Most weeks, liberal columnist Gail Collins and conservative columnist Bret Stephens, both of the New York Times, publish an online back-and-forth that seems designed at least in part to show that it’s possible to disagree agreeably. I often enjoy it.
During the Trump era, it was perhaps an awkward exercise because Stephens made little effort to hide his disgust with Donald Trump. Stephens is an actual, sincere and deeply intelligent conservative, which gives him almost nothing in common with Trump.
Perhaps this awkwardness will subside, now that Trump is out of office, but perhaps not. Trump still takes up a lot of oxygen and less intelligent conservatives than Stephens may believe that under our system Trump, as the recent ex-president and titular head of the Republican Party on the basis of his 2020 nomination, gets to define conservatism pending future developments.
But I actually laughed out loud, in the privacy of my workspace, when reading this exchange from the most recent Collins-Stephens colloquy, kicked off by Stephens asking Collins whether she thinks Trump will run again in 2024, which led to this (italics are mine):
“Gail: Sigh. I presume so, but that’s in part because I always expect him to do the thing that’s worst for the country. If he’s feeling up to it, why would he let somebody else have the spotlight?
“Bret: Michael Wolff had an Opinion piece in The Times on Friday that contained the revealing tidbit that Trump isn’t planning on building a presidential library, which is the usual thing for an ex-president. Wolff seemed to take this as an indication that Trump doesn’t see himself as a political retiree, though it’s equally plausible to interpret it as Trump having no interest in a building stuffed with documents he didn’t read the first time and rooms he can’t rent to the government.
“Gail: There really is something deeply wrong with the name Trump Library.
“Bret: The Homer Simpson Chair in Analytic Philosophy makes about as much sense.”
I also enjoy the Gail and Bret show!
It’s nice to see that there are at least two people left who can converse civilly across the ideological divide,though the Trumpistas seem to have them agreeing more often than not. The differences are often in the details.
You should at least know how to read in order to have your own library.
I laughed out loud, too… Presumably, there’d be an especially large FOX News wing…
I believe there should be a Josiah Bartlet presidential library. It would have all the scripts of “The West Wing” and run C.J. miming “The Jackal” on a continuous loop.
Agreed that his Twitter rants should be captured for posterity. However, what ever papers survive his shredder would be of great value. As a warning to future generations of the danger megalomania in the white house poses.
Not sure he shreds. Allegedly staff regularly retrieved crumpled and/or torn up documents from his wastepaper basket.
I imagine theybqould.be enlightening and most likely frightening
Trump’s Twitter rants are: EVIDENCE. So therefore must be preserved for posterity.
Well, since you all are so secure in your hilarity, I will point out in my usual way that Obama for his “library”, seized public land in an historic waterfront park in Chicago, for a $350 million for-profit, public/private patnership that is barely even a library. Apparently too the CEO of the non-profit Obama Foundation, building the Obama Center makes about $900,000, if we are keeping tabs on what is good for America.
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/professors-join-chorus-opposition-obama-foundation-presidential-library/
“Since plans were announced to construct the library in Jackson Park, near the University of Chicago, the Obama Foundation has received constant rebuke from local leaders demanding a community benefits agreement, green space advocates opposing the privatization of park space, and unions wanting jobs for local workers. Joining this chorus of opposition, professors at the University of Chicago believe the Obama Library is poorly planned to benefit the local economy and South Side residents. In their collective statement, the professors explained:
“We are concerned that rather than becoming a bold vision for urban living in the future it will soon become an object-lesson in the mistakes of the past. We urge the Obama Foundation to explore alternative sites on the South Side that could be developed with more economic benefits, better public transportation, and less cost to taxpayers. We would be pleased to support the Obama Center if the plan genuinely promoted economic development in our neighborhoods and respected our precious public urban parks.”
Please provide the details on how Obama “seized” public land.
And remind us all again, too, how Obama left the country w a surplu$. As did every DEM president in my long lifetime. Unlike every REP president, who left massive debt. And none more so than Donald J Trump (tho if we ck his pockets, bank accts & esp off shore accts, I do believe we could recover much of the missing money.)
He went back in a time machine to when he was president.
Makes as much sense as the original allegation.
Um, the Obama Center is breaking ground sometime this year. I am not talking about his presidency. Bash Trump all you like. I am just not willing to give Obama a free pass to do whatever he likes.
The park was built by Frederick Olmstead. Obama set it up to put his “Center” in that park without really consulting the locals. When any other entity takes public land for private use that is what it it called. Why not with Obama.
And since you’re so secure in your haughty sermonizing, I’ll point out every “library” built to honor a President in the last 30 years has been embroiled in controversy.
From “Open Secrets”: “In 1993, President George H.W. Bush pardoned Edwin Cox, Jr., convicted of bank fraud, then received between $100,000 and $250,000 toward his presidential library from the senior Edwin Cox, a wealthy Texas businessman and GOP donor.
During George W. Bush’s final year in office, a lobbyist close to Bush was caught on tape telling a dignitary from central Asia he should make a $250,000 contribution to the Bush library in exchange for access to the White House.”
You’d have a little more credibility if you actually would think a bit deeper than having the usual reaction of “Oh, Eric and the liberals are at it again. What can I post to show they’re just as bad.” In case you missed it, the point of the column was the absurdity of Trump being associated with a library. You needed to come up with examples of Obama obviously not knowing anything about a historical event or maybe just producing a tape of Obama painfully trying to read off a teleprompter like his predecessor.
Which sounded to me a lot like looking down and condescending to the non book readers in America, aka deplorables.
The elected representative of the people of Chicago disagrees:
The completion of the review means that the city could start moving utility lines as soon as April, with construction of the four-building campus starting in August, Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced Wednesday.
“With this final step in the review, Chicago is now officially the home of the presidential center for our country’s first Black president,” Lightfoot said in a statement. “The Obama Presidential Center and nearby capital improvement projects will undoubtedly distinguish our city’s historic South Side as a world-class economic and cultural hub. Through opportunities both created and attracted by these initiatives, residents in the surrounding communities, will have long overdue access to much-needed, sustainable and good-paying jobs and other neighborhood resources.”
AKA gentrification
No one mentioned the Obama Library in any way, including as a paragon of urban land use.
In other words, what you’ve posted has nothing whatever to do with a possible Trump presidential library.
It’s easier to comment when you’re not tied to reality or relevance.
It is easy to comment when all you are saying is the other person is not connected to reality or relevance.
You make my point.
Which comment sounds like the proverbial….nothing to see here folks, move along.
If you like, although I was aiming for something along the lines of “don’t change the subject.”
There is also a question about your usage of “proverbial,” but we can let that go until another thread-hijacking attempt.
Actually, I’m trying to turn this thread into something useful, an exercise in recognizing the corruption on both sides, rather than this utterly pointless bashing of Trump.
And here I am, being all ungrateful for your guidance.
Bing! “Both sides!” Everybody take a drink.
Yep, some reduce serious problems to a zero-sum result, which allows them to do nothing about serious problems.
Or to step back and assume an air of moral superiority, because not only are they above the fray, they know what is truly important.
Moral superiority is what this article and most of the commentary is about.
Moral superiority is not the same thing as demolishing a weak argument.
False equivalence — the ‘proverbial’ “it’s OK because everyone does it”.
Scale makes a difference.
Golly, gee whiz, followed those links and didn’t see anything about a land “seizure”, twist the facts much? Or is acquisition the same as seizure?
Since when is calling it a seizure when a private entity taking public land for private use, especially a famous park built by a famous builder of parks, “twisting the facts”? If Trump did it you all would freak out.
Presidential libraries are privately funded but federally administered.
“If Trump did it you all would freak out.”
If Trump did it, he would have raised boatloads of money from a bunch of easy marks, and then pocketed it himself, with no accountability. “Freak out,” in this context, would mean “seek an indictment for RICO violations.”
Info is hard to come by (the Obama Foundation website is not very forthcoming), but the Obama Presidential Center is in fact not a Presidential Library, and it will not be administered by the Federal government. The library within will merely be a branch of the Chicago Public Library System.
https://www.factcheck.org/2017/08/obama-center-not-federally-funded/
“In fact, in an email to FactCheck.org, James Pritchett, the director of public and media communications at the National Archives and Records Administration, confirmed that the Obama Presidential Center will be a “private entity” and “will not receive any funding from the National Archives.” NARA operates the other presidential libraries, but it will not operate the Obama library.”
Which changes nothing, really. If it’s going to be a branch of the Chicago Public Library it will be available for public use, and still irrelevant to the discussion here.
If that is the case, then the only topic allowable here is what a horrible human Trump and his supporters are.
Well no, I think the contrived and blatantly tangential nature of some of the commentary is well within the bounds of fair play too.
When Trump is the subject of an article, talking about anyone else is changing the subject.
The subject could also be construed in the context of Presidential libraries. Methinks thou would not protest so much had I brought up other shenanigans of other Republican presidents. The fact that there has been so much controversy around the Obama Center and they are about to break ground seems relevant.
And like I said, the article and most of the commentary seemed otherwise pointless, like the folks here are going to spend much of the next four years bashing Trump for the sake of bashing Trump (unless the point is distracting attention away from the current President.)
Methinks the joke, such as it is, was in the inherent absurdity of a Trump presidential library. That’s really all it is.
You must be a riot at parties.
RB, Since 2016 I have found Dems increasingly humorless. But yeah, I’m not much of a partier. Most people don’t talk about what really matters.
And the Chicago Public Library System is not in any way controlled by Obama.
Amen
Lets try again:
A. City of Mpls puts a property up for sale and I purchase it, the property goes from public to private hands, seizure or acquisition?
B. City of Mpls owns property and make them and offer to purchase it, the property goes from public to private hands, seizure or acquisition?
The MPLS Park Board doesn’t put up park land for sale for anybody. They have a couple of “public-private” partnerships, which are plenty controversial, but most people don’t complain much about a few restaurants.
Obama is a kind of “Wall Street Democrat,” so this comes as no surprise.
I got a good laugh out of this one, too.
Trump was not sophisticated enough to feed documents into a shredder. It seems he would just crumple them up and toss them in a wastebasket. Courageous aides (the ones with the grit to tell him that something he did was not okay) had to stop him from doing that because of the Presidential Records Act.
Mr Stephens, as is his habit, has a point here.
That would be a very tiny library: a copy of “The Art of the Deal” and that Playboy magazine with Donald Trump on the cover: you know – the one that was framed and hanging on the wall when he posed for a photo shoot alongside of an acclaimed Trump supporter and now disgraced evangelical figure, Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife, Becki? Now I know why that cover of Playboy didn’t disgust both of them . . . Anyway, a library for a man who avoids reading? How about a room with Fox News and other Trump loving news stations playing non-stop instead? Wall to wall, with comfy couches added, from which to view the huge TV screens and of course, a huge Diet Coke button, to quench one’s thirst periodically. That sounds more like it.
“I wrote The Art of the Deal with Donald Trump: His Self-Sabotage is Rooted in His Past,” is Tony Schwartz’s contribution to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President (St. Martin’s Press, 2017), edited by Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. There’s no way Trump or his reckless, feckless enablers would allow that book to be placed in any hypothetical “Trump Library”!
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is well worth reading, as it shows why the psychiatrists and mental health professionals were willing to argue that the “duty to warn” the general public about the dangers posed by Trump as president overrode the so-called “Goldwater Rule,” among other interesting aspects.
Trump would only go along with a library in his name if: it was HUGE & gaudy, had his name on it in HUGE letters, he didn’t have to lift a finger, he wasn’t required to read one single thing in it, and it was really a money laundering front the better to fleece others and support his lavish lifestyle. I suggest he be charged with ‘building it’ w cheap matls & labor, sue all others involved to get out of having to pay one red cent while destroying their businesses and reputations, then…and here’s the kicker…be made to live in it himself, not knowing day to day if it might ultimately collapse on him. That wb just retribution for his lifetime of screwing over others. 3500+ lawsuits in his adult lifetime! Who else operates like that?? And it would keep him busy ’til the feds finally get around to charging him with RICO and throw him in jail for the rest of his life. Praying I live long enough to dance in the streets that day.
What’s astonishing is that what you just mentioned amounts to a very charitable approach to Trump’s pattern of fraud and abuse. You didn’t even mention the several dozen women who have credibly accused him of sexual assault, or the very real possibility of kompromat held over him by Vladimir Putin!
The fact is Trump still faces the possibility of felony indictments for his financial crimes, and the revelation of exactly what kind of kompromat is held by the Russians.
I laugh out loud too whenever I read petty criticism of Trump from alleged journalists because he’s the author of a best seller and a billionaire and they’re not.
Here’s a laugh: there are, apparently, people who believe Trump wrote his best-seller.
Here’s another one: some people believe him when he says he’s a billionaire.
PROVE IT. Trump makes all sorts of audacious claims. What we know is that he likely has more DEBT than any individual in the world: at least a BILLION. A relative provided the NY Times w records and Deutsche Bank shared data, too, and paid a massive fine for hiding it initially…and wrote off a loan of almost $350MILLION after he landed in the White House (thanks Putin). He next largest debt is to….drum roll…China! $700+ MILLION. That explains his hatred of them and his many tariffs against them (which American taxpayers are ultimately paying for!) Too many Americans haven’t read all the exposes’ written about Trump since the ’80s. Clearly. Too many also apparently struggle to add 2+2 & get 4. To put the pieces of the puzzle together. This is distressing because you know what? Trump himself ALWAYS TELLS US WHAT HE’S DOING AND GONNA DO! It’s par for the course with psychopaths and malignant narcissists! ME, ME, ME! LOOK AT ME! ADORE ME! GIVE ME ATTENTION 24/7!
Neither is Trump.
He wasn’t the person who wrote the book, and ‘billionaire’ usually involves the credit column, not the debits. Still waiting for the tax returns ….
Having read Art of the Deal as an earnest young business student, it was somewhat surprising to see every deal outlined in the book eventually go bust:
Trump Airline
Taj Mahal
New Jersey Generals
The guy is a genius at self-promotion – of that there is no doubt. But his business acumen is suspect, at best.
Trump isn’t a billionaire. He would be a billionaire if he hadn’t squandered his dad’s trust fund on one failed business after another. Probably every journalist who has ever written about Trump has been more successful at making money than Trump has been. All Trump has ever done is lose money given to him by other people.
And Trump sure didn’t ever write a book. His bestseller was ghostwritten. And the guy who actually did write it has come out and said that most of it was fiction and that Trump was a fraud.
Trump is a loser and a failure. But for some reason some people are attracted to losers and failures.
Trump didn’t write The Art of the Deal, he had a ghost writer for that, Tony Schwartz — who has excoriated Trump in his contribution to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals Assess a President. That excellent book is edited by Bandy X. Lee, then a professor of clinical psychiatry and law at the Yale School of Medicine. I recommend you read it, and reconsider your adulation of Trump.
And it was Trump’s father who gave him millions to begin with — Trump then proceeded to squander several billion dollars over the years, but got away with it, up until now, by engaging in a massive abuse of the tax codes and other laws. It required crimnal tax fraud, bank fraud, real estate fraud, insurance fraud, falsification of business records, and allowed him to engage in money laundering for other crooks, too. There is absolutely no aspect of Trump’s shoddy life that is worthy of a shred of admiration — and that is apart from the dozens of women who have credibly charged Trump with sexual assault, including at least one rape, of the journalist E. Jean Carroll!
A while back when asked about it, he said it would be a part of one of his properties: Trump Golf, Casino and Presidential Library.
Seriously. He really did say it.
Pretty much what I would expect him to say, and would probably build if any bank would finance it (cue the Putin accusations).
Meanwhile the Obama Center is more an exercise is self aggrandizement, doing without saying, I am going to take this land in this public park because I know what is best for you, south side.
Trump never seemed like a normal human being. He never seemed interested in things, or at least, presented the illusion of being interested thing. If I had his billions, I would find ways to have fun with it. Not strap myself to rocket ships and fly off to space, maybe, but something.
Again: Trump is not a billionaire. He lies and grifts and cons and makes stuff up. He has massive debt. He robs Peter to pay Paul. It’s a shell game. He also jumps thru many hoops to not pay taxes and keeps multiple sets of books…which the feds now have documentation on because a former d-in-law gave it to them. It is what’s driving the current Southern District of NY charges against him & his company and multiple employees. This has been in the works awhile, some years, but it’s building steam; there have been charges made and a grand jury indictment. It is what drove my other comment about hopefully seeing RICO charges against Trump in my lifetime yet. He’s evaded serious charges umpteen times thru the years, in a variety of nefarious ways. I pray this time things finally stick. No one sb able to con so many for a lifetime with zero consequences. That is not what our country’s laws dictate. And for a former president to be such a law breaking sleaze?! Absolutely unconscionable!
And then stiffs Paul with ten cents on the dollar.
Understatement of the year award for your first sentence.
Seriously broken person
You know, some day the absurdism revealed by these Trump defenders will be gone. Never forget.
Isn’t that the point of hom having a library, ad a lasting reminder of the absurdity
To be frank, Mr. Black, this is a really pointless posting. Of course “Trump library” is an absurd pairing of words, and of course Trump deserves nothing but ridicule (or, if one can summon a Jesus-like virtue, pity). But our nation and civilization are facing some real existential issues these days, due to the gradual coalescence of power among the very few for whom the bigfoot punditry, like the rest of the mainstream media, have spent decades running interference. Two of those pundits giggling smugly about Trump’s ignorance just doesn’t seem very column-worthy.
I totally agree. Is Mr Black going to beat this horse for four more years, or could he maybe discuss and invite discussion about something, anything Biden is up to?
WHD: Have you not heard that Trump will be back on the job in August, so coverage is relevant.
I can help out on Biden: He has done more to improve income disparity than any President since FDR and more is on the way if the Trump / McConnell Republicans can be prevented from stopping it. All things that you used to profess to care about, now surpassed by contrarianism.
His recovery act was pretty much a bipartisan thing, an easy gimme. Otherwise his Infrastructure deal is not likely to improve life for working poor in America, it is a Republican friendly bill which then it is most likely going to be a lot of no-bid contracts to favored companies. His $3.9t bill to rebuild America more sustainably could do a lot, if he gets it passed, which every day it seems a little less likely.
As for comparing him to FDR, that is giving him WAY too much credit at this point. Most of the gains in wages didn’t have anything to do with Biden, that is mostly a function of people having a lot of time for hindsight in 2020 and are now like, NO WAY am I going back to that **** job for $10/hr.
I will say, his expanded child tax credit payments could go a long way helping people who need the help most.
Six months after President Biden was elected, Trump continues to get more print from the author. Sad.
Six months after Donald Trump, the loser of the 2020 election, slunk out of Washington like a sore loser, he continues to dominate the Republican Party.
6 months after he left office, Trump is still lying about the election and the January 6th terrorist attack.
Any rational and decent human being would agree that Trump was a disgrace and an un-American traitor. Sadly, a lot of people are not rational. We’ve got sick people who are mocking the brave men who risked their lives to defend this country on January 6th.
Agreed.
I will never understand why people like Tom hate law enforcement.
Tom never said that he hated law enforcement, you did (falsely). Tom said that Eric Black continues to write more about former failed President Trump than he does our current successful President Joe Biden. And Tom said that that was sad.
I do wish that the Mpls. 3rd Precinct officers received the same justified sympathy and efforts to prevent what happened to them from happening again too. But that is another subject.
“I do wish that the Mpls. 3rd Precinct officers received the same justified sympathy and efforts to prevent what happened to them from happening again too.”
I’m not sure of the antecedent of your sentence, but do you wish for the same sympathy as shown to the Capitol Police? Okay”
There were no rioters at the 3rd Precinct. From the TV footage, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit. We’ve seen plenty of video of people in the police station, and they weren’t rioting. It doesn’t look like an insurrection when you have people that breach the police station– and I don’t condone it – but they’re staying within the public areas of the station. That’s not what a riot would look like. There have been things worse than people without any firearms coming into a building.
How’s that?
“The Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct burns during a riot following the death of George Floyd in May 2020. (FOX 9) MINNEAPOLIS (FOX 9) – One year after the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct building was set on fire and looted, the site remains fenced off and boarded up.”
Perhaps this will refresh your memory of what happened at the 3rd Precinct. It differs slightly from your recollection, but it is the truth.
“The truth is not a left-wing value” is a statement attributed to Dennis Prager. He appears to be correct.
The ability to recognize irony does not appear to be a right-wing value.
Not sure what you mean, but the facts speak for themselves. No irony needed.
I pointed out that lies were being told about my statement. By leftists. Seems like my quote is spot on. Thanks for the info on PragerU, which I really am not interested in.
I am copying these comments to show to my law enforcement relatives to show them what I truly am, a law enforcement hater. When I recently visited one of them and his/her law enforcement friends I failed to tell them all this but I am sending copies to all of them. When I visit my law enforcement relative and his/her family this weekend I will show them the same copies so that they know who I truly am. They will all know that Edward Blaise says so and that they are the authority and that they always speak the truth. Dennis Prager claims that the “the truth is not a left-wing value” and I think that this thread shows that to be true. Bless you!
What police union are you speaking of? The Capitol Police deserve every bit of sympathy and support that they can get and my law enforcement friends and family agree. Why wouldn’t they?
After the election I predicted many a Dem would make Biden’s first hundred days all about Trump. I think it is about day 188.
Trumpism is a virulent disease of the body politic, so naturally enough, some seek to excise it. That isn’t going to stop. On the contrary, the lawsuits already filed against Trump’s business, citing the crimes connected to keeping it afloat, will be making headlines for months.
And Donald J. Trump’s role as the main inciter and organizer of the January 6 seditious insurrection — which the FBI described as “domestic terrorism” — should shock the conscience of even the most jaded cynic, to the extent they have any sincere concern for the police who were directly brutalized, as well as for preventing future attempts to overthrow our democracy.
Just a wake up call, if you really think Trump and his despicable enablers are off the hook.
Trump is not the only virulent disease in the body politic, he is just one Dems continue to be fixated on to the exclusion of just about everything else. As for 1/6, I know this, the one question that won’t be asked in those hearings is what role did the FBI have. In the Michigan Plot to Kidnap the Governor, they arrested 13 conspirators, and had 12 agents and informants imbedded in the conspiracy, including the second in command. People are starting to ask, who led who? So any assertion that the FBI was ignorant about what was going to go down on 1/6, is mostly ignorance about how the FBI works. That is a story that matters.
I sympathize — still, we continue to study the lives of the Caesars, and the heinous deeds of more recent despots. Trump has been compared to the Roman Emperor Caligula, but that’s manifestly unfair to Caligula, who was highly educated and capable of extemporaneous poetry. See Suetonius’s magisterial Lives of the Caesars for more relevant comparisons to Trump.
Trump is only relevant because The Media can’t let go. It’s just another symbiotic relationship, a half step above the Kardashians. I challenge Eric to keep his pieces Trump-free for 30 days.
You’re partly correct. Trump is nothing more than an unusually uncouth Kardashian who has accomplished nothing in his life other than self-promotion.
Yes, he relies on the media, but if he stopped clamoring for attention all the time, the media would go away. If he just crept off to his lair in Florida, spending his days playing golf and watching TV (kind of like he did when he was President), no one would pay any more attention to him. Instead, he and his devotees insist on keeping him relevant (some devotees have hit the unusual level of complaining about the attention their hero gets).
I hate to say you guys but all you have to do it look at the number of comments Eric racks up every time his writes about Trump… and you know why he’s still writing about Trump. Soooooo….
So what you are saying is he is putting numbers above substance?
I think the most succinct way to describe this, and forgive me if someone has already pointed this out… a Trump library is simply an oxymoron. The guy is famous for his capacity to avoid reading anything beyond a page in length. So what’s a Trump library going to look like? The most likely scenario is that they’ll fill it with a bunch of books Trump would lie about having read.