Somewhat a WAG but I suspect it’s the same playbook he keeps running today. He’s using his natural racism (which not only his words but his actions show) to push his actual agenda.
In this case, probably Ed Koch, who was running for yet another term as mayor. The ads happened to come out just as primary season was heating up. And this was late 80s NYC, so crime and race relations were certainly on people’s minds. And Koch and Trump didn’t exactly get along, with Koch supporting a lot of policies and people who pretty much got in the way Trump wanted to do things.
Probably due more to other factors than Trump’s ad (though I imagine Trump likes to think he played a bigger role), like having been mayor since the 70s, Koch ended up losing the Democratic primary to the eventual general winner David Dinkins, who was elected NYC’s first black mayor over Rudy Giuliani, who eventually beat him in the re-match 4 years later running on a lot of familiar talking points.
Suppose he actually isn’t racist, why take out an ad about the Central Park 5? Remember, back the 80s, as racist as it might have been, publicly declaring yourself to be a racist was actually frowned upon, unlike today. If all he really cared about was getting his name involved in the debate, he could have pushed himself to the front with any message. Why chose the racist message over all others? The debate was so hot that coming out in favor of any side of the debate would have had people talking about him. After all, not everyone with a loud mouthed opinion could afford a full-page newspaper ad to shout with. He’d have gotten as much recognition from supporting them as opposing them, or even just saying, “Let’s all calm down and look at this rationally!”
I don’t think that’s true at all. An ad which said “Relax, stay the course, give the justice system time to run its course” would have been met with yawns and forgotten within days.
I don’t think that’s the video I saw. In my mind, I see him as younger and in a more casual environment. In the video you linked, he says ‘We have the money.’ In the one I remember, he said when asked who will pay for universal health care, ‘The government would,’ or words to that effect. But thank you for the video you found. It does show him saying that he’s in favour of universal healthcare paid for through taxes by our government.
I initially misread this as “he doesn’t even have enough morals, scruples, ethics, standards or basic humanity to be a racist.” Which, now I think on it, may be close to the mark.
MTG is complaining that some Republicans are being nasty and are coming to get her because they’re unhappy with the chaos she’s causing in the House. It’s almost as if you can’t act like an asshole for years without some people getting upset about it.
On the question of whether or not trump is racist, of course he is. He learned it from the old man, Fred trump himself. Woody Guthrie even wrote a song about it:
I want to know something but want to limit the amount of disgusting I have to read to learn it.
Stormy Daniels testified that she felt trapped in the room with Trump and he pressured her into sex.
Is this a reasonable summation of the beginning of the act? If it is does it seem reasonable that a porn start would ever have problems discussing boundaries or ever saying no? She wasn’t a starry eyed staffer or low level campaign peon.
This is not some attempt at sympathy for that orange bastard, as far as I am concerned he has always been unelectable.
My feeling is, she was pressured into it, but made the decision to roll with it. Sometimes people do unpleasant things because they think that doing it will advance their interests somewhere else. She was hoping he’d actually get her a spot on The Apprentice, and she decided that was worth the price of letting Trump get away with being a creep.
This was a sleazy affair all around, and there’s plenty of sleaze for everybody involved. If it were not so, Trump would never have been in the position of having to buy her silence in the first place.
There’s a difference between doing something for a reason and doing it for no reason.
Trump says that he’s a devout Christian and a Law and Order sort of guy, and he’s using that as the basis to sell a Bible and Constitution double set.
If we have to choose who Trump is on the basis of his statements, then we’d all be fools to not vote for him, endlessly. He is after all a genius in all things and more upstanding than any other human that came before.
We’re all ignoring most of what Trump says. I’m ignoring a bit more, on the basis of paying attention to which bits of policy he put more weight behind. That’s not an arbitrary criteria.
