Are Americans and the media overreacting to Pres. Donald Trump’s “shithole countries” comment? I mean…what’s the big deal?!? Haven’t most of us used an expletive occasionally?
Sure we have. Some of us likely curse even more than Donald Trump does. But it’s not the word itself that’s the problem. It’s not even the fact that Trump is a notorious potty-mouth who says disrespectful things to people all the time. It’s much deeper than that. Who cares if he curses? That’s the LEAST of our problems.
The issue and concern is perfectly explained by a man named Garrett Murphy.
If they were just talking about him using an expletive, I would say yes. But that’s not what the press is talking about, something I would think is obvious.
We’ve had many, MANY foul-mouthed presidents…LBJ was legendary for it…and you don’t see the press talking about Bush calling somebody a shithead or Obama’s expletives on the basketball court.
No, the press is reporting on the disdain and contempt Trump showed to these other nations. He called them “shithole countries”. Each of them, the entire nation. Shitholes.
I see that Trump is already insisting he didn’t say it. That’s great! Right now, off the top of my head, I can think of at least a dozen things Trump has openly said, on video, then insisted he never said them. So, frankly, I automatically assume if he’s reported as saying something and he denies it, that means he said it.
It also doesn’t help his case when he’s already described Mexico as a country that purposely sends their worst citizens to live here, insisting that all US immigrants from Mexico are rapists.
Also doesn’t help his case that, back during the hurricane season, Texas was deserving of aid, Louisiana was deserving of aid, Florida was deserving of aid…but Puerto Rico? No, those people are corrupt, primitive, and undeserving.
This also reflects horribly on Trump because…well…let’s do this:
WOW does a pattern emerge….
Other people commenting on the thread agree
Geoffrey Widdison, a chemical engineer:
Okay, let’s go over this again.
The media, and the public, isn’t reacting to Trump using naughty language, they’re reacting to what he’s saying and what it reveals about him.
This is the exact same dodge that Trump’s supporters used for the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape. The issue wasn’t that he was using salacious language, the issue was that he was using that language to brag about sexually assaulting women, and doing so in such a casual way that it was clear that he thought nothing of it, felt no guilt about it, and, in fact, took a perverse pride in it. That spoke volumes about his attitude towards women, his sense of personal entitlement, and his likely history,
When people act like the issue here is Trump using a bad word, they’re either completely missing the point or willfully trying to redirect the conversation. Most people don’t care about Trump using an expletive. What they care about is Trump using that kind of dismissive and insulting language to refer to entire nations, and, by extension, both the people who live in those countries and the people who’ve emigrated from them. The only reason you would say something like that is if you have such a condescending attitude, and total lack of concern towards them that you see them as inherently less important than you, even subhuman.
And the fact that some percentage of the US population sees nothing wrong with saying what Trump said is, in itself, a really big problem.
And BAM….from John Heim:
Secondly, there is really no such thing as a media over reaction. The media reports the news and people react. it’s the nature of a free press for sensational stories to get more attention than boring ones. Sometimes a news source can manipulate the public by publishing a misleading or incomplete story. This is not that. The salacious nature of this particular story may have made it more sensational but the media didn’t cause that. We did.
Image via Gage Skidmore
