— This Is Punk Rock Time (@PunkRockTime) July 15, 2020
The memoir about life in the Trump family and its effects on the psyche of the current commander in chief sold 950,000 copies through Tuesday, the book’s first day of sales. https://t.co/KgYy6tmIBG
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 16, 2020
That’s gotta chafe the Oval Office Occupant’s flabby arse.
From everything I have seen, the book tells a real-life version of Frankenstein: Fred Trump, egomaniac, wanted a more powerful version of himself. He failed with his namesake eldest son*, but succeeded — all too well — with young Donald. He’s a patchwork android, is Donny, forever gnawed by the dim understanding that he’s missing some vital spark of humanity which makes him a horror to the ‘normal’ world, smashing everything he can in a fruitless search for vengeance…
*(Remember Ivanna saying The Donald wasn’t sure about naming their first son after himself? ‘But what if he’s a loser?’)
Interesting review from Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate:
… At bottom, Too Much and Never Enough may be the first book that stipulates, in its first pages, that the president is irreparably damaged, and then turns a clinician’s lens on the rest of us, the voters, the enablers, the flatterers, the hangers-on, and the worshippers. It is here that Mary Trump’s book makes perhaps the most enduring contribution to the teetering piles of books that have offered too little too late, even while telling us that which we already knew. Because Mary Trump begins from the assumption that other analysis tends to end with: Donald Trump is lethally dangerous, stunningly incoherent, and pathologically incapable of caring about anyone but himself. So, what Mary Trump wants to know is: What the hell is wrong with everyone around him? As she writes in her prologue, “there’s been very little effort to understand not only why he became what he is but how he’s consistently failed up despite his glaring lack of fitness.”
The book is thus actually styled as an indictment not of Donald Trump but of Trump’s enablers. The epigraph is from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and it’s emphatically not about Donald John Trump at all: “If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness.” Mary Trump blames Fred Trump for Donald Trump’s pathology, although she doesn’t claim that her uncle is a tragic victim of abuse. She blames his family that propped him up (also her family, it should be noted), and then in concentric and expanding circles, the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the “claque of loyalists” in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion. Even the phrase “too much and never enough” is perhaps deliberately borrowed from the language of addiction, and what Mary Trump describes here is not just her uncle’s addiction to adulation, fame, money, and success, but a nation’s—or some part of a nation’s—unfathomable addiction to him.…
The section of the book that has garnered the most attention is likely Mary’s claim that Trump cannot be evaluated for pathologies because he is “in the West Wing, essentially institutionalized” and that he has in fact “been institutionalized for most of his adult life. So there is no way to know how he would thrive, or even survive, on his own in the real world.” We are not used to seeing entities like the White House described in this way—a “very expensive and well-guarded padded cell”—as a means of protection for the broken man inside rather than as a platform from which a leader can change the world. And her ultimate point is that even a shattered psyche, buffered from the real world, can still do irreparable damage to it. But the most interesting assessments she offers are reserved for those inside the “institutions,” the people who might have saved us and certainly have not, from the nuclear family, to the Trump businesses, to New York’s bankers and powerful elites, to Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Jared Kushner. They all knew and know that the emperor has no clothes, even as they devote their last shreds of dignity to effusive praise of his ermine trim and jaunty crown.
Mary Trump seems to answer the question of why they do this in a section late in the book about Donald Trump’s father, Fred Trump. In describing Fred’s growing realizing that his fair-haired boy, Donald, was a fraud, Mary explains that, yes, Fred himself was a master at fattening his wallet with taxpayer funds, committing tax fraud to benefit his children. (Mary admits she was the one who leaked the family tax information to the New York Times in 2018 for its blockbuster story.) But as it became clear that Donald had no real business acumen—as his Atlantic City casinos cratered and his father unlawfully poured secret funds into saving them—Mary realized that Fred also depended on the glittery tabloid success at which Donald excelled. Fred continued to prop up his son’s smoke-and-mirrors empire because, as Mary writes, “Fred had become so invested in the fantasy of Donald’s success that he and Donald were inextricably linked. Facing reality would have required acknowledging his own responsibility, which he would never do. He had gone all in, and although any rational person would have folded, Fred was determined to double down.” …
…[W]hat she reveals is a devastating indictment of all the alleged adults who stick around Donald Trump, who came together to fail America, to leave vulnerable populations to fend for themselves, and who continue to lie and spin to pacify his ego. They do it because they can’t admit the payoff is never coming, and to save themselves from the embarrassment of having to admit they were catastrophically wrong.
I don’t know if anyone else remembers Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Nancy Reagan, which was basically the story of two badly damaged child-abuse victims bonding in a folie a deux that would eventually take them to the White House. The media kept telling us that the Reagans would bring “glamor” back to the White House — that we were entitled to Ronnie’s “sunny optimism” (i.e., pathological indifference to human suffering) after four years of boring, workaholic Jimmy Carter.
Donald Trump is the straight-to-streaming, half-arsed reboot of that franchise. Behold: Descending on their golden escalator, a reality-show “star” and his sullen trophy wife! No more Democrat guilt-inducing lectures about inequality and climate change; instead, media-friendly hijinks with an ‘unpredictable’ would-be dictator and his gang of laughable incompetents!
One last trip to the public trough, before the Republican party and its media enablers collapse completely…
So I reviewed the Mary Trump book: https://t.co/VBRXrE4qYZ
But like with any review, there are things I didn't have space or time to discuss, stuff that is interesting but not vital to include in the review. So I'm going to run through the book and point out some stuff. Thread…— Carlos Lozada (@CarlosLozadaWP) July 10, 2020
“Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, and Mitch McConnell, all of whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred”
Mary Trump
— #ModSquad? Melanie (@Lonestarmomcom) July 16, 2020
Welcome to Story Hour.
What will we be reading? Excerpts from Mary Trump’s new book, ‘Too Much and Never Enough,’ of course.
See you tomorrow at 8p EST for episode 2. pic.twitter.com/AMTxdy6e1m
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 16, 2020
donnah
I watched the Rachel Maddow interview with Mary Trump on Thursday and it was good. I doubt that any of us didn’t know what the book would reveal, that Donald Trump is psychologically damaged and should never have been elected president. But it sounds like Mary brought receipts, both literally and figuratively.
I hope her book continues to sell and she makes a lot of money, since she was probably entitled to quite a lot more than she got from the family. Rachel reaffirmed many key points in the interview and also asked Mary about Donald’s overt racism, which Mary confirmed. There are already a lot of tell-all books about him out already, but this is a tell-why.
p.a.
A long term question to investigate if the US survives as a viable democratic 1st world nation is whether the tRump, Palin, W, Reagan electorate was there all along, just too apathetic to vote when even Eisenhower Repubs ‘refudiated’ their beliefs, until Luntz, Fallwell Sr, Limbaugh et.al. energized them, or whether the Moral Majority/hate radio/Fox News/Atwater/Rove nexus created the beast from whole cloth. Probably some of each, but the process needs to be understood. At its base I assume racism is the soil, whether the plants were there and dormant, or planted fresh. Like the mostly covert anti-Semitism of pre-depression Germany was the medium for Nazism.
But for now, when the house is on fire stamp out the fire, then worry about causes.
Kay
@donnah:
Maybe I’ll try Maddows’s interview. I watched part of her interview with Stephanopoulos, who did a bad job. There was one good part. Mary Trump said something to the effect that voters didn’t have real information on Trump and Stephanopoulos of course took offense – got all prickly and defensive because now we’re veering towards the enablers, right, and there we may not go. He said Trump was an “open book” and she corrected him quite firmly.
WereBear
I’m listening to the audio book from my Scribd app.
DAYUM.
I see a lot of criticism that this isn’t a jewel-like Proustian literary memoir. But guess what? This is about a deeply dysfunctional family, and this is what it’s like.
The incidents which trail off and are never explained. The confusing timelines and mangled recollections and the outright lies that can’t be sorted out. The struggles to make sense of it all, then and now.
That’s what it’s like.
If reading the book gets you confused and angry: that’s an accurate reflection of the subject matter.
Kay
I know everyone knows this but it makes me feel better to say it- it isn’t over yet. They are going to hang onto power with everything they have, and they have a lot- they control the entire executive branch and the senate. This is just getting started. Donald Trump has an entire group of loyal lackies installed without senate confirmation or really and vetting at all in very powerful positions. They want to remain in power and they have no personal ethical boundaries at all.
You can count the people who stood up to him on two hands. The vast, vast majority went along and will continue to go along no matter what he does.
trnc
Worst fears realized. Possibly the only correct premonition he ever had.
John S.
@p.a.: It’s cognitive dissonance on an epic scale, playing out across generations. Which is why my people say “never forget” when it comes to the events around WW2.
The conservatives in this country are fundamentally no different than the conservatives in any other country. It’s only a matter of how far they are willing to take their ideology to its logical extreme.
It was a very unique set of circumstances that brought the US into WW2, and led to conservatives here cheering on the defeat of the Nazis (after many of them had originally supported them), while wrapping themselves in their own nationalism thinly disguised as patriotism. But it could have easily gone the other way, and many works of fiction have contemplated that.
As memories fade, recollections of events become skewed and history gets rewritten over time, so it’s easy to forget what conservatives are all about. Conservatives either overlook or convince themselves that they aren’t on the wrong side of history, or the arc of moral justice. But they always are, and they always will be — because that’s what their ideology represents.
So the rest of us, who aren’t trying to cling to something that never really existed, or reject what actually did exist and want to move away from it, should never forget. Even if others do.
Nicole
I had a friend from childhood who normally didn’t vote who said she thought a Trump Administration would be like a roller-coaster ride, and she didn’t mean that in a bad way.
She lives in Florida, with her deeply racist parents. I cut off all contact with her a couple of years ago, and am very glad to have that particular toxic influence out of my life, but I sometimes think of that roller-coaster ride comment of hers and wonder how she’s enjoying the hills.
Betty Cracker
@donnah:
Exactly!
Lithwick is right that a lot of the blame lies with the people who can’t admit they were “catastrophically wrong” — from Fred to Trump’s enablers in the White House to the base of voters who are still in denial as bodies pile up from Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic. Trump will be gone and hopefully soon, but that’s a problem we’ll be dealing with for the foreseeable future.
donnah
@Kay: I thought Rachel did a good job, let Mary talk, and asked good questions. Mary comes across as serious, thoughtful, and she seems to have a sense of humor as well. She struck me as being very concerned about what her uncle might yet do during his term.
Kay
This is the most dangerous period of the last 3 and 3/4 years- they’re threatened and they know it.
Spanky
@Kay: Alright Sunshine, let me add this to your summary: They have the (probably vast) majority of police – departmental and individual – on their side as well. The militarization of all police forces over the past 20 years may not have been directed to this moment, but it’s coming in very handy for the junta.
Wyatt Salamanca
To me, nothing better demonstrates Trump’s pathology than his absurd statement that his actions saved 2 to 3 million Americans from dying of COVID-19. The 139,000 dead Americans mean absolutely nothing to this raving Neanderthal. If Trump wins in November, he’ll continue playing this sick, depraved numbers game in an effort to minimize his monstrous, unforgivable incompetence.
I hope Mary Trump’s book tour continues to get under Trump’s incredibly thin skin.
raven
@Kay: Someone last night said Cuomo’s was better.
trnc
I’m not sure it’s possible to determine with any scientific method, but I tend to think their current attitudes were grown and nurtured from basic human nature that allows for a wide range of beliefs and rationalization.
John S.
@Kay: Vicious animals are always the most dangerous when they are cornered and fear for their survival.
Butter Emails
@p.a.:
It’s a combination. A lot of the authoritarian followers were already there, but distributed between the two parties. Republican efforts over the last several decades have caused most authoritarian followers to shift to Republican voters.
At the same time, fear tends to create new authoritarian followers. The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks probably generated a lot of new ones. There’s plenty examples of bog standard Republicans and liberals going off the deep end after those attacks.
On top of that you have Fox and other conservative propaganda channels amping up the fear and hate 24/7. The phenomenon of liberal children and grandchildren lamenting their once liberal and moderate parents and grandparents decent into frothing reactionary due to a steady diet of Fox News is pretty much cliché at this point.
The other piece of this is that the Republican party propaganda apparatus and affiliates have been steadily ramping up the crazy and further radicalizing their followers. There are now sizable contingents on the right who believe that nearly all Democratic politicians are involved in ritual cannibalism and run a global pedophile ring.
Amir Khalid
I wonder if this book is in Malaysia yet.
Kay
@donnah:
He treated the book like a celebrity tell-all and I don’t care anymore about the Trumps as cultural figures. I don’t think they’re “fascinating!”- I think they’re malicious and dangerous. I would be the wrong audience for the celebrity tell-all aspect of her book. She’s smart- I felt she understood how he was framing- minimizing- and pushed back admirably from this, but he’s a pro and he entered that room with his agenda and the subject of the interview wasn’t going to get in the way of it.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
I disagree, to some extent. I don’t think they think they were/are “catastrophically wrong”; they either think they’re right (much/most of the time), or they don’t care whether they’re right or wrong (because they’re focused on achieving their racist/fascist/grifting/kill-or-own-the-libtards goals by any means necessary).
Kay
My husband watched part of the interview with me – he really just has no use for the Trumps- and I said she was doing quite well and he said “of course she’s doing well- these people have spent their entire adult lives involved in litigation”. Guffaw.
Another Scott
Thanks for Lithwick’s review.
tl;dr – 1) “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” 2) “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
Too many people wanted to take short-cuts to get their piece of the prize. As Kay says, people actually have to do the work. The lying, the cheating, the dissembling, the gaslighting, Cohen’s bullying of Donnie’s critics, the empty lecterns waiting for Donnie to show up, the burying of bad numbers – all of it. It’s people not doing their jobs, lying – and accepting lies – to get their piece of the pie.
Maybe they’ll learn??
Cheers,
Scott.
SFAW
I read some tweet saying that it’s already outsold The Art of the Deal, as in: more than that book of lies sold in 32 years. I have a tough time believing that, but it would be hilarious if true. [NB: Did a very quick googling, and some cites say Art sold 1 million or perhaps more, but apparently accurate figures don’t exist.]
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
I’ve wondered if there’d be much difference if the Trump Crime Cartel and the Kardashian Grifters traded places. Kayne is roughly as deranged as Donnie, but Kris might be a better manager, and the vapid women just can’t be worse than the Trump spawn.
And to answer everyone’s question: No, it is not too early to start drinking.
Danielx
@Kay:
This.
A Trump victory is the only standing between a lot of his enablers and jail, and they are only going to get more crazed and vicious as election time draws nearer. I may be wrong, but I suspect this is the most dangerous time in our ongoing democratic experiment.
The only solution is to stamp the beast so thoroughly it never raises its head again.
Jager
I finished the book Wednesday night. One of the lighter things Mary writes about is Christmas at her grandparent’s house. One year her mother Linda received a designer purse from Donald and Ivana, it was a re-gifted present, her mother knew because there were used tissues inside. The same year Mary’s Christmas gift from Donald and Ivana was a fancy, high-end food basket (a great gift for a college kid?) she knew it was it a re-gift, the tin of caviar was gone.
Jeffro
…until Covid-19. It really is causing trumpistas some major psychic distress. There is no way to spin it, no way to avoid the reality of it. It’s why masks inflame them and the possibility of schools not opening back up makes them crazy – it means their pathetic little god-emperor has failed. And he knows it too.
topclimber
@John S.: Jesus said “the poor will always be with us.” So too the conservatives. Think there’s a link?
PsiFighter37
David Fahrenthold tweeted about how the Trump campaign spent $380k at Mar-a-Lago in 2 days on a “donor retreat”. Except all the payments are conveniently $10k and under, which is the threshold to trigger reporting to the IRS.
No doubt in my mind now that the campaign itself is a front for money laundering or for outright grifting. This is amateur shit that anyone working at a bank in any capacity (which I have been, starting as a sophomore in college) is trained to spot.
I wonder how all these rich people giving away money to Trump will feel since he is outright stealing it and not even pouring it into his campaign…
Wyatt Salamanca
h/t https://www.salon.com/2020/07/17/fox-news-peddled-misinformation-about-the-coronavirus-253-times-in-five-days-study/
Fuck Trump and fuck his biggest enabler in the media, Fox News.
Hoodie
@SFAW: They’re in denial about themselves. If they admit that they were catastrophically wrong, then that opens the door to the possibility that the reasons for supporting Trump might also be wrong, e.g., that the tax cut you got does not justify putting children in cages or forcing people to go back to work to risk exposure to COVID. It says so much about the monster you are if you are willing to support someone like Trump to get what you want. Moral choices like this occur frequently for everyone, but a lot of, if not most, people pull back from the abyss. Others take the express train right over the edge because they paid for that ticket and hate to lose that investment.
Jeffro
Dana Milbank’s latest column touches on this. There’s always been a sizable crazy contingent in this country; trumpov and the GOP are the first to fully bring them in, stoke them, weaponize them
Kay
@Danielx:
I just don’t want people to be disheartened when it gets really bad, because it will get really bad. All the nonsense about how he “doesn’t really want this” or “they know they’re going to lose” is just that- it’s nonsense. They LOVE having all this power and they are desperate to keep it.
He’s a nutjob and the people he surrounds himself with are weak and of poor character. They’ll take any order from him. The better ones either never accepted positions or are long gone. They’re the worst of the worst in there. The bottom.
Emma from FL
@WereBear: I haven’t read the book but I have seen some of the fatuous criticisms. I grew up in a mildly dysfunctional family — mild, mind you — and I recognized it immediately.
Yep. That’s what it’s like. It’s just that some of us don’t have enough money to raise the stakes this high.
debbie
@Jager:
Did her father get kicked out of the family because he was an alcoholic, or did he get kicked out and then become an alcoholic? Does she mention how he tried to steal his father’s estate from his siblings while his father was still alive?
Emma from FL
@Boris Rasputin (the evil twin): Actually, those women are as vapid as a PhD in nuclear physics. They have built an empire on knowing how to tweak their lives to appeal to the vast mass of celebrity humpers. There be hard-assed businesswomen under all the make up and the sexy clothes. Better than any Trump.
Danielx
@Kay:
Right. There will be “election monitors” wearing uniforms and carrying weapons, among other obstacles intended to keep people from voting.
We cannot let them win.
Danielx
@Emma from FL:
All families are dysfunctional, it’s just a matter of degree. ?
debbie
@Danielx:
As Kathryn Hepburn mused in The Lion in Winter, “What family doesn’t have its ups and downs?”
Jager
@debbie:
After Fred Jr started flying for TWA, his dad would call him on a regular basis and tell him, he was “Nothing but a bus driver.” Old Fred mentally pounded the hell out of him all the time. When he got his job with TWA, Fred Jr moved his family to a little house in Marblehead, young Donald came up for a weekend and played Fred Sr’s role. It was around this time Fred Jr. started his heavy drinking. Fred Jr was never kicked out of the family, after his divorce he lived with Fred and Mary for a long time, he had a room in the attic and old Fred gave him a shit job in his company.
WV Blondie
@Another Scott:
This is a key part of the Trumpistas’ pathology – I think a lot of ’em knew he was a con man. What they admired, what they wanted to emulate, was how to succeed at the grift. No more working, no more earning money honestly, just lie and cheat on everything and get rich doing it.
Every once in a while, when my husband and I are contemplating our dire economic straits, he’ll suggest that we simply find some rich people to cheat. I understand the impulse, but I can never shake that small, still voice that warns we’ll never get away with it. Not that it’s wrong (the rich people I know are universally assholes), but that we’ll get caught.
This country is full of people who ignore the voice.
raven
@Jager: The Great Santini.
Jager
@debbie:
Mary gets into great detail on the financial issues.
Smith Mitchell
When Trump was elected, I thought: well, he’s run every organization he’s ever led into the ground. So the only question is which organization he’s going to screw up now: the republican party, or the United States of America. He’s already messed up the country, so let’s at least hope that he takes the republican party down too.
Jager
@raven:
Yep.
Fred Jr loved to fish, when Donald was in HS, Fred Jr would take him fishing, Donald couldn’t fish worth a shit and refused to listen. Mary recounts one fishing trip when Donald got pissed when his brother was trying to help him, said, “I know what I’m doing!”, then he stalked up to the bow and sat and sulked for the rest of the day. He hasn’t changed a bit.
raven
@Jager: Shark bait.
MagdaInBlack
@WV Blondie:
My husband used to say ” Fuck it, maybe we should just be complete assholes, it seems to work.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Wyatt Salamanca: Maybe that’s the better version.
patrick II
@Jager:
That reminds me of several Sci-Fi stories where an android is mimicking human behavior to disguise its inhumanity — but doesn’t quite have the feeling for it so it is just awkwardly going through the motions trying to fit in.
Salty Sam
Nope, sorry, do not lump me in with “us”. I spent September and October of 2016 begging Repubs in my life to NOT VOTE FOR THIS ATROCITY!
And though I respect Dahlia Lithwick’s writing about the law, I can understand her counting journalism as a whole into that group.
Frank Wilhoit
@p.a.: Yes, they were there right along. They made a good deal of trouble, off and on, 1914–1941. Then they were willing to support the war against Japan, but not the war against Germany; but the full armamentarium of wartime propaganda was brought to bear to drive that perspective underground. Their re-emergence into the public discourse was less a matter of the factors you cite than simply of the passage of time since 1945.
Frankensteinbeck
@p.a.:
Granted I’m no more authority than anyone else, but I see no mystery in how we got here. Look around and you’ll see how deep the hate and racism are in this country. They’re not new. I’ve lived half my life around Trumpers and they haven’t changed much.
Combine that with the history of things going nuts politically following the increase of minority visibility. Big push after desegregation when the worst racists, the evangelicals, decided they couldn’t sit by and let their kids go to school with blacks. They organized, came up with righteous sounding bigotry-based causes, and elected Reagan. Reagan’s big thing was uniting the various branches of asshole by ‘making white people comfortable with their bigotries again.’ Basically he provided “I’m not a racist but” excuses.
Except it didn’t work. By the nineties, blacks were on TV and interracial couples were showing up framed as something daring but acceptable. Clinton specifically had a reputation for being good to blacks. “Democrats are evil” started becoming acceptable mainstream Republican discourse.
The process kept growing. The shock of 9/11 stoked a lot of previously mild racists, and have them a taste of being allowed to be open in their bigotry. They liked it and were hungry for more. Note that the Republican Party leaders tried to make overtures to bring in minorities during Bush’s time and the voting base would NOT have it.
But as Republican voters got meaner and angrier, society as a whole kept moving left, and the demographic timer kept ticking. If you look back at minority cultural representation in the 80s vs now it’s a different world, things have moved so far. In the 2000s there started to be a few shows with black and Latinx stars for white children’s consumption. The racists, and they are more than half of whites, have been watching society crumble around them.
And then, of course, a black man became president and Republican voters Lost. Their. Shit. Remember when Republican leaders tried to walk back some of the craziest nonsense in 2009 and had to publicly apologize? Including McConnell and Rove? This was the apocalypse to even moderate racists, and they said: No more. We will budge not an inch more. Reaganite polite racism has not stopped the tide. This was an existential war they were a hair’s breadth from losing, and they have acted like it since. Obama’s re-election made it worse. The White Establishment threw everything at stopping the black president and failed. Bill O’Reilly: “This is the end of the White Establishment in America.” All along the way, more people who thought they could handle minority equality saw it get close and found out they could not.
When 2016 came around, Republican voters told the dignified racist candidates to fuck off, and Trump exploded into the lead by calling Mexicans racists. The hard racists who like to pretend they’re virtuous were a little nervous, but when Trump got elected and they got to see a corrupt, ignorant Nazi like themselves in power, they were in ecstasy.
I’ve mostly stuck to race as the driver here, but other bigotries are inextricably linked and the cultural visibility trend has been universal.
It all lines up, and if you haven’t noticed that about half of whites are stone cold racist after watching the last 12 years, I don’t know what to say.
zhena gogolia
Mary Trump has a pretty interesting twitter feed. I’ve added it to my bookmarks.
I’m torn about buying the book. I’d like to support it, but I don’t want to read it (LP Story Hour is enough for me), and I NEED TO START GETTING RID OF BOOKS, NOT BUYING MORE.
MattF
Another thing that’s coming up these days is the flat-out crazy, e.g., QANON et. al. and so forth. Some of it, I guess, is performative libtard-baiting, but I think some of it is last ditch cornered-rat outofyourfuckingmind. It’s a tactic, I guess, and it’s unclear what, if anything, to do about it.
Doug R
@p.a.: Remember most of trump’s* supporters are old enough to remember colored restrooms, colored water fountains, colored entrances. He’s only losing the +65s because they don’t like human sacrifice, at least when it comes to them.
Kropacetic
Looking at that picture of Trump on the cover of the book, how was he even dumber looking when he was young?
Jager
@Frankensteinbeck:
A Chinese American woman we know was waiting in line with her mother at a restaurant shortly after trump was elected. An old white guy and his wife were in line behind them, out of the blue the old white bastard said, “Now that we have a real president you people are going to have to watch your step.”
Our friend’s family has been in the United States for over 150 years, she and her mom were shocked, they’d never had anything like that happen before.
Yutsano
@Another Scott: “I did it by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties. And I did it SQUARE.”
Unfortunately, that was a fictional duck. But listening to David Tennant do that line is *chef kiss
marklar
@Butter Emails:
Spot on analysis. If you read up on “terror management theory”, you’ll find that when people feel threatened, self-interest becomes caught up with group identity and ideology. Authoritarians, with their we=good they=evil messages offer easy answers in how to find safety for your group.
Toss in the cognitive dissonance mentioned by other folks here, and all you Jackals are offering a workshop in judgment and decision-making!
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: Remember, Eisenhower became President in the middle of the McCarthy episode, more or less let it fester and at one point presided over a mass-deportation episode actually called “Operation W**b**k”, and that’s not even getting into foreign policy. His reputation as the Last Good Republican is somewhat overblown. I think he gave these folks enough red meat.
Marcopolo
I’m surprised no one has posted this tweet from Mary Trump trolling the President:
The figures are the number of folks who watched the Maddow interview compared to the number of folks who watched Orange Julius’ town hall with Hannity. #Seldom seen (what a great double entendre) refers to Trump’s comment about his “seldom seen” niece.
I hope Mary Trump earns millions from her book. It’s publication & the publicity surrounding it has already given a lot of us pleasure as we watch the President squirm.
debbie
@Jager:
Ah, thanks!
Ruckus
@Butter Emails:
When you travel down the road that the right is on, led by a deranged idiot, there is no reverse, only a cliff to fall off. As the false fear of normalcy builds, there is no way to see that what you fear isn’t what you think it is, because every step makes normalcy more obvious and therefore more scary. And everyone in the grasp of the anti normalcy parade gets more and more fearful, hateful of the destruction they themselves are causing they believe that only staying on the same path will save them. It’s a reenforcing stream of anti normalcy. Until it crashes into itself and burns everyone near it. At it’s base it is about survival and that made up false concepts against survival are real and getting worse. It’s living in a world of no perspective and thinking that world is going to kill you. It’s not logical, real or reasonable, but the group reenforces the worst fears of the illogical, unreasonable and false narrative.
In this case the fear is racism and becoming poor and no amount of whiteness and no amount of money can fix what’s broken because it isn’t real, except for the response to that fear brings on towards the real victims here. At some point it becomes not black and white as it were, it becomes us vs them – survival. And that’s an instinct that all animals have, to figure out how to survive in a hostile world, without making it more hostile. Humans seem to be only partially successful at this, often blaming the wrong issues for something that doesn’t actually exist.
Luciamia
@Betty Cracker: a lot of con artistes away with it cause their victims are often too embarrassed to admit they got conned.
Matt McIrvin
I have a couple of nieces and I’m proud of my certainty that if I were to become as malevolent a public figure as Donald Trump, they would call me on it like this.
Jay
As all threads, other than respite threads are open threads,
News from the Great White North.
Last Monday, a Covidiot, came in the store. Was awaiting test results, decided to kill time with some recreational shopping. No mask, no gloves. Trace and contact let us know on Thursday. Photo was circulated, now we have 22 associates in quarantine and the store had to be completely disinfected. The public was also exposed, but trace can’t identify them so in 7-21 days, we are going to have a bleeding red cluster here.
Also, Kim’s partner, who hasn’t been self isolating, ( young, social) came down with a fever of 103, they have gone into self isolation, ( one more coworker gone), much closer to me, and are awaiting test results. Kim is immune compromised and of the age group.
Subsole
@Danielx:
Replying to you but directed to the room.
Okay. So if they have the cops and the courts and the paramilitaries and the senate and the media and the death-squads-in-training and the electoral college and the bankers and the bureaucracy and the voting machines and the election monitors and the money and the military and the Russians and the guns and the tech companies and did I mention the fucking death squads and so on then how –
precisely
-do you and the rest of the joy and rainbows contingent propose we “stamp the beast” – and thoroughly enough to leave a mark, no less?
Because I really don’t see that getting discussed very much.
Maybe I’m still rattled from Adam’s post last night but Jesus. It’s like those fundraising emails from the DNC screeching about catastrophe if you don’t give now. You can’t say it’s hopeless then exhort people to fight. It don’t work.
Not asking for a sunshine suppository, but if that really is the state of things then I humbly submit we’d be better off making bipe pombs and fleeing to the woods instead of posting here.
@topclimber: In that Conservatives are revolted by the poor, yes.
@PsiFighter37: They won’t care. They’re zombies.
@Wyatt Salamanca: Is there any way at all to sue these people for recklessness? Something? Anything?
@debbie: What changes if it doesn’t mention that?
Dorothy A. Winsor
Interesting map linking where you live with the odds that in a group of 5 people, all 5 are wearing masks. You can zoom down to zip code level.
debbie
@Subsole:
I think it really shows Trump for who he is.
Marcopolo
@Kay:
Agree 100%. Witnessing what is going on in Portland, OR right now is a prime example of what you are saying. The administration is flailing around trying to find a way toward a positive narrative. But it’s not working. From accounts I’ve looked at today, the number of protestors has doubled overnight in Portland. Sending in shadow soldiers to abduct folks off the streets to “uphold law & order” doesn’t work if the entire city shows up and tells you to leave.
It is a reminder that Trump, his family, and most of the folks who surround him are not the brightest folks in the world. But they have their hands on levers of enormous power. And I imagine that over the past 3 & 1/2 years all of them have engaged in activities that put them in legal jeopardy if those actions are scrutinized at all closely. So the stakes are high for them.
I was thinking during my morning walk that Trump could have avoided all of this if he had just taken Covid-19 seriously when it first appeared. Let the eggheads run the operation. He could be holding those rallies he so desperately misses doing around now. He’d be able to have his big beautiful adulatory RNC next month. I don’t claim to understand how the pathology of a person like Trump works and I know folks say his psyche literally doesn’t allow him to take responsibility for failure but I hope that before he falls asleep at night that there is some corner of his brain that acknowledges he is prime reason for the shitfest he finds himself in now.
Aleta
I saw a clip of Maddow’s interview in which she focused on Mary T’s story about T telling a derogatory lie about her when he introduced her(to Mel, iirc), even though Mary was standing right there.
Made me think about the media’s decades long willingness to print T’s lies (so dependent on direct access and breaking a story) — how the media gives T, for free, the power of blackmail-like threat against anyone who opposes him or stops enabling. It’s practically a given that T will lie about you, but it’s another level if you will face the media printing and echoing lies about you. And on top of that, Twitter permits T to lie about those who cross him—he doesn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Subsole
@Jay: Yikes. Good luck to you all.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: Sexism is a massive and persistent problem in American politics.
Jay
Kay
@Marcopolo:
Radley Balko knows a thing or two about authoritarian shitheads.
Did you see they’re lying about the unlawful detention? They claim there was an angry mob. There’s video. The streets are empty. Blatant. fearless lying knowing there’s video to disprove it. They’re completely confident no one will hold them accountable or check them. They’re all stupid and reckless with huge egos though, so we have an advantage there.
Jay
Kay
@Marcopolo:
I smiled when I saw the low quality hire Trump hired to run this illegal operation. He looks like a soldier in a movie. They pick these people for how they look. This one is has a nasty authoritarian bent, but Trump chose him because of his chiseled features.
Kay
@Marcopolo:
I want a legitimate investigation into the Trump thug who shot that protestor in the head and I want a real prosecutor to charge and try the case. They can make it a state case, charge it under state law. Keep it out of Barr’s corrupt purview.
Salty Sam
@Frankensteinbeck:
Good recap.
raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Here’e one from Georgia Tech
COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool
This map shows the risk level of attending an event, given the event size and location (assuming 10:1 ascertainment bias).
The risk level is the estimated chance (0-100%) that at least 1 COVID-19 positive individual will be present at an event in a county, given the size of the event
Choose an event size. Use the drop-down menu to choose a county you would like to zoom in on.
Jess
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Great map, thanks! But please warn us if you’re linking to NYT. Most of us only get 5 free articles/month.
Frankensteinbeck
@Betty Cracker:
Absolutely, and in my life I watched a massive backlash against sexual equality in the 80s that is only starting to reverse now. ALL bigotries are tied together in that mess, because as blacks became more visible, so did everyone else. It is not an accident that Democrats nominated a white woman after a black man, or that Republicans picked Trump to face her. Desegregation driving the evangelicals into politics got the insanity ball rolling, and black visibility has been the clearest marker of the progression, but there is no extricating any of the major bigotries from the process.
Yutsano
@Jess: All their Covid stuff isn’t subject to paywall. Same with WaPo. But still FTFNYT.
Salty Sam
Kay
@Marcopolo:
I also want Homeland Security broken up. Part of the mission of that vast agency is pandemic preparedness and response. They’re an abject, total failure and I don’t want to continue to pay the same people – they failed. Reorganize it and fire the entire top management tier.
They’ve been more successful at shooting protesters than preparing for or mitigating a pandemic. Take it away from them.
Ohio Mom
I don’t think the U.S. as a whole was ready for this book until now — as a therapist, I imagine Mary Trump understands timing revelations to the client’s ability to finally grapple with the hard stuff.
But the financial records and tax returns, she couldn’t have dropped that while he was still a candidate?
hitchhiker
I listened to the book on audible. It’s not a political tell-all or a hit job.
It’s a narrative told by a perceptive observer who was just inside enough to be able to describe how her family produced the person who currently has us all by the balls. She was the bright granddaughter who enjoyed some of the privileges and none of the security that would have been part of the package for a more functional family.
She tells about being asked, while in grad school, to ghost-write what would be the 3rd trump book. Why does trump think of her? Because Tufts, where she went to undergrad, has sent him a copy of a letter she’d written years earlier in support of a professor in the tenure process. Tufts was looking for money from trump and using that letter to demonstrate how much Mary valued the great education she got there.
Uncle Donald read the praise of the professor and thought, “Hey, she could make me sound this good!” Mary didn’t figure that out until later, of course. She took the job and spent some months trying to do the work. There was no plan, and she never even got an interview with her uncle. Someone from the publisher eventually told her they wanted a different ghost-writer, and that was the end of that.
It’s interesting in terms of the crappy family dynamic … she hasn’t, at that point, walked away from them even though she knows they’re assholes. She’s still trying to fit in and somehow be part of them, maybe even take advantage of what they have to offer. It’s what most of us do, tho’ usually on a much smaller and less twisted scale.
The most interesting thing to me was that she never understood they were actual criminals until the NYT team took the documents she gave them and exposed the crimes. She knew they were bizarre and cruel. She knew they’d been horrible to her father and mother, and later to her and her brother. But she’d also been the beneficiary of the wealth, sometimes. Boarding school, expensive camps, university, invitations to Mar a Lago, and eventually to the White House — it was a crazy-making young life, and it’s to her credit that she managed to peel away from it.
My take from her interviews is that she’s genuinely frightened at what’s happened and what’s still possible.
cain
Covid-19 is changing the game – their ideology cannot stop a pandemic – and people dying due to it will only amp up the resistance to their siren song. They don’t have the tools to combat it because it thrives on their ideology and spreads even faster.
The pandemic is mixed bag – due to the deaths – but it is also giving us a fighting chance to resist these assholes. Self preservation amongst the voters is a powerful force. People are going to be forced to choose a side – the side hopefully that they know will fight the pandemic.
Salty Sam
Thanks for asking the question. You did it much more artfully than I did last night, and yeah, I guess I’m still rattled by Adam’s post as well.
And short of digging up my old copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook, I still haven’t seen much in the way of realistic answers.*
ETA- * Adam did provide some good info on buddy system, legal prep, etc, for a poster who is organizing protest in her community, so thanks for that.
debbie
@Jess:
You can delete their cookies and set the clock back to zero.
Just One More Canuck
@Jager: It’s too bad that Fred Jr didn’t do what Al Neri did to Fredo when they went fishing
Just One More Canuck
@zhena gogolia: buy it, then donate it to a library?
Leto
@Ohio Mom: She makes a specific point in pointing out that she didn’t think anything she could’ve said would’ve mattered. After slandering Gold Star families, mocking the disabled reporter, the Access Hollywood tape… I mean, pick any number of things that would’ve ended anyone else and it just didn’t matter. Her voice into that would’ve been no different.
As far as the financial records goes, she hadn’t looked at those in 20 years and didn’t really know the intricate details about what were in those. I can understand that. Honestly I understand both.
Ksmiami
@p.a.: we need trials and sentencing and truth commissions in order to save the country moving forward
zhena gogolia
@Just One More Canuck:
I’ve ordered it. Maybe it’s the one Trump book I can actually read
ETA: I will certainly pass it on to someone.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: Desegregation wasn’t the only thing that drove evangelicals into politics; hostility toward “women’s lib” did too. It wasn’t/isn’t an ancillary phenomenon. They’re definitely intertwined, but IMO, the mess we’re in can’t be adequately explained (let alone resolved) without explicitly referencing both, any more than solving income inequality will make racism and/or sexism disappear.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: You are right about sexism being a massive problem in American politics. Taking the idea further, one could say that the patriarchy embedded in our institutions and culture is a massive problem not just in this country but worldwide. I am sometimes an optimist, and I would like to think that a couple of generations from now people will look back and understand how patriarchy has held back the human race.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: Cheryl asked the key question: what’s the number of loyal goons they really have at their disposal, adding up the border guards, ICE, the Bureau of Prisons, whatever? Because it might be enough to make a terrifying show in one city but not necessarily enough to disrupt the election in 20 cities or hold the whole country against a mass uprising.
The last card is the military, but the military is not nearly as personally loyal to Trump and the higher-ups have been making muffled noises that suggest that they’ve already been resisting his attempts to use them for illegal purposes and are rejecting more of the same in advance.
Also, the people running the whole operation are somewhat delusional and not very smart. What they seem to think, right now, is that making it a fight between federal cops vs. terrifying animalistic “rioters” and the Democratic politicians who love them will actually get them net votes, and right now it is not doing that at all; it’s just red meat for the base.
So who knows. Swarm the cities with peaceful protesters and they probably hit their limit–they can’t do more things like the DC operation without getting more blowback. If they try a violent coup they probably can’t hold this country forever.
James E Powell
@Salty Sam:
Agree completely. Saying the problem is “us” is just another way to say “both sides!”
Yutsano
@Betty Cracker: What really drove them around the bend was Carter forcing them to integrate their Christian schools. They were not about to give up their all white academies for some low life peanut farmer. It was a few other factors but yeah that was a big one.
EDIT: or what Frankensteinbeck said. But with a bit more detail.
jc
@Hoodie:
My Trump voting brother in law very much has the attitude that “everyone does it” — cheats on their taxes, fudges the value of their property, etc. — so that makes it all ok. They support Trump because he makes it clear to them that their lack of ethic and morals is fine and justified.
Kay
Good. State criminal charges that the corrupt Trump people can’t reach.
State AG’s are one of the things we have in the coming months. Not all of them, obviously, but enough of them to matter. If they send these people into states and they commit crimes they’re subject to state criminal laws. The Trump people won’t have corrupted that process. Yet.
cain
That was fairly predictable. I said on twitter that they’ve only made it worse. Americans, the lot of us, regardless of side, will not back down from a challenge like that. A chance to go toe to toe with this hated govt while being on the side of angels? Fuck yeah.
All they’ve done is not only increase the size of the protest, but also increase participation from other states whose young will also be heading here.
Young white people. they be angry – and it’s important to know it will be a majority white.
Redshift
@Frankensteinbeck: Now that you mention it, it’s quite an indictment of the press and our general social discourse that when comparisons were made between the BLM protests and 1968, and speculation about whether Trump might be able to use that, the memory of 1968 was of backlash to street protests and “disorder,” not the racist backlash to the civil rights movement, even though the current protests are civil rights protests!
cain
@Kay:
I think though there is still a lot of fear of a Trump reprisal. He holds federal dollars and our state needs money to prop itself up and be solvent during this pandemic.
This is what makes Trump the most dangerous. I think ultimately, the western states are going to have to figure out how to be independent of the fed during this crises.
cain
I expect Barr to run the clock, and end in the SCOTUS asking fed law enforcement for immunity against state actors.
Frankensteinbeck
@Subsole:
They don’t. A whole lot of cops are complete fucking assholes and their unions especially love Trump. There’s been no sign that the police actually obey him at all.
They don’t. Trump’s record of getting smacked down by the courts is long, and every time he wins it’s notable as an exception. Even the Supreme Court, which he was handed by McConnell, has ruled against him on most things.
Okay, this they have, lock, stock, and barrel. In fact, this is our biggest problem. McConnell, ‘grave digger of American democracy’, is by far the worst and most destructive villain in our politics, not Trump. McConnell could yank Trump’s chain into obedience in a second, but he doesn’t want to.
Sorta? Republicans have the media less today than they have had in a long time, and certainly vastly less than in 2016. Trump is just so damn awful and scandalous that media coverage is 24/7 ‘Trump’s latest fuck up’. The media is certainly wired for Republicans, but it’s a problem that has existed for a long time and is at a nadir.
Jesus Christ, the panic about this. Dime Store Hitler wants the military machine gunning protestors and his own personally loyal storm troopers dragging his political enemies away to be tortured, murdered, etc. What in four years his most loyal sycophants have managed to scrape together are a few guys in vans performing illegal arrests right around federal monuments, while their bosses cheer and go “Yeah! See, Trump? You have a Law and Order army! We’ll take over the nation!” Then they had to let the people go because the arrests were illegal. Also note the lengthy history of absolute incompetence of said bosses. Odds are even the paper cutout version of an SS that Trump has will get slapped down by the courts very soon. My guess is the legal reasoning will be ‘If you’re going to be cops, you have to pretend to play by certain rules that the cops pretend to play by’ and ICE will go home and sulk because that’s not what they wanted.
The electoral college giveth and the electoral college taketh away. It’s not particularly stacked in Republicans’ favor, Democrats are just freaking the fuck out because Trump got the luckiest result ever last time, and we always assume the last presidential election is the baseline no matter what kind of black swan event it might have been.
They do have the bankers, but bankers don’t have a lot of votes and don’t cheat very hard in their favor.
We have the bureaucracy. Solidly. That is why Trump throws screaming tantrums about the ‘deep state’. Truthfully, reality has the bureaucracy, but reality favors liberals. The best Trump has is sidelining the bureaucracy as much as possible.
There has never been real evidence they have the voting machines, only panic mongering and guilt-by-association stuff.
I have been hearing that this time Republicans are going to have armed monitors countrywide scaring off voters in every election since at least 2010, and it has never happened. Maybe half a dozen polling places have a couple of obnoxious assholes who generally get chased away. Bluntly, these people are not organized, and there has been no hint that they’re getting organized. To claim that the Portland thing is a first step towards that is silly. Republicans don’t do first steps, and Trumpists sure as Hell don’t. They rush everything they’ve got as fast as they can in the hopes they won’t get stopped in time. The White House also leaks like a sieve, so no, there’s no secret plan being organized for this.
Weirdly, this time around we seem to have the money, and Republicans are panicking. They’re used to a massive advantage in that.
Trump said he was thinking of sending the military out to shoot protestors, and they publicly – which they NEVER, EVER do – gave him the middle finger. The military is going to follow normal military procedure, which doesn’t give Trump anything he really wants. Hell, he couldn’t even get his military parade he wanted so badly. He got like three parked vehicles and a jet fly-by?
Putin is not a god. He has pushed a little further political trends that were already strong.
HA HA HA HA THOSE chickenshits? Forget about it. They can’t even manage their little demonstrations anywhere they think they’ll be outnumbered. It’s a major event when they ever manage to show up and even try to look intimidating.
Eh. They have Facebook, and Twitter turns a blind eye. Most of the tech companies are just sitting on their thumbs and spinning, maybe throwing some money (like they always have) towards Republicans or letting Trump show them off on stage.
The cosplay attempt to pretend they have death squads in the hopes Trump will whine less. As much as what he has is illegal and a bad thing, it resembles a death squad in the same way a cardboard cutout of an AR-16 resembles a real one.
There. Does any of this help? And I will note that I have been one of the voices of “No, we are not doomed” the last three and a half years, and I have been right every single time except when, like with Gorsuch on LGBT rights, I have been insufficiently optimistic. Look, things are bad. Things really suck. Trump is an ugly cancer causing misery every day. COVID could get pretty ugly and I get scared sometimes about RBG’s health. Don’t blow it out of proportion and pretend Trump has the power to do the things he’s been screaming and whining about not having the power to do.
Betty Cracker
@Yutsano: I’m old enough to remember when white evangelicals didn’t get all that worked up over abortion and birth control.
Yutsano
@cain: Supremacy Clause only goes so far. There is nothing that keeps a state from enforcing its own laws on people who are breaking them even if they are federal agents. In fact it’s a violation of government ethics rules to use your status as a federal agent to stop any state law enforcement. Oh they will but it will haunt them once a competent DHS head gets there.
It’s also time to get rid of the Department of Homeland Security. It’s no longer serving any purpose other than political terrorism for the current Squatter in Chief.
Sab
@Kay: I am curious. Do you think we could trust Dave Yost in a similar situation?
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
If you are an avid reader—or even not so avid—a Kindle is a good investment. The books you buy don’t take up any physical space, and the Kindle editions are usually cheaper than the physical ones (although many times not much less).
You can also download the (free) Kindle reader app and use that to read Kindle editions. But I think you have said that you don’t have a tablet or smart phone. You can download the app to your computer, but it’s probably no fun to have to read while sitting at your computer.
I have a Kindle (and previously had a Nook), and the only physical books I buy now are ones that I know I want to keep a physical copy of—“classics” and personal favorites—and cookbooks, which for some reason often have problems with formatting and illustrations on Kindle.
Redshift
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. In DC, they could do a massive show of force because it’s not a state, so they could use national guard troops (and the Park Police, who I hadn’t realized were another pretty awful agency.) Elsewhere, they only have Bureau of Prisons, CBP and federal building security, who can’t add up to that much.
And I suspect that if they continue to invoke CBP’s “the border is everywhere” jurisdiction claims to go after citizens, the result will be a lot more people knowing they have that policy for immigrants, and a backlash they didn’t plan for.
gwangung
@Redshift: Yeah, I’m thinking their best shot was to use this gambit to introduce fear, paranoia and splits in action.
But if there’s unified reaction (as in, say, EVEN MORE peaceful protesting, beyond their ability to handle in even one city), maybe this will backfire on them.
leeleeFL
I find it interesting that I apparently had the Donald pegged exactly right in 2015. I thought I just was lucky to have had my Dad trashing the entire clan for years.
The evening of the escalator ride my Tennis guys that I usually wait on were talking about him non-stop. I threw caution to the wind, screwed up my inner Saul Alinsky and told them to stop talking about him and he’d go away because he was a fame junkie! When they said they liked him, I told them to stop that, it was bad for the Country. Wonder if any of them will remember?
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: Agreed, except that I wonder if it’s really so impossible for Trump to use the National Guard in the states. Some state governors will be sympathetic, and grant him permission under the Insurrection Act.
With the rest, it seemed to me as if they were trying to build the kind of case in Oregon that could be used to federalize the National Guard against the governor’s wishes, by stating that the state government was making it impossible for federal law to be enforced (as in the Little Rock desegregation case).
Salty Sam
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks for a good answer.
Redshift
@Betty Cracker:
Yep. The myth their leaders have sold them on is that evangelicals got involved in politics because they were outraged over Roe v. Wade. The reality is that Falwell et al. saw it as a route to political power, and taught them to treat it as a religious issue even though it never was for them before.
trnc
Wolf and Cuccinelli aren’t weak. DT has more power, but they know how to manipulate him, so for all intents and purposes they’re giving the orders, not taking them.
Redshift
@Matt McIrvin:
Sure, but those aren’t the states where it’s useful for them, even if the cities have Democratic mayors. I can’t imagine it would do much to sell Fox’s “Democrats are letting lawless rioters take over the streets” narrative to have the national guard occupying Houston, for example.
trnc
@Frankensteinbeck: Good points, although I would say that “voting machines” is really a metaphor for the the whole process of voting, and the republicans have tilted that in their favor quite hard in a lot of districts by closing voting locations, passing Voter ID and then making it difficult for some to get the ID, and purging voter rolls in a partisan way.
Colleeniem
@Betty Cracker: Sexism is a massive and persistent problem
in American politics.:(
Redshift
@MattF:
I probably harp on this too frequently, but never forget that ever since Richard Viguerie discovered in the 70s that conservative mailing lists were a gold mine for commercial marketing, and lots of people got in on the grift, the conservative movement has been selecting for gullibility. I think that’s a big part of the reason conspiracy nuts are fringe on the left and commonplace in the mainstream on the right. I now assume any nutty beliefs from a wingnut are sincere and not a performance until proven otherwise.
The Q people remind me of the period when the Lyndon Larouche types infiltrated some local Democratic parties years ago, and even won nominations here and there. The Dems repudiated them and told people they weren’t Democrats and not to vote for them. Somehow I doubt that will be the response from the GOP.
Betty Cracker
@Redshift: I remember evangelicals in my family (including my preacher grandpa) talking about abortion and birth control as tools of godless modernity luring women away from their rightful place in the family, blah blah blah. It was about controlling women.
You’re right about the political power play that evolved from that with the Moral Majority nonsense in the 1980s. That has since evolved into a thousand similarly oppressive griftopias, Falwell Jr. and Graham Jr. being exemplars of the type.
We’ll never be complete rid of those fanatical goons, but hopefully going all in on a failing buffoon like Trump will discredit them with lots of younger Christians. I read a piece in The Atlantic (I think) that suggests it has.
Gin & Tonic
@Steeplejack: I find that a Kindle is very convenient for travel (which I guess is out of the question for a while) particularly if reading a hefty tome – looking at you, Robert Caro – but the non-ownership of the book still bothers me. It’s just a long-term lease, and I can’t really do anything to pass it along. My wife and I have way too many books, but just somehow keep adding more, and still have the thought that some of them, anyway, may eventually be of interest to somebody else in the family, and we can hand it to them and say “here, I enjoyed this and you might too.”
Kay
Can you imagine being a grown up and writing this? Had a front row seat to the last 3 years, learned absolutely nothing.
Kay
@Sab:
No.
Kay
This analysis of the massive Trump Administration failure on the virus is brutal to Birx:
I suppose they knew it was coming out, which is why they lied and smeared Fauci. Failed at smearing him, but tried.
Tdjr
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks Frankie! That made me feel a little better.?
Frankensteinbeck
@Gin & Tonic:
I have had to leave so many books behind in different moves that I came to the conclusion they’re not on average longer lasting than the electronic versions.
Kay
Ugh. I mean, the rest of the team are the usual low quality hires- hacks and ridiculous PR people like Hope Hicks and the idiot son in law. But Birx was an actual public health expert and she SOLD the idea the worst was over. Jesus. What a career legacy. Catastrophic.
Tehanu
@Frankensteinbeck: Thanks. I too got really freaked out by Adam’s post about Portland. You’ve made me feel a bit more optimistic and a lot more determined to keep my head up.
Zinsky
I can’t imagine my nieces writing anything like this blistering screed about me. Donald Trump must be one sick puppy to generate such hatred from a niece!
Just Chuck
@Salty Sam:
The Anarchist’s Cookbook is a great way to blow yourself up. Whatever wasn’t copied directly from Army training manuals was more or less made up out of whole cloth. The author regretted writing it until the day he died. It’s garbage.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I’ve always wondered what her deal was. I gave Birx the benefit of the doubt, thinking she and Fauci were playing good cop/bad cop with Trump. Now we know.
Kristine
@Frankensteinbeck:
Thanks for this.
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: Flat Earthism actually transitioned from a joke troll movement to a genuine belief system because of these people.
Salty Sam
@Just Chuck:
C’mon Chuck, I know that. But give a guy a break and just let him virtue signal his radical bona fides from back in the day ?
Philbert
@Yutsano: All this. Another thing that drove them around the bend was the Iran hostage siege. The GOP saw a bunch of wild-eyed religious fanatics humiliating us. I saw a lot of conservative people shift from skeptical but ‘whatever’ to very deep hostility to modernity.
Miss Bianca
@Jay: Sigh. Oh, dear. : (
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Can you offer to financially sponsor one ore more copies for your library?
Jean
@Frankensteinbeck: Thank you. Your post mitigated my anxiety!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Zinsky: My then nine year old niece told me I was “the meanest man in the whole wide world” because I wouldn’t let her go look at candy at Costco with my step-daughter. The lady in line behind me said, “no he’s not”.
rikyrah
The Story Hours is hilarious. Simply hilarious.
rikyrah
@Kay:
I dunno Kay. It was you who made the point that, after all we did know about Dolt45 in 2016, those that chose to vote for him showed THEIR LACK OF CHARACTER. I never forgot you making that point.
Stephanopoulous is part of the MSM who gave us ‘ BUT HER EMAILS’.
And, who poo–pooed people like me and the 94% of other Black women who told you not to vote for him.
If WE had enough information in 2016 not to vote for him, how come that wasn’t enough for those who looked at all we knew and STILL cast a ballot for him?
rikyrah
@Kay:
You don’t lie, and each and every one of them should be hung with him out to dry in November 2020.
KSinMA
@Frankensteinbeck: I am so framing this.
rikyrah
@Wyatt Salamanca:
I want them to be sued into oblivion.
rikyrah
@Jay:
Prayers to all :(
SuzieC
@Frankensteinbeck: Your posts on this thread are some of the best I’ve ever read on BJ. Thank you.
Ohio Mom
Thanks to all who read/listened to Mary Trump’s book and were able to explain her thinking and motivations to me.
A lot of us have blind spots when it comes to family, she is just human. She did open her eyes and we are all benefitting.
Another Scott
@hitchhiker: Thank you.
Cheers,
Scott.