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You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Dolt 45 / Sad Trombone Open Thread: When Grifters Start to Lose Their Grip

Sad Trombone Open Thread: When Grifters Start to Lose Their Grip

by Anne Laurie|  March 29, 20192:28 am| 46 Comments

This post is in: Dolt 45, Election 2020, I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Sanders Campaign, Open Threads

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What if Trump threw a tantrum-rally, and nobody paid attention? Even the NYTimes couldn’t work up any real enthusiasm for the Toddler-in-Chief’s latest frantic attempt to salve his wounded ego:

… In many ways, the speech was a return to first principles for Mr. Trump, reviving an insurgent theme that had fueled his campaign in 2016. He said the Russia investigation underlined the need to “drain the swamp,” and he celebrated his cheering supporters over what he described as the faithless elites in Washington.

“I’m president and they’re not,” he said.

“I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to better schools than them,” he added. “Much more beautiful house. Much more beautiful everything.”…

The mood in the arena, however, was no more intense than at other Trump rallies. If anything, the crowd seemed a bit sedate as he began speaking. Many held up signs that said “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs,” reflecting the economic priorities that drive voting in this Rust Belt state.

And for all his indignation at the start of the speech, Mr. Trump lapsed into well-worn themes later in the one hour and 22-minute speech, even delivering a leisurely reminiscence about his election victory…

On the flight to Grand Rapids, Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, two former campaign advisers known for riling up Mr. Trump on Air Force One before his rallies, were aboard.

Inside the White House, aides were concerned about the two of them tagging along — and possibly having open access to the president — but ultimately did not take steps to limit their travel, according to a person familiar with the planning.

Mr. Trump has long savored his victory in Michigan. But the state could be more of an uphill struggle in 2020. Democrats made significant gains in the 2018 midterm elections, including winning the governorship…

In Reuters’ two-minute video recap (below the fold), Trump doesn’t look triumphant, or even angry. His eyes keep darting from side to side, like he’s looking for the exit — or for the authorities…

Trump blasts Russia 'witch hunt' at Michigan rally https://t.co/24arNG6hgg pic.twitter.com/BxZX7oglwR

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) March 29, 2019

Of course, he’ll still have his Deplorables, right there in the bunker with him:

There'a a sea of middle-aged white people behind Trump pic.twitter.com/FtULMRlV8R

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

I've been covering Qanon for a year, and the amount of pro-Q people in this video from yesterday's Trump rally line in Grand Rapids is absolutely shocking. This is just a portion of it. pic.twitter.com/hTDGEnPsEi

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) March 29, 2019


 
And while we’re discussing, shall we say, outside-the-box firebrands whose audience may be going in search of fresher novelties:

Surprising to see this in a far leftist publication like The Nation. https://t.co/4tBcS28xZx

— Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) March 28, 2019

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Reader Interactions

46Comments

  1. 1.

    Major Major Major Major

    March 29, 2019 at 2:31 am

    The Nation is ‘far leftist?’

  2. 2.

    Mary G

    March 29, 2019 at 2:34 am

    That’s a lot of white people in the QAnon line. Discouraging number of them young.

  3. 3.

    BlueDWarrior

    March 29, 2019 at 2:42 am

    @Mary G: I’m not surprised. Those are the kinds of people who were legitimately radicalized by right-wing Twitter and Facebook.

  4. 4.

    Ruckus

    March 29, 2019 at 2:48 am

    @BlueDWarrior:
    Legitimately radicalized?
    Not sure I’m following correctly. There’s legitimate radicalization of Trump supporters? I seem to be missing something.

  5. 5.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    March 29, 2019 at 2:49 am

    I really wish Chevy Chase would take action against Dump for his plagiarism.

  6. 6.

    Major Major Major Major

    March 29, 2019 at 2:50 am

    @Ruckus: I read it as synonymous with ‘literally,’ there.

  7. 7.

    Ruckus

    March 29, 2019 at 2:53 am

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Maybe it’s far left in comparison to Trump?
    Maybe it’s an inside joke?
    That’s all I got.

  8. 8.

    Ruckus

    March 29, 2019 at 2:56 am

    @Major Major Major Major:
    Yes.
    That would be my take, maybe it’s late night posting with autocorrect.

  9. 9.

    Plato

    March 29, 2019 at 2:58 am

    So much for the next generation won’t be so much bigoted racists/sexists theory.

  10. 10.

    Major Major Major Major

    March 29, 2019 at 3:07 am

    @Plato: the existence of crazy idiots doesn’t actually demonstrate the existence of a higher ratio of them.

  11. 11.

    Yutsano

    March 29, 2019 at 3:10 am

    Where did my fucking comment go?

  12. 12.

    (((CassandraLeo)))

    March 29, 2019 at 3:11 am

    @Major Major Major Major: There’s probably no hope that white people will stop being terrible in future generations. Thankfully, future generations also have proportionately way fewer of them!

  13. 13.

    Amir Khalid

    March 29, 2019 at 3:16 am

    “I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to better schools than them,” he added.

    Is there no end to Trump’s lies?

  14. 14.

    Major Major Major Major

    March 29, 2019 at 3:24 am

    @(((CassandraLeo))): I wanna say every youth demographic except for “white, no college” polls better than its older peers, but I might be remembering wrong.

  15. 15.

    Amir Khalid

    March 29, 2019 at 3:28 am

    @Plato:
    Die, die sich mit dem Gedanke trösten, dass Bigotterie mit den alten Bigotten aussterben wird, vergessen leider, dass junge Bigotten jeden Tag mündig werden.

  16. 16.

    Amir Khalid

    March 29, 2019 at 3:35 am

    @Ruckus:
    I think BlueDWarrior is referring to people who actually were radicalised by RW social media, rather than by some other means.

  17. 17.

    Ruckus

    March 29, 2019 at 3:37 am

    @Amir Khalid:
    Wise man speak truth.

  18. 18.

    sukabi

    March 29, 2019 at 3:43 am

    @Ruckus: radicalized actual people instead of bots pretending to be actual radicalized people maybe?

  19. 19.

    opiejeanne

    March 29, 2019 at 3:47 am

    @Mary G: I can’t do QAnon. I just can’t deal with them and their stupidity. As bad as Anti-vaxxers.

  20. 20.

    opiejeanne

    March 29, 2019 at 3:52 am

    @sukabi: I can’t figure out what is meant either. I can’t even hypothesize.

  21. 21.

    Jay

    March 29, 2019 at 4:25 am

    @opiejeanne:

    I think its a reference to the past and recent Social Media “bans” which blocks ISIL, and now some Nazi’s,

    But Social Media still allows all the long pathways to radicalization to exist, they’ve just banned the end zone pages of some of the most deadly terrorist groups.

    So, one can start watching “edgelord” you tubes on line, follow the path downwards, but it doesnt lead to Stormfront or AtomWaffen, the trail stops one webpage short of enlisting to fight the coming race war.

  22. 22.

    OzarkHillbilly

    March 29, 2019 at 5:04 am

    @Yutsano: FYWPoof!

  23. 23.

    OzarkHillbilly

    March 29, 2019 at 5:08 am

    @opiejeanne: Qanon is short for Cue a moron.

  24. 24.

    Sherparick

    March 29, 2019 at 6:14 am

    @Major Major Major Major: Eric Altermann is a good writer & never drunk the Kool-aid of Bernieism. By the way Bernie, release your tax returns.

  25. 25.

    Sherparick

    March 29, 2019 at 6:17 am

    @Amir Khalid: No. Trump will be lying to his dying breadth.

  26. 26.

    trnc

    March 29, 2019 at 7:12 am

    @Sherparick:

    Trump will be lying to his dying breadth.

    And, hell, why wouldn’t he? The signature feature of today’s republican is that they would gouge out their own eyes if they ever thought they would have to see any actual information about DT or other republicans.

  27. 27.

    Chris Johnson

    March 29, 2019 at 7:22 am

    @Jay: For ‘follow the path’ I would put ‘get persistently led’ downwards.

    As someone who watches a fair bit of YouTube including woke stuff like Shaun, donoteat01 and Contrapoints, I know that if you click on the wrong thing out of curiosity the right side of your screen (recommendations) fills up with garbage, all clickbait, all alt-right.

    I think this is in part because the platform is actively pushing people to be alt-right, but much more because the algorithm dictates it. This is what we get out of AI: the ‘paperclip-maximizer’ AI told to maximize people’s engagement with itself (and increase usage of YouTube in general) works out that if you get sucked into alt-right you start obsessively watching all these freaking crazy videos and abandon your life and previous beliefs to become an internet psycho.

    And Google goes, ‘Yay! Engagement!’. And so the raw mechanism of how YouTube ‘thinks’ about engagement, gets you propagandized, because YouTube’s interests are alt-right interests when alt-right equals ‘crazy obsessives who do nothing but make and watch propaganda videos that they think are THE most important thing EVER’.

    This is a kind of AI in action. It’s not a nice kind. The antidote is somewhat labor intensive and could be killed off by YouTube at any time: hide alt-right videos when you recognize them (without watching them) in the sidebar, and tell YouTube you don’t want to see that channel. You do this by clicking on the vertical three dots in the sidebar (not the video!) and select Not Interested. Then you get an option for Tell Us Why, and that gives you an option “I’m not interested in this channel” (note you’ve never actually been to the channel, but it’s probably got some kind of horrible name too) and choosing that is the magic bullet to train the AI.

    As soon as you click another alt-right or adjacent video, you’ll get bombed with alt-right again and have to do it all over. But if you go to all this trouble you can watch YouTube and pretty much get recommended just more of stuff you know and trust, often stuff you’ve seen already. Which is much more stress-reducing, I find :)

  28. 28.

    BobS

    March 29, 2019 at 7:23 am

    @Major Major Major Major: Yeah, I wondered about that, too. Jacobin, or Monthly Review, but not The Nation.

  29. 29.

    z

    March 29, 2019 at 8:06 am

    @Chris Johnson: Given that the basis of the Q anon conspiracy theory consists of harassing real people and their real children with ridiculous conspiracy theories and regularly including private information (eg screenshots of emails in twitter posts and youtube videos) I’d really like to see Podesta and others targeted sue the hell out of google/facebook/twitter. If AI can make this content more visible it can also be used to identify it and shut it down. I regularly report posts of that nature on Twitter as personal harassment and nothing happens. Not everyone involved is a public figure; particularly children named.

  30. 30.

    Libraryguy

    March 29, 2019 at 8:10 am

    Though to be fair to The Nation’s current image, they do also have 2 new essays: Aaron Mate’s “RIP, Russiagate” and Stephen F Cohen’s “The Real Costs of Russiagate.”

    The subtitles tell it all: Mate is “The implosion of the collusion theory is a humiliation for everyone who promoted it.”

    Cohen: “Its perpetrators, not Putin or Trump, “attacked American democracy.””

    Both, based on Barr’s letter and nothing else, and ignoring everything that has been publicly revealed over the last 3 years.

  31. 31.

    SFAW

    March 29, 2019 at 8:42 am

    “I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to better schools than them,”

    Than THEY, you fucking imbecile. Can’t you even speak English properly, with all your “education”?

    And going to Fordham, and then Wharton, for an undergraduate BFA is not quite on a par with going to … oh, I don’t know … going to UMich (horrors, a state school!) or the Cal system (OMFG, another set of state schools!) before Reagan did his best to destroy it. At least W made it through Harvard B-school, asshole, which is a shitload better than any FAKE degree you might claim to have earned.

    Lying motherfucker.

  32. 32.

    kd bart

    March 29, 2019 at 8:44 am

    Trump also claims to be a better painter than Churchill.

  33. 33.

    SFAW

    March 29, 2019 at 8:45 am

    @Libraryguy:
    Refresh my memory: isn’t “The Nation” supposed to be a non-wingnut rag?

    Asking for the plane of existence f/k/a “Reality.”

  34. 34.

    SFAW

    March 29, 2019 at 8:52 am

    @Amir Khalid:
    Ich hasse es (manchmal) wenn du Wahrheit sprichst

  35. 35.

    kindness

    March 29, 2019 at 8:54 am

    A Donald Trump perp walk would be a sweet gif. Just sayin’.

  36. 36.

    Julia Grey

    March 29, 2019 at 9:00 am

    I read a much different take on the rally over at TPM. About how the crowd was hugely enthusiastic and “roaring” and had camped out for tickets, etc. I found it terribly depressing.

    What do the QAnon people believe about the Mueller investigation now? I thought they believed it was a secret effort to investigate Hillary?

  37. 37.

    FlipYrWhig

    March 29, 2019 at 9:02 am

    @SFAW: They’ve been plagued with raving tankies like Stephen Cohen for decades. And then there’s the other aspect, the leftier-than-thou side, for which the single most important thing to know about 2016 is that Hillary Clinton lost because she sucks, and that SOMEONE WHO ISN’T HILLARY CLINTON wouldn’t have lost by virtue of not sucking, and that any story about 2016 other than “Hillary Clinton uniquely sucks” is a distraction/waste/myth/hoax. It’s tiresome.

  38. 38.

    FlipYrWhig

    March 29, 2019 at 9:03 am

    @Julia Grey: When Jimmy Buffett has a concert, excited Jimmy Buffett fans break out the gear and go nuts at the hits. That doesn’t really tell you very much about how many Jimmy Buffett fans there are. The same applies to Trump. Don’t let it get you down.

  39. 39.

    Skepticat

    March 29, 2019 at 9:25 am

    I have a better education than them. I’m smarter than them. I went to better schools than them.

    And may this nitpicking proofreader/copy editor note that it’s apparent that in none of these schools did he learn proper grammar.
    I’m also fairly sure we all know that anyone who has to tell you how smart he is usually isn’t.

  40. 40.

    Kathleen

    March 29, 2019 at 9:26 am

    @Sherparick: He was also pioneer regarding documenting media atrocities in the 90’s (“What Liberal Media”).

  41. 41.

    SFAW

    March 29, 2019 at 9:55 am

    @Skepticat:

    in none of these schools did he learn proper grammar.

    RWMF response: “Libtard! He was sent to DC by God so that he would shake things up and drain the correct-grammar swamp!!! Libtard!!”

  42. 42.

    Ella in New Mexico

    March 29, 2019 at 11:07 am

    @Major Major Major Major: I read legitimately meaning “truly”. As in “straight up legit”

  43. 43.

    Just Chuck

    March 29, 2019 at 12:45 pm

    @SFAW:

    Than THEY, you fucking imbecile.

    “Them” is the objective pronoun, “They” is subjective. He is using “them” correctly.

  44. 44.

    SFAW

    March 29, 2019 at 1:21 pm

    @Just Chuck:

    “Them” is the objective pronoun, “They” is subjective. He is using “them” correctly.

    It would help — if you’re going to issue a “correction” — that you know what you’re talking about. [Yes, I realize that this meaning of “about” is not supposed to end a sentence.]

    Yes, I know that “they” is subjective, and “them” is objective. The sentence that the Traitor-in-Chief constructed (so to speak) is a shortened form — understood by most persons with a knowledge of English grammar — of “I have a better education than THEY DO. I’m smarter than THEY ARE. I went to better schools than THEY DID.” The verbs do/are/did were implied/unspoken by the sentence construction. This is standard English construction. That people choose to use incorrect grammar because they think it sounds better does not magically confer correctness upon it/them.

    And, just to pile on: The sentence “It is me” is also grammatically incorrect; the grammatically correct version is “It is I.”. The use of the verb “to be,” in that format, means one should use the subjective case of the pronoun, not the objective. That it has been popular to use “me” for the last 50-or-so years is immaterial.

    I ain’t no English teacher, nor is I a professional grammarian, but unless some of the basic rules regarding grammar have been rewritten, my original comment is the correct version.

  45. 45.

    Dan B

    March 29, 2019 at 5:07 pm

    Sanjay Gupta has researched lifespans worldwide. They are increasing in almost every cohort. The US is decreasing. All the decrease is in the white working class. He attributes this to constant stress. So there may be some truth to the “economic anxiety” line. At the same time this is no excuse to blame black, brown, LGBTQ, OTHERZ!, for your stress. But it’s easy to radicalize people when they are under stress.

  46. 46.

    Mike G

    March 29, 2019 at 6:16 pm

    Trump doesn’t look triumphant, or even angry. His eyes keep darting from side to side, like he’s looking for the exit — or for the authorities…

    I live for the day Trump has his Ceaucescu-on-the-balcony moment, when he realizes the crowd isn’t buying his tired bullshit anymore and is turning ugly on him; and we see a flash of raw fear at what he’s created.

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