Trump 59: The Walls Are Closing In, So Naturally He's Running Another Grifting Scheme

[thoughtful]

5 hours ago, Ozlsn said:

That photo makes it look like he's melting.

Or demonically possessed.

Probably both.

Margaret Hamilton did it better.

Spoiler

 

Edited February 1, 2023 by thoughtful
fixing format

[Howl]

I'm very curious to get Mary Trump's take on Trump compulsively referring to himself in the third person on SM, in public and even in private conversations, as Bill Gates reported.  

[Ozlsn]

5 hours ago, thoughtful said:

Margaret Hamilton did it better.

  Hide contents

 

She would have made a much better President too. Missed opportunity!

[thoughtful]

1 hour ago, Ozlsn said:

She would have made a much better President too. Missed opportunity!

And, if one is going to be the color of a vegetable, green is as good as orange, any day.

Not to mention that Air Force One would be a skywriting broom - that would be cool.

[GreyhoundFan]

Lol

 

[thoughtful]

It looks like some sort of Trump/Lindsay Graham/Joker mashup.

[GreyhoundFan]

some of the responses are great:

Spoiler

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Dandruff]

2 hours ago, thoughtful said:

It looks like some sort of Trump/Lindsay Graham/Joker mashup.

Rather porcine, IMO, but at least his face doesn't appear to be roadkill with an American flag as topper.

[GreyhoundFan]

He'll continue to do this since he's not seemed to have any real repercussions. "Two years after Jan. 6, Trump is still promoting violent rhetoric"

Quote

It has been some 25 months since supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol. Trump was later impeached for allegedly inciting the mob, with a historic number of Republicans voting to convict, though the Senate acquitted him. And many of those arrested for rioting said Trump’s suggestive language ahead of that date amounted to a call to arms.

Trump has shown little remorse and no signs of self-reflection about what happened that day. In fact, he’s making and promoting the same kind of references to political violence that preceded Jan. 6.

Perhaps the most pronounced recent example came Tuesday. On his Truth Social platform, Trump shared the message of a user actively encouraging physical violence on his behalf.

Discussing a hypothetical effort to disqualify Trump from office, the user said anyone behind such an effort “will have to figure out how to fight 80,000,000 + it’s not going to happen again.”

“People my age and old will physically fight for him this time,” the user said. “What we got to lose ? I’ll donate the rest of my time here on this planet to do it. And I know many many others who feel the same. They got my 6 and we Are Locked and LOADED.”

Trump decided this was a message that needed to be shared with his supporters.

Unlike many of Trump’s previous allusions to political violence, this one contains no real ambiguity or dual meaning that could be exploited for plausible deniability. It was a straight-up assurance that Trump supporters will “physically” fight for him, en masse.

This is only the latest instance in which Trump has gestured in this direction. Using Truth Social, in recent months he has upped his amplification of messages related to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that the FBI has linked to the threat of extremist violence and that was embraced by many Jan. 6 rioters.

And just after the raid of Mar-a-Lago in mid-August, Trump warned that “terrible things are going to happen” if people become enraged at his treatment.

Trump at the time layered his comments with a purported offer to do what he could to help lower the “temperature,” but even his allies at Fox News were skeptical that was really his intent. And Trump’s comments since then certainly indicate that skepticism was warranted.

Indeed, later that month, Trump ally Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) predicted “riots in the streets” if the former president were prosecuted for failing to return classified documents. Trump promoted the interview on Truth Social without comment. (Graham later tried to walk this back, saying, “I reject violence.”)

Then, in late September, Trump slipped some chilling words into one of his regular social media attacks on Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), saying McConnell “has a DEATH WISH.” The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board summed the situation up thusly: “Mr. Trump’s apologists claim he merely meant Mr. McConnell has a political death wish, but that isn’t what he wrote. It’s all too easy to imagine some fanatic taking Mr. Trump seriously and literally, and attempting to kill Mr. McConnell.”

Trump employed and shared such suggestive rhetoric early and often in his political career. A federal judge in 2017 found that he might have incited violence at one of his rallies. In one 25-hour period in mid-2020, Trump said, of violent racial-justice demonstrations, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” and promoted video of an ally saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”

(Incidentally, that ally was later convicted of his role in the Jan. 6 riot and then became the first U.S. official in 150 years to be constitutionally disqualified from office for engaging in insurrection.)

These kinds of comments have drawn criticism — and warnings about their dangers — before. They felt freshly relevant in the aftermath of the insurrection, which furnished stark evidence that certain people take such Trump comments as literally and as seriously as some observers feared.

And the weight of such rhetoric was felt again after it ramped up in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search: The FBI reported increased threats against its agents, and an armed Trump supporter and avid Truth Social user tried breaking into an FBI field office in Cincinnati, before being killed in a shootout.

There is now no denying that such language, even if you somehow regard Trump’s intentions as innocent, can lead to a very dark place.

And now, the Jan. 6 committee’s investigation has offered real evidence that Trump might have seen the political utility of violence and the threat of violence that day, when he resisted calling for peace and later expressed “love” for supporters who stormed the Capitol.

Despite the supposed olive branch he offered in mid-August, it has become abundantly clear that Trump views his supporters’ willingness to get violent as something to be proud of, and potentially as leverage.

Likely because of all its precedents, what happened Tuesday has gone largely unremarked-upon in news coverage. But it was a striking moment: a supporter offering the kind of sentiment that many acted on in real life on Jan. 6 — and Trump deciding to share that with others primed into similar beliefs about the nefarious people trying to take him down.

 

[Ozlsn]

31 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

He'll continue to do this since he's not seemed to have any real repercussions. "

And meanwhile the former President of Brazil has applied for a US tourist visa, probably not least to avoid questioning and potential prosecution.

Trump needs to be indicted, arrested and preferably incarcerated.

[fraurosena]

Has Trump erupted on social media yet?

The article's text:

Spoiler

Trump campaign staff on 2020 election lies: ‘fan the flame’

A newly released audio recording offers a behind-the-scenes look at how former President Donald Trump’s campaign team in a pivotal battleground state knew they had been outflanked by Democrats in the 2020 presidential election. But even as they acknowledged defeat, they pivoted to allegations of widespread fraud that were ultimately debunked — repeatedly — by elections officials and the courts.

The audio from Nov. 5, 2020, two days after the election, is surfacing as Trump again seeks the White House while continuing to lie about the legitimacy of the outcome and Democrat Joe Biden’s win.

The Wisconsin political operatives in the strategy session even praised Democratic turnout efforts in the state’s largest counties and appeared to joke about their efforts to engage Black voters, according to the recording obtained Thursday by The Associated Press. The audio centers on Andrew Iverson, who was the head of Trump’s campaign in the state.

“Here’s the deal: Comms is going to continue to fan the flame and get the word out about Democrats trying to steal this election. We’ll do whatever they need. Just be on standby if there’s any stunts we need to pull,” Iverson said.

Iverson is now the Midwest regional director for the Republican National Committee. He deferred questions about the meeting to the RNC, whose spokesperson, Keith Schipper, declined comment because he had not heard the recording.

The former campaign official and Republican operative who provided a copy of the recording to the AP was in the meeting and recorded it. The operative is not authorized to speak publicly about what was discussed and did not want to be identified out of concern for personal and professional retaliation, but said they came forward because Trump is mounting a third attempt for the White House.

In response to questions about the audio, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said: “The 2024 campaign is focused on competing in every state and winning in a dominating fashion. That is why President Trump is leading by wide margins in poll after poll.”

Wisconsin was a big part of Trump’s victory in 2016, when he smashed through the Democrats’ so-called “Blue Wall” in the upper Midwest, and his campaign fought hard to keep the swing state in his column four years later before his loss to Biden.

Biden defeated Trump by nearly 21,000 votes in Wisconsin in 2020, a result that has withstood independent and partisan audits and reviews, as well as lawsuits and recounts in the state’s two largest and Democratic-leaning counties.

Yet, two days after the election, there was no discussion of Trump having won the state during the meeting of Republican campaign operatives.

Instead, parts of the meeting focus on discussions about packing up campaign offices and writing final reports about how the campaign unfolded. At one point on the recording, Iverson is heard praising the GOP’s efforts while admitting the margin of Trump’s defeat in the state.

“At the end of the day, this operation received more votes than any other Republican in Wisconsin history,” Iverson said. “Say what you want, our operation turned out Republican or DJT supporters. Democrats have got 20,000 more than us, out of Dane County and other shenanigans in Milwaukee, Green Bay and Dane. There’s a lot that people can learn from this campaign.”

The meeting showcases another juxtaposition of what Republican officials knew about the election results and what Trump and his closest allies were saying publicly as they pushed the lie of a stolen election. Trump was told by his own attorney general there was no sign of widespread fraud, and many within his own administration told the former president there was no substance to various claims of fraud or manipulation — advice Trump repeatedly ignored.

In the weeks after the election, Trump and his allies would file dozens of lawsuits, convene fake electors and pressure election officials in an attempt to overturn the will of the voters and keep Trump in office.

It’s unclear whether the staff in Wisconsin coordinated their message directly with campaign officials in Washington.

Parts of the Nov. 5 meeting also center on Republican outreach efforts to the state’s Black community.

At one point, the operatives laugh over needing “more Black voices for Trump.” Iverson also references their efforts to engage with Black voters. “We ever talk to Black people before? I don’t think so,” he said, eliciting laughter from others in the room.

Another speaker on the recording with Iverson is identified by the source as GOP operative Clayton Henson. At the time, Henson was a regional director for the RNC in charge of Wisconsin and other Midwestern states. They give a postmortem of sorts on the election, praising Republican turnout and campaign efforts while acknowledging the Democrats’ robust turn-out-the-vote campaign.

Henson specifically references Democratic turnout in Dane County, which includes Madison, the state capital, and is a liberal stronghold in the state. A record-high 80% of the voting-age population cast ballots in 2020 in the county, which Biden won with 76% of the vote.

“Hats off to them for what they did in Dane County. You have to respect that,” Henson said. “There’s going to be another election in a couple years. So remember the lessons you learned and be ready to punch back.”

Henson, reached by phone Thursday, said, “No thank you” when asked to comment about the meeting.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Dandruff]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Hmmm...who do we know who has a very checkered past, has people trying to keep him anonymous, shielded, and protected, and is considered both a MISFIT and a COWARD?

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Howl]

I worry A LOT about the victims who have been doxxed as part of Trump's violent rhetoric.   

One victim is Shaye Moss, the Georgia election worker called out by Trump for voting fraud. She had to leave her home for a period of time at one point because of harassment and threats.  She provided emotional testimony about her experience to the Jan 6 Committee. 

Ashli Babbit is a cause célèbre among Trump's most completely unhinged supporters.  I worry that the policeman who shot Babbit might be Paul Pelosi'd  or worse due to Trump's targeting. And yes, Trump would be thrilled if that policeman was violently attacked or assassinated. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Grandpa Ranty is at it again:

 

[fraurosena]

Oh. I’m not sure what to make of this… if not Trump, then who? And how bad is that for the country?

Ps: has Ranty McRantface started ranting about this yet?

[GreyhoundFan]

57 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Oh. I’m not sure what to make of this… if not Trump, then who? And how bad is that for the country?

Ps: has Ranty McRantface started ranting about this yet?

I’m assuming Koch will back DerSantis. 

[GreyhoundFan]

His minders need to up his meds:

 

[Dandruff]

12 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

His minders need to up his meds:

 

This may be too messed up for meds.  The thing is flying over the US, China doesn't bother to mention it, and he thinks we should have asked them about it, trusted their answer, then expected them to make the greatest deal ever (EVER!) if it was manned?

Moments like this I'm grateful that the US, and possibly the rest of the planet, managed to survive his presidency at all.

[Xan]

His latest on the Chinese balloon:  "The Chinese would never have floated the Blimp (“Balloon”) over the United States if I were President!!!"  Actually, they did fly about three balloons over the US when he was president but the people really in charge decided it would be better not to tell him about it.  I don't know what's more frightening -- that we have people who don't follow the chain of command or that there was a commander in chief who was so ignorant that he couldn't be trusted with any information.  I'm thinking that the second one was the more frightening.

[Dandruff]

5 hours ago, Xan said:

His latest on the Chinese balloon:  "The Chinese would never have floated the Blimp (“Balloon”) over the United States if I were President!!!"  Actually, they did fly about three balloons over the US when he was president but the people really in charge decided it would be better not to tell him about it.  I don't know what's more frightening -- that we have people who don't follow the chain of command or that there was a commander in chief who was so ignorant that he couldn't be trusted with any information.  I'm thinking that the second one was the more frightening.

Both circumstances are dreadful, though I prefer to believe that the chain of command wouldn't have been broken if the commander wasn't so utterly flawed and the stakes weren't so high.

Of course he's still whining but at least he isn't doing so from the WH...