News flashes are swirling around the GOP finally realizing the mess that Trump has got us in. Time to work to fixing things. Need to work wisely for a normalcy.
| synonyms: | lout, boor, barbarian, Neanderthal, churl, bumpkin, yokel; More |
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Queen Elizabeth II has cancelled a scheduled Friday meeting with Donald J. Trump after complaining of a "flare-up of bone spurs," Buckingham Palace has confirmed.
The announcement took many royal watchers by surprise, because in her sixty-six-year reign the Queen had never before complained of bone spurs.
But, according to the Queen's spokesman, Peter Rhys-Willington, Elizabeth had intentionally kept her chronic bone-spur condition a closely guarded secret until now. "Her Majesty is a very brave woman, and has not wanted to unnecessarily worry her subjects," Rhys-Willington said. "And so, for decades, she has suffered in silence."
The Queen referred to her bone spurs obliquely in an official statement issued on Thursday. "We are sorry to have to cancel the engagement, but we feared that meeting Donald Trump would be most painful," the Queen's statement read.
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"Everything is horrible—worse than we ever imagined—and there's not a damn thing we can do about any of it. But whatever happens, we can't give in to despair."
Considering recent events, it shouldn't come as a great surprise that the British are doing their best to guarantee that Trump is thoroughly humiliated during his scheduled visit this week.
CNN reported on Tuesday that "There's a British campaign to make Green Day's 'American Idiot' the No. 1 song when Trump arrives" on Friday.
For the past couple of weeks, a social media campaign has sought to make Green Day's classic 2004 jam "American Idiot" the No. 1 tune in the UK by the time Trump arrives Friday…. The campaign asks people to download "American Idiot" between Friday, July 6, and Friday, July 13, to push the 14-year-old single to the top of the Official UK Charts. So far the effort appears to be working, with the song checking in at No. 18 on the chart Tuesday.
British media giant, The Independent, elaborated on the effort, reporting:
"American Idiot" was originally written in part about President George W. Bush and features lyrics such as: "Don't wanna be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information Age of hysteria/It's calling out to idiot America."
It was recently referenced by Sen. Tim Kaine, who suggested that if the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, planned on gifting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with a CD of Elton John's song "Rocket Man", Kim should reciprocate with "American Idiot".
The Independent reported that "In January, Mr Trump reportedly told Theresa May that he would not visit unless she banned protests, which she said would be impossible."
Indeed there are multiple protests scheduled throughout the United Kingdom this week, with The Independent reporting that: "Activist Leo Murray successfully raised the necessary £16,000 to pay for 'Project Trump Baby' – a six metre-high inflatable baby resembling Trump, with unusually small hands and feet, which will be flown over London when the real-life version arrives."
The Guardian added that the "'angry Trump baby' balloon will fly over Westminster from Parliament Square after the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, gave permission for it, before mass marches begin at midday."
The Guardian also reported on other scheduled protests:
Thursday
Friday
The Guardian concluded their report, noting that: "There will also be demonstrations on Friday evening in Glasgow and on Saturday in Edinburgh at noon."
For anyone planning on being in the U.K. this week, the Evening Standard published an article detailing "where to peacefully protest" Trump's visit.
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PRESENTED BY QUALCOMM  | ||
| Axios AM | ||
| By Mike Allen ·Jul 11, 2018 | ||
Good Wednesday morning. It's 7/11. Situational awareness: To protect allergic passengers, Southwest Airlines "will stop giving away peanuts on flights next month, ending a tradition that goes back decades" ... Starbucks "will eliminate single-use plastic straws ... by making a strawless lid or alternative-material straw options available" ... "Alamo Drafthouse Leads U.S. Theater Chains in Eliminating Plastic Straws." | ||
| Trump unwinds the 20th century | ||
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Illustration: Lazaro Gamio/Axios | ||
As President Trump meets other NATO leaders in Brussels today, the backdrop is his role in tearing at the post-World War II order. But Axios future editor Steve LeVine writes that a picture is taking shape of an American future without many of the basic institutions that many consider 20th century advances:
The N.Y. Times' Peter Baker quotes Curt Levey, president of the conservative Committee for Justice, as saying the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh will mean "a conservative court, really [for] the first time since the 1930s."
Be smart: Karen Harris, managing director at Bain Macro Trends, tells Axios that the new order will be the U.S., Russia and China — "multiple parallel great powers pushing against each other in the two new borderlands of cyberspace and [actual] space."
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"I need somebody to come through here please, ASAP. Now. There's about eight people in a van, and they've been in the store for about an hour. They keep going back and forth to the bathrooms by my back door." That's the 911 call—obtained by WSB-TV Channel 2 Action News—from a Subway employee on a family of 6, Felicia and Othniel Dobson and their four children, ages 8, 12, 13, and 19. The family had stopped at the Subway in Coweta County, Georgia, on their trip back from South Georgia to their home state of North Carolina. They had been attending a grandparent's birthday party for the weekend.
The employee freaked out because this isn't some Cleaver family reunion! These people have high levels of melanin in their skin!!!!
A Newnan police officer showed up. The Dobsons said the officer apologized and told them the employee had said she was suspicious of the family and that she has been robbed before and thought they would rob her.
The Dobson family told the Channel 2 Action news that their 19-year-old is going to college this year, the kids are upstanding young folk, and there had been nothing to indicate there was an issue. Subway headquarters says they are "investigating," and the owner of this particular franchise called the family to apologize and say the woman had been put on "administrative leave."
I reached out to Felicia Dobson and she sent this statement from the family.
It can be dangerous to make a call to law enforcement with blatantly false information for people of color. The employee's voice was quivering as she described my family as non-customers, more women than men, and hanging around a back door eventually describing us as being suspicious and possibly going to rob her to an officer. This call came after we purchased several footlong subs and one addition while she took a smoke break outside of the store. We have no words for her action. Our kids were stunned to see their parents speaking with an officer following what they thought was a normal dinner followed by using a single stall bathroom one at a time. Our hope is that this one day stops happening to people in this country. Discrimination is never ok. We pray that love will prevail.
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KALLSTADT, Germany — Herbert Trump did not want to talk about it. Neither did Ilse Trump. Ursula Trump, who runs the Trump bakery in the next village, eventually relented, palms upturned, and sighed: "You can't choose your relatives, can you?"
The relative in question is Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, multimillionaire, the most powerful man on the planet and a seventh cousin of Ursula Trump's husband — though in Kallstadt, a sleepy village nestled in the rolling hills of Germany's southwestern wine country, he is simply "Donald."
That is not least to avoid confusion with the other Trumps (or "Droomps," as the name is pronounced in Palatinate dialect) listed in a phone book for the area: Beate Trump, a podiatrist in another nearby village, for example, or Justin Trump, a teenager whose friends say he sometimes gets teased for his coif of orange-blond hair.
But the Weisenborns and the Geissels and the Benders and the Freunds in Kallstadt are related to Mr. Trump, too. "Practically half the village is," chuckled Kallstadt's mayor, Thomas Jaworek, before quickly adding: "I'm not."
Both of Mr. Trump's paternal grandparents, Friedrich and Elisabeth Trump, were born in Kallstadt, home now to 1,200 inhabitants. Growing up directly opposite each other, they were baptized in the village church and married a few miles down the road before immigrating to the United States.
By all accounts, Mr. Trump shares some key characteristics with his German grandfather, among them an interest in hair: Friedrich worked as a barber in New York before making his fortune running a restaurant and, reportedly, a brothel for gold diggers in the Yukon.
Like his grandson, Friedrich was a teetotaler and avoided his military service. Though rather unlike him, he prided himself in paying taxes on the 80,000 marks he possessed in 1904 — the equivalent of a millionaire today — archival records show.
In Protestant Kallstadt, where volunteers diligently tend communal flower beds and vintners have run a cooperative for 116 years, Friedrich Trump was a popular guy. Contemporaries described him as "polite," a man who "lived quietly and withdrawn" and had an "unblemished way of life."
Kallstadt's relationship with Donald Trump is more troubled, which may explain why there are no signposts pointing to the ancestral Trump home, a modest property with a sloping roof and a blue gate on one of the main village roads, let alone a plaque.
And even though the local tourism office celebrates the regional delicacy of pig stomach, and the fact that the church organ dates to the days of Johann Sebastian Bach, little, aside from the names on a few graves in the village cemetery, hints at Kallstadt's most famous grandson.
"We don't use the name in any way in touristic marketing," Jörg Dörr in the tourism office explained. "The topic is too controversial."
Keeping a low profile has not kept the tourists or media away, nor the occasional Trump impersonator wandering up and down the street. On the contrary: "I have people peering through my window or knocking on my door all the time, asking 'Where is the Trump house?'" lamented Manuela Müller-Wohler, who runs a nursery in Mr. Trump's grandmother's childhood home.
Sometimes she is so annoyed that she sends them the wrong way, or to the house of a neighbor she does not much like. The other day she wanted to do her weekly shopping, but her driveway was blocked by a tourist bus.
Her neighbors opposite, who bought Mr. Trump's grandfather's house — and, like Ms. Müller-Wohler, did not know the history before the purchase — are so exasperated that they have tried, and failed, to sell.
Like the man himself, Mr. Trump's ancestral presence is disruptive.
After his election, local hotels received boycott threats and some cancellations from longtime customers. Wine orders were called off. Emails arrived from all corners of Germany, challenging the "Trump village" to take a stance, Mayor Jaworek recalled.
Standing behind the counter of the Trump bakery in nearby Freinsheim, Ursula Trump recounted a phone call she received shortly after Mr. Trump was elected president.
On the line was a woman imploring her to "please call him and tell him not to build a wall" at the Mexican border, Ms. Trump said.
"I had to break it to her," said Ms. Trump, who is 71, nearly the same age as the president, "I don't have his phone number."
When Mr. Trump was inaugurated, she baked spongecakes covered in stars and stripes and edible pictures of him. "It was a joke," she said. But neighbors started boycotting her bakery, and she did not make the cake again.
If Kallstadt's relationship with Mr. Trump is difficult, that appears to go both ways.
"The Germans are bad, very bad," Mr. Trump remarked during a meeting with European Union trade negotiators last year, complaining about Germany's chronic trade surplus with the United States.
Mr. Trump even used to deny his German ancestry altogether, claiming that he had Swedish roots. (There is a Karlstad in Sweden.)
"Fake news," commented Roland Paul, a local historian who was one of the first to research Mr. Trump's German family.
Mr. Trump's grandfather left Kallstadt for the United States at age 16 in 1885, and returned in 1902 a rich man, Mr. Paul said. He married the girl next door, and the couple went back to America.
But soon Ms. Trump became homesick and wanted to go back to Germany. They returned, and her husband wrote a series of letters in 1904 and 1905 requesting the right to regain residency. Because he had not performed his military service, the Prince Regent of Bavaria refused.
"We shall be ordered to leave?" Friedrich wrote after being informed that his visa would expire in July 1905. "That is hard, very hard for a family."
For some here, there is paradox in that history.
"The heartlessness of the Bavarian bureaucracy towards Mr. Trump's grandfather is reminiscent of the heartlessness of the president towards illegal immigrants in America," said Walter Rummel, the director of the state archive in nearby Speyer, where the unsuccessful immigration file of Friedrich Trump is kept.
"A loser file," Mr. Rummel said sarcastically.
For the past seven decades, contact with the American Trumps has been sporadic.
The Trump Organization donated $5,000 to help restore the church facade in 2001; Mr. Trump himself signed the check, said the pastor at the church, Oliver Herzog.
Mr. Trump's grandmother visited in the 1920s, said Mr. Paul, the local historian. The only other American Trump who appears to have come through Kallstadt is John Walter, a first cousin of the president and family historian.
Another Trump relative is Steffen Geissel, who does quality control for local wines. His great-grandmother was a sister of Mr. Trump's grandfather. His grandmother Louise flew to America to attend the 80th birthday of Mr. Trump's father, Fred, when Mr. Geissel was a boy, he said. She brought him back a signed photograph of Mr. Trump.
"Best wishes to Steffen," it reads. All of his cousins got one, too.
Since Mr. Trump's election, Mr. Geissel said, "everyone has been trying to work out how closely related they are to Trump."
This can sometimes lead to curious exchanges. Bernd Weisenborn, whose great-grandmother Barbara was also a sister of Friedrich Trump, was serving a local customer in his restaurant shortly after Mr. Trump quit the Paris climate accord.
"Look what your relative is up to again," the customer said.
"He is your relative, too!" Mr. Weisenborn shot back.
Now Kallstadt is alive with rumors that the president himself may visit.
In January, the mayor met with the United States general consul, who wanted to see the Trump house and, over pig stomach and grape juice, announced that he would send the ambassador to visit next.
And when Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Mr. Trump at the White House in April, she gave him a map of the Palatinate region where Kallstadt is.
All recent American presidents have visited the Ramstein air base, the headquarters for United States troops in Europe, a mere 45-minute drive away, Mayor Jaworek pointed out.
But if the president comes, he might be the only Trump around.
"I think I'm going to go on holiday," Ursula Trump said.
