trumpty plumpty

[TDub]

you want wind? I want wind? they all want wind.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

[KUTradition]

so, he admitted out loud that he thinks he has every right to interfere in the election

the downward spiral continues

[jfish26]

so, he admitted out loud that he thinks he has every right to interfere in the election

the downward spiral continues

…Trad screams, into the wind.

[KUTradition]

so, he admitted out loud that he thinks he has every right to interfere in the election

the downward spiral continues

…Trad screams, into the wind.

surprised i’m not hoarse yet

[Shirley]

so, he admitted out loud that he thinks he has every right to interfere in the election

the downward spiral continues

…Trad screams, into the wind.

surprised i’m not hoarse yet

C'mon, it's only been 9 years of this shit.




so far

[Sparko]

Really 13 if you count the birther bullshit.

[Shirley]

Really 13 if you count the birther bullshit.

Who's counting?

[jfish26]

I mean, you can sharpie around whatever part of the map you want, I guess.

[Sparko]

The Central Park Five was warmup I guess

[KUTradition]

Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.

ERECTION INTERFERENCE!!!

[jfish26]

Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.

ERECTION INTERFERENCE!!!

Not that you need it, but a friendly reminder that (1) it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, (2) there is no evidence of material voter fraud of any kind, and hardly any evidence at all (if any?) of non-citizens trying and succeeding to vote, and (3) things like voter ID laws and voter roll verification laws, while couched in good-sounding explanations, are vehicles for voter suppression that is not remotely justified by the (non-) prevalence of fraud.

[KUTradition]

Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.

ERECTION INTERFERENCE!!!

Not that you need it, but a friendly reminder that (1) it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, (2) there is no evidence of material voter fraud of any kind, and hardly any evidence at all (if any?) of non-citizens trying and succeeding to vote, and (3) things like voter ID laws and voter roll verification laws, while couched in good-sounding explanations, are vehicles for voter suppression that is not remotely justified by the (non-) prevalence of fraud.

but of course

also in the article from NBC:

Trump also suggested last week that congressional Republicans should demand “more than the SAVE Act," suggesting there should be a “border” component of the government funding bill, too.

[jfish26]

Does Trump know there aren't, like, spiders crawling all over him all of the time? Or is he so far gone that he actually FEELS them?

[japhy]

Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.

ERECTION INTERFERENCE!!!

The Rubepublicans are quickly becoming a death cult.

So when the 2024 elections are over and the dust settles. When trumpty plumpty has had another great fall and he drags down the Rubepublican party with him.

Do the rubes quit him? By this I mean not just our local message board rubes, but the bigger rube nation and the Rubepublican party as well?

This political grift has been the most financially successful grift of trumpty's long grifting, cheating, stealing, unethical career. He doesn't have to produce or build anything, he has virtually no liability, he just opens up a website and fawning halfwitted rubes open up their wallets. Rubes of all ages and wealth levels want to give the orange grifter their money. He ain't gonna give that up. How long are the actual conservatives going to stick with the Rubepublican party while trumpty holds the steering wheel?

trumpty dumpty will want to run again in 2028 if he loses in 2024, will the Rubepublicans agree to this? He will immediately start asking the rubes for money to cover his court costs because he is a bazillionaire and he doesn't need the money.... but you should give him some of yours anyway.

He will demand that the Rubepublicans fall in line and financially support him, or else he will take his halfwit conspiracy cult legion to a third party with no constraints. That is his gift to the cult, they have long been fringe conspiracy rubes. But having a former president share their "secrets" openly is his validation grift to them.

[jfish26]

Donald Trump is pressuring Republicans to shut down the government at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t pass a GOP-backed proposal to establish new election rules nationwide.

ERECTION INTERFERENCE!!!

The Rubepublicans are quickly becoming a death cult.

So when the 2024 elections are over and the dust settles. When trumpty plumpty has had another great fall and he drags down the Rubepublican party with him.

Do the rubes quit him? By this I mean not just our local message board rubes, but the bigger rube nation and the Rubepublican party as well?

This political grift has been the most financially successful grift of trumpty's long grifting, cheating, stealing, unethical career. He doesn't have to produce or build anything, he has virtually no liability, he just opens up a website and fawning halfwitted rubes open up their wallets. Rubes of all ages and wealth levels want to give the orange grifter their money. He ain't gonna give that up. How long are the actual conservatives going to stick with the Rubepublican party while trumpty holds the steering wheel?

trumpty dumpty will want to run again in 2028 if he loses in 2024, will the Rubepublicans agree to this? He will immediately start asking the rubes for money to cover his court costs because he is a bazillionaire and he doesn't need the money.... but you should give him some of yours anyway.

He will demand that the Rubepublicans fall in line and financially support him, or else he will take his halfwit conspiracy cult legion to a third party with no constraints. That is his gift to the cult, they have long been fringe conspiracy rubes. But having a former president share their "secrets" openly is his validation grift to them.

I was actually JUST about to post this on its own, but what a perfect place.

You Can’t “Move On” from Trump

Understanding our shared, comforting fantasy.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/you-cant-m ... from-trump

1. You Cannot Turn the Page

Last week Philip Bump wrote an exceptionally perceptive piece about Kamala Harris’s promise to end the last decade of acrimony and why that may not be possible.

Here’s Bump:

The Trump era is about Trump in the way that the War of 1812 was about 1812: a critically important component and a useful touchstone but not all-encompassing. Turning the page on the era requires more than Trump failing to get an electoral vote majority.

Perhaps a more accurate time span to consider is something like 15 years. The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 was hailed as a signal moment in the evolution of American politics and demography, but it also triggered a remarkable backlash. Ostensibly rooted in concerns about government spending, it was largely centered on the disruption of the economic crisis (which triggered an increase in spending) and that overlapping awareness of how America was changing.

This is correct. Now let me tell you a story about a time I was wrong.

Eight years ago I believed that Donald Trump was an aberration.

He had skated through the primaries by winning only a plurality of Republican votes. He underperformed his poll numbers in virtually every primary. Large swaths of Republican voters and Republican elites hated him. His convention featured an attempt to deny him the nomination followed by the primary runner-up telling Republicans to “vote their conscience” in November.

Trump had trailed Hillary Clinton in nearly every general election poll, often by 5 to 7 points.

Looking at this tableau I reached the following set of conclusions:

* Trump would lose the general election.

* In the Republican party there would be recriminations against anyone who had supported his doomed campaign.

* The GOP would revert to being something like the party of Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.

I was wrong. Utterly and completely. So I set about trying to understand why.

2. We’re Not Going Back

My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.

By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.

This was a true innovation. Prior to Trump, no one had viewed minority rule as a viable electoral strategy.

My second mistake was believing that there would be in-party recriminations against Trump and his Republican confederates.

In the fall of 2016 I often joked about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Republicans would convene after Trump’s defeat. Since politics is war by other means I assumed that the losing side in this war would have consequences visited upon it.

This was wrong not just because Trump won the presidency. It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war. Trump represented people who had voted Republican not because they liked Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush, but because those figures and their policy objectives were the closest alternative to what they really wanted.

And what they really wanted was grievance-based political violence.

Trump offered these voters the possibility of political violence—recall how he reveled in telling his 2016 rally crowds about beating up hecklers, and his rhetoric about immigrants (“we have drug dealers coming across, we have rapists, we have murderers, we have killers”) and about the need to take firm action against “the crime and terrorism and lawlessness” in American cities.

And Trump tapped into these voters’ feelings of grievance toward not just immigrants but also liberals and “elites in media and politics who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.”

Once these voters saw that the party organization was too weak to resist this mode of operation, whole new vistas opened up before them.

The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office.

In short: I am convinced that had Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election Trump’s hold on the Republican party would have continued and he would have been the GOP nominee in 2020 and 2024 as well.

So no, there were never going to be recriminations against conservatives and Republicans who had collaborated with Trump. The recriminations would run in the opposite direction: The forces of Trumpism would continue to own the Republican party and anti-Trumpers would continue to be driven out. (Unless they chose to convert.)

Which leads to my third mistake: Believing that the Republican party would snap-back to being a “normal” party.

I had always believed that in politics causality was a wheel. You turn it in one direction, then you turn it in the other direction. You set course, then you reverse course.

That view was incorrect. Political causality is like causality in most other realms: It branches. It is path dependent.

Something happens and that action or event creates an entirely new universe. Which leads to another branch. And another. There is no going back. There is never any going back. The world is contingent.

Let me give you a historical example: The First World War was an accident. It didn’t have to happen. If you ran the events leading up to it ten times, it probably doesn’t happen in seven of them.

But the fact that the First World War did happen caused a bunch of contingent events which created a new universe. And in that universe, the accident of the First World War made the advent of the Second World War inevitable.

I’m sure some people in 1917 looked at the First World War and thought, “This whole thing was an accident that never should have happened. Once it’s over we can go back to normal.”

But that was incorrect. The Great War created a branch away from normal. “Normal,” as people understood it in 1912, was never coming back.

I made the same analytical error in 2016.

Other people continue to make this error today. Larry Hogan, Chris Sununu, and Nikki Haley make it on a daily basis. So do the conservatives who insist that they are (still) skating to the puck of some post-Trump future.

The idea that we can turn the page on Donald Trump is a fantasy.

It’s a comforting fantasy, for sure. But a fantasy nonetheless. We’ve hit too many branching points over the last decade. What is, is.

At some point the Republican party will branch again, but it will not snap back to 2012. If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.

We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.

Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.

[japhy]

I do periodic welfare checks on DC, just to make sure he is still out there.

But this is obviously weighing upon him. My gut says he is going to vote for Kamala if he thinks his vote makes a difference.

[kubowler99]

I think I stated something similar a few weeks ago. There is no turning back for the 'grand old party'. If anyone follows Heather Cox Richardson on FB (I know JFish does because he posts her stuff here occassionally), she had a fantastic FB live session yesterday that talked about this.

And there's no real bench for the republican party as well. If/when they lose in November (again, barring the state/local election commission shenanigans), we're talking probably a couple of decades to recover, if at all. Most likely what happens is the democrats will branch off into 1 or more different sects and become new parties. If that means we move the national politic back to the left (so that we're actually middle instead of right like we are today), I'm all for it.

[MICHHAWK]

we all get a vote. i look forward to using mine.

in fact. if they are not requiring identification. i may vote multiple times.

[japhy]

trumpty and friends are about to fleece the rubes bigly, again.

All-Time Low

The share price of former president Donald Trump's Truth Social meme stock has plummeted to a new low after several key executives started offloading their holdings.

Around midday Tuesday, shares dropped below $18, setting a new record low since the company began trading after merging with a blank check acquisition company in March. Minutes after trading opened on Wednesday, it hit new lows again.

The crash shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as it wouldn't be surprising if Trump himself pulls the rug on investors within just weeks. The six-month lockup period determined by the Securities and Exchange Commission is almost over, opening the door for the former president to sell his own shares.

And that could be a make-or-break moment for Truth Social's parent company Trump Media. Trump owns 114 million shares — roughly 60 percent of the company's outstanding stock — so if he cashes out, it would be yet another major vote of no confidence.

Cash Grab

The current selloff is also likely being accelerated by a number of executives, including CEO Devin Nunes and COO Andrew Northwall and CFO and treasurer Juhan Phillip, selling millions of dollars worth of company shares.

The company has burned through many millions of dollars in cash, despite only making a measly $4.1 million in all of 2023. In the last quarter alone, the company reported a net loss of $16.4 million.

Even with shares sliding, the company is still being valued at billions of dollars, making it astronomically overvalued by any standard calculation.

However, with executives — and possibly Trump himself — looking to jump ship, Trump Media could look like a very different company within just weeks.

Given the broad failure of Truth Social to turn into any form of viable product — especially since Trump has taken up tweeting on X-formerly-Twitter again — the company was arguably never anything more than a thinly veiled attempt by Trump to raise some much-needed cash to cover lawsuit- and election campaign-related expenses.

Business failures aside, Trump could still have the last laugh. The former reality TV host could still rake in over $2 billion by offloading his shares, bookending a sketchy and blatant cash grab.

But the important part of this parable is that the rubes showed their faith in, and love for trumpty by paying into his grift.

Oh, and they owned the libs!

Good job rubes!