Trump, June 2017: From [Covfefe] with Love

I'm looking forward to his exegeses on racial epithets and who is allowed to use them. Should be enlightening.

no one has quite the same tenacity in trying to take down Trump as does Trump himself

unfortunately he's maintaining his lifelong, near-unbroken record of failure on this one too

Hah, biz. Sad but true.

it's all pretty much fucked. as much as the racists were pissed a black guy was president, the fair-minded on the planet seem nonplussed there's a spoiled fat self-destructive asshole rich kid, born on third base, in the white house, a bully in the international order. and to think what america used to symbolize, jeez louise

not to get all trenchant but 'what america used to symbolise', outside the states anyway, was just as much slavery, foreign interventionism and gun violence as it was truth, justice and the american way

Yeah, I'm not into this mythic version of America I've seen bubbling up lately in reaction to the rise of Trump. This place has had its fair share of issues for the entirety of its existence. I mean, we allowed Trump to run for president and then we elected him president. You don't do that if you're an untroubled people.

It's the lib version of MAGA, and it's NAGL.

allowing him to run is not a problem

This graphic appeared on Morning Joe today. (I saw it on Twitter; I don't have cable.)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBjla-YXoAA1R6l.jpg

Of late "Joe" has dropped any pretense of defending him; if I'm not mistaken he called Trump a moron or something last week.

I'm always so baffled that anyone who's had extensive personal experience with him could've ever thought otherwise. I at least get the consistency of the Double Down Brigade, as deep reserves of cognitive dissonance seems to be a prerequisite for taking him at all seriously in the first place.

wealth provokes an extremely powerful contact high in certain people

FINALLY met a Trump voter this weekend (a dude in my building who I kinda knew already but didn't know had voted for Trump). Several of us were chilling in the courtyard and started in on the political hair-pulling and he wasn't really defending any charges against the dude at all. He'd really only go so far as to express agnosticism re: Trump's personal involvement wrt collusion with Russia.

Few people like to admit they're wrong in public.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article154106459.html

Fuck Morning Joe, didn't they used to be buddy buddy? Also, fuck him for being Republican and as far as I know still being a Republican.

Fuck Morning Joe

Mika's taking care of that

They're both fucked.

They can go fuck themselves.

Morning Joe is on MSNBC, right? Yeah, fuck them, them turning has got to be all about the ratings. MSNBC has apparently been doing really well with the anti-Trump stuff, with Fox fading a bit, so no doubt management told them to keep it up or be tougher. It's all so obvious and cynical.

In the last few months MSNBC has hired Megan Kelly and Hugh Hewitt, joining Morning Joe and Nicole Wallace as fiery liberal commentators.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/03/us/politics/trump-plans-to-shift-infrastructure-funding-to-cities-states-and-business.html?_r=0

“If we thought it was the time to release an infrastructure bill, we would release an infrastructure bill,” Mr. Cohn said. “We just can’t keep throwing stuff on Congress. We actually need them to get legislation done. And as they start getting legislation done, we’ll come back with infrastructure.”

infrastructure week!

In the last few months MSNBC has hired Megan Kelly and Hugh Hewitt, joining Morning Joe and Nicole Wallace as fiery liberal commentators.

Well, gotta be fair and balanced! You know, for cred.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-this-marketing-agency-helped-president-trump-will_us_593469a8e4b062a6ac0ad0fc

A private source from Trump’s campaign has leaked an invoice from Oak Park Alliance, a high-profile marketing agency specializing in digital marketing. Among the largest charges on the invoice is a $30,000 charge for “30 front-page posts — /r/the_donald.” Among Reddit users, “the_donald” is a well-known community that focused on championing Donald Trump throughout the campaign season. Also included on the invoice are several services, such as downvotes on subreddits supporting democratic presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, publications of high-profile articles, content creation, and one listed as “damage control.”

holy shit did they overpay for this

Morning Joe's sins are legion, but I think there is some nuance required in how to characterize the show's Trumpattitude.

1. The show took T's electoral chances seriously (or at least pretended to) when almost no one else would. Which, while not morally neutral, turned out to have, arguably, a sort of prescience. We will never know whether this one media entity taking T's chances seriously

2. They DID give him a platform, in the sense that when he called, they would talk to him and let him bloviate. Trump surrogates and defenders were frequent guests (as was the case on lots of media outlets).

3. Trump-skeptics and Trump-critics also got plenty MJ air (including and especially Her Mikaness). Various species of souring on Trompiness were also given lots of air.

Personally I haven't watched a minute of TV nooz since November, and have no plans to resume. But the narrative of "Morning Joe was all buddy-buddy with Trump" is, I think, not quite right.

xpost I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Best Show (previously on WFMU) but many of their older bits revolve around characters who are basically incredibly stupid sociopaths, and so many of their scenarios which seemed ridiculously ott a decade ago have actually played out in real life over the past year or so. But, yeah, that reminds me of the bit about someone paying a shitload of money to have someone hook them up with a Facebook account. Fuckin' satire is over, man.

gotta be honest, i wish i had the entrepreneurial flair to bilk money out of credulous dum-dums by charging a time $1k for a reddit post

especially a "front page post" on the_donald, where there are thousands of bots upvoting literally everything. this is like one hour of work max.

Can you believe this*, Trump's had another go at London's mayor, that uppity Muslim, Sadiq Khan.

(*of course you van)

this motherfucking guy

can twitter just fuckin ban this guy already pls

Ban him from planet Earth.

Also, fuck him for being Republican and as far as I know still being a Republican.

I feel the opposite about this -- I think every Republican who says "I'm a Republican but come on this shit is bullshit and has gone too far" is part of the health of the nation.

Among the largest charges on the invoice is a $30,000 charge for “30 front-page posts

holy shit did they overpay for this

i might be off my rocker but i don't think 30K spent on a subreddit is any less effective than other things it would have bought - a few radio ads or tv spots or robocalls. i don't know about the thousands of bots upvoting everything, though. does that make it easy to make the front page? if we were having a contest to see how many skittles everyone had and then we gave everyone 10 free skittles, it doesn't seem like it would affect anyone's odds of winning. i rarely visit reddit though so i'm probably wildly misreading all of this. but in the age of the superpac it seems like 30K would be absolutely nothing to a presidential candidate

Kinda agree with eephus there. Some Rs saying "Yeah THIS is too much" is a necessary step toward sanity.

idk it'd be cool if his moronic tweets are the last piece of evidence kennedy needs that the "travel ban" is motivated by animus and not a sober executive evaluation of terror threats. or if they, ironically, get him banned from traveling places like the UK. although then he'd just claim that all of london is a dangerous "no-go area" and anyway very bad and fake.

xxp its dumb because there are 15 year old edgelords who do that shit for free. making tons of "front-page posts" with thousands of fake upvotes is the biggest concern of that sub. and yea before the front page rules changed t_d was on it all the time if only because they had the most bots. like you could literally post "HILLARY CLINTON DEMENTIA CONFIRMED!!!" with no text and get 4k upvotes within a minute.

i dunno how any reasonable person could look at those tweets and see them motivated by anything other than animus, really

of course, reasonable people are seemingly in shorter supply than they used to be, and unreasonable people are motivated by the same animus, so...

not to get all 5D chess but maybe they figure "attacking judges for striking down the ban" is better politics than actually doing the ban

— slackbot (@pareene) June 5, 2017

seriously tho how do we go about forming an ilx spinout focused on corporate shitposting? i feel like there's a lot of untapped potential here

its dumb because there are 15 year old edgelords who do that shit for free.

hey, maybe they're getting paid off too! although you only have to pay 15-year-olds around 5K for 20 front page posts.

jk jk, i'm sure you're right. there are some nice corners of reddit but in general i avoid the place like a plague so i have no idea how it really works.

Jared K's donor history is innaresting (hi dere, Cory Booker)

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Jared+Kushner

this just in: in college, jared kushner couldn't get enough dick swett

I for one support the endless source of rope that Twitter is handing to our commander-in-chief.

http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/336347-gop-senator-trump-could-be-more-focused-on-agenda

He could, couldn't he

I agree with Pareene. A lot of GOP strategy, not just Trump's (but especially Trump's) is 1) enact terrible policy that fucks people 2) "if only the goddamned liberals had let us do this the right way it would have been great."

no politician is ever going to admit their opponents beat them in a fair fight, tho, that's not a left-vs-right distinction

to return to maura's link:

A party that traditionally has had a fraught relationship with the media has become outright hostile, led by a president who picks more fights with journalists than any GOP leader since Richard Nixon.

But interviews with Republican strategists and party leaders across the country reveal that what started as genuine anger at allegedly unfair coverage — or an effort to deflect criticism — is now an integral part of next year’s congressional campaigns.

The hope, say these officials, is to convince Trump die-hards that these mid-term races are as much a referendum on the media as they are on President Trump. That means embracing conflict with local and national journalists, taking them on to show Republicans voters that they, just like the president, are battling a biased press corps out to destroy them.

David Woodard, a political consultant for South Carolina Republicans whose clients have included Sen. Lindsey Graham and Reps. Trey Gowdy and Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, recalled the old adage often quoted by politicians: “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

That’s dead now.

“If you pick a fight with them, I think it kind of helps you, and I don’t think many people care,” Woodard said.

It's probably going to be a heckuva 'chicken/egg' pickle for future historians to work out whether America's devolution into all-out tribal warfare or the erosion of systems acting as bulwarks against chaos came first. I'm having a hard time keeping track myself.

in the meantime we can keep eating our pizza with forks and knives