Trump 43: King of Chaos

[GreyhoundFan]

Continued from here:

 

"Trump hailed an El Paso shooting survivor as a hero. But his story was fake, police say."

Spoiler

At a White House ceremony on Monday honoring “heroes” of recent mass shootings, President Trump vividly described the actions of one El Paso man. Chris Grant was “picking out snacks for his kids” inside Walmart, Trump said, when he spotted the shooter and quickly took action.

“Chris grabbed — listen to this — soda bottles and anything else in front of him,” Trump said, “and began hurling them at the gunman, distracting him from the other shoppers and causing the shooter to turn toward Chris and fire at Chris, whereby Chris suffered two very serious gunshot wounds.”

Grant, 50, was wounded in the August shooting, which killed 22 — but the rest of his story doesn’t add up, El Paso police now say. Surveillance video of the massacre showed Grant in “an act of self-preservation, nothing more, nothing less,” police said in a statement on Wednesday.

“It’s just that what he said is not truthful,” El Paso Police Sgt. Enrique Carrillo told KVIA. “We saw his actions ... and it’s not like he described.”

The White House never checked out Grant’s story with El Paso police, Carillo told the Washington Examiner.

Although Grant traveled to D.C., he didn’t get his commendation from Trump, who handed it to Grant’s mother instead. That’s because the Texas man was detained by the Secret Service before the ceremony, ABC News reported, over an open arrest warrant.

In a statement, the Secret Service confirmed “a White House visitor with an arrest warrant was temporarily detained” Monday, although they declined to name the person. El Paso police told ABC News it was Grant, although it’s unclear what charges he faces.

Grant’s family didn’t immediately return a message from The Washington Post late on Wednesday. The White House also has not responded to the El Paso police department’s allegations.

Grant first described his bottle-throwing bravery in an interview with CNN host Chris Cuomo days after the Aug. 3 shooting. Lying in a hospital bed with tubes sprouting from his nose, Grant choked up describing the attack.

“I saw him popping people off,” Grant said. “To deter him, I started just chucking bottles. I just started throwing random bottles at him. I’m not a baseball player, so one went this way and one went that way.”

But then, Grant said, one bottle got close enough to catch the attention of the alleged shooter, later identified by police as Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old allegedly inspired by anti-immigrant hatred.

“That’s when he saw me,” Grant said. “He just — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — just started firing off rounds at me.”

Grant was hit twice near the rib cage, the El Paso Times reported. His family told the Times that he spent two days in a coma before waking up at the hospital.

Grant’s story was widely shared after Cuomo’s piece aired, and he later met Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R). On Monday, he was among five El Paso survivors invited to the White House for an event that also honored six police officers who responded to a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio.

“We welcome 11 extraordinary American heroes,” Trump said to open the ceremony.

Carillo said El Paso police would have shared their concerns about Grant’s story, had they been consulted.

“Nobody bothered to check with us,” Carrillo told the Examiner. “They would have been informed, as I am telling you now, that our detectives reviewed hours of video and his actions did not match his account.”

The police spokesman emphasized Grant hadn’t done anything wrong during the attack — he simply hadn’t tried to distract the shooter as he claimed.

“We are not demeaning his reaction which are of basic human instincts, but they amount to an act of self-preservation and nothing above that,” Carillo told the El Paso Times.

Police did say they were surprised at how widely the video evidence differed from Grant’s telling.

“We’ve never had anything like this happen, never had a victim’s report so skewed from what actually happened,” said El Paso Sgt. Robert Gomez, according to KVIA.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[JMarie]

5 hours ago, AmazonGrace said:

 

This would be the money he would have used to buy Greenland, right?

[fraurosena]

Ah, so it’s the bulbs fault he looks like an Umpa Lumpa. That explains it way better than it being a fake tan.

The effect of those bulbs is really longlasting too, as he also has an orange complexion in broad daylight. 

[smittykins]

Ah, so it’s the light bulbs that make him look orange, not cheap bronzer?

 

Riiiiiiiiiight...

[apple1]

Quote

President Trump: "The light bulb. People said what's with the light bulb. I said here's the story, and I looked at it. The bulb that we're being forced to use. Number one, to me, most importantly, the light's no good. I always look orange. And so do you. The light is the worst."

That spiel (even more than some of his other crap) makes him sound (even more) like he has dementia.

[mamallama]

Oh it's the bulbs!  I was afraid he had wind mill cancer.

[GreyhoundFan]

Baltimore greeted the mango manboy:

 

[Alisamer]

Quote

President Trump: "The light bulb. People said what's with the light bulb. I said here's the story, and I looked at it. The bulb that we're being forced to use. Number one, to me, most importantly, the light's no good. I always look orange. And so do you. The light is the worst."

Is anyone really upset about "being forced to use" a certain kind of light bulb? Don't most people just buy whatever's available? I mean, I do get a little picky about color temperature for some purposes, but other than that, it's whatever's cheap. Items and technology change all the time, people are used to it. I'd be more irritated about being "forced to buy" yet another new game system because new games won't play on the old ones! (Old being a couple years old, not 140 years or so like light bulbs!)

And really, is "Isn't it terrible! We are being forced to save money on our energy bills by buying more energy efficient light bulbs!" really much of a rallying cry?

The only bulbs making Trump look orange are the ones in whatever tanning bed he uses in between spray tans.

Trump and his base are official BEC about anything a democrat might agree with. Kind of like how congress spent much of Obama's tenure stamping their feet like toddlers screaming "don't wanna!" no matter what the issue was.

[JMarie]

5 hours ago, smittykins said:

Ah, so it’s the light bulbs that make him look orange, not cheap bronzer?

 

Riiiiiiiiiight...

So why doesn't anyone else look orange? Maybe it's not the light bulbs....

[fraurosena]

4 hours ago, apple1 said:

That spiel (even more than some of his other crap) makes him sound (even more) like he has dementia.

He didn't stop there. Here he is going on about a national security advisor. 

1. "It's great because it's a lot of fun..."
Being national security advisor is a serious business. It's not supposed to be fun!

2.  "...it's a lot of fun to work for Donald Trump."
First of all, why speak about yourself in the third person? That's just plain weird. Secondly, I think the people working for you will beg to differ about it being fun. Well... maybe you think them laughing around you means they're having fun. That could be it...

3. "Because I make all the decisions... and I have to work." 
You have to work? Sorry, Trump, but we don't call golfing ever other day 'work'. You wouldn't know what work was if it hit you in the head with a golf club.

[JMarie]

"And it's very easy actually to work with me"

If that were true, there wouldn't be record turnover in his administration.

[GreyhoundFan]

"In the weeds: Trump is the most aggressive micromanager in the history of the Oval Office"

Spoiler

President Trump announced at the 2016 Republican convention what sort of executive he would be: “I alone can fix it.” It wasn’t obvious then that this could mean “fixing” a weather forecast with a Sharpie, but in some ways that incident was simply Trump exercising an extreme form of the micromanagement he’d promised.

Other presidents have interfered on small-bore issues that distracted them from the big picture. But Trump has done so on a greater scale, and often with uglier motives — wielding the vast powers of the chief executive to settle grievances, burnish his ego and enrich himself. Never has the Oval Office seen such awesome authority deployed with such manic persistence on minute matters miles beneath it.

The forecast incident offered a tutorial: Trump tweeted misinformation about the path of Hurricane Dorian, found himself contradicted by federal weather officials, then doctored a storm map to support his error and insisted that officials corroborate his mistake. But the episode was hardly the solitary example of micromanagement gone haywire. Trump sent military brass scrambling to keep up after he announced a ban on transgender people serving in the armed forces; pushed the National Park Service to produce photographic evidence inflating the size of his inaugural crowd; threatened individual companies with tax hikes; obsessed over steel slats as the best design for his border wall; criticized the price of an Air Force One upgrade and then selected its paint colors; sought to block business mergers; oversaw the details of a military pageant he’d ordered up for the Fourth of July; inserted himself into the business of the Swedish justice system to try to free a jailed American hip-hop star; directed the military to strip four of its attorneys of their medals because he didn’t like the case they had prosecuted; and allowed Mar-a-Lago club members to send feedback about the Department of Veterans Affairs directly to its managers. And that’s a partial list.

Micromanagement is usually a sign of a presidency in distress, a reflection of an insecure occupant in the Oval Office desperate to control events that can’t be controlled and fearing for his political fate. And it’s true that the trade war with China has gotten away from him and that his approval rating is just 38 percent. But Trump doesn’t micromanage policy details quite the way prior struggling presidents have. Where his predecessors sometimes knew so much that they got obsessed with the details, Trump knows so little that microscopic concerns seem almost to be ends in and of themselves. The result allows him to breed corruption at the highest levels, damages faith in democracy and governance (which redounds to his benefit), tramples norms of presidential conduct and produces incoherent, unsustainable policies.

It would be fruitless to search for a surefire formula for how much presidents should involve themselves in policy decisions and personnel details. Some of Trump’s predecessors were so disengaged that they skirted the law (Ronald Reagan’s hands-off approach opened the door to the Iran-contra scandal) or faltered in a crisis (George W. Bush’s detachment during Hurricane Katrina was a contributing factor in the terrible federal response to the disaster).

Other presidents were so immersed in particulars that they believed they knew more than anyone else. Sometimes, this approach worked. George H.W. Bush was careful to tell administration officials that any triumphal declaration after the Berlin Wall fell would probably weaken Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and was unacceptable — a level of personal foreign policy involvement that was responsible and prudent. Franklin Roosevelt’s obsession with building more and more airplanes as the answer to Nazi militarism was animated by his detailed knowledge of advances in aviation technology and German air strength.

At other times, the value of presidential contributions was less clear. Fearing that the U.S. military would put bombs in places that would trigger Chinese or Russian intervention in the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson identified bridges, airfields, factories and military convoys that he told his commanders were acceptable targets. “If we choose these army barracks 15 miles from Haiphong, how can we be certain of the accuracy of our aim?” Johnson pressed.

Yet presidential micromanagement has also been a mask for something darker. Richard Nixon used his powers to get back at his opponents (particularly in the White House press corps), a method Trump would later find useful. Nixon’s desire to employ “the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies,” as John Dean wrote in a White House memo, spurred the creation of an “enemies list,” with derogatory information that could be used to discredit the president’s critics. (Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., for instance, was cast as an African American rising star with a “known weakness for white females.”)

A focus on minutiae that shouldn’t really take up a president’s energy above all signals ineffective leadership of the vast federal government. Former White House chief speechwriter James Fallows revealed in 1979 that President Jimmy Carter, in some ways the antithesis of Trump, obsessed over details. “Carter came into office determined to set a rational plan for his time, but soon showed in practice that he was still the detail-man used to running his own warehouse, the perfectionist accustomed to thinking that to do a job right you must do it yourself,” Fallows wrote. “He would leave for a weekend at Camp David laden with thick briefing books, would pore over budget tables to check the arithmetic, and, during his first six months in office, would personally review all requests to use the White House tennis court.”

Trump’s scattershot management style checks all the boxes. His peculiar brand of leadership calls attention to his businesses, punishes his perceived enemies and reinforces his notion of himself as a “genius.” And his fascinations often have little to do with policymaking or other presidential functions.

By using his position to tell the world about the virtues of his various resorts, he has not-so-subtly implied that staying at a Trump property (as Vice President Pence did in Ireland this month; as Air Force crews have done in Scotland) is a way to stay in the administration’s good graces. During the recent Group of Seven meeting, Trump said outright that his Doral resort in Florida would be a great venue for hosting the next G-7 summit. Reagan held the meeting in Williamsburg, Va., to highlight America’s colonial heritage. Bill Clinton’s was in Denver to show off the American West and Native American traditions. George W. Bush hosted it in Sea Island, Ga., an upscale resort that could be walled off from post-9/11 threats. These earlier presidents had a purpose beyond self-enrichment (or personal aggrandizement) when selecting the sites.

When grievances are the animating factor behind Trump’s micromanagement, they often concern businesses that have run afoul of him. He orders federal agencies (sometimes explicitly, at other times implicitly, via Twitter) to go after or defend specific companies and industries. Recently, his Justice Department announced an antitrust investigation into four automakers that had reached a deal with California to maintain emissions standards and reject Trump’s desire to lower them. Shortly before taking office, Trump warned Milwaukee-based manufacturer Rexnord and other firms that if they shipped some of their operations overseas, he would tax them as a penalty. (He does not have the legal authority to follow through.) He ordered his adviser Gary Cohn and Justice officials to block a merger of AT&T and Time Warner because he despises CNN, which is owned by Time Warner. (Officials did nothing.)

Some instances of Trump’s meddling are born of his desire to cover up ineptitude, so he can preserve his image of himself as infallibly in charge — of everything. Witness the Alabama hurricane tweets, or his command that the military display tanks and planes for him on and over the Mall. Trump’s self-focus as a “genius” who knows more than anyone around him, and can do it better than the people who are supposed to do it, led to his promotion of the border wall’s raw materials and the Air Force One designs. He has also publicly pressured Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to lower interest rates, citing his own superior knowledge and calling Powell and his Fed colleagues “boneheads.”

But other instances of micromanaging offer Trump a way to demonstrate to his hard-right base that he is delivering on his implicit campaign promise to attack pluralism and racial, ethnic and gender diversity. In July 2017, Trump announced his military transgender ban on Twitter — defying the views of his own military leaders, yet cheering his evangelical supporters. (The decision, former Navy secretary Raymond Mabus Jr. said, was the most “stark and unfounded reversal of policy” in military history.) Trump also contradicted his Customs and Border Protection chief over whether Bahamians displaced by Dorian could seek refuge in the United States. Yes, said Mark Morgan, “this is a humanitarian mission.” But wait, not so fast, said Trump, there could be some “very bad people.”

Trump’s micromanagement covers the trifling and the consequential — and if it feels endless, that’s because it’s core to his leadership.

Finally, his style also leads to policy confusion. On topics from refugees to family separations to Syria, gun safety, tax cuts and tariffs, Trump’s micromanagement yields incoherence and whiplash. His positions are overturned in a flash, and orders are made without vetting and with no chance of being implemented effectively. His travel bans, for example, have faced constant court challenges and pushback in Congress.

Toward the end of his first term, President Barack Obama told journalist Michael Lewis that he was “trying to pare down decisions” because there were too many. He didn’t want to decide what to wear or what to eat. “You need to focus your decision-making energy,” he said, and not be “distracted by trivia.” He wanted only the big decisions to make it to his desk.

Perhaps there is a middle ground that Trump could stake between Obama’s big-picture approach and Carter’s budget arithmetic. Between 7 million and 9 million people make up the federal workforce, depending on how you count. The president would do well to let some of them do their jobs.

 

[fraurosena]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Perhaps there is a middle ground that Trump could stake between Obama’s big-picture approach and Carter’s budget arithmetic. Between 7 million and 9 million people make up the federal workforce, depending on how you count. The president would do well to let some of them do their jobs.

He'd have to appoint people to a lot of the management positions that have been vacant for almost three years now...

[fraurosena]

Epic eye-roll time...

 

Spoiler

Or... does he think Randy Rainbow's song is complimenting him?

 

[smittykins]

That song never gets old. ❤️

 

[JMarie]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Epic eye-roll time...

 

  Hide contents

Or... does he think Randy Rainbow's song is complimenting him?

 

Who is he quoting in that tweet???

 

[fraurosena]

38 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Who is he quoting in that tweet???

 

His own brain-fart?

[thoughtful]

43 minutes ago, JMarie said:

Who is he quoting in that tweet???

Nobody knows.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-twitter-boast-puzzled_n_5d7ce2d7e4b03b5fc88460a2

The headline:

Quote

Donald Trump Randomly Tweets ‘Stable Genius’ Boast And People Are Puzzled

 

[GreyhoundFan]

15 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

Nobody knows.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-twitter-boast-puzzled_n_5d7ce2d7e4b03b5fc88460a2

The headline:

 

Some of the tweets in that article are hilarious.

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, JMarie said:

Who is he quoting in that tweet???

 

Himself, I think. 

Stable genius who blames the lighting for his Oompa-Loompa pigmentation...

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump uttered what many supporters consider blasphemy. Here’s why most will probably forgive him."

Spoiler

President Trump has had trouble with a number of the Ten Commandments.

There’s the adultery. There’s the prohibition against giving false witness, for a man who has made more than 12,000 false or misleading claims during his presidency.

And then there’s this commandment: Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain.

That’s the one the president violated again on Thursday night, when he joked about “goddamn windmills” while talking with House Republicans in Baltimore about energy policy.

For some of the president’s evangelical supporters, Trump’s occasional use of the word “goddamn” is a bridge too far, even for a president whose behavior they’ve grown accustomed to excusing as they fervently support his policies.

“I certainly do not condone taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is a whole commandment dedicated to prohibiting that,” said the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a Texas megachurch leader who is one of Trump’s most outspoken evangelical advisers and supporters. “I think it’s very offensive to use the Lord’s name in vain. I can take just about everything else, except that,” when it comes to off-color language.

Trump has been urged in the past to cease using this particular word. A state senator from West Virginia, Paul Hardesty, told Politico in August that he got calls from three constituents after one Trump rally alone. He wrote a letter to the White House: “Never utter those words again.”

At that rally, the president had told a North Carolina crowd about the Islamic State, “They’ll be hit so goddamn hard,” and had recalled warning a businessman, “If you don’t support me, you’re going to be so goddamn poor.”

This was the same Greenville rally at which Trump’s supporters chanted “send her back” about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a chant Democrats decried as racist. But it was the blasphemy that spurred some West Virginians to call their Trump-supporting state senator to ask him to do something about the president’s language.

That’s not surprising to Timothy Jay, a retired psychology professor who made it his business for 40 years to be the world’s leading expert on swear words.

“I’ve done surveys where I ask people: What’s the most offensive word?” Jay said. “Some [religious] women would say the word ‘f---,’ but they wouldn’t say ‘Jesus Christ.’ Some of my interviewees have said, ‘We could say ‘f---’ and ‘s---’ at home, but we weren’t allowed to use profane language.”

Profanity, Jay notes, is not the same as obscenity. An obscenity is a crude term for a bodily function. Profanity demeans something from the sacred realm — for example, misusing the words ‘hell’ or ‘damn,’ which in some Christian interpretations ought to be reserved for talking only about God’s role in judging the dead.

Blasphemy is a specific type of profanity — an insult to God.

American culture tends to consider obscenities to be more taboo. An f-bomb sounds much more crude to most listeners than “hell” or “goddamn” or an exclamation of “Jesus Christ.”

“Theologically, that’s backwards,” said Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor at Liberty University, the conservative evangelical school in Virginia. “You can look at any culture and see what it values by its swear words. Whatever it is that it values most, those are the things that will have words related to them that are verboten.”

In other words, she said, Christians ought to hold the sacred in much higher esteem than the body or sex acts — and thus to care much more about words that demean the sacred. When she teaches her students at Liberty about the plays “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Death of a Salesman,” shows replete with sexual expressions and coarse arguments, she lectures: “As Christians, the most offensive thing probably should be Willy Loman’s taking of the Lord’s name in vain throughout the play.”

She noted that Christian squeamishness about vulgar bodily terms arises out of the Victorian era, not the early church, and can change with the times. “Martin Luther had quite a mouth,” she said.

Jeffress agreed that profanity is more problematic than other crass language. Asked to compare Trump’s use of “goddamn” to his infamous reference to certain nations as “shithole countries” — a statement which several evangelical pastors did condemn — Jeffress said the worse offense was the profanity.

“I would never condone taking the Lord’s name in vain,” he said. “When it comes to other types of foul language, that’s a concern, but it’s certainly not the major concern when we’re in a virtual battle for the soul of the nation.”

Language aside, Trump remains highly popular among evangelical voters. Almost 70 percent of white evangelicals told Pew Research Center this year that they approve of his performance in office. Most evangelicals support him for appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, restricting abortion access and LGBT rights, favoring Israel and other policy priorities.

Jeffress said he hears from pastors and congregants in conservative parts of the country who are concerned about Trump’s language, including the insults he uses on Twitter. But the president is not losing their votes, the evangelical leader said.

“He enjoys a tremendous amount of support from people of faith not because of his language, but in spite of his language,” Jeffress said. “Most Americans did not oppose the salty language of General Patton. All they cared about was that he led us to victory. Many Christians believe we are in a war … for the culture, a war for the soul of America.”

In his speech in Baltimore on Thursday, Trump came out swinging against many of his favorite targets, including his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and several of his prospective 2020 rivals, for whom he engaged in another of his favorite rhetorical moves: name-calling. He referred to “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Bernie” and “Pocahontas.”

He arrived at the profanity when he turned to criticizing wind power, with an incorrect description of the technology.

“The energy is intermittent. If you happen to be watching the Democrat debate and the wind isn’t blowing, you’re not going to see the debate. ‘Charlie, what the hell happened to this debate?’ He says, ‘Darling, the wind isn’t blowing. The goddamn windmill stopped,’” Trump said to the Republican congressmen, who laughed.

Wind power does not stop powering appliances when the wind stops blowing.

Trump is not alone in the 2020 field in employing strong language once considered unfit for polite discussion. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) have all said “damn” in Democratic debates. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Andrew Yang and Julián Castro have all used obscenities in debates, interviews or tweets.

Former congressman Beto O’Rourke has become so well-known for cursing on the campaign trail that his campaign sells official $30 T-shirts that use the words “hell” and “f*cked up.”

But Jay, the expert who has published decades of research studies on swearing, says that Democrats remain deeply cautious about one taboo when it comes to language: terms that are offensive on the basis of gender or race.

That’s another taboo that Trump has long ago crossed.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

The hilarious Clay Jones wrote a great essay about the mango moron. He included lots of new nicknames I had not heard previously. "Oompa Loompa Deep State"

Quote

For God’s sake, what is it now?

Trump is orange. He’s been orange for a very long time. There have been multiple articles about his orangeness with various theories offered to explain why his face looks like a baboon’s ass. The number of scholars who have offered opinions to explain the phenomenon of his hue is only rivaled by those trying to figure out just what the hell that is sitting on his head. Is it a toupe, ridiculous combover, truffle, or an unfortunate beaver who spent his entire life beaver sinning and his punishment in death is to sit bleached on top of Trump’s head?

Trump’s orange skin is doesn’t get much attention from media pundits, but it does inspire some of the nicknames he’s acquired over the past few years. Right now you’re thinking, a dignified and mature journalist would never post a list of hostile and petty nicknames for Donald Trump based upon his skin tone.

So here they are: Agent Orange, Angry Creamsicle, Boiled Ham in a Wig, Bribe of Chuck, Butternut Squash, Cheddar Boy, Cheeto Benito, Cheeto Mussolini, Cheeto Fuhrer, Cheeto Jesus, Cheeto-Dusted Bloviator, Cheeto-in-Chief, Cheez Doodle, Cheez Wiz, Cinnamon Hitler, Cheeto Christ Stupid Czar, Comrade Cheetolino, Corn Husk Doll Cursed by a Witch, Decomposing Jack O’ Lantern, Dehydrated Orange Peel, Fascist Loofa-Faced Shit-Gibbon, Fuckface von Clownstick, Gossamer-Skinned Bully, John Boehner’s Tanning Partner in Crime, Killer Klown from Outer Space, King of the Oompa Loompas, Orange Anus, Orange Back Gorilla, Pile of Old Garbage Covered in Vodka Sauce, Ronald McDonald Trump-Bozo, Sack of Gilded Lunchmeat, Screaming Carrot Demon, Tan Dump Lord, Tangerine Tornado, Tangerine-Tinted Trash-Can Fire, The Human Corncob, Xenophobic Sweet Potato, The Angry Cheeto, Captain Crunch, Deeply Disturbed Fuzzy Orange Goofball, Don of Orange, Great Orange Hairball of Fear, The Human Tanning Bed Warning Label, Last of the Mango Mohawkans, Orange Bozo, Orange Caligula, Orange Clown, Orange-Hued Self-Immolator, Orange Man, The Orange Messiah, Orange Moron, Orange Omen of Doom, Orange Toilet Bowl Crud Brought to Life as a Genital-Grabbing Golem, Orange-Tufted Imbecile Intent on Armageddon, Orange-Tufted Asshole, OranguTAN, President Goldman Sucks, Pudgy McTrumpcake, Putin’s Papaya-Flavored Pawn, Queer Orangutan, The Talking Yam, Thin-Skinned Orange Peel, Orange Dildo, and Orange-Flavored Shitgibbon.

Why is his skin orange? So, so very orange. Is it a spray tan? Does he use a tanning bed? Is it all clown makeup? Is it an allergic reaction to Adderall? Are tanning goggles the explanation as to why he has the reverse-raccoon look happening? His sycophants in the White House tried to explain that he’s so orange because of good genes. No. An orange is orange because of good genes. Trump has boasted about his genes in the past, comparing himself to a racehorse. If Trump was a racehorse, he’d either be glue or dog food by now. Also, that’d be one orange, racist racehorse.

But finally, we have an explanation and with it, Trump’s admittance that he “looks” orange. He didn’t admit he is orange.

Because Republicans don’t have enough shit to get upset over, they often make stuff up or recycle past outrages. Several years ago, they were upset that the government put restrictions on light bulbs. The new light bulbs are more expensive, but better for the environment and last longer. A lot longer. They’re really better light bulbs. Conservatives got upset for a while until new fake outrages came along, like Obama put mustard on a burger, and then at some point, they realized the new energy-efficient light bulbs are actually better than the old incandescent bulbs, so they shut up about it. But now, Donald Trump has brought the old gripe back.

The Trump administration is easing restrictions on the old, nasty, wasteful incandescent bulbs, which is just shy better than lighting your home with a burning garbage can in the living room. I thought it was just another move to erase Obama’s legacy, but as it turns out, it’s even more personal than that.

While speaking to Republican House members in Baltimore Thursday, Trump said, “The bulb that we’re being forced to use – No. 1, to me, most importantly, the light’s no good. I always look orange. And so do you.” No, I don’t look orange. In fact, I don’t think any of us looks orange. Even Trump’s kid’s, they might look like entitled trust-fund baby assholes, but they don’t look orange. But hey, Trump has admitted he “looks” orange. The next step is for him to admit he IS orange.

This may not be Trump lying as much as it’s him refusing to accept reality. He lies about his weight and height, but he honestly may not realize just how ridiculous he looks. He may not see it in mirrors, but I’m sure he notices in pictures. He’s decided the explanation is that LED light bulbs are to blame. He’s already made an admiral doctor lie about his weight and height so the next step will be convincing government scientists that liberal light bulbs make him look orange. It’ll be Sharpiegate all over again.

The truth is, the light bulbs don’t make Trump look orange. He looks orange when he’s outside, whether it’s overcast, raining, or sunny. And there’s also the fact he’s been orange for at least two decades. If it’s his “good genes” that are making him orange, they didn’t kick in until the year 2000.

Trump is a ridiculous human being. And even though it sounds petty, I wouldn’t have voted for him based on his hair alone. Anyone who willfully makes himself look like shouldn’t be trusted to select a cable provider less enough possess codes to nuclear weapons.

Trump makes himself orange. Light bulbs don’t make him orange anymore than they make him a narcissistic racist. And before he tries, no. Paper straws aren’t the reason he sucks.

 

[fraurosena]

Asks "Who the hell is Joy-Ann Reid?" ... and promptly proceeds to show he knows full well who she is. 

And now I've got to be patient until MSNBC posts today's show so I can see why she's triggered him. 

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

And now I've got to be patient until MSNBC posts today's show so I can see why she's triggered him. 

Probably this:

Of course, it could be the story about Jerry Fallwell Jr.