Trump's publicity stunt article about going to the railroad explosion town gets the paper towel treatment in Raw Story comments

 

By Hal Brown

Evening Update: You couldn't make this shit up/....

Click above to read article. The ex-president took “Trump Spring Water” to an Ohio town reeling from a derailment disaster, along with some water he said was of “a much lesser quality.”

Afternoon Update:

Click above to read article

......

Trump wants to show up President Biden who visited a war zone and was hailed both for his bravery and his empathy. Now Trump wants to show off his empathy for those who suffered from the toxic cloud from the train wreck in Ohio by going there. 

He isn't even there yet and it is already making the news:

Click above to enlarge image

Politico's article doesn't say anything about paper towels but does explain how Trump's intention can backfire:

Click above to read article

Excerpt:

Donald Trump’s visit to the site of a toxic train derailment in Ohio is offering a political opening to battered Biden administration officials — by calling new attention to the former president’s record of rolling back regulations on both rail safety and hazardous chemicals.

Trump’s administration withdrew an Obama-era proposal to require faster brakes on trains carrying highly flammable materials, ended regular rail safety audits of railroads, and mothballed a pending rule requiring freight trains to have at least two crew members. He also placed a veteran of the chemical industry in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical safety office, where she made industry-friendly changes to how the agency studied health risks.

Here's the HUFFPOST top of website article:

Click above to read article

This is how Fox is covering his planned trip:

Click above to read article

It's not surprising that the Fox article attacks Biden, however it may have answered the question about whether Trump is actually donating personal money to help the citizens:

Trump is expected to donate thousands of gallons of cleaning supplies, along with 13 pallets of water to East Palestine. A single pallet typically holds a couple of thousand bottles of water. The former president is teaming up with nonprofit organizations Blue Line Moving and KORTX. 

For the curious, this is what a pallet of water looks like and how much it costs:

Click above to see on Amazon. 13 pallets would cost $7,345 which I assume Trump could pay for himself.

The article also says he will donate thousands of gallons of cleaning supplies which brings up the question as to whether this will include paper towels, a question that goes unanswered.

Numerous commenters to a Raw Story article about Trump's planned visit referenced his dismal record on rail safety, but I was struck by how many commenters to the Raw Story article (scroll down) about this referenced the paper towel debacle in Puerto Rico.

"They had these beautiful, soft towels. Very good towels,” Trump told Mike Huckabee." Click above to read article

From Raw Story:

Click above to read article.

Below is the Raw Story comment that leaped out at me because of the photo. It was followed by other comments related to the paper towel spectacle from Puerto Rico.

Whirledpeas 24 minutes ago

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Shaydee25 minutes ago

Will Trump be throwing out paper towels? Will he shout out, 'where's my African-American?'

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Ricardo Santos 32 minutes ago

The motherfcker is so vain, he'll make the story about him! Melania in stilettos giving out water, Trump throwing paper towels, and "Whose boat is this", Trump and Melania attending three different hurricane tragedies. So, expect nothing but attacks on Biden and Mayor Pete.

dlindeman hour ago

I wonder how many paper towel rolls will be thrown today. tRump lacks any basic human concern for anyone but himself so this could be interesting.

Bradley an hour ago

Maybe the jerk will give out paper towels.

Mike Nan hour ago

What use will this easy to spot liar, grifter, coward, fraud and corrupt unfit incompetent Russian dupe be a disaster? The Six Time Bankrupt fraud is used to causing them, not fixing them.

Is he bringing paper towels to throw them?

fauxnombre1 an hour ago

Here comes tossed rolls of paper towels. Praise the Lord.

baselbob an hour ago

Let's see, shooting basketball hoops with paper towel rolls probably won't work. What can the poor schmuck do to show his sincerity? On second thoughts, maybe they can soak up the toxic chemicals with those towels?

Postictalan hour ago

Get him a roll of Bounty and he'll be fine.

Finbackrich  Finbackrichan hour ago

Bet he forgot his
... paper towels ...

Anyone who has analyzed Trump's personality, whether a mental health expert or not, knows that Trump is the exemplar of someone incapable of empathy. Furthermore, they know he relishes making people suffer. This makes him a sadist. He is a bully. This is a characteristic prevalent among MAGA Republicans. See "Understanding the sadistic bullies in the GOP" my blog from yesterday.

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Updates:

That Time I Blogged as a Slime 24 minutes ago

Trump's East Palestine stunt could backfire because 'he's not known for empathy': Maggie Haberman

I'm sure the fine citizens of East Palestine can't wait to have a fat, flatulent fascist prick lob paper towels at them like an asshole.

Mr Joshuaan hour ago

Hey, Trump has empathy. This is nothing a few paper towels and MAGA hats thrown into the crowd won't fix. Amirite or amirite?

Eyeball_Kid  TV Guyan hour ago

By now, he'll descend into tossing used toilet paper.

Here are related stories: 

'Like a campaign rally': Trump to impose 'big show' on suffering East Palestine residents

East Palestine mayor fears Trump visit will turn them into ‘political pawns’

Quite a contrast: Biden visits Kyiv,, Trump used a Pence visit to blackmail Zelensky

 By Hal Brown

There was a commercial on MSNBC so when I sat down this morning with my cup of coffee I clicked on HUFFPOST to see what their lead story was.

I want to share the third thing I thought about when I read the following:

This was the main page of the BBC website:

I read these articles before I saw the news on MSNBC:

 The first things I thought were a mixture of "good on him" feelings about being proud that the United States had president like him. Next, I thought briefly about how stringent the secrecy and security had to have been. Then, third, I thought about this:

Excerpt:

President Trump repeatedly involved Vice President Pence in efforts to exert pressure on the leader of Ukraine at a time when the president was using other channels to solicit information that he hoped would be damaging to a Democratic rival, current and former U.S. officials said.

Trump instructed Pence not to attend the inauguration of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in May — an event White House officials had pushed to put on the vice president’s calendar — when Ukraine’s new leader was seeking recognition and support from Washington, the officials said.

The last president to visit a war zone was George W. Bush who visited Iraq in 2003. This was probably a high point in his dismal presidency (see last paragraph here). Biden joins Bush, Lincoln, FDR, Eisenhower, and LBJ on the list of presidents who have visited war zones.

The logistics of the trip are now being reported including the fact the Russia was notified about it in advance:

Excerpt:

The trip that Biden made into Kyiv was “bold” and “risky,” and done after months of planning for a range of security concerns, according to several White House officials.

The logistics were coordinated with a range of different government agencies, which included threat assessments to determine if Biden could safely enter and exit the war-torn country. It was made more challenging, officials said, because there is no U.S. military presence in Ukraine.

“This was a historic visit unprecedented in modern times to have the president of the United States visit the capital of a country at war where the us military doesn’t control the critical infrastructure,” said Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser.

There's a video here of an air raid siren going off as Biden and Zelensky visit the historic St. Micahel's Cathedral. I don't think anything in presidential history compares with this.

Watch the video (below) here:

 

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Watching the President of the United States walk down the line of Ukrainian officials and shake hands with each of them was inspiring enough but then this happened with one of them:

........

Update: I wasn't the only one to think along these lines. This is from David Rothkopf.

Excerpt:

In sending this message, Biden pointedly evoked without mentioning his name yet another American president in a visit to the Eastern edges of Europe: Donald Trump during his 2018 Helsinki meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Biden went to Europe to send Putin a message of American and allied strength. Trump went to grovel before Putin. Biden stood up for American values and our allies. Trump said he trusted Putin more than America’s own intelligence and law enforcement services. Biden embodied America’s strength. Trump illustrated and represented our greatest weakness.

A year after Trump embarrassed the country in Helsinki, he compounded the offense by withholding aid from Ukraine in an attempt to extort Zelensky into doing political dirty work against Biden to help Trump’s reelection efforts. It was an illegal act that ultimately led to Trump’s first impeachment. At the same time and throughout the following year according to reports from Trump’s own top advisors, he was actively advocating to withdraw American troops from Europe.

There is no doubt that had Trump been re-elected, today we would be witnessing an American president standing alongside his Russian counterpart not Zelensky, marking the weakening of the West, not its enduring strength. Perhaps that prospect, the sense that America was weak and divided and did not care about Ukraine, would not lead the fight to preserve democracy, encouraged Putin to undertake his ill-fated, hugely costly, profoundly ill-considered invasion last February. It seems likely it had an effect leading to that disastrous miscalculation.

Noon update:

From Fox Business:

'Bold move': Fox Business host gushes over Biden's 'game-changer' Ukraine visit

Fox Business host Stuart Varney praised President Joe Biden on Monday for a surprise visit to the war zone in Ukraine.

Varney reacted on his Fox Business program just hours after Biden visited Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. 

"This could be a game-changer," Varney announced. "President Biden makes a surprise visit to Ukraine. It was a very well-kept secret. He took a train from the Polish border to Kyiv. And even as air raid sirens were sounding, he was meeting with President Zelensky. And then, walking the streets in a war zone! Highly symbolic."

........

Unrelated to the visit per se I noted that story was headline news on major media websites like The New York Times ... 

... and even the partisan Fox News had it on the opening page so you didn't have to scroll down to see it...

... but the supposedly nonpartisan CNN website had it so far down the page you had to scroll down twice to see it:

Perhaps this is another sign that under new leadership CNN has moved closer to being like Fox News. Consider: 

The changes at CNN look politically motivated. That should concern us all. By Robert Reich.

This article is more than 5 months old