Trump on Any Day Ending in "Y"

 

Trump announces he wants to throw “everyone on the [January 6] committee” in jail. pic.twitter.com/33hEYGByu1

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) December 8, 2024

Trump "Met the Press" and in his interview with Kristen Welker, he said all kinds of incredibly fascinating things. He still only had "concepts of a plan" with respects to health care. He's going to deport the "Dreamers" and is looking into ending birthright citizenship (which is actually in the Constitution). He lied about how many murders have been committed by undocumented migrants. He admitted he "can't guarantee" his tariffs won't raise prices (because they will).  He's going to get rid of Christopher Wray as head of the FBI for no other reason than wanting his own attack-dog there. 

Oh yes, and he wants the 1/6 Committee in prison for noticing he defrauded people by lying about the 2020 election and directed a crowd of rioters at the Capitol to "Stop the Steal (AKA the lawful certification of the election)" and then the Committee really went wild and pointed it out. 

TrumpWorld is always a bit more mad that people point out wrongdoing then that they are guilty of it. Trump is allergic to accountability. It makes him break out in vendetta.

Stupid or Bad Faith?

 

Rampell: Do you know that there actually was bipartisan legislation intended to to increase our fentanyl detection technologies at the border. And trump killed it.

Jennings: You keep fighting these old battles. Donald Trump won.. Mexico has to do something.

Rampell: They have… pic.twitter.com/szaKgKSuGI

— Acyn (@Acyn) November 27, 2024

This is why I think cable news is basically worthless: someone like Scott Jennings (it could be so many other GOP mouthpieces, though) will argue something that is either based in sheer ignorance (possible) or they HAVE TO know better than, but this is the GOP line and their "job" is to defend it. The networks can argue that they are doing this for "balance"--but that's not what it is. They are airing out a position that is basically absurd with no penalty for either lying or being as dumb as a stump.

I used to go back and forth with myself about this kind of representation, especially at the top of the Bush years. Is it ignorance, is it lying, and what's worse?

And the answer is: what does it matter? If a position is completely detached from facts, it just is bad. Donald Trump winning an election doesn't change the facts of what is happening at the at the border with Mexico any more than George W. Bush winning affected whether invading Iraq over WMD's (dumb--or lying?) was a good idea. 

We Have Met the Stupid, and it is Us

 

I have talked about the stupidity of using polling as a "story" for news purposes before. People are measuring opinions, but you can't measure facts. If an opinion is just wrong as to the facts, what did you learn? People might not answer honestly. They might be just vibing and have never thought about your question before. It might be useful for a news organization to see what sorts of things the public needs to be more educated about--but is it news?

Look, the above chart is from two years ago, about when I wrote the post I linked to. Yougov.com found that people wildly misestimate the size of various groups. When you see that people are estimating 21% of the population is transgender, bathroom panic starts to make more sense, until you ask yourself if people responding to the question even really understand fractions. Do people really think one out of five people are trans? Do they think like one in four are Muslim, and that one in three are atheist? 

These numbers don't jibe with anything in people's actual lived experiences. What this poll shows is that people are innumerate. Their mental math is broken. They aren't converting their concept of how many people per are anything--they are just really bad contestants on "The Price is Right".  

Silence is Darkness When Light is Needed Most

 

I don't have any confusion that I am, at best, an editorialist--an opinion-writer, providing somewhat informed comment on the basis of well-reported investigative journalism (other people's). I'm also not under any illusions about what even the endorsement of an august paper of record like The Washington Post means to someone who in late October is still undecided--who knows what sources of information that person seeks out? 

But the decision not to endorse comes down to editorial credibility, and whether the paper (a quaint linguistic atavism for a journal now so-often received in digital form) can speak truth to power. In the spirit of Woodward and Bernstein--do you speak truth to power?

In the spirit of Vladimir Kara-Murza, do you speak truth to power? 

In the spirit of Jamaal Khashoggi, do you speak truth to power? 

If Fascism is Baked in, Why Choose Fascism?

 

Q. Hearing John Kelly's disturbing revelation about Trump's admiration of Adolph H!tler, does it change how you feel about Trump?

Chris Sununu: No. We've heard a lot of extreme things from Trump. With a guy like that, it's kind of baked into the votepic.twitter.com/sMTbZicUrJ

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) October 24, 2024

So, I wanted to get this off my chest--fascism being "baked in" is the reason you REJECT a candidate, not the reason you support him. 

I might charitably presume Chris Sununu thinks this is Trump saying "extreme things" that he does not mean, and that he can differentiate the extreme things Trump says from what he intends to do, and from what those who surround him want to do. If this is how he is looking at it, he is deeply stupid, because people who support extreme words do so because they like them and want them to be so. Trump says them because he gets away with saying them and presumes that he can do what he likes later on, because he has persuaded enough people that the previously unthinkable is permissible. 

Sununu tells himself this is the direction that he believes people are going. So--he is following a multitude to do evil?  He is being a go-along-to-get along, imagining someone else will fix the problem of fascism? Or is he willing to get his hands dirty, too?

TWGB: Fox and the Sour Grapes

 

Media needs to play this clip for GOP candidates and say NOW YOU HAVE HEARD IT--and get them to respond. Because he is using people's names. Real damn people. https://t.co/wGtl0QjSpS

— Vixen Strangely (@VixenStrangely) October 16, 2024

What would you call the shade Trump painted himself for this? Terror Cotta? The "enemy within"--which Trump has suggested siccing the military on, includes (Democratic) US Congress members. It probably also includes former GOP US Congress members like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. It likely includes certain former White House personnel--his own former White House. IT includes people like Gen. Mark Milley.  And this "enemies list" is not about people who lied about him--oh no. They did something far worse.

They told the truth.  Trump has never been a fan of transparency--even though we can see through him. Russian interference was real and the Trump campaign had multiple Russian contacts, and the perfect phone call wasn't perfect. It was extortionate. 

So, how does Fox News, who was sued by Dominion not so long ago and settled for a really amazing amount of money for lying about the 2020 election, in the person of one Brett Baier, presumed serious interviewer, use this information--that Trump considers various prominent American public servants fair game for being rounded up by the military and punished for being the "enemy within"? 

He whitewashes it to try and make the Democratic 2024 Presidential candidate look like she's being extra. 

No, really. 

RFK, Jr. is a Complete Shit Individual

 I had to see a bit more of RFK, Jr.'s Twitter after seeing this whole spiritual savior moralizing fuckshit:

So, I wonder if RFK, Jr. is in constant contact with God when he's pretending that he did not solicit and share nudes from a much younger reporter and does stuff like support Donald Trump when he's "critical" of the EPA because they...acted on Trump's say-so to play-down the harmful effects of various chemicals. 

Another example of the corrupt influence of industry on our government. In this case, the EPA.https://t.co/8WzOQuGlks

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 22, 2024

Who did what to whom and when matters. I don't think the whole world of Olivia Nuzzi--she managed to go far, fast, because of her looks very probably and good for her, but you have to combine it with smarts.  And courting a "digital" romance with a subject in the name of access journalism isn't smart. Especially when she gave more than she got. 

Now, Let's Play "Do You Hear What I Hear?"

 

Having a hard time coming to any conclusion besides the obvious one about what Rich Lowry catches himself blurting out here pic.twitter.com/PFHQMCS8UP

— Madeline Peltz (@peltzmadeline) September 16, 2024

Now it's time to play the inciting new game show, "Do You Hear What I Hear?" where the contestants try to make out whether it's the word we are not supposed to say, or just a terrible, terrible slip of the soft palate. In our clip today, we have Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, on Megyn Kelly's show, which I guess is a thing, extremely butchering the word "migrants" or "immigrants" until it sounds like....

Well, you be the judge. 

OK, time's up, audience. So, as is the catch phrase of our show: "Did you hear what I hear?"

No. You actually don't need more time for this. I don't know what part of NR or Megyn Kelly or Rich Lowry confused you about whatever is "in their heart". The actual answer is--the reason people are hearing it isn't about whether it has been said out loud, it's about this dumb dance we are doing around immigration trying not to make it about---that, when we know damn good and well it is. 

You can actually not use that one word and still be saying that word more than you know. That's the  whole answer. We don't need a whole lot more episodes. 

So those of you who got the right answer here, you win a lifetime supply of the baggage of knowing about it, and for those you who didn't know, you get the parting gift of probably figuring it out but most likely not from this blogpost. 

Thanks for playing everybody! And let's meet again probably sooner than we think we should right here in the 21st century but apparently not!

UPDATE: Here's a bonus round, Christian supremacist edition:

JD Vance Creates Stories

 

I know this might get lost in the swirl of yet another Republican-ish white male gun-owner possibly trying to take a pop at Donald Trump (thoughts and prayers) but this is really rather serious: Trump's running mate admitted he sometimes creates stories (lies) because he wants people to see the truth (also different lies). To be more exact:

In a stunning admission, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, said he was willing “to create stories” on the campaign trail while defending his spreading false, racist rumors of pets being abducted and eaten in a town in his home state of Ohio.

Vance’s remarks came during an appearance on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, where he said he felt the need “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people”.

And what suffering was that? Because the "suffering" was supposedly happening before the acid thrown on cars and the Proud Boys marching through town and the Klan fliers posted hither and yon. The college campuses going virtual and the suspected arson. 

He can call that the "hecklers' veto" and pretend that people who threaten violence or do vandalism aren't going to do the real thing. We know in El Paso and Buffalo and Squirrel Hill sometimes bad things happen to real people because the real people and the real bad people do exist. 

That isn't "stories". 

They're Eating the Dogs! Debate me!

 

What a split screen. I mean. pic.twitter.com/pKW39fDfoh

— Annika Brockschmidt (@ardenthistorian) September 11, 2024

They are not eating the dogs. Putin is eating Trump's lunch. Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, and every state has laws against infanticide. Trump's "concepts of a plan" are not a goddamn plan and he looked weak, delusional, unfocused, changed the subject and rambled like a lunatic, and demonstrated why 81 million people voted against him four years ago. Trumps history of racism was discussed. as was his weakness and lack of patriotism. 

Vice-President Harris had reasons to smile, to express pity for delusional old Trump mingled with the satisfaction of having a new crotchet of his to seize on with any given response. He was baited on his weakness, on people leaving his rallies, on his former staff having bad things to say about him--

And he rose, or should we say, sank, to each allusion. 

He messed up by showing up thinking his act was all he needed. The ABC team did a good job of fact-checking, which Trump fans will no doubt view as putting their thumbs on the scale. I guess my point about that is--why are the facts so stubbornly aligned against what Trump says, though?  That is certainly something you might want to consider!

Maybe Trump is just a pathetic liar. 

This Tenet Thing--

 

Since 2016, I've felt sort of hyperaware about the potentiality of Russian disinfo because obviously, WikiLeaks and the IRA. Per the Senate Intelligence Committee, in multiple volumes, this was anything but a hoax. The claim Trump didn't welcome it and appreciate it is more than answered by his campaign's silence about it and even attempted cover-up. Money was funneled through Facebook and Twitter ads and RW-pressure groups like NRA. I joke that we are still living in 2016 because we are still finding out how that election was, well, weird. 

I deleted a post about how weird it was that Benny Johnson was a dupe to launder Russian talking points in the Tenet exploit because I realized that his basic dopiness and right-wing credulity is a whole fucking bigger mood than I was handling at the moment. We get that RW dopey incendiaries are out here--and they are pretty well-funded domestically as it is. Like, you pick a random concern-trolling "Liberty" "Freedom" "Heritage" or "Family"-labelled group from the last 100 years, and it was probably founded by some freaky Christian billionaire bigot family like the DeVos, Wilkes, Prince, Mellon, Coors, Koch, Busch, etc. The family-tree of theocratic and Bircher-light think tankitude has been incestuous and generously endowed since forever. 

But where there is money and batshit, you have a real problem--people who love the hell out of money and don't care what degree of batshit they spew. If you wanted useful idiots for foreign actors, this is one way you could open up a path for useful idiots to wrongfully mobilize people by playing on their fears and so on. Propaganda is cheap and effective. Even when we try to sanction the fuck out of the players to try and make it prohibitively costly to shit in the US litterbox--someone will try it.

The Things They Say

 

The desperation is hilarious. https://t.co/8OZ0H0y44C pic.twitter.com/Owr6iTAPaO

— Chris D. Jackson (@ChrisDJackson) September 1, 2024

(This post been busted--here's a link adjacent as fuck.) I should have saved the image. 

The same kind of people who think Kamala Harris never saluted also are mad Barack Obama saluted once with a coffee cup or wore a tan suit that one time.  The same kind of people will boldly assert she doesn't know where Arlington Cemetery is, when she knows the route. Someone like Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a book about Arlington, can say with some confidence that Biden and Harris should have attended an event to which they were not invited on his weekly Sunday chat shot hit. (Yes, weekly, and why? Do people want to see this mook?) He says it with confidence not because it's true, but because he doesn't expect to be thrown out on his ear. 

This is the guy who wrote the letter ages ago that recommended we back out of the JCPOA, and it was literally one of the dumbest foreign policy decisions ever. He's an open partisan whose opinions aren't to be trusted--ergo, he's on tv every week. 

Apparently, the media just exists to air opinions without context. 

Same Old Tired Playbook

 

Bash: “Trump suggested that you happened to turn Black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.”

Vice President Harris: “Same old tired playbook. Next question, please.” pic.twitter.com/F2PrHOXETK

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) August 30, 2024

It's been clear for a while now that Trump does and says things entirely for attention--good attention or bad attention, he just wants people to talk about him and to have the conversation to revolve around him. It's regrettable that so much of the media falls for this, and politicians end up discussing some peculiar brain-scat from an obviously unwell person instead of talking about actual issues, because they rely on someone else's opinion of whether or not said brainshit was a whole mental turd or not instead of being able to call anything out as the steaming puddle of cerebral diarrhea it is, out of fear of not being seen as "objective". 

This is me saying this. The person who has whole pages devoted to TrumpWorld. I have dissected the pellets of Trump-droppings from time to time myself. 

Kamala Harris, on the other hand, used seven curt words to dismiss the idiot birther and suggest the interviewer try something more substantive. She isn't bothered by what he said. We don't have to pay attention to it. 

I just freaking love her for that. 

The arsonist wants to set fires, but we don't have to give him oxygen. (I feel like this is a preview of how she will handle any debate provocation, and I am looking forward to him trying to confront a whole shut-down of his stock in trade.) 

TWGB: The Bedminster Bore

 

Not that long ago, I watched some right-wing commentator on Bill Maher's show try to say that Trump was NOT a "country club Republican", and for some reason, no one told her that Trump owns the fucking country clubs. (Was it Batya Ungar-Sargon? I can't find the clip but it's hardly worth my time to keep looking for it.) He owns the country clubs. He is not a working-class hero. He stiffs working people whenever he can. 

He just sat down with fellow billionaire Elon Musk and talked about how unions were bad because working people would be paid more if they were unionized. And today, he stood in front of his country club in New Jersey with some prop groceries and...um...talked about Hillary Clinton's emails and calling Kamala Harris a communist. Because how long can someone talk about the economy when he's only talking about it to get elected?  He lied, as per usual, because it's what he does. 

It was a dumb snooze version of his stump speech that he fooled certain chosen journalists into turning up for. Low energy. Lower-case "t" Trump. 

This Looks Like News

 

No this isn’t a concert it’s the Harris/Walz rally in ARIZONA 🔥🔥🔥#KamalaBringsUsJoy
pic.twitter.com/WDBWD0yLPh

— Skyleigh Heinen-Uhrich (@Sky_Lee_1) August 9, 2024

This clip is the Harris/Walz crowd in Arizona yesterday. It's big, and these people are turned up to eleven.

Now, I understand the news media like to cover Donald Trump--if it bleeds, it leads, and there's probably money riding on his having a big old red-faced aneurism on stage one day or of course, he just spews his usual "American carnage"-flavored rant--it's a lurid carnival where both the observers and the observed are the freak show. 

But what if there was a thirst for something different and better? Maybe instead of hearing for the hundredth time about low water pressure and whales being driven mad by windmills, insults against journalists, other politicians, immigrants, wide swaths of the American people, and of course, lying about every little thing under the sun and a few beyond it, we could have a conversation about something more constructive than that. 

I think this is the podium to train the cameras on--not the empty one that stays empty even when a late, sweaty, angry old man finally lumbers behind it. Take a look at this crowd, and what had happened to those poll numbers over the last two-three weeks, and ask yourself "What are these people seeing now that they weren't before?"

This looks like news to me. What if we just want some good news for a change? What if people are tired of being mad and just want nice things for a change? What if they want some truth? For a change?

You know, I could go with that. I think a lot of people could.

It's Up to Us

 

I spent the last few days putting off writing about the "Pass the Torch" movement. Oh, I was getting ready. I was going to sit down and take names and call out the fuckery. People didn't start one minute from the first question during the debate before I think the "drop Biden" movement started, in a way that felt coordinated and desperately shitty to me. 

Who the fuck treats a decent man who just gave us an astonishingly successful 3.5 years like this? Why are Democrats even airing our laundry in public? I'm a fan of transparency on one hand, but on the other it felt disrespectful to the man and his honorable public service. 

Every dumb horserace "Here's what a contested convention would look like" article, every "who might we see in a blitz primary?" thumbsucker, seemed to be a repudiation of the primaries we just had. 

The last straw wasn't the has-been campaign mahoffs of yesteryear who have displayed the political savvy of brain-damaged lemmings in the rush to shaft the incumbent Democratic president, though, that was going to make me bleed my frustration all over the internet--it was the distilled self-parody of Sorkinism: suggesting Democrats nominate Mitt Romney. 

Big "not The Onion" energy, but why did my eyes water? 

Because much as my feelings about Mitt Romney have moderated from 2012--he still isn't a Democrat, and it felt defeatist. One major party is captured by racist, violent authoritarianism, and the other is consigned to irrelevance and mere "Never Trumpism"?  Fuck that. 

This Isn't Good Journalism or Good Politics

 

On last night's exclusive ABC interview with the president of the United States, we saw a very confused man ask a question, lose track of the answer, then ask that same question moments later as if he didn't ask it at all. Many, many times. (See how this works?)

I'm talking about George Stephanopoulos, of course, who sounded like he trying to take the car keys away from Daddy while Pops was trying to win the Indianapolis 500.  I don't know what it did for ABC's ratings, but I know what it did for my opinion of journalism today.  That's right--my priors were reinforced. And if you thought Biden was an old man in denial about the approach of time, you probably came away the same way, and if you thought he was doing a good job as president and to leave him the hell alone about one debate, you probably didn't see anything that worried you--

Except for the fact that this wasn't journalism. It was a staged event with false stakes imposed on it--every bit as much a media presentation as a softball interview. It didn't have to be "adversarial" in tone to keep the question of whether the Reaper was playing keepsies with the Commander in Chief's marbles. If Biden sounded confident, he was too confident. If he sounded dismissive.... etc. 

But how you deny you've lost it without sounding in denial? (A-hah! A "Non-denial denial"!) How do you dismiss the results of a debate vs. the results of a strong legislative agenda? (The time for dismissing the debate and pointing to the scoreboard was probably before the debate, but then we would have had chin-stroking about "Why is Biden avoiding a debate?" Bad faith is bottomless when the floor is shame, and people stop having any.) 

TWGB: With Fear for Our Democracy

 

I will respect the limits of presidential powers that I have for three and a half years. But any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law.

I concur with what Justice Sotomayor wrote today:

"With fear for our democracy—I dissent."

So do I. pic.twitter.com/YmrPBMQhgY

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 2, 2024

I took a weekend-sized break from commenting on the "replacing Biden" discourse in advance of this actual decision.  Chief Justice Roberts can pretend he limited the immunity of a deranged and/or criminally intentioned officeholder to their "official acts", but I fail to see a brightline or obvious test for what that actually means. It is the decision of Humpty-Dumpty: When the court uses a word (or a phrase) it means what they chose it to mean, neither more nor less.   

The contentiousness of the debate over whether Biden. finding himself tongue-tied and twisted in a 90-minute fact-free-for all against a serpent-tongued bigot, misogynist, traitor, rapist, and white collar fraud, should step down pales before this--of course Trump is a bad man and Joe Biden is a good man. But who the fuck among them believes in the American experiment of a country of the people, by the people and for the people?  Because don't be mistaken, and far too many were in 2000 and in 2016:

You aren't just voting for a person, you are voting for a government. Will that administration care about good government that tries to lift us all up because it is the right thing to do? Or are you getting a petty tyrant and corruption? (Please ask yourselves what legalizing bribes and inviting everyone to go on ahead and sue to get the law you like, the congress be damned means--draining the swamp my fat ass.) 

Our talking heads and assorted media jackals aren't up to this shit. If Trump has a political enemies list, then the press-the folks he has called "enemies of the people" are going to be on it, it's just a question of when.  And they want to talk about whether an old man with a cold who has won back our allies, stands up to our enemies, and has reinvigorated our economy glitched during a dog and pony show? 

Are they not up to this historical moment? Do they have no read on the failures of history? Are they entranced by the notion that It Can't Happen Here? 

Not Much of a Debate

 

Disclaimer: I hate debates. They are a stupid formality that are somehow supposed to educate voters about the candidates--and they don't do that. The first (and possibly only?) 2024 presidential debate reflected everything I hate about debates, regardless of format. One candidate lied relentlessly, one candidate tried to talk policy, and the moderators were basically useless. No one is learning anything from it. It was brutal to watch, and I had the sound off and relied on closed caption because the sound of Trump's voice lying makes me a little irrational. 

That said, two huuuugge Trump lies got debunked right off the bat: the first being that Biden would be on some kind of uppers or super-soldier drugs, and the second being that the CNN moderators were out to tank Trump.  Biden seemed hoarse and a bit subdued. Tapper and Bash started off with inflation, and the debate somehow went 44 minutes before the convicted felon insurrectionist's weak point (being a convicted felon insurrectionist) came up. 

That was...inauspicious. 

Now, it is a lot to expect real-time fact checking against Trump's farrago of nonsense, but major howlers, like whether ANYONE supports post-birth abortion, probably begged for some pushback--but since the media barely tries to do that in interviews, why expect it? Even if it's literally an accusation of murder. Of course, there will be ample fact-checking stories to come--but you know who is going to read/or watch those?

That's right--people who are already pretty informed. Your uninformed voter probably tuned out the debate about 30 minutes in and is gone forever. 

TWGB: Live By the Fake News...

 

The "professional shitposter" who falsely claimed to be a juror's cousin and whose post MAGA has been running with to demand a mistrial just posted this. pic.twitter.com/ojiTEnepUS

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) June 7, 2024

TrumpWorld loves the idea of Fake News. They wanted to make the events of 1/6 about antifa, who weren't even there, after all. So why not try to invalidate Trump's very real guilty verdict on 34 charges with the word of a "shitposter"?

My God. How much has Trump himself benefitted from fake news and shitposting?  Is a rando keyboard wiseass going to be the reason Trump isn't seriously convicted with some white collar crime for laundering his hush money through his business to benefit his 2016 election and so on?

Judge Merchan is pro-actively addressing this particular arcane form of internet fuckery, I feel like this is about nipping the stupidity in the bud. After all, the convictions make a lot of sense to people who aren't idiot-pilled: there are two things in life Trump loves, and they are adultery and white-collar crime. Eventually, they were going to collide and blast Trump right in his orange-painted face.