Donald Trump: Classic or Dud?

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.

They are back live in Fulton County right now questioning Nathan Wade's lawyer about his knowledge of the relationship, he isn't giving the defense much whatsoever.

The attorney for the defense is so bad, just utterly flailing around trying to get Wade's attorney to provide any useful information.

If they were doing a better job they would be making a better case that they are not wasting everyone's time. Even the judge seems bored and ready to move on.

they are wasting so much time trying to make a point that wouldn't show much even if they were able to nail it down

And this witness ain't giving them nothing.

Roffle:

Left: motion from the Trump folks today arguing "well even if he did cook the books, it could've been to spare himself embarrassment with the Mrs rather than save his campaign. Right: story from @swin24.bsky.social and I over a year ago predicting this

seemed like the witness didn't want to perjure himself, funny how this always seems to happen in Trumpland

hes got a meme stock now, too perfect

What’s gotten far less attention, though, is this: A frenetic rally in a stock tied to Trump Media & Technology Group — which operates the Truth Social platform he posts on daily — has minted a nearly $4 billion windfall for him.

There are any number of caveats to this figure, including how it’s only a paper profit for now that he’ll have to wait months to monetize, and yet the stock’s surge is a potentially huge financial boost for a billionaire candidate suddenly short on cash.

The type of transaction — known as a de-SPAC or blank-check deal — that would hand Trump this new-found wealth is a complex one that briefly became popular on Wall Street during the stock mania unleashed by pandemic-era stimulus. In this particular deal, Truth Social’s owner would enter the stock market by merging with a publicly traded company called Digital World Acquisition Corp.

https://archive.ph/m3RVH#selection-1627.0-1645.31

*wriggle*

Sigh.

this is really the perfect trump event wriggling out of a jam in the stupidest most media poisoned way possible while screwing over his supporters by dumping the stock that theyve pumped out of loyalty

idk if itll actually work but its an interesting story

i thought for sure that $400M would be too much for trump to ever be able to cover in a world stacked with evil billionaires!

wait i can see it now hes gonna do very public obvious securities fraud in an effort to keep the price up while he sells

This reminds me of the guy I work with who is always a disorganized mess, has made multiple very public colossal fuckups that have cost us money, yet every year he miraculously gets another massive promotion to everyone else's complete shock.