Trump 53: Orange Florida Man Awaiting Indictment

[fraurosena]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Trump hotels have been dropped by a major luxury travel agency network"

 

Huh, now they drop him? Not when he was in office, not while he was investigated for his ties to Russia, not while he was being impeached for pressuring Ukraine to meddle in the elections, not when he bungled the pandemic so badly over 500.000 people died, not when he pushed and perpetuated the big lie, not when he refused to concede, not when he instigated an insurrection, not when he got impeached again? But now, when he’s out of office for a couple of months and losing popularity and influence?

Not impressed.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by fraurosena

[Becky]

4 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Huh, now they drop him? Not when he was in office, not while he was investigated for his ties to Russia, not while he was being impeached for pressuring Ukraine to meddle in the elections, not when he bungled the pandemic so badly over 500.000 people died, not when he pushed and perpetuated the big lie, not when he refused to concede, not when he instigated an insurrection, not when he got impeached again? But now, when he’s out of office for a couple of months and losing popularity and influence?

Not impressed.

 

I get what you are saying, but hey - it's a step toward ignominious descent into complete irrelevancy, which is exactly what he deserves and exactly what I hope happens.  

[Xan]

6 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Huh, now they drop him? Not when he was in office, not while he was investigated for his ties to Russia, not while he was being impeached for pressuring Ukraine to meddle in the elections, not when he bungled the pandemic so badly over 500.000 people died, not when he pushed and perpetuated the big lie, not when he refused to concede, not when he instigated an insurrection, not when he got impeached again? But now, when he’s out of office for a couple of months and losing popularity and influence?

Not impressed.

 

It was just a business decision.  While he was still president, he could help them in various ways.  Now that he's no longer useful to them, they have found it easy to toss him and his hotels aside.  It's not as if Virtuoso really cares about niceties like democracy or following the law.  They just cater to upper class travelers.

[Dandruff]

3 hours ago, Xan said:

It was just a business decision.  While he was still president, he could help them in various ways.

Or, I'd guess, not help them in various ways.

It'll be interesting to see how former guy tries to market his businesses in the future.  I tend to doubt that his base alone can keep them afloat.  I'm sure there are millions of people determined to not spend a penny on anything with that name on it, along with businesses and individuals who won't want to renew contracts and leases with him when they expire.

[Black Aliss]

On 3/15/2021 at 4:01 PM, 47of74 said:

Most of my family are not the kind who have flags in their yards.  Even the military veterans in my family in my parents generation aren’t so much into flying the flag.

My dad has my grandpa’s flag in the house. It was either the one they used at his funeral or one he received as an honor of done sort. Otherwise my dad is not one of the flag waving set even though he served in Vietnam. 

I certainly don’t feel the need to have one up. Before it was just not feeling the need to prove anything to anyone. Now it’s that plus people might make the wrong assumptions about me. 

WIWAK we flew a flag on the 4th of July and probably Memorial Day. It had 48 stars. My mother apparently wasn't too happy about Alaska and Hawai'i statehood, or maybe she didn't want to spend money on a 50 star flag if they were just going to keep adding new states.

Since the Viet Nam war era I've associated flying the flag with false patriotism and all that goes with it--xenophobia, racism, "love it or leave it". Now I'm thinking it's time to reclaim our flag. I just might buy my first American flag this year. (Or should I wait until DC and Puerto Rico achieve statehood?)

[Alisamer]

10 hours ago, Black Aliss said:

WIWAK we flew a flag on the 4th of July and probably Memorial Day. It had 48 stars. My mother apparently wasn't too happy about Alaska and Hawai'i statehood, or maybe she didn't want to spend money on a 50 star flag if they were just going to keep adding new states.

Since the Viet Nam war era I've associated flying the flag with false patriotism and all that goes with it--xenophobia, racism, "love it or leave it". Now I'm thinking it's time to reclaim our flag. I just might buy my first American flag this year. (Or should I wait until DC and Puerto Rico achieve statehood?)

I'm curious how those two new stars would fit!

In any case I have never flown the flag but if those two are added as states I might get one to fly for a bit. My next door neighbor would appreciate it, but the Trumpsters across the street might not. Too bad for them.

[47of74]

3 hours ago, Alisamer said:

I'm curious how those two new stars would fit!

In any case I have never flown the flag but if those two are added as states I might get one to fly for a bit. My next door neighbor would appreciate it, but the Trumpsters across the street might not. Too bad for them.

I think I once read somewhere that it’s current proportions one could fit up to 57 stars on the flag.  Of course if there were more the designers could change the blue part’s size or adjust the size of the stars. 

It would be interesting to see since it would be the first time in over 60 years the flag has changed. 

[Black Aliss]

3 hours ago, Alisamer said:

I'm curious how those two new stars would fit!

 

I hadn't given it much thought until you mentioned it, but then I became obsessed. 

4 rows of seven stars (28), alternating with 4 rows of 6 stars (24)

For 51 stars, 3 rows of 9 (27), alternating with 3 rows of 8 (24)

Let's let Guam in, too!

4 rows of 8 (32) alternating with 3 rows of 7 (21)

I think the 53 star flag wins, aesthetically.

[thoughtful]

15 hours ago, Black Aliss said:

Since the Viet Nam war era I've associated flying the flag with false patriotism and all that goes with it--xenophobia, racism, "love it or leave it".

My feelings about the flag being abused as a symbol of unpleasant things goes back to that era, as well. I've always had mixed feelings about displaying it, and think having the opportunity to re-embrace it because DC, Guam and Puerto Rico are added would be great.

Oooohh, what about the Virgin Islands? I want Stacey Plaskett to have a vote in Congress!

Oh, and I can remember my elementary school teacher telling us about all of the classrooms having gotten new flags fairly recently, because Alaska and Hawaii had been added.

Edited March 26, 2021 by thoughtful
I hadn't finished a sentence!

[47of74]

An interesting tidbit I learned is that previous versions of the flags do not become obsolete when a new flag is issued and can continually to be legally flown. 

I wonder if any of the organizations that have super sized flags - such as the football field sized ones - will be in a hurry to order new flags?  Or if local governments will be able to spend money to replace flags on uniforms or vehicles or defer it till money’s not so tight?  

If PR and DC get added I may have to get a new flag.  Of course I would not be a Branch Trumpvidian about it and attach it to my vehicle like some of his cult members do. 

[47of74]

Yeah they may have to update this one in a few years....

48, 49, 50, 51, 52...PERFECT!

[mamallama]

Perhaps if we get a new flag Branch Trumpvidians will take to putting the old one in the back of their pick ups instead of the confederate flag.  We can hope.

[fraurosena]

TFG really misses tweeting.

 

[fraurosena]

TFG also misses rallies.

 

[47of74]

32 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

TFG also misses rallies.

 

The couple and their families have no room to complain about OFM’s boorish behavior. They chose to have the reception at that thing’s place. 

[47of74]

On 3/26/2021 at 8:00 PM, mamallama said:

Perhaps if we get a new flag Branch Trumpvidians will take to putting the old one in the back of their pick ups instead of the confederate flag.  We can hope.

They'll be like Abe Simpson...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump is losing the war over his legacy"

Quote

On Sunday evening, CNN aired a special featuring interviews with the senior officials involved in the early coronavirus pandemic response under President Donald Trump. No longer operating under the Trump political umbrella, they offered assessments of the past year that lacked any soothing veneer.

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House response under Trump, expressed her belief that the deaths that occurred after the first wave of infections last spring were largely preventable. It’s a sentiment that matches recent research but was at odds with the sanitization practices of the Trump White House to which Birx had so often adhered. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top epidemiologist, suggested that it was government experts, not Trump, who had decided to push forward quickly on a vaccine to combat the virus in January 2020. That was months before the administration rolled out Operation Warp Speed, its push for vaccine development.

The former president got his say this weekend, too. He spoke for several minutes on Saturday night, excoriating the administration of President Biden in defense of his own.

The venue? A wedding at his private club in Florida.

It is always the case that presidents want to shape their legacies. No president wants to be Warren G. Harding, pilloried by history when he's remembered at all. Much better to be a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, legacies sitting on real foundations that have been carefully tended over time. One has to assume that for Trump, always so keenly attuned to public perceptions of him, the drive to be remembered in a specific light is even stronger.

And yet Trump is perhaps uniquely poorly positioned to frame his own legacy.

Most modern presidents, even controversial ones like George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have at least enough institutional legitimacy to be seen as reliable interlocutors about their own tenures. One can envision either of them or Barack Obama sitting down alongside a panel of historians at an event hosted by a prominent university, discussing presidential decision-making and its ramifications in good faith. It's quite difficult to imagine Trump doing the same thing, as difficult as it is to imagine his sitting down with someone like NBC News's Lester Holt and offering his honest assessment of his own missteps.

Trump spent all of his political capital on trying to stay president, first by constantly misleading the public and, after the 2020 election, by stoking the dishonest claim that his second term had been stolen away. Since the moment the U.S. Capitol was first breached on Jan. 6, an event far beyond any acceptable political activity, Trump has repeatedly tried to excuse those who participated — Trump supporters all. Speaking to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham last week, he ridiculously claimed that those who had beaten law enforcement officers and broken windows in a last-ditch attempt to overturn the election results had, in fact, simply been “hugging and kissing the police and the guards” in the facility.

Fox News is one of Trump's few outlets for speaking to the public at his point. The network, eager to win back the portion of its Trump-positive audience that peeled away after it had the gall to recognize that he'd lost, is happy to have Trump exclusives and its hosts have little inclination to push back on the former president's obvious falsehoods — which suits Trump just fine. Trump no longer has his Twitter or Facebook accounts, seeing them stripped away in the wake of Jan. 6. He lamented the loss of that audience in his interview with Ingraham but tried to put a positive spin on it.

“So I put out statements now ‘from the office of’ and the statements are picked up by everybody,” he said, referring to tweet-esque press releases that his team occasionally puts out. “I mean, it actually works better.”

Of course it doesn’t. The visibility of those statements relies specifically on their being “picked up” by the media, meaning that the media has an opportunity to note when their contents deviate from reality. This was the entire reason Trump used to celebrate his Twitter account: it reduced the intermediary role of the press. Now, he relies on the media to propagate what he has to say. The right-wing media will do so uncritically, but no one in that universe has the audience that Trump did, nor are they reaching those who might be persuaded on Trump’s legacy.

Trump has floated the idea of building his own social media network, which would certainly help boost his connection to his base, if not reshape how the world views his presidency. (In fact, it would likely just cement those perceptions.) He could write a book, if he could find a publisher willing to weather the outcry, but there’s no reason to think that it would be anything other than a hagiographic rehash of “The Art of the Deal.”

Perhaps recognizing the position he's in, Trump's reportedly agreed to speak with a dozen journalists working on books about his administration. But, again, the results are largely dependent on his own willingness to be self-reflective — and largely out of his control.

There's another risk for any effort to shape Trump's legacy that the CNN interviews with the health officials makes obvious. We're only about two months past the end of his term in office, and efforts to understand what happened within his administration are still just beginning. Last week, The Post reported that at least nine oversight probes had been hindered during Trump's time in office, some of which will be completed or released in coming months. The ability of Trump loyalists to keep sketchy activity or faulty decisions out of view largely collapsed on Jan. 20, 2021, and the Biden administration will likely have little reason to be generous in keeping them hidden.

Trump's legacy is already rocky, to put it mildly — and we don't yet have a full picture of his presidency.

Don't cry for Trump, gentle reader. He still has a robust institutional defense system in place, from Fox News to various right-wing media figures who are eager to at least solidify how he's viewed by his long-standing political base. On Monday morning, Fox announced a new paid contributor to the channel: Trump's daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.

“Welcome to the family,” “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt said to Trump when announcing her new role.

“I sort of feel like I’ve been an unofficial member of the team for so long,” Trump replied, capturing the state of affairs quite accurately.

The problem for Trump is that his family — even his extended family in conservative media — will likely not be who is etching his presidency in the history books.

 

 

[47of74]

Fuck knob says he’s going to the border. 

Quote

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday confirmed that he'll probably visit the southern border in the next few weeks while insisting that he'd prefer not to be involved in President Joe Biden's immigration efforts.

In an interview with Fox News' Justice With Judge Jeanine, Trump told host Jeanine Pirro that he'll "probably" go to the border soon. "Over the next couple of weeks," the ex-president said. "The Border Patrol wants me to go. Probably over the next couple of weeks. I don't think there's a rush for me to go. [Biden's] supposed to go and make the decisions."

Trump said that that he doesn't want to be involved in the situation at the border but he'll likely visit because officials from the United States Border Patrol (USBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have asked him to.

"A lot of people want me to. Border Patrol and all the people at ICE, they want me there, they asked me to go. So I sort of feel like I owe it to them. They're great people, they're doing an incredible job," he said. "It's a very, very dangerous situation. I'd love not to be involved. Somebody else is supposed to be doing it."

Sure Donny Dumbfuck. They want you there. Ya right. Gonna guess the only way they’d want him there was if he was going across the border to seek asylum in Mexico. 

[Becky]

9 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Fuck knob says he’s going to the border. 

Sure Donny Dumbfuck. They want you there. Ya right. Gonna guess the only way they’d want him there was if he was going across the border to seek asylum in Mexico. 

 I want names, who exactly made contact and issued an invitation?  I would bet my 401k that he cannot provide them.  He can't help himself, he lies as easily as he breathes.  

[47of74]

2 hours ago, Becky said:

 I want names, who exactly made contact and issued an invitation?  I would bet my 401k that he cannot provide them.  He can't help himself, he lies as easily as he breathes.  

Yeah because they likely don't exist.  I don't see too many people in any of those agencies being willing to commit career suicide by trying to undermine the current administration.  I'm sure there are hardcore Branch Trumpvidians who wouldn't mind taking one for the team, but I think at least some of them have figured out by now that Donald Dumbfuck won't help them out when they get fired. 

[47of74]

Some good news 

Quote

The defamation suit against Donald Trump filed by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos is back on track after New York’s highest court agreed the case should continue now that the onetime reality-TV host is no longer president.

Trump had argued the U.S. Constitution placed him, as president, beyond the reach of state courts. In a brief order, the New York state Court of Appeals said Tuesday that the argument was moot.

Zervos, who claims Trump sexually assaulted her more than a decade ago and then defamed her by calling her a liar, has said she’ll seek to question Trump under oath in the case, one of several legal threats facing the former president as he maps out his political future. E. Jean Carroll, another accuser whom Trump has called a liar, is also planning to depose him in a defamation suit.

Trump’s presidential immunity argument was previously rejected by a trial judge. In March 2019, an intermediate appellate court in Manhattan also said Trump could be sued, saying that a “president is still a person” and “he is not above the law.” Trump appealed to the state’s highest court.

 

[47of74]

Add another one to the pile. 

Quote

Two US Capitol Police officers who say they were injured during the January 6 insurrection are suing former President Donald Trump for inciting the crowd. 

The officers -- the first police to sue in court following the riot -- say they suffered physical and emotional damages because Trump allegedly "inflamed, encouraged, incited (and) directed" the violent mob that stormed the Capitol.

Capitol Police Officers James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, who have been with the force for a combined 28 years, said they were injured during the attack. Hemby "was crushed against the doors" of the Capitol, was "sprayed with chemicals" and bled from his face, the lawsuit says. Blassingame claims he was slammed against a stone column, injuring his head and back.

Each of the officers are seeking at least $75,000 in damages. They accuse Trump of aiding and abetting their assaults and directing his supporters to assault them, according to their new complaint.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Donald Trump launches new website for personal office after social media bans"

Quote

New York (CNN)Donald Trump is back online.

The former president and first lady, Melania Trump, have launched a website to serve their personal offices. The website, 45office.com, comes after Trump's ban from social media sites in the aftermath of the January Capitol insurrection.

The site features a lengthy biography for the former president that starts, "Donald J. Trump launched the most extraordinary political movement in history, dethroning political dynasties, defeating the Washington Establishment, and becoming the first true outsider elected as President of the United States."

It also includes more than a dozen pictures of himself, in which he is depicted boarding Air Force One, greeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un and, yes, kissing a baby. Other photos are of the president and Melania Trump dancing at the inaugural ball and at black tie dinners in the White House. The website makes no mention of his two impeachment trials. It does reference how "the coronavirus plague arrived from China," and says that Trump "acted early and decisively to ban travel from China and Europe, which saved countless lives."

As of Tuesday, Covid-19 has killed at least 550,371 people and infected about 30.3 million in the United States since last January, according to data by Johns Hopkins University.

Trump has largely remained off the internet since the January 6th Capitol insurrection that killed five people and led the Justice Department to charge at least 150 people with insurrection, a number that could increase to 400 or more. In its aftermath, Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter and other social platforms, such as Snapchat.

The former president will return to social media in two to three months on his own platform, according to Jason Miller, a long-time Trump adviser and spokesperson for the president's 2020 campaign. The new platform will attract "tens of millions" of new users and "completely redefine the game," Miller added.

Following Trump's ban on Twitter, Jared Kushner, the former president's son-in-law and senior adviser, intervened to stop the efforts of aides who attempted to get Trump on fringe social media platforms such as Parler and Gab.

Visitors to the former president's website can also request a personalized greeting from the president and the First Lady, or request that the Trumps attend an event. Due to the high number of requests, the greetings page says it will take up to six weeks for processing.

As for having the Trumps attend an event, the website said it there would be no status updates "due to the volume of requests President and Mrs. Trump receive. Requests must note if media will be present and if there will be any notable attendees."

 

[fraurosena]

Oh dear, he really misses all the attention, doesn’t he? He’s becoming ever more desperate.

My Schadenfreude about that is simply delicious.

[thoughtful]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The website, 45office.com, comes after Trump's ban from social media sites in the aftermath of the January Capitol insurrection.

I am now picturing his employees with a long list of possible names to try, finding that most of them are taken, and lead to sites mocking Trump.

Also, rolling their eyes and crossing off Trump's suggestions: "I'm sorry sir, I don't think Donnyisstillpresident.com or LoveTrumpdammit!.com are  good ideas."

Edited March 31, 2021 by thoughtful
riffle