to Christianity and married an Englishman, a union that is credited with bringing a lull to hostilities between the settlers and American Indian tribes.

 

Her real story inspired the popular 1995 Disney animated film of the same name.  This furthered the perceptions of Pocahontas as a princess, although historians say what has been written about her is a romanticized legend at total odds with the actual hardships she actually endured.

 

An associate professor of psychology and American Indian studies at the University of Washington, Stephanie Fryberg, has said her studies have found that exposing Native American children to real images of Pocahontas usually lowered their sense of collective self-worth.  “Mr. Trump’s comments reinforce broad stereotypes of Native Americans as Indian chiefs, mascots and princesses, rather than contemporary people who are contributing to society,” she said, adding: “He’s not using the term in any way to be an honor. He using it to mock her.”

 

But of course Trump’s explanation is very different.

 

“I am the least-racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” Trump told The Washington Post.  However, Trump has been offering Native American stereotypes for years.

 

Back in 1993, he created a major upset at a House Subcommittee Hearing by testifying that “organized crime is rampant in Indian casinos around the nation”.  At the time, Trump was fighting the then expansion of gambling on many tribal reservations which was a direct threat to Trump’s then gambling casino empire.

 

Trump has claimed that he was able to keep mobsters out of his casinos, but that Native Americans would not be able to.

 

“That an Indian chief is going to tell Joe Killer to please get off his reservation is unbelievable to me,” Trump said.  This brought on objections from many of the lawmakers.  Trump also questioned the legitimacy of the Mashantucket Pequot Indians, who operate the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut.

 

As usual, Trump had an insulting comment about the Pequot Indians saying, “They don’t look like Indians to me, and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.”  (How would he even know that?)

 

Back in 2000, Trump secretly financed negative newspaper ads in upstate New York warning that a casino sought by the St. Regis Mohawk nation would attract criminals and drug users.

 

Trump has repeatedly tweeted about what he calls Warren’s ­“phony Native American heritage,” but her heritage has not been officially investigated and confirmed or denied, so currently, he is just blowing smoke.

 

But, last week’s Trump comments against Warren has left many Republican leaders squirming.

 

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) ignored a question about his use of the Pocahontas name.   

 

“I’m not going to enter into the daily visitation of Trump’s comments”, said Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who warned earlier this week that Trump has a “dwindling amount of time left to elevate the tenor of his campaign”.

 

But Trump will just continue to refer to the senator as “Pocahontas” while on the campaign trail.

 

If this is where the Trump campaign is going to continue heading, Trump’s failure as a Republican presidential nominee will end up becoming one of the worst election losses in GOP history.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016