Trump, June 2017: From [Covfefe] with Love

He sees his own daughter and thinks "I'd fuck that"

This fucking worthless grease fire is my boss

I don't know why this week is the one that has put me over the line - from just strongly disliking him, in a sort of abstracted way, because he's going to be responsible for thousands or millions of deaths and he'll never even be able to comprehend his own enormity, to actually wishing painful misfortune would befall him and his family - maybe it's just been cumulative and some unconscious threshold was just met.

This piece of shit is not just an embarrassment to America and a stain on the presidency. He's an embarrassment to humankind. https://t.co/Dl5tMQMhMO

— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) June 3, 2017

Reza Aslan is right... even though he ate human brains that one time.

I don't know why this week is the one that has put me over the line

i also have a sense of crossing a line of rage, and sense it with others too (like Reza just above lol). seems like many people who normally try to be somewhat respectable are being moved to just say "FUCK YOU".

i think maybe it's not the initial line that is being crossed, it's a line beyond that line

lots of people wish for terrible things so that supposedly things will get so bad that we'll be able to set it all on fire and start fresh (or some bullshit), forgetting that things can always get much worse than they already are. in a related way trump is such a fucking scumbag that there's no bottom to it. he'll seemingly hit rock bottom and then drill his way down another half mile until he's evicting the residents of fraggle rock or whatever

The really surprising thing to me is the utter disrespect for Trump coming from other US politicians who oppose him. The forced comity typically granted on Sunday morning talk shows and cable news is not extended to him. This morning John Kerry compared Trump to OJ Simpson on Meet The Press.

Fraggle Rock

Maybe he can get the Dozers to build his fucking bullshit wall.

This morning John Kerry compared Trump to OJ Simpson on Meet The Press.

lol, i was wondering how in the world this happened, but it's actually not a bad analogy

"He's going to go out and find a better deal?" Kerry said. "That's like OJ Simpson saying he's going to go find the real killer. Everybody knows he isn't going to do that because he doesn't believe in it. Because if he did believe in it he wouldn't pull out of Paris. American has ceded global leadership on this issue."

lol that's a pretty good one, John

this Solnit essay has some echoes with recent posts:
http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/

I'm thankful that Trump has always been and always will be a selfish, impulsive, vindictive, intellectually incurious asshole. If the guy was remotely capable of compromise he'd be truly dangerous. That he can be outright mocked and ignored is largely a boon to us all.

for the life of me I can't understand why people waste column inches psychoanalysing trump. who gives a shit

because he's the most powerful person in the world and trying to understand how his mind works is both interesting on its own terms and can help us understand how to beat him?

a really annoying twitter trend among a bunch of the people i follow is this faux-outrage at like every article in a major publication that tries to examine the power dynamics inside the white house or the trump family -- or literally any trump-related subject that isn't a pure spleen vent. like either grow the fuck up or start reading teen vogue exclusively

he's the most powerful person in the world

He sits on the biggest military arsenal in the world. There's a difference. Actual power - getting other people to do things you want done - is slipping from Trump's grasp day by day.

Was thinking this morning that if Trump economic and other policies continue as they've been going, by year's end, emigration from the US (immigrants returning home, US workers seeking jobs in Europe or elsewhere) might outstrip immigration to the US.

the essay is more like a literary analysis than a psychoanalysis (El Tomboto's comment about fictional archvillains is what made me think of it; Solnit interprets him more like a fairy tale character than a psychological subject), but I get not wanting to read anything more about him. Still, the takeaway is what Josh just said: that this preening egomaniac is now the object of mockery at an unprecedented scale, and like unperson just said he doesn't really have the power he thought would be his

the strange thing about trump's ego is we know he craves approval, which makes the paris accords thing so bizarre (and an indication that he and bannon are increasingly isolated and vindictive). americans supported remaining in the paris agreement by a pretty substantial margin iirc -- even republicans were pretty evenly split, i even think i saw some polls saying a plurality favored remaining

He craves approval but also relishes a nice cathartic tantrum here and there, multiple times per day.

In time, he will be beaten (assuming the anti-authoritarians aren't right).

What's different with Trump is I want to him to be hurt personally, humiliated in ways he understands. I want "trump" to become synonymous with catastrophic failure born of ignorance and arrogance, I want Russian mobsters to call in the debts of the Trump Org at the bottom of a real estate cycle, I want his children to testify against him, change their names, and go into hiding. I want him to succumb to stroke induced impairment that prevents him from leaving his penthouse, but fully cognizant of the seething contempt in all mentions of his name.

Now that you've written it out like that, I want the same thing. Also want Melania to do a teary confessional on schmaltzy tv where she exposes more personally embarrassing details.

me too plus i want the government to restore pre-reagan taxation (and public investment) levels and call it 'the trump tax', as in, our experiment with voodoo economics produced the trump tragedy

I want to completely forget everything that happened over the past two years.

i want everyone else to forget about the last two years, but i still remember, and then i remind everyone what a bunch of giant assholes they are but they don't know what i'm talking about, but secretly i know i'm right

I get wanting to understand a powerful guy but it's all speculation and none of it is actionable in any way that approaches reality

i was ambivalent toward the lithub piece but i really liked this LARB article that it linked to, which i missed upon its publication back in march:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/arendt-matters-revisiting-origins-totalitarianism/

Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amid economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority is stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”

Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives. By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”

The reason fact-checking is ineffective today — at least in convincing those who are members of movements — is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was massive voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

Would be good if the lesson could be learned from this administration and in the right way. hate to think that it would be opening the door for further outrages a little down the line where people think that a few tweaks could make the whole thing successful.

Would be good if the population, partially woken up buy having to deal with this specific ogre would remain engaged to the extent taht nothing like this could repeat.

Would be fantastic if it lead to a break away from the standing 2 party system despite itself rather than it being the beacon of change it would like to see itself as. Just hoping that the desire for change that lead to this continuing fiasco was something that could be utilised to much better ends.

Just hoping that immediate aftermath includes the removal of such things as Mitch McConnel who just seems to be an obstruction to anything constructive and has been for years.

I wish I could use 400 words to say "arguing on facts and merits doesn't work against a totalitarian mindset"

I like Sanpaku's ideas but gonna stick with acid bath or maybe kerosene-soaked suit, ignited, then crashing out of a skyscraper window

I will say I have been enjoying Masha Gessen's writing on Trumpism https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/opinion/sunday/trumps-incompetence-wont-save-our-democracy.html?_r=1&referer=https://t.co/cqwkpRC3eF

I did at first but the constant doomsaying gets old. I know my kid's future is fucking imperiled and we're all doing the wrong things while nobody is doing the right things but this is not Actual Russia

oh so there isn't rampant systemic inequality and injustice? thats cool

You're kind of an asshole

In the takes one to know one sense

guilty as charged

anyway how anyone can claim the US has ever held moral authority in recent years is beyond me given that leaked memo re: the Saudis / ISIS

No one who should be taken seriously has ever said that.

Corbyn,

"At this time it is more important than ever that we stay united in our communities it is the strength of our communities that gets us through these awful times as London Mayor Sadiq Khan recognised but which the current occupant in the White House has neither the grace nor the sense to grasp."

Having a go at the mayor of London

i had already forgotten that that was khan now so when i saw it i just naturally assumed that trump or his trumpettes were having digs at boris, which seemed opportunistic but quite likely valid

too low-information to do them any good is i guess what i am saying, i suppose it works better for them when they can do it next to a picture of a brown face

the strange thing about trump's ego is we know he craves approval, which makes the paris accords thing so bizarre (and an indication that he and bannon are increasingly isolated and vindictive). americans supported remaining in the paris agreement by a pretty substantial margin iirc -- even republicans were pretty evenly split, i even think i saw some polls saying a plurality favored remaining

But the loud & ignorant wing of his base loved him doing it because it (on paper) accomplished a campaign promise quickly.

he's just continuing to do the same things that won him the election. if anyone voted for him thinking he would act or think differently in office than he did every day in full public view during the campaign, they were stupid. O else they were self-deceiving, which amounts to the same thing in the end.

he's a damaged and fucked up person who acts on impulse. it's disgusting and not that interesting. the problem is we built a society where millions of people think it's totally fine for someone to be the way he is, that such a person in fact should be placed in a major leadership role.

Absolutely. Trumps a symptom of a problem, that with 62 million voters, won't go away soon.

The goal til 2019 should be patiently explain to people in the RW bubble the ineptitude and corruption, so that DJT support is under 20% by the time impeachment proceedings start. In support of this, I'd rather like to see some negative stock/real estate market action, and I'll think between corrections of current overvaluations, slow reckoning of the foreign policy disaster and Janet Yellen this will happen. There will still be a handful who think the deep state/MSM/liberals etc stole their president, but that's inevitable. Hopefully RW terrorism will be limited.

http://www.wweek.com/news/2017/06/04/right-wing-protesters-assemble-in-downtown-portland-hugely-outnumbered/

Meanwhile, in approval-land: if I'm reading 538's comparison charts of presidential popularity right, we've just passed a major milestone: for about ten days, for the first and possibly last time, Trump was briefly not the least popular postwar president over a given stretch of time at equal distance from inauguration day. Trump of course was starting from the unprecedented-save-Dubya position of starting out with less than majority support, so he's got his work cut out for him - his numbers remain godawful, and seem to be continuing to erode. But enough preamble: it just so happens that Bill Clinton hit his all-time career lows in late May 1993 --- Big Don notches up a major win!

Sadly for Trump fans, even assuming his numbers stay where they are right now, there will be precious few opportunities left to not be the worst-approved president of the last seventy years. Clinton never dipped that low again, so Trump will have to count on remaining slightly less hated than George H.W. during the recession, Nixon in the last stages of Watergate, Dubya after Katrina, etc. Good luck!

looks like he might be able to outperform gerald ford for a little bit, too. ford dipped below 35% for a few weeks, starting on day 159.

Oh yeah... I was wondering what that was from.