Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

Because I got hyphen

What a moron, doesn't know a hyphen from an ampersand.

Given his diet, maybe he should be a bit more concerned with the colon.

Tip your waitress.

Trump is soooooo dumb
How dumb is he?
He's so dumb he thinks putting air quotes around things makes them inadmissible
He thinks Question Mark means his chief of staff has to testify before Congress

It's almost impossible for me to comprehend the minutiae and the endless petty grievances that must circle his head 24/7, like turds flushing in a gold-plated toilet bowl.

have you hung out on right wing social media? That's all your neighbors and relatives do.

It's almost impossible for me to comprehend the minutiae and the endless petty grievances that must circle his head 24/7, like turds flushing in a gold-plated toilet bowl.

Even amongst his followers, I wonder what percentage see that tweet and think, "Yeah, Fuck CNN for leaving out that hyphen."

guarantee you it's happening

have you hung out on right wing social media?

I used to check out Freerepublic occasionally to see what they were on about, but quit long ago. I try to stay away from the comments section of the media I consume as I don't care what garbage people think, but sometimes I feel the need to correct utter lies/bullshit.

I haven't thought about Freerepublic since we liberals were all lying about how great the Iraq War was going

There's one blogger I read who still reposts Free Republic comments as if that proves anything other than that nursing homes shouldn't have internet access.

I found out a friend has a Truth social account to see what kind of stupid crap is going on. What entertained me is that all of the Trump posts max out at around 800 likes. Not a high engagement platform!

Sad!

It’s not that we liked or enjoyed or found Trump funny. It’s that we understood what would make him appealing to other people. As much as I wish the man would vanish into a black hole, on, like, the very basic charming con man level, I get it!

With Captain Florida, there is just … nothing, nada, zilch. There is no charm, or soaring oratory, or grace, or even a sense of being comfortable in his own skin.

i created a Gab account after it launched. Dunno how much traction that still has amongst those types but it was wall-to-wall racism and insanity.

on, like, the very basic charming con man level, I get it!

here on ilx there were many who delighted in Trump's early "big-mass-of-candidates debate" appearances in the summer of 2015. they cheered him on as he relentlessly belittled all his more conventional media-favored opponents like jeb! cruz and rubio. he was viewed as a kind of useful idiot cutting the "real" candidates down to size.

Classic

on the one hand he single-handedly burned the Bush-Cheney republican party to the ground, which is pretty classic. otoh he rules over a fanatically loyal zombie army numbering in the tens of millions, all clamoring to eat our brains, which is very dud.

checking in on the competition

There is something very wrong with this man pic.twitter.com/pOpInPBj5q

— Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) August 8, 2023

Trump is not just funny, he is the world’s greatest performance artist. His whole insane persona, an effete New York billionaire asshole turned idiot king of the “deplorables” of rural America, would be a remarkable literary invention, but he actually played it out in a reality. Everything he touches is somehow diminished — it is impossible for a serious person to be a patriotic American now, even in a qualified sense, after he reduced the pageantry of our politics to a pornographic spectacle. He ruined an entire country — a massive country, the world’s most powerful country — through the sheer perversity of his personality, and since we stooped to his level it’s hard to say we didn’t deserve it. (Resistance liberals, especially me, were as cringe as his supporters.) I hope he dies soon. He is a curse upon all of us. The fact that his performance was great doesn’t mean it wasn’t despicable and evil.

he was meant to die of covid, the perfect end to his story, the fact that the drugs that saved his life were produced just in time to do so was an affront to god

that shit is all so wild in retrospect because it's clear now how Trump's campaign and eventual victory was pretty much all a media creation. virtually nobody took him seriously back then, in fact I remember some CNN talking head going "I dunno, his poll numbers are pretty good, there could be something happening here" and getting laughed out of the room. even Trump himself was apparently only doing it to draw attention to himself in order to get The Celebrity Apprentice renewed. but he got ratings and so the RNC made the decision to focus these 12-man debates solely on him, and the media promoted them hard by going "oooh what's Trump gonna say next? who's the next guy to get a nickname? how racist is he gonna be?", essentially giving him billions of dollars worth of free airtime. and none of the other candidates wanted to attack him because it was clear he had 90% of the lunatic/KKK vote and they all wanted to be the guy who collected that once he inevitably dropped out. and because the GOP stands for nothing at all it turns out the voters actually didn't care who was a "serious" candidate, they just voted for the guy who made everyone mad, because that shit is how they get off in life. I mean if the media had just treated him like any other candidate he probably would've been one of the first guys out, now an entire political party is chained to a dude who is actively and brazenly trying to burn down the entire country

"I don't know how to tell you this, Donald, but these were not monoclonal antibodies you were given. You were given...poison"

"w...how is this....possible"

(doctor turns around, last name Rubio)

The fact that he A) didn't accept his defeat, and B) actively attempted to overturn it, was the final blow in his clown show

Authoritarians all over the world can point and say, "See - democracy is a complete mess! Trust us instead" ... all based on his inability to accept defeat with grace

pic.twitter.com/0l1xtYZeeK

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) August 8, 2023

I also pitch that it be written by Matthew Yglesias, Tulsi Gabbard, and Bret Stephens

Oh, that was actually in the Times today

it was written by a Hoover Institute guy who served in the W. cabinet. Total insanity, the op-ed has 4000 comments from incensed libs.

I don't know, seems like a sound argument. Prosecuting Trump is just so divisive. So is beating him in elections. We should let him have this do-over in the name of national unity.

he was meant to die of covid, the perfect end to his story, the fact that the drugs that saved his life were produced just in time to do so was an affront to god

I thought he was supposed to die of huffing horse tranquilizers or something.

Maybe injecting pureed Big Macs.

I forget. Hard to keep track of the wacky Diet Coke memes and the ither absurd shit that should have rid us of this charlatan long ago. And yet he remains. I am tired of even thinking about his stupid face and hair and yet he remains.

Will no on rid me etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSTWqRkBN74

Will no one rid me etc., meant to say.

The dude heard "don't look directly at the eclipse" and was like, "I will now look directly at the eclipse." And yet he is still with us, constantly. Can someone please tell him not to jump into a volcano?

the op-ed has 4000 comments from incensed libs

"We did it again!" the members of the Times editorial board wheeze from behind their oxygen masks, high-fiving each other in slow motion.

idk it probably wouldn't have been as much fun as you think. when Trump was hospitalized you had people like Rachel Maddow, Stephen Colbert, and Morning Joe all saying shit like "obviously I disagree with him on many things, but he's still the President and we pray for him to have a speedy recovery" which felt truly deranged to me. I mean these are people who got on TV 4-5 days a week to talk about how terrible this dude was for the country and how he was pretty much singlehandedly getting people killed during the pandemic, and now we have to *pray* for him? fuck off. he got Covid because he held a huge event in celebration of the death of RBG, the exact sort of mass gathering that every doctor in the country was saying you shouldn't do. if he died it would 100% be because he deserved it and the entire country would be unambigiously better off for it. yet I bet anything if it had actually happened you'd have wall-to-wall "respectful" coverage of his passing in a way that would've made him a martyr and the first big media personality to imply that he had it coming would immediately lose their job.

Can someone please tell him not to jump into a volcano?

Yeah, sure, but with our luck there would be a perfectly timed blast of cooler air that just lifts him back and gently sets him down from whence he leapt, cursing us to another year of his continued existence.

(NB this isn't a commentary of the "oh whenever will he face legal consequences" ilk, just more about his consistent dumb luck in failing upwards despite his best efforts)

lol I can't imagine a bunch of corporate media people saying, "Burn in hell President Dickhead!"

yeah, if he died the whole nation would have been forced to act real sad by both Maga chuds and tone-policing centrists. It would have sucked. Instead his humiliation to losing...to Joe Fucking Biden, was the truly great end.

https://i.imgur.com/zkgCFxy.gif

I guess I'm too uptight but it does genuinely bug me when people on the left who otherwise despise him are like "he's so funny! I hope this king never dies so we won't ever be denied moments like this" in response to the latest dumbass thing that he's said during a rally or whatever. I am incapable of enjoying anything about him or any aspect of his personal presentation, no matter how much of an ironic remove I situate myself at. I find him repellent in an absolute sense, and I don't want to see or hear from him ever again.

Should I loosen up and enjoy the ride as he enters his late Elvis phase and starts to morph into irl something like how Eli Valley depicts him? Maybe... but when he calls Chris Christie a fat slob or whatever I just feel like I am at the most depressing dive bar ever, listening to a drunken loudmouth regular commenting on whatever's showing on the tv overhead. Soon it will be almost a decade that he's been blasted into our consciousness on a more or less daily basis. Just a bad dream that never ends, or a particularly shitty horror movie franchise.

Soon it will be almost a decade that he's been blasted into our consciousness on a more or less daily basis.

Imagine having grown up in the East Coast media market and knowing the fucker by face, name and reputation for 40 years, maybe longer. In New York and New Jersey, he's been famous — and a famous piece of shit — for pretty much my entire life.

I guess I'm too uptight but it does genuinely bug me when people on the left who otherwise despise him are like "he's so funny! I hope this king never dies so we won't ever be denied moments like this"

About that last sentence -- wow, you know people who've said this?

yea I feel that's overstating it, I think it's possible to hate his guts and still think he does shit that's funny, I know a lot of people who feel that way who think him potentially dying of Covid would've been the funniest thing ever

I do admit I've got pretty mixed feelings about those Twitter personalities who made their entire shtick "look at this dumb asshole", feel like they've got a pretty symbiotic relationship with him that makes that shit tough to watch. like that lady who got a billion views just lip synching Trump speeches, that shit fucking sucked

I mean it in no complimentary way whatsoever to acknowledge his showmanship and weird sort of charisma. Those are both key to successful authoritarian figures. It’s not that I in any way enjoy him, I just recognize that for all his ludicrous lunacy he has actual political strengths that (obviously) we underestimate at our peril.

Every day I pray for a chicken or fish bone to do its deadly chore, but then I realize he only eats chicken tenders shaped like dinosaurs, and never eats fish outside of an annual shrimp cocktail

It's like denying that Reagan had genuine political gifts -- the guy won in two electoral landslides, he must have done a lot to woo Dems.

The thing is Trumps political instincts are terrible. He got jack shit done in office and permanently alienated a bunch of the base. He keeps backing the biggest freaks possible many of whom go on to lose races that shouldn’t have even been close. He was literally attacking the country’s World Cup team just a few days ago. What he’s good at is television. He knows how to chuck red meat and how to get himself on the news. He knows that being the GOP nominee means you can say and do whatever the fuck you want and no one will hold you accountable. He won the nom in 2016 because he was the most shameless and nakedly racist. That seems a lot different to me than what Reagan had, even as shameless and racist as that guy was

Btw I know you’re not comparing the two Alf just remarking it’s a very different thing, Reagan definitely did know how to court moderates and centrist Dems, I can’t imagine Trump winning over a single 2020 Biden voter in 2024, he just has no clue how to do anything but pull ratings

Keep 'em coming:

Fulton County DA Fani Willis, who has been investigating Donald Trump and his allies' efforts to overturn the Georgia 2020 election results, is likely to go before the grand jury next week to present her case, sources tell ABC News.
https://t.co/TpLKqedGhe

— Olivia Rubin (@OliviaRubinABC) August 8, 2023