Thread by @JewhadiTM

Think Trump is 'outrageous?' He's nothing compared to these past presidents  nypost.com/2020/02/29/thi… via @nypost

Unprecedented, unprecedented. Everything is unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

Except it pretty much has. Whenever you see the word “unprecedented” in the media, you should ask yourself: Has this reporter ever read a history book?

Think Trump is more vulgar than anyone who’s held the office before him? In 2016, when Rubio implied he had a small dingle-dongle, Trump responded, “I guarantee you there’s no problem” — and everyone got the vapors.

But Lyndon B. Johnson actually liked to show off his Johnson, peeing in the open air outside the House Office Building. When reporters once asked Johnson why the US was in Vietnam, he pulled out his todger and exclaimed, “This is why!”

You say Trump is an unprecedented threat to civil liberties? Woodrow Wilson’s administration threw people in jail for opposing his policy to join WWI the year after he campaigned on the slogan “He kept us out of war.”

Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned and still behind bars when Wilson left office two years after the end of the war. Imagine Trump throwing, say, Beto O’Rourke in jail for opposing his Iran policy. Wouldn’t that be more outrageous than anything he actually has done?

You say Trump is an unprecedented fascist? Take a peek at the history of the American Protective League, a private organization given semi-official status by Wilson’s AG.

During WWI, the APL was basically a group of brownshirts and thugs who carried official-looking badges that amounted to a license to beat up protesters & search homes without warrants. Wilson’s fascists numbered a 1/4 of a million at their peak & had some 600 offices nationwide.

Trump has undermined the press in an unprecedented way? Trump booted Jim Acosta (temporarily) out of the WH and he may mock The New York Times, but Wilson conducted a sustained campaign of suppression and intimidation against the left-wing press for opposing his war policy.

Andrew Jackson directed government contracts to newspaper publishers who gave him favorable coverage, and John Adams put a newspaper publisher in jail for nine months for “false, scandalous, and malicious writing, against the said President of the United States.”

Trump is guilty of abusing his power in unprecedented ways? If SCOTUS kept overturning Trump, and Trump’s response was to suggest that they had dementia and proposed adding 6 Trump-friendly justices to the bench — wouldn’t that be the most controversial thing he had ever done?

It would not, however, be unprecedented, since that’s exactly what Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed.

If you think Trump is an unprecedented racist but consider FDR the model for all great progressive presidents, remember his internment program, which rounded up 120K people based solely on racial suspicion and threw them into prison camps - and most were American citizens.

As for “indulging racists,” Lyndon B. Johnson can hardly be topped on that score. True, it was a different time, but even at midcentury it wasn’t cool to refer to the Civil Rights Act as “the n—-r bill,” as Johnson repeatedly did.

Johnson once told his black chauffeur, “As long as you are black, and you’re gonna be black till the day you die, no one’s gonna call you by your goddamn name. So no matter what you are called, n—-r, you just let it roll off your back like water.”

(Before that, Wilson resegregated the federal government and hosted a White House screening of the Ku Klux Klan movie “The Birth of a Nation” in 1915.)

Trump sought to use unprecedented force of the federal government against a political opponent? Please. Johnson didn’t just suggest Ukraine launch an investigation, he did something much more direct and outrageous — he actually had the CIA spy on his opponent, Barry Goldwater.

CIA man Howard Hunt — whose actions would later help derail the presidency of Richard Nixon — infiltrated Goldwater campaign headquarters, “collected advance copies of position papers and other material, and handed them over to CIA personnel,”

Trump sought to press his attorney general to serve political ends like never before? Bill Barr can hardly top Robert F. Kennedy when it comes to suspecting the Attorney General is partial in presidential matters.

When John F Kennedy appointed his brother as AG, he said, “I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.” 4 years later, Pres Johnson asked his AG whether he could fire the (independent) chairman of the federal reserve board

You say Trump has tried to influence the sacred, independent Federal Reserve Board for the first time ever? Johnson physically assaulted Martin, pushing him against the wall and screaming, “Martin, my boys are dying in Vietnam, and you won’t print the money I need.”

Trump says random stuff on Twitter that no previous president ever would have dreamed of? During a crisis about the value of the dollar, Johnson publicly suggested Americans be barred from traveling outside the Western Hemisphere in order to keep 💵 from leaving the country.

Johnson also told people they might have to cancel their summer vacations in France to aid his reelection prospects.

Finally, let’s not forget that the administration of Barack Obama himself, who frequently claimed to have presided over a scandal-free era, actually spied on journalists from the Associated Press and The New York Times in order to trace the source of leaks nypost.com/2018/09/08/oba…

In 2004, before he became president, Obama declared, “We don’t like federal agents poking around in our libraries in red states!” But President Obama’s officials did worse than merely “poke around”; they harassed and intimidated legitimate reporters acting in the public interest.

Team Obama may never have called reporters “the enemy of the people” as Trump has, but he treated Fox in much the same way Trump treats CNN, barring its reporters from briefings and announcing: “We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent.”

That’s just a passive-aggressive way of calling one news outfit “the enemy of the people.” Trump may be the first president to regularly insult people in all caps on Twitter, but in substance and temperament he’s very, very precedented.

via @rkylesmith