…So I can’t properly write about everything that’s happened in the course of the last week without every single thing turning into an 800 word rant, so I’ll just briefly recap the insane shit that has happened in the last…Christ, it’s only been a week!? For fuck’s sake…
1.) On Saturday at Donald Trump’s rally that was more poorly attended than most Week 4 of preseason NFL games, one of the many, many dumb things Mango Unchained said was that he had purposely asked members of his administration to slow down COVID-19 testing.
2.) Predictably, people got rather upset about the President arguing for slowing down testing in the midst of a huge spike in cases, notably in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, where, ya know, his rally was being held.
3.) Administrations officials and even the Vice President all immediately spun it that Trump was telling some sort of nuanced joke that literally no one else could understand, presumably in a bid to…I don’t know, own the libs? Whatever, point is, administration officials said Trump was only joking, and it starts to fade into the news cycle…
4.) Until Tuesday, when Donald Trump unequivocally said he was 100% not joking about asking his administration to slow down COVID-19 testing and repeating the lie that the only reason there are more cases is that there are more tests being conducted.
5.) Trump held a press conference in the Rose Garden with the President of Poland at which he made frequent references to COVID-19 being behind us, at a time when cases are rising all over the country.
6.) In the midst of sagging poll numbers due to his response to COVID-19 and racial unrest that’s spreading across the county, the Trump administration picked now of all times to try, once again, to get the Supreme Court to completely invalidate Obamacare, in the middle of a goddamn health crisis.
7.) Trump has continued unabated to travel to states where spikes are happening, exposing his campaign team and Secret Service agents to the virus and forcing them to quarantine.
Okay…I’m going to detach myself emotionally from the fuckshit and just look at this through a purely political lens..
It has been obvious for some time that Trump’s only plan is that he has no plan. Often times we try to find a method to Trump’s political madness, as though everything he does is driven not by his lizard-brained impulsiveness but by a Machiavellian plot whose machinations we can not possibly comprehend, let alone understand. We told ourselves that Trump’s appeal was in his ability to “tell it like it is” to disaffected white men and women who felt their country was going too fast and leaving them behind, and that his racist rhetoric and blunt tone were calculated risks to appeal to a pocket of voters who rapidly find that their grip on supremacy is slowly but surely being chipped away.
We told ourselves that the weird outburst about Mexicans being racists and about how big his dick was and how he would grab women by the pussy and the demanding to lock up a political opponent were not, in fact, outbursts, but a smart man working a crowd of rubes. We told ourselves that Trump had figured out how to manipulate the media into giving him free coverage and how he had kayfabed an entire swath of people because he was just too damn smart for us.
Even those of us who said we didn’t believe that to be the case probably, in our minds, believed some parts of the lie that Trump was and is a master tactician, moving the political world around like pawns.
If the last six months have told us anything, it’s that Trump is quite literally incapable of that kind of forethought. Trump didn’t use strategy to become President. Trump becoming President was an accident, a variable he almost certainly never accounted for. Trump’s only driving force behind trying to run for President was to see himself on TV, raise his national profile, and then grift a bunch of losers into fronting him enough money to start his own television network.
He tripped dick first into the Presidency and convinced himself he could do a job he had no actual interest in doing. And for the first few years, America was (just barely) in a good enough place that the structures the founders put in place were strong enough to stand up to his more authoritarian leanings. And even those authoritarian impulses had less to do with him maintaining his grip on the Oval Office and fundamentally changing the government into an oligarchy and/or dictatorship than him simply not understanding or caring to understand how government worked, and what his role in it was. He thought being President made you the boss, when it really makes you a highly paid upper-level manager who has to deal with a bunch of shit rolling down hill.
Trump is a fake billionaire who could have used the presidency as a means to become an actual billionaire. There is so much grift to be had, so much money to be made for someone as nakedly corrupt as Trump is. That’s perhaps the most astounding part of Trump’s Presidency; for all he has assisted in dismantling the foundations of the country, if he had actually kept a few of those pillars intact while adopting a tone that even approached “Presidential”, he could’ve been Ronald Reagan.
Reagan was also a sunsetting, doddering, shitty actor who didn’t know what he was doing, but knew enough about the system to know how to become a revered icon among his peers, shoving bucket loads of money into his pocket and the pockets of his corporate enablers. Reagan had a bunch of scandals too, but he knew just enough that he could come across like a wizened old man instead of a political hack praying on racism. (Can you believe Trump hasn’t even attempted to put his name on a building or something as President? Having shit named after him is his entire fucking deal!) Reagan, on some level, had a strategy.
Trump does not have one. He is not acting like a man who wants to be President. Because we are humans, we keep waiting for Trump to pivot. Seriously, all of us do it. Even if you have zero respect for Trump, even if you have a bottomless well of hatred for this man, you’re still waiting for that pivot. Waiting for the master plan to come together. Because we’re all human beings, and we like to see order in chaos. There has to be a reason he’s doing all this.
But that’s just it; there is no reason he’s doing this. Even in 2016, there were times, however brief, that Trump could strike a somewhat moderate tone and kinda sorta seem like maybe he would only be, like, the third worst President in modern history.
Does Trump want to use his rallies as a restart point for his flagging campaign, or does Trump just miss being able to go places and have adoring people chant his name? Is Trump’s unwillingness to acknowledge that COVID-19 is still running wild a calculated plan to appeal to conspiracy theorists and undereducated white men, or is his just trying to pretend it doesn’t exists in the hopes it goes away? Is he defending Confederate statues because he’s using racial division and fear and intimidation politics to rile up the base that propelled him to victory in 2016, or is he just a racist who likes the statues and is completely detached from the politics of it?
Even if you believe all his COVID-19 moves are completely politically valid, attacking Obamacare, an issue that Trump has repeatedly lost on during his presidency, during a goddamn national health crisis makes absolutely no sense.
The only conclusion you can draw is that Trump just doesn’t believe any of the copious amounts of data that suggests he is currently a major underdog. And that I can partially understand I guess, but numerous reports point out that Trump doesn’t only completely reject data from national polls, but repeatedly disregards polls made by his own goddamn team, the types of people who literally have to make picture books for the President to be interested in what he deems the boring parts of being a president.
I mean, imagine that; his own team formulated a well thought out if not morally dubious answer to why Trump would say he what he said in Tulsa about demanding his people stop testing so many people. They fought with news anchors and “the lamestream media” and said that he was only joking, and that the liberals were just being punked into thinking he was serious…and then the first opportunity Trump had to step in front of a microphone, he completely invalidated their work, in an attempt to own his ignorance.
He didn’t have to step on that rake. He chose to step on it.
None of this is to suggest Trump can not be re-elected. But at this point, all the polls would have to be the most wrong they’ve ever been to account for a polling error this fucking big. Not just national polls, not just state polls, but Trump’s internal polling that he pays for.
And instead of even trying to come close to doing anything that could be remotely be considered “a small change to maybe not seem like a craven, brutally and fatally stupid dipshit”, Trump has re-entrenched himself, taking on ideas and policies that groups he won in 2016 are increasingly uncomfortable with.
Just go and play with an interactive electoral college map, and you will see how narrow Trump’s path to victory is. And it’s not like I want Trump to win; I’d more than welcome the ability to bag on Joe Biden for being a bad President.
But it does go to show you that Trump seemingly lacks any sort of desire to create a coherent message or even do this fucking job. He has no valid reason for why he should be President anymore; he keeps bagging on Joe Biden for his age, but Trump is old too. He can’t talk about how he’s gonna keep building his wall when migration has slowed to a fucking trickle and the European Union is considering not letting us into their countries. He might get a cheap pop for calling COVID-19 “Kung Flu”, but there’s not enough juice in that particular racism orange to get him very far. He can’t run on law and order at a time where white attitudes about police brutality are finally starting to change. He can’t run on trade because he keeps getting worked into a chute by every dictator and authoritarian and coming out the other side with precisely zero deals. He can’t run on repealing Obamacare because America has repeatedly spoken up and said they don’t want it repealed. He can’t run on draining the swamp when the swamp creatures keep writing books about how much of a creature of the swamp he is.
Watching Trump’s rambly, two hour campaign events lays bare just how little he has to fucking offer.
Here’s the TL;DR — I don’t want Trump to be President anymore. But I’m consistently baffled that he doesn’t seem to want to be President either. Or even that, in the interest of making as much money as possible to spend on mistresses and bad lacefront toupees, he wants to stay President. He just seems fucking done, and tired, and unwilling to even try to pretend to engage in something approximating a contest.
Which is fine! But it’s frustrating that we let this man who didn’t want to do this job do the thing he didn’t want to do, and now we all have to suffer because he’s stopped even pretending he wants to do it.
Trump has abdicated a responsibility he never wanted, and now he’s seemingly willing to let it all burn. I honestly, truly think that deep down, Trump has no desire to get re-elected. It’s why I don’t put much stock in the thought that he wouldn’t vacate the Oval Office if he loses; Trump is a coward, and I can’t imagine a coward potentially risking getting dragged out of the house. He’ll leave the place in disrepair and act like he got screwed. But I think he’ll be relieved. He can go back to being a goon and a simp and never have to worry about anyone other than himself again.
Joe Biden might be handed a country that’s on fire, from a man who doesn’t know how fire works. Or worse; he could be elected again, and we spend the next four years watching the house burn down, while Trump doesn’t even care about putting the flames out.
Even shorter TL;DR: I’m not asking Trump to be a good President, I just want him to try to be a good corrupt President. At least then, things could potentially make sense.
You’re right. It’s all been an accident. An extremely unlikely series of events that somehow lined up and shoved this imbecile into all our lives. Trump is Bizarro Forrest Gump.
Forrest was defined by a good heart and limited intellect. The thing that defines Trump is hatred and mental illness. Whatever has happened in that weird cavity beneath that awful combover, it’s manifested in a serious decline in mental acuity and capacity. I’m not saying he was smart to begin with — far from it. But anyone who’s watched friends or relatives decline can see the same things here. Irrational anger, bizarre outbursts, linking unrelated things together, extreme paranoia, limited speech and vocabulary, the list goes on and on.
I’ve said it before, but he’s almost purely reactive now. He simply lashes out at any stimulus, and that reaction is typically both inappropriate and extreme. He can’t not react — it’s the only thing tethering him, however tenuously, to reality. He’s the old man yelling at clouds writ large, and he’s in charge of a country. But if he’s not yelling, he won’t exist any more, even to himself.
I’d love to see him pay for his crimes, but as soon as he loses this election (please God), he’s going to completely detach. They’re propping him up with medication now, but once that becomes pointless and the pills get cut off, I think he’ll be virtually catatonic in a few months.
He’s a grotesque version of Chauncey Gardner with his base hanging on his every word. It defies logic!
Another way to think about it is that Trump isn’t here because he particularly wanted it. He is incapable of that kind of knowledge. Their system put him here.
He is here because the Republican system has been tuning and retuning itself to burp up the ultimate expression of their dreams. Trump is the final product churned out by their system.
This is why there has been no meaningful pushback against him in the GOP. The supposed libertarians only really cared about slashing taxes on the rich, and wiping out environmental regulations. The religious right only wanted to be able to stick their beliefs in the faces of other people. The hawks only wanted to keep the military spending going. The racists wanted their dumb white base to keep hating. And all of them, above all else, wanted to destroy anything the liberals supported.
And all of the other 2016 GOP candidates couldn’t express those things as reflexively and mindlessly as he could. The GOP algorithm rated them as too complicated and too confusing, even if they were barely any different.
The rational man and the rational party would turn on each other, but he is the GOP in all of its purity, and neither he nor the party have any clue how they got here.
…I think possibly part of what brought him to the fore & ultimately both gave him the presidency & kept him safe from conviction in the impeachment thing is the same thing that the likes of Vlad found appealing
…he’s not just any old useful idiot…he’s the universal idiot…all these little subsets of fuckwittery believe he’s *their* useful idiot
…& they all think they’re getting away with everything they want to while he acts as the lightning rod when the backlash shows up
…I just hope they find that in the long term they’re wrong about that?
Trump being the fall guy is interesting, and certainly on brand for the GOP. I suspect that they would have started backing away from the crazy man during his second term. But I think they’ve let things go a little too far and a little too long — the pandemic has been a serious game-changer, and now it’s too late for them to start distancing themselves from him. They gambled on a second Trump term, and that’s now in serious doubt. The GOP is kind of stuck on a ship that started taking on water MUCH faster than they thought.
Then they gambled on the virus going away — and now they’re backpedaling furiously. The governor of Florida, a witless nincompoop Trump lickspittle, was forced to close bars today, after touting “reopening” the economy. Virus cases spiked massively. It’s happening elsewhere, too. And every time these idiots have to backtrack, their limited credibility takes another beating.
Bottom line — the GOP bet on the wrong horse, and they went ALL in. Hopefully they will pay for it in November.
My only contribution is that I’m still firmly of the belief that Trump does want a second term–as continued protection from prosecution, since Barr’s made it clear he won’t let Trump be charged/subpoenaed while in office. God willing, if Biden and the Dems retake the White House and Senate, even then I don’t think for a second they’ll prosecute 45* with any meaningful force for his corruption and other crimes. They’ll be too busy making a big show of ‘national healing’, ‘reaching across the aisle’, or whatever other “taking the high road” bullshit a la post-Nixon.
Fuck that. I want the SDNY to make sure Trump, his family, his entire organization never gets a moment’s peace for their crimes. Rot in a goddamn jail cell, you Facist Fanta piece of shit.
Damn. That analysis is so excellent that I wish I wrote it. He’s the GOP Frankenstein’s Monster, and he’s run amok. He’s what they built, and now they don’t know how to shut him down.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/05/28/donald-trump-convention-1988-285832
the band strikes up, the confetti starts to fall, the balloons are rising and falling,” 150,000 of them, red, white and blue, and there were 15-plus minutes of sustained, ecstatic sound. And in the middle of this scene, Trump said something, not quite to Gay, who was immediately to his left, but loud enough for him to hear.“This is what I want.”
This is it in a nutshell. trump wanted the trappings of the presidency. He wanted to be worshiped. He wanted rallies and parades, photo ops, state dinners, golf games with celebrities, Air Force One. He wanted to be seen with and as a strong man like Putin, like Erdogan.
The early days were sort of fun, he’d politically destroyed HRC, who had the temerity to not invite him to Chelsea’s wedding. There was a story going around the trump called HRC’s personal assistant saying he’d mislaid his invitation, could they send another. His request was refused, the assistant knew he’d never been invited. He set about dismantling the achievements of the uppity Black man who insulted him in public. In jest of course, jest but that didn’t matter to trump. Then people asked him to read and learn stuff. He was expected to work. He managed to wriggle out of most of it until the pandemic hit. Bill Barr can’t lock the virus up or threatened it into submission. No matter how hard he tries trump can’t lie the virus away. Neither can he photo op his way out of the protests and demands for long overdue equality. It didn’t work at St. John’s.
I don’t know if he’s just going through the motions because he still owes Putin, or he’s afraid of losing in such a public way. If he’s trying to do as much damage as he can before he’s no longer, hopefully, in the White House. If he knows he’s got it in the bag because the Russians have a foolproof plan to cheat him into a second term. It’s maddening trying make sense of what you’ve pointed out is nonsensical!
The problems with the “Russia has this election in the bag for him” gambit are 1.) at least at this point, four months out from the election, Biden has such a sizable gap that this manipulation would have to be both supremely sophisticated and insanely noticeable to be able to put winning the electoral college in play (there’s just not enough votes that they can selectively skim off the top to give Trump a narrow victory this time), 2.) Putin is kinda sorta dealing with his own coronavirus controversy, which leads me to 3.) Putin is too busy trying to change Russia’s constitution to ensure he stays in power to give a shit about anything Trump is doing.
At this point, Trump doesn’t help Putin any, even if Trump does own millions of dollars to Russian oligarchs. In fact, Trump being pressured into putting sanctions on Russia probably all but hurt that relationship. I have no doubt that Putin will tell Trump what Trump wants to hear, but at the end of the day, Putin doesn’t really give a shit if Trump sinks or swims at this point. He’s got his own shit going on.
And the strange thing is, as damaging as Trump’s Presidency has been, if he was even the least bit more effective, he could have enriched himself and his friends for the rest of his life, paid off his debts to the Russian, and set up a functional oligarchy, all with the help of a rabid base and left things far worse. And he hasn’t fucking done that! Instead his base keeps on shrinking and he actively makes moves to undermine his advisers while surrounding himself with actual, literal know nothings like Jared Kushner and
NuMelaniaHope Hicks.At this point, Trump even fails at being a failure.
This makes sense, but I’m afraid to get my hopes up. Not that Biden is some great prize.
It’s been said over and over, and in innumerable different forms and permutations but here we go one more time: fuck this orange idiot dipshit. The above comments are spot-on that he wanted the glory and prestige of the title of POTUS without any of the responsibility. This man who is the the maximal combination of laziness, stupidity, and lack of self-awareness is rounding out his first stint in an actually demanding job and it has ruined him. On top of that, he’s uniquely unqualified for the particular crises facing America right now. It does bring me some joy to watch this blatant fraud’s cult of personality crumble around him, but good lord it is a travesty that it’s taken this long.
He thought it was a ceremonial position, like Queen Elizabeth. He had visions of getting rich off the title alone, while letting others handle the ‘work.’ He never for one second thought President Obama was actually doing anything while in the White House. He saw him grow into a beloved figure the world over, and he wanted that adulation. He had no clue what he was signing up for.
paraphrasing Eddie Murphy; “I fucking won?!?!?”
…sadly I think even that is overly kind…he wouldn’t understand how to be the kind of monarch england currently has…I think he imagined something more like henry viii?
…that guy invented his own church just to invent divorce because the optics were bad on the multiply executed sort of ex-wives…& because the church that didn’t have divorce did have a bunch of demands…like money (iirc) & fealty
…love her or hate her liz’s gig would be at least as far beyond the man as the one he’s currently burning down around his ears…not that any of that in any way changes all the ways that everything you said is on the money?
I agree with everything except the part about Reagan “knowing what he was doing.” The people around him knew what they were doing but I honestly believe Reagan had Alzheimer’s his entire presidency. His son thinks it was three years in but I heard an interview with a psychiatrist that was on the staff at the time that said she diagnosed it before he took office. Can’t find the book she wrote though. This is the Ron Reagan comment…
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/side-effects/201101/when-did-reagans-first-signs-alzheimers-appear
Trump only wants to remain president because the other option is jail. He can run out the statute of limitations on a bunch of his legal issues if he wins but maybe not if he doesn’t. I hope Biden doesn’t pull an Obama and in the “call for unity” not pursue criminal indictments on those fuckers! Every last one of the Trump crime family should be in jail or hung for treason. My kids tell me the youth have a plan to “Free Barron”, I told them he is probably already a lost cause but they seem to know more than me lately so who knows.
But do you honestly think Trump is self-aware enough to think that prison time for him is genuinely an option?
Trump has been a criminal for most of his adult life and has largely skated by without jail time and only having to pay out money and settlements, and most of that I’m assuming is coming from loans that he had no plan to pay. I can’t fathom a world where Trump is thinking to himself “I can’t lose the Presidency, what if they put me in jail?”, because he’s never shown the kind of introspection that would make that a thought that could cross his mind.
Because ultimately, part of Trump’s unique, toxic combination of narcissism and self-loathing creates a cocktail of sustained ignorant bliss. It’s why he can’t look data straight in the face and believe anything it’s saying. It’s why he doesn’t want to learn anything. Trump has this sort of blind, creepy-as-fuck optimism that everyone is just going to go his way.
“He’s scared he’ll go to jail” rings as hollow as “He’s going to refuse to leave office”, because it flies in the face of loads of evidence that Trump is completely oblivious in the former case and too much of a coward in the latter case.
…I think it might be one of those why-not-both things?
…like…on the one hand he actually does have a lifetime’s experience to tell him he’s right about “how the world works” including him being able to skate away absent negative consequences as long as he sticks to what daddy & daddy’s lawyer (the good kind that viewed taking notes as disloyal & unprofessional & generally fucking stupid since they’re inevitably incriminating) taught him…& the loadsa money facade doesn’t spring too many leaks…then he can finagle others to bail him out in an effort to save their own asses
…but his odds of that panning out in his favor improve dramatically if he can hide behind presidential immunity until the statute of limitations runs its course on a few of the more recent things he’s so obviously guilty of…all while flinging shitty judges at benches the way monkeys throw shit at unsuspecting zoo patrons
…so he didn’t want the job…doesn’t understand the job…would like to be shot of the whole thing…& always intended his re-election funds to be the r.o.i to line his pockets/service his insane debt (which must be the book-keeping equivalent of an escher painting by now) so never really wanted to use it up on getting back in for the second term
…but he knows the list of things he ought to have been in jail for is so long he can’t even remember most of it on any given day & the white house has shielded him from stuff even he can’t have been confident it could so he also fancies the extended warranty combo deal supersized with the pocket AG package bolted on because he surely does love that special immunity
…sure it makes no fucking sense & is arguably the biggest failure of imagination since faust screwed the pooch on the part-exchange value of a soul…but the man was a moron before his brain atrophied so that’s pretty much to be expected?
The other piece of his legal troubles that may scare him more than prison is the threat to his businesses.
He probably knows better than ever what kind of fire and fury the IRS can bring, and he won’t have Mnunchin blocking for him anymore if he loses. He is going to have a boatload of creditors banging on the door too as the real estate and travel industry slumps continue, and all the promises of what a president can do for them will evaporate if he loses.
He’s had his idiot sons running things for almost four years, and they’re twice as bad as he is. And he knows allies like Kushner and Adelson will run for the hills the instant he’s out of office.
Yeah, I think I’m coming down on this side of the debate. Trump can’t consider possible consequences because he can’t conceive of any consequences. He’s not a master strategist — he’s not even an incompetent strategist. He can’t think farther ahead than whatever is in front of him right now. It’s that totally reactive thing I mentioned. That’s why he does so many stupidly self-destructive things — he can’t see a range of potential outcomes, or any outcomes at all. So he blurts out horseshit and takes crazy actions because he can’t see how they might affect him until it actually happens.
I’ve also worked for a few toxic narcissists in my life, and the one characteristic that linked them was insanely overwhelming self-confidence. All of them were vastly smarter than Trump, but they still felt they were utterly untouchable. One was arrested by the feds and is still serving time, and the other two were ousted by their boards of directors (both of them TWICE after launching second companies). None of them ever saw it coming (even the second time!) because they were blinded by their own self-confidence.