The Former Guy is Nuts

 

Trump says the Obama Administration “says it in their stats” that Trump built 500 miles of border wall when he was president. pic.twitter.com/hWHLiZax3r

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 1, 2023

He thinks the Biden Administration is a continuation of the Obama Administration and is lying on the wall he never really built. TBH, he's all the way nuts:

Montage of 33 clips of the stupidest, most vile, insane, weirdest, addled dementia-ridden, psychotic statements made by Trump over the past two weeks. pic.twitter.com/iCbt5PtzBX

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) September 30, 2023

None of this is new. He's been the guy who has been talking about windmill cancer and buying Greenland and stuff like that.  The problem is, no one ever seems to want to call the weird as fuck things he says actually "crazy" even though they objectively are. It's like Trump has been given a safe space, available to celebrities, to be eccentric or stupid as hell, and the media doesn't want to report that thing. The Trump is not just a criminal fascist thing, a rapist and a racist thing. They don't want to report on the fact that he's dumb as hell. Windmill cancer. Windmills killing whales. Electric cars only travelling for twenty minutes. People drinking bleach to stop Covid. 

The weirdo projects his crimes on others, he suggests other people should commit acts of vengeance for him, he wants impeachment of his political "enemy" and a government shutdown because he thinks it will help him (it would not have because federal prosecutions are funded differently). 

He has been an unstable not-genius for a long while. His supporters are by now, just absolutely shithouse rats. How are you supporting the guy who says any of the things this one says? 

We are not saying this enough. Trump is not stable, not a genius, not sane. He's not just a crook, he's bent.  He' s actually stupid, even though the media has been schooled to not call him stupid. 

They have no trouble calling Biden "old". Where is the trouble with pointing out that Trump is a pussy-grabbing fraudulent dumbass with no redeeming qualities? Because that would be the very sad truth of it. 

And he may have bought a gun and regularly threatens violence. Maybe it would be entirely right for the court to put him in a place where we all feel safer about him. Like a situation where he can stop lying and threatening people.  Things candidates for office um--just don't normally do. 

STAY THE F*CK CALM!!

On one hand, Trump doesn't want people to PANIC about COVID-19, like the Churchillian stateman that he calls himself, but on the other hand, liberals are going to ban energy (because with wind, you know, on a breezeless day you won't be able to watch your seven-eight hours of Fox News), take your guns, shutdown the economy and auto production, destroy the suburbs, get rid of cows, and kill you with soup. (And apparently do a "reverse racism" by teaching kids history I think he's saying, right?)

I feel like we are getting very mixed and very silly messages here. Is it possible that Trump....always lies? Wow. Stay tuned, folks.

UPDATE: Brief addendum--Trump has said a shit-ton lately about the destruction of the suburbs and about Democrat-led cities being "on fire". You know what can destroy suburbs? Wildfires. You know what's on fire? The fucking West Coast. If Trump wants to do presidenting, now would be a pretty good time to pull his big-boy pants up and try it, right?

Tilting at Windmills all Day

It would strain the credulity of any person living a mere five or six years ago to imagine the kind of extraordinarily and bizarrely stupid day we have had the exceptional weird fortune to witness, and it would blast right past every firewall of the belief system of those people to imagine that, of all the unfathomable sheer stupidity witnessed today, so much of it would be just another fucking weekday under the ruling auspices of Mad King Donald that we'd just shrug it off.  It wouldn't be a DEFCON 1 emergency. Helicopters wouldn't be circling overhead at the White House. It's just....

Tuesday.

It's just a fucking Tuesday around here, anymore. Not even Thursday, people. Not even newsdump Friday.

It's just one of those days when the orange-tinted dingus is in rare form and accuses two congresswomen of being profoundly anti-Semitic, mocking one of them for tearing up because she will not be visiting with her grandmother due to a profound personal principle regarding the dignity of her kin. It's one of those days when he then turns around and accuses US Jews of being "disloyal" if they vote for Democrats.

But gosh, he sure said a lot of things today (recorded in this thread by Aaron Rupar, who at this stage, has seen an awful lot), such as reiterating that he really could have ten million Afghanis killed, if he so minded ( he still is not so minded) and offered a repeated belief he has that Afghanistan is why the Soviet Union is now Russia, and that Russia should be in the G-8, and it's only a G-7 and not a G-8 because Putin "outsmarted Obama" which I guess is a weird way to phrase "annexed Crimea" but fuck it, he was rollin'. He also offered an opinion about Kashmir (it's complicated).

Uh, and he's not going to do the background checks thing because the NRA owns his ass (still!) and also the economy is just fine, so people should stop saying it isn't, but in the meantime, yes he would very much like a payroll tax cut, maybe lowered interest rates, you know--a spiff. Which doesn't sound half nervous at all!

And any of those things would have been "Wow! He does not know what he's talking about and says things anyway--is he ok?" Except this is the new normal, right? And then he does this:

He cancels a meeting with the PM of Denmark because she is not going to let him buy Greenland. And if he's not going there to buy Greenland, what is he even going there for? To look at windmills? Because he's Donald Fucking Trump, and he hates windmills. Everyone knows that!

Andy Kaufman never had such dedication to a cringe bit. If this is a joke, damn. 

But if this is not a joke....

Also, damn. 

Is Stable Genius Joking, Though?

Pres. Trump jokes about windmills in speech on energy: "All of a sudden it stops, the wind and the televisions go off, and your wives and husbands say, 'Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight, but the wind stopped blowing." https://t.co/JsAo4rT8TM pic.twitter.com/H3ERYkZ5CR

— ABC News (@ABC) August 13, 2019

In a relentlessly false speech, like many of Trump's other, relentlessly false speeches, Trump repeated a laugh line about the power going out if the wind stops, but honestly? Why do we give him the benefit of the doubt on this one? I can easily see him rejecting buying an electric car because he'd never find a cord long enough for where he wants to go.

His thing about windmills--I still say it is nearly quixotic.

Anyway, Trump also reminded us about how much he loves trucks, and okay--we know, kiddo. We know.

Stay Bull Jean Yuss 2: Code Orange

Trump at NRCC dinner:
-vows to "take back the House"
-says “They say the noise [from wind farms] causes cancer”
-tells crowd he's just sure someone will leak "his whole damn speech" to the media while it's being broadcast on C-SPAN

But everyone just sits and grins cause money. pic.twitter.com/73yQXBEfjT

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) April 3, 2019

Donald Trump is having a bit of a "normal one" today, I'm afraid. I mentioned earlier that he was reprehensibly lying (as was his minion, Hogan Gidley) regarding Puerto Rico, but did not also mention that he was also going volte-face over his earlier claims that he was fully exonerated by the Mueller report. Now, he says Dems are crazy for wanting the full report that allegedly fully exonerates him, which does suggest that crowing over not-quite four pages of a summary of a summary might have been overselling things a bit. This was, sadly, not the entirety of Trump's dysfunction and incompetence on display.

In an event with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Trump was simply bizarre. He was unable to say the word "origins", saying instead "oranges". He stated his own father was born in a nice place in Germany (he was born in the Bronx). He also seemed to indicate that part of the problem with immigration was judges.

Judges. Mkay.

I've joked recently about Trump being a "Stay Bull Jean Yuss" because of his quite obvious ignorance about how wind power even works and his own crowing about his supposed intelligence. Indicating that wind power causes cancer comes from the same place anti-vax bullshit does (oh, wait up, he's about that bullshit, too)--the fake news sewer of the internet.

I've also kidded that maybe some part of Trump's ignorance and apparent incapacity is a work, not a shoot, on the off chance that he needs an insanity plea for whatever shit he fears all the investigations surrounding him will eventually lead to.

Yeah. But it still isn't funny and needs to be looked into, though. There is something very not okay with this picture. It looks bad because it is bad, you guys.

Stay Bull Jean Yuss

Donald Trump is glad the U.S. is not powered by wind "because it only blows sometimes" https://t.co/8Ny2VzhHL5 pic.twitter.com/n5fkOavVvw

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) March 29, 2019

The wind may only blow some of the time, but Trump blows all of the time.

UPDATE: I mean, seriously....

TRUMP: "If Hillary got in... you'd be doing wind. Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn't blow, you can forget about television for that night. 'Darling, I want to watch television.' 'I'm sorry! The wind isn't blowing.' I know a lot about wind." pic.twitter.com/tGsUIoUmUQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

Should This Stand?

This is going to be a pretty short post because it's already the wee hours and I am certain there will be great shades of fuckery to confront on the morrow, but there is something especially weird about the tendency that President Trump has to undermine the various intelligence agencies who actually do the work of gathering information and analyzing it to provide context that should inform Trump's decision-making process. This relationship should not be either adversarial, nor should it be a top-down thing where Trump dictates what "reality" is.

The IC has provided credible information that ISIS is still active, that North Korea has not stepped down its nuclear program, that Iran is still largely abiding by its nuclear agreement, and that while border security is important, the overland threat is sort of not that big a priority. And Trump rubbishes it all, and then posts the above Tweet that tells us not to believe our eyes and ears about what IC professionals who have sworn an oath to protect and defend this country are saying, believe Trump! Trump might trash treaties and hate NATO and not even understand what defending allies is about, and for that matter, believes climate change is a hoax even though the Pentagon takes it seriously now, and has been doing so for years.

Any person with an open and rational mind, being confronted with information from people who have made it their lives' work to provide high-quality information in the service of their country, would try to incorporate at least some of it into their own frame of reference to try and do their own job better.

Not Donald Trump. He seems to find expertise suspect and is intensely uncomfortable with the very idea that he might not be the smartest person in the room. And it seems like he prefers to take his cues from actually stupid people, like the cast (I cannot call them "journalists") of his favorite shows on the Fox News channel.  Could anyone think for an instant that Lou Dobbs knows more than the FBI about law enforcement or counter-terrorism? (Dobbs has the distinction of being an original "birther" and having been dropped by CNN for his especially anti-immigrant views. His only distinguishing quality seems to be his bigotry.) Let alone weighing in on the rare genius of other Fox personalities like Tucker Carlson and Jesse Watters, who do not understand that the sun and wind still can generate electricity even when it is very cold, because they are functionally science illiterate, and who promote racist propaganda because they are...

Well, by any stretch, not persons who should be trusted over the actual people doing national security work, anyhow, regardless of whatever low esteem they should actually be held in. But it nonetheless remains that Trump, despite having qualified professionals that could provide him with good information, prefers his entertainment to inform his world.  Quite possibly because he lacks the attention span for anything other than "the shows".

But there are fewer professionals available to try and amend Trump's odd mental topiary,  owing in part to the thanklessness of the job and Trump's own limited arsedness to replace the brain-drain in his administration with good quality people, if he could even get them. In fact, his recent shut down was explained somewhat anonymously as an opportunity to purge careerists--quite baldly admitting that expertise wasn't really the Trump Administration's thing.  

Long story short, Trump harps on the Deep State because competent people see through his bullshit, and this gives him a lot of discomfort. So how long will anyone want to stay on when words will be put in their mouths, and their genuine assessments will be supplanted with Trump's casual falsehoods? Especially when he prefers, when his lie is called out, to continue not listening. 

Climate Sunday: How About those Marches?

Time-lapse, bird's-eye video shows thousands of protesters marching toward White House during climate change march https://t.co/yhOcdt6iHR pic.twitter.com/YqhsCxvvaA

— CNN (@CNN) April 30, 2017

Another weekend, another massive turnout in protests against the policies of Donald Trump. There is one thing you can say about his first 100 days--he's definitely set an anti-environmentalist tone. He has signed an executive order to expand offshore drilling (so we can expect more Deepwater Horizon-like spills, I suspect) and to mine and drill and log at national monuments. His EPA is conveniently killing the pretty solid Energy Star program that, it turns out, hasn't been working for his businesses. The EPA has also taken useful climate science data from its website. And as for investing in environmental security measures against the ravages from the effects of global warming? Well, this Administration won't be bothering with that sort of prudent and timely material protection, either.

What frustrates me most about all of this is that this Administration is informed by a kind of penny-wise and dollar-foolish short-sightedness that tries to frame environmentalism as a concern of elitist privilege that costs unnecessary fortunes to address, while ignoring the reality that the people who seem to agitate against green measures are often connected to fossil fuel money, and the communities that bear the brunt of a changing climate are often the poorest. I can't respect a person who is ready to tilt at windmills if they deface the view from one of his properties, and then wants to build a great, huge, beautiful wall...a sea wall, that is, to protect another one from the sea-level rise that per Himself is just a hoax. Situational much?

Just as President Trump has learned (although, to be quite honest, not as fully as he needs to) that dealing with things like health care, taxation, trade, and handling crazy little tin-pot dictators with effective nukes and not-terribly effective missiles, are harder than he once believed them to be, I would sincerely like him to acknowledge that maybe there is a pretty good reason to pay attention to scientists and reasonably concerned individuals who are trying to alert him to the realities that environmental hazards pose. I hope that he would try to actually go out of his way to find the experts who can help him respond to a Hurricane Katrina or Superstorm Sandy-level weather event, or a directly man-made threat like the Deepwater Horizon spill. I think it would be great to know that he could listen to people talk about their environmental concerns, and take them seriously. But his rhetoric and the actions of the past 100 days don't give me an awful lot of encouragement.

How do you even tell this guy that CDC disease research and Coast Guard interdiction and the environmental measures taken by the Pentagon are all more essential to national security than his fakakta Mexican border wall is ever going to be? (I don't know! Do you?)

Maybe pictures of these amazing, engaged, motivated crowds can do what mere words don't.

Climate Sunday: The Fossil Fool

This week, Donald Trump gave a speech about his energy policy, which, if you think about it, would be a speech that should intersect with environmental policy and foreign policy and trade deals and all the stuff this guy thinks he knows stuff about and, well, doesn't.

His speech left something to be desired--like any competence at all with any of the matters at hand.

Coal jobs aren't coming back. We're not bringing them back because to do it, we'd have to deregulate to the point where we accept a callous loss of life, lower wages, and somehow make coal a desirable fuel source again in the developed world where most energy gets consumed. Do you see high-rise buildings put up with a coal furnace in the basement these days? I don't think you see that so much anymore, but Donald Trump builds great buildings, so maybe he knows.

He criticizes the wind industry for killing birds. I've joked before about his Quixotic attempts to tilt at windmills in Scotland, but do you want to know what really kills lots of birds? Large buildings.  As a builder of great big edifices, you think he'd know about this particular edifice dysfunction.

He also rather peculiarly seems to think we are shipping random bits of water out to sea in California to save fish and that there is no such thing as a drought.  This was dumb as hell when Carly Fiorina tried it, right?  If you are a farmer--which there are an awful lot of in California, you know your best water source isn't a spigot somewhere that magically sends you water. It's clouds, in the sky, that rain on your land.  Yeah, pumping groundwater and turning a knob somewhere to get the water flowing sounds nice--but we can't retroactively build reservoirs back when to catch the water that isn't falling right now. If someone somewhere wants to cough up money for a time machine and some building reservoir money--awesome sauce. But until you can--guess what? Realize the whole water situation changed in a vulnerable area where population expansion cause a higher demand than the local sources probably could sustain even under the best of circumstances.

He wants to back out of the Paris Accord, and I don't even think he knows what it is. He's looking at it like a trade deal--but to be quite honest, if he thinks there's a way to get anyone to sign up to behave responsibly without mutual cooperation, he's not dumb, he's delusional. There's no leverage in backing out. You lose all authority to tell anyone else what to do. But this doesn't bother him, most likely, because he is a nutter who believes shit from tabloids, and not climate science.

This guy? I environmentally can not with this guy.