From what I hear out here in the midwest "just doing stuff" is why his supporters will never let go of the idea he is a president god. "He's getting things done!" is our rallying cry out here, apparently, who cares what they are.
I am also in the Midwest, and the degree of undeserved love from some people several years ago was unreal. Even for a good president, it would be embarrassing. (I didn't even have an Obama bumper sticker FWIW). The flags, the banners , talking like he's a personal friend. It was like watching a teenager love a great band or a college dude and a great film. It's actually weirdly touching, in it's way.
Except that the kind of uncritical love I had for Pearl Jam is arguably a lot less appealing coming from a 70 year old, directed at a dying wannabe authoritarian.
That's the thing that is genuinely the hardest thing to fathom for me. I do not think I can conceive of having the kind of reverence that they have for Trump for any human on earth. Even putting aside his gargantuan deficiencies as a leader and a person, and ignore how transparently little he could possibly give a shit about them in return, how do they do it? How can you put another person on that much higher of a pedestal than yourself?
You don't think Trump's a horny goofball? We have how many affairs, how many women he paid off? And you gotta admit, he's constantly making goofy faces...
Nobody is willing to admit that a big part of the Trump phenomenon is that he lets losers feel validated like no other political figure in American history.
I understand your comment completely, and yet I am such a hopeless liberal that a small part of me thinks, "don't call people losers, that's not nice"😂
Even though I personally encountered a woman who lectured me for 20 minutes straight about how all Democrats are Nazis, (yes, that specific word)murderers, traitors, liars etc. Imagine Trump, but completely humorless and five times more emotional. You might wonder, what was the occasion of this epic rant? I was there professionally to fix something at her house, on the day of Trump's second swearing in. As she droned on and on, I smiled and made made not a single reply to all this abuse. I calmly redirected the conversation to the service I was fixing.
Again, this was after Trump WON. You might expect a degree of celebration from her on such an occasion. Nope. She was addicted to outrage, and if anything, she was missing her fix.
You might also think she would get the subtle message that I didn't agree with, or care to hear about her political views, and would calmly drop the subject out of basic politeness.
You would be mistook.🤣 The whole time, I spoke not a word about politics. It began as obnoxious but by the end I was just genuinely amused and slightly sorry for her. As far as I could tell she was not high or anything, just completely unhinged from normal people.
Needless to say, most people are not like that, regardless of their politics. But I never meet a single Obama supporter of similar character.🤷
This is why the Founders gave Congress the power of impeachment. Forget the 25th Amendment—it was designed for Presidents too debilitated to fight back.
Impeachment is and always has been the appropriate remedy for Donald Trump. It was meant to rid us of a corrupt president who abuses his office. Trump's not crazy; he's just uninhibited by a party that has given up on holding him remotely accountable. They signaled that the moment they approved his Bizarro Earth cabinet full of the kind of Fox News fever-dream candidates that sent John Boener into an early retirement.
Also, t's worth noting that this is the Cabinet you'd be relying upon to kick the 25th Amendment into gear. A Cabinet chock full of losers so incompetent and ill-suited to their positions that they owe everything to Donald Trump. And they know it. You expect them to axe their own meal ticket? Please.
Cabinet officials are pretty far down on the list, though. Before them are the VP, Speaker of the House, then the President pro tempore of the Senate. And all of that is only relevant in case of something like a nuclear attack or foreign invasion, where several people in the line of succession might be eliminated at once. If Trump were removed by impeachment, Vance would become President and he'd appoint a VP before even the Speaker of the House would have a shot.
I guess this is what authoritarians do: battering institutions that would check their power until they can't fight back, act on completely specious whims with no logic or purpose behind them, and exhaust the public so completely with a blizzard of insane mercurial behavior until they, too, are too tired to put up a fight. I hope we can survive this.
He has a strange fixation on ideas that have been passe for a century, like tariffs and overt imperialism. I want to see what he does with bimetallism next!
Oh come on man. Listen to Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, Marco Rubio, JD Vance. It also does not take much brain power to connect the dots with Trump policy combating Chinese communist hegemony. Go back over Trump's campaign promises. Go look at the Trump White House website. If you don't know the goals, it is likely willful ignorance.
1) Iran is in the middle of a war crime. If you don't know this, you're so out of the loop that we might as well not discuss the current geopolitical situation until you find more comedians that glow, and get them to tell you what's what.
2) Tariffs are the original "jack in the box" -- not only is "nobody sure what Trump is doing", nobody is sure if it's going to "remain what Trump is doing" tomorrow. Now, let that sink in. That Is The Point. The Point is to scare the market and deflate the over-inflated Wall Street. Because "everybody knows" tariffs are bad (cite Krugman if you must).
There's other points to tariffs, and there's certainly a 100+ page document laying out the case for each individual country's tariffs -- but Trump doesn't read the policy papers (he skims), so neither should you.
Top level, that's what's going down.
Well, that and Trump's assault on The World At Large, creating a bazillion distracting initiatives that the Left Must Fight. So don't assume that anything (even the geopolitical, like Venezuela) isn't part of a larger war. Trump can afford to lose his pissin' match with Harvard, but Harvard can't, and so Harvard is distracted.
"The only semi-coherent noises Trump is making on Iran are that it has something to do with their nuclear program, but he assured us in July that he had “obliterated” that program." Plus he literally lied in the SoU speech, saying all they had to say was they wouldn't pursue nukes when they've said that before, including in the last week.
I agree about tariffs but not Iran, where I think the state department does have a good coherent plan but Trump is only like 40% clues in on it at best. Given the quality of public discourse I don't think it'd be better to have more of a national discussion over it either way though.
Before you say this, you have to trust the State Department. This is the department who, under Biden, said that the goal of "Russian Sanctions" was to destroy Europe's economy. You know, backstabbing our allies....
... maybe we don't want to have State anywhere near anything?
From what I hear out here in the midwest "just doing stuff" is why his supporters will never let go of the idea he is a president god. "He's getting things done!" is our rallying cry out here, apparently, who cares what they are.
I am also in the Midwest, and the degree of undeserved love from some people several years ago was unreal. Even for a good president, it would be embarrassing. (I didn't even have an Obama bumper sticker FWIW). The flags, the banners , talking like he's a personal friend. It was like watching a teenager love a great band or a college dude and a great film. It's actually weirdly touching, in it's way.
Except that the kind of uncritical love I had for Pearl Jam is arguably a lot less appealing coming from a 70 year old, directed at a dying wannabe authoritarian.
At least so says me.
I listen sometimes to the KOMO podcast b/c of the Kansas City Chiefs stadium grift and occasionally am exposed to the people who call in.
It's scary bad, the love worship they have for Trump. He can't do anything wrong in their eyes.
Citizens murdered in cold blood by ICE? "Gotta break some eggs to make an omelet LOL."
The other constant theme is
"(Blank) it's Democrats fault."
Insert any noun in the blank.
It's scary. It's like listening to
Pod people.....
Hey, hey, we'll have none of that! You lovers of wordplay think that you're so clever eh? Well it's not clever.
It's fucking P-unatural.
That's the thing that is genuinely the hardest thing to fathom for me. I do not think I can conceive of having the kind of reverence that they have for Trump for any human on earth. Even putting aside his gargantuan deficiencies as a leader and a person, and ignore how transparently little he could possibly give a shit about them in return, how do they do it? How can you put another person on that much higher of a pedestal than yourself?
That's what I liked about Clinton, whether you voted for him or not, we could all agree that he was basically a horny goofball.
I didn't vote for him, but mostly on account of being in the fifth grade at the time.
You don't think Trump's a horny goofball? We have how many affairs, how many women he paid off? And you gotta admit, he's constantly making goofy faces...
Nobody is willing to admit that a big part of the Trump phenomenon is that he lets losers feel validated like no other political figure in American history.
I understand your comment completely, and yet I am such a hopeless liberal that a small part of me thinks, "don't call people losers, that's not nice"😂
Even though I personally encountered a woman who lectured me for 20 minutes straight about how all Democrats are Nazis, (yes, that specific word)murderers, traitors, liars etc. Imagine Trump, but completely humorless and five times more emotional. You might wonder, what was the occasion of this epic rant? I was there professionally to fix something at her house, on the day of Trump's second swearing in. As she droned on and on, I smiled and made made not a single reply to all this abuse. I calmly redirected the conversation to the service I was fixing.
Again, this was after Trump WON. You might expect a degree of celebration from her on such an occasion. Nope. She was addicted to outrage, and if anything, she was missing her fix.
You might also think she would get the subtle message that I didn't agree with, or care to hear about her political views, and would calmly drop the subject out of basic politeness.
You would be mistook.🤣 The whole time, I spoke not a word about politics. It began as obnoxious but by the end I was just genuinely amused and slightly sorry for her. As far as I could tell she was not high or anything, just completely unhinged from normal people.
Needless to say, most people are not like that, regardless of their politics. But I never meet a single Obama supporter of similar character.🤷
This is why the Founders gave Congress the power of impeachment. Forget the 25th Amendment—it was designed for Presidents too debilitated to fight back.
Impeachment is and always has been the appropriate remedy for Donald Trump. It was meant to rid us of a corrupt president who abuses his office. Trump's not crazy; he's just uninhibited by a party that has given up on holding him remotely accountable. They signaled that the moment they approved his Bizarro Earth cabinet full of the kind of Fox News fever-dream candidates that sent John Boener into an early retirement.
Also, t's worth noting that this is the Cabinet you'd be relying upon to kick the 25th Amendment into gear. A Cabinet chock full of losers so incompetent and ill-suited to their positions that they owe everything to Donald Trump. And they know it. You expect them to axe their own meal ticket? Please.
I never thought I'd miss John Boener but here we are!
He always seemed like a nice guy aside from his terrible political beliefs
It's unfortunately also the cabinet that forms the line of succession in the fantasy scenario of him getting impeached and removed from office.
Cabinet officials are pretty far down on the list, though. Before them are the VP, Speaker of the House, then the President pro tempore of the Senate. And all of that is only relevant in case of something like a nuclear attack or foreign invasion, where several people in the line of succession might be eliminated at once. If Trump were removed by impeachment, Vance would become President and he'd appoint a VP before even the Speaker of the House would have a shot.
I guess this is what authoritarians do: battering institutions that would check their power until they can't fight back, act on completely specious whims with no logic or purpose behind them, and exhaust the public so completely with a blizzard of insane mercurial behavior until they, too, are too tired to put up a fight. I hope we can survive this.
Nailed it! He just likes to see his name and face in the news. The press could do us all a favor by ignoring Trump for a week. His head would implode.
That would be awesome but then he will start WW3 with
Iran to make us pay attention.
Don't forget the greed. Example: he wants airports named after him AND for the airports to pay him royalties.
How can someone be so laughable AND scary at the same time.....
Well..I know a lot of Jeffery Dahlmer jokes 🤣🤣
I think I spelled his name wrong and would like to apologize. I didn't mean to insult the memory of the honorable Jeff Dahlmer.
That would eat at me.
If you don't know what you want you won't want what you get.
But he is defending the Christians and doing God's work. You know, the God of the Old Testament type of work.
He has a strange fixation on ideas that have been passe for a century, like tariffs and overt imperialism. I want to see what he does with bimetallism next!
He heard the phrase "cross of gold" and has been obsessed with finding it ever since.
This was very good. Nihilistic as all hell but it was very good.
Trump is measuring his Presidential accomplishments by looking at his bank statements
Oh come on man. Listen to Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick, Marco Rubio, JD Vance. It also does not take much brain power to connect the dots with Trump policy combating Chinese communist hegemony. Go back over Trump's campaign promises. Go look at the Trump White House website. If you don't know the goals, it is likely willful ignorance.
1) Iran is in the middle of a war crime. If you don't know this, you're so out of the loop that we might as well not discuss the current geopolitical situation until you find more comedians that glow, and get them to tell you what's what.
2) Tariffs are the original "jack in the box" -- not only is "nobody sure what Trump is doing", nobody is sure if it's going to "remain what Trump is doing" tomorrow. Now, let that sink in. That Is The Point. The Point is to scare the market and deflate the over-inflated Wall Street. Because "everybody knows" tariffs are bad (cite Krugman if you must).
There's other points to tariffs, and there's certainly a 100+ page document laying out the case for each individual country's tariffs -- but Trump doesn't read the policy papers (he skims), so neither should you.
Top level, that's what's going down.
Well, that and Trump's assault on The World At Large, creating a bazillion distracting initiatives that the Left Must Fight. So don't assume that anything (even the geopolitical, like Venezuela) isn't part of a larger war. Trump can afford to lose his pissin' match with Harvard, but Harvard can't, and so Harvard is distracted.
"The only semi-coherent noises Trump is making on Iran are that it has something to do with their nuclear program, but he assured us in July that he had “obliterated” that program." Plus he literally lied in the SoU speech, saying all they had to say was they wouldn't pursue nukes when they've said that before, including in the last week.
Trump something something Raisinet misspelled something something trump.
I was hoping you'd dunk on Bret Stephens for feeling compelled to make The Case when the regime can't even be bothered.
I agree about tariffs but not Iran, where I think the state department does have a good coherent plan but Trump is only like 40% clues in on it at best. Given the quality of public discourse I don't think it'd be better to have more of a national discussion over it either way though.
Before you say this, you have to trust the State Department. This is the department who, under Biden, said that the goal of "Russian Sanctions" was to destroy Europe's economy. You know, backstabbing our allies....
... maybe we don't want to have State anywhere near anything?