Two funerals and a wedding: The shunning of Donald Trump

Let the shunning continue!!!!


Two funerals and a wedding: The shunning of Donald Trump


http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-trump-pariah-20180827-story.html#
Noah Bierman

Aug 27, 2018 | 4:45 PM


Sen. John McCain's decision to exclude President Trump from his funeral is an extraordinary moment on its own, a posthumous rebuke from an American icon who regarded the presidency as sacred, and believed its current occupant defiles that office.

Yet Trump's exclusion from such high-profile events of mourning and celebration — where American presidents are typically counted on to stand in for an entire nation — is emerging as a pattern over his 19 months in office.


Trump, the outsider who rode the politics of grievance, resentment and insults to election, and into the Oval Office, is becoming for many a pariah president. To be unwelcome at funerals, cultural celebrations and victory parties is another unprecedented aspect of his presidency; aides to recent White House occupants could not recall similar snubs, even for presidents during times of unpopularity or investigations.



In April, Trump was asked to stay away from the funeral of Barbara Bush, wife to one president and mother of another, leaving it to former Presidents Clinton and Obama to serve as national consolers to the Bush family. In December, he opted to skip the president's traditional attendance at the annual Kennedy Center Honors gala after several of the artists being feted threatened a boycott.



The British royal family dispensed with inviting foreign dignitaries to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding in May partly to avoid having to invite Trump, whom Markle had attacked as "divisive" and "misogynistic." Trump canceled the usual White House celebration for the NFL's Super Bowl champions when he learned most of the Philadelphia Eagles players were unwilling to attend. Only months earlier the Golden State Warriors had passed on their own invitation to celebrate their 2017 NBA championship title at the White House.

Trump has used such rejection to his advantage to mobilize his supporters. He complains to them, as he's done at political rallies as recently as this month, that the "elites" will never accept them — the "deplorables" — the term he co-opted from Hillary Clinton to highlight their sense of the disapproval shown by the nation's political and cultural establishment for Trump and his core supporters.

"You ever notice they always call the other side …'the elite?'" Trump said at a Minnesota rally in June. "The elite. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I'm smarter than they are. I'm richer than they are. I became president and they didn't. And I'm representing the greatest, smartest, most loyal, best people on Earth — the deplorables."

The riff drew loud applause, as it often does.

Yet friends and allies say he is also deeply wounded, seeing the snubs as part of a larger effort to delegitimize his presidency.
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President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump at the White House on Monday. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press)