Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

when has Republicans being evil and incompetent monsters ever stopped half of America from voting for them? (xps)

Fear and loathing...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-fears-trump-will-take-the-republican-party-down-with-him/article/2623311

lol that they are just now realizing that Trump is a clown

Fear and loathing...

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-fears-trump-will-take-the-republican-party-down-with-him/article/2623311

lol how many times since March 2016 has the GOP allowed itself to get quoted in stories with URLs like this?

DOJ official to @thedailybeast: Trump's comments could "absolutly" be construed as obstruction https://t.co/968YGsI0ZW pic.twitter.com/uwzAhb8kiO

— Colin Jones (@colinjones) May 19, 2017

waiting for Trump to just go on TV and scream ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

LOL at an administration utterly incapable or uninterested in thinking things through or planning in advance ... except when it comes to looking into the rules of impeachment.

This is actually a really cool shot:

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2017/05/20/us/20prexy1/20prexy1-master768.jpg

BTW, omg, who is looking after Baron!?!?

Baron

Don't tell me he's Home Alone?
Is that where the orange one came in? Kind of fitting bookend?

Hahah okay tons of great quotes here

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/19/trump-officials-he-looks-more-and-more-like-a-complete-moron

Amazing quotes in there

Also:

🚨🚨🚨 COMEY agrees to testify in open session before Senate Intel pic.twitter.com/PXktidhJyI

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) May 19, 2017

Trump himself hasn’t been implicated in any of these leaks except where he’s implicated himself, where he says something that makes his perhaps less-than-sterling intentions clear,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the controversy candidly. “He keeps saying there’s no collusion, and I think he’s right. So if he would just shut his trap, what would Dems have?”

Holy cow, when your staff are willing to talk smack about you to the press this freely, what kind of a future does your admin have

how many words have donald and barron exchanged over the last four months, i wonder

"not the mama!"

it's kushner

If you're at the point of saying something like that to a reporter, why not just quit? Go be free.

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 19, 2017

Be great if the plane comes back and they all go to the White House and there's nobody there.

Be great if the plane comes back

nuh uh

Note I said 'if'

true. there's always the chance Trump demands to fly the plane

Speaking of Twilight Zone episodes, I'd like that when the plane descended for landing they saw dinosaurs out the window.

they're going to a very volatile part of the world and they're infamously incompetent. is security a particular strength of this administration or is trump exposing himself to a lot of risk traveling to the middle east?

supposedly this will be the first time a plane has flown directly from saudi to israel in . . . quite a while

this really is a pretty telling video, Comey wants to be a million miles away from Trump and Trump is greeting him in this really amazing smarmy way, i swear he almost blows him a kiss before he walks over.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoIA7y_Kccc

The body language says everything.

i'm sure the height thing really does bother him

dunno - i remember that being heavily cited at the time as "look at snivelling comey and his best pal trump"

xpost.

i mean seems comey, in whatever awful madness this is, has impressively stood up to a terrible admin.

At this point, I'm really curious how the ~35% still approving Trump are avoiding the news. They certainly surf online, watch non-Fox national news, listen to non RW talk radio. I actually worry about it, as in, should Trump be impeached some 30+% will have no idea why and consider it a betrayal of democracy by DC elites.

^ certainly surely cannot

"not the mama!"

― Charles "Butt" Stanton (Neanderthal), Friday, May 19, 2017 6:18 PM (thirty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's kushner

― 龜, Friday, May 19, 2017 6:19 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol for some reason I mentally detoured into "kushner is barron trump's real dad" territory for a second but that thankfully doesn't line up logistically

Eh, Comey has the opportunity to play hero and he may be taking it -- we'll see what his testimony is like. But it's not like he's exactly a victim here.

sanpaku: https://www.apnews.com/780cc65e99354b00877c870acf2cdaf0

I saw a report somewhere that public opinion does play a big role in all of this and that impeachment talk isn't realistic until approval ratings go down further (at least below 30%) because it's going to take that for the republicans to get on board

xp:

I've seen that, I still wonder what active measures these folks take to avoid news. It's not like being an literalist evangelical, where its easy enough to avoid science classes/articles/documentaries.

I had a number of informal talks (mostly online) with Trump supporters before the election, in which I encouraged them to look into his past as a serial business failure, and certainly irreligious/vulgar individual, and usually concluded, "He's an inept conman, we've known it and you will soon".

Analyses of Trump support will probably feature in dozens of theses going forward. The developed world really hasn't had such an important cult of personality since the 40s.

I'm also pretty worried about the rhetoric that T has already put out to that 30%, literally a declaration of war

i swear he almost blows him a kiss before he walks over.

My reading video of that is that you can remove the "almost".

if Quist wins that election next week in MT the GOP is going to freak the fuck out

He sent an email to his list that said something like, "as steve bannon said, the swamp won't let itself be drained without a fight." As this goes on he is going to try to tell his reporters that all of this is about the establishment trying to stop him from making america great again.

Whether this spin will work with his base, idk

It is. If you believe the media/unelected government is a coastal elite with no love for you, and someone blowhorns your concerns on immigration and trade contrary to mainstream politicians, you might believe that the Trump revelations is a globalist (Jew?) conspiracy against your interests. The fact the guy at the center of it is feeding into these misconceptions worries me. I don't want an accidental civil war.

What I want is some way to get through to the less informed, to tell them this is why your jobs are gone and this is what each political party did about it, and wants to do about in the future, and the disenfranchised just ignoring the mainstream isn't going to help.

regardless of what happens now, in the distant future there will still be small pockets of white supremacist trump supporters who will stick with him to the end. it's a creepy thought.

Def. i don't have a good sense of what percentage of the country this is though. 25% are said to be "die hard" trump followers, but will all of them stick with him to the end? If he was impeached after not doing anything useful for them?

Whether this spin will work with his base

that spin will work for quite a large number of people, considering that 25% of 330 million is quite a large number. in terms of national politics, that number would not be enough to save him, but it would hugely piss all those folks off, because they would believe him and see ending his tenure in office as a massive betrayal.

it all comes down to how much evidence Mueller can amass and how clearly it points to criminal acts. the speed with which this has been rolling along and trump's propensity for never backing down on anything he does, however bad and wrong, I'm guessing he'll have dozens of republican congressional reps ready to pitch him overboard by August or September. they're already turning that idea over very seriously from all indications.

White supremacists were here before Trump, and will be after. They're not terribly important politically, and a few individuals have committed, and will continue to commit isolated terrorist attacks (from Ok city to Atlanta olympics, to maybe abortion dr assassins). The problem for American politics is the larger mass that supported Trump because he was the first politician in their memories to express their concerns in a language they could understand (even if almost incomprehensible to the literate). How do we get them to rejoin the mainstream? How do we get them to understand the complications and nuance of issues?

I don't think its really a matter of education. I don't believe education standards and critical thinking have declined much in my lifetime. The main thing that's changed is that once we received our news, and often opinions, from nuanced thinkers, and now many don't.

Like,during the campaign he had a kind of transgressive swagger that appealed to people. But that has evaporated now imo. When he talks he just seems fantastically out of his depth. The narrative he used to put forward -- drain the swamp, build the wall, jobs -- seems less convincing than it used to be when the prospect of a Trump president was purely hypothetical.

Sorry my last post was an addendum to my previous post. yall type fast

Aimless: what if Trump supporters are told Mueller is a tool of coastal elites? When basic foundations of Democracy like journalism are attacked (and in some cases, subverted), our institutions themselves may be seen as "enemies of the people".