President Rejected Trump 50: Patient Zero of the White House Covid Cluster

[GreyhoundFan]

31 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

Riddle me this FJ peeps:

Trump is full speed ahead to stop the vote count and cast doubt on the numbers. Is he going to do this for all states? Even the ones where he is losing? If Biden is flattening him in Wisconsin for example is he still going to claim votes can’t be counted after Election Day?

 

I imagine he will do this in every state, whether he wins or loses. Remember, he thinks that if all the "illegal aliens" didn't vote for Hillary, he would have won CA and the US popular vote in 2016. He wants to sow as much confusion as possible.

[fraurosena]

23 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I imagine he will do this in every state, whether he wins or loses. Remember, he thinks that if all the "illegal aliens" didn't vote for Hillary, he would have won CA and the US popular vote in 2016. He wants to sow as much confusion as possible.

Plus he needs an excuse for his inevitable loss. 

[mamallama]

I wonder if we can pick up some used Sore/Loserman signs from the 2000 election.

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this stuff up.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good explanation of the GDP smoke and mirrors Twitler is crowing about:

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Op-ed on the NYT. Sad, but many foreigners looking at the US feel exactly like this.

Spoiler

How Will I Ever Look at America the Same Way Again?

It’s always assumed that those of us who felt certain of Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 were putting too much trust in polls.

I was putting too much trust in Americans.

I’d seen us err. I’d watched us stray. Still I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump.

We had episodes of ugliness, but this? No way. We were better than Trump.

Except, it turned out, we weren’t.

Never mind that the Russians gave him a boost. Or that he lost the popular vote. Some 46 percent of the Americans who cast ballots for president in 2016 picked him, and as he moved into the White House and proceeded to soil it, most of those Americans stood by him solidly enough that Republicans in Congress didn’t dare to cross him and in fact went to great, conscience-immolating lengths to prop him up. These lawmakers weren’t swooning for a demagogue. They were reading the populace.

And it was a populace I didn’t recognize, or at least didn’t want to.

What has Trump’s presidency taken from us? I’m reasonably sure that many Americans feel the same loss that I do, and I’m struggling to assign just one word to it.

Innocence? Optimism? Faith? Go to the place on the Venn diagram where those states of mind overlap. That’s the piece of me now missing when I look at this beloved country of mine.

Trump snuffed out my confidence, flickering but real, that we could go only so low and forgive only so much. With him we went lower — or at least a damningly large percentage of us did. In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions.

He played Russian roulette with Americans’ lives. He played Russian roulette with his own aides’ lives. In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much.

Polls from mid-October showed that about 44 percent of voters approved of Trump’s job performance — and this was after he’d concealed aspects of his coronavirus infection from the public, shrugged off the larger meaning of it, established the White House as its own superspreader environment and cavalierly marched on.

I’m not forgetting pre-Trump American history. I’m not erasing hundreds of years of slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, the many kinds of discrimination that have flourished in my own lifetime, all the elections in which we Americans made stupid choices and all the presidents who did “un-American” things. We’re a grossly imperfect country, our behavior at frequent odds with our ideals.

But for every abomination, I could name a moment of grace. For many of our sins, stabs at atonement. We demonstrated a yearning to correct our mistakes and, I think, a tropism toward goodness. On balance we were open, generous. When I traveled abroad, people from other countries routinely complimented Americans for that. They experienced us as arrogant, but also as special.

Now they just pity us.

How much of this can we pin on Trump? Not as much as we try to. And oh, how we’ve tried. This obsession of the news media and his detractors with every last eccentricity and inanity isn’t just about keeping a complete record, I’ve come to realize. It’s also a deflection, an evasion: If he gets the whole of the stage, then Americans’ complicity and collaboration are shoved into the wings.

And the freakier we make him out to be, the less emblematic he is. The more he becomes a random, isolated event. We emphasized what a vanquishable opponent Hillary Clinton was because that diminished the significance of the vanquishing and the vanquisher. We spoke of a perfect storm of circumstances that led to his election as a way of disowning the weather.

We cheered on Robert Mueller’s investigation not just because it might hold Trump and his wretched accomplices to account but also because it might explain him away, proving that he reached the White House by cheating, not because he was what nearly half of the country decided that they wanted.

We tried to make him a one-and-done one-off. But deep into his presidency, when his execrable character had been fully exposed, his Fox News cheerleaders continued to draw huge audiences for their sycophantic panegyrics.

Trump himself continued to attract big crowds to his rallies, like the one in Greenville, N.C., in July 2019, when he pressed his attack on four Democratic congresswomen of color, including Representative Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia. Egged on by him, his audience chanted: “Send her back! Send her back!” He stopped speaking to give those words room, and he soaked them in.

Or what about the recent rally in Muskegon, Mich., where he freshly assailed the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, despite the fact that his obsessive denunciations of her had possibly been a factor in an alleged plot by 14 men to kidnap her? “Lock her up!” many of the attendees bellowed, to Trump’s obvious amusement.

Again, how has his approval rating not fallen to negative integers?

I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him, as my Times colleague Farah Stockman explained especially well in a recent editorial that was set in America’s disheartened heartland. “Even false hope,” she noted, “is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.”

The headline on the article was “Why They Loved Him.” But why haven’t more of them stopped loving him? And how did so many Americans beyond that group fall so hard for him, thrilling to his recklessness, applauding his divisiveness, indulging his unscrupulousness? He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain.

He tapped into more conspiratorialism, too. And I do mean “tapped.” Trump didn’t draw out anything that wasn’t already there, burbling beneath the surface.

He didn’t sire white supremacists. He didn’t script the dark fantasies of QAnon. He didn’t create all the Americans who rebelled against protective masks and mocked those who wore them, a selfish mind-set that helps explain our tragic lot. It just flourished under him.

And it will almost certainly survive him. The foul spirit of these past five years — I’m including his hateful campaign — has been both pervasive and strangely proud. That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes it so chilling.

I could be overreacting. Maybe, just ahead, there will be moments of grace, enough of them to redeem us. Maybe I’ll look up on or after Nov. 3 and see that Biden has won North Carolina, has won Michigan, has won every closely contested state and the presidency in a landslide. Maybe I’ll have to eat my words.

Please, my fellow Americans, feed me my words. I’d relish that meal.

 

[Becky]

1 hour ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Op-ed on the NYT. Sad, but many foreigners looking at the US feel exactly like this.

  Reveal hidden contents

How Will I Ever Look at America the Same Way Again?

It’s always assumed that those of us who felt certain of Hillary Clinton’s victory in 2016 were putting too much trust in polls.

I was putting too much trust in Americans.

I’d seen us err. I’d watched us stray. Still I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump.

We had episodes of ugliness, but this? No way. We were better than Trump.

Except, it turned out, we weren’t.

Never mind that the Russians gave him a boost. Or that he lost the popular vote. Some 46 percent of the Americans who cast ballots for president in 2016 picked him, and as he moved into the White House and proceeded to soil it, most of those Americans stood by him solidly enough that Republicans in Congress didn’t dare to cross him and in fact went to great, conscience-immolating lengths to prop him up. These lawmakers weren’t swooning for a demagogue. They were reading the populace.

And it was a populace I didn’t recognize, or at least didn’t want to.

What has Trump’s presidency taken from us? I’m reasonably sure that many Americans feel the same loss that I do, and I’m struggling to assign just one word to it.

Innocence? Optimism? Faith? Go to the place on the Venn diagram where those states of mind overlap. That’s the piece of me now missing when I look at this beloved country of mine.

Trump snuffed out my confidence, flickering but real, that we could go only so low and forgive only so much. With him we went lower — or at least a damningly large percentage of us did. In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions.

He played Russian roulette with Americans’ lives. He played Russian roulette with his own aides’ lives. In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much.

Polls from mid-October showed that about 44 percent of voters approved of Trump’s job performance — and this was after he’d concealed aspects of his coronavirus infection from the public, shrugged off the larger meaning of it, established the White House as its own superspreader environment and cavalierly marched on.

I’m not forgetting pre-Trump American history. I’m not erasing hundreds of years of slavery, the internment of Japanese Americans, the many kinds of discrimination that have flourished in my own lifetime, all the elections in which we Americans made stupid choices and all the presidents who did “un-American” things. We’re a grossly imperfect country, our behavior at frequent odds with our ideals.

But for every abomination, I could name a moment of grace. For many of our sins, stabs at atonement. We demonstrated a yearning to correct our mistakes and, I think, a tropism toward goodness. On balance we were open, generous. When I traveled abroad, people from other countries routinely complimented Americans for that. They experienced us as arrogant, but also as special.

Now they just pity us.

How much of this can we pin on Trump? Not as much as we try to. And oh, how we’ve tried. This obsession of the news media and his detractors with every last eccentricity and inanity isn’t just about keeping a complete record, I’ve come to realize. It’s also a deflection, an evasion: If he gets the whole of the stage, then Americans’ complicity and collaboration are shoved into the wings.

And the freakier we make him out to be, the less emblematic he is. The more he becomes a random, isolated event. We emphasized what a vanquishable opponent Hillary Clinton was because that diminished the significance of the vanquishing and the vanquisher. We spoke of a perfect storm of circumstances that led to his election as a way of disowning the weather.

We cheered on Robert Mueller’s investigation not just because it might hold Trump and his wretched accomplices to account but also because it might explain him away, proving that he reached the White House by cheating, not because he was what nearly half of the country decided that they wanted.

We tried to make him a one-and-done one-off. But deep into his presidency, when his execrable character had been fully exposed, his Fox News cheerleaders continued to draw huge audiences for their sycophantic panegyrics.

Trump himself continued to attract big crowds to his rallies, like the one in Greenville, N.C., in July 2019, when he pressed his attack on four Democratic congresswomen of color, including Representative Ilhan Omar, who immigrated from Somalia. Egged on by him, his audience chanted: “Send her back! Send her back!” He stopped speaking to give those words room, and he soaked them in.

Or what about the recent rally in Muskegon, Mich., where he freshly assailed the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, despite the fact that his obsessive denunciations of her had possibly been a factor in an alleged plot by 14 men to kidnap her? “Lock her up!” many of the attendees bellowed, to Trump’s obvious amusement.

Again, how has his approval rating not fallen to negative integers?

I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him, as my Times colleague Farah Stockman explained especially well in a recent editorial that was set in America’s disheartened heartland. “Even false hope,” she noted, “is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.”

The headline on the article was “Why They Loved Him.” But why haven’t more of them stopped loving him? And how did so many Americans beyond that group fall so hard for him, thrilling to his recklessness, applauding his divisiveness, indulging his unscrupulousness? He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain.

He tapped into more conspiratorialism, too. And I do mean “tapped.” Trump didn’t draw out anything that wasn’t already there, burbling beneath the surface.

He didn’t sire white supremacists. He didn’t script the dark fantasies of QAnon. He didn’t create all the Americans who rebelled against protective masks and mocked those who wore them, a selfish mind-set that helps explain our tragic lot. It just flourished under him.

And it will almost certainly survive him. The foul spirit of these past five years — I’m including his hateful campaign — has been both pervasive and strangely proud. That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes it so chilling.

I could be overreacting. Maybe, just ahead, there will be moments of grace, enough of them to redeem us. Maybe I’ll look up on or after Nov. 3 and see that Biden has won North Carolina, has won Michigan, has won every closely contested state and the presidency in a landslide. Maybe I’ll have to eat my words.

Please, my fellow Americans, feed me my words. I’d relish that meal.

 

This states my feelings so well. It’s not just that I despise Trump and all he stands for, I am grieving for what I thought the USA was, and who my fellow Americans are. I am beyond disillusioned, and I am not sure a Biden victory will heal that broken part of my soul. 

[fraurosena]

Such a loving father, isn't he? 

"Now go back to work!"

[fraurosena]

He did what now? Yeah, now I'm convinced he's knows he's going to lose and does not want to be in public when the results are announced. He'll probably be hastily packing his bags and fleeing the country instead.

Trump Cancels Election Night Party at Trump International Hotel

Quote

In the final few days before the big day, President Donald Trump has canceled his planned appearance at his nearby Trump International Hotel for an Election Night party and will instead probably stick around at the White House, The New York Times reports. The reason as to why Trump made this quick switch is uncertain, although he has been frequently criticized for mixing his personal business with his presidency. The Trump campaign, which hasn’t been doing so well financially, would have had to pay for the event and presumably make social-distancing accommodations considering that the COVID-19 pandemic is again spiking across the nation as well. “November 3rd will go down in history as the night we won FOUR MORE YEARS,” Trump wrote in the initial invitation to fundraisers that was sent out. “It will be absolutely EPIC, and the only thing that could make it better is having YOU there. Join us on Election Night.”

 

[Dandruff]

1 hour ago, fraurosena said:

He did what now? Yeah, now I'm convinced he's knows he's going to lose and does not want to be in public when the results are announced. He'll probably be hastily packing his bags and fleeing the country instead.

Trump Cancels Election Night Party at Trump International Hotel

Who knows...I think he might just want to be vague until bottom-line results are coming in.  Then, I'd guess he'll either be at the hotel or polluting Twitter from his bunker at the WH.  Packing his bags and leaving is a nice idea, though.

Wonder how many members of his own extended family will be voting for him.

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Dandruff said:

Wonder how many members of his own extended family will be voting for him.

That all depends on how much they are profiting off his being in the Oval...

[47of74]

Madame Tussauds tossed their Wax Fuck Nugget in the dumpster

Quote

In a plot twist not even 2020 saw coming, Madame Tussauds Berlin revealed that they've thrown their Donald Trump wax figured into a dumpster ahead of the 2020 election. In other words, they dumped Trump both literally and figuratively.

Madame Tussauds seems to have moved Wax Trump into his new dumpster home on Friday, with the museum’s marketing manager Orkide Yalcindag telling Reuters, “Today’s activity is rather of a symbolic character ahead of the elections in the United States. We here at Madame Tussauds Berlin removed Donald Trump’s waxwork as a preparatory measure.”

As you can see in these iconic and frankly history-making pictures, Wax Trump is surrounded by bags of trash, a discarded "Make America Great Again" hat, and several tweet bubbles including "Fake News!" "You are fired!" and, my personal favorite, "I love Berlin!" The museum also kindly situated Trump's dumpster in front of Trump Tower, so at least he'll feel at home!

 

 

[Alisamer]

4 hours ago, Dandruff said:

 

Wonder how many members of his own extended family will be voting for him.

Remember last time he was literally over Melania’s shoulder to make sure she voted for him! 
 

hopefully some of them see the inevitable and vote against him, if only to escape the sinking ship faster. 

[WiseGirl]

I agree with the description of 45.

[fraurosena]

His lies are insane.

 

[Becky]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

His lies are insane.

 

Can’t win on the actual issues? Make up some stupid shit and sell it to the rubes. 

How the heck does any adult with 2 or more functioning brain cells to rub together believe this nonsense? I will never, never understand. 

[47of74]

19 hours ago, Becky said:

This states my feelings so well. It’s not just that I despise Trump and all he stands for, I am grieving for what I thought the USA was, and who my fellow Americans are. I am beyond disillusioned, and I am not sure a Biden victory will heal that broken part of my soul. 

Mine as well.  Even if Biden wins on November 3 I'll never look at this country the same way ever again.  The fuck face supporters can bray all they want later - be it a year or 50 years from now - about how they never truly supported fuck face but I will still not forgive them.  Far as I'm concerned they can join their master in the cave so deep that they have to look up to see hell.  And if I was ever in a position to leave and never return I'd take it regardless of who is in the White House at the time. 

[Jana814]

I really hope that Biden wins on Tuesday. My sister went to the university of Delaware for college. Biden gave the graduation address. My father wasn’t of fan of his speech at however, my father hates Trump, so he voted for Biden, he wasn’t a fan of Hillary either but still voted for her. We’re in New Jersey & we can mail-in our votes. 

Edited October 31, 2020 by Jana814

[WiseGirl]

What the ever loving fuck.  He is insane and a danger to us all. 

"Trump uses Midwestern swing to launch false attacks on doctors while Covid cases rise"

 https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/31/politics/donald-trump-doctors-midwest-2020-election/index.html

[fraurosena]

7 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

What the ever loving fuck.  He is insane and a danger to us all. 

"Trump uses Midwestern swing to launch false attacks on doctors while Covid cases rise"

 https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/31/politics/donald-trump-doctors-midwest-2020-election/index.html

He's also such a whiner, making idiotic false claims (I saved Minneapolis.. wtf) and boasting -- of course! -- about crowd sizes.

 

[fraurosena]

The first results of the super spreader events have come in. 

 

[fraurosena]

Uhhh, so why weren't you?

 

[sndral]

5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

The first results of the super spreader events have come in. 

 

I saw this in my news and hastened over here to share - here’s a link to the Stanford research. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3722299

[47of74]

 We live next door to the airport so I hope fuck face's super spreaders don't come around here during tomorrow's local kluxer rally trying to use our land to get a better view or some such bullshit.

[WiseGirl]