Trump

[TheGlyphstone]

Start a fund that will give money to Real, True Americans. Donate all the proceeds to Native charities.

[Haibane]

Set up a corporation to demolish Trump's wall - and make them pay for it.

[Callie Del Noire]

Set up a corporation to demolish Trump's wall - and make them pay for it.

I like this..

I’d love to do the ‘real Americans’ thing to help out Native Americans too.. it’s on my ‘if I win a HUGE lotto list’.

[Lilias]

[Missy]

I might be missing something here. According to that article:

"McConnell told his conference that such a move would force every single one of them into a "terrible vote" in which they would have to go on the record in affirming that President Donald Trump did indeed lose the November election."

Why is it a "terrible vote" to contest Biden as 46? They've been doing that since Nov 3rd. I don't see how objecting to Biden as the next president in any way is to them an acceptance that Trump lost. To them he didn't lose.

More or less what Oniya said, the situation for the reds is a lose-lose, the only way to win is to avoid the problem and that's a losing move in itself. In part becuause American politics are bipolar bipolitical success of a single party depends on having sufficient mass (depending on how well the Electoral College biases to you) to be able to retain power. This means if such a vote happens and the reds vote in favor of it, they lose the critical support of moderates who are convinced Trump is shouting out his ass (but are proud of their ethics of not generalizing towards the entire Republican Party - so long as they don't start spouting Trump's nonesense), alternatively if they vote against it, then they lose the support of the Trumpophiles who takes every turd Trump creates, bake it into a shit pie and treat it as a delicacy. If that vote happens there's no way to do anything without offending someone who represents a large segment of would be supporters, without which they're done for. The only way to get by without being too unscathed is to sweep it under the rug and hope nobody pays any attention.

Oddly enough it would almost be in the interest of the Democrats to make sure that vote happens, if only to make the truth bare. It's not as if the discord hasn't been sown by the Reds themselves, why shouldn't they reap what they've sown?

[Missy]

If this was discord, you'd have just gotten a thumbs up.

[Lilias]

If this was discord, you'd have just gotten a thumbs up.

Every once in a while, the tabloids get it just right.

[Missy]

well yes - I am reffering to the headline and not the outlet, of course.

[Bibliophilia]

Set up a 'Pro-Life'n fund, use it to donate to the Innocence Project, Defund the Police, and abolishing the death sentence.

[Missy]

So, who's at fault? What are the odds of a change in the winds?

[gaggedLouise]

There's been so much talk in the media (especially social media) about Trump's last chance being to stage a coup, or to impose harsh martial law and make mass arrests of his enemies (more or less the same as a military coup), and people tossing up dates for "the next move" by Trump, Rudy or Sidney Powell, that I've begun mentally changing out a few words in the lyrics to Anna Anakonda, an old goofy hit single from around here about a man whose new love interest is a snake woman... :)  In tango rhythm:

Donnie Anaconda,
When will the Coup d'Etat be on, say?
Maybe already Monday?
No, I guess we'd better wait a week or two!



(In the original, it's the wedding that he is both longing for and putting off) :)

[stormwyrm]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/12/trump-coup-sidney-powell-martial-law-michael-flynn-meltdown.html

Yep. Looks more like no one is actually worried that Trump's most insane plans will actually work. More like he'll try to pull something so outrageous that it discredits the whole Republican Party and costs them the Georgia runoffs.

[gaggedLouise]

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/12/trump-coup-sidney-powell-martial-law-michael-flynn-meltdown.html

Yep. Looks more like no one is actually worried that Trump's most insane plans will actually work. More like he'll try to pull something so outrageous that it discredits the whole Republican Party and costs them the Georgia runoffs.

At least Mark Meadows and some other WH people who actually know the law told him that a blunt martial-law takeover was a no-go. I bet Bill Barr was relieved to have left the White House...

[Beorning]

What I don't understand is that, even now, Trump doesn't seem to be losing supporters in droves (or is he?). I would've thought that when the news leaks that the president is actually trying to discuss imposing martial law not to lose power, every sane person would realize that this guy lost it and we have a dictator-in-the-making at hand...

And aren't some of the Trump supporters people who believe in conspiracy theories about US government secretly building concencration camps for dissidents etc.? In other words: people who are obsessed with the tyranny of the federal government. And yet, they support the one president who actually would probably end up doing such stuff, if allowed...

[Haibane]

I feel certain that yes, he is losing some supporters. However there are some others who think he really is right, that the vote really was rigged and that the courts are in on it and that therefore a coup is a reasonable response.

Meanwhile Trump refuses to publicly denounce Russia over the hacking incident and this is why.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trump-russian-hack-solar-winds-cyber-putin.html

[Kitteredge]

What I don't understand is that, even now, Trump doesn't seem to be losing supporters in droves (or is he?). I would've thought that when the news leaks that the president is actually trying to discuss imposing martial law not to lose power, every sane person would realize that this guy lost it and we have a dictator-in-the-making at hand...

And aren't some of the Trump supporters people who believe in conspiracy theories about US government secretly building concencration camps for dissidents etc.? In other words: people who are obsessed with the tyranny of the federal government. And yet, they support the one president who actually would probably end up doing such stuff, if allowed...

Many Republicans are now Trump cultists. It's really hard to find other terms for this, but they are Trump and Trump only, and have bought into the crazed narrative that the election has been stolen. Ergo, anything it takes to restore the rightful leadership of their king.

It may sound like hyperbole, but it's not. What's going on in the United States, weirdly ignored by too many of us, is absolutely nuts. David Frum, one of the arch-conservative writers under George W. Bush, once said, "If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." (2018) He was correct. And conservatism has become "whatever Trump wants."

[Oniya]

And aren't some of the Trump supporters people who believe in conspiracy theories about US government secretly building concencration camps for dissidents etc.? In other words: people who are obsessed with the tyranny of the federal government. And yet, they support the one president who actually would probably end up doing such stuff, if allowed...

First, they came for the refugees, and Trumpists said nothing because 'They took our jobs!'
Then, they came for the protestors, and Trumpists said nothing because 'We're gonna own the libs!'

[Sara Nilsson]

Looking around here, only one of the many trump flags vanished after the election. Everyone else has theirs up. Granted I only lived here a little over 10 years now but i never seen flags for a candidate stay up after the election before. And this is a rather left leaning (well American left anyway) area.

Still plenty of those fucking red MAGA hats or the new stop the steal hats.

Thing is, they want him to send in the military. Its a fucking cult at this point, just look at the idiot maga hatters screaming destroy the GOP because they wouldn't follow Trump off the cliff and fight for him to stay president.

I honestly weep for this country.

[Oniya]

Looking around here, only one of the many trump flags vanished after the election. Everyone else has theirs up. Granted I only lived here a little over 10 years now but i never seen flags for a candidate stay up after the election before. And this is a rather left leaning (well American left anyway) area.

The first election that I can clearly remember was Reagan's first.  In all that time, I've never seen candidate advertisement (which these flags are) staying up after an election.  There's only one in my neighborhood, don't know about further outside the city, but it's still up there.

[Dhi]

When Mark Aguirre ran an AC repair van off the road, he did so knowing full well that the man in the van could die.

When he held the innocent man at gunpoint, he knew that the situation had been escalated to deadly force, and sought any excuse to use it.

When he knelt on his victim's back, he could not possibly have been ignorant of George Floyd's murder at the hands of police.

After all, he is an ex-police chief.

Every step of his crime, he sought a situation in which he could take a human life without blame. Desperately he wanted to kill a human being, but it needed to be within these rules which would allow him to escape consequences. He craved permission.

Ask any of them to wear a mask to protect America and you will get a meltdown. But travel back in time a year, and ask any of them to take up arms against an enemy, to kill for America. That's the dream, that's the fantasy.

That is what the Trump cult is about. It isn't anything to do with Trump's qualities. It is about permission. Trump is better than Jesus because Jesus clearly never condoned the things they want him to have condoned: hatred, bigotry, murder. These things have been in the margins of American Christianity for some time, but under the Trump cult they are front and center, loud and proud.

It's not necessary that they be stupid, although it's evident many of them are. The cognitive dissonance at work here is simply that they're willing to turn a blind eye to all reason if the justification to do harm is there.

[John Birch]

The Trump phenomenon ain't going nowhere fast. The question of where it goes from here is mainly a question of whether he runs again in four years-- and if not, it's a question of whether his movement outlives him (politically) and is channeled by one of the various aspiring heirs apparent, the Marco Rubios and the Josh Hawleys.

I guess we'll see, but it would be naive to think something of this magnitude could be killed with a single election.

[stormwyrm]

Seems doubtful that the military will obey any such blatantly unconstitutional orders though, or so I hope. If enough of the military plays ball though, the prospect of a second Civil War is disturbing. In the nation with the largest number of nuclear weapons. God help us all.

[Skynet]

What I don't understand is that, even now, Trump doesn't seem to be losing supporters in droves (or is he?). I would've thought that when the news leaks that the president is actually trying to discuss imposing martial law not to lose power, every sane person would realize that this guy lost it and we have a dictator-in-the-making at hand...

And aren't some of the Trump supporters people who believe in conspiracy theories about US government secretly building concencration camps for dissidents etc.? In other words: people who are obsessed with the tyranny of the federal government. And yet, they support the one president who actually would probably end up doing such stuff, if allowed...

They already are, albeit for undocumented immigrants, and not trying to hide it. The ICE camps don't have the sense of scale in numbers imprisoned in comparison to Nazi Germany or modern-day China or the death ratio, but the modus operandi is functionally the same; bigots in administrative positions fearing that an ethnically different group is going to bring the downfall of the country. It's rather ironic, as the very same Trump supporters screaming about FEMA concentration camps during the Obama era are now the same ones laughing at the people suffering in these facilities. I made an exhaustive thread on the subject here.

To give an overview of how far the GOP has fallen, a Gallup poll in October 2020 found a 95% approval rating for Trump among Republicans. The Never-Trump Republicans are practically nonexistent on a national level.

[Callie Del Noire]

Seems doubtful that the military will obey any such blatantly unconstitutional orders though, or so I hope. If enough of the military plays ball though, the prospect of a second Civil War is disturbing. In the nation with the largest number of nuclear weapons. God help us all.

A lot of the military were taught about ‘lawful orders’.  I know I’ve played the ‘unlawful’ order call myself. I wouldn’t sign off a plane for transatlantic fligh5 because of radio concerns. They sent it anyway, got another tech to sign off, it spent three weeks in Spain and I got to rewire it for my sins

[Missy]

When Treason surprises no one