Friday, May 29, 2020

Trump stomps on his Twitter megaphone



     I believe it is the complaining I shall miss the most.
     The whining.
     I almost added “the grumbling.” But Donald Trump does not “grumble,” not the low, corner-of-the-mouth, suppressed muttering implied by the term. No, his every grievance is an air horn two inches from your nose: “BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!!!!!!!!”
     I’ll miss that.
     And by “miss” I don’t mean, “wish back.” God no. But “notice it’s gone.” That delicious moment when the endless beep-beep-beep of a truck backing up nearby just suddenly ... stops.
     The steady drumbeat — no, drumroll, rat-tat-tat-tat — makes pausing at a single cavil a challenge. While you carefully consider one, three more are fired off. It’s nonstop, exhausting, the drip-drip-drip of norm-shattering psychopathology.
     Did I call them drips? Make that a firehose — high pressure, the nozzle flinging itself about, water jetting in all directions. You can’t drink from it.
     But you have to try, occasionally, despite the soaking. Because some Trump gripes are more significant than others.
     His lashing out at Twitter this week is worth getting water-logged to address. Because it shows just what a nihilistic, “Top of the world, Ma!” ending we can expect should he somehow lose the election in November. No gentle going into that good night, not for The Donald.
     It started Tuesday, with a lie he’s been repeating a lot:

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....
     Republican invocation of voter fraud is itself a fraud. The GOP takes an insignificant problem and pretends it is widespread in order to suppress Democratic votes and undercut trust in the electoral process that increasingly disfavors their shrinking base of angry, fact-averse white folks.

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14 comments:

  1. Thank you. I'm glad someone is finally mentioning the real possibility that if Trump loses the election we could witness our version of the Beer Hall Putsch.

    To watch as the stage is being set for the end of our experiment in self government is frighteningly Orwellian in its genius.
    Just as Hitler was dismissed as a joke, doing the same with our Geobells - Steven Miller - is at our own peril.
    If you need proof, look no further than the last Presidential election when most pundits dismissed the possibility of Trump presidency as almost an impossibility.

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  2. My greatest fear, after the fear that he will somehow steal a victory, is the terrible damage he will do between losing the election in November and the inauguration in January. That final leash, the desire to be reelected, will be removed, and he will be more angry and vindictive than ever. He can be expected to throw a destructive tantrum worse than ever.

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  3. Sadly we are beset by the tyranny of people who are not as nice as we would like.

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  4. We might be able to get him into a straitjacket if we can convince him that he looks good in it.

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  5. Now Trump is mad at Twitter because it flagged one of his tweets about the Minneapolis riots. The tweet in question referred to "THUGS" (all caps, his) and charmingly rhymed "looting" with "shooting." Twitter had the temerity to make anyone accessing that tweet first see a message informing them that it violates Twitter's terms of service.

    Trump presumably is angry that this will impede, even in a small way, his opportunity to exploit racial conflict, which after all is how he got elected in the first place.

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  7. Foreshadowing for sure. That there will be trouble when Trump loses the election is certain. But what kind of trouble? One way of dealing with an enemy is to put oneself in his shoes: what would I do, if I were in his position? But that strategy doesn't work with Trump, who is not encumbered with any scruples, any sense of shame, any regard for others who might be harmed or even killed because of his actions, even any notion that history might deal unfavorably with him. We literally cannot imagine all the options open to Donald Trump that would be closed to any decent human being. The Democrats attempted to preempt his predictable efforts to retain power, but failed. And only antagonized the monster by doing so. I have abandoned hope. Perhaps it's time for us atheists to pray for help from the heavens.

    john

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    1. Both John at 6:48 a.m. and John (tate) make excellent, disturbing points. If our Maximum Leader had the foresight of a normal person, he'd have known that acting promptly with regard to Covid 19 would have not only benefited the citizenry, but himself in the long run, because fewer would have died. Instead, he thought he could somehow prop up the economy for a month or two by claiming that the virus was a hoax. That cost lives, but also did nothing for the economy in the final analysis. It may, of course, have allowed enough time for he and his cronies to dump a bunch of stocks, though. "We literally cannot imagine all the options open to Donald Trump that would be closed to any decent human being." Uh, yep.

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  8. "Trump will have been hammering at the electoral process for six months before the first ballot is cast."

    While that's true, it understates the case by quite a bit. He's been hammering at the electoral process since before the 2016 election. He evidently started in August of that year, when he was 6 points behind Hillary in the polls and was already looking for excuses, in case he lost.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-trumps-many-unsubstantiated-allegations-voter-fraud/

    The most irritating thing about this ridiculous griping is that the electoral process has unfairly *benefited* Republicans much more than it's hurt them in this millennium. W should have lost in 2000. Of course, the Bone Spur-in-Chief lost in 2016 by 3 million votes, but the antiquated, slave-state-benefiting Electoral College gave him the presidency. The 6 Senators from New York, Texas and California represent in Congress approximately the same number of folks as 62 Senators from smaller states. Etc.

    https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/03/11/us/politics/small-state-advantage.html

    As for Twitter, this tells me all I need to know. "I, an anonymous nobody, got suspended from Twitter for calling Ann Coulter, who is a Nazi, a Nazi. But Trump, the president of the United States, can baselessly accuse someone of murder and encourage people to take dangerous drugs and that’s totally cool."

    https://twitter.com/OhNoSheTwitnt/status/1265666237419393026

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    1. And now, Ann Coulter is virulently anti-Trump. Who'd a thunk it?

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  9. Let's win the damn election first, then worry about Trump leaving.

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    1. If he loses, and especially if he loses badly, it is the signal that America has had enough of the Insane Orange Clown and his Posse, and wants a regime change. He will be forced to accept that decision, or else he will soon find himself mired in the deepest shit of his lifetime.

      "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."--did those words come from Mao or Che? Nope. It was JFK.

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  10. If you are complaining, he's doing a good job!

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