Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

fuck the trumps

Tiffany's okay

Oh well here’s the latest. Fucking Georgetown

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/01/28/politics/jose-andres-ivanka-trump-cafe-milano/index.html

(cafe milano is apparently a well known safe space for Republicans in DC)

Tiffany's okay

second-least-worst behind barron maybe but i dunno if i'd stretch to 'okay'

2 scoops junior and i'm eric will take lil' barron elephant trunk hunting soon enough, america. rest assured :)

Jose Andres is a mf'ing treasure.

xp yeah the odds are not great on Barron shaking out to be a decent human being. That's a pretty rough lineage, he'd have to be radicalized out of it.

where's the symbionese liberation army when you need 'em

I believe in Barron. He doesn’t seem that “into” being a Trump and is much closer to his mom than his dad by all reports.

^barron knight

one of my closest friends for many years was the daughter of a well-connected senior republican politician and she disagreed with just about every single thing he did so

used to make fun of dr morbius for saying like

we always knew he was deranged, now we're just seeing when everyone loses their collective good sense under the pressure of political frustration

i for one am keenly anticipating the reign of the boy-king barron from 2019-apocalypse (exact date tbc)

I have probably said this before, but my childhood was replete with political spawn. Strom Thurmond's daughter was a classmate of mine, the Cheney girls were schoolmates, we were distantly aware of Tucker Quayle and the Scalia kids, yadda yadda.

Personally I would rather not speculate on them until they actually enter the arena of their own volition (as the Cheneys did and as Ivanka has done).

I believe in Barron. He doesn’t seem that “into” being a Trump and is much closer to his mom than his dad by all reports.
― treeship 2, Monday, January 29, 2018 9:49 AM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I remain confused about this characterization of Melania Trump—that she's some beacon of goodness, must surely be decent because her husband is such an ogre. Is there something about her that leads people to believe this? She seems terrible.

i suspect it's because melania cuts a pretty depressed figure as first lady, so she looks like we feel

mind you she married trump in the first place so i dunno how much sympathy she deserves

Maybe she's depressed because her values are fucked up and she made some terrible choices in life. Fuck her for being complicit.

I've never understood the logic either. She could divorce him and upend his whole shit if she wanted to and she'd have a ton of support from all kinds of corners, but there's no real indication she actually wants to mess with anything. xp

Like, you don't have to marry the American because he has a helicopter. It's not like he rescued her from some miserable life.

it mainly strikes me as another hopeful but baseless fantasy of #resistance that people cling to tbh, unless there's some actual substantive statements of hers I've missed

honoring trump with any kind of nickname is ridiculous, you're just entering into his own game. it's silly but it's also exactly what he loves doing with anyone he doesn't like

You guys should read this important piece from the progressive newspaper called the New York Times: The Quiet Radicalism of Melania Trump

the resistance is coming from inside the white house: the first term of melania trump

She is terrible. I don’t know how anyone could spend time with trump and then marry him. Fucking gross.

The reason a lot of people try to spin her as a good person trapped in a hellhole is because the reality of trump is so far apart from our own lives that they resemble tv show characters more than real people. A tv show needs at least one sympathetic character for the audience to identify with, somewhere, and she’s the least worst option.

lord almighty that ny times piece

the quiet radicalism of doing absolutely nothing

makes u think

xpost lol yeah I read yet the other day. Classic clickbait title! She is a radical because she hates her husband so much and refuses to use her position to help people or take up some sort of cause that she believes in.

none of the trumps are worth a shit. people are making the mistake of thinking that because maybe the trump marriage isn't great, that means she actually gives a fuck about the people his policies are affecting. i would say the chances of that are pretty low.

She sees the opportunity as First Lady to try to make sure that at least ONE good thing happen during her family’s time in power, and she radically says “no”

She seems acquiescent, definitely. Complicit, maybe. Is that the same as terrible? I don't know.

In any case it is like fifty-seventh on my list of priorities right now. Is M. a basically passive person who thought she was signing up for luxury and ease, but got accidentally thrust into a media maelstrom because of her new husband's toxic cocktail of id, greed, and ambition? Or is she Lady MacTrump, urging him on to greater heights of monstrousness? Or somewhere in between?

Don't know, don't really care; I'm much more alarmed by the Trumpoid march through the agencies, like HHS sidelining women's health and refugee issues to focus on "religious liberty." With the Department of the Interior headed by an oil pipeline executive and an oil industry CEO as Secretary of State, how long until Federal employees' adherence to environmentalist causes becomes a disqualifying factor?

I know that people can walk and chew gum at the same time: we can oppose the president's horrible policies AND still find time to mock his tacky-ass household furnishings. But jeez, do we need to pick on the 10-year-old?

it's like when people creepily idealize Ivanka, gee i wonder why. anyway they're all terrible.

The nation was torn, the democracy imperiled, but she stepped bravely to the fore and presented a line of caviar-based skincare products.

she (melania) supported the birther campaign in the press too. vile

Is there a version of the Darwin awards for people who don't die but rather willfully maneuver themselves into a personal hell and then inexplicably choose to remain there? Because Melania would be a recipient of that award. Yes, I'm sure your life sucks. What exactly did you expect when you married and had the child of someone who has never hidden the fact that he's an irredeemably-awful person?

Wealth without responsibility

The life of almost all other wealthy people

The Pete Rose Prize

who gives a shit about the kids or anyone else not in a position of power in the trump admin. ivanka is the only one with any kind of power

flappy otm

I don't know, the sons may be chumps but they have business interests that certainly impact the president's decision making. It's a kind of power in the administration that's worthy of concern.

Eric might be more pleasant if they finally remove the multiple fecaliths from intestine

I don't know, the sons may be chumps but they have business interests that certainly impact the president's decision making. It's a kind of power in the administration that's worthy of concern.

― Pumpkin Soup and Mandy Patinkin (Hadrian VIII), Monday, January 29, 2018 11:27 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sure, maybe the sons. don jr. is involved in the mueller probe in a big way. but they're effectively sidelined, by all accounts not doing much & by many accounts trump doesn't think much of them ("they were in the back of the room when god was giving out brains")

Here’s an anecdote from Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries about Trump pouring a glass of wine down Marie Brenner’s back as revenge for a bad story and slinking away pic.twitter.com/Rfu1Ur1qM7

— Jia Tolentino (@jiatolentino) January 31, 2018

guessing no one watched it but Stormy Daniels on Kimmel last night was one of the weirdest interviews I've ever seen, she basically telegraphs up front "everything you read is true but I can't say a word about it"

she seems nice

sam rockwell to play her as female chuck barris

she seems nice

I met her once, about a decade ago, at a mutual friend's book party. She was professionally friendly. Nina Hartley was also there - she was genuinely nice.

guessing no one watched it but Stormy Daniels on Kimmel last night was one of the weirdest interviews I've ever seen, she basically telegraphs up front "everything you read is true but I can't say a word about it"

I watched some of it. The "you might think that, I couldn't possibly comment" about how the signature on her press-release denial of the affair not actually being hers meant that the denial was not to be believed was a curious opener, but she didn't seem bright enough to make dancing around not being able to say anything else actually fun or funny.

The only reason anyone wants to interview her right now is because of what she's not allowed to talk about, so the whole exercise is futile and stupid in a meta pomo way. Which I guess is appropriate for the current cultural moment?

this isn't 'new' anymore but it is very eye-opening

A new report from Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy analyzes news coverage of President Trump’s first 100 days in office.

The report is based on an analysis of news reports in the print editions of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, the main newscasts of CBS, CNN, Fox News, and NBC, and three European news outlets (The UK’s Financial Times and BBC, and Germany’s ARD).

Findings include:

President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories—three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents. He was also the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds of his coverage.
Republican voices accounted for 80 percent of what newsmakers said about the Trump presidency, compared to only 6 percent for Democrats and 3 percent for those involved in anti-Trump protests.
European reporters were more likely than American journalists to directly question Trump’s fitness for office.
Trump has received unsparing coverage for most weeks of his presidency, without a single major topic where Trump’s coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative, setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.
Fox was the only news outlet in the study that came close to giving Trump positive coverage overall, however, there was variation in the tone of Fox’s coverage depending on the topic.

Worth another look: In the Company of Men.

"Now, he's a new...breed of fuck. Like a special strain of fucker. Oh, I hate that little prissy cocksucker."

President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories—three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents.

That is an astonishing statistic