The Trump Road Tour--Arabia, Israel, Europe

[Dill]

"Trump embraces Israel, but Russian ties still trail him"
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-embraces-israel-russian-ties-still-trail-him-040507303--politics.html

Trump's visit Monday was laden with religious symbolism. He toured the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which by Christian tradition is where Jesus was crucified and the location of his tomb. Wearing a black skull cap, he became the first sitting president to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City, the most holy site at which Jews can pray.

Trump was joined by first lady Melania Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump. The family was separated by gender. The president and Kushner visited one side, while the first daughter and first lady visited a portion of the site reserved for women. Trump approached alone and placed his hand on the stone.

The visit raised questions about whether the U.S. would indicate the site is Israeli territory. The U.S. has never recognized Israeli sovereignty over parts of the Old City seized in the 1967 war.

The White House struggled to answer the question. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley declared the site part of Israel, while U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Monday dodged the question. Trump himself never commented

[Dill]

Here are some articles from last year which speak to the current US-Israeli context.

"Why Israel Loves Donald Trump"
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/donald-trump-israel-2016-netanyahu-213748

"Six Reasons Trump Would Be Disaster for U.S. Jews, Israel and the Middle East"
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.700648
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.700648

Is Donald Trump the Friend Israel Needs?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/opinion/sunday/is-donald-trump-the-friend-israel-needs.html

“We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect.” Thus President-elect Donald J. Trump tweeted just before Secretary of State John Kerry discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict last week. He added: “They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but …”

Mr. Trump was presuming to side with Israel in its regional fight, but … as Mr. Kerry implied, particularly when he spoke elegiacally of Shimon Peres, one cannot be a friend to Israel without actually being a friend to some Israelis over others, one conception of Israel, the region, and Jews, for that matter, over another. These are also Jewish culture wars — centered on Israel, but played out vicariously among American Jews — and Mr. Trump has stepped, or stumbled, into the thick of them. Nor do they affect Jews alone, given America’s web of relations in the region. One hopes and trusts that senior appointees to his foreign policy team will take notice.....

Mr. Friedman’s allies in Israel’s right-wing Likud Party and its nationalist and Orthodox coalition partners see the land, including the West Bank, which they call Judea and Samaria, as holy. They regard any strategic territorial compromise entailing a withdrawal of Israeli sovereignty as sinful. In this respect, they benefit politically from the violence produced by the occupation.

Perhaps 40 percent of Jewish Israelis hold these attitudes, which imply others, such as theocracy over Supreme Court defenses of individual dignity, or privileges for Jewish citizens over Arab citizens, whose right to vote they consider provisional. A clear majority of these rightists want the release of Yigal Amir, who assassinated Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. They see Europeans as anti-Semitic unless proven otherwise, Reform Jews as apostates, and Islam as terrorism’s gateway drug. Last week, the editor in chief of Haaretz, Aluf Benn, warned that Greater Israel zealots have moved to control the news media, schools, courts and army. “That means replacing the heads of cultural institutions and threatening a halt to government funding for those who don’t go with the flow,” he said.

[BmorePat87]

WATCH: President Trump to the President of Israel (while in Israel): "We just got back from the Middle East." pic.twitter.com/NPuOgXBjDQ

— Yashar (@yashar) May 22, 2017

I love that the Israeli Ambassador to the US (younger guy w dark hair on the right) visibly face palms after Trump says that.

[6andcounting]

(05-23-2017, 08:35 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote:

WATCH: President Trump to the President of Israel (while in Israel): "We just got back from the Middle East." pic.twitter.com/NPuOgXBjDQ

— Yashar (@yashar) May 22, 2017

I love that the Israeli Ambassador to the US (younger guy w dark hair on the right) visibly face palms after Trump says that.

[*michaelsean*]

(05-23-2017, 08:35 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote:

WATCH: President Trump to the President of Israel (while in Israel): "We just got back from the Middle East." pic.twitter.com/NPuOgXBjDQ

— Yashar (@yashar) May 22, 2017

I love that the Israeli Ambassador to the US (younger guy w dark hair on the right) visibly face palms after Trump says that.

He meant the middle of the Middle East.

[Belsnickel]

(05-23-2017, 08:35 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote:

WATCH: President Trump to the President of Israel (while in Israel): "We just got back from the Middle East." pic.twitter.com/NPuOgXBjDQ

— Yashar (@yashar) May 22, 2017

I love that the Israeli Ambassador to the US (younger guy w dark hair on the right) visibly face palms after Trump says that.

I saw that and laughed far longer at it than I should have. He had a decent recovery for it though. Inner dialogue: "Oh, for fu...nothing to see here, just adjusting my hair."

[BmorePat87]

"IT is A gREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WiTH ALL OF MY FRIENDS - SO AMAZiNG + will NEVER FORGET!"

Trump's message that he wrote in the guestbook at Israel's main Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.

Obama's?

"I am grateful to Yad Vesham and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are bless to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim 'never again'. And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who helped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

[GMDino]

(05-23-2017, 02:10 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: "IT is A gREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WiTH ALL OF MY FRIENDS - SO AMAZiNG + will NEVER FORGET!"

Trump's message that he wrote in the guestbook at Israel's main Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.

Obama's?

"I am grateful to Yad Vesham and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are bless to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim 'never again'. And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who helped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

I'm gonna repeat myself but if you go to twitter and search "great honor" Trump you can kill a couple days.  EVERYTHING is a great honor.

He has such a small vocabulary to go with his small hands....

[Belsnickel]

(05-23-2017, 02:15 PM)GMDino Wrote: I'm gonna repeat myself but if you go to twitter and search "great honor" Trump you can kill a couple days.  EVERYTHING is a great honor.

He has such a small vocabulary to go with his small hands....

Off topic, but I'm wondering how many articles in the social sciences are going to be written about the small hands thing. Every time I see it I think of different angles this can be discussed. None of them are really good for Trump or those that bring it up.

[GMDino]

(05-23-2017, 03:19 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Off topic, but I'm wondering how many articles in the social sciences are going to be written about the small hands thing. Every time I see it I think of different angles this can be discussed. None of them are really good for Trump or those that bring it up.

As I was writing "small vocabulary" my mind pictured trying to hold a huge, unwieldy pencil in school with these tiny little hands as an explanation why he knows so few words and it was funny, thus the reference.  

[Dill]

(05-23-2017, 02:10 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: "IT is A gREAT HONOR TO BE HERE WiTH ALL OF MY FRIENDS - SO AMAZiNG + will NEVER FORGET!"

Trump's message that he wrote in the guestbook at Israel's main Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem.

Obama's?

"I am grateful to Yad Vesham and all of those responsible for this remarkable institution. At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are bless to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim 'never again'. And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who helped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit."

YOW!  The puts the difference in their diplomatic skills and breadth of understanding in a nutshell.  good post.

[Dill]

(05-23-2017, 03:19 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Off topic, but I'm wondering how many articles in the social sciences are going to be written about the small hands thing. Every time I see it I think of different angles this can be discussed. None of them are really good for Trump or those that bring it up.

For now, journalists and bloggers have certainly picked up on the limited vocabulary. Some of this devolves into high-falutin name calling, but there are some insights into the relation between nuanced vocabulary and nuanced thought--and how lack of the former might indicate lack of the latter.

"Trump's Trashy "77-Word" Vocabulary Exemplifies Sly Intelligence"
https://www.inverse.com/article/27515-donald-trump-bad-vocabulary

"The Emperor Has No Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-emperor-has-no-vocabulary_us_58a6d469e4b026a89a7a2971
He’s like a Jabberwocky terrorist.

His ability to drown out reason with a steady, pernicious flow of babble and blather effectively demoralizes everyone within earshot. He brandishes nonsense like a flamethrower, basically torching his listeners with an unstoppable barrage of disconcerting and creepy, cryptic crap. It’s why an impressive assemblage of hard-bitten, savvy reporters looked as though they needed a blankie, a ba-ba, a binky and a jumbo-sized bottle of Excedrin by the time he was through.

Trump's Vocabulary
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/25/1656205/-Trump-s-Vocabulary
Reading the transcript of Trump’s interview by the Associated Press, I was struck not only by its incoherence but by the paucity of words that Trump seems to have available to him to discuss any subject. By my count, he used the word “great” 36 times in the interview, always in the context of discussing himself or his achievements.  He used “big” or “bigger” or “biggest” a similar number of times, always in the context of his actual or planned accomplishments

"Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader"
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-third-grader-121340
Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.

The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.

"Trump’s Tremendous Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/toni-hargis/donald-trump-vocab_b_14935538.html

As a reminder of how political discourse has degenerated over the life of the Republic, I include two sentences written by an earlier president. What impresses is not so much the vocabulary as the ability to hold an architecture of complex ideas together in one thought while expressing it in the linear form of a grammatically correct sentence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Yes, politicians used to talk like that--and didn't use speech writers.

[Belsnickel]

(05-23-2017, 04:31 PM)Dill Wrote: For now, journalists and bloggers have certainly picked up on the limited vocabulary. Some of this devolves into high-falutin name calling, but there are some insights into the relation between nuanced vocabulary and nuanced thought--and how lack of the former might indicate lack of the latter.

"Trump's Trashy "77-Word" Vocabulary Exemplifies Sly Intelligence"
https://www.inverse.com/article/27515-donald-trump-bad-vocabulary

"The Emperor Has No Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-emperor-has-no-vocabulary_us_58a6d469e4b026a89a7a2971
He’s like a Jabberwocky terrorist.

His ability to drown out reason with a steady, pernicious flow of babble and blather effectively demoralizes everyone within earshot. He brandishes nonsense like a flamethrower, basically torching his listeners with an unstoppable barrage of disconcerting and creepy, cryptic crap. It’s why an impressive assemblage of hard-bitten, savvy reporters looked as though they needed a blankie, a ba-ba, a binky and a jumbo-sized bottle of Excedrin by the time he was through.

Trump's Vocabulary
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/4/25/1656205/-Trump-s-Vocabulary
Reading the transcript of Trump’s interview by the Associated Press, I was struck not only by its incoherence but by the paucity of words that Trump seems to have available to him to discuss any subject. By my count, he used the word “great” 36 times in the interview, always in the context of discussing himself or his achievements.  He used “big” or “bigger” or “biggest” a similar number of times, always in the context of his actual or planned accomplishments

"Donald Trump Talks Like a Third-Grader"
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/donald-trump-talks-like-a-third-grader-121340
Donald Trump isn’t a simpleton, he just talks like one. If you were to market Donald Trump’s vocabulary as a toy, it would resemble a small box of Lincoln Logs. Trump resists multisyllabic words and complex, writerly sentence constructions when speaking extemporaneously in a debate, at a news conference or in an interview. He prefers to link short, blocky words into other short, blocky words to create short, blocky sentences that he then stacks into short, blocky paragraphs.

The end result of Trump’s word choice is less the stripped-down prose style of Ernest Hemingway than it is a spontaneous reinvention of Ogden’s Basic English, the pared-down lexicon of 850 words selected by early 20th century linguist/philosopher C.K. Ogden as the bedrock of a new world language. In the August 6th Republican candidates debate, Trump answered the moderators’ questions with linguistic austerity. Run through the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test, his text of responses score at the 4th-grade reading level. For Trump, that’s actually pretty advanced. All the other candidates rated higher, with Ted Cruz earning 9th-grade status. Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, and Scott Walker scored at the 8th-grade level. John Kasich, the next-lowest after Trump, got a 5th-grade score.

"Trump’s Tremendous Vocabulary"
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/toni-hargis/donald-trump-vocab_b_14935538.html

As a reminder of how political discourse has degenerated over the life of the Republic, I include two sentences written by an earlier president. What impresses is not so much the vocabulary as the ability to hold an architecture of complex ideas together in one thought while expressing it in the linear form of a grammatically correct sentence:

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Yes, politicians used to talk like that--and didn't use speech writers.

That was kind of in a different direction, but I get what you're saying. I recently read FDR's Looking Forward and I couldn't imagine any of our last 5 presidents, at least, writing like that. Our current POTUS likely wouldn't even understand it.

[GMDino]

Press statement @WhiteHouse says 1 goals of @POTUS Israel trip is "promote the possibility of lasting peach" pic.twitter.com/HE1l2lThg8

— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) May 22, 2017

[Dill]

(05-23-2017, 10:56 PM)GMDino Wrote:

Press statement @WhiteHouse says 1 goals of @POTUS Israel trip is "promote the possibility of lasting peach" pic.twitter.com/HE1l2lThg8

— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) May 22, 2017

  So much mispel ther!  Peach agreemint reched sooon!!

[BmorePat87]

(05-23-2017, 10:56 PM)GMDino Wrote:

Press statement @WhiteHouse says 1 goals of @POTUS Israel trip is "promote the possibility of lasting peach" pic.twitter.com/HE1l2lThg8

— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) May 22, 2017

Israel has beautiful peaches, the best. 

[GMDino]

Which person in this picture has no idea what's going on?

[hollodero]

(05-23-2017, 10:56 PM)GMDino Wrote:

Press statement @WhiteHouse says 1 goals of @POTUS Israel trip is "promote the possibility of lasting peach" pic.twitter.com/HE1l2lThg8

— Matthew Levitt (@Levitt_Matt) May 22, 2017

Wazzup, peach? By any chance an impeach?

[GMDino]

That face expression from the pope says everything ​@POTUS @Pontifex #Trump #PopeFrancis pic.twitter.com/CRPzX1s69k

— Antonio Šećerović (@antsecerovic) May 24, 2017

[*bfine32*]

In case anybody wants any non-insulting and/or belittling comments from the visit I listened to an interview with an interpreter today about Trump's visit and he said it is very difficult for them to translate for him because most dignitaries speak using similar phrases. He said Trump doesn't speak in the same common phrases and they have a hard time translating what he called his "Americanisims". He gave an example of how he had a hard (impossible) time translating "showboat".

He also said Trump uses a lot of "fillers" while he's thinking and those are difficult to translate, but he most or the audience will think he's keeping something from them.


Now back to the belittlement...