Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

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

Reagan was a middling actor who made his political bones by betraying his friends. That pretty much set the tone for the rest of his life.

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

― frogbs,

No, I know you don't think so! I'm saying that acknowledging the enemy's gifts isn't endorsement.

and like you I've spent hundreds of hours at this point reminding my Dem base in South Florida that it's been downhill for Trump since 2016.

xp There was actually a thing called a 'Reagan democrat' and they numbered in the tens of thousands... I'm sure Trump converted a handful in 2016 but none in 2020

It didn't help that the Dems in 84 ran . . . Walter Mondale.

There was actually a thing called a 'Reagan democrat' and they numbered in the tens of thousands..

More than that if you count both presidential elections and what went on for the next 20 years

There's an old Mondale event poster in a liquor store on San Pablo Ave on the Oakland/Emeryville border... 'Featuring Gov. Jerry Brown"

I have no idea why they haven't taken it down

The thing is Trumps political instincts are terrible.

This is true but it also supposes that he cares about politics as we think of them. If you view this all as the grandest prima donna act in a life full of them — a relentless need and urge to be bigger and bigger and bigger — rather than as some kind of political enterprise, I think he makes more sense. Of course people around him are using him for political ends, and he's happy for them to do it as long as they put him in front of adoring crowds, but also he's constantly getting in the way of their political ends because most of them he doesn't really care about. (Except, like, the racist and sexist ones, he's fully on board with those.)

Which is to say, Trump and Reagan wanted different things from politics and the presidency. Reagan cared about both in ways Trump never will.

xps my dad (who is horrible but that's not relevant to this example) literally voted Republican/Reagan for the first time in his life b/c he hated Mondale so much

I'm saying that acknowledging the enemy's gifts isn't endorsement.

― the dreaded dependent claus (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

see the thing is framing it as a "gift" I think implies a level of skill that may not be there. its true that being an abrasive asshole loudmouth who speaks off the cuff and doesn't learn shit got him really far in life, but it's also true that this is a country where those born rich can do no wrong, with a legal system where you can stymie pretty much any lawsuit by just bleeding the plantiff dry and a tax system where rich property owners can effectively pay nothing. and of course a political & media system that really loves controversy. I mean this is a country that briefly made Charlie Sheen its biggest celebrity when he was going through a mental breakdown and allowed the "cash me outside" girl to bank millions of dollars for no reason at all. We made the Jersey Shore cast household names and the Kardashians billionaires. By the way I'm not saying anything bad about those folks, I have nothing against any of them, just saying Trump strikes me as a uniquely American thing. Fascists and racists and authoratarians can and do win elections all over the globe but Trump feels like a guy who could only win in America. You think his approval rating was low here? Every poll ran outside of America revealed that 85% of the planet thought Trump was a tremendous dipshit.

so like, if he was actually 'gifted', or was indeed some kind of "master wizard" as the Dilbert guy liked to say, surely he could leverage that shit a bit better? he was reduced to a babbling maniac on the debate stage by...Joe Biden. he floated tremendously dumb ideas constantly and immediately had to either walk them back or spend weeks insisting people heard him wrong. literally every single person who's ever worked for him says he's a moron who's trivially easy to manipulate. he was played like a fiddle by Steve Bannon, the guy commiting fraud in broad daylight who is currently suggesting that a Trump/RFK ticket would unite the nation. so does he actually have gifts or do we live in one sick fuck of a nation?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F3BuPzfXkAAadG9.jpg

Just want to interject that he looks like a Frank Miller drawing of himself at this point.

EMERGENCY EYEWASH STATION

Obviously Trump has unusual political abilities. Tons of people with more political experience than him and much savvier political teams have tried to get elected president and failed. It's not an easy thing to do, especially running as he did the first time with no real infrastructure or even any real clue about how to go about it. It's not giving him credit to say he has actual political talents, it's just acknowledging the obvious. That doesn't make him "smart," obviously, but ask Liz Warren how far smart gets you.

If we accept that the man is trivially easy to manipulate then it becomes much harder to explain why he always ends up doing exactly as he pleases in spite of dozens of his closest political advisors, defense lawyers, members of Congress and sitting judges trying to persuade him to do otherwise, including Steve Bannon, who was tossed aside and verbally abused just like every other person who enters his inner circle. The manipulators seem to have a very poor track record imo.

xxxpost Donald Trump as Flattop in...Dick Tracy

I think that’s more down to the fact that, as every book written about him claims, he only remembers what the last person he talked to said

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.

lmao I forgot about this.

Just want to interject that he looks like a Frank Miller drawing of himself at this point.

there is a method to how he conducts himself. he treats everyone and everything around him with contempt, as if life itself is a joke. this makes a certain % of people love him as they wish they too were liberated from moral constraints. and then for the people who try to stop him, they just end up embarrassing themselves. ever try to discipline an unruly kid and then have the kid laugh at you? that’s what it’s like to criticize him.

he was reduced to a babbling maniac on the debate stage by...Joe Biden.

By the way I'm not saying anything bad about those folks, I have nothing against any of them

Oh, I do. This country worships absolute morons. Maybe that’s true elsewhere, I dunno, but thanks for reminding me that a dumb, affected teenager could signed to a recording contract thanks to an appearance on Jerry Springer. (many do)

That was supposed to say many xp, stupid phone.