A story about a pathetic man's downfall [34 Felony Convictions]

[Fudge Nuggets 19166]

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

[DDD Dad 14272]

42 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

The problem is, they are.  I have yet to meet anybody who buys into the qanon stuff, who isn't mentally ill.  Yes, that makes them susceptible to being radicalized, but we have to figure out how to crack that nut and bring them back from the insanity.  Would help if we had a coherent mental health system.

I think we are agreeing.  "Mental illness" has become the excuse du jour for avoiding issues regarding gun control, suicide, etc., especially considering we as a society have no appetite to DEAL with those who suffer from it.   

[Eskimohorn 5624]

Osama bin Laden wasn’t a liar. He was consistent in the application of his philosophy and never denied what he was doing. He never pretended to be a defender of American democracy while he sought to destroy it. And he hated the Saudi Royals. 
 
I don’t think comparing him to Donald Trump is exactly fair, especially when we’re losing a 9/11’s worth of American lives to COVID-19 every day and we STILL have no national strategy to combat it. Trump has done more damage to America than bin Laden ever did. Although a good argument could be made that Trump is part of the damage bin Laden did to America and that’s totally reasonable. 

I think Bin Laden is a continuation of the post Cold War assault on Western-style democracy from Oligarchs, China, Russia, and Middle Eastern powers. Social media is accelerating our plunge.

[4th&Five 41483]

16 minutes ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

They didn’t let Hitler’s allies stay in power. 

[Eskimohorn 5624]

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

So we gonna carpet bomb Branson and Bryan-College Station, then relocate Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to Argentina?

[LTbear 4161]

16 minutes ago, Eskimohorn said:

So we gonna carpet bomb Branson and Bryan-College Station, then relocate Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham to Argentina?

Is... is that an option?

[Mo Horn 8810]

 

[staboner 4963]

2 hours ago, Dr. Teeth said:

I think this Pinterest ban might start the nukes to fly. 

[Bama Chick 28596]

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

We occupied their cities.

We brought their leaders before Nuremberg.

We made the citizen sympathizers cleans concentration camps and dig mass graves for the Jewish victims.

The global community shunned and shamed the whole of Germany.

We didn’t allow Hitler’s surviving henchmen a platform.

We can ban them from social media and....... well, that’s about it.

[Brisketexan 104799]

Listened to the BBC this afternoon. Holy fuck....how embarrassing. The coverage might as well have been of some third world backwater. And it was all accurate. They don’t pull punches.

For example, they raised the FACT that the President has spent weeks actively trying to solicit the military to support him in overturning the result of the election. “Only because the American military - as cautioned by ten former secretaries of defense - refused to go along with him did this coup attempt fail.”

It really is that simple. He tried to get the military to support him so he could stay in power. Had they gone along with it, this would be all over - we would have lost the Republic fully, finally, and irrevocably.

We came that close....and it’s not over yet. And the fucking BBC damn well knows it. They were referring to Trump, quite alarmed, as an ongoing threat to democracy and the world.

Jesus fucking Christ.

[Neonmoon 38127]

1 hour ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

 

1 hour ago, 4th&Five said:

They didn’t let Hitler’s allies stay in power. 

 

41 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

We occupied their cities.

We brought their leaders before Nuremberg.

We made the citizen sympathizers cleans concentration camps and dig mass graves for the Jewish victims.

The global community shunned and shamed the whole of Germany.

We didn’t allow Hitler’s surviving henchmen a platform.

We can ban them from social media and....... well, that’s about it.

Yup, pretty much. 

The Great Betrayal. When Northern Republicans (now Democrats) ended reconstruction and removed federal troops protecting black Americans and their rights in exchange for Southern Democrats (now Republicans) accepted Rutherford B. Hayes as President during the contest election of 1877

 

[atomheartbevo 89511]

2 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

Has anyone bothered to figure out how Germany deprogrammed their crazies after WWII?  I hope someone took notes back then because we’re going to need to do the same thing. 

Bama Chick nailed it above, but I'd throw in that we hung quite a few of his co-conspirators and senior leadership for war crimes.  That really put a damper on the German population.  That and we occupied everything, the Soviets raped everything (except maybe the horses, but I wasn't there).

 

 

[TwiceHorn 31367]

2 hours ago, 4th&Five said:

They didn’t let Hitler’s allies stay in power. 

Germany didn't.  We did.  We tried and imprisoned and executed many or most of the true believers.

The mere party members were banned from power by legislation that we forced, basically.

Some came to the US to work for us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

[Beau Vine 54072]

3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

President of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention

Never seem so many oxymorons in so few words...

[Grandioso 2592]

Still blows my mind that days after we all learned that Trump tried to get the GA Sec to commit voter fraud, thousands of his supporters stormed the capital to "stop the steal." 

It's so fucking topsy turvy. 

[Francisco 2.0 32355]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stewing-in-the-white-house-trump-plots-a-boastful-media-tour-and-screams-im-not-going-to-resign?ref=home?ref=home

 

Quote

Sequestered in the White House following a series of high-profile resignations and the deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday that he openly ignited, and with under two weeks left in his time in office, Donald Trump is so far undeterred by the fact he could soon become the first American president to get impeached twice by the House of Representatives. Instead, he’s determined to remain in office and make himself look good—body count aside. According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, the president at one point in the White House on Friday “literally yelled” the words, “I’M NOT GOING TO RESIGN,” before launching into a tirade about how Democratic lawmakers will regret their push to impeach him a second time, and that they are hurting “the country” by doing so.

 

Quote

Two other people familiar with the situation say Trump made other similar comments this week or gave no indication that he was worried about leaving early or a removal. Trump, the two sources said, also predicted that it was, to him, a pointless endeavor since the soon-to-be Democratic-controlled Senate, currently in GOP hands, would never convict him in another impeachment trial, and asked advisers if they agreed with him.

In addition to mounting calls for his resignation or invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove him from office, Trump now faces possible investigation for incitement to riot for his comments to supporters before Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol.

 

Quote

Since Friday, the president has also been livid at Twitter for banning his @realDonaldTrump account, demanding to know if there were legal remedies to the permanent suspension, those close to Trump say.

White House spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday afternoon. But campaign aide Jason Miller, a current senior adviser to Trump, told The Daily Beast on Saturday evening, “Be careful of what you wish for. Big Tech, Big Media, and their friends in the national Democratic Party have a unique ability to overreach, resulting in a strengthening of President Trump’s political base.”

 

Spoiler

In the days since the pro-Trump riot and its death toll, as well as in the recent days of a coronavirus surge in the United States, the outgoing president has been consumed by his standard diet of personal grievance and plans to promote and brag about what he deems his “amazing achievements,” even as some top members of his own party start distancing themselves from his mess.

According to two sources with knowledge of the matter, the president and several close advisers are now discussing the possibility of Trump sitting for multiple media interviews in the coming days, in an attempt to boast about his time in office, including with one potential interview they're hoping will focus on the Middle East deals he and his son-in-law, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, helped to strike.

However, various current and former Trump officials who don’t think he should resign immediately feel that he should just get out of the picture now before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Asked if the president should resign, Barry Bennett, who served as a senior Trump adviser during the 2016 campaign, said on Saturday, “No. But go to Florida and stay. This is not a time to escalate the boiling anger across the country. Smart leaders will understand that anger on both sides is the real threat to our country. Not Trump. Escalation is not unlike what he did. We can’t afford to go any further down this road…If it’s not too late.”

 

[Nice Guy Eddie 13425]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Listened to the BBC this afternoon. Holy fuck....how embarrassing. The coverage might as well have been of some third world backwater. And it was all accurate. They don’t pull punches.

For example, they raised the FACT that the President has spent weeks actively trying to solicit the military to support him in overturning the result of the election. “Only because the American military - as cautioned by ten former secretaries of defense - refused to go along with him did this coup attempt fail.”

It really is that simple. He tried to get the military to support him so he could stay in power. Had they gone along with it, this would be all over - we would have lost the Republic fully, finally, and irrevocably.

We came that close....and it’s not over yet. And the fucking BBC damn well knows it. They were referring to Trump, quite alarmed, as an ongoing threat to democracy and the world.

Jesus fucking Christ.

This is what needs to come out in an impeachment investigation. Who exactly did trump pressure to overthrow the Constitution? Now that his public voice has been heavily silenced and he will lose the commander in chief power in days, even the military and politicians will have no problem coming clean. Maybe he has a few cabinet or other leaders that will fall on their sword for him, but I doubt many.

what really sucks is that evidence is probably being destroyed today by low level loyalists. It won’t erase the conversations though.

[Walte464 450]

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

[atomheartbevo 89511]

3 hours ago, DDD Dad said:

I think we are agreeing.  "Mental illness" has become the excuse du jour for avoiding issues regarding gun control, suicide, etc., especially considering we as a society have no appetite to DEAL with those who suffer from it.   

It's real easy to say we should lock up all of the qanon nuts we capture, but then, unless they murdered somebody, they will be let out in short order, and still have the problems.

The bad thing is, these people had these problems for years -  my qanon relative, I've always known something was wrong with her, long before qanon.  She didn't even vote until 2020, and I don't think her bf was politically active until the past few years as well.

Qanon and Trump managed to collectively point these people in the same direction.  Prior to that, it was easy for all of us to ignore, because they simply weren't very visible, or their habits were...harmless (crazy cat lady, etc.).  Qanon/Trump basically weaponized them in a way.  Put them in echo chambers where they reinforced the bad habits in one another, instead of normally being surrounded by relatives who were trying to steer them the right way.

Edited January 10, 2021 by atomheartbevo

[DDD Dad 14272]

11 minutes ago, Walte464 said:

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

Just a quick beast drive across the border?

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

11 minutes ago, Walte464 said:

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

I went to the station site, but didn't see anything beyond what you've got posted--photos of the plane. Optimistically, he's going to announce something positive with respect to a trade deal or the Wall (Okay, the wall isn't optimistic, but let's have some perspective considering militia attacks on the Capitol). Pessimistically, he's going to try and rally ICE and BP officers to forsake their oath and be loyal to him because of the upcoming events encircling the inauguration. At this point, who knows? I'm on the ledge for the duration.

[Eastwood 4394]

That's a real head scratcher. I can't think of a reason for him to be in the RGV.

[Surly Bevo 24876]

Kirstie Alley probably ate her followers

[pantone159 719]

8 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Pessimistically, he's going to try and rally ICE and BP officers to forsake their oath and be loyal to him because of the upcoming events encircling the inauguration.

I had not thought of that, but that does not seem impossible. It probably is some wall bs though.

 

[Neonmoon 38127]

3 minutes ago, Eastwood said:

That's a real head scratcher. I can't think of a reason for him to be in the RGV.

Border wall dedication 

[Underdog 28508]

Delia's Tamales?  Maybe he reads Surly and saw us discussing them. 

[Underdog 28508]

8 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

Kirstie Alley probably ate her followers

Not anymore since she heard they were high in cholesterol. 

[Biff Tannen 45590]

47 minutes ago, Grandioso said:

Still blows my mind that days after we all learned that Trump tried to get the GA Sec to commit voter fraud, thousands of his supporters stormed the capital to "stop the steal." 

It's so fucking topsy turvy. 

180 degrees from reality my friend. 180 degrees. 

[Biff Tannen 45590]

35 minutes ago, Walte464 said:

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

In a final, epic twist, he’s going to climb the wall and flee into Mexico. 

[atomheartbevo 89511]

Pat Toomey thinks he committed an impeachable offense.  He's out of office in two years, but taking this publicly, he's putting a bullseye on his back for some deranged Trumpkins.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/09/politics/pat-toomey-trump-impeachable-offenses/index.html

Anybody keeping track of how many Republicans are coming around?

[atomheartbevo 89511]

22 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Pessimistically, he's going to try and rally ICE and BP officers to forsake their oath and be loyal to him because of the upcoming events encircling the inauguration. At this point, who knows? I'm on the ledge for the duration.

On January 20th, he is no longer President.  Biden will be sworn in.  Any ICE/BP want to fuck around and find out, they will stop receiving paychecks and benefits, and could very well be prosecuted.  Trump loses nothing - he will still have his money, his resort, etc., but asking ICE/BP to make themselves unemployable for the rest of their lives, yeah, no, that's not going to work out for him.

Here's the thing a lot of people miss:  A true revolution requires a shitload of people who have absolutely nothing to lose.  These are people at rock bottom - maybe they aren't getting enough food to feed their families, they aren't able to keep a roof over their heads, the government is taking their money and their resources (crops, farm animals, making them house troops, etc.).  

Right now, Trump has a bunch of Karens and Chads or Kevins (not sure of the difference) who have jobs and Facebook posts they need to make, you know, the ones leisurely strolling through the Capitol, and they do not want to lose their jobs, their homes, their families, their abilities to ask to speak to the manager.  And then he's got a bunch of mentally ill qanon types like the woman who tapped into her inner Leeroy Jenkins, and while the last type make for great cannon fodder, you can't actually build and sustain a revolution off of them, as they are unpredictable at the very least.

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

4 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

On January 20th, he is no longer President.  Biden will be sworn in.  Any ICE/BP want to fuck around and find out, they will stop receiving paychecks and benefits, and could very well be prosecuted.  Trump loses nothing - he will still have his money, his resort, etc., but asking ICE/BP to make themselves unemployable for the rest of their lives, yeah, no, that's not going to work out for him.

Here's the thing a lot of people miss:  A true revolution requires a shitload of people who have absolutely nothing to lose.  These are people at rock bottom - maybe they aren't getting enough food to feed their families, they aren't able to keep a roof over their heads, the government is taking their money and their resources (crops, farm animals, making them house troops, etc.).  

Right now, Trump has a bunch of Karens and Chads or Kevins (not sure of the difference) who have jobs and Facebook posts they need to make, you know, the ones leisurely strolling through the Capitol, and they do not want to lose their jobs, their homes, their families, their abilities to ask to speak to the manager.  And then he's got a bunch of mentally ill qanon types like the woman who tapped into her inner Leeroy Jenkins, and while the last type make for great cannon fodder, you can't actually build and sustain a revolution off of them, as they are unpredictable at the very least.

He also has a lot of police on his side. Those guys at the Capitol? Some were police that came from other places.

But I hope it is this:

21 minutes ago, Neonmoon said:

Border wall dedication 

and collectively if the 80 plus million people who voted for Joe Biden huff and we puff at just the right moment, we may just pull off a fairytale.

[Eskimohorn 5624]

Listened to the BBC this afternoon. Holy fuck....how embarrassing. The coverage might as well have been of some third world backwater. And it was all accurate. They don’t pull punches.

For example, they raised the FACT that the President has spent weeks actively trying to solicit the military to support him in overturning the result of the election. “Only because the American military - as cautioned by ten former secretaries of defense - refused to go along with him did this coup attempt fail.”

It really is that simple. He tried to get the military to support him so he could stay in power. Had they gone along with it, this would be all over - we would have lost the Republic fully, finally, and irrevocably.

We came that close....and it’s not over yet. And the fucking BBC damn well knows it. They were referring to Trump, quite alarmed, as an ongoing threat to democracy and the world.

Jesus fucking Christ.

This is all Trump’s long game of getting the UK, Western Europe, South Korea, and Japan to beef up their standing army and military preparedness, so democracy can continue to exist. That should help the US finally be able to reallocate its military spending to more reasonable levels.

When we’re able to adequately fund universal healthcare, education, and infrastructure funding, we will all owe Trump a debt of gratitude for playing the “Mad King” role.

[Surly Bevo 24876]

Probably there to get his "Newcomer of the Year" Award from Los Zetas.

[Chooky 13304]

23 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

Kirstie Alley probably ate her followers

There's a lot going on right now and I think it's in poor taste to hurl unnecessary invective toward that dripping pig flap who condensates like souring lunch meat left in the sun. 

[Dr. Teeth 5842]

30 minutes ago, Eastwood said:

That's a real head scratcher. I can't think of a reason for him to be in the RGV.

One of the places they were able to commit voter fraud. 

[tantric superman 4667]

21 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

In a final, epic twist, he’s going to climb the wall and flee into Mexico. 

It's like Fred Gomez Carrasco all over again!

(Yeah, I'm old.)

[WhatTheBuck 28730]

1 hour ago, Walte464 said:

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

A prop? (Theatrical, not aeronautical.)

[Francisco 2.0 32355]

Long piece on Trump from David Roth.  As typical of a Roth piece, it gives you something to think about.  

 

https://defector.com/after-the-sacred-landslide/

 

Quote

Donald Trump does not become president of a country by accident, although there has inarguably been a strong slapstick element to it. A country would first have to be depraved enough to produce a Donald Trump in the first place, and then it would have to go on getting progressively sicker in ways that permitted him to rise, through one egregious public idiocy after another and from one act of casual defilement to the next, to the sort of prominence that would make that presidential campaign possible. It would have to be sick in ways that would make it such that long before he inexorably won his party’s nomination and then the nation’s highest office, nearly every American knew his name. The country would have to be distracted and defeated and deluded enough to believe that this qualified him, and even qualified him in unique ways. It would have conflated not just who Trump appeared to be on TV with who he really was, but its own governance with unusually slow-moving TV programming.

 

Quote

The people that knew Trump’s name didn’t really know what he was, or anyway couldn’t believe the crabbed and pathetic fact of it despite his repeated assertion and performance of it. They knew him as a gilded living metonym for the idea of business success, and elected him president in what amounted to a casting decision. It was his second time in the role of America’s Richest Bad Boy, but after trying it on for real and failing badly in the previous millennium Trump flourished when given the opportunity to play it in a more consequence-free way, as a character on reality television. He ran as a sort of hybrid of those two personas, with the implied Olympian mastery of the more recent iteration filigreed with the unvarnished retrograde bigotry and cheesy showbiz thirstiness of the original. They had a complementary aspirational appeal, at least to people whose highest aspiration was to say and do and take whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, forever. Trump was admirable, to those who admired him, because he was living proof that a person could be an absolutely replacement-level asshole and also be untouchably rich and famous and respected and, because of how editing works, also always right.

 

Quote

Trump easily superimposed his blowzy fixations and default rich-kid binaries on his new identity as a politician, which makes sense if you have seen what our politics are like. Trump’s understanding of the world and way of doing politics mirrors the gossipy TV shit he’s revered his whole life—who’s hot and who’s not, gloating victory and shameful humiliation, feuds and betrayals and shocking sweeps-week plays. This is a pretty narrow and facile way of being in the world, but the damage that leads Trump to see life as an endless series of Entertainment Tonight segments that should by rights all be about him proved jarringly easy to superimpose on a politics that wasn’t really about anything more interesting. The first time Trump ran, it was as the person who could and would avenge various offenses against his followers’ honor in ways that his opponents were too weak to do and too compromised even to attempt. When he ran again, during the second zenith of a plague that he’d alternately ignored and denied, he didn’t even bother making that pitch. He did not claim to have fixed the problems he’d done so much to create, or even to have an idea about how to fix them; he ran against those problems as he understood them, which was as if they were petty and jealous rivals unfairly trying to make him look bad, but mostly he ran as The President, and on the demand that what was his must be allowed to remain his, as it was his by right. Trump ran as himself and only as himself, which is to say he ran as the bulletproof avatar of a brutal, arbitrary, and manifestly untenable status quo that had finally collapsed into a grim loop of defiant public protest and unaccountable state violence. He got many more votes the second time around than he did the first, but this time he lost.

 

Spoiler

One of the most important things to know about Trump is that he never has a plan. He barely has an itinerary. He simply moves from one flubby gilded hustle to the next, dedicating each moment to whatever feels good or whatever he thinks looks strongest. What mess he leaves behind is by definition not his problem, and he’s always already somewhere else by the time the stain sets. Trump is used to having other people do what he says, because he is richer and more powerful than them; that people have almost always done just that has made him soft and weak and strange, but also it has seldom led to him being seriously inconvenienced. He’ll call that a win.

So of course Trump didn’t have a plan for losing the election. He expected that the people working under him—that is, the entire United States government—would find a way to stop the election that he’d lost from becoming official when he gave that order, but he had no sense of how that might work beyond them just somehow doing it. He promised evidence that would show he was right and then told other people to find it. It never came, but at some point he just started acting as if it had been delivered and denied, and began talking about how unfair that was. 

It was his opinion that he’d won ten or so million more votes than he’d actually received, a victory that Trump, Trumpianly, called “a sacred landslide.” On Wednesday, after he told them to do it, hundreds of people who live to share Trump’s opinions overran the U.S. Capitol building on his behalf, because they believed they were doing their patriotic duty or at least serving their own unenlightened self-interest; it is a pillar of Trumpism not to recognize a distinction between the two. They were mostly following through on the promise that has always been at the heart of Trump’s appeal, which is that they would get to be a part of his greatest deal ever, and cut in ahead of every less-connected other person when it came time to share the winnings, and enjoy the premium luxury finishes and absolute personal impunity synonymous with the word “Trump.” 

Trump has used this glib old huckster’s promise long before it became the heart of his last and most ambitious grift, to sell real estate seminars and signature neckties and ghostwritten books about winning and any number of other similarly valueless things. Trump has always promised to make the profoundly broken American state work for the people that voted for him, or at least more readily and brutally against the people that those voters didn’t like. He really did deliver on the last bit, but Trump’s success in unleashing the full idiotic force of American sadism was less a matter of anything he actually did and more a matter of the license he gave others to do as he does—to do whatever outrageous harm they want to do, to demand whatever they want simply because they wanted it. 

As the clock ran out on his presidency, Trump began making demands that were more and more difficult and dangerous and degrading to fulfill, and when he stopped getting those things he simply demanded them again, this time more bitterly and with redoubled grandiosity. By Wednesday, the conflations were total—for him to lose the presidency was inherently unconstitutional, it was illegal, it went against God; the only truly patriotic thing to do was to keep the country under his singularly damp command, indefinitely; to save the nation, everything that was not Trump would need to be permanently replaced with him. “We’re going to walk down,” Trump told his people on Wednesday, “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and I’ll be there with you, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” Trump didn’t actually walk with his people down to the Capitol, because he doesn’t walk as a matter of course and because he doesn’t do his own errands. His loyalists rushed the Capitol and briefly, giddily, took it over and defaced it on his behalf; the president was driven home to watch it on television and complain on Twitter about all the people who had let him down.

By the time Trump’s people breached the Capitol building, the story in which they saw themselves had expanded far beyond him. He was still very much its central character, and his permanent presidency was still its main aim, but there were by the end a lot of strange things in it that had been brought in from outside. The rot and drift and killing abstraction in American life that had made his first campaign possible—that emptiness and parlousness that Trump correctly adduced as proof of a great and longstanding betrayal of the public trust and incorrectly claimed that he would fix—had only grown, and the stories that people told about Trump on television and online and to themselves metastasized in turn. 

Trump’s second campaign was something much more like fan-fiction than politics, but while all of it centered upon him, there were variants of it available for every taste. Some of the people that rushed the Capitol on Wednesday did so because they believed in a congeries of brutal and incoherent fantasies about Trump’s enemies. They believed that Trump would reveal the cures for cancer and diabetes that those satanic conspirators had hidden; they believed that he would reveal incontrovertible evidence not just of his electoral win but of his enemies’ soaring cosmic perfidy; they believed that there would then be summary public executions of these enemies, who happened mostly to be the villains of conservative cable news programming over the last decade and change, and that those executions would be overseen by Trump’s allies in the military and law enforcement. These people told and sold each other these things online, over and over and over again, and the stories grew, and the people hearing and telling them changed in strange and terrible ways. Other marauders, who were perhaps less inclined towards the collective online fantasy that mushroomed in lurid parallel with Trump’s ongoing neglect but who were just as happy to do violence in his name, believed that when they moved to capture and kill Trump’s enemies they would simply be permitted to do so, because of their relationship with the man himself, and the unspoken and wildly presumed benefits they imagined that conferred. 

None of that happened, of course. Politicians who thought they stood to gain from doing so made some gestures to the effect of honoring Trump’s bleary and incoherent orders, at least until it was time for them to hide with their peers from the people who’d broken in to do whatever it was they thought Trump wanted them to do. Trump’s people set up a literal gallows outside and brought rifles and zip ties inside with them, but then they were stuck there, chanting and desecrating and posting and posting and posting it all online to advance their own individual stories. Finally they were just milling aimlessly around the grandest building in the country, the place where government ostensibly lives, like video game characters waiting to be raptured up to the next level, or onto the quest after this one. 

On Trump’s behalf, at Trump’s behest, his people had done their part. But because anyone who spends enough time thinking about Trump comes to sound and think and fail like him, there wasn’t even really any demand to make beyond More Trump. There was no one around to threaten, even. These people had taken Trump and his abettors seriously, and answered the language that they used—the endless calls to fight, to avenge the great and dishonorable betrayals of an enemy that deserved no mercy—with commensurate action. They’d expected to confront their enemies, and find catharsis, and victory. But the chamber was empty, and there was nothing to do but shout and pose.

On Friday night, Twitter suspended Trump’s account; the platform finally banned him when, like a true poster, he evaded the suspension by posting his usual furious spuriousness from various other accounts. It did not really get quieter without him, because Twitter doesn’t really ever quiet down, but there was a strange realization under all the signifying and counter-signifying and multiply exhausted joking around. Trump’s sudden absence pointed towards a greater, older vacancy.

In a country where people expected or demanded anything more from their government than violence and theatrical pomp, Donald Trump would not have gotten very far. Those are the only things he ever promised or cared about delivering, and he rose as far and as fast as he did against opposition that was unwilling or unable to offer anything but its own softer versions. The stories that sprung up around if not quite about Trump were as brutal and lazy as the man himself; they teased themselves endlessly from one episode to the next, building toward a brutal grand finale in which America’s heroes would murder its villains, on TV, at some time to-be-determined. All the grifts rhymed, even if none of them actually made sense. 

But, in the absence and abandonment of this long low moment, every idle sadism and dishonesty flourished like a particularly insistent invasive plant. Here is the fact of it: the country’s leaders cannot quite bring themselves to say that the lives of people living in this country matter at all, let alone act as if they do. The state fails daily; it has somehow forgotten how to do anything but hurt and cannot even agree that it would be good to try to help. It does not tell the truth as a matter of course, which gives license to everyone adrift in this to believe whatever story they find most compelling. In the ways that matter most, in the places where it is needed most, the state barely exists. Where there is supposed to be strength is only power and brute force; what is supposed to be held in common has been openly looted; the triumphal national image is gnawed to bits by a frantically denied shame and raw fear.

The distance and defeat in this is awful to behold, and has created a nation that is both desperately strident and shockingly servile. In the absence of any capacity or will to demand more from it, politics just becomes what people argue about instead of what’s actually happening to them. It’s just a TV show, and people watch it as such. This was the one big thing that Trump understood—not just that he could do whatever vile thing he wanted, but how many millions there were who truly could not imagine any greater pleasure or higher calling than the chance to do it for him.

 

[atomheartbevo 89511]

55 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

He also has a lot of police on his side. Those guys at the Capitol? Some were police that came from other places.

One of their own was killed and another nearly crushed.  And video is coming out from Tuesday night, showing the MAGA types loathing the cops and screaming at them.  And the MAGA types are even angrier at the police, given how many are being rounded up and brought back to DC.

If he's headed to the Valley to try and get a few BP/ICE agents on his side for some last-minute batshit coup attempt, that means he doesn't think the FBI, US Marshalls, Secret Service, military, etc. support him.   

I think it's 100% Wall.  That's one of his few "successes", and it's one that always played well to the crowds.

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

Sorry, I think I'm too far out on the ledge. Maybe I need to go stress bake some more. I have lost any semblance of objectivity after this week.

[Gardner Barnes 1562]

Or people are realizing those clowns suck shit through a straw. 

How many of those “followers”’were bots?

[Shaddie 1649]

19 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

Sorry, I think I'm too far out on the ledge. Maybe I need to go stress bake some more. I have lost any semblance of objectivity after this week.

I am watching food network now. Some yeast rolls would be awesome right now. 
 J/K. I am drinking way too much and wake up way too early wondering what kind of shit I will see. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13049]

10 minutes ago, Shaddie said:

I am watching food network now. Some yeast rolls would be awesome right now. 
 J/K. I am drinking way too much and wake up way too early wondering what kind of shit I will see. 

Likewise. I haven't baked with yeast since Christmas so thanks for the reminder. I like making those big pretzels and I have a neighbor that likes them so that will keep me busy. It's the nice by product of baking; we keep a little for us and share the rest so we don't overindulge.

[dingleberryswitzer 2724]

2 hours ago, Walte464 said:

Wtf is the point of this? Trump train and rallies began after this news was released. 

Will have to wait to see his official schedule.  

"The president will take many important plane rides.  The plane will take off and land many times.  He will eat several packets of airline peanuts.

[atomheartbevo 89511]

Kinda almost wish Trump could get off a tweet tonight.  If true, then that means he thinks Trump is already unstable.

 

[dingleberryswitzer 2724]

6 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

he has the servers already - his campaign, advertising, and email servers

Email servers you say?   Is that even legal?  

<Hilary.jpg>

[Gatorubet 30165]

Sorry, I think I'm too far out on the ledge. Maybe I need to go stress bake some more. I have lost any semblance of objectivity after this week.

PM me for my mailing address for banana bread loaves.

[Buzzrock 14884]

Sorry, I think I'm too far out on the ledge. Maybe I need to go stress bake some more. I have lost any semblance of objectivity after this week.

Give Brisket a smooch for us

[Bodhi 1120]

13 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Kinda almost wish Trump could get off a tweet tonight.  If true, then that means he thinks Trump is already unstable.

 

Fuck this guy.  Fuck DeVos, Fuck Mulvaney, and Fuck all other enablers that are willing to take a conflicting stand now only because they believe it will benefit them.  They were all fine being suckerfish for the past 4 years for personal gain while the country suffered.  Die of syphilis and rot.