418 Comments

Trump is a goin’ down, my friends. He will lose by 10 million votes this time around.

Expand full comment

I wonder what Republicans are like behind closed doors? In public, they all act like they're trying to behave like a human by using a human operator's manual written by a guy who'd only ever done 80's-era VCR operator's manuals.

Expand full comment

I can only give you one data point, my ex-husband whom I divorced in August 2015. My lawyer, who was also a friend from HS, asked me what happened. I said, "He's like the Tea Party, but on steroids. You ask how the weather is - he'll complain about "BS global warming", you tell him about the school play - he'll complain about his property taxes, you tell him the yard looks nice/kids don't have cavities/dog just took a bath - he'll say, "You just live with your liberal, rose-colored glasses on". My friend said, "It's like the whole damned country!"

For the past 9 years, I've been watching my nation replay my marriage nightmare.

I'm OK now (and I think the nation will be too). But it's going to take work and vigilance to fix, restore and renew our spirit. We're never going to return to the 1950's (or whatever era). And we're never going to have our naivete back.

So yes, they act how they think humans would act after only reading an '80's era VCR operators manual.

Expand full comment

Ta, MM. Lies and the lying liars who tell them.

Expand full comment

Has anybody mentioned the fact that Trump suddenly became a Christian on or around 2016?

Expand full comment

And thus secured forgiveness of all his sins. Constantine did better by getting a deathbed baptism, thus evading punishment for his many murders, which included his wife and son. Elaine Pagels makes the point that Christianity's big appeal was cheap forgiveness of sins.

Expand full comment

And then Republican Christians of the time realized that forgiveness was a little too cheap and started selling indulgences, the NFT's of the day.

Expand full comment

👩‍🍳 💋. No notes.

Expand full comment

NYT June 8, 2016 at 5:38 p.m. EDT

For at least the third time since he became a candidate for president, Donald Trump was asked whether he seeks God’s forgiveness. The first two times he said no, but in an interview published Wednesday his answer was a bit vaguer.

Here is the exchange, which ran on the blog of Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist and conservative Christian leader:

Thomas: “You have said you never felt the need to ask for God’s forgiveness, and yet repentance for one’s sins is a precondition to salvation. I ask you the question Jesus asked of Peter: Who do you say He is?”

Trump: “I will be asking for forgiveness, but hopefully I won’t have to be asking for much forgiveness.”

Thomas: “Who do you say Jesus is?”

Trump: “Jesus to me is somebody I can think about for security and confidence. Somebody I can revere in terms of bravery and in terms of courage and, because I consider the Christian religion so important, somebody I can totally rely on in my own mind.”

Last summer, Trump was asked at the Iowa Family Leadership Summit whether he had ever asked God for forgiveness.

“I am not sure I have,” he said then. “I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don’t think so. I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.” He went on to say that he does receive Communion at church.

“When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed,” he said. “I think in terms of ‘Let’s go on and let’s make it right.'”

In January, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he doesn’t regret never asking God for forgiveness and doesn’t have much to apologize for.

“I have a great relationship with God. I have a great relationship with the evangelicals,” Trump told Tapper.

“I like to be good. I don’t like to have to ask for forgiveness. And I am good. I don’t do a lot of things that are bad. I try to do nothing that is bad.”

Expand full comment

I'm surprised that PAB said that. It would have been more in character to say that Jesus was a total loser, who cured all those people and fed thousands and never got any money. And all his bitching and moaning about the ill treatment of poor people only got him accused of treason and nailed to a cross. The only payoff he got was a cheap placard, INRI, mocking his claim to be King of the Jews. He didn't even know how to get rich as a tax farmer.

Expand full comment

"I have my little cracker" - and Xtians still think of him as "Godly".

What mooks.

Expand full comment

Yeah it's not like you have to do any work for that forgiveness.

Expand full comment

'So why doesn't Donald Trump play up his Oompah Loompah heritage? Is he ashamed of that part of his ancestry?'

Expand full comment

👆

Expand full comment

Definitely a Person Of (unnatural) Color

Expand full comment

"In that interview, Trump claimed Harris suddenly 'turned Black'”

Correction: he says she "turned Buh-Lack." He's always pronounces it that way, in the same way R's replace Democratic with DemocRat to emphasize the "rat."

Expand full comment

I see various things saying that Trump thinks he can make up some ground among Black voters. And yet he comes out swinging, attacks Scott the instant he gets the mike. It seems very calculated, but beyond me what the calculation is.

Expand full comment

We give him too much credit. Chump is all id. We can't do that because we have to face our consequences. His money has delayed that.

There's no grand strategy, no planning, no calculations. For whatever reasons, a person gets in his sights, and he lashes out. He does what he thinks is going to make him feel good at that moment.

Expand full comment

Joke's on the January 6th crowd. If he pardons any of them it will only be a handful of prominent ones, like say the so called shaman. The rest will probably get nothing.

Expand full comment

No, he's so lazy and incapable of coming through on any of his promises that he'll fail to sign any pardons. Plus as far as he's concerned all his energy is going to be spent ensuring that he'll be king and he won't need any more votes.

Expand full comment

You haven't heard? He'll be so grateful to be back in the White House that he's just going to start giving away pardons he was selling for two million a pop.

That true believer from Bumfuck sitting in his cell waiting for that call is going to be sitting there a long time.

Expand full comment
founding

Just by the by, I would vote for a demonic werewolf before I would vote Republican, especially with the King of Trolls and Appalachian Wormtongue at the top of the ticket.

Expand full comment

They'd definitely get things done, but they respect the process.

Expand full comment

Demonic werewolves have a certain charm, unlike any member of the trump party.

Expand full comment

All that running and jumping and ripping overweight Republicans to shreds certainly keeps them looking hot in their human forms.

I'd vote for that.

Expand full comment

I still remember my bewilderment after Trump told them all to go home. They walked away as if it had been any normal day touring Washington. I couldn’t believe no one was being arrested; I thought if any situation I had ever seen merited mass arrests, it was January 6th. But no, they all drifted away.

Expand full comment

Time to find the closest Cracker Barrel. Yamiche Alcindor while talking about 1/6 said her overwhelming feeling at the time was how entitled these people were. How sure they were that they weren't going to get in trouble. As a Black woman this was as stark a representation of white entitlement that she'd ever seen.

Expand full comment

I think I was shocked both then and now that people breaking into the Capitol was treated so… dismissively. But I suppose that reflects the attitude of the administration at the time. So, yes. White entitlement.

Expand full comment

Can you imagine the bloodbath if they'd been mostly Black?

Expand full comment

No. I honestly cannot image what would genuinely be American carnage.

Expand full comment

I live in the suburbs of Saint Paul, so between the rioting over the murder of George Floyd and what little I know of the forces used against civil rights marchers, I have a faint idea. Then I try to dial it up 200% and add a lot more blood. And yet I still expect the reality would be worse.

Expand full comment

January 6th was the most egregious misuse of freedom of assembly to ever occur. I can think of nothing that compares. None of the participants deserve the slightest degree of clemency.

Expand full comment

January 6th rioters got away with murder. Imagine BLM protestors had done this. The body count would have been dozens and the ones who werent shot at the scene would be all serving 20 to life.

Expand full comment

Why can't people push back on Trump's J6 justifications? Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland rioters WERE arrested, charged, and (I'm sure) convicted. Also, too, the DC protest.

To let him keep arguing that nothing happened in those instances is journalistic malpractice.

Expand full comment

Seattle, Minneapolis, and Portland are gone. They were burned to the ground by ANTIFAs and BLMs. They don't exist anymore.

The January 6th rioters were peaceful tourists who were willingly let into the building by the same police who were beaten, and were also FBI agents dressed like MAGAts to make Donnie look bad.

Expand full comment

It is terrible here in ye olde Twin Cities. We just shuffle around through the embers, searching for the fortitude to survive yet another dangerous day.

Thank heavens we finally have legal weed to distract us.

Expand full comment

In which of those cities did protestors occupy a Federal installation and do $20 million in damage?

Expand full comment

Donalds is desperately clinging to the hope he might replace Vance on the ticket -- although not as desperately as Tim Scott, who actually went through with marrying a woman.

Expand full comment

i really thought tim believed he had dodged a bullet (to coin a phrase) when JD got the nod, but when things started to get ugly he must've decided he finally had to go thru with it.

Expand full comment

Donalds is a lying POS. Just like Donald!

Expand full comment

It's all about control. Trump is being rather straightforward that it is his and his party's foundational belief that you don't get to decide which race(s) you are.

The cool, considerate men (white, Protestant, Eastern) get to. This is the essence of the evil of American white supremacy.

While you're working at fighting injustice, it helps to laugh.

Trump's asinine performance at the NABJ makes me think of a scene from "The Right Stuff" --- The scene in which legendary character actor John Dehner, as pompous TIME/LIFE publisher Henry Luce reserves to himself what is and what is not a proper name for a Mercury astronaut.

After some argument over whether Gus is an appropriate name, Dehner pulls off a subtle but powerful bit of stage business -- he raises a papal Hand of Benediction when he tells Grissom, "All right, you can be Gus."

[INT Day - Office of TIME/LIFE Publisher Henry Luce]

LUCE:

With this one deal I'm giving them $500,000...split seven ways over three years. How does that sound?

Now I want them all to meet my people who will write their true stories. These stories will appear in LIFE under their own by-lines. For example...

"by Betty Grissom..." or,

"by...Virgil I. Grissom."

- Or...

GRISSOM:

Gus.

LUCE

What was that?

GRISSON

Gus. Nobody calls me by that other name.

LUCE

Gus? An astronaut named Gus? ...

What's your middle name?

GRISSOM

Ivan.

LUCE [conferring with aides]

Maybe ... "Gus" isn't so bad. Might be something there.

[thinks. Gestures as a papal blessing toward GRISSOM]

All right, you can be Gus.

###

Expand full comment

"...cool, considerate men..."

Am I showing my age if I recognize a 1776 reference?

"Always to the right, never to the left..."

Expand full comment

And the rule that white people of that kind laid down for centuries was: Black mixed with anything else makes Black. One drop of blood from Africa makes you Black regardless of any other part of the family tree. Suddenly they're the ones who don't like that rule?

Expand full comment

You got to remember, they had her pegged as Indian-American, and she didn't get permission to change.

Expand full comment

... the elite whites laid down concurrent rules that limited who was said to be white. Nobody was white whose line traced to any culture located within a 500 miles of the Mediterranean Sea (some French excepted) nor any culture east of the line drawn from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic.

From a purely academic perspective it is interesting that as American racist dead-enders have gotten more desperate over the last 60 years, their own definition of white has expanded to include formerly "non-white" groups they long persecuted, such as people of Iberian, Italian and Slavic heritage.

Race is a social construct, and the worst. As Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote in 'South Pacific,' the evil of racism is something that "must be carefully taught."

It's pathetic to watch Trump try so mightily to blow the breath of life into those old evils.

Expand full comment

"Nobody was white whose line traced to any culture located within a 500 miles of the Mediterranean Sea"

I guess that makes me an honorary brother, seeing as my Dad's family is originally from the Baeleric Islands smack dab IN the Mediterranean. Of course I pretty much had that base covered by growing up in New Orleans' Ninth Ward. LOL

Expand full comment

The main criterion in the old rule about whiteness was Protestantism, thus Irish (although not Mediterranean like the Spanish and Italians) were out, and any of the Orthodox from Greeks to Russians were out, and Jews of course were out of the question. Certain French were accepted if they could claim to be from the Huguenots.

Expand full comment
founding

They just further arrogate to themselves to apply their rules as whim dictates. The whole thing is starkly illogical, so logic is not applicable to it.

Expand full comment

Exactly this. *They* are the ones who get to decide. What race you are, what gender you are, what counts as family values, or a "real" job, or "common sense".

And they can't stand it that so many people are going "Nah, I'm gonna do this instead".

Expand full comment

They don't get to decide

And they hate us as a result

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/04/magazine/kamala-harris-black-identity-history.html

Expand full comment