Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

I’m getting my own show on newsmax. Tune in monday at 8pm

use the “don’t sue me” disclaimer is my non-legal advice. i use a “i’m so uncollectable” codicil, too.

Thiiiis fuuuuuucking guuuuuuy

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Former President Trump sought to appeal to Black voters on Friday night in South Carolina by repeatedly citing the 91 felony charges he faces and comparing them to unfair treatment from the criminal justice system toward minorities in America.

“A lot of people said that’s why the Black people liked me, because they had been hurt so badly and discriminated against. And they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against … Maybe there’s something to it,” he said, right after talking about the charges.

He also cited his mug shot in Georgia — taken last summer after he was charged for trying to overturn the state’s election results — as a reason that Black voters would gravitate toward him in November. Trump said he now saw Black Americans wearing mug shots on their T-shirts.

“When I did the mug shot in Atlanta, that mug shot is number one,” Trump said. He added that the Black population “embraced it more than anyone else.”

He also said: “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/24/trump-black-voters-indicted-mug-shot/

stay woke donnie

Orangebone

As if there’s some compendium of “best selling mug shots” broken down by demographics.

"Maybe there's something to it."

"I just made it up on the spot, but - hey - anything's possible."

https://bsky.app/profile/kleinman.bsky.social/post/3km2dthtdyk23

One of the replies shows Spike Lee holding up a pair of 'gold' shoes superficially similar to Trump's, but when you compare the two Trump's pair looks like embarrassingly cheap crap knocked off by the low bidder and designed by somebody's alcoholic brother-in-law, while Spike's look both stylish and wearable, like something a person who was really into shoes might covet.

“For hard-working Americans, Nov. 5 will be our new Liberation Day,” Trump said in an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “But for the liars, and cheaters, and fraudsters, and censors and imposters who have commandeered our government, it will be their Judgment Day.”

sounds fair.

“These are the stakes of this election: Our country is being destroyed and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” he declared, casting Biden’s leadership as “an express train barreling toward servitude and to ruin.”

”A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell. And in many ways, we’re living in hell right now,” he said, adding that: “the unprecedented success of the United States of America will be my ultimate and absolute revenge.”

He's high on his own supply.

...and said supply is just gas station dick pills.

Next band name, thanks C.

the unprecedented success of the United States of America is on my ultimate and absolute revenge vision board too!

I think what'll be interesting is that for so many older people, his election was totally reality-breaking, but for kids growing up under him, that's just what a President IS. He's the baseline of their understanding.

— Brendan Hill (@playwrightrodeo) February 24, 2024

The next celebrity Republican President probably won't be that Trumpish though, in terms of the specific traits that make him so anamolous.

Not that I have a clue who that would be.

probably Donald Trump

Just putting his fetid corpse up every four years does seem more likely now sure

This MF will say anything - next thing you know he’ll be selling his own version of Wonka’s chocolate factory on the stump with no irony

Oompa loompa doompa dee dump

I liked the way Bakari Sellers framed the election last night: Biden vs. Trump vs. the couch.

Only just caught up with the data set on last week’s president rankings and realized that, even among conservative/GOP-affiliated scholars, Trump ranks 43rd of 45, perhaps underlining how much the divide really is between “the elite” and everyone else

What Trump voters like most about him are features that barely show up on the radar of "presidential scholars" or else rate as negatives.

I think just “scholars” of any type about covers it

there may be authoritarian xenophobic nationalist presidents in the future. (i hope there aren't). but there will never be the likes of this guy again. there isn't even anyone else in popular culture who is similar to him, like someone who is a deliberate parody of themself but still takes themselves seriously. maybe vince mcmahon or someone like that.

he's like a mix between vince mcmahon, joan rivers, tony soprano, and mussolini. the latter element -- the lust for power -- is the most incongruous with the rest of how he is lol.

How?

because he is basically a right wing talking head type of guy with a very new york sassy insult comic thing. but then he really does want to be a dictator. some people had the idea during the 2016 election that he just wanted to be president to serve his vanity, as a ceremonial role, but that turned out to not be true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

i know he isn't an architect of project 2025, but it represents an attempt to translate the sort of things he tried to do into a systematic agenda.

a lot of people didn't think that HE thought that he would win. that he was just doing it for his brand and publicity. i can believe that. he certainly wasn't prepared in any way when he got in there.

i was surprised he didn't pivot to a more moderate and mainstream style once he was elected. i think our sycophantic media class would have been relieved and embraced him if he did that, but instead he kept the lunatics around (bannon and flynn) and did things like the muslim ban. he also gave a speech at the fbi where he insulted them his first day i think.

I don’t think other people trying to bend Trump’s unacceptability into an acceptable narrative is an indicator that the avaricious yearning for power that has been the hallmark of his pursuit of celebrity for as long as I can remember knowing about him. One of the reasons his campaign was initially funny was because it was so obvious from both The Apprentice and also his rhetoric that he viewed the Presidency as a venue for dictatorship, and it stopped being funny when he started winning primaries and his obvious disqualifications didn’t disqualify him.

DJP otm

I missed out an “is surprising/out of character” because I was typing on my phone but I think the gist of what I meant comes across

i hear sooooo many people on t.v. news saying complimentary things about nikki haley its insane. and i try not to be conspiracy-minded. msnbc constantly having people compliment her. the daily show had a good bit about it the other night. drives me nuts. maybe she's not trump but she's still pretty damn scary. she must be good for ratings. they hope she'll hang in there. good narrative. whatever.

msnbc is full to the brim with anti-Trump republicans who believe George W Bush was an unfairly tarnished great man, of course they love Hailey

otm, it turned out Trump as president is exactly the same as Trump in every other setting. Surprising if your metric is, “How do presidents behave,” but not if it’s “How does Donald Trump behave?”

(Xposts)

this one. i promise not to keep spamming with daily show clips. they've just been good recently. that jon stewart tucker carlson russia thing made me laugh so hard! he hasn't made me laugh in....man, since obama? or bush. who knows. this clip is right on to me though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYp2j2dKsjA

Like I said on Thursday, if Trump didn't exist Haley would be our most nutjob conservative presidential nominee in history.

The only truthful thing Trump has ever said is when he admitted after the '16 election that he didn't think he'd win.

If Trump didn't exist it's hard to say what positions Haley would be taking on anything, since she's mostly an opportunist. In this case the opportunism takes the form of "splitting the difference between Trump and normal pre-2016 Republican candidates," but in different circumstances she could be tacking in any number of directions.

I base my conclusions on how she ruled as governor during the Obama years and she was pretty fascist already.

Her idea of "An alternative to Trump" is to run as she did in the mid '00s and it was already dismal, way to the right of Romney and McCain.

She was terrible for sure. (I like this history of her support of the Confederate flag, both before and after she ordered it taken down: https://kevinmlevin.substack.com/p/nikki-haleys-revisionist-history)

I just mean that Trump has distorted everything in the Republican Party so much that it's hard to imagine what they would be like without him. Still terrible! But maybe also still hewing closer to the longstanding practice of keeping the racist/fascist/nationalist base energized enough to vote but preferably at arm's length.

Her Dixie flag decisions looked like, if I remember (someone can correct me), a mix of disgust and cynicism. Her public statements seemed to capture a genuine sense of outrage, i.e. why do so many people in my state espouse Confederate values, when she was also ignorant if not stupid about what her party had espoused since 1964.

Her basic line was, "It's appalling that white supremacists have hijacked the noble Confederate flag," which ... yeah.