I don’t get it.
Read a recent, snarky Dana Milbank column in the Washington Post. It began with a visit to Trump-speak–a language bearing less and less relationship to American English.
“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”
Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.
Milbank offered some additional examples of Trump-speak: “We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already,” and “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”
Whenever I am reminded of Trump’s intellectual lapses and/or his inability to use the English language, I marvel that this is the guy MAGA folks think should control the nuclear codes….
Much of Milbank’s column was focused on Trump’s selective memory. When he recently recited the time-honored political question “are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Milbank theorized that he’d “forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.”
As the Supreme Court was hearing arguments about banning the abortion pill, Trump also conveniently “forgot” his previous emphatic support for that ban, and his proposal to ban it fortuitously disappeared from his web site. Given that polling shows some 7 in 10 Americans opposed to such a ban, the Heritage Foundation also experienced a website “glitch” that conveniently obscured that part of the Foundation’s Plan for 2025.
As Milbank wrote,
The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.
Evidently, the House Republicans didn’t get the polling memo.
The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.
Sometimes its a convenient loss of memory; other times, it’s obvious mental illness compounded by jaw-dropping ignorance. Take Trump’s “explanation” of why Truth Social’s stock wasn’t listed on the New York Stock Exchange:
He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”
Then there’s the most recent grift: selling bibles.
Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the Gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.
“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.
Trump’s campaign shows a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump,” and he has called himself “the chosen one.” He’s shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus. And Milbank reports that Trump recently posted a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion.
There’s much, much more–but it all begs the question: who in their right mind looks at this pathetic sociopath with his limited (and rapidly declining) intellect and his God complex and says “yes, that’s my guy!”? Is giving his supporters permission to express their racism and hostility to “elitists” really enough to outweigh the daily evidence of his manifest unfitness?
I don’t get it.
Is giving his supporters permission to express their racism and hostility to “elitists” really enough to outweigh the daily evidence of his manifest unfitness?
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It would seem so
I liken this guy to D. C. Stephenson who together with his cronies made oodles of dollars selling robes and pointed hats to a gullible public.
Trumps favorite book is “My New Order” a book his ex-wife testified to in divorce court, he kept on his night stand! Not the Bible. Why read about God when Hitler is so much more important to him. That’s why he quotes Hitler not Scripture!
The more deranged he gets, the more he’s going to divert to his idol. Sadly, this has been brought out before, but somehow there seems to be shock over this. Remember, Adolf Hitler had deep ties to the church. He went to Catholic school, then converted to protestantism. Then combined some of the Protestant sects to the Church of Germany. This is done out in the open, it’s all on tape, and yet, the spineless and the intellectually constipated refuse to show any resolve in stopping the Lone Deranger!
Someone could make a case for why so many of Trump’s followers stick with him. What I take note of is that nowhere out there is a couple sipping their morning coffee and one of them says, “You know, I’ve been giving Trump a second look. And I’m starting to like the guy. Think I’ll vote for him.”
Watching Ari Melber’s “Saturday: The Beat” yesterday; I finally turned him off. The list of his billionaire supporters who left him behind then returned with their billions to those who continued support for all he stands for left me sick and more afraid of November than before. We need to begin hoarding large jars of Vaseline because we are going to get it up the old rusty road in ways we cannot imagine…with or without Trump in the Oval Office. Their support is for the man and more for what he stands for and his MAGAs who will still be in office.
“…who in their right mind looks at this pathetic sociopath with his limited (and rapidly declining) intellect and his God complex and says “yes, that’s my guy!” We need to be preparing to defend ourselves against neighbors, friends and, sadly, some of our own family members who belong to him lock, stock and barrel. I’m sure they are all reading their USA Bibles for chapter-and-verse proof of his deity.
Eight years ago I sat a lunch table with a group of coworkers and asked if anyone had ever seen an episode of “The Apprentice”. Nobody had. Maybe it’s been censored out of existence? It was Trump’s reality show. My wife and I saw a few episodes and it was fun seeing young talented and creative people pull off various projects, but Trump was the wildcard train wreck freak show in the middle of it. Nothing has changed in all that time except his sentences seem to have been more coherent then.
“The fake news will say, ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be very smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what it is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go, ‘Holy shit. Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.” ~ Donald Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/06/donald-trump-speech-analysis
The oh so ugly, sad truth is, and many have said this before, there hasn’t been a day that goes by that The Donald hasn’t been in the news, usually the main talking point, ever since the day he descnded down that escalator in Trump Tower and into our lives. He has been a plague of disgusting, useless garbage disrupting and corrupting normalcy and decency forever. My great fear is that no matter the outcome in the myriad of his court cases he will never go away, never fade into ignominy, but rather remain a permanent stain on our great nation forever.
Without any objective data to base this on, I suspect that many of Trump’s supporters pay no attention to the facts highlighted in today’s column but rather cling to him and to this movement because it gives them a sense of validation, even power perhaps. I can’t forget how his campaign seemed to take off after Hilary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark. I even saw bumper stickers proclaiming and embracing that identity. When a person feels ignored, left behind, powerless, held in contempt, etc., it is understandable that they will look to alleviate those feelings. When a group of people are made to feel that way, that group will find common ground in a source of refuge from those feelings. Trump gives many of his followers that refuge.
What do we do? Referring to his supporters as “orange ectoplasm“ doesn’t help. Seventy-four million of our fellow citizens voted for Trump in 2020. Not all of them fit in the category I described above, but I suspect many did. What would you do with/for/about these fellow citizens? Maybe some of them are your (erstwhile) friends, or perhaps your neighbors or even your family.
I think we’re seeing the results of a growing tear in our social fabric. Something about our approach to change, whether Biden wins or loses.
http://civildiscoursenow.com/profiles/blogs/indiana-abortion-law-stayed-based-on-rfra
I understand why extremely greedy multi-millionaires,billionaires and corporate CEOs want trump elected again. He gave them everything they asked for and they want to come back to the hog trough to steal even more.
As for the average citizens that support him, their reasons appear to be willful ignorance and an addiction to hate-filled right wing media.
Not a buffoon. That’s too gentle. Trump is a psychopath. Couple that with his complete narcissism and you get what we see every night/day. His followers are him, and he is them. They are a cult; a cult that worships the modern-day golden calf. All this underscores mine – and real experts’ theses – that the human mind is still locked into caveman survival instincts. Tragic.
These pathetic fools who support Trump are all tribal all the time. The billionaires? For them it’s just about the Benjamins – just as Marx predicted.
And no, Trump won’t live forever. It’s bad enough that he lived this long.
This is Orwellian stuff – a party of Winston Smiths busily running around stuffing yesterday’s “Truths” into the Memory Hole and insisting that, whatever nonsensical thing Big Brother belches out today, it has ALWAYS been not just true, but the truthiest truth that ever truthed. We have always been at war with Eastasia, and we are grateful that Big Brother has once again generously increased the chocolate ration.
Theresa Bowers. You are right. That’s why I’ve been saying ever since Biden was elected that Trump has no chance of being re-elected. He had his best chance in 2020 and has been going downhill ever since. His slide is turning into a plummet. That’s not to say the country isn’t in danger. Voting a straight blue ticket is still vitally important, but Trump is not the American people’s choice.
Reds like Trump for precisely the opposite reasons that we dislike him. He’s lawless, shameless and uninhibited. He has no idea what the Constitution says, so he is precisely the best protection they have from the responsibility of freedom, which is to grant the same freedom to everyone else in the U.S.
His incoherent rants are one of the reasons his followers love him so much. To them, he sounds just like them. He attacks those they want to attack. He hates the same people they hate. He thumbs his nose at “the elites.” Understand that those very same “elites” are those mocking his rhetoric. They do worship him and if anyone points out how he is using them they won’t hear it.
Closely held beliefs are impervious to facts!
“…and his proposal to ban it fortuitously disappeared from his web site.”
No, his issue is not what one would think of as ordinary “forgetting,” it is indeed, Orwellian manipulation, counting on the “blind” imbecility of his followers.
Gil, you are too sadly totally correct, and Vernon, indeed, this waste of protoplasm is a hugely sick guy, a, once more, Malignant Narcissist, and yes Marx is looking on and saying “I told you so!”
Mark Backe, what you say is important. The object of the wealth redistribution up crowd is to divide the electorate into two warring tribes to destroy the relevance of our Constitution (the melting pot). Nobody wants to lose freedom and the issues dividing us boil down to protecting my freedom (red) versus protecting everyone’s (blue).
Mark Backe, You have a point for a certain segment of his base. However, when I see huge signs promoting him in the wealthiest parts of the deepest red county in the state, I find it hard to believe that the residents feel left out or marginalized in any way. Most are incredibly privileged, often beneficiaries of the top educational institutions in the country, inherited wealth, exclusive access to perks of wealth and station. It is entitlement, often racist at its core. Historically, the same places were centers of the Klan rise in the early and mid 20th Century.
Hate was often learned at the kitchen table. I suspect it still is.