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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump ordered numerous hecklers to "get out" of the crowd during his rally in Louisville, Ky., on March 1. Trump interrupted his stump speech five times to call for the hecklers' removal, at one point telling those in the crowd not to hurt the person being taken away. (Reuters)

The courts keep taking Donald Trump both seriously and literally. And the president's word choices are proving to be a real headache.

A federal judge in Kentucky is the latest to take Trump at his word when he says something controversial. Judge David J. Hale ruled against efforts by Trump's attorneys to throw outa lawsuitaccusing him of inciting violence against protesters at a March 2016 campaign rally in Louisville.

At the rally, Trump repeatedly said get 'em out of here before, according to the protesters, they were shoved and punched by his supporters. Trump's attorneys sought to have the case dismissed on free speech grounds, arguing that he didn't intend for his supporters to use force. But Hale noted that speech inciting violence is not protected by the First Amendment and ruled that there is plenty of evidence thatthe protesters' injuries were a direct and proximate result of Trump's words.

It is plausible that Trumps direction to get 'em out of here advocated the use of force, Hale wrote. It was an order, an instruction, a command.

On March 1, 2016, then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was heard shouting, "out, out," as Trump supporters and protesters clashed at his rally in Louisville, the day after his Super Tuesday victories. (Reuters)

It's merely the latest example of Trump's team arguing that his controversial words shouldn't be taken literally. But though that argument may have held water politically during the 2016 campaign, it has since repeatedly hurt Trump's cause when his words have been at issue in legal proceedings.

Just last week, a federal judge in Hawaii rejected an argument from Trump's attorneys asking that his travel ban executive order be evaluated without considering Trump's and his team's past comments about themotive behind the ban and whether it targets Muslims.

Trump's campaign in 2015 proposed a blanket ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States the news release remains on his campaign website and the courts ruled that this rhetoric was relevant when it halted his first travel ban, despite Trump's team arguing that it wasn't a Muslim ban. In striking down the first travel ban, the courts cited Rudolph W. Giuliani's comments that suggested Trump sought to make his Muslim ban idea legally practical.

So when first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban,'" Giuliani said. He called me up. He said, 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'

When Trump and his team issued a revised travel ban a few weeks ago, the courts again halted it and again cited that past rhetoric.

And in extending that order last week, the federal judge in Hawaii yet again cited the words of Trump's team specifically, top adviser Stephen Miller, who had suggested the second ban would be, practically speaking, the same as the first.

Fundamentally, you're still going to have the same basic policy outcome for the country, but you're going to be responsive to a lot of very technical issues that were brought up by the court, and those willbe addressed, Miller said. But, in terms of protecting the country, those basic policies are still going to be in effect.

Trump and his team will undoubtedly dismiss this latest example as yet another activist judge who is out to get him.But yet again,they are forced into the position of saying that Trump's words shouldn't be taken at face value that he didn't mean what he actually, literally said.

I've argued before that this is a completely unworkable standard when it comes to the media's coverage of Trump. It allows Trump team members to retroactively downgrade whatever theywant to, while leaving the good stuff intact essentially a Get Out of Jail Free cardthey can redeem anytime they want.

Butwhile Trump's supporters have certainly bought into that arrangement, the courts have yet again proved unwilling to grant the president that Get Out of Jail Free card.

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A judge rules Trump may have incited violence and Trump again has his own mouth to blame - Washington Post

PARIS In the early hours of Nov. 9, Marine Le Pen was the first foreign politician to congratulate the new U.S. president-elect.

In the weeks that followed, the leader of Frances far-right National Front did everything she could to tie her presidential campaign to the upset victory of Donald Trump, claiming that she would be the next chapter in a global populist revolt against the establishment.

On the morning after the U.S. election, she took to the stage at her partys headquarters outside Paris, heralding Brexit and Trump as part of an unstoppable worldwide phenomenon democratic choices that bury the old order and steppingstones to building tomorrows world.

But a month before the first round of the French elections, Le Pens tone has markedly changed: no more President Trump at least not for now.

Le Pen, almost certain to qualify for the second and final round of the elections, seems to be keeping her distance from her compadre. The word Trump rarely figures in her speeches and rallies these days, and when she squared off against Frances four other presidential candidates in the campaigns first televised debate March 20, she avoided mentioning him in any policy discussion, despite ample opportunities to do so.

On a broader level, following the defeat of Geert Wilders in the Dutch elections last month, Le Pen and her aides even have shied away from their frequent forecasts of the populist wave soon to cascade through France and carry them to power. If she wins, she now says, it will be because of France and the French not because of a seismic shift in geopolitics and the tail wind it would bring.

Im counting on you to carry out with me the battle for France! she said Thursday, speaking at an agricultural fair in rural Brittany.

We have to put France back in order! she said Monday in a speech in the Vendee.

I will engage France on the path of economic patriotism for our small business, for our farms, she said Sunday in Lille.

The shift, analysts say, mirrors her recent softening of her famously hard-line stances on both the European Union and the euro. Le Pen has campaigned largely by advocating the removal of France from both, but she now says she would hold referendums on each especially after recent opinion polls have reiterated the popularity of the currency among ordinary French voters.

The same now applies to Trump.

Its difficult for Le Pen to use Trump, when she knows that so many French disapprove of him, said Dominique Mosi, a political scientist and co-founder of the Paris-based French Institute for International Relations.

According to opinion polls, nearly 8 in 10 French voters harbor strongly negative views of the U.S. president, who has repeatedly insisted sometimes through the commentaries of a mysterious, unidentified friend named Jim that Paris is no longer Paris and that France is no longer France in the wake of the terrorist attacks that have claimed 230 lives here since the beginning of 2015.

In France, where even fringe politicians are expected to dazzle with wit and erudition, the brash and often unscripted public persona of the U.S. president has become something of a liability for his chief French ally, who was spotted in the basement cafeteria of Trump Tower on an impromptu visit in January.

In France, even if you are of the extreme right, as Marine Le Pen is, you do not have credibility if you do not know how to align a subject, a verb and a complement, said Franois Heisbourg, the chairman of the Geneva Center for Security Policy and a former member of a French presidential commission on national security.

Trump truly wouldnt last 20 minutes in the French political system not because of his ideas, but because of the way he expresses them.

In fact, the substance of Trumps ideas or versions of them does remain popular with a number of French voters, who favor a return of national sovereignty, immigration bans and rapprochement with President Vladimir Putins Russia. These are all pillars of Le Pens platform, and she is expected to garner at least 40percent of the vote, according to the latest polls.

There is also the issue of the anti-Americanism at the heart of the National Front, which for decades has railed against American imperialism abroad and its principal local manifestation the European Union. If Trumps isolationist rhetoric represents a departure from decades of U.S. foreign policy, he is still an American president in the eyes of a party long in favor of France abandoning its ties with the United States for a new relationship with Russia.

If she rarely mentions Trump anymore, Le Pen who met with Putin in Moscow last month has no qualms about reminding her supporters at every turn of her plans to deliver on that Russia promise.

In her recent speech in Lille , days after returning from Russia, she called Putin a real statesman engaged in the same fight against terrorism as France.

The crowd went wild.

Read more

Frances presidential election may determine the future of the European Union

Frances National Front co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen says the battle is already won

Ahead of pivotal European elections, rightist websites grow in influence

Todays coverage from Post correspondents around the world

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Marine Le Pen's tricky alliance with Donald Trump - Washington Post

President Donald Trump while departing the White House on March 15, 2017 in Washington, DC. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images

A federal judge ruled on Friday, March 31, that President Donald Trump incited violence against three protesters at a March 2016 campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Courier-Journal reported that U.S. District Judge David J. Hale ruled that the protesters had established sufficient evidence to proceed with their case against Trump, 70, and rejected the president's attorneys' free speech defense.

The protesters, Henry Brousseau, Kashiya Nwanguma and Molly Shah, claim they were assaulted by the real estate mogul's supporters at the Louisville rally last year after he repeatedly urged the crowd to "get 'em out of here." Trump's lawyers argued that Trump didn't anticipate his supporters would use force.

"It is plausible that Trump's direction to 'get 'em out of here' advocated the use of force," Hale wrote in his 22-page ruling. "Unlike the statements at issue in the cases cited by the Trump Defendants, 'get 'em out of here' is stated in the imperative; it was an order, an instruction, a command."

Hale also wrote in the ruling that the removal of Nwanguma, an African-American woman, was "particularly reckless." The judge declined to remove allegations that Nwanguma was a victim of racial, ethnic and sexist slurs from Trump's supporters.

One of the Trump supporters named in the lawsuit, Matthew Heimbach, is a leader of the white nationalist group Traditional Youth Network. Politico reported that Heimbach sought to remove references to the group, but Hale ruled that Heimbach's statements "toward non-whites and persons who oppose Trump" can stay in the record as the case moves forward.

After last year's incident, Trump called the protesters "bad dudes" who were "really dangerous."

Nwanguma, Shah and Brousseau, who are seeking unspecified punitive and compensatory damages, have accused Heimbach and another man of assault and battery. They have also accused the Trump campaign of incitement to riot, negligence, gross negligence and recklessness.

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Federal Judge Rules Donald Trump Incited Violence at Campaign Rally - Us Weekly

The word factoid has now become a factoid. In an ironic, postmodern twist, most people now confuse the definition of the term, believing that it represents a small piece of statistical data. In the past week alone, writers for TheWashington Post,Houston Press and thePhiladelphia Tribunehave misused the word in the implication that a factoid is something that is true or empirically verifiable. Matt Bruenig, in a recent column, provides a typically maddening example while attempting to analyze demographic information aboutsupporters of Donald Trump: So, in addition, to the above factoid, its also true that most of Trumps voters are not white working class people.

Ignorance of the actual meaning of factoid is a perfect demonstration of Americas contemporary failure to separate the authentic from the artificial, and the demonstrable from the deceptive.

Norman Mailer coinedthe word factoid in 1973 to describe ideas or information perceived by the publicas facts but actually dubious or instruments of obfuscation. Writing in his brilliant and almost psychedelic biography of Marilyn Monroe, Mailer described an earlier book on the Hollywood starlet as a book with facts embellished by factoids, that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.

During an interview shortly after the publication of Marilyn, Mailer surveyed the sociopolitical damage of factoids: A factoid is a fact which has no existence on earth other than whats appeared in the newspaper and then gets repeated for ever after. So people walk around as if it is a blooming lively fact.

As one of the pioneers of literary journalism, Mailer not only inventeda word but deployed it against his critics and as a weapon against the so-believed supremacy of traditional, objective journalism. Marilyn, as many readers pointed out immediately afterits release, is full of exaggerations, innuendos and interpretive license. The difference between Mailer and the dispensers of factoids, as he would explain, is that heembraced and advertised his subjectivity, often calling even his nonfiction books, such as his masterpiece The Executioners Song, true life novels. Mailer described his account of the 1967 anti-war march on the Pentagon, The Armies of the Night, with the subtitle History as Novel, The Novel as History.

Mailer, along with Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion and other new journalists, convincingly argued that celebrating subjectivity and personal narration, while introducing the tactics of fiction in reportage, leads to more honest journalism. Human nature renders even the most seemingly and intentionally neutral reporting as biased and narrow. Too many writers and commentators, suffering under the strain of a small imagination, pollute the atmosphere with factoids. Members of an uninformed and incurious public inhales the pollutant, then proceed to cough it up in every room thattheyenter. Public discourse soon becomes sick.

The injection of factoids into the American ecosystem is not merely the fault of reporters, but often the deliberate assault of politicians who seek to advance a dangerous agenda through the manipulation of a frightened and gullible citizenry. It is possible, for example, Mailer wrote, That Richard Nixon has spoken in nothing but factoids during his public life.

Mailers indictment of the Silent Majority as particularly vulnerable to the theatrics and theories of paranoia is illuminative, given that throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump the large print, abridged, childrens version of Richard Nixon continually referred to his whining constituency as the silent majority. It was one of many Nixonian phrases that Trump resurrected, but even more than the rhetoric, Trump re-engineered Nixons tactic of persuasion through factoid for an electorate with a shortened attention span and enlarged appetite for cruelty and vulgarity.

Crooked Hillary, Trumps nickname for his election opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was nothing more than the weaponization of the factoid that Clinton was irredeemably corrupt. A large percentage of Americans believe that she is guilty of everything from murder to running the State Department as a sophisticated Mafia operation on behalf of her husband. Actual evidence that is, facts instead of factoids verifying the charges is in short supply.

The two main issues of the Trump platform, aside from misogyny and bigotry, were immigration and trade. While Trump has taken the dishonesty to new sewer-level depths, he did not create, but only took advantage of, the parochial and false perceptions about globalization among the American public. Almost entirely built from factoids, national opinion on immigration imagines masses of Mexicans invading the United States, threatening to destroy civil society. At some point the factoid naming illegal immigration as a crisis emerged, and even many Democrats feel its necessary to acknowledge the problem of porous borders before advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. The truth is that illegal immigration is at a low pointand, as many studies have proved, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

Trump, who even worse than Nixonseems incapable of uttering a truthful sentence, launched his campaign with an insane declaration aboutstopping the so-called illegal Mexicans who are rapists bringing crime and drugs.

The factoid abouttrade is that it costs Americans millions of jobs. It is certainly true that trade has resulted in the loss of some jobs, but factual research has demonstrated that this is a mere fraction when compared withthe jobs being eliminated through technological automation. TreasurySecretary Steve Mnuchin recently boasted of the Trump administrations separation from reality, telling an interviewer curious about his response to artificial intelligences inevitable disruption of the job market that it is not even on our radar screen. It is 50-100 years away.

President Trump continually bemoans the sad state of the depleted military, allowing another dangerous factoid to thrive in political debate. The American military is the most highly funded public institution in the United States and possibly the entire world, given that the U.S.budget is roughly the size of the nextseven military budgets combined, according to NationalPriorities.org.

The United States under Donald Trumps influence is one where beliefs and policies form entirely out of factoids (Obamacare is imploding, etc.), and dramatic anecdotes. Rather than dealing with the reality of declining immigration and the lack of criminality among most immigrants, Trump and his sycophants discuss horrific stories of illegal immigrants murdering innocent citizens. The Trump administration governs with a combination of the worst persuasive tactics, creating an amalgamation of the con man, the Madison Avenue adman and the shallow newsman.

Norman Mailer once announced his modest literary goal of making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. For all of his flaws, he understood that culture is an invention and that something like a factoid is not easily erasable. Once it exists, its lifespan is long and ugly.

A revolution in consciousness requires that people rescue art from advertisement, truth from lies and facts from factoids. Getting right the meaning of the word factoid is a good place to start.

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Donald Trump: A bigger factoid president than Nixon? - Salon

Mashable

I made an exact replica of Donald Trump in 'The Sims 3' and a lot of wild things happened Mashable Donald Trump is nothing if not unpredictable. Does he love Paul Ryan? Does he want the Speaker of the House to step down? Will the whole world be a barren wasteland by the time my future children are in 8th grade? The Sims 3, on the other hand, is a ...

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I made an exact replica of Donald Trump in 'The Sims 3' and a lot of wild things happened - Mashable