As we spatter further along, the T-Rump was in Iowa today, this evening, and the shit was at high tide.
Despite the Orange Turd being a horrifying human being, a criminal liar, and a pure asshole, the undeniable stance of his followers is a thing to behold — what the living fuck?
Woman at Trump rally in IA tonight: “He’s a Godly man. He’s working for God. He really cares about us. He cares about what happens to us. He didn’t come in there because he wanted money. He is actually working for God & wants to help us .. and God is on his side” pic.twitter.com/IJm8KVnA87
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) December 14, 2023
The world has gone mad when this shithead is the top-notch Republican right now and could be the next president of the United States. Crazy is as crazy does.
This is classic dementia word salad. I know what he’s *trying* to say but his descriptors and words are completely mixed up and he sounds like a brainless imbecile. “A guilty plea from the Supreme Court”. Yikes. The immense pressure he is under is making the deterioration worse. https://t.co/ysoYdjW4iK
— Spiro’s Ghost (@AntiToxicPeople) December 14, 2023
However, due to circumstance, the crazy-ass shit is taken as a matter of just T-Rump being T-Rump — yet he’s certifiably nuttier than dog shit:
This is spot on.
Brian Klaas on the "banality of crazy", by @atrupar https://t.co/vuLwm1hoSA
— ??Self-Driving Car Instructor??? ? (@Want2RunAgain) December 13, 2023
In an attempt to ‘not; normalize the walking-talking crazy, American political scientist Brian Klass noted the scenario this morning at Public Notice — don’t give away the farm:
The press has failed in covering Trump in two different phases. The first phase was Trump’s rise. In 2015, Trump was a fringe candidate, and at that point it made a lot of sense to not amplify him. You don’t have to cover lunatics unless they are already affecting the system.
In 2015, Trump wasn’t. He was polling at one or two percent early on in the campaign, and they gave him billions of dollars in free media. Back then, I did agree with the “don’t amplify him” perspective. At that moment, he wasn’t a major figure, so he wasn’t worth covering.
Now I think we have the exact opposite problem. Trump is so ubiquitous, in terms of how much influence he has on American politics, that the real problem has become that the routine nature of his incendiary and authoritarian rhetoric has meant the press has tuned him out. That has, I think, created the very wrong impression that Trump is becoming more normal when the opposite is happening.
In 2017, whenever Trump tweeted anything I got media requests from CNN, MSNBC, the BBC. I was going on TV all of the time to talk about every single tweet. Some of them were pretty banal and genuinely not that big of a deal. They were just unusual, because he wasn’t the standard politician. Now he’s saying, “We’re going to purge the vermin,” and he’s talking about going after his political opponents, and the phone doesn’t ring.
I think that’s the canary in the coal mine. Trump doesn’t even generate news these days when he says literally the craziest stuff in the last 30 years of American politics. It isn’t even covered.
There was a great analysis in The Guardian where they looked at Clinton’s “deplorables” remark compared to Trump’s “vermin” comments — and “vermin” was much worse because Trump was saying he’s actually going to go after people, while Clinton was just trying to describe people with odious views — and they found that “deplorables” got 18 times more coverage.
[…]
Domestic US political journalists can tell you everything there is to know about Reagan trivia, but they’ve never worked in an authoritarian regime. They’ve never understood what it’s like for Hungary to lose its democracy. I think we’d be better served if people who had been working in places where democratic breakdown is actually a factor of life — Hungary, Poland, Brazil — if those people were involved in the conversation, there would be more of a comparative analysis.
Something that’s really messed up about American media is you turn on the news in any other country in the world and there’s international news as well as domestic. But the US basically only covers things insofar as they intersect with American politics. If Biden goes somewhere or Biden comments on Gaza, then yeah, it’s a story. The degree to which the US press is insular I think has blinded us to the fact that other countries have gone through what the US is going through right now — extreme polarization, an authoritarian populist who’s trying to dismantle democracy.
That story is compelling. It’s something people could latch onto if they understood that there are parallels. Instead, the coverage ends up being like, “Trump said X on Truth Social,” and that’s the end of the story. What you need to do is say that when a powerful political figure starts talking like this and amplifying political violence, it’s a precursor to the breakdown of democratic institutions. It’s not like the US has invented this problem for the first time, but the press is treating it as if it’s totally unique. That’s where the storytelling is weak.
In all the reporting about T-Rump’s aim for a dictatorship, maybe there’s a chance this could turn around and focus on being how freaking ‘crazy‘ the dangerous, horrid asshole is to just about every facet of American life.
We can only hope — and go out and vote!
Total-100-percent-bullshit, or not, yet once again here we are…
Image out front is my favorite of the T-Rump mugs, though, ‘favorite‘ does not mean in any form or fashion, as in, ‘my favorite movie,’ or ‘my favorite song.’ It’s more of an anti-appreciation/like.
And aptly titled, ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong (and found here), it’s an image that displays the elemental form of a purloined sociopath — a bloated profile of flatulent bile and arrogant ignorance.