Trump, June 2017: From [Covfefe] with Love

This can only mean one thing: US declares War on Europe!

Deafening silence from the UK I note.

compelled thousands to revel in the whole deplorable thing.

just the other evening i was having a drink at a local happy hour and this nice looking senior citizen was waiting for her friend to arrive so she can present her with the Adorable Deplorable matching bracelets she got. UGH i wanted to punch those old bitches after about 3 mins

Dead soon enough. Or hey, at this rate, maybe even sooner!

Has anyone yet proposed a march on Washington culminating in collective vomiting? Like, through the fence onto WH lawn?

The Petudo tweet is a good reminder there is lots of UN (and, oddly, Vatican) stuff on sustainability, global warming and urbanisation working directly with mayors and bypassing national governments. Hopefully cities across the US will be falling over themselves to fill the void of moral leadership.

I'm pretty conscious that my shock at the whole 'deplorable' thing is in itself a symptom of my own white privilege, that it shocks me that people would so unashamedly revel in their racism and homophobia and so on.

My favourite part:

"As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot, in good conscience, support a deal that punishes the United States: the world's leader in environmental protection."

"The United States, under the Trump administration, will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on earth, we're gonna be the cleanest, we're gonna have the cleanest air, we're gonna have the cleanest water."

"but do his approval numbers mean anything at all?"

You brought up people "not giving a shit" and I tried to find some metric of measuring how much of a shit people might possibly give...? Also FYI the country is brutally gerrymandered and suffering from growing voter suppression efforts by the Republicans so I don't think the 2018 results really present a final determination on whether "people give a shit."

But if you want to get into whether approval numbers "mean anything" in the sense of "mattering," I would say, yes, they do. A President that is massively popular has an easier time accomplishing things in Congress than a President that is massively unpopular. As I've rambled about before on these threads, when the President is constantly screwing up and walking into scandals and clumsily defending himself against really serious charges, it gets harder to get a legislative agenda - there are only so many hours in a day and they're going to the wrong things. It was purple-district Republicans, plus a solid blue wall, that killed Trumpcare 1.0 a couple months ago - so for whatever you do next, you need to win some of them over, convince them that voting for this thing won't kill them with their constituents back home. If you're massively popular, that's easy - they run on "I stood with the massively popular president." If you're massively unpopular, it's going to need more work because they're thinking "my god, these town halls are eating me alive, everybody was already fuming about your awful health care plan and now there's a viral video of me getting sonned hardcore by a senior citizen demanding a Russia investigation." There's going to need to be a lot of meetings with these legislators. You and your staff are going to have to dedicate lunches to wheedling, arm-twisting, deal-cutting, wearing down their doubts, pointing to your internal research that suggests the legislation is actually more popular than it seems, whatever.

But oops, now all your time is spent meeting with lawyers and hunkering down with the inner circle of mutual paranoia, ranting about leakers and enemies in the press. While you do that, your more competent staff are devoting what should be arm-twisting time to coming up with today's cover story for yesterday's awful revelation, and trying to propagate it to your surrogates to use on TV. Said surrogates, including the congresspeople who are unreservedly for the bill, are devoting their TV airtime to defending the massively unpopular, scandal-ridden President, and they're doing it badly because a) it's pretty indefensible and b) your dysfunctional White House can't even devote itself to the spin-doctoring of your competent staff because you tweeted out a totally different story twenty minutes ago.

Obviously there are still lots of awful things he can do (will do, is doing) but American legislative politics don't just run on autopilot in between elections... the things that happen and the popularity of politicians matter as the story unfolds.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBQtw8DWAAA4ptb.jpg

macron just addressed france and said we must "make the planet great again" (lolz?)

I have rarely seen a purely political move confessed as being such. They have no choice but to sandbag the dam.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) June 1, 2017

Would Bush or Rubio have done this?

Probably not? They also lost!

And like, actually lost, not "won by negative three million people"

I don't think they would have either. The timing of this is so arbitrary -- it's a completely gratuitous tantrum.

I confess to not understanding the apparently monumental nature of pulling out of the Paris Accord.

We will re-enter as early as 2021; in the intervening time, private investment will still turn more and more to sustainable sources, and at this point no amount of renewable green anything is anything more than a tourniquet; some kind of technological reversal solution is the only likely way to save life as we know it anyway.

BUT this is still the kind of thing the GOP will get behind en masse.

Sorry self xp

not really. only 22 GOP Senators signed that stupid letter

xp

and majorities in EVERY STATE support staying in the agreement

yep

http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Politics-and-Global-Warming-November-2016-01.png

he doesn't even pretend to be the president of all of us

he is only the president of everyone's stupid uncle who posts that dumb shit on facebook

But those coal miners are clinking their oxygen tanks together in toasts tonight!

this is so demented

Imagine if Trump visited a coal mine and it collapsed on him? That would be a fitting end.

I confess to not understanding the apparently monumental nature of pulling out of the Paris Accord.

We will re-enter as early as 2021; in the intervening time, private investment will still turn more and more to sustainable sources, and at this point no amount of renewable green anything is anything more than a tourniquet; some kind of technological reversal solution is the only likely way to save life as we know it anyway.

― El Tomboto, Thursday, June 1, 2017 6:21 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark

agree

it's what it represents, innit? the sheer old-fart fuck-you nihilism.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DBRO6srWAAEmm_b.jpg

Silver lining: maybe it's almost time to start the Anglo-American Cultural Supremacy into the shitbin thread

or wait did we do that already and it was about something funny ha-ha instead of the actual wagon wheel going into history's mud

even if we end up going down some hail mary geo-engineering path, that will require global cooperation. even then, lowering emissions will still need to be a part of addressing climate change. it's insane for america to be the one country to try to undermine global solidarity on this issue.

Is this how we get to the utopian star trek future?

Silver lining: maybe it's almost time to start the Anglo-American Cultural Supremacy into the shitbin thread

It won't go down without a fight.

Agree with tb and Chinese symbol

Stevie, what dyou think wouldn't it be better all round just to ignore the old fuckers symbolism, it's ugly and all and obviously his having garnered enough pustules with voting rights to occupy the position is troubling but even moves as showily malevolent as this won't in the medium run achieve anything much at all

Good yanks just need to stay alive and healthy until 2018, and hope that whatever momentum the tea party at al managed to get up while Obama was in office will well and truly have worn off by that stage.

Yes. It is also insane to have a democracy that elects the less popular leader because "them's the rules!"

Nothing sane about democracy tbf

I wouldn't let a randomly selected quorum pick a fucking sandwich

we're a democracy that enshrined the rights of a minority of white supremacists into our founding document, an error which we will never stop paying for

So many xps on xps. Not following my own Zing pro tips

Sorry to stick with this people don't give a shit thought. I know I am reducing things, but I can only assume the vast majority of the millions that didn't vote did not do so because they were gerrymandered or otherwise restricted, they did it because they didn't care or didn't care to bother. I understand that by any reasonable metric Trump has been doing a terrible job and has terrible support, but by any reasonable metric he should not be president either.

xp:
Technically, geoengineering doesn't require cooperation, just persistence. A squadron of jet fighters with 20km+ ceilings could deposit enough sulfur aerosols, but they have to do it for roughly 500-1000 years, til 60% of emissions are dissolved in the oceans. Skip a few years, the albedo falls to normal and everyone experiences abrupt extreme climate change.

Josh, we all agree with you.

The fact that anybody would vote Republican in this climate, and therefore tacitly endorse whatever Trump is doing, is sign enough that even if people do give a shit, millions upon millions of them give a shit about enacting horrible horrible policies. Which frankly is the not the kind of civic engagement I find hopeful. Like, re Russia, even if people are disturbed a huge hunk of them aren't disturbed enough to consider it more important than all the horrible things they want him to do. Given how terribly destroying the ACA or dropping out of the climate Accord poll, I don't even know what these people want from Trump.

Sorry, readily admit I am just ranting. Need to vent, so thanks for whatever patience you can afford me.

Technically, geoengineering doesn't require cooperation, just persistence. A squadron of jet fighters with 20km+ ceilings could deposit enough sulfur aerosols, but they have to do it for roughly 500-1000 years, til 60% of emissions are dissolved in the oceans. Skip a few years, the albedo falls to normal and everyone experiences abrupt extreme climate change.

― it's just locker room treason (Sanpaku), Thursday, June 1, 2017 6:52 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Jesus Christ

Trump is like some idiot who promised to eat glass. And when everybody tells him, no, you don't have to eat glass, he says, I'm sorry, a promise is a promise.

Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FjWe31S_0g

nah, trump is the guy who enforces the promise to eat glass on the idiot who agreed to it. then everybody's like "hey, it's ok. he doesn't really have to eat the glass" trump buckles down and insists that he must eat the glass.

imo

And then he eats glass himself anyway.

i never hated anyone so much

he is making us eating the glass, rather.