No one can keep up. Here’s an attempt to list the lunacies expressed by Trump just today.
So far today, Trump has called himself:
- The Chosen One
- The King of Israel
- The Second Coming of God
Just thought you might like to know that the person with his finger on the trigger of America’s nuclear arsenal appears to be losing the last of his marbles.
He also called American Jews disloyal if they voted for a Democrat, threatened to turn captured ISIS members loose on Europe, claimed that victims of shootings in El Paso and Dayton loved him, suggested that suicidal veterans could be treated with a stimulant, and suggested once again that he’d run for president again after his second term.
But he wasn’t done!
Later, President Bone Spurs says he thought about giving himself a Medal of Honor.
How much longer must we suffer with this babbling boob running the country into the ground? I know. For as long as Moscow Mitch controls the Senate.
And to think that you guys wanted to escape from England because George III was deranged. Can’t be long before King Donald is talking to the trees in the White Palace gardens.
Maybe tomorrow he will offer to buy Canada from the Queen of England. Do they show old Beverly Hillbillies episodes on his TV?
He needs to be removed from office. I don’t give a shit if it’s by legal means or not. He’s got to be removed.
PaulBC, you know as well as we all do that Trumplethinskin’s TV is always showing Fox News.
They are going to keep him on his feet until he wins his second term, then they will suddenly realize he is criminal and insane and we get 3 terms of Pence.
I found the perfect song for Trump.
https://youtu.be/4z288_yi9Ig
I can’t find any reference for him recommending suicidal veterans receiving any stimulants, but I did find one where he recommended a general anesthetic, a ketamine derived drug (specifically, a S(+) enantiomer of ketamine).
Antidepressant effects have been observed and further studies resulted in recommending the drug be administered only in a health care facility. That rather makes sense, even at a low dose, the chances that a patient would fall and be injured, that whole general anesthetic thing and all.
So, he’s now an expert in medicine and mental health care.
What a putz!
There is a medical explanation for Trump that has a lot of data behind it.
He may be suffering from some sort of age related cognitive impairment.
He is 72.
Those are progressive and, if this is the case, he will only get worse with time.
In fact, he does seem to be getting worse with time.
It isn’t the least bit unusual.
Saint Reagan was clearly suffering from early Alzheimers during his second term in office.
The true holier-than-thou types would normally consider the three bullet points blasphemy. Imagine the shrieks if Obama said those things.
He also said something about ending birthright citizenship by executive order. Of course, there’s the little problem of the 14th Amendment. But hey, Fox News thinks he’s right.
I would be so happy if he just disappeared from the scene.
I find the idea that Jewish people in Israel “love him like he is the second coming of God” particularly risible. Last I checked, the Jewish people in Israel – and everywhere else, for that matter – are still waiting for the first coming of God. People who love anyone like the second coming of God are, ipso facto, not Jewish.
A very insightful comment I read in one of our German newspapers analysed Trump’s tactics. By creating a new scandal every day – some of them horrific, like the treatment of children in the border camps, some of them simply absurd and thus entertaining – our brains are being hijacked. It is simply too much to process. If you don’t actively recall all of his atrocities every day (and few people do, especially in Germany where we have our own problems) they are more or less submerged under the flood of new stupidities that emerge from the White House.
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/sascha-lobo-wir-verlieren-den-kampf-um-unsere-koepfe-a-1282994.html
BTW; the author also said that right-wing populists like Trump aren’t the only ones who use the tactic of successfully hacking our brains. He used the example of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, who support the BDS – in his opinion an anti-semitic group – and thus were understandably banned from visiting Israel, but acted as if their Muslim beliefs were the cause. His conclusion: We are “losing the fight in our heads” and cannot help it.
It’s an interesting read by a very good author, who is famous for his analyses of right-wing strategies (he is very much on the left himself).
He did use the words “chosen one”, I’ll leave that.
The others no. Wrong in more than one way.
The quotes were:
“people love him like”, not “I am”.
So…
I mean, I knew to check. My trust is diminished, my hope is diminished.
Why? Just why.
Seeing this on “my side” makes me feel more alone, which isn’t what I want in these troubled times.
Brian Pansky wrote:
Yeah, and it was also Trump apparently quoting someone else heaping this absurd praise upon him (this person also believed that the death of Heather Heyer was a Soros-funded false flag ploy, so there’s at least a little antisemitism there). “The chosen one” is all on Trump, though, and fits into a long pattern.
True.
Trump was certainly having a good wallow though. How much he was just quoting and how much he was also addressing himself in the third person would be hard for me to say. He may not even know himself. Maybe someone has the stomach to do an exegesis of the whole sorry display. Not me.
IOW, to the extent that he’s a legend in his own mind, he was using somebody else’s text to mythologize himself– you know, in his own, crass, totally self-absorbed, smirky, pompous, oblivious, self-important, preachy, abusive, incompetent, vainglorious, fabulist, declamatory, divorced-from-reality and recursively self-referential way.
Chabneruk@11: He’s not just normalizing his behavior, flooding people with it insures that there isn’t an effective response organized against it.
@PaulBC #2:
I hope so, because when she tells him to piss off he’ll then lash out by refusing to visit either Canada or the UK and save us the trouble of arranging more demonstrations against him.
This on the same day the rape-ublicans try to enact “indefinite (read: permanent) separation and detention” of kidnapped children. “Indefinite separation and detention” means that ICE agents could rape, assault and murder children with impunity and no accountability. Considering that ICE HAS employed violent abusers, pedophiles, rapists and at least one serial killer, this is not a far-fetched accusation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49425624
As I read today:
The wrong Amazon is burning.
The wrong ICE is melting.
@Rich Woods #17
I can’t speak for Canada, but in the UK our own mini-Trump will ignore any demonstrations – he believes in the Will of the British People, and he has a very clear idea of who the British People are. Mostly white, mostly rich, mostly xenophobic, mostly wishing it was still the high point of probably the greatest criminal enterprise in history, the British Empire.
Chabneruk@11–
I’m not a supporter of BDS, but that opinion piece is far from insightful.
Despite it being a common meme, it is simply untrue that Trump is generating scandals faster than people can keep up with them. The problem with Trump is that there is a huge rump of American voters who don’t care or worse are pleased about the scandals. Nobody is saying “I’ll vote for this corrupt moron because I can’t handle the flood of terrible news about him.” Even the author’s own explanation of how the Greenland Purchase Debacle interfered with his outrage about the border concentration camps is not plausible to me. I get no relief from being horrified by the border camps just because Trump uttered some new stupidity today, and I don’t believe he does either.
Accusing Tlaib and Omar of being even worse than Trump with these tactics is not just wrong, it’s wilful false-equivalence bullshit.
That “in fact” is a deliberately misleading logical connection designed to make the reader think that Trump was not the reason Israel denied them entry, but an independent Israeli decision…but this is completely wrong. Israel had already granted them approval to visit, and this approval was withdrawn after Trump publicly pressured Netanyahu to ban them. So now we’re up to the third bit of bullshit.
Yes, the EU has banned people from entering. The list is here. What you will notice is that the list is basically of criminals who collaborated with Russia to annex Crimea. Not a single one of them was banned for criticising the EU or calling for boycotts against EU member states. So this is bullshit #4.
Your “insightful” correspondent has claimed that the banning of Tlaib and Omar is not rare — well actually, before this banning Israel had only banned fourteen other people under this law. So it’s not a common thing at all. This is bullshit statement #5.
I can find no evidence despite quite a bit of searching that Omar and Tlaib claimed it was their Muslim background that led to the banning. If you know of such a quote, I would be interested to hear it. But given that the statement is unsourced, and the article links to sources it misrepresents, it is quite possible that this is bullshit statement #6.
If I were to look for blame on the left for emulating Trump, it would not be Tlaib and Omar (even though I disagree with them on BDS), it would be narcissistic commentators like Lobo trying to position himself as a unique interpreter of the modern world (“It is actually my job to understand the digital present, to identify and explain the patterns”) who would use a complete non-sequitur derailment to twist Trump’s latest folly into an attack on other leftists for being even worse than Trump(!), and spread malicious falsehoods about them in an international newspaper.
Don’t worry, your election campaign is starting up now, soon be time to vote him out!
Oh, wait, I forgot that in your country (and, as far as I am aware, in your country alone) presidential election campaigns take a year and a half to conduct. A very strange phenomenon. Why is that? Why have you chosen such a glacially slow process when most countries manage it within four to six weeks? Is this a modern thing, or has it always been that way?
In any case, carry on with the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Here’s the nightmare scenario: The economy goes south in 2020 and Trump loses the election, perhaps badly. He then refuses to go. He goes on TV and tells his supporters that the system is rigged, the election was stolen, and calls on them to rise up and have a civil war against all the groups they hate: Blacks, Hispanics, gays, Californians, Democrats. His supporters, already suffering from a bad economy, do just that and there follows six months of carnage.
Once upon a time I believed Americans were better than that. Now I’m not so certain.
cartomancer@21, It’s a modern phenomena, roughly dating primary “reforms” c.1970, enacted in response to the chaotic 1968 dummie convention in Chicago. Primaries themselves only date back to c.1920. Except for the electoral college choosing the president, the entire system (including political parties & precisely how electoral college electors are chosen) essentially evolved out of nothing — the process is not specified in, e.g., the constitution. Prior to the introduction of primaries, the candidates were mostly chosen in “smoke-filled back rooms” at conventions (which continued to generally be the case until those 1970-ish changes, which introduced binding primaries).
wzrd1@7, Hair furor himself apparently said the unspecified drug was a , Trump Debuts Baffling New Plan to Buy Up Tons of an Experimental New Drug to Help Veterans:
blf@23: “Except for the electoral college choosing the president, the entire system (including political parties & precisely how electoral college electors are chosen) essentially evolved out of nothing”
Ridiculous! Anything that complex must be due to Intelligent Design!!!
leerudolph@25, With a choice of politicans or cockroaches, I’ll go with the beetles. I’m not inordinately fond of politicians.
If, in 2014, Barack Obama had said those things before going on a chopper to some out of DC destination, he would no longer be President of the United States by the time the helicopter landed.
Yes, Trump comes out with insane crap almost every day, sometimes several times a day. But I’ve heard too much of this other bullshit: “Trump is losing the last of his marbles…”, “He’s finally going completely crazy…”, “He’s intentionally flooding our minds with nonsense so we can’t cope…” Oh, fuck off.
Trump has always been fucking nuts. He is an idiot, he is unread, pig-ignorant, narcissitic to a stunning degree, and corrupt to the basest level. IT. IS. NOT. FUCKING. NEW. Watch TV interviews with him from the 90s or 00s, watch The Apprentice, read the his own words in books, newspapers, court transcripts, read what WH staff who’ve left him have been saying for 2 years, and note all of the crapmountain of insanity that spewed from his mouth during the 2016 election race. As we say in Ireland, he’s a complete fucking gobshite. I know people who dealt with him on his Scottish and Irish golf course projects over the past 10 years, and jeesus he was always as full of foul unrefined flattus as he is now. This notion that he is perpetually getting more dumb or dangerous or uncontrolled has been around since January 2017, as if some are hoping “maybe this will finally spur his people to desert him!”. It’s complete bollocks, and NO, they won’t. Mitch McConnell and friends would be happy to stick with Trump and shore him up till his body is as decayed as McConnell’s own soul. His fuckwit supporters never cared, and never will, about the shite he comes out with, because “MAGA!” means nothing more than “Give me some comfort that my long held bigotries are finally OK and let me be a prick to minorities in public!”
And the suggestion that Trump has anything close to the level of intellect, coherence of vision, rationality, or understanding of social psychology required to dream up a media strategy to “flood our minds and make us sleep walk into obedience”, is just so fucking dumb Trump could actually have given birth to it himself.
What is increasingly worrying is that no matter how much Donald Trump defiles and debases the office of the President of the United States – and its now at the point that the vast majority of the rest of the world see it as nothing but a punchline – the streets of major US cities are not flooded with protests day in, day out. From here, it seems its just been accepted as a new normal, and people are sleepwalking to oblivion anyway. Look at Hong Kong. What’s happening in the US is vastly more dangerous and consequential in terms of democracy and human rights, yet protests are few. The streets should be flooded, daily, until the Democrats initiate the impeachment process (yes, its doomed to fail, but fucking look up “accountability”, assholes), and Republicans start maneuvering to replace the human filth that sits in the Oval Office with any living creature capable of expressing empathy.
chrislawson@20 Don’t agree with you on a number of points. I can absolutely follow Lobo’s train of thought regarding the relief. As someone who doesn’t believe in a higher power I regularly despair in view of what is happening in the world today (Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro) and that people are not only capable of such a degree of malice – even worse, get voted into office despite (or because) of it. It is a relief to think of Trump as an incompetent, blustering buffoon. I actually have to remind myself that he is actively hurting people – children – every day, otherwise I might smile at the notion of buying Greenland. Which, to my mind, is the whole point of his strategy. Maybe it is different when you actually live in the US.
I also think that you misread Lobo in regard to Tlaib and Omar. He is warning the left against falling for the tricks Trump uses if they are employed by people. He is not saying that they are worse than Trump, only that they “won” the battle of populist rhetoric in this one instance.
Regarding their ban, the question should not be so much if they were banned before or after Trump’s intervention but if this ban has legitimate reasons. That is the point: If they support an antisemitic organisation, it would be at least problematic to later on attack Trump for dividing Jews and Muslims, which they did: https://www.newsweek.com/omar-tlaib-slam-trump-netanyahu-israel-ban-making-jewish-muslim-communities-boogeyman-1455123
Again, I don’t think that Lobo wants to attack Tlaib and Omar to slander leftist in an attempt of false equity. He is merely warning against the methods employed regularly by Trump – and that even people on the left are not immune against them, whether they come from Agent Orange himself or from their own ranks. Which is a fair warning, in my book.
Brian Pansky@12
There’s a difference between reporting and polemic. While I agree with your understanding of the facts in this case, I’d be lying if I said I cared a great deal. People should be doing their own fact checking using multiple sources. LGF’s list is shorthand for the point that Trump is associating himself with some very crazy rhetoric. This point (which is important) loses a lot of impact in trying to explain what actually happened.
I can understand feeling “alone” and that’s your choice. I do find that reporting the facts accurately is rarely an advantage in a political fight, and the stakes of losing this fight are very high. It is an ethical obligation if you claim to be reporting facts, but that is a small subset of communication. Maybe there is a way to augment a snappy polemic piece with an appendix that clarifies the precise nature of the claims made.
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blockquote>In fact, Israel denied them entry because Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar support the BDS, a clearly anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic movement in my view.
So, in your view, just how much do we have to kiss Israel’s ass and ignore their attempts at theocracy-based genocide and apartheid to not be dubbed “anti-Semitic?” I just need to know if I need to bring a dental dam.
Let’s try that again:
Chabneruk@11
So, in your view, just how much do we have to kiss Israel’s ass and ignore their attempts at theocracy-based genocide and apartheid to not be dubbed “anti-Semitic?” I just need to know if I need to bring a dental dam.
(Cross-posted from a recent Political Madness All the Time thread, original posting by SC.)
This: “Everyone outraged over Trump and Netanyahu treating US lawmakers who support the BDS movement like criminals should also be outraged that other US lawmakers and @AIPAC are trying to criminalize support for BDS by ordinary Americans here at home.”
Brian Pinsky @ #12 — While you are technically correct, I doubt that Dumbo knows the difference between a simile (“like a king”) and an assertion (“I am the king”). Plus, quoting Wayne Allen Root does not mitigate his arrogance.
@5: I tend to agree with your assessment that if Trump were to win next year (which I do not think he will) the Republicans would quickly dump him in favor of Pence. However, we won’t get three terms of that asshole. If he takes office within the first two years of a term, he can only run for re-election once. He could conceivably have almost 10 years (by acceding just over two years in to Trump’s second term) because in that case he could run for re-election twice. I refuse to even consider that possibility, because what Trump could do in his fifth and sixth years is beyond imagination.
The more relevant question is: Will Trump contest the election results? Alas, that may produce chaos the likes of which we have not seen.
@20: Thank you.
@19 Wrote ” the greatest criminal enterprise in history, the British Empire.,well the British didn’t murder all the Native Americans .Don’t know why you are picking on us Brits ,the whole of Europe was doing the same thing ,in fact empire building has been going on for thousands of years .Not a great fan of the British Empire by the way .
davidc1 @37: 23% of the world’s population at its height. Maybe not the worst-behaved criminal enterprise in history, but certainly the greatest.
Maybe not the worst-behaved criminal enterprise in history
Faint praise, indeed, but probably earned
From the post – “Just thought you might like to know that the person with his finger on the trigger of America’s nuclear arsenal appears to be losing the last of his marbles.”
There is a serious flaw in this statement in that it assumes Trump even had any marbles to lose……
Trump, Trump, Trump. There is also all the Goebells, Goerings and Himlers carrying out his edicts and showing that they wholeheartedly agree with them. Then there are all the fans and those aligned with him.
I agree with the statement above that the US zshould ve more like Hong Kong right now, but your citizenry are too comfortable and probably really think the next election will fix it.
I’m surely not the first to make the association, but what we’re witnessing is the Gish Gallop presidency. I doubt that tRump is actually aware of that technical/tactical term, but that’s what’s happening on a daily basis. It’s not more complicated– and perhaps even less effective– than that.
The essential problem with the Cheeto-in-chief, for me, is that he is a constant source of outrage. I have to look away from the news on a regular basis lest I end up in the hospital with another stroke. I cannot stand the man but the continual outrage just isn’t healthy for me.