What is Trump even saying here?
Trump: Which is incapable of solvin’ even the sollest problem. We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on pic.twitter.com/eM7dTV8iHe
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) January 23, 2024
On his good days, Trump is still fine. On his bad days he can barely string two sentences together.
Still, his meaning is clear: America is going completely to hell. It's doom porn. For some reason, there's a big audience of people who just can't get enough of this stuff. Like Ted Johnson, who was profiled today in Politico:
“People need to be held accountable. That’s why you’ve got to break the system to fix the system,” he said. “Because it’s a zero-sum game right now. And to be honest with you, the Democrats are genius. They did anything they could do to win and gain power, even if they lie, cheat, steal. … What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country. Who could bring it back?” He answered his own question: “Trump’s the only one.”
What's remarkable is this description of Johnson:
He’s 58. He’s married to his second wife and has three young adult sons. He was in the Army for 22 years — he retired as a lieutenant colonel — and now he is a senior project manager for an IT security company and works from home. He lives in a classic three-bedroom house he bought almost four years ago for $485,000 that’s now worth roughly a quarter-million dollars more.
This is not some discouraged working class guy who lost his job to outsourcing and has never been able to recover. Johnson is married, upper middle class, makes good money, and lives in a nice, safe small town where almost everyone has a college degree. But after watching Fox News he went from thinking he'd vote for Nikki Haley to being a die-hard Trump supporter. Because Democrats are destroying the country and someone has to take a wrecking ball to it before we can rebuild.
I know that not everyone is as well off as me. Still, it's just a fact that the vast majority of Americans are in pretty good shape and the country as a whole is as strong as any country in the world. The burning desire among many conservatives and liberals to believe that everything is horrible—and getting worse—is nothing short of inexplicable.
I clicked on the link and looked at the face and thought "another guy with a hardscrabble life" duped by the Big Lie. And I, too, was surprised to learn he's a former high rank military officer and a now gainfully employed IT manager with a nice house in a very pleasant part of New England suburbia. Extraordinary. Some people enjoy small picture intelligence but big picture idiocy.
This isn't really a surprise to me. A disturbing number of people in the right wing orbit have GOOD lives.
It makes it even more clear that it's about the loss of relative privilege for white males feeling like oppression.
Just reading the demographics about this guy, it all made sense to me: lily white name, retired service member now working in IT (both of which skew right), and affluent suburban homeowner. Of course he's only a semi-reluctant Trumpist.
I'd add to this that there is a very, very large component of this being comfortable people looking to complain about something. Oppressed people will form movements and use serious politics to push back on their oppression*--their tactics and demands are linked to real-world problems. There is (or can be) joy and fulfillment in working towards solving those problems, but that is secondary.
But comfortable people don't really _have_ real-world problems. Nonetheless, there is still joy and fulfillment in being part of a movement (or a perceived movement), and those feelings are enhanced if the movement has some hazy connection to Big Things. So the maga crowd has attracted a lot of well-off people with the leisure and resources to get their kicks from getting riled up about nonsense while wearing red hats.
The tell is something like how much these folks are upset about trans people. Trans people of course don't present any actual problems for anybody, but even if they did, there are so vanishingly few of them that it wouldn't be worth discussing outside of niche areas. Nonetheless I constantly hear from conservatives how what they perceive to be the wrong gender of person getting to play a sport in high school is a Big Issue that must be discussed (and how it's very suspicious that the Elites--whoever those might be--aren't discussing it enough).
So in my eyes, it comes down to a lot of hat-wearing by people with nothing better to do. Maga people like being maga people, and their catechism and in-group uniform is yammering about whatever issue other maga people are yammering about, and the more trivial/nonfalsifiable that issue is, the less risk getting all roused up about it poses to one's actual comfortable life.
______
*Provided, of course, that the oppression is not so bad as to rob the oppressed of the ability to engage politically.
LTC Johnson had 22 years of guaranteed pay checks, medical care and pension contributions. Then Biden closes Afghanistan, the military’s last justification for unlimited funding.
Funny as a proud military man he’s okay with T for throwing WWII vets, Ukrainians and Kurds under the bus.
Also not surprising was his interview comment. Asked about his take on Jan 6 - Johnson said “I thought it was Patriot’s Day”. iirc when I took my commission, I swore swear to “protect” the constitution.
Worth remembering that polls show the biggest Trumpies are those with low education/high salaries. Contractors, in other words.
This guy perhaps doesn't quite fit the stereotype, but pretty close, I would guess.
“Some people” 95% of the total population are basically retarded
Sure Ted Johnson is doing okay, but a some people are doing better than him. And some of them are woman, gay or even black. One wonders if that is what he is really pissed off about?
On a related subject, what is this sollest problem that Donald claims we can’t deal with?
I was just going to say something similar. I bet a couple more questions probing Mr. Johnson's attitudes towards gays and minorities would richly illuminate just why he thinks everything is "going to hell."
Just like those anti-DEI folks the NY Times covered on Sunday. Deep down their just a bunch of racists, misogynists and homophobes who think their hate can be utilized for political power.
Actually, very, very few women or black people are doing better than him. Perhaps an extremely small number of gay white men are.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he needs assurance that no woman, no black person, and certainly no gay man ever—ever—does better than him.
Back in 2016 Kevin wrote a post in Mother Jones in which he tried to figure out one of Trump’s stream of consciousness remarks. Here’s what Trump said then:
“We defend them. We defend them. Every time somebody maybe makes a threat, there go the ships, there go the planes, there goes everything. And every time you turn on one of those aircraft carriers it costs you probably a million bucks. I’d say, don’t turn it on. The captain would say, we want to show you how great these engines are working. No, I don’t want to hear it, just don’t.”
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/06/lets-play-what-hell-did-mean-todays-guest-donald-trump/
Has anybody ever figured out what Trump is talking about? Oh, you can try to interpret his “real” meaning but I think what ends up happening is you interject your own thoughts into what really is just the babbling of a baboon.
But really, has anything really changed since then? Are Trump’s weird ramblings worse today than then?
That makes perfect sense when you consider Trump's anti-NATO stance (anti-foreign-policy in general, actually). Don't activate ships, planes, etc, just because some ally has a threat where we need to back them. He's just placing it in a language he thinks his base can understand.
I find his attitude ridiculously short-sighted, but it's coherent.
More recently he's been serving up a word salad composed of fragments of his greatest hits with his base. It's increasingly unintelligible but to his base it still hints toward what they want to hear.
It’s amazing that that makes “perfect sense” to you. Is there some sort of gibberish translator I’m unaware of?
Did you actually read weird's comment?
Did you read mine?
Yes, because yours didn't make sense in context.
*sigh* This is the context.
Kevin said
“Still, his meaning is clear”
I said:
“Oh, you can try to interpret his “real” meaning but I think what ends up happening is you interject your own thoughts into what really is just the babbling of a baboon.”
For years, Trump has had moments where he said or texted weird things. Commentators tried to make some sort of sense of the bizarre comment. And they interpret some sort of coherent thought. But I don’t think there actually is a coherent thought, hence my comment.
This is a great point, his style is encouraging projection so his fan base identifies with him.
I’m very concerned that you can’t figure out what he means here. It’s really not opaque or convoluted at all and in fact is aligned with his general foreign aid approach.
"Word salad composed of fragments" is right. It's not coherent sentences; it's more like poetry: a series of emotionally evocative words.
The difference for me is, poetry is usually (although admittedly not always) very carefully thought out, but I don't think there's much behind this. I think he's just verbalizing whatever pops into his head, and what's popping into his head is neither coherent thought nor even consistent: it's more like a freewheeling Id.
That it happens to resonate with his base is I think due to two things. First, like dreams, "random" thoughts have a connection to the conscious world: things that have been on your mind and thought "habits" are more likely to pop up than other things. As you note, these are "greatest hits" that he's rambled about before, so he's more likely to ramble about them again.
And second, he could say ANYTHING -- he could natter about three-headed aliens kidnapping children and roasting them in public parks ("it's terrible, they're coming, the aliens, they're coming, they're taking our kids, our precious kids, and they're killing them, they're eating them, using the grills and the barbecues that we paid for, our tax dollars, we paid for barbecues, and they're killing our kids, the aliens, it's terrible, just terrible") -- and his base would cheer and shriek and babble excitedly to each other about what he just said and how TRUE it is, and and and. It's a cult, and anything the Leader says is by definition a pearl of wisdom.
That anyone thinks this increasingly senile sociopath is fit for the Presidency is not just sobering; it's scary.
He'll repeat the snippets that got applause in the past. Like Pelosi -- oh, sorry; this week, it's "Nikki Haley" -- who refused his 10,000 men, or soldiers, or national guardsmen, or whoever, to defend the Capitol, which obviously didn't need defending because it was just a peaceful self-guided tour, right?
But the "Nikki Haley! Nikki Haley!! Nikki Haley!!!" snippet is all the crowd needs to hear, and is their only takeaway. Sara Palin did it, too.
"That makes perfect sense"
I think that's part of the hack/magic* of Trump's speaking style: it doesn't make actual sense, but there's maybe something to it so the human brain, with its pattern-seeking algorithms honed over millenia of searching for food and predators on the savanna, hangs a patina of meaning onto.
The fact that this patina corresponds with what the listener expects means that they either strongly like what Trump is "saying" (this guy hates the people I hate!) or strongly dislike it.
_____
* To be clear, I don't think it's intentional in a sort of evil supergenius sort of way, but is instead a conditioned thing with Trump--Trump babbles about windmills and toilet flushes, the sort of people who like listening to that sort of thing applaud and cheer, so he does it some more.
Precisely; he focuses on inconsequential details that even the most uniformed listener can grasp, and he does this because he gets a reaction. The difference is that he used to be able to compose several sentences that are a logical sequence referring to a single subject -- in the example given, military aid to foreign allies. Crowd reaction reinforces the form of these productions.
What's happening now is that he's often shifting the point of reference within a single utterance ("sentence" implies more structure than is often found) and emits a word salad composed of loosely related crowd-pleasing fragments. He's definitely losing cognitive ability but at least for now the emotional content of his emissions still arouses the reactions he desires.
Trump was off his head in 2016. He still is. I've grown tired of saying it.
This was in July 2018:
'“I have broken more Elton John records. He seems to have a lot of records. And I, by the way, I don’t have a musical instrument. I don’t have a guitar or an organ. No organ. Elton has an organ. And lots of other people helping. No, we’ve broken a lot of records. We’ve broken virtually every record. Because you know, look, I only need this space. They need much more room. For basketball, for hockey and all of the sports, they need a lot of room. We don’t need it. We have people in that space. So we break all of these records. Really, we do it without, like, the musical instruments. This is the only musical – the mouth. And hopefully the brain attached to the mouth, right? The brain. More important than the mouth is the brain. The brain is much more important.”'
He's not thinking clearly, and is unable to articulate his points well. That doesn't mean his listeners don't understand the content of what he's saying. Chances are good that they actually prefer the word salad, since it doesn't sound "practiced" the way normal politicians speak. Lots of regular people speak about politics and policy in a gobbledygook of platitudes and poorly thought out analogies.
The first example in this comment string is clearly: "we spend too much money on NATO protecting others, and the military is wasting money showing off our arsenal in military exercises we do for the benefit of foreign countries."
The second is: Elton John is famous for his records, but I have even more records - records that I have broken. They're just a different kind of record. He makes music with pianos and organs, but I make my music with my voice, a voice that is ruled by my powerful brain. And with that brain and voice I can fill stadiums with my own adoring fans. What I do is so much more important than what other famous people do.
cephalopod, you're exactly right, this is how most of us actually speak. Although it is also true that if Biden spoke that way Fox would never have an end to it.
Yeah, totally agree that Trump is pretty easy to understand as long as you get the context is "everything the coastal elites do is a disaster and I'm much better than they are".
However, even for me "we are institute in a powerful death penalty" is starting to push the limits, although, again, I get it that the idea is America is the "institute" (institution?) and "in a powerful death penalty" probably means "our culture is dying"... but he's starting to expect an awful lot of his audience, sometimes. And I don't think he can afford to do that.
".. death penalty.."
Probably intended "death spiral".
Good point. That makes sense of it.
Small correction: I wrote "we are institute" but Trump was quoted as "we are AN institute".
But hmm, maybe my mistake makes more sense of it... i.e., "institute" there is a verb rather than a noun ("institute" meaning something like "put in... a death spiral" in this case...). But that's exactly the kind of "mistake" Trump makes that his fans probably don't notice/don't care about. Probably the very fact that they get it and "smart" people like us spend time saying he makes no sense is a point in his favor, to the fans, since he's flipping the usual frustration or shame they feel about not "getting" academic stuff or school stuff in general.
"Chances are good that they actually prefer the word salad, since it doesn't sound "practiced" the way normal politicians speak."
It definitely doesn't sound practiced, since most politicians speak in coherent English sentences.
A lot of Trump's incoherent rambling arises from the fact that he is *phenomenally* stupid. As Fran Liebowitz put it, "Trust me, you don't know anyone dumber than Donald Trump." So what happened when he was president is that he had to absorb a bunch of information for which he had no broader context or any way of grasping what it meant. So what he does -- like his lawyer, Alina Habba -- is think he can fake acting smart, particularly when showing off at a rally or fundraiser or whatever. What he seems to be talking about here is whether the US should be deploying naval assets to protect an ally from aggression or something. As we all know, Trump viewed alliances like NATO like a county club in which members had to pay "dues" and if they weren't paid up (in his mind, somehow), they could go fuck themselves. That somehow merged in his head probably with a time he was touring an aircraft carrier and the admiral wanted to tell him about the engines or something and he didn't give a crap because, again, he's really, really stupid and that stuff just bored him. I remember for a while he couldn't let it go that the USN Gerald Ford used magnetic launch catapults rather than steam ones and he couldn't understand why because what if they get wet or something.
Really, really stupid.
Lots of people laughed and are still laughing about Donald Rumsfeld's remark about "known unknowns". Which is just phenomenally ignorant; their own "unknowns" clearly remain so.
A man needs to have some appreciation for where his knowledge and experience fail him, and a willingness to get expert advice or even training to make up for it. Not just ignorantly bull along and assume bluster, violence, and pig-stupid remarks will get him through.
+1
TFG on turning it on.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sVp3yFNEYQ
Wingnuts of both left and right require the existential threat to justify their extremism, otherwise they'd end up thinking billionaires are the root of all their problems.
Please, stop with the both sides.
Left wingnuts are a handful of people, mostly on college campuses, who have absolutely zero political power in the United States.
Right wingnuts control the supreme court, the house of representatives, enough of the senate to prevent anything serious from happening, and 30-odd states. They also own the largest national & local media companies.
So just stop it. Please.
I’m convinced that the left wingnuts become rightwing nuts later in life.
I think this is true, to at least some degree. I think it's why people were confused by the Sanders-to-Trump voters. It's not really that confusing if you know anyone like that, though.
Some of the rudest Sanders supporters Iormer in 2016 were definitely sexist young men - how many of the others, I won't try to estimate. it didn't surprise me that some turned to trump.
+1!
It's not both-sidesing, wingnuts are all on one side regardless of whatever hat they might be wearing.
Left wingnuts exist as the perfect foil for right wingnuts allowing them to paint every not a wingnut with a cartoon brush. They may be small in number but useful stupidity is a grotesque menace, especially as they seem able to monopolize the entirety of the institutional conversation of higher education.
Ah yes, the "look what [left wingnuts] made [right wingnuts] do" all-purpose abusers' and bullies' favorite argument rears its ugly head again.
So... what's the solution to the existence of left wingnuts serving as the perfect foil for right wingnuts? Extermination or just freezing them out of all media outlets? Cause in a country of 330m people, you're never going to stop seeing new wingnuts reach adulthood, and some of them will be coded as "lefties," so I guess the problem of right wingnuts controlling SCOTUS, half of Congress and a majority of states can never be solved.
They're both forms of social conservatism, so I would advocate working to create popular recognition that they are two halves of the same coin, distinct, unempathetic and antagonistic to the interests of most people, but easily provoked and easily organized.
This Johnson guy obviously has no fecking idea what his life would be like if the wrecking balls really *did* hit the systems he depends on for his livelihood, his sustenance, and the function and valuation of his shelter. Like most of these people, he must think he's surrounded by an invisible protective shield that'll keep out the chaos he wants to unleash on the rest of us.
+1!
Every Republican/Libertarian thinks they're going to be the one sitting on a throne made of human skulls rather than one of the skulls.
+1!
A saying from my youth: Shit floats to the top. Russia, Germany and some other countries found out to their grief.
Cis het white male privilege is a h-ll of a drug.
Still, his meaning is clear: America is going completely to hell.
Uh, no, His meaning is not clear, Kevin. The man said "We are an institute in a powerful death penalty."
Complete demented gibberish. And half the country wants to give him the launch codes.
Now it is revealed: this is what he meant by "Covfefe"!
But aren't we all, in some deeper sense "an institute in a powerful death penalty?"
Think about it!
lol
LOL + 10.
"Ask not for whom the death penalty calls ..."
"What they’re doing is they’re destroying the country."
Whenever anyone says this, either DJT or his followers, the automatic follow-up must be: "How, exactly?"
Taxes too high? Too many brown people? Queers not in the closet? Not enough oil drilling? I'd like to know what I'm dealing with.
Sadly, this is very coherent. Whatever group constitutes "them" is associated with Democrats. Electing Republicans to power across the country and expelling the Democrats and their "deep state" allies will stop "them."
If you get more specific about the problem, you have to have a plan or solution and you could get blamed for failing to solve it. Whereas the "solution" to this "problem" is giving Trump and his allies absolute political power. "They" will destroy the country with the help of the "deep state" but if you elect Trump, Trump will replace them with his people who don't want to destroy the country.
That also explains the absence of any political platform. Having power is the objective.
People love this. Trump sounds just like them. Incoherent mumbling about the world going to hell and the scary OTHERS who are to blame (brown people, muslims, smart people, Jews, women, communists, gays, wokes, etc).
Sure, Fox News and the echo chambers play a role....but the civil war and the long running battle against minorities existed long before Fox was around.
He sounds tired. Maybe he should take a nap.
Buddha: “Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.”
And more Fox News viewers than any external threat. Many people have no purpose in their lives and its driving them crazy.
Weird that humans are the only animals that worry about having no purpose in life.
Well, I think worry reflects that we think about the future while animals do not. I have also noticed that some animals (dogs, horses) do seem to like to have purpose. Or they seem unhappy if they have purpose and then lose it.
1a. I'm increasingly buying into the theory that a lot of well-off Trump supporters are essentially bored with their lives and feel that they need something to give their life meaning. Trump, the ultimate con man, might even realize this on some level, and exploits this need in other people to his advantage.
1b. A steady, round-the-clock diet of Fox News probably doesn't help either.
I think there is some truth to this. Certainly explains family members and associates who were always Republican because tax-cuts and cheap labor but are now Trumpers who dont really care about any policies at all.
Group psychology and motivated reasoning explains that a whole lot better than boredom. These people became Republicans because it sure sounded nice not to have to pay as much in taxes, especially not on their affluent incomes, and what's the government need it for anyway since it had a surplus? (this being the 2000 election)
These people then need to justify, and continue justifying/rationalizing, their votes for Republicans that started out. And to resolve that cognitive dissonance, they fully embrace and identify with the party they originally wanted to support simply because they're selfish with their money and don't feel that they should have to pay taxes.
1a - definitely. It's also why guns and luxury pickups are so popular with this crowd. Why there are so many preppers. They have fantasies of being the tough guy, the survivor in a Mad Max universe. Life is so easy for them, they can't derive much tough-guy pride from it.
It's not what Trump supporters lack that makes them angry about Biden and the Democrats. Its what they fear they will lose: money, racial status, and privileged treatment.
I work with lots of people like that Johnson fellow. They seem perfectly nice on the surface, but every once in a while the mask slips off. Back before trump I kept asking one of them why, given that that we’re living the good life, they were so obsessed with the evil Obama. Never really got a good answer. It’s a character flaw.
Also, ex military are quite the trump loving cohort. Officers especially so.
Character flaw. Might be genetic. Certainly a form of psychosis on some level.
You don't need Trump to be a wrecking ball. We have enough feckless clowns in both parties who can do that without even trying. Trump is just a symptom, not the actual problem.
Uh, no. Trump is both a symptom *and* the actual problem.
+1!
What makes such a person adopt such a "view" of the world is a fascinating question. Even if we all agreed on a common reality, there would be plenty to disagree afterwards on the best course of action. Ultimately, one would think that being stuck with a crazy fictional construct is not a great way to start making decisions about our lives. Yet, rational thoughts is only a thin veneer on top of many irrational emotions. I am a research scientist, and even in our work, it takes a lot of discipline to constantly step back and try to grasp the objective reality that is presented to us. In every day life, you can believe in pink elephants and still more or less go on with your life. If you think you can jump off a cliff and fly, then reality will lead to fatal consequences pretty rapidly and obviously for all to see. If you put your hand on a hot stove, you will get burned. But if you think that the Covid vaccine will kill you and choose not to take it then the chain of consequences is more murky. Maybe nothing happens to you. But it's very different if millions of people choose not to take it however. If you worry about inflation, immigration, global warming, world peace, the objective reality is very complex. As horrible as it sounds, people need to re-learn how to observe objective reality for what it is before they get emotionally attached to some response.
Trump makes slightly more sense than a group chat on my teenager's phone.
People are very good at injecting meaning into things, and are likely drawn to the unpolished, angry tone of Trump more than anything else.
Also notable from the Ted Johnson story...he claims to have voted for Obama twice before voting for Trump (I don't believe that for a second), and the reason he no longer supports Nikki Haley is that he's determined that January 6 was "staged" by Nancy Pelosi.
"... he's determined that January 6 was "staged" by Nancy Pelosi..."
I think that is supposed to signal: "I know what I am saying is bulshit but I am going to say it anyway."
Ted needs to keep up. Everybody knows now that it was Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley!!! who "staged" Jan 6, since she was out of the Trump admin and had time on her hands. Also, no "10,000 men" for her! Probably some kind of lezbo, amirite?
/s, in case it wasn't obvious.
Someone should ask Ted why Trump is bragging he offered Pelosi/Haley 10,000 troops if it was a peaceful rally?
he's retired military and every tv on every military base is tuned to fox news 24/7
republicans bitch about public money going to support liberals in academia but tax dollars supporting fascist-friendly news on base is a-ok
The reason that MAGAs have lost contact with reality is not inexplicable. The simple reason is that it is an upsurge of tribal identity. The tribe in question is the White Christian tribe, which has long been dominant in the US. They are clearly facing loss of this dominance and they resent all the signs of non-white, non-Christians attaining equality or getting special privileges as they view it. Support of the tribe supersedes rationality and benevolence.
This basic tribal instinct is something that is usually available for politicians to exploit when there is a change in the status quo. Germans resented the loss of WW I, and Hitler took advantage of this. He also attacked Jews, as Republicans now attack LGBTQ people; minorities are usually available to excite tribal resentment. This kind of thing is not "populism", nor is it unique to Fascism. The upsurge usually requires some kind of leader who may be viewed as quasi-superhuman. The leader doesn't have to be rational, he just has to press the right buttons. Something is dictating that tribal individuals behave in a destructive manner, and rather than recognize that it is instinct they consider that they are being directed or led from above.
Countless pieces in the media, including blogs, try to explain this in anything other than a biological way. No, MAGAs are not really acting on any kind of economic resentment, although tribalism dictates that everything bad is due to what the other tribe does.
A quibble: don't call 'em "Christians". At best, they're southernized Baptist Protestants, who don't think Catholics are "Christians" at all.
Also, apropos of nothing, PBS has an "American Experience" program about the American Bund, the home-grown Nazi movement in the US prior to 1939. It's repeated tonight in New Mexico, but is probably available whereever PBS is streamed.
They were called Christians because they viewed accepting Jesus Christ into their heart was the only way to salvation. Today it seems they reject Jesus Christ as too soft on crime, too empathetic to the meek, and generally just not tough enough to own the libs. Instead they whole heartedly accept Trump’s teaching that only he can save them.
Johnson is a typical American fascist who served in the Army for 22 years. Johnson is an obedient subject of capitalist domination, but unconsciously he knows the US war machine must be destroyed.
In the article we read:
[His brother] Fred, very much anti-Trump. “He goes, ‘Well, what do you think about Jan. 6?’ And I said, ‘I thought it was Patriot’s Day.’”
and
“January 6th,” he said. “January 6th was staged.”
“By?”
“The Democratic Party,” he said. “Nancy Pelosi.”
=-=-=-=
So he's obviously insane.
Bill Kristol,
https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1749492104806453278
Barbie almost completely snubbed at the Oscars, but Ken gets a nomination.
Should have seen it coming, did not.
Kevin, if by "fine" you mean somewhat cogent fascist racist asshole lunatic, then I suppose you are correct.
i'm always fascinated by trump's 'new civil war' types with their $80,000 pickup trucks and ar's
somehow they have this fantasy that they'll be shooting antifa/blm guys all day then swinging by the 7/11 on the way home to fill up and grab some corona for monday night football
as if that big picture window overlooking their back yard presents any sort of defense against the mayhem roiling outside
Also, why the _and_ liberals bit?!? To the degree that liberals are down on the world it is, at least, for real reasons. We are on the brink of fascism and will be past the brink if Trump wins this year. Global warming is, in fact, a huge problem and I, for one, don't think the world is up to the task of tacking it. Our economy absolutely does not work for the working class that well. I could go on. I also don't think very many liberals think the answer is to burn it all down so we can rebuild it.
But, pretty much every thing conservatives think are existential problems are either grossly exaggerated or pure figments of their fevered imaginations. And most conservative seem to think like the guy in the piece and want to burn it all down and rebuild it.
So, yeah, great comparison there.
The thing that strikes me: Trump was tremendously *ineffective* at breaking the system, in the sense that this guy intends. Trump got almost nothing done. He didn't make a breakthrough on immigration. He didn't make health care less annoying. He may have cut taxes but he certainly didn't make filing for taxes on April 15 one whit easier.
This is not because the Democrats or big-government opposed him. It's because Trump can't stay focused on anything long enough. He doesn't know what a real breakthrough would take. He doesn't want to do the hard work it would take to make things better.
Why does anyone (ie, his supporters) think he's going to be anything other than a windbag?
" It's because Trump can't stay focused on anything long enough."
Wrong.
Trump didn't do the things you listed because he never wanted to. He never cared about immigration, health care or making filing taxes less annoying (for anybody except himself), and in general any improvement to the welfare of the public. Whatever he ever said about these issues are just campaign messaging.
His idea of a good national leader is "being strong", i.e. suppressing the population. He didn't get there in the first term, but he did try, and he will go much further in the second term if he gets one.
You can see what he cares aboout (and could see it for years) from the compliemnts he gives to various dictators. It is always for "being strong" (i.e. suppressing th epopulation), never for improving the welfare of the public in their country in anyway.
Seconding the dismay at Kevin's blithe equation of liberals and conservatives at the end of this post. Because at least in the US, there's not much confusion:
Conservatives see everyone's lives getting better and are outraged because that means LGBTQ+ lives are getting better, and Black people's lives, and so on. They may be upset from sheer bigotry, but many of them are upset because every Black person who gets a good job is "taking that job from a deserving White person," in their eyes. Worse, they think affirmative action means, not correcting an existing bias, but creating a bias against Whites. They don't care about the reality of the situation, they are just aggrieved because the gains of others necessarily mean they have lost something.
Whereas liberals, at least by Kevin's posts, may ascribe to factors like systemic racism explaining poor educational and medical outcomes, where Kevin, at least, believes there's some unknown factor involved and racism isn't it. If we assume Kevin is correct, the underlying impetus for some liberals is to improve their own conditions, but the majority want to improve the situations of others. Where many conservatives perceive themselves harmed when they see a successful Black person (witness the ongoing outrage about Barack Obama), many liberals perceive themselves harmed when they see an unsuccessful Black person. That a liberal might have the wrong idea about how to help rectify that situation doesn't change the fact that they want to help.
And, as Kevin should understand, if liberals start getting the changes they want, they want more changes, faster. Increasing acceptance of gay people and legal gay marriage doesn't make prejudice against gay people vanish, and trans people are suffering, so we need to improve the lot of gay people and of trans people, too.
A liberal American who sees Trump in the lead in the presidential race is going to think democracy is threatened, and will look at all those statistics about corporate profits outstripping workers' compensation or the vast expansion of the wealth of the wealthiest while the rest get little; that the poor are better off than they were doesn't change the injustice of the present system. But that attitude of "the country is doomed if Trump makes himself dictator, dissolves the government, and empowers oligarchs over the people while locking up anyone who isn't white" is radically distinct from the conservative concern that the nation is doomed because government handouts and discrimination against whites and Democrats stole the last election.
Trump said "which is incapable of solving even the SMALLEST, smallest problem," not the "sollest" problem. He says dumb things regularly, but here the Biden campaign is making it up.
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