The people in Trump World are either evil or incompetent or both. While there may have been some exceptions to this rule early on in the administration when people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and think that he was actually interested in being a serious president, now that he has been revealed to be dangerous delusional sociopathic narcissist, such people have either left or been fired and the ones still supporting fit almost perfectly into those two categories.
I am a fan of puzzles and I must say that I am still struggling to understand how in the world Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giluliani ended up holding what Trump tweeted was a “Big press conference” in the back lot of a landscaping company. Over at MSNBC, Chris Hayes tries to make sense of it, saying that it is emblematic of the incompetence that has characterized Trump’s entire life. I tend to agree that in this case, incompetence wins out, since evil makes no sense.
So many things had to go wrong for this debacle to occur. Philadelphia is a massive city with tons of hotels and conference venues. If the location venue had been announced in error because of confusing it with the luxury hotel brand, it would not have been difficult to find another more upscale venue at short notice to hold a press conference. It was not urgent so delaying it by a few hours until they found a better venue would not have been difficult. The fact that aides went to the trouble of fixing so many Trump-Pence signs on the wall suggests that the scheduler in the campaign tasked with arranging these events meant to hold it there all along and had those signs ready. Given that Trump is obsessed with image and how things look more than anything else, this was a screw up of mammoth proportions.
But that was not the only post-election hijinks. Some Trump supporters created a Facebook group called Stop the Steal but that turned into another hilarious mess.
On Thursday, a Facebook group called “Stop the Steal”, a reference to the president’s false claims that Joe Biden is “stealing” the US election, was disabled by the social network for misinformation after gaining more than 350,000 members. Other groups emerged in its place, including a second “Stop the Steal” group that attracted more than 40,000 castaways from the original group.
But less than 24 hours later, an administrator for the group changed its name to “Gay Communists for Socialism” without explanation, confounding the new members.
…Dozens of posts from angry and confused Trump supporters asked, “What happened to stop the steal?” and, “Why is this group called gay communists for socialism?”, while others demanded, “Get me off this page!!!!!!”
The Guardian confirmed the group was created on 5 November as “Stop the Steal” before being renamed. One administrator, whose real identity could not be verified, told the Guardian the group was a planned operation to troll conservatives with a fake “Stop the Steal” group.
…“We had no idea it would take off like this or suck in as many clueless people as it did when we made the switch,” the administrator said. He said the group, which now has 60,000 members, has an additional 20,000 member requests.
Good times!
This is an interesting article: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/14/giuliani-trump-legal-plans-436475
The gist is that a team of legal experts had been planning a series of legal maneuvers since June. Then, the day after the election, Giuliani waltzed in and took over, advancing his conspiracy theories, scaring off the top lawyers they had been trying to line up, and blowing up all their carefully laid plans.
This, of course, is also typical of the administration.
Thank you, Rudy! You are my hero! 😀
re brucegee1962 @1: from that Politico article:
Damage his reputation?! How could you possibly damage something that is so awful and harmful to begin with? And the only political aspirations that he has is to be dictator for life and punish anyone who is against him.
@3 johnson catman
The only part of being in charge that he really seems to enjoy is standing in front of adoring crowds, and he can do that while he’s campaigning. It’s starting to look as if he will immediately declare his 2024 candidacy, so we’ll be stuck with his smug face holding superspreader rallies for the next four years where he whines about socialism and election fraud.
I suppose the one good thing is that most of the media will probably start ignoring them now.
The MAGA marchers have had their hashtags taken over by TikTockers posting pictures of pancakes.
I don’t think that the Four Seasons thing was an accident, it was politically astute. There’s no way any news that is not fake news would have paid attention to this event, it’s Not Actually Interesting. Next to a porn store and a crematoriam and now everyone is reporting it. The sources of propaganda news, they of course are leaving this information out, because it never mattered.
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…now that he has been revealed to be …
You don’t appear to be sarcastic writing this here Dr. Singham. Sincerely, there was a sudden revelation? You were surprised? If not just you, then who?
Mr. Trump’s first two divorces resulted in scandal in the gossip pages, scandal in the business sections, and two tell-all books. Dude was convicted of racism. The Republican debates 2016 were all about who could be the most awful, and fake news kept on implying “he will get better after this particular debate/primary election now because of (moronic, irrelevant and historically disproven propositional realities x, y and z)”. Stop internalizing fake news that implies he was ever something not awful. Stop internalizing fake news that implies that he ever learned from his “mistakes” and is now going to be better.
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@1 brucegee
This seems like a naive post and the article it refers to also seems naive. The goal is and always has been to undermine the election and activating his base regardless of how any lawsuit goes. The original plans were to take in those supporters who like that stuff, the Giulani rant was for appealing to the supporters who like that other kind of stuff.
That lawyers are resisting working for him works in his favor because his base doesn’t like lawyers or anybody pretending to be with knowledge. Money always works on lawyers and there are always more of them.
From what I saw, those signs could’ve been tacked up in 15 min tops. It seems most likely to me that they told the President-reject about the press conference at the Four Seasons before they asked the hotel. When that fell through, they scrambled for plausible deniability with anything in town named Four Seasons to avoid him having to admit he was wrong about the venue (still had to push back the time), and that’s the best they could do on short notice who would let them hold it there.
The Trump administration can’t even get Four Seasons right, and he wants another four years. SMH.
I suspect they had the signs ready for whatever venue, and likely didn’t even realise a mistake had been made until they arrived at the address (I suspect they did not know it in advance for that city, and so googled ‘four seasons [city name]’). And Trump being what he is, he simply could not admit that a mistake had been made, and so pretended the venue had been intended all along.
Several people have commented about the “Trump-Pence” signs, but I don’t see “Pence” on those signs at all. Perhaps it is in really small letters somewhere, but The Orange Toddler-Tyrant apparently doesn’t even want to share ad space with his VP.
I think this is it. Their priority is not fixing the mistake, but to avoid admitting they ever made one.