Trump 48: Nobody Likes Me

[GreyhoundFan]

Boo-hoo, Dr. Fauci is more popular...

 

Continued from here:

 

[fraurosena]

Love the thread title, @GreyhoundFan!

[WiseGirl]

Some great replies to 45's Tweet about elections.

Spoiler

And my personal favorite

Edited July 31, 2020 by WiseGirl

[thoughtful]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Love the thread title, @GreyhoundFan!

Me, too, but if it makes anybody think of the childhood taunt, please put all pictures of worms under spoilers. :::shudder:::

 

[GreyhoundFan]

3 minutes ago, thoughtful said:

Me, too, but if it makes anybody think of the childhood taunt, please put all pictures of worms under spoilers. :::shudder:::

 

Yeah, I feel the same.

[GreyhoundFan]

I wasn't sure where to share this, but it's a good read from Joe Scarborough: "What a tremendous burden it must be for you to still be defending Donald Trump"

Spoiler

What a tremendous burden it must be for you to still be defending President Trump. You have called yourself a constitutional conservative for decades, but now you sit silently as the president pushes to move this year’s election because he might lose. Even some Republican senators are speaking up. Why aren’t you?

Trump remembers how you ran interference for him when he claimed unlimited powers under Article II of the Constitution, so he thinks you will stay quiet. Remember your silence after Charlottesville? You eventually mustered the nerve to claim Trump never preached moral equivalence between torch-carrying Nazis and protesters. How unthoughtful it was of David Duke to expose you by praising the president’s putrid performance and thanking Trump for his “honesty and courage to tell the truth.” The former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard even bragged to reporters that Charlottesville represented a “turning point” for white nationalism. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump,” Duke proclaimed. “That’s why we voted for [him].”

Ouch. That one had to sting, but you kept on defending Donald.

If you had a political soul after that shameful stunt, the Cold Warrior in you would have been as sickened by Trump’s retreat from Germany as U.S. strategists were over his ceding of Syria to Vladimir Putin, handing Moscow a foothold in the Middle East for the first time since 1973. No country was a closer ally during the Cold War than West Germany, and no nation is more critical to Europe’s future now than a unified Germany. Undermining the U.S.-German alliance because of an ignorant misunderstanding of NATO’s dues structure undermines the historic work that Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush completed throughout the Cold War’s final years.

But there you are, silently supporting a demagogue who sits by while intelligence suggests Russia’s leader put bounties on the heads of young American troops. Trump instead plays Putin’s apologist by declaring the United States equally guilty.

“Well, we supplied weapons when they were fighting Russia, too,” Trump said of our efforts to liberate Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion some 40 years ago.

Did any part of you cringe when Trump leaned once again on the crutch of moral equivalency, ignoring the glaring fact that the U.S.S.R. was America’s sworn enemy during our “twilight struggle” against communism? Maybe not. Maybe Trump has you figured out and knows what a frightened political soul you are, and remembers that you remained mute when he defended Putin’s killing of journalists and political rivals almost five years ago. “Our country does plenty of killing also,” candidate Trump told me when I repeatedly pressed him on “Morning Joe” to criticize Putin’s murderous ways. He wouldn’t then when the victims were Russian reporters, and he won’t now when the targets are young American heroes in uniform.

I know Trump’s devotion to Putin deeply disturbs you, but somehow you swallow that bile and keep running cover for them both. How hard it must have been to keep all of that down when Trump’s foreign policy adviser, national security adviser, campaign chairman, deputy campaign chairman, personal lawyer, political consultant and attorney general were all busted for lying to federal investigators or Congress about their contacts with Russians. But you still kept your head down and marched in a single formation behind Trump.

When it was revealed that Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign was “sweeping and systematic,” you shrugged your shoulders. You later learned that Russian nationals with connections to the Kremlin promised Trump’s family dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that they were excited to learn it was part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” You remained motionless, numb to it all, when federal investigators later revealed that Russia’s GRU began hacking Clinton-related email accounts hours after Trump announced this: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

By this time, you began mindlessly regurgitating the former reality TV host’s propaganda about the “Russian hoax,” and hoped Americans would be stupid enough to ignore the mountains of damning evidence against Trump. Your singular focus turned to the Steele dossier’s most lurid tales, and you believed then, and now, that Christopher Steele’s fantastical claims could erase a multitude of Trump’s sins. You repeated the lies of Attorney General William P. Barr and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey O. Graham when they falsely claimed the FBI’s investigation began with Steele’s dossier. And you kept repeating this idiotic defense even after it became painfully evident that Trump’s team welcomed Russia’s interference in American democracy and then tried to cover it up. You still refuse to criticize the Trump team’s use of material stolen by Russia during the last month of the campaign, just like you and your president continue turning a blind eye to any Russian bounties.

None dare call it treason, but perhaps one day they will.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump’s ‘Delay the Election’ tweet checks all 8 rules for fascist propaganda"

Spoiler

Just before 9 this morning, President Trump wrote this and pinned it to the top of his Twitter feed: “With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???”

With this tweet, the president both revives fascist propaganda and exploits a new age of Internet post-truth: He follows a trail blazed by fascists, but adds a twist that is his own.

A fascist guide to commentary on elections would have eight parts: contradict yourself to test the faith of your followers; tell a big lie to draw attention from basic realities; manufacture a crisis; designate enemies; make an appeal to pride and humiliation; express hostility to voting; cast doubt on democratic procedures; and aim for personal power.

Trump achieves all eight with admirable concision in this one tweet. He decries voting by mail, but praises absentee ballots, which are nothing else but voting by mail. The blatant contradiction, the test of faith for the true believer, is there right at the beginning, a gatekeeper for the rest of the tweet.

The big lie, in all capitals, is that the coming elections will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent in history. Historically speaking, the greatest source of inaccuracy and fraud in our elections is the suppression of African American votes, which is bad now but has been much worse. Of course, this is not at all what Trump means, and that is the point of a big lie: to replace a familiar reality with a nonexistent problem.

Tyrants in general and fascists in particular like to manufacture crises. Something that is true but of limited significance is transformed into an emergency that requires breaking all the rules. So, true, it does take time to count ballots, and some states do it better than others. But the claim that this requires an extraordinary step such as delaying an election is a manufactured crisis.

The cleverness of the manufactured crisis is that it plays out at the level of emotions rather than facts. If people accept it, they put their emotions in the service of the tyrant. The next move, made in the next sentence of the tweet, is to invoke humiliation. The “great embarrassment” has not happened and will not happen, but if we choose to feel humiliated, we then look for the wrongdoer.

This has been the siren song of tyrants: Some shady enemy has done us wrong, and we must restore our honor. In this tweet, the enemy is implicit: Someone has made voting improper, unsafe and insecure. From the context, it is clear that what is meant is that Democrats have tried to make voting easier. In fact, paper ballots are the most proper, safe and secure way to vote.

The basic substance of the message, then, is a call to resist voting and question democratic procedures. In that way, the final three traditional fascist objectives are achieved. Citizens are supposed to forget about their individual right to cast a ballot and doubt the familiar procedures of democratic elections, while the president simply remains (as he imagines it) in power.

So we circle back to the grand contradiction. The president claims to defend voting but does so by expressing the desire to have elections indefinitely delayed. He blames others for the risks we face and the problems, although it is his own White House and his Republican allies in the Senate who have blocked legislation that would extend voting at home and block intervention from abroad. He calls for dramatic action to resolve a nonexistent problem and suggests a power he does not actually have.

This is where the differences with historical fascists begin. Fascists believed in responsibility: a terrible responsibility, as they understood it — the need to destroy an old decadent world in the name of a new racial paradise, to drown democracy in blood, to fight wars for territory abroad, to set the world on fire. Trump has no such visions and no sense of responsibility, terrible or otherwise. He simply prefers to stay in power and have a comfortable life. He expresses just enough fascism to make this possible.

Hence the “just asking” part of the tweet, at the end, expressed as “???.” Whenever anyone asks about a tweet’s authoritarian character, the response of Trump and his minders will be that he was just posing a question. This makes it harder for his critics to pin him down, but also harder for his allies to take him seriously. No one goes to the wall for three question marks.

 

[47of74]

Fuckopotomus von #BunkerBitch was caught on tape

Quote

President Donald Trump dismissed the “bullshit” of the effects of cancel culture as he negotiated with a senator to preserve the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at military installations, according to a recording of a phone conversation given to The New York Times.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) put Trump on speakerphone at an Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C., as the men talked politics Wednesday night. The conversation was overheard and recorded by “someone in the room,” the Times reported Thursday.

“All right, my friend,” said Trump. “Are you doing good? We’re going to keep the name of Robert E. Lee?” 

Inhofe responded on the tape: “Just trust me. I’ll make it happen.”

I'm trying to decide if that fucking idiot Sen. James Inhofe did this on purpose to make fuck face look bad and save his own electoral hide, or if he's so fucking stupid to do that in public.

[church_of_dog]

Two things.

First, did Trump just show a flaw in his fake armor by declaring Absentee Ballots Good, while Mail-In Ballots Bad?

I was a pollworker for ten years, though admittedly all at one precinct, so I don't claim to know if rules differ in other states, but as far as I know the only difference between "mail-in" and "absentee" voting, if indeed any, is whether the setting is just for one election vs long-term.  I'm pretty sure the ballot itself, and the voting process, including the priority with which is it counted, is the same for both.  I'm pretty sure that, looking at the ballot itself, there is no way to distinguish between the two.

So maybe someone could tell him that this year's push for pandemic-safe voting is to use Absentee Ballots, which he has declared Good?

??‍♀️

 

Second thing.  What worries me about his attempt to delay the election, law notwithstanding, is that there has been a fundamental change in our culture that has ripened during the last few years.

It's not a matter of differing values, differing beliefs about the proper role of government, as it used to be with a politically divided country.

No, what we have now is a culture divided on WHAT CONSTITUTES REALITY.  (sorry for shouting).

T's habit of saying things as if they are reality when they are clearly not, and his followers' habit of repeating these claims and then spreading around false "evidence" to back them, is different from anything we've faced in the past, as far as I can tell.

The growth of the internet beyond its infancy has brewed a situation where all claims appear equally legitimate, and people give any ol' wacko website as much gravitas as bona fide authorities.

And what's scary to me is that, with enough people lined up behind it, a false claim's [mock] gravitas becomes indistiguishable from bona fide authority to all but first-hand researchers.  Please read this paragraph in imaginary bold and italic.  I'm tempted to write it twice.

So -- the scenario that worries me even though the law is clear that the president doesn't have the singular power to delay an election, is that if he has enough sycophantic governors behind him, all he has to do is claim he DOES have that authority, and even just a few states believing him and declining to manifest the election on the correct day in their state, would cause the kind of mess into which true trouble can step.

 

I do take comfort in the law that states what is to happen in case the election IS delayed, and in no case does it permit the incumbent to simply remain in office.  I only hope he can't bamboozle a high enough proportion of Congress (and the military, as the presumed enforcement arm if it were to come to that) to believe otherwise.

Edited July 31, 2020 by church_of_dog

[mamallama]

I believe in some states you need to show that you cannot get back to your home state to vote.  For example, college students must supply tuition bills and service members can get ballots but if your work hours conflict you cannot.

[Alisamer]

48 minutes ago, mamallama said:

I believe in some states you need to show that you cannot get back to your home state to vote.  For example, college students must supply tuition bills and service members can get ballots but if your work hours conflict you cannot.

Yes - the difference is that in some states it is very difficult to vote any day other than Election Day, and you have to prove a reason to qualify for an absentee ballot.

I live in NC, and am able to vote early just by showing up at the polling place. We have a good amount of early voting days, even for primaries, and I don't even have to show up at a specific place - I've never voted at the designated spot that is my "official" place, I go to another (larger) place in the same county. Before the primary in the spring I happened to have a few extra minutes and dropped by on a whim to vote - I walked right in, no line, and was done pretty quickly.

However, my friends who live in South Carolina have a much harder time. For the primary in the spring, they had to delay coming on our shared vacation (JUST before the worst of the virus hit!) by a day so they could go vote. 

 

In November, no matter how difficult they try to make it, I'm putting on a mask and going to vote. I'll take a vacation day if I have to. And if I get sick from it, at least I'll have gotten my vote in first.

[fraurosena]

Still pathetically obsessed with crowd sizes, I see.

 

[fraurosena]

The attempt to ban TikTok is so ridiculously dumb...

 

[WiseGirl]

3 hours ago, fraurosena said:

The attempt to ban TikTok is so ridiculously dumb...

Yes. Clearly he has no clue that when you tell teens (and some older people) not to do something they will find a way. Perhaps some older person will get TikTok just because they know it will irritate 45.

[WiseGirl]

This part concerns me "Far from a mere difference of "personality," the examples of "nobody liking" Trump this week suggested a President actively isolating himself in his own bubble of conspiracy theories and questionable science, with fewer and fewer people willing to step inside to join him."

"'Nobody likes me,' Trump complains, as even his allies fade" https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/01/politics/donald-trump-allies-election/index.html

[GreyhoundFan]

Yet they still support him...

 

[fraurosena]

 Of course we believe you.  

 

[JMarie]

20 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Yet they still support him...

 

How are any contributions going to be matched 600 PERCENT???

[fraurosena]

Owned.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

41 minutes ago, JMarie said:

How are any contributions going to be matched 600 PERCENT???

Back in the day, I worked at a public broadcasting station. Sometimes high level donors or corporations would 100% match pledges during a specific show or timeframe. If six different people or companies were matching pledges, that would be a 600% match. Of course, with the corrupt twitler campaign, I assume it is all lies.

[Dandruff]

29 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Back in the day, I worked at a public broadcasting station. Sometimes high level donors or corporations would 100% match pledges during a specific show or timeframe. If six different people or companies were matching pledges, that would be a 600% match. Of course, with the corrupt twitler campaign, I assume it is all lies.

The term "funny money" comes to mind.

Perhaps a workaround for campaign contribution limits?

[fraurosena]

The only thing he knows is "make people afraid of the other candidate, then they'll choose me". It worked with Hillary.

He's getting rather desperate this time around though.

 

[Dandruff]

26 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

The only thing he knows is "make people afraid of the other candidate, then they'll choose me". It worked with Hillary.

He's getting rather desperate this time around though.

 

Where is the source for this?

[formergothardite]

3 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Where is the source for this?

It seems to be a joke. But the scary thing is that Trump is so out there it is hard to tell what are parody quotes and what are real quotes. 

[fraurosena]

How anyone can listen to this rant and believe he's perfectly sane is beyond me.