Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

I am not exactly breaking new ground here, but he is clearly mentally ill, possibly as a result of, or made worse by, extended drug use.

xp Are they though? From my vantage point in Minnesota, Florida is the state whose politics I’ve seen the most coverage of in the last few years. Way beyond the former champ, Texas.

And, to be fair to Florida journalism, our local papers have extensively covered -- editorialized about -- DeSantis' horrors

I feel like the coverage I see is a lot about political positioning

centrist dem pundit class not really caring about book banning is i guess not surprising but upsetting none the less particularly considering their enthusiastic coverage of the politics of higher education

Ron DeSantis Is Not Scott Walker

His support among Republicans at this early stage of the primary cycle puts him in rare company.

By Nate Cohn
Published Feb. 13, 2023
Updated Feb. 15, 2023

xpost that's national political press, though, a cloaca in the best of times. Flipping through channels last week, though, I caught "Morning" Joe denouncing a (dismissed) proposal requiring teenage girls to disclose their menstrual status.

yeah cant speak to the florida press but nationally the desantis coverage while voluminous hasnt been great

It’s possible I’m in my own self-structured echo chamber. What I’m seeing stops just short of putting trans students and their parents in public stocks and giving everyone else a mandatory stone

My hometown paper's opinion page: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/

And, to be fair to Florida journalism, our local papers have extensively covered -- editorialized about -- DeSantis' horrors

I was visiting my dad in the Tampa area last week. There was a scathing op ed in the Times (I think) about DeSantis's racism. It was, if I recall correctly, on the front page.

Good thing no one reads the dying lamestream media.

The failing Tampa Times

I almost posted “the MH. how many divisions do they have”? but after libations, i post it. lol i’m sure negronis would have afforded better judgment to me, blee me mine were not that good. 🙂

he's slightly modified his "joke" about the n-word

Trump: "You have two n-words, neither of which should ever be mentioned ... you know what the one is, but the other is the nuclear word." pic.twitter.com/vBYmX5nRdh

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

more than once, he has told it more along the lines of "we all know what the n-word is, right?", and then he waits for everyone in the crowd to laugh at the really funny question, before eventually clarifying that he definitely mean nuclear

I hope he runs and I hope he is absolutely obliterated, and I don't mean metaphorically

I hope the chuds turn on them both.

Trump claims the US has surpassed socialism and is now a Marxist communist country pic.twitter.com/Jz12XFVryv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2023

also extraordinary.

They’ve gone along beyond that what they’re going

You know, I was just thinking that while on my way to work in a collective farm where the means of production is owned by the proletariat

i'm going to take a massive dump and ensure it is evenly distributed amongst Trump and the rest of the GOP

I avoid videos of trump but maybe I shouldn't; watching that clip, it's nearly impossible to imagine him getting anywhere near the white house again.

love him to be getting near back seat of hearse. like come on his cholesterol is through the roof even w/ a statin

Every time a famous person dies that is younger and more healthy than him, I get kind of frustrated ngl.

Every time anyone who dies who isn't him, I get kind of frustrated agl.

I avoid videos of trump but maybe I shouldn't; watching that clip, it's nearly impossible to imagine him getting anywhere near the white house again.

He seems really disinterested, for someone motivated by spite and desperation

Hope he wrecks the rest on the way out!

From your mouth to the ears of the gods.

Ya this version of Trump has like 20% of the energy of 2016 Trump and none of the charisma, which is to say he still looks more electable than desantis

Oooh, pass the Bactine!

Trump's thought/conversational patterns were always circuitous and rambling, but he now sounds exactly like James Austin Johnson's impression of him. He's become the parody.

He sounds kinda sad we never stopped at the Socialist Station, maybe he heard they have good burgers or something.

Good berders

After reading the many comments posted above about the Trump clip in the Rupar tweet I had high hopes of seeing a much different and diminished Trump. I'm sorry to say I saw nothing there that his past voters would shy away from or reject as unacceptable. It's no different than his normal incoherence. His supporters will hear all the right notes and ignore the things we notice the most.

Like how he has to pause between the words "Socialiat" and "station", because he's never once been on a train and has no idea where they go when they are not running.

His supporters will hear all the right notes and ignore the things we notice the most.

In 201whatever the critique of the critique of Trump was that we took him literally but not seriously, while his supporters took him seriously but not literally.

We forget this at our peril.

So you had people who weren't so much pro-Trump as anti-anti-Trump. The more the "elites" mocked him, the more he was loved by chuds. So let's be careful how we evaluate his current chances, despite how tempting it is

(maybe at some point this repeated caveat can just be taken as assumed and not repeated endlessly)

It would be a little easier to dismiss his chances if he were locked up. Just sayin'...

Being locked up is not a bar to being elected. We'd all be better off if he were fuckin' dead.

hell just call him and tell him he's locked out of his home, he'll believe it and start screaming and banging on his windows and then call him to tell him that liberals removed the air from his home and he'll believe it and suffocate and die.

jimbeaux otm. whatever 'martyrdom' blah blah at this point i'm just wanting to be rid of him.

the damage is done, him being gone doesn't magically end the GOP march towards fascism but it at least removes one of its players from the chess board

No one of whom I am aware has the ability to mobilize the mouth-breathing troglodytes like Trump.

I mean it'll be a power vacuum but it wasn't as if more extreme right-wing candidates weren't starting to gain footholds even pre-Trump.

him dying leads them to splinter a bit though which helps

it's quite possible I've been out of the country too long at this point and I'm missing the overall US vibe, but trump long-windedly rambling through that tortured train station analogy, getting slightly lost mid-riff, and ending up complaining about "the commies" just doesn't have the juice his past public appearances had imo. I'm not advising anyone to take it easy or anything — and I have no illusions that the core 40% maniac electorate will vote for him, Ron, or whoever the hell — but idk he's lost almost all the showbiz dazzle he once had. maybe that won't matter, I'm not making any predictions, I literally meant it's hard for me to imagine him succeeding again

alternately, it's just that the terror his public appearances used to precipitate in me has finally gone, which means nothing outside of my own brain

a big factor, i think, which is also very hard to measure and very subjective is how people are watching footage of trump these days. up until the early 2010s, it seems like evening news and mainstream newspapers was a major source, maybe the major source. at some point the major sources switched to just straight up propaganda (fox and rightwing radio already being a thing, then breitbart and daily caller then newsmax and OANN and wherever dumbasses get their news from these days)

i guess what i'm trying to say is that i don't think many conservative voters are likely to even see trump say the dumb shit about "the commies". they'll get a version that edits that out. the people who do see it are the true diehards who will watch a full speech by him or attend a rally, and at that point they're clearly some of the worst, hateful people who are currently alive so they're already a convert

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

Chuds won’t be turned off, but the not insignificant segment of people who in 2016 may have been like “he’s a successful businessman and I always said we need a businessman as president and sure he says weird things but he’ll mellow out in office” may be tuned off this time.

poll: will you be shocked

A special grand jury that investigated election interference by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies in Georgia recommended indictments of multiple people on a range of charges in its report, most of which remains sealed, the forewoman of the jury said in an interview today.

“It is not a short list,” the forewoman, Emily Kohrs, said, adding that the jury had appended eight pages of legal code “that we cited at various points in the report.”

She declined to discuss who specifically the special grand jury recommended for indictment, since the judge handling the case decided to keep those details secret when he made public a few sections of the report last week. But seven sections that are still under wraps deal with indictment recommendations, Ms. Kohrs said.

Asked whether the jurors had recommended indicting Mr. Trump, Ms. Kohrs gave a cryptic answer: “You’re not going to be shocked. It’s not rocket science,” adding “you won’t be too surprised.”

...“We definitely started with the first phone call, the call to Secretary Raffensperger that was so publicized,” said Ms. Kohrs, whom The Associated Press first named and spoke with on Tuesday about the election meddling investigation.

“I will tell you that if the judge releases the recommendations, it is not going to be some giant plot twist,” she added. “You probably have a fair idea of what may be on there. I’m trying very hard to say that delicately.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/21/us/jury-in-georgia-trump-inquiry-recommended-multiple-indictments-forewoman-says.html

https://i.imgur.com/VIPWosK.png

Ms. Kohrs said she was between jobs, after helping make masks during the pandemic, when she received a grand jury summons last year. Even though she didn’t vote in 2020, she said she was “insanely excited” about serving on the jury, adding, “This is one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me.”

She could tell that not everyone on the jury felt the same way. “It seemed like everybody else was not initially happy about eight months of jury duty,” she said, and so she volunteered to be the forewoman.

Among the things that surprised her in listening to the testimony, including from a number of officials from the Trump administration, was “how much people curse in the White House.”

As forewoman, she got to swear in each of the witnesses who came through, including her state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp.

“It was really cool,” she said. “I got 60 seconds of eye contact with everyone who came in the room. You can tell a lot about people in that 60 seconds.”

When she asked David Ralston, the former Georgia House speaker who died in November, if he swore to tell the truth during his testimony last July, he told her “it was the first time in 60 years he had said ‘I do’ to a woman,” Ms. Kohrs said.

Noting that she was 11 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened, Ms. Kohrs said that “Rudy Giuliani is almost like a myth figure in my head, so I’m already intimidated.” She said she made a point of shaking his hand when his testimony was finished.