trumpty plumpty

[jfish26]

Where Racism Goes To Become Rhetoric

https://defector.com/where-racism-goes- ... e-rhetoric

Wednesday night, in Long Island's 16,000-seat Nassau Coliseum, Donald Trump told the crowd at a rally for his presidential campaign that the United States—and particularly New York City, a few miles away—had been overrun with criminal immigrants, "people coming from jails out of the Congo in Africa."

The former and would-be future president continued:

They're coming from the Congo, they're coming from Africa, they're coming from the Middle East, they're coming from all over the world—Asia! A lot of it coming from Asia. And what's happening to our country is we're just destroying the fabric of life in our country, and we're not going to take it any longer, and you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot.

This was spectacularly racist, explicitly racist against the majority of all the nonwhite people on Earth, the most racist thing I'd seen a presidential candidate—Donald Trump included—say in my lifetime. It was a barrage straight out of a Ku Klux Klan rally: Congo! Africa! Middle East! Asia! We're not going to take it any longer! Get rid of these people!

I would have said it was obviously shocking, except both shock and obviousness have become tenuous concepts in American politics. When I went to look up references to the quote after seeing it go by on social media, I began to worry that the original poster might have made it up for clout; I saw no mention of Trump talking about "the Congo" that night on Google News or in major reporters' Twitter accounts.

But I went to C-SPAN and there Trump was, saying it. The Nassau County crowd—in what the New York Post recently reported that U.S. News had rated the safest community in the country—cheered as Trump vowed to drive out the immigrant crime menace. "November 5 will be your Liberation Day," he told them.

Apparently Trump has been telling people at his events about the threat of criminals from the Congo and beyond for months. The Washington Post put it into a fact-check roundup in March ("no such decline in Congo’s prison population is shown in the data"); critic at large A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in a "Critic's Notebook" item reviewing Trump's speech after his criminal conviction, wrote about it knowingly, as if it were old news: "A citizen looking for campaign issues might find some boilerplate in a peroration that conjured images of Venezuela and Congo emptying their prisons and asylums onto America’s streets."

Yet the Times hadn't ever directly reported on those remarks, and it still hasn't. In its story from Nassau Coliseum, the paper wrote that Trump had "continued to stoke fear around immigration," and then quoted only the later part of the passage:

"We’re just destroying the fabric of life in our country," Mr. Trump said, referring to Democrats' immigration policies. "And we're not going to take it any longer. And you got to get rid of these people. Give me a shot."

New York Times

The Washington Post's story on the rally reported that Trump "brushed off criticism for dehumanizing migrants": "'You got to get rid of these people,' Trump said, alluding to his pledge for mass deportations." Politico described Trump's speech as delivering "fiery hardline messages about crime and immigration."

Nine years into the Trump era of presidential politics, it still seems impossible for campaign-trail journalists to describe him or his project. Those accounts of Trump's performance on Long Island were mostly accurate, on their own terms, and even critical of him, while also being completely inadequate to the task.

Consider the one certifiably false claim in the Times passage: that Trump was "referring to Democrats' immigration policies." What Trump was referring to, in the literal text of his speech, was some agenda by which the United States is importing convicted criminals released from other countries' prisons. The Biden administration has no policy that does anything like what Trump was talking about.

It's tempting to conclude that therefore Trump must have been talking about nothing, that those nonexistent thousands and millions of immigrant criminals were simply one more empty oratorical flourish from the country's emptiest orator. Hasn't he been saying things like this ever since he came down the escalator talking about Mexicans "bringing drugs" and "bringing crime"? Isn't it just a posture, albeit an ugly one?

But the ever-expanding factual vacuum of Trump's message sucks more and more real things into it. Everyone understood he had no possible case that he had won the 2020 election, either, and then after two months of his seemingly pointless ranting about it, a mob was smashing into the Capitol to try to steal the victory for him—to steal it back, as they'd been told.

Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have been telling people that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, and now Vance has moved on to saying that the Haitians are spreading disease. Vance knows that these things aren't true, and he admitted that he knows they're not true. It doesn't matter, because he's not telling his voters that he and Trump will protect their pets and promote public health. He's telling them they'll get rid of the Haitians.

The bomb threats that Springfield is now getting, day after day, aren't stopping Vance, because the bomb threats go with his message. Even if the Democrats and the journalists say that the Haitians are in this country legally, Vance said they are not. Trump has promised he will do mass deportations in Springfield. He has promised that he will deport millions of undocumented immigrants from around the country, many millions more than the Democrats and the journalists say exist. He said in the debate that he will use local cops to help him out.

This gets refracted, through the conventions of campaign coverage, into "messages about crime and immigration," because crime and immigration are standard political issues. People rank them on their lists of the subjects they're concerned about, when the pollsters ask them to rank their concerns. Concerns about crime and immigration, the Times recounted in a piece about Congress and the New York State Democratic Party this week, are understood to have cost Democrats control of the House in the 2022 midterm, in races in places like Nassau County. Trump was simply pressing an issue where he sees an advantage.

But if a President Trump asks the cops to deport people for him, the cops will find people to deport. People from Africa, from the Middle East, from Asia. The "Democrats' immigration policies," here, are the 1965 Immigration Act and constitutional birthright citizenship. He told 16,000 cheering people what he plans to do. Was that news?

[Sparko]

Immigrant crime is what republicans do to immigrants.

[KUTradition]

vaping is gonna be saved

thank god

[KUTradition]

this is my kind of America

Ohio residents flock to Springfield’s Haitian restaurants: ‘They are family’

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... estaurants

[jfish26]

[MICHHAWK]

who is doug eamoff. and why do i care about him.

[japhy]

No big deal, it's just a quarter million$ from the Rube's election war chest that would otherwise be wasted on down ballot candidates. trumpty will just deduct it from her divorce settlement.

[jfish26]

No big deal, it's just a quarter million$ from the Rube's election war chest that would otherwise be wasted on down ballot candidates. trumpty will just deduct it from her divorce settlement.

Which of course ties into one of the questions a discerning rube might ask, were rubes capable of discernment: why is my savior I mean candidate pressing me to buy tchotchkes directly, rather than the campaign issuing me said tchotchkes as souvenirs for campaign contributions?

[japhy]

No big deal, it's just a quarter million$ from the Rube's election war chest that would otherwise be wasted on down ballot candidates. trumpty will just deduct it from her divorce settlement.

Which of course ties into one of the questions a discerning rube might ask, were rubes capable of discernment: why is my savior I mean candidate pressing me to buy tchotchkes directly, rather than the campaign issuing me said tchotchkes as souvenirs for campaign contributions?

Someone had grifted.
Rubes not to make reply,
Rubes not to reason why,
Rubes but to do and die.
Into the valley of Lies
Rode the sixty million.

[Sparko]

The not-bright brigade

[KUTradition]

Georgia is not only a battleground state with an influential role in choosing the next president, but it is also a beautiful place to live with wonderful natural vistas from the Blue Ridge Mountains in the north down to the islands, estuaries, and beaches by the Atlantic Ocean. There is no shortage of photographs bearing witness to its beauty so Donald Trump’s campaign must have had some other reason for using images of the wrong Georgia in Facebook ads urging potential voters to check their voter registration status. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the meadowed mountain range providing the backdrop to the Trump ad was taken from Shutterstock's photo library and appears to be in the former Soviet republic, a very different type of battleground where, no doubt, the U.S. would love to win hearts and minds, but are not so bothered about votes.

[japhy]

Let's be blunt. Juan Williams sure is.

At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?

How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”

Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.

It has long been a curiosity to me that many of the most racist, seem to live in areas where they have the least interaction with non-white people. Fear of the unknown? Fear of change, as in a changing society?

“Beginning in the early 2010s — and accelerating during the presidency of Donald J. Trump…” The New York Times noted earlier this year, “white voters without a degree, increasingly moved toward the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of all white, non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party.”

This is the heart of Trump supporters who told YouGov pollsters they believe Trump is telling the truth about Haitian immigrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.”

The YouGov polls also found that 80 percent of Trump supporters also buy his lie that Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” into the U.S. I wrote a 2018 book about Trump’s history of racism. Vice President Harris echoed the book’s research in talking last week of Trump’s racist past. She pointed back to his participation in the “birther” lie, the incendiary claim that the first Black president, President Obama, had not been born in the U.S.

Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”

In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”

Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”

There are real consequences to all these racist lies. Last week, a Trump-supporting sheriff in Ohio encouraged people to report their neighbors who displayed Harris-Walz lawn signs. This incident called to mind parallels with police in Nazi Germany.
Widening the racial and political divide leads to alarm over possible violence. USA Today recently reported that more than one-third of Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump “say political violence is acceptable.”
According to a new Deseret News-HarrisX poll, 77 percent of U.S. voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about political violence before Election Day, including 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.

“We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence and violence against public officials,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last week in a speech.

The 48 percent backing Trump try to move away from his racism by talking about the need for a better economy. But Trump’s main economic plan is to impose tariffs that will drive up prices. He has no plan to improve health care or provide more affordable housing.

It was less than 30 years ago when Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, stared down racism in the GOP. “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion…,” Dole said at the 1996 convention, “the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.”

Where are those Republicans now?

Bob Dole....he would be called RINO today of course.

Member when conservatives were a principled lot who had core beliefs based upon small government and cutting government spending and shit? Lynn Cheney is talking about starting a new conservative political party. There seems to be no chance of resurrecting those ideals in the rubepublican party.

[twocoach]

Let's be blunt. Juan Williams sure is.

At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?

How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”

Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.

It has long been a curiosity to me that many of the most racist, seem to live in areas where they have the least interaction with non-white people. Fear of the unknown? Fear of change, as in a changing society?

“Beginning in the early 2010s — and accelerating during the presidency of Donald J. Trump…” The New York Times noted earlier this year, “white voters without a degree, increasingly moved toward the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of all white, non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party.”

This is the heart of Trump supporters who told YouGov pollsters they believe Trump is telling the truth about Haitian immigrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.”

The YouGov polls also found that 80 percent of Trump supporters also buy his lie that Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” into the U.S. I wrote a 2018 book about Trump’s history of racism. Vice President Harris echoed the book’s research in talking last week of Trump’s racist past. She pointed back to his participation in the “birther” lie, the incendiary claim that the first Black president, President Obama, had not been born in the U.S.

Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”

In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”

Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”

There are real consequences to all these racist lies. Last week, a Trump-supporting sheriff in Ohio encouraged people to report their neighbors who displayed Harris-Walz lawn signs. This incident called to mind parallels with police in Nazi Germany.
Widening the racial and political divide leads to alarm over possible violence. USA Today recently reported that more than one-third of Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump “say political violence is acceptable.”
According to a new Deseret News-HarrisX poll, 77 percent of U.S. voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about political violence before Election Day, including 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.

“We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence and violence against public officials,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last week in a speech.

The 48 percent backing Trump try to move away from his racism by talking about the need for a better economy. But Trump’s main economic plan is to impose tariffs that will drive up prices. He has no plan to improve health care or provide more affordable housing.

It was less than 30 years ago when Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, stared down racism in the GOP. “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion…,” Dole said at the 1996 convention, “the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.”

Where are those Republicans now?

Bob Dole....he would be called RINO today of course.

Member when conservatives were a principled lot who had core beliefs based upon small government and cutting government spending and shit? Lynn Cheney is talking about starting a new conservative political party. There seems to be no chance of resurrecting those ideals in the rubepublican party.

My Mom was born in very rural Saline County, IL in the mid 1940s, which was at the time a whites-only county. Blacks were not allowed to buy property there and it was strongly recommended that all non-whites leave the county before dark (AKA a "sundown county"). Her only interactions with black people was via the trains that went by taking them to Chicago. Her local church taught that blacks were demon spawn sent by the devil to tempt white women and kill white men. Thankfully, none of this racist nonsense stuck with her as she has always taught us to see everyone as worthy of respect until they prove otherwise.

So that is the base of knowledge that a lot of rural white people have in this nation. A huge portion of this nation is only one or two generations from segregation and open, legal racism. It's going to take another century for this stuff to be aged out of the system.

[japhy]

OK, fair point.

Former president Donald Trump is hellbent on "Making America Great Again" — but if his dying Truth Social startup is anything to go by, he's the one that needs saving.

Case in point, shares of Trump Media & Technology Group — the company behind the president's would-be competitor to Twitter, Truth Social — have been plummeting for almost any time frame you look at, including a staggering 41 percent decline in the past month alone.

Remember, this is the same guy who promised he'd "fix" Obamacare and then didn't, and that he was going to build a wall on the Southern border that Mexico would pay for, which also didn't happen.

So if you find yourself considering Trump's outsized campaign promises this time around — like that he'll save America from an imagined crime wave, even though crime is actually falling — just remember that he's demonstrably failing to run a startup right now, even while the rest of the market has been doing great.

Shares are down over 25 percent over the last five days alone, reaching historic lows. The value of the stock dropped below a pitiful $12 per share this morning for the first time since before October 2021, around the time it was announced that Trump Media would go public with the help of blank-check company Digital World Acquisition Corp.

The scale of Trump Media's floundering is astonishing. In a matter of months, Trump Media has more than wiped out any gains it had made since merging with a blank check acquisition company in March.

The precipitous drop has also eviscerated the value of Trump's personal holdings. The former reality TV host holds almost 57 percent of the company's outstanding shares, and while they're still worth around $1.4 billion today, that's a far cry from the heights they briefly reached after the company went public earlier this year.

Whether the company can turn the grim situation around is dubious. Truth Social has failed to attract new users and is quickly becoming a lonely echo chamber for the angrily shouting candidate.

Recent estimates suggest the platform has around five million active monthly users, a pitiful number that pales in comparison to even multi-hyphenate Elon Musk's hate speech incubator X.

The failing startup has attempted to put on the appearance that it has big plans in the works, including the launch of a streaming service. But its catastrophic finances paint an ugly picture. Despite its multi-billion dollar market cap, the company has been burning through cash with reckless abandon, raking in a measly $4.1 million in revenue last year while losing a staggering $58 million over the same period.

Last week, University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter told ABC News that even after hitting all-time lows, the company is still overvalued by 1,000 percent.

"It’s grossly overvalued," Ritter told CNN earlier this month. "It’s hard to come up with a value of the company that is much more than the cash on the balance sheet."

With shares in seemingly perpetual freefall, Trump's get-rich-quick scheme is starting to look even less lucrative, especially now that insiders are free to cash out and abandon ship.

Several key executives have already offloaded millions of dollars worth of shares earlier this month, including the company's CEO Devin Nunes, COO Andrew Northwall, and CFO Juhan Phillip.

Was this all a bid to raise some cash for Trump's reelection campaign? As Reuters reports, Trump Media's stock losses have outpaced a drop in betting-market odds that Trump would be reelected.

Meanwhile, the company remains adamant that it's a viable business that will rebound from several catastrophic months of trading.

"With further innovations planned soon, TMTG is optimistic about our growth strategy," a statement received by CNBC reads.

But you can prove the media wrong rubes, buy his stock now! Drive the price up! It's the retirement investment you have been waiting for.

[defixione]

The former reality TV host . . .

[Overlander]

The former reality TV host . . .

The only thing he has done successfully was be a total prick on TV

[KUTradition]

anyone catch his “rally” in Pennsylvania?

specifically, his remarks on women and abortion?



some faux jedi mind trick shit, to be sure

[jfish26]

anyone catch his “rally” in Pennsylvania?

specifically, his remarks on women and abortion?



some faux jedi mind trick shit, to be sure

You mean the one where the adjudicated rapist told all women he is their protector and they won't need to think about abortion ever again?

[twocoach]

anyone catch his “rally” in Pennsylvania?

specifically, his remarks on women and abortion?



some faux jedi mind trick shit, to be sure

You mean the one where the adjudicated rapist told all women he is their protector and they won't need to think about abortion ever again?

Watching a man whom I would not trust to be alone in a room with any woman I care about state that he is going to be the protector of women and make them feel safe was just fucking creepy.

[KUTradition]

anyone catch his “rally” in Pennsylvania?

specifically, his remarks on women and abortion?



some faux jedi mind trick shit, to be sure

You mean the one where the adjudicated rapist told all women he is their protector and they won't need to think about abortion ever again?

magical stuff