I don’t know if Robert Mueller will ever get to the bottom of the Russia collusion story or nail Trump on financial malfeasance uncovered by the investigation. But Trump sure is acting like the walls are closing in already. Here’s a pair of delusional tweets from this morning:
Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2017
Notice all mainstream media outlets are now classified as “fake news.” And a base that even GOP-leaning polls show shrinking to “crazification factor” levels is deemed “stronger.” The base may be stronger in the sense that the concentrated form of any substance is stronger — in this case, concentrated into a more rabid and delusional group. But it’s shrinking, even in the GOP-leaning polls Trump has cited in the past, and given his obsession with ratings, etc., it’s safe to assume he knows that.
This weekend, the NYT ran a piece on how Republicans, including Pence, are creating shadow campaigns for 2020 in case the Trump presidency implodes. GOP congressmen and senators are distancing themselves from Hair Furor now that they sense he’s a paper tiger who may damage their own electoral prospects. Pence pushed back on the NYT story in terms so indignant they aroused further suspicion: the toady doth protest too much.
On Meet the Press, the topic was how Trump has failed to unite the GOP, and indeed it is a marvel that a Republican president has to shoo away GOP vultures circling the putrid carcass of his administration only six months into his first term — particularly when the economy is relatively strong and we haven’t faced a severe internal or external crisis. But critiquing Trump on his failure to unite the GOP doesn’t go nearly far enough. Trump is famously unable to unite his own inner circle.
I can’t remember a president ever being so openly indifferent to the goal of uniting the country. Just last week, Trump led “lock her up” chants against an opponent who garnered three million more votes than he did, and with every utterance, he seems more determined to “otherize” political enemies and exploit internal divisions for political gain.
It’ll get worse before it gets better. The more under siege Trump feels, the more he’ll double and then triple down on anti-immigrant hysteria and other wedge issues to solidify his shrinking base. We’ve got to prepare as best we can, and if anyone has new ideas on that score, I’d love to hear them. In the meantime, buckle up.
NobodySpecial
You weren’t here for that Reagan fella, then, were you?
different-church-lady
I would actually count that as getting better. Healing isn’t always pretty.
A Ghost To Most
Feature, not a bug. Dividing the country into us and them has been the Russpublican theme since 68.
Major Major Major Major
He ain’t looking so great in the Fox News polling either, what with the under 50% and falling.
Villago Delenda Est
This vile creature needs to be utterly destroyed.
dm
Nate Silver has been pointing out in a couple of recent 538 podcasts that while 45’s approval rating doesn’t appear to be moving much, there is a shift from “strongly approve” to mere “approve”. So it may not even be “stronger in the more concentrated” sense.
satby
@A Ghost To Most:
Truth.
different-church-lady
@A Ghost To Most: When working for Nixon in 1971, Pat Buchanan’s philosophy was (paraphrase) “Split the country in half, and our half will be bigger.”
Betty Cracker
@A Ghost To Most: I think it’s an order of magnitude worse under Trump. Past GOP presidents at least gave lip service to the notion that they were the president of the whole country. Trump talks of nothing but his rally goers, as if that’s the only constituency he’s even supposed to be concerned with. GWB was a terrible president, but at least he tried to tamp back anti-Muslim hysteria after 9/11. Does anyone doubt for a moment Trump would eagerly amplify it?
dedc79
Trump’s going after Blumenthal (again) about Vietnam. I personally have never favored going after a politician for avoiding service in Vietnam. The progressive position is that the war was wrong, so why on earth would we fault people who didn’t want to participate in such a war? That said, I think it’s fair to to make an exception when, as is the case here, the President has invited criticism of his own conduct by criticizing someone else regarding their service. I think the distinction is that we shouldn’t criticize the president for seeking deferrals – we should criticize his hypocrisy in going after Blumenthal.
germy
Some interesting trivia:
Remember the rally from a few days ago, the weird older … enthusiastic guy sitting behind Trump? I think several commenters here noticed him.
http://www.wvgazettemail.com/news/20170804/kentucky-doctor-gains-internet-fame-after-huntington-trump-rally
Big Ole Hound
Just think how much worse Pence could be with all the religious fanatics plus the evangelicals and racists all convinced he is their savior.
coin operated
Lord Dampnuts floor for support will never vanish. Decided to get into a drunken political argument with my IGMFY friends here in Sturgis, where being a liberal is no mean feat. They do not like Trump, McConnell is particularly despised, but no matter where the conversation went Hillary’s emails were *always* the fallback position. Whoever predicted that this would be cover for future Republican malfeasance was spot on.
Lyrebird
Why oh why oh why do people still pay to interview Cillizas and Lords and so forth on the teevee, and pay Broders and McArdles to arglebargle, and not YOU???
I am not trying to be fatuous or flatter,
this is a question that bugs me!!!!
But if it also conveys some appreciation, good.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Betty Cracker:
Depends on how they brief the numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRrMu7B1L2I
Major Major Major Major
@Big Ole Hound: but Trump already has all those, partly because they know pence is already running half of domestic policy. Meanwhile trump is destroying our basic institutions of government.
different-church-lady
@dedc79:
There we go trying to use logic and persuasion on the Trumpian mind again. They Do. Not. Care. About. Hypocrisy. There is no logic, there is no fairness. They were not duped into voting for him; he gave them exactly what they wanted, which was hatred-for-kicks. This is a game of Calvinball, except that in place of the cute cartoon kid is a Calvin who pulls the wings off of flies.
germy
@Lyrebird:
Because Betty writes the truth. In a wise and entertaining way.
She’d stick out like a sore thumb.
satby
Most of the Trumpers and /or RWNJs I know have gone quiet. They were thinking they were going to see liberals defeated and were ready to gloat 24/7/365; but their boy’s unfitness and embarrassing tweeting, and the backlash to the RW agenda has quieted all but the most clinically insane. They honestly thought more people agreed with them about immigrants, Muslims, etc. And they aren’t that comfortable having to pretend the stuff about Russia doesn’t matter, they grew up during the Cold War. I’m just glad they’ve shut up. None are super fundy Xtians though.
dmsilev
@dedc79: TPM’s story summarizing Trump’s latest Twitter emissions ended on a note so dry it came with a drought warning:
JCJ
Saw something similar on a bumper sticker here in Deplorable, Wisconsin recently. It was something like
MattF
Had dinner with my old friend from Minnesota on Saturday. She’s politically savvy retired Congressional Democratic staffer, predicted Trump would win the nomination and the election. Says she’s surprised to find Trump is a lot stupider than she’d thought, and a liar (rather than delusional or cognitively impaired).
germy
I hope Pence makes the cover of Time magazine.
With a caption like “Waiting In The Wings” or “Ready For The Number One Spot”.
Gin & Tonic
I wonder how all the Gadsden-flag groupies at the Trump rallies would respond to this: Volodymyr Balukh, a Ukrainian activist living in Russian-occupied Crimea, was arrested in December, and was sentenced Friday to 3 years and 7 months in prison for the crime of raising a Ukrainian flag over his home.
SenyorDave
@coin operated: They’ll be running against the Clintons for the next few decades for sure. I stopped someone recently during a “conversation” about Trump when she went to the emails (and then uranium and Clinton Foundation) and just said she isn’t the president, she is in fact a private citizen, and Trump is the POTUS. She said it was more important to investigate Hillary. I left because there are only a few situations where I will curse someone out, and they almost always involve competitive sports (cheap shots in basketball, etc.).
GregB
Pence is horrible but he has never run in the gutter like like. Trump is working hard to create violent monsters among his followers.
Pence doesn’t go on Alex Jones and doesn’t have moral degenerates yeah like Roger Stone advocsting gleefullyto get on with murdering fellow citizens. Pence is terrible but orders above Trump.
different-church-lady
@MattF:
Oh, so she’s a lot stupider than she thought too.
Kraux Pas
Fewer, better
RussiansRepublicansLAO
I don’t know about you all, but I’m completely nauseated by the number of fucktards out there that still support this moron. I know that Cleeks law explains some of it, but damn!
different-church-lady
@LAO: Well, figure out a way to suck it up, because they’re still going to be around long after Trump is gone.
And yeah, I have no idea what to do about it either.
different-church-lady
Why, you’re right, Donald, that statement is hard to believe.
SFAW
@dedc79:
Does that fucking moron know how to do anything other than attack people he perceives as threats?
If there were someone at the DNC with enough guts/stones/whatever, they should find someone to attack (verbally) Lying Littledick EVERY FUCKING DAY. Attack about his (figurative) fellating of Putin, attack about his lying about the Uday/Kushner/Russkies meeting, his hypocritical draft-dodger nutjob pronouncements, his businesses’ bankruptcies, the grifting that his orgs are known for, his lying about “donations” the “he” has “given,” his delusional “I got more votes” mantra, his idiotic AGW statements, attack anything and everything that he’s ever lied about. It is what some people call a “target-rich environment.”
The primary goal of the above is not to somehow, magically, convince his base to turn on him — they never will. The goal is to drive him so over the edge that he says and does shit which will (A) give Mueller even more ammo and more things to look into, and (B) get the two or three Rethug Senators, who are not Ryan-like in their idolatry, to start talking about Shitgibbon in a similar fashion, and (C) use Lying Littledick’s insane responses as boat anchors to hang around ALL Rethugs in the midterms.
Not sure Perez is up for that kind of scorched-Shitgibbon campaign — he’s not the one to do the attacking, but he should find the right person — but SOMEONE should already be working on it.
LAO
@different-church-lady: I’m going try. But, damn! The level of uninformed, pure stupidity is difficult to comprehend.
Betty Cracker
@satby: Same here. The family members who were crowing about the election are now reluctant to talk politics at all. They won’t come right out and admit Trump is an embarrassment yet, but they know it’s true.
satby
@GregB: Mike Pence directly took actions that will ultimately cost 200 people their lives. His rigid fundamentalism is potentially more dangerous.
randy khan
@dm:
The “strongly approve” to “approve” shift has been happening almost since the inauguration. It’s pretty striking. If you did a graph that aggregated the various shades of approve and disapprove – say, having a five-point scale and averaging across that scale – you’d probably see a more precipitous decline than the raw approve/disapprove numbers show.
Thoroughly Pizzled
Not that we needed any more proof, but Trump in his bunker ain’t lashing out at big banks and NAFTA. It was always just an excuse to vote for the racism.
Major Major Major Major
@LAO: no surprise to this gay man that broad swaths of America are hypocritical bigoted theocrats.
randy khan
@SFAW:
I like it. Sean Spicer will need a job soon, and he’d be perfect for that role. (j/k, in case that isn’t obvious.)
Major Major Major Major
@satby: what, you think trump isn’t already gonna do something like that at Pence’s bidding? You think Mexico-city-on-steroids was Trump’s idea? Think trump gives a shit about trans people in the military? Meanwhile trump is destroying several executive branches and has already bombed Syria.
randy khan
Betty mentions it in passing, but it really is remarkable that Trump’s approve/disapprove has taken such a dive given that the economic news has been pretty decent. It tells you how incompetent he and his team are. If there’s a recession, he could get into the teens or even single digits.
Spanky
@Lyrebird:
Because once upon a time Marcy Wheeler said a naughty word on TV, thereby proving that bloggers should never ever be on TV ever again unless their name is Andrew Sullivan.
For ever and ever amen. The end.
Uncle Cosmo
Archie Bunker mentality, amirite?
Kay
“The Trump Base”. He;’s such a shitty President. God almighty for one day of your LIFE be a bigger person, Donald.
Me, me, me. My base, my family, my business. He should just golf full time and he can take his unemployable adult children with him.
He’s President of 32% of the country, or whatever polling says on a given day. Iike this giant ego void we;re all supposed to fill. They’re so goddammned NEEDY, these people. “Love us! We demand you love us!” It’s the definition of entitiled. It’s not enough they’re making out like bandits in this scam they’re running. We have to LOVE them too.
Yuck. Go away. Do some work or something.
Lyrebird
@germy: @Spanky:
Sigh. Yes.
If this has to be our news-media reality, at least we can skewer it together.
Thanks.
Spanky
@GregB: Pence doesn’t have to do any of those things, as long as his “boss” is doing the dirty work for him. Once Trump is out of the way I won’t be surprised if Mikey doesn’t start right in. Just a bit less obvious about it than Donnie.
LAO
Seriously off topic but the funniest thing my SIL has ever sent me.. Especially apropos since my dog is a toy killer.
Brachiator
I don’t think that this is Trump, or at least not by himself. Trump’s Twitter rants are always filled with ego and resentment. And simple. Trump would say “the people love me. My rallies are bigger than Hitler’s. Biggest rallies ever!”
This reeks of Bannon, a deliberate strategy to use white populism against Congress, and perhaps to lay the groundwork for Trump firing Sessions or Mueller.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
And I bet you are tempted to paraphrase your post title from the other day: “And YOU get a ‘Fuck you’! And YOU get a ‘Fuck you’! EVERY ONE of you gets a ‘Fuck You’!”
dedc79
@different-church-lady:
I completely agree that there’s no point using logic and persuasion on the Trumpian mind. But that doesn’t really address my point. We shouldn’t criticize Trump for getting deferments from serving in Vietnam because the progressive position is that the war in Vietnam was wrong. This is true separate and apart from the fact that we won’t win any arguments with Trump or his supporters by going after his lack of service.
Spanky
@randy khan: Well, it is a long time before Easter Bunny season.
LAO
@Major Major Major Major: I thought the number would be 20% or so, not 1/3 of the country. Also, I expected his total lack of honesty and humanity would turn off a few more people. The utter dis-ingeniousness of Evangelicals, while, maybe not surprising, is totally disheartening.
dedc79
@SFAW:
I think (and i’m far from the first to observe this) that Trump’s attacks are most interesting for what they tell us about his own insecurities/fears. He must feel some shame about having avoided service in Vietnam, so he lashes out at Blumenthal about it to deflect.
Barbara
@satby: The super fundy Xtians are delusional. No matter how often you tell them that the whole point of religious freedom is to be free to worship as you see fit or not, they still have this idea they can cram religiously inspired laws down the throats of non-believers or just other-believers, including other Christians. I tell them that my husband’s ancestors were jailed in a southern state for refusing to attend COE services and fought on the side of the Revolution for the right not to attend church and their eyes glaze over. They are trashing their birthright and in the long run killing themselves with their faux, exterior facing piety. My husband calls this the negative halo effect, where even churches that hate what evangelical Christians are trying to do by supporting Trump and then, they hope, Pence, are poisoning the well in ways that are going to have drastic consequences for all churches.
Major Major Major Major
@dedc79:
Nonsense. We believe in collective societal responsibility, even for things we disagree with.
@LAO: I’m so old I remember when prop 8 passed in even the liberal California.
Kay
Who remembers the ENDLESS media scolding of Obama on how he wasn’t uniting the country?
It;s fucking ridiculous the double standard they employ for this clown. They expect NOTHING – the bar is so low it no longer exists.
I’m old enough to remember the pursed lip lectures on how Hillary Clinton was “too divisive”. Imagine if Obama had spent all of 2013 going after Mitt Romney. I could hear the outrage from my desk.
Cheryl Rofer
The Axios link is here.
Cheryl Rofer
@dedc79: This seems to be why he’s tweeting about Blumenthal.
dedc79
@Major Major Major Major:
I don’t agree with this and I would think many other progressives would balk at it too. Particularly if the word “things” encompasses stuff like ill-conceived wars that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and ruined countless others.
germy
@Brachiator: Bob Schooley did some detective work and found a bunch of bogus “young women and minorities who are pro trump” twitter accounts. He found the original stock photos (models wearing “insert logo here” shirts) and tweeted them side by side with the republican & trump logos added.
Today I see many of those fake twitter accounts have been taken down.
Matt McIrvin
I’m actually surprised that he doesn’t have more support than he does. I expected all the mainstream media outlets to knuckle under to his threats immediately, and that by now we’d just be seeing fulsome praise for Trump’s stern and fatherly leadership across the board, with a corresponding rise in his popularity.
Maybe it’s just that the 9/11 equivalent hasn’t happened yet–maybe he actually missed the train to benefit from one of those, though I wouldn’t be too optimistic.
Kay
You know, the Trump Family would be a lot less vulnerable to their sleazy business practices coming out if they hadn’t decided to take jobs with their father or father in law.
These adults made decisions. No one ordered Trump to hire his unqualified family members and no one ordered them to accept the jobs. If they have to pay for their nepotism remember who made this situation- they did.
Kay
There was a really easy way for Ivanka and Jerard to stay out of the prosecutor’s reach- they could have opted not to take jobs they weren’t qualified for.
Choices. They had choices. They make poor ones.
Spanky
@Cheryl Rofer:
Well within the margin of error for the standard 27%.
Dammit, somebody should really do some research on the intersection of social science and statistics that John Rogers discovered.
Marguerite Hill
The sheep here in this lovely corner of RedLandia are mighty quiet. The local Republicans no longer announce their meetings in the weekly newspaper. It’s almost as if they are ashamed to let others know they are Trump acolytes.
The local powers that be have consolidated polling places. After the incredible turnout in 2016, you’d think they would make voting easier and more accessible, but not these Republicans. ALEC commands to make it more difficult to vote by having more people crowd into fewer places during the upcoming elections, so they do it. I’m waiting to see if the General Assembly reduces early voting period.
Dolt45* is heinously imbecilic in his continuous self-aggrandizement, his flaunting of his radioactive narcissism, and his sociopathic need to spitefully dominate, subjugate, and demean others.
The Republicans created this monster, it took them decades to get it just “right”! If legal immigrants are deported, many area doctors, who just happen to be immigrants, will leave and health care will be less accessible. If TrumpCare is implemented, the local hospital and nursing homes will close and many nurses and CNAs will be unemployed. Oops! There goes the insurance sector down the toilet!
As for agribusiness, crops will once again rot in the fields if undocumented immigrants are forced to leave. Putrid Perdue & Rotten Cotton should have warned Tangerine Trujillo about these prior failed monstrosities. These policies are ill-considered, the result of poor reasoning skills.
Perdue & Isakson support Trump’s reckless decision to abandon the Paris Climate Accord. Jekyll Island and Tybee Island underwater won’t attract tourists. I wonder how beach front property in Atlanta will look.
The current White House occupant yearns to destroy because in truth he is not a builder, a creator, a doer. He’s had everything handed to him on a silver platter. All his life, he has been unfettered from the moorings of etiquette, decency, morality, kindness, cooperation, compassion, and empathy. JFK said a rising tide lifts all boats. DJT says I am the Titanic and all you little tugboats can float or flop.
Matt McIrvin
@Cheryl Rofer: That’s an interesting contrast to the article that, I think, debbie linked to a few days ago, with the worrying claim that Trump’s loss of popularity is almost entirely in deep-red and deep-blue states that don’t matter, and the key swing districts haven’t budged.
azlib
@randy khan:
Agreed. Usually, presidential approval is correlated with how good the economy is doing. I do not wish for a recession because with the Republicans in charge of Congress, we would not get much in the way of coutercyclical stimulus.
Aardvark Cheeselog
File under: It’s Worse Than You Think.
raven
@dedc79: He’s on his ass for lying about it.
cain
@germy:
I believe there was such a cover in the first Iron Man movie. :-)
ET
Sadly his fanatics love him for this and that is the only group he is really playing to. He don’t care about those that didn’t vote for him (in any case in his pea sized brain and yuge ego say that no one didn’t vote for him all those Clinton votes were fraudulent). He doesn’t care about the GOP because everything is all about Him and Him right now – not about the party going forward. He doesn’t care about Republican congress members because everything is all about him and they aren’t his whipping boys and personal minions (except the few that are). He doesn’t care about the future of the country – unless is negatively impacts his bottom line. He will only need the media once he is out of the White House and needs them to get and tout his next reality show.
Roger Moore
@randy khan:
I’m not sure about that. Trump’s popularity has declined by about 10 points since his inauguration. Both Clinton and Obama had similar declines over the same period in their presidencies, and Ford had a much bigger drop, which I assume was associated with pardoning Nixon. What’s remarkable in Trump’s case is that he started with <50% approval and still managed to lose that much popularity. The only other president to start with similarly low popularity was W, and his numbers improved a bit over his first 6 months as some of the bitterness from his selection wore off and people decided to give him a chance.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I’m pretty sure Daddy Trump ordered them to take the jobs, and they had to accept them because they’re financially dependent on him because they’re otherwise unemployable.
You know how they could have avoided all this? By getting real jobs after college instead of knuckling under to Daddy. It would have been tough, but it’s the only solution. Even Tiffany feels like she has to constantly kiss his ass even though she lives on the other side of the country.
satby
@Major Major Major Major: of course he is, but Drumpf isn’t actually committed to anything other than his image and will. Faced with enough of a backlash he folds and claims he was joking about whatever it was, or that it was “fake news”. Pence is a True Believer, opposition just encourages him to believe he’s on a divine path. I think that’s more dangerous.
Matt McIrvin
@Spanky: Remember Hillary Clinton’s unforgivable remark about the “deplorables”? She said they were about half of Trump supporters, which would be just under a quarter of the whole electorate. A little less than 27% but close enough for a ballpark estimate.
Frank Wilhoit
@different-church-lady: Buchanan’s advice must be understood in its ethical context, which is that the bigger half gets everything and the smaller half gets nothing. It must also be understood in its historical context, which is that Nixon (say what one will of him) dared not follow it through; but Reagan did.
Thought experiment: suppose Buchanan’s prediction to have been correct. But how much bigger? And how much bigger is bigger enough? How small must a minority be, in order for it to be feasible/permissible to send them away from the table? 1%? 30%? 50% minus epsilon?
This is why, in this time and place, upper-case-‘R’epublicans are lower-case-‘d’emocrats and vice versa.
Make no mistake: democracy answers the above question as 50% minus epsilon. In a democracy, if you are outnumbered, you have nothing. This is why democracy is ethically invalid.
rp
@Roger Moore: IIRC, Bush’s approval rating started at a little over 50% and dropped steadily but not steeply until 9/11.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Actually no: W started out way more popular than Trump, though not as popular as Obama. On Inauguration Day W was in the 55-60% approval ballpark (the “giving him a chance” adjustment happened between November and January), and his popularity gradually dropped over his first several months in office until he was just a hair above 50%. Then 9/11 happened and rocketed him up to be basically the most popular President since modern polling began, and it was all downhill from there, with occasional blips up associated with things like the beginning of the Iraq war.
http://www.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx
NCSteve
@A Ghost To Most: Except the only thing it’s a feature of is that he is the most mentally ill president in history. By far. Nixon and all of his nested neuroses was the very picture of mental health by comparison. Lincoln’s chronic depression was a strength by comparison. Kennedy and Clinton’s sex addiction were mere bagatelles.
He’s crazy and getting crazier. That’s the thing we just can’t seem to make ourselves face up to, in large part because the kind of craziness he has has the effect of making him loathsome and despicable.
cain
@Barbara:
In actuality, the number of people who no longer practice any religion has been going out. People can tell hyprocrisy and wrong from right and these evangelical churches have it all wrong. Worse, they have turned into exactly the kind of people that Jesus preached against in the first place.
tobie
@coin operated: Do remind these Hillary-haters that Pence did State of Indiana business on an aol account and after months of delay turned over the emails on the account that he deemed to be about state business. We’ll never see the other emails. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Frankensteinbeck
@dm:
Conservatives hate to be embarrassed, hate to be called out for their stupidity and racism, and particularly hate it when their philosophy fails utterly and is mocked nationwide. It’s a big reason they elected Trump, but instead of proving them right, he’s now embarrassing them.
@Betty Cracker:
The general argument is that while Trump is worse, he might just be waking the country up to how horrible Republicans are. I think this is a case of arguing two different issues!
@GregB:
Pence is more racist and bigoted on every front than Trump. The man is a nightmare, and unlike Trump is publicly bland enough to not get major pushback for it. He also would not have Trump’s problem of being SO utterly incompetent Trump fails to get most of his evil done. Granted, his international policy would be normal, if stupid and hawkish.
Brachiator
@Kay:
They didn’t have a choice. This is who Trump is. They originally took jobs in the family business because daddy demanded it. They have never worked independent of their father.
And Trump looks at the presidency as an extension of the family business.
Kay
I’m amused that the Trump Family think they have this upstanding business rep to protect.
Let’s see- they don’t pay people who do work for them, they’ve been investigated for money laundering, they have a long string of bankrupcies where they stiffed people they owe but lived lavishly, and they made money off ripping off desperate people with Trump University.
What’s to protect? Christ, I can’t imagine what we DON’T know, given what we know.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@satby:
There’s something you don’t understand here. Those people had it coming. Their deaths, which were in no way premature, were a feature, not a bug.
Marguerite Hill
@dedc79: Undoubtedly he feels shame, but he has no name for his feelings, those are “girly” & have no place in such a “manly man.” Ha Ha Ha.
Consequently, he does what he always does: he projects so he can place his feelings, his shame, his self-hatred onto someone else.
I suspect his war against immigrants is tied, in a Gordian knot manner, to his hatred of his mother Mary, his ex-wife Ivana, and his current wife Melania. I bet if he could he’d delight in deporting all three, even exhuming his mother’s remains. No man has such contempt for women without it somehow being rooted in some contretemps with Mother Dearest.
Iowa Old Lady
Pence would be terrible. We are in a cleft stick here. The Rs and our fellow citizens who voted for these two have harmed us all.
Kenneth Fair
For those who don’t know the reference to the Crazification Factor (the idea that 27% of the country will put party identification, personal prejudice, or whatever, ahead of rational judgment), it comes from a timeless 2005 Kung Fu Monkey post by John Rogers.
Kay
Kushner’s probably terrified he’ll be exposed as someone who profits on dunning poor people for rental contracts.
Oh, wait! We already know that about him! That’s the stellar rep they’re protecting. I don’t know- what will we find out? They they trade in illegal body parts? Has to be pretty damn bad if it’s worse than what everyone knows.
We’ll find out Ivanka’s full of shit with her love for working women? We’ll find out her fashion empire is built on women’s slave labor? She brags about it!
rikyrah
@Kay:
And, denying that to him AND his supporters is one of the most enjoyable things about this nightmare we live in currently.
quakerinabasement
+1 for Crazification.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Betty Cracker:
That’s Bannon. Oh would I love to be a fly on the wall with Kelly and Bannon discussing communication strategy.
Frankensteinbeck
@Barbara:
I am VERY familiar with how these people think. They see theirs as the only true religion, and indeed their whole way of life as the only valid way. Everything else is evil and wrong. Freedom of religion can only apply to them, because nobody else’s faith is really a religion. They can’t be, because they’re wrong, just people refusing to believe the obvious truth. It’s such a bedrock assumption, they have trouble even thinking about it consciously. Other people having rights is alien.
rikyrah
@Kay:
Kay, you’re on point. Love it.
They do these loathesome things, yet we’re supposed to respect them?
PHUCK.OUTTA.HERE.
Mnemosyne
@Frank Wilhoit:
This is a weird thing to say when Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million and only won the Electoral College because Karl Rove spent at least 4, and probably 8, years rigging Republican-controlled states so the Republicans would win in 2016 even if they got fewer votes.
The Republicans are outnumbered, which is why they had to cheat to put their guy in the White House.
tobie
@Thoroughly Pizzled: Yup, this came up in last night’s open thread. Trump rails against Mexicans, Chinese and “lousy trade deals” because it plays on white grievance. I don’t think his rancid base would be able to tolerate a serious discussion about the growth industries of the future and what the face of labor will be in a decade. Unfortunately cable isn’t up to this discussion either.
Major Major Major Major
@dedc79: we aren’t collectivist? We get to pick and choose which government-mandated responsibilities to shirk? It’s not like you couldn’t be a conscientious objector.
Edited for correct @
rikyrah
@Kay:
I know, Kay. The curve for this unqualified White Man is REAL
Betty Cracker
@Barbara: I was raised in part by conservative evangelicals and have lived among them almost all my life. I didn’t think it was possible for me to have more contempt for their politics. Boy, was I wrong!
They’ll get no more assumption of good faith from me on any issue, ever again. Their support of this incompetent degenerate proves beyond reasonable doubt that their appeals to morality, pretensions to patriotism, etc., are and always were hogwash.
You couldn’t devise a better test than Trump to demonstrate that evangelical conservatives prize preservation of a system of white supremacy above every other value. Vile hypocrites, the entire lot of them.
Marguerite Hill
@Kay: How well I remember! Every time, I would think “How can President Obama unite factions when one side has been brainwashed to hate the other? How can Faux Nooze expect President Obama to unify while they are actively sowing division and racial animus?” Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch never wanted this country to be as one because then they wouldn’t make billions of dollars!
I wish Murdoch would be stripped of his US citizenship, banned from media, fined into financial insolvency, and deported.
FlipYrWhig
He really does think that rally size is an important marker of deep and wide support. He thinks “everywhere I go, people turn out to love me, ergo the overwhelming majority of people love me, and the polls that say otherwise are lying.” I am positive that he really, truly, does not understand that a small proportion of a sufficiently large number is still a large number, just a large number that’s smaller than other, larger numbers. That’s how his bad skill at basic math intersects with his narcissistic delusions.
maryQ
The other day I was listening to a call in show on NPR (why? Right. I dunno, was on the radio when I got in the car) and a dude named “Dave” called to refute the host and the guests who were giving the latest Trump outrage the usual NPR treatment-guests speaking factually and dispassionately about rules and laws and norms and precedents and evidence, host bending over backwards to say “but what about….” but really having no choice but to conclude that this was to be taken seriously. Anyway, “Dave” goes on and on about fake news, hating both parties corrupt establishment, Hillary’s emailz, Paul Ryan is a weakling, Trum is a true and authentic leader, we don’t care what you think, everyone just trying to take him down, blah blah blah. And then “Dave” said something to this effect: “You know, if he gets impeached because of all of the lies and the corrupt establishment something, something, you better be prepared for the violence that is coming your way. We’re the ones with the guns”.
Saw similar sentiments on Twitter recently.
In my deep blue state and purple-blue town, the citizenry went 2-1 for HRC. The cops, on the other hand, are all pro Trump.
God help us all.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
I think Kushner’s afraid people will not understand that everything he does is legitimate and brilliant. From what I’ve read, that’s what his father tried to drum into him.
cmorenc
@Betty Cracker:
Even for those of us who who are filled with gladness as the Trump presidency continues toward implosion, there’s a dangerously perverse underside looming if the country does face a severe crisis (more so than even Russian meddling). What if the crisis is sufficiently severe and imminent that the country really does need a leader most of us can at least momentarily get behind, for the good of the country? When 9/11 happened, George W. Bush at least temporarily rose to the occasion (though of course his administration blew it with the subsequent pivot into the Iraq misadventure). Now imagine if Trump had been President when an event like 9/11 occurred – Trump’s tendencies would tend to do things that would exacerbate the crisis and antagonize the divisions and distrust, not unite us, and we’d all have to hope the generals (Mattis and Kelley) could exert enough influence and power to stave off complete unrecoverable disaster.
Try to imagine Trump as Prime Minister of Britain at the time of the Dunkirk disaster.
FlipYrWhig
@tobie:
And this is why “the Democrats need to be populist about trade and they’ll get back to winning in the Midwest” is so foolish. Except among the super-well-informed highly-educated left, “NAFTA” and “trade deals” politically aren’t about exports and imports and so forth. They’re all about more people speaking Spanish in places they didn’t before. No one who actually cared about trade deals per se would also be a proud Walmart shopper. Trumpies LOVE Walmart and think liberals look down on them for shopping there.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Frankensteinbeck:
Yup. Had a funny conversation with old friends – she was brought up Catholic, he’s a non-practicing, non-believing Jew who gave no religious schooling to their children. Years ago she brought her young son to tend her parents graves in the Catholic cemetery, and he wondered loudly why the statue of the same guy was all over the place. When she told him quietly it was Jesus, and people believed he was the son of God, he yelled for all the other Catholics at the cemetery to hear – Zeus! It’s Hercules! LOL. Then she explained to me that when her husband, a doctor, got offered a fuckton of money to move to Southern Baptist Louisiana, they passed and stayed in Massachusetts. There just really is no good way to live among those kinds of religious fanatics as a non-believer.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
I don’t think this is a matter of being delusional so much as not caring at all about abstract principle or long-term consequences. They want to get their way, nothing more, nothing less. If they can take advantage of an abstract principle you believe in to get their way, like claiming religious freedom or getting power by winning a democratic election, they’ll gladly do so. But the moment that abstract principle gets in the way of them getting their way, like preventing them from imposing their religious views on others or them losing an election, they’ll drop it like a hot rock. All that matters is getting their way; everything else, including long-term consequences of trashing institutions that have helped them in the past, is secondary.
bemused
@germy:
Omg, a cardiologist Trumper and a crooked one to boot. Takes a “special” person to brazenly do unneeded surgeries on human beings for millions of dollars Of course, he’s a yuge Trump fan.
FlipYrWhig
@coin operated: Does anyone even explain anymore what “Hillary Clinton’s emails” are supposed to, you know, MEAN or SHOW? She had some emails that she deleted because she was covering up evidence of… what? Something worse than hobnobbing with the Russia kleptocracy, massive tax fraud and/or wallowing in dirty money from around the world, sexual assault, and bragging about sexual assault? I mean, just say what Hillary’s Very Bad Thing IS. The whole thing has been so. fucking. stupid for so. fucking. long.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Worth noting the GOP since Lincoln had been an alliance between groups with contradictory agendas and has always need a strong leader, so this is a huge problem for Trump and the Republicans.
And let us take a moment to savior the irony that Trump is the one who claims to be strong, deal maker and a winner. Just a sad little poser at the end of the day.
Major Major Major Major
@FlipYrWhig: she was “very reckless”, donchaknow.
Don’t ask the person telling you this to explain what an email server is or does, of course.
Roger Moore
@rp:
That isn’t what 538 shows in their charts. They show him as a bit below 50% during his inauguration, improving to a bit above 50%, then bouncing around in the same general area, possibly with a bit of falloff, until the big jump after 9/11.
bemused
@Betty Cracker:
When Trumpers come out and openly admit they got skunked, then maybe I will feel like sanity and reality is making a comeback in this country.
nonynony
@Roger Moore:
Exactly right. The two unifying principles of conservatism in the US these days are “Take What You Can When You Can” and “I Got Mine, Fuck You”.
That’s pretty much modern conservatism right there. Grab as much as you can and keep it. No wonder they loved them some Trump so much.
joel hanes
Here’s a wedge issue that Dems can use :
The Trump misadministration has made their first direct attack on Social Security.
They have quietly offered early retirement on favorable terms to a major fraction of the employees of the Social Security Administration — what a company would do as the first step in downsizing. The SSA is not currently overstaffed.
The employees have until 1 Sept to accept or reject the offer.
If they follow the downsizing pattern, the second step is to lay off the remaining employees who don’t conform to management’s desires: those with long careers and therefore higher salaries, those who have raised their voices or gotten crossways with management. I’ll bet that the careerists who strongly defend Social Security and fight to preserve it in its current form will be chopped mid-Sept, leaving only small fry too afraid to oppose their political bosses.
Trump promised to preserve SS. He lied.
Every American has a stake in preventing its destruction.
Frankensteinbeck
@FlipYrWhig:
It goes back to Benghazi, where Obama set up Americans to die because he’s a Muslim who hates America and agrees with terrorists. Hillary let it happen because she’s an absolutely evil, cold bitch. Things have drifted so far that I’m not sure many of them even remember it’s about Benghazi, but they’ve held onto that Hillary is corrupt, utterly evil, and abused her power to hurt America and American interests. So, anything she covered up or was incompetent at is wildly important evidence of such.
MomSense
I just saw something really weird on twitter. Trump recorded a video message and now there is speculation that they used a green screen to superimpose his head on a different body. It does look really strange but I can only look at it on my phone and the wifi is spotty.
Anyone else see this? Something is definitely wrong with the image.
Peale
@bemused: I’ll believe it when I hear reports that large numbers of democratic voters are obtaining IDs and registering to vote on their own. Like they’re so upset, they’re going to figure out where their polling places are without someone nagging them on the phone during GOTV drives. Like this time they actually mean it when they tell pollsters that they are upset about something the GOP is doing.
Gin & Tonic
@joel hanes: Aren’t they protected to some degree by civil service laws/procedures?
terraformer
Pence is setting up his PAC, apparently with the full knowledge of Trump and his inner circle. They’re probably okay with that because it would be Pence who would make all of the pardons once he takes office.
Gravenstone
@Mnemosyne: I suspect that it’s a mix of Trump wanting/needing safe and familiar faces near by, and Ivanka (and to lesser extent Jared) realizing they needed to stay in close proximity to try and compensate for the doddering old fool’s failing mental state. Of course, in both cases the underlying need was to keep the gravy train rolling unimpeded for as long as possible.
FlipYrWhig
@Major Major Major Major: I know I don’t have to tell you anything about this, but for fuck’s sake it’s so frustrating. Let’s even stipulate, for the sake of arguing with a still-committed Trumpie, that she recklessly mishandled classified information. Then what? Did something HAPPEN because of it? Something bad? Something… at all? A modicum of follow-up conversation can only reveal that the whole “story” is “It shows that Hillary Clinton is shady in exactly the way I thought she was before.” That this had anything to do with the outcome of the election will never stop being flabbergasting.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mnemosyne:
Not for long, though. She’s going to Georgetown Law starting this fall.
FlipYrWhig
@Frankensteinbeck: Right. But I’d still like to compel people who STILL SAY, unironically, “but her emails!” to have to get the mental exercise of having to walk through the whole story to explain why it mattered AND that it mattered so much it would be a reason to vote for the other guy.
Jeffro
@different-church-lady: Seconded here…we’re going to have to just be brave, stand fast, and see this through. He never should have been there in the first place, and he has degenerated at every turn of events. He has to go.
MomSense
@Major Major Major Major:
…even the liberal fill in the blank should be a rotating tag line.
randy khan
@Spanky:
Indeed.
Jeffro
@bemused:
Some of them will…I suspect that a majority of them will never admit there was anything wrong with Trumpov, nor any collusion, nor any grift, none of it. I think Richard Nixon still had the support of 20% or so of voters when he left office. Trumpov will beat that (in a negative way) but we’ll never get most Trumpkins to admit they were wrong and that their leader is a grotesque joke on America.
Villago Delenda Est
@Big Ole Hound: The Evangelicals are, for the most part, racists. They’re descended from sects that sided with slavery, white supremacy, and the Confederacy.
Major Major Major Major
@MomSense: Submit a quote!
Alternatively, let me know if that doesn’t work, still working out server kinks.
randy khan
@Roger Moore:
Interesting point. I think the last sentence in this chunk is the important one – you’ve got a guy who started low and has managed to lose somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of his support from that low starting point in less than 7 months. You’d think that, starting for such a low number, his support would have been largely from his solid base, but that turns out not to be the case.
No Drought No More
Trump is cracking and it is a good sign. Today’s tweets about the steadfastness of his deranged supporters reminds me of Nixon buttering his republican die-hards at a dinner speech (circa late ’73 or early ’74) by comparing them to finest steel that had experienced the hottest fire. It might have been the speech in which he declared “I am not a crook”.
“..And your ass ain’t talking it’s way out of this, either”.*
*(My recollection of the line in Pulp Fiction as spoken by the great Samuel Jackson to Flock of Seagulls).
MomSense
@tobie:
Speaking of trade. Trump’s Trade Pullout Roils Rural America
heads up: Politico link.
Patricia Kayden
I hope we’re not cottoning up to a Pence presidency. He needs to go too whenever Mueller gins up enough evidence to bring down Trump. The entire lot of them need to be shown the door (Ryan, McConnell, Bannon, the first Lady Ivanka and her hubby). None of them have clean hands either as directly involved in Trump’s shenanigans or willingness to overlook said shenanigans so they all can go at the same time. What a messy, sleazy administration!! This feels worse than Bush the 43rd.
coin operated
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s not even deleting emails. It’s that she had them on a personal server (legal at the time) that were marked classified (after the fact). Comey really salted the earth with his ‘careless’ speech and that was enough. She is GUILTY!!!11!!!1! (along with the foundation and Benghazi) and should spend the rest of her life in federal prison.
What I’ve enjoyed doing was pointing out that, even after being under investigation for the better part of 4 years, Republicans were unable to score a single indictment against her. The fallback to that? Obama was SO powerful that he was able to put the brakes on Boehner and Cantor (I had to remind them who was in charge then). They said this with straight faces…I couldn’t continue after that.
Patricia Kayden
@bemused: What makes you think that Trumpers will ever come out and admit that they were wrong? Most likely, they’ll simply slink away and become apolitical (which would be great actually). President G.W. Bush had supporters both times he won but now you would be hard pressed to find any vocal Bush supporters. I assume the same thing will happen with some Trumpers.
mike in dc
I think the drop from “strong” to “somewhat” support is a sign of what I call “defense fatigue”. Supporters get tired of having to defend every statement, screwup and failure of Trump. It is akin to a war of political attrition. Shaving off support by tenths of a percent at a time.
Major Major Major Major
@coin operated: Well, Loretta Lynch and the tarmac, dontcha know, and besides, what about Seth Rich? DWS and Iran, wake up, libtard.
SFAW
@Kay:
As you well know, it would be irresponsible NOT to speculate.
Villago Delenda Est
@Patricia Kayden: The door they all need to be shown is the door to a prison cell.
MomSense
@SFAW:
I’m going with laundering money for the Russian mob, drug smugglers, and human traffickers. And if I’m wrong I’ll tweet #fakenews 500 times.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@dedc79:
.Except in Trump’s world, Trump is a vet because went to military school.
SFAW
@coin operated:
“OK, so you morons believe that Obama was SO POWERFUL that he controlled the minds of the Republican Congress, but yet couldn’t get them to work with him on any of his legislation? The same Obama that you morons kept telling us was ‘incompetent’? No, no — don’t bother to answer. I don’t want your teeny-tiny brains to get overworked by trying to defend your insanity. Do you assholes have a brain-damaged cat I can talk to? Because that cat would make more sense than YOU dumbfucks do. If stupidity were a crime, you guys would have been thrown into the dungeon by now, for the rest of your unnatural lives.”
I realize that you might not be able to phrase it exactly thus, to people you know and don’t completely hate. Fair enough. I won’t charge you too much to do it for you, if you want.
scav
@Jeffro: Might be a smallish some of them. My benighted Reverand Aunt, she of the actual “I don’t care if he’s a fascist, I’m highly educated blah blah blah” Trumpista is now fluttering her best ingenue eyelashes and nudging others to commiserate with her “I, poor innocent waif, was misled!” campaign, “Many Intelligent! people voted for him! flutter flutter flutter” Tried to rope me in by an e-mail from the blue informing me she’d “just noticed the email I sent her exactly as she put it into the trash can and could I resend it?” when we both know damn well I’ve not communicated with her for about a solid 3/4s year.
Barbara
@Roger Moore: The point is, getting their way is now measured in terms of political achievement. Not necessarily the number of people who came to last week’s service, or the number of new baptisms or new members or members going into the field for missionary service or to become pastors. These are all things that they used to care about and many churches still do. This is Mammon or Satan in the form of politics.
Amir Khalid
@cmorenc:
Trump seems to have no problem imagining himself as Churchill. That’s whom he’s trying to imitate with that scowl which he thinks of as his Serious Leader face.
bemused
@Peale:
I was being sarcastic. I don’t actually think any Trumpers can ever acknowledge they were punked, definitely not publicly. It’s all winning or losing for them. Not winning would mean they were losers and they can’t have that.
bemused
@Patricia Kayden:
That’s the best to hope for, that they say hell with them all and don’t vote.
SFAW
@MomSense:
I’m OK with your choices. It might be interesting to throw in Jon-Benet Ramsey, see what happens.
Ooh, thought of another one: it was actually Lying Littledick who had Vince Foster bumped off, and had it made to look like Hitlary did it. Why? Because he’s such a jeenyus that he knew someday he’d be running against her, and needed something to go after her with. Of course, he hadn’t counted on the MSM being so compliant that Foster was lost among all the other Crimes Against Humanity that she committed.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Big Ole Hound:
Worth noting Pence took the job of VP because he couldn’t get relected governor of Indiania. While the God Botherors love Pence, he’s widely loathed by other conservatives. So same problems with Trump that a President Pence wouldn’t be able to unite the GOP.
cat
@satby: The thing to remember about Pence is that, yeah, he’s evil. But, he tends to fold like a cheap lawn chair as soon as he gets enough pushback. See: the article you linked, the neutering of SB 101, etc. Trump, on the other hand, can be sweet-talked into doing all the evil stuff Pence would do anyway and he’s psychologically incapable of recognizing that pushback isn’t just a fiction created by mean people who are jealous of his winning. Pence-grade evil can be dealt with, because it is subject to the normal checks and balances that have been put in place to limit the damage. Trump’s a cartoon supervillain with Superman and Captain Planet nowhere to be found.
eclare
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: And don’t forget he survived STD’s which were his Vietnam….I still like the quote “Mueller’s Vietnam was Vietnam”
SFAW
@Amir Khalid:
Yeah, he’s like Churchill all right. Every day is another Gallipoli (with not quite so many deaths) with Lying Littledick.
joel hanes
@Gin & Tonic:
Aren’t they protected to some degree by civil service laws/procedures?
Yes, to exactly the extent that the Trump Administration observes any norms or other restraints on its caprice.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
Something really, really bad. Whatever Trump is accused of, Hillary’s emails would have shown she was doing stuff that was 10 times worse.
Remember, the stolen DNC emails showed the world that some staffers were getting impatient with Bernie’s refusal to admit he’d lost the primary, along with John Podesta’s risotto recipe, and that was PROOF POSITIVE THAT CORRUPT DNC STOLE THE PRIMARY!!!1!1!!1
Hillary’s “lost” emails — none of which are actually lost, the FBI has every one of them, including the “missing” 30,000 — contain whatever her enemies most want them to contain, updated daily.
Ksmiami
@SFAW: Sign me up. I’ll nail the bastards.
Elizabelle
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Andy Borowitz today, re the dim but evangelically fervent Mr. Pence:
Mike Pence Considering Running for President in 1820
The Moar You Know
If anyone here thinks a Trump voter is going to repent of their choice and vote for a Democrat next time, well, it’s not going to happen.
They knew exactly what they were voting for and he is doing exactly what they want. He is Cleek’s Law come to life, with a never-opened Bible in one hand and the nuclear button in the other.
Jeffro
@scav: It’s probably not a bad time to re-send your best anti-Trumpov material from the past year out to any RWNJ friends/relatives you might still have. Just to nudge ’em a bit, remind ’em that there were plenty of INTELLIGENT people sounding the alarm about him and his gang of looters over 18 months ago.
Just last week, I got my dad and brother to send me their thoughts on outcomes of the Russia investigations. It was laughable last week, but it’ll serve as a nice reminder to them when I re-send them their predictions six months from now. (Of course by then they’ll probably be full-on, ‘out’, Putin defenders…sigh…)
joel hanes
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Evangelicals are, for the most part, racists. They’re descended from sects that sided with slavery,
This used to be more true than today.
One of the saddest changes in America has been the abandonment of the liberal, thoughtful, “mainstream” Protestant denominations by big chunks of their congregations in favor of the culture-war mindset of evangelical sects. Northern varieties of Presbyterianism and Congregationalism and Lutheranism and Methodism just no longer reliably delivered the feeling of superior virtue and thus superiority that they once did — they became intellectual, inclusive, and spent too much time on the Sermon on the Mount, and not enough in Leviticus and Samuel. My own home Presbyterian congregation welcomed an out gay couple, and about a quarter of the congregants found that impossible to countenance, and left for more gender-bigoted pastures that do have black and mixed-race congregants, but that don’t countenance non-cis non-hetero sexuality.
Ruckus
@dedc79:
Guys like drumpf and many others as well, they got deferred because they are assholes. They didn’t mind that war or any other war as long as they don’t have to participate. That’s not even close to the same as being against that war or even all wars and getting deferments or going to jail for that.
They are chicken shits, who don’t mind others getting dead or disfigured for them, but they wouldn’t return the favor and had ways to buy their way out.
Fuck them. Fuck drumpf.
Peale
@The Moar You Know: I don’t care if they vote Democrat. I’ll be happy if they just stay home. Weird, crazy white people – I’d like to see their turn-out rate decline. Yeah, its not the most democratic idealism, but then when I said “I think voter turnout is too low to sustain a democracy and we should do something about that” I didn’t mean “because I want more crazy GOP candidates winning elections.”
MCA1
@randy khan: There’s a tie here, I think, to what LAO and others were expressing upthread, to which I completely relate. It is one on hand absolutely and continually astonishing to me, even after absorbing the “I don’t understand anything anymore” mentality that’s taken over in the shock of having watched us actually elect this fucking guy, the number of people who would answer a pollster with “Yes, I approve of the job he’s doing as President.” Astounding. That ANYONE could be paying the slightest bit of attention and not be mortified in embarrassment at this person as our leader is amazing to me. I figured at the absolute most 15-20% of the country was so driven by spite and right wing media produced anger and delusion that they wouldn’t see through this idiot and his bottomless degeneracy and fake populist bullshit in a week. And yet here we are 7 months in and a stubborn third of the country still gives him a thumbs up. Every time I check in on the Gallup daily numbers and it’s ticked upward a couple points I throw my hands up and despair.
But, this is where we’re actually lucky that he’s so driven by his boundless narcissistic impulses. Because evidently we’re an incredibly forgiving and/or naive and/or well-meaning citizenry. There was obviously at least about 20% of the country who went into this presidency willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, whatever trepidation they may have had. All he had to do was not be a delusional, colossal prick every second of his life, and they would have continued to give him the benefit of the doubt. But he hasn’t spent one moment, not one, even pretending to be President of the entire United States instead of Cult Leader of Himself. He hasn’t attempted to sway one single person who didn’t vote for him into supporting him. If he had just pushed an actually populist agenda, I bet he’d be polling in the mid-50’s right now. At minimum he’d be in a place where Republicans in Congress weren’t turning on him and sections of the Executive Branch weren’t completely tuning him out and pretending he’s not tweeted whatever he just tweeted. That he’s squandered all of that unearned goodwill may well turn out to be our saving grace. Fingers crossed.
Mnemosyne
@FlipYrWhig:
The only way to do that is to use my Thanksgiving method of playing dumb and asking questions. And it will be hard to do, because you will need to be very calm and mild and keep your affect at “puzzled,” because any hint of sarcasm or anger gives the game away.
Tell them that you will listen with an open mind, but they need to explain and answer questions. Ironically, it’s the only way to get them to change their own minds.
Spanky
@Ruckus:
I blame LBJ.
Peale
@Mnemosyne: Yep. Considering how snarky can be in interoffice communications, the fact that the DNC e-mails were so damn tame is why I couldn’t support Hillary any longer. I mean, come on. Something – say something – really bad. Make fun of bald men. And, yeah, “fuck the fuckin’ conservative Catholics and their petticoat-wearing pontiff” would have been worth reading had Podesta used more color in his language. Boring bored boors all the way down.
Ruckus
@satby:
The people I know have done the same.
Easy to go quiet when their man won.
Easy to go quiet if it means not having to defend voting and/or hope no one notices they voted for this turd.
Easy to go quiet and yet not be unhappy they voted for this turd.
Much harder for them to admit and apologize for the above, even if they agree with you, maybe especially if they agree.
Mnemosyne
@Patricia Kayden:
I don’t know if it will ever be proven, but I feel pretty confident that the Republicans have been getting money from Putin and other oligarchs ever since Citizens United was decided. Probably from Chinese billionaires as well.
coin operated
@SFAW:
Appreciate the offer, but if I want to waste my money the list starts with bourbon, cigars, and motorcycle parts. Educating those beyond redemption ranks just slightly higher than donating to a Joel Osteen ministry.
p.a.
@The Moar You Know: we just need them to stay home. indeed, not sure the puke funnel has created more ‘better’ bigot-idiots over time rather than just consistently aroused them when before they would slough off in apathy (for a time) after social/electoral defeats: prohibition, Brown v. Board of edu/ civil rights legislation.
Ruckus
@Spanky:
While I agree with raven, Fuck LBJ, he’s not the one responsible for the chickenshits in question. They are responsible for themselves. They don’t get a pass because of Vietnam, because of LBJ, or even Nixon.
TooTall
There is a piece of his base that will never abandon him, no matter what. Remember the interviews of rally-goers before the election, who said, “He talks like I talk. That is why I support him.” They will always believe him, no matter what facts are shown, no matter what lies are exposed. There would be too much cognitive dissonance to resolve in the mind of the voter. Meaning: If Trump is a liar, and I believed his lies, then that makes me a fool. No one wants to think of themselves as a fool. Thus, the attacks on the media. Blame the “fake news” media, no matter the “facts.” Ignore the Pants-on-Fire lies, because it is better to blame the media, then blame themselves for being fooled by a skilled liar.
Before the election, there was a deliberate effort in the media to say “both sides distort the truth,” when it was plain to see that Liar-in-Chief lies more often that anyone else, and to a greater degree of falsehood. Now, when the media tries to say how awful the lies are coming from the White House, I have to laugh. Why wouldn’t the “impartial media” say this a year ago?
catclub
@coin operated:
Never mind that Comey specifically said there was no crime to pursue.
Spanky
@MCA1:
Oh, but they are paying attention. Sadly, it’s the perhaps inevitable result of killing the Fairness Doctrine, but there’s a good percentage (27%, anyone?) of the voters who get ALL their info from Fox and Hate Radio. And we know they are not reporting the truth.
J R in WV
@Major Major Major Major:
Come on, that Prop 8 was yesterday, historically speaking. It was sunny that day!!
“;-)”
I hope that comes across as semi-colon, hyphen, right parenthesis… not as a colored emoji – not that there’s anything with being bright yellow and a perfect circle. I’m just old enough to remember an ascii world.
Mnemosyne
@The Moar You Know:
We don’t need them to vote for the Democrats next time. We just need them to stay the fuck home and not vote.
Wapiti
@Ruckus: At his core, Trump is a coward.
He couldn’t fire Comey, face to face. Hell, he couldn’t look Reince Prebius in the face and tell him it was time to go.
Donald is as cowardly yellow as a person can be.
Immanentize
@satby:
Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions long for the 80s and the AIDs plague when one could (self)righteously claim that horrible AIDs deaths were God’s just judgment and proof of their own grace. It makes me angry and unbearably sad.
Barbara
@Wapiti: I think the shame of being seen as a failure is the animating force of his existence. It makes facing shame in any form radioactive to him, and firing people inflicts failure and thus requires coming face to face with what he interprets as shame. So yes, a coward, but a very specific kind of coward.
burnspbesq
Depending on how you slice and dice them, the data still have the ability to depress and scare the shit out of you.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/trump-approval-holding-steady-in-the-one-place-that-matters/
Princess
@MomSense: I haven’t seen this, but I saw a photo of him a day or two ago and I thought he looked much skinnier than usual. Not skinny, but with a much smaller cut. I did wonder whether it had been shopped.
Immanentize
@Ruckus: all true. That is why conservatism never fails but is only failed. I think a way to get a wave democratic election is to say something like, Trump had some things right in words — workers are getting shafted by businesses, change is hurting rural America, automation means that our nation’s former primary path to the middle class has changed, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are more important in this moment than ever before and everyone working in government — Federal state and local — needs to treat everyone with respect and dignity.
They can then move on from Trump rather than turn on Trump (and themselves).
bemused
@MCA1:
So many also want the federal government to be blown up, drowned in a bathtub, stripped to bare studs. How they think that would benefit them is mind boggling. Among the many things they pay no attention to is history. If they did, they’d realize the people at the bottom, lower and middle incomes are the first to suffer the deprivations of a government stripped to bare bones. Idiots.
schrodingers_cat
@burnspbesq: Nov 2018 is more than a lifetime away in political terms.
Ruckus
@dedc79:
You are confusing a position against the war (OK) with a position not against the war but against it costing them anything. (Fucking not OK) They were fine with me and raven and the rest of the over half a million serving, no matter if we wanted to or not.
They were fine with the war, they just weren’t willing to personally risk anything for it.
That is not the fucking same at all.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
What he said was ‘She’s guilty but can’t be prosecuted because of a technicality.’ Sure, what she’s guilty of is innocuous, usual, and the technicality is important, but that doesn’t matter. He went out of his way, to the point of breaking professional norms, of telling America at length that Hillary totally misused confidential material, but can’t be arrested because they can’t prove she meant it. It was disgusting, and for anyone who has the slightest prejudice against Hillary it’s hard proof she’s corrupt.
Frankensteinbeck
@bemused:
The federal government would be unable to stop them from doing every asshole thing they like, especially abusing minorities. Note their utter glee at the ICE and Sessions’ policies.
Ruckus
@LAO:
Why?
They believe in total outlandishness, in utter ridiculous bullshit. Why should this be any different?
I expected them to go to their knees and thank whatever it is that they fervently believe in that they finally have someone as crazy as they are representing them.
Immanentize
@Ruckus: And this “fine with the war, but nimby” is exponentially worse with an all-volunteer military. Our current system de-democratizes all wars. It’s the only reason we can be in the middle East three times longer than we were in Germany in WWII.
Mnemosyne
@Immanentize:
I don’t talk about this very often, but I once had what I still feel was a genuine religious revelation about AIDS:
AIDS was a test of our compassion and how far we had come as a species. And we failed it.
Ruckus
@Kay:
They have to go with their strengths.
Their main strength is that they are wealthy idiots. They have a wealth of money, they have a wealth of idiocy. They like to prove it as often as possible.
artem1s
no not ‘in case’. they are creating shadow campaigns for WHEN Trump implodes. This has always been the plan. First that his campaign would implode and the old guard would get to blame Trump for losing to a woman. Pence was put in place specifically because he will make it easy for the fundies in the party to slide right back in with ZEGS, Gohmert and the New Deal killers. No one can convince me that any of them thought he was ever going to be running anything. He was just a more craven, inept, and insane sock puppet than W was.
LAO
@Ruckus: You really don’t find it stunning that rather than “hold their noses and support Trump,” evangelicals have warmly and fully embraced him? What can I say, I’m surprised.
J R in WV
@cain:
Absolutely! They are actually heretics with regard to the actual teachings of Christ, which I separate from the absurd rantings of Paulism. They pay more attention to selected requirements from the Old Testament which have nothing to do with anything taught by Christ in the gospels.
Fair warning, I don’t believe Christ was the son of god, nor that there’s a god creator of the universe. Just that he taught excellent mores for his time. I don’t think he would have lit the fires under accused heretics during the Inquisition, for example.
jl
Our current debased GOP is just Trump with better manners and grammar, and better trade craft at swindles,I think that is an important message.
Ruckus
@Kay:
For conservatives, rent gouging on “the others” is OK. They of course deserve it. Besides just making money is the holy grail, not how you do it. And in drumpf’s case, conservatives get a twofer.
Princess Leia
@Marguerite Hill: THIS!
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
This. The best thing about them politically is that nobody knows exactly what’s in them, so everyone who dislikes Hillary is free to imagine whatever evil they want. It’s the political equivalent of a horror movie not showing whatever it is we’re supposed to be afraid of, only people’s reactions to it. Our own imaginations fill in the space far more effectively than showing us anything would.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
This.
Except that you can apply this to conservative politics as well. Most liberals (except the Bbros) are willing to disagree on at least some points or on degrees of differences, but conservatives see everything else as evil and wrong. They have to be right, not because of any rational, logical thought, but because they believe.
gvg
@Mnemosyne: People naturally defend their parents even if the parents are scum. When I was a foster mom, the training emphasized never try to cut down the parents to the child even if the parent was physically abusive. this would cause the child not to trust you even though it wasn’t logical. I have several cousins who were adopted and a friend also. Almost all of them as adults sought out their birth families, even though it bothers the adoptive families. In most cases, the reunion was not particularly happy to say the least but children seem to have to know. I am not sure if that is cultural or genetics. Tiffany was raised far away from Trump. She probably romanticized daddy somewhat. Its pretty common. It may seem obvious to us that Marla protected her, but I doubt she told Tiffany that.
bemused
@Frankensteinbeck:
Guess they’re willing to lose health care, Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, disability, pensions, etc, etc to be assholes but doubt that they think about the tradeoffs.
MomSense
@Princess:
In the video it looked like they erased all the chins so maybe it’s just him with his neck photoshopped off because it really looks like his jaw bone is resting on his shirt collar.
J R in WV
@Marguerite Hill:
That analysis is horrible, but sounds acutely true to my ear. Good job explicating how he got to be the way he is. Father was a slum lord, grand father ran a brothel in a goldrush town, mother from Scotland must have been a case… no way the guy has a good outcome in terms of personal happiness.
Not that his personal problems excuse his horrific treatment of everyone from Ivana thru Icanka to the American people to the rest of the world, which he hasn’t had time to get around to yet, but give him a chance!!! Just wait, you haven’t seen anything yet!!!
Roger Moore
@LAO:
I’m disappointed but not surprised. Their religious views have always been more about hating people who are different from them than about any kind of positive morality. How can you be surprised when people who said AIDS was God’s punishment for gay people but happily excuse adultery from their own congregations wind up supporting the most obnoxious bigot?
West of the Rockies (been a while)
@germy:
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.
Immanentize
@Mnemosyne:
I agree. I was a public defender in Miami during those dark days. I lost clients, colleagues and friends. And they were all treated like immoral monsters regardless of the actual purity of their deeds and/or spirits. I share your assessment.
J R in WV
@Kenneth Fair:
Reading the discussion, Tyrone came up with the crazification factor from Obama’s run for senate against Alan Keyes. It’s worth clicking through to read the whole discussion. And the number keeps popping up in the data!!!
Barbara
@Roger Moore: I would say it more like this: They have given up. They no longer believe that with God all things are possible, or that there is sufficient positive virtue for relatively fewer people to be committed Christians irrespective of what the rest of the world decides to do. It speaks to how much their self-proclaimed faith was simply a manifestation of external power structures that gave them more power than the people around them.
Ruckus
@FlipYrWhig:
If you defined it, that would limit it. If you defined it you would have to prove it.
They have to leave it open ended. First, those in the know understand it’s a nothing. Second, those same people saw and see an undefinable talking point, and that is good for them. It doesn’t have to even be bad, just the perception is not only more than enough to cause problems, as long as it stays unprovable it is better. They don’t want an investigation, they don’t want to actually know. That would invalidate their entire line of bullshit. And whats more they absolutely know it.
Barbara
@J R in WV: Well, calling it data is being a bit charitable!
Boatboy_srq
@MattF: And why can’t Lord Dampnut be all of the above? Cognitive impairment has only a limited relationship with honesty and personal ethical integrity, and dementia patients can be liars regardless of their ailment.
Brachiator
@NCSteve:
Some days I sit and ponder whether Trump is more loathsome than despicable, or more despicable than loathsome, or equally loathsome and despicable.
'Niques
@FlipYrWhig: I am of the firm belief that the only reason we even know about Hillary’s email servers is that the Russian hackers could.not.find.her! A particular dot-gov account is far more easily discerned than a gmail-dot-com or aol-dot-com account. She has been vilified because the treasonous bastards could not get to her emails. Irony is dead.
J R in WV
@Mnemosyne:
Frank is kind of wrong, in that the reason the Constitution is so complicated because the founders knew about the possibility of the tyranny of the majority, and wrote lots of fail-safes and veto points into the system, to protect the minorities from being discriminated against. It would be hard to put a requirement to be a fundamentalist christian in order to be elected president, for example.
It’s also why we’re a Republic and not a democracy with a small “d”.
ETA: and of course you’re correct, the Rs are a shrinking minority, which is why they’re desperately attempting to build in cheating so they can continue to have a chance to win elections. Plus, you know, that lying all the time thing, also too.
J R in WV
@cmorenc:
What Dunkirk disaster? You lie!!! There is no Dunkirk in this nation, and nothing bad ever happened there!!! Take him away from here, NOW!
ETA: To the Tower with him!!
Sorry, I can’t help myself sometimes. That’s what I imagined when I read your post, which is great.
'Niques
@SFAW: That child sex ring the right claimed Clinton was in charge of? Projection. Always.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
You mean like people born here but darker-complected can’t be deported, like that rule?
We already know Trump and his people care nothing for any rules they can figure out how to break. Get with the plan here.
Ruckus
@LAO:
I’ve met a few evangelicals in my life. Every single one of them has been a waste of meat. They are a cult. It may be a different cult than say scientology or the other evangelical church down the street but I notice that most of these places are either huge mega churches or are all in poor areas. The mega churches have an obvious rational, money, but the poor churches are in my mind even worse. Giving people hope in bullshit while doing absolutely nothing to help them get out of living on the edge is not exactly the most humane way of living.
J R in WV
@No Drought No More:
IIRC, my dad was in attendance at the “I am not a crook!” speech, which was made at a gathering of newspaper editors. Small world.
LAO
@Ruckus: I get it. By no means and am I a fan. But, I always believed that there was some sincerity in their bullshit beliefs, in that they believed the garbage that they spewed. But, clearly there isn’t it.
geg6
@maryQ:
That guy doesn’t know shit. I know plenty of liberals with guns. Mother fucker shows up at my house, he’ll get plugged.
catclub
@joel hanes:
Yeah, right. All those government haters with their ‘keep government hands off my Medicare’ will be roused to support government workers.
requires an understanding of how things work, and also an ability to envision the future. I am not seeing it in disaffected Trump voters.
Frankensteinbeck
@bemused:
To make it even more fucked up, they DO think about the tradeoffs. They think that the leopard won’t eat their face. More specifically, racists believe that the Other is the cause of all their problems, while they themselves are inherently superior beings. Destroy everything that benefits the Other, and magically the world will turn into a utopia for the deserving. A lot of them said this point blank about repealing Obamacare, that they would not lose their insurance because once the moochers were kicked out of the system, they would get such good jobs they could buy insurance without assistance. These are bedrock articles of faith for people driven by hate.
sunny raines
anyone thinking trump unites anything has totally missed trump’s shtick. trump is the WWF of politics – it’s a free-for-all. Any “alliances” are only temporary for an immediate effect and soon dissolve in fighting and animosity….only to be re-instituted some time in the future when needed. Its all show, only on the political stage instead of the wrestling entertainment stage.
Its politics as entertainment and it works on the ignorant trump supporters. If his base shrinks its only because they’re bored, not in anyway concerned about trumps constant lying, his incompetence, and immorality – that all IS the show to them.
Dave
@gvg: That’s Interesting my oldest brother and sister were adopted. My sister I know did attempt to seek her birth family whereas my brother has never shown the slightest interest. His wife had no idea he was adopted until long after they were engaged and an offhand comment led to a wait what moment. It probably helps in some way that they were the oldest children. I’ve never thought of the as my adopted brother and sister unless it was specifically regarding that topic. Like I never understood the meme that finding out you were adopted was hard because it was just a thing that is.
The Moar You Know
@Ruckus: Met one. “Poor Church” guy. First question out of his mouth was if I’d give his “church” sound equipment for free. Second was if I knew where any “hot ass” was. His wife was outside and frankly too young to even be his daughter, never mind spouse. I told him he was probably in the wrong town (liberal NorCal college town famous for hirsute lesbians). He asked me if I wanted to go to his church, I said no, he told me to go fuck myself and left, having struck out on all the three grifts that he knew.
Every time I see one on the TV I think of that guy. He was the most honest and upstanding of any of the breed so far as I can tell.
Marcos Lopez
Support your local antifa chapter. If flash points of violence break out with the fascists, they will be our front lines.
Tehanu
There’s a reason the base is called the “base.” It’s got nothing to do with being the support or foundation and everything to do with being:
1. morally low; without estimable personal qualities; dishonorable; meanspirited; selfish; cowardly.
2. of little or no value; worthless: hastily composed of base materials.
3. debased or counterfeit.
4. characteristic of or befitting an inferior person or thing.
Boatboy_srq
@randy khan: 1992: it’s the economy, stupid; 2017: it’s the stupid, stupid.
Captain C
@SFAW:
Like a pinup fantasy girl, Obama is whatever they need him to be at the time, even if it was the opposite just a femtosecond ago.
Citizen Alan
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Didn’t Trump literally claim to have been a vet because he was having sex in the 1980s and managed to avoid AIDS? Or did I hallucinate that Exchange? So many of Shitgibbon’s comments seem like something out of a awful dream.
Ruckus
@LAO:
When I was 12 and had to start wearing glasses, my first choice of career, astronaut by way of AF pilot was out of the question. So I started looking around for something I wanted to do. Preacher and politician were 2 of the many choices. I decided that I couldn’t lie well enough to do either of those but especially the first. I’ve been proven right on this point far more often and far more poignantly than I could ever imagine at age 12.
But the biggest reason for not becoming a preacher was that one has to lie about bullshit and be sincere. Always. It’s the job description. Selling bullshit. Had a HS buddy who’s dad owned a dairy. Those cows shit every day all day (and night) a lot. I told the XO that was signing my discharge papers from the navy, that I’d rather shovel that shit every day for the rest of my life rather than serve under men like him. And if those were my choices, I would have. Being a preacher is to me at least 14 levels of bullshit thrower lower than a person who shovels cow shit for a living. At least shoveling cow shit is honest work.
I don’t care if they believe it. That’s on them not on me.
Ruckus
@The Moar You Know:
He was honest. You knew as soon as he opened his mouth that he was full of shit. And then he went on to further prove it. Never had that level out of any that I’ve met. They do get upset when they realize that you aren’t buying their bullshit. Especially if you tell them it’s all fucking bullshit. Really especially if you tell them that if they don’t leave you alone you are going to shout at the top of your lungs that it’s all bullshit. They don’t like the truth, they can’t sell that.
Ruckus
@Citizen Alan:
So manyAll of Shitgibbon’s commentsseem likeare something out of a awfuldreamnightmare.FIXT for you.
HelenWheels
@Barbara: From the pulpit, my (now ex) pastor attributed both ‘fake news’ and transgender to influence of Satan.