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Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience.
U.S. News and World Report: We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’
I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.
For nearly 25 years, I led marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal. I led the team that marketed “The Apprentice,” the reality show that made Donald Trump a household name outside of New York City, where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns.
To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.
Via The Dispatch
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
David Rothkopf, the host of the podcast Deep State Radio, beheld Trump’s descent this week from “being periodically adrift” to something stranger and more savage: “He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” (Mary Azoy, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Steven Rauch, Claremont, Calif., among many others)
Donald Trump himself is “the enemy within.”
The good news is that 1 in 10 Republicans aren’t buying what Trump is selling. The bad news is that 9 in 10 Republicans are chumps.
Think about it: Trump says something stupid, the newspapers report it, and he insists it’s “fake news.” Trump is behind in the polls, and he insists they are “fake polls.” The election comes out the same way the polls did—with Trump losing—and he insists it’s a “rigged election.” As the political philosopher Raylan Givens put it, “You run into an a–hole in the morning, you ran into an a–hole. You run into a–holes all day, you’re the a–hole.” Maybe it’s the case that the news is all fake and the polls are phony and the elections are rigged and we’re having all these hurricanes because shadowy Jews control the weather and the Bilderbergers put that worm in Bobby Kennedy’s brain … or maybe—hear me out!—Donald Trump is a loser, a charlatan, and an incompetent who won in a freak election in 2016 thanks mainly to his status as a genuine celebrity among the merely “Fox News famous.” You don’t have to be Occam and you don’t need a razor to cut through the bulls—t.
Look at the Republican Party today: Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Hulk Hogan, and Donald Trump. For Pete’s sake, if I were to write that the Republican Party needs to get rid of that handsy weirdo, you’d have to ask: Which one? It’s the only way Republicans know how to reach across the aisle, as it were.
No wonder that 1 in 10 Republicans say they’re going to vote for Harris in November. One wonders a good bit about the other nine.
Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.
…
Nothing about Democrats’ Supreme Court “reform” nonsense is going to land Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer under federal indictment for numerous felonies. Nor would anything prevent voters who dislike seeing Congress tinker with the judiciary from punishing Democrats severely at the polls. If, on the other hand, Trump had successfully connived, defrauded, and intimidated his way into remaining in power for a second term after losing an election, all institutional checks designed to make the executive accountable to the people he serves would have been defeated. What he did wasn’t just a difference in magnitude relative to what Democrats hope to do with the court—it was a difference in kind.
… Trump has actually tried to overturn a presidential election. For all her faults, Kamala Harris has done nothing remotely comparable. Right-wingers keen to draw civic equivalencies between the two have a knack for glossing over that. Both nominees have proposed certain indefensible ideas; only one has taken America to the brink to show that he means business.
Frankly, Trump is so manifestly unfit for office in ways that Harris isn’t that basing the case against him on his 2020 coup plot arguably does him a favor by overlooking what a full-spectrum cretin he is.
…
Defeat Trump, save the plane, and then get ready to start barking at Captain Kamala Harris on which way she should steer. It’s straightforward from here.
Trump’s rejection of the rule of law is comprehensive: He’s upset that people suspected of crimes like shoplifting aren’t prosecuted, yet he’s also furious that he is himself subject to prosecution when accused of crimes. Earlier this month, he promised retribution for those members of the law-enforcement community who have tried to hold him accountable, “which will include long term prison sentences.” In other words: They would lose not only their pension or car, but their freedom. He also promises to pardon those who ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Policing is only for those Trump hates. He and his friends get a pass.
David A. Graham, Trump’s Dark Turn Toward Police Violence
Another person wrestling with it is Mitt Romney, who’s on his way out of the Senate and into an uncertain future. If ever there were a man teed up for a happy retirement, it’s him; he has money to burn and a famously big, loving family to enjoy. But he doesn’t sound happy. “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group,” he complained with exasperation recently to The Atlantic.
The person his kids and grandkids might need protecting from is the Republican nominee for president. Mitt is so worried about Donald Trump abusing executive power to harass the Romney family that it’s contributed to his decision not to endorse Kamala Harris, according to the Washington Post. When Trump talks about “retribution” against his political enemies, Romney takes him literally and seriously.
Should he? Is Trump’s “retribution” chatter an empty threat designed to motivate his fans to vote? Or is he bonkers enough to order a revenge campaign from the Oval Office?
“It doesn’t matter,” you might say, fairly enough. Whether Trump’s demagoguery is strategic or proof of insanity, he’s unfit for office either way. And American voters seem to agree that it doesn’t matter, as there seem to be enough of them who don’t care about either the question or the answer to reelect him. “Affectation or bonkers?” is a question for serious citizens, not ours.
Trump’s promises of retribution against his political opponents is classic autocratic behavior and utterly plausible, especially insofar as he plans to avoid having any “adults in the room” in his second term — only ass-kissers. Please do not vote for this monster.
When he was governor of Indiana, Mike Pence was widely hated, and I couldn’t understand why, let alone share the hatred. Now, because he obeyed the law , instead of obeying Trump, on 1/6/2021, there’s a tendency to imagine him with a halo.
But until he apologizes convincingly for a preplanned stunt at taxpayer expense during his Vice Presidency, he’ll get no more than tepid support from me.
#hypocrisy #retribution #policing #Mitt_Romney #Mike_Pence #costly_stunts
I rise to defend my smart phone against the partisans of flip phones and Light Phones.
On my smart phone, I can:
I am not evangelizing, but I am explaining why you’re not going to shame me out of my smart phone.
Special Counsel proposes making public more evidence from Trump election case. Trump plans massive shake-up of US Justice Department. Trump threatens to prosecute Google for showing ‘bad stories’ about him.
How can anyone who passed high school civics consider voting for this man?
Nick Catoggio, on Trumpworld rallying around newly-indicted NYC Mayor Eric Adams:
The cultiest element of Trump’s very culty political movement is that it has its own internal morality that supersedes traditional morality. That’s why so many creeps, crooks, and kooks are drawn to it. Like any cult leader worth his salt, Trump offers acceptance and community to those who find such things hard to come by in respectable society.
MAGA’s internal morality is based on two principles. First, Trump’s needs trump all other interests, political, moral, or legal, without exception. Second, one’s moral worth is measured by how antagonistic one is toward the enemy. No one who hates the right people can be truly “bad,” no matter how badly they’ve behaved in conventional moral terms.
You see, Eric Adams is not happy with all the immigrants in New York City. The enemy of my enemy is my friend — conditionally, of course.
CNN: Study Asked 10 And 11-Year-Olds About Trump And Harris. These Are The Themes That Came Out
Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear the name Kamala Harris?”
Fourth grader: “Liar”
Interviewer: “What’s the first word that pops into your head when you hear Donald Trump?”
Different fourth grader: “Pure evil.”
As the claims about the Haitian immigrants and their pet-munching ways began imploding this weekend, J.D. Vance turned up on the Sunday shows to declare that he regrets nothing. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Springfield’s representative in the Senate boasted to CNN.
Trump is a would-be caudillo, but his cowardice has largely spared us having to fight him, because he prefers to hide behind lawyers and then, after his lawyers get laughed out of court, to rage about the judges from the safe remove of social media. He is the Walter Mitty of Augusto Pinochets.
On abortion, to take a representative issue, Trump looks unlikely to take any affirmative act at all: His position—to the extent that one is discernible somewhere in that Hefty SteelSak full of meth-addled New York City subway rats that he calls a brain—is that he has done everything that needs to be done on the issue by appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted against Roe.
→ Lauren Boebert rival accuses her of “melting down” at debate: Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, best known for giving her boyfriend a handy at the Beetlejuice musical, debated rival Trisha Calvarese on Tuesday. Afterward, Calvarese posted on Twitter that Boebert “melted down on the debate stage.” She also accused Boebert of disrespecting veterans and failing to help lower the cost of prescription drugs.
Now, I do not want to be fair to Lauren Boebert. Even if it was above the pants, no one who performs any kind of sex act at the Beetlejuice musical has a place in public office. Cats? Sure. It’s sexy. How could you not? But Calvarese’s claim of a meltdown isn’t really supported by the clips the candidate herself posted on Twitter. A meltdown is a tantrum. It’s shrieking, it’s crying, it’s banging your fists against the floor. It’s what happens when I don’t get rush tickets to Cats.
But Boebert just looks like a non-tantruming idiot because that is, in fact, what she is.
Katie Herzog, filling in for Nellie Bowles.
The Battle Cry of the Gullible
The battle cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, industrial plants, and every other type of machine with electricity rather than fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Second to silver, a rarer and far more expensive metal, copper is the best natural electrical conductor on Earth. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical EV contains as much as 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that undergird the energy grid in practically every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electric grid will have to grow as much as threefold to meet the expected demand. A recent report from S&P Global predicts that the amount of copper we’ll need over the next 25 years will add up to more than the human race has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere close to this much copper in such a short time frame,” the report notes. The world might not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict supplies will fall short by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs has declared “no decarbonization without copper” and called copper “the new oil.” (Source: wired.com, bold added)
For the Washington Post, David Ignatius spoke to former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin about his decision to resign from Congress in April. “The story turns on a gruesome moment the night of Dec. 30, 2023, in Gallagher’s hometown of Green Bay,” Ignatius wrote. “The local sheriff had received an anonymous call claiming that Gallagher had been shot in the face and that his wife and two young daughters, 3 and 1, had been taken hostage. A SWAT team arrived at the house to find Gallagher and his family safe. His anguished wife, Anne, somehow had the presence of mind to ask the SWAT team to take their shoes off before they searched the home. But for the young couple, trying to build a family in the town where they were born and raised, the cruel hoax was a deeply upsetting event. For Gallagher, it proved to be a breaking point. … ‘I signed up for this, but my family didn’t,’ he told me in one of a series of interviews. ‘That was a moment when we felt we needed to make a change and take a step back from politics.’”
Mark Twain on lemmings
The loud little handful—as usual—will shout for the war. The pulpit will—warily and cautiously—object . . . at first. The great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, “It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it.” Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded, but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the antiwar audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long, you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men. . . . Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
William T. Kavanagh, The Uses of Idolatry (quoting Mark Twain).
Trump as of Labor Day Weekend
I get the sense that the assassination attempt spooked him more than he’s willing to admit and also slowed him down. And yes, there are those niggling details about him being a nut, a narcissist, a boor, a bigot, a blowhard, a tornado of baloney — a man who, to borrow from an old joke, could commit suicide by leaping from his ego to his I.Q.
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