What is even more dangerous than the fact that non-insane-far-right outlets have shown over and over and over that they will just take whatever the Trump "media" team sends them and print it is this:
Trump is setting up the framework for his next coup attempt with this stuff.
So the Trump campaign is already laying the framework to deny it when he loses the 2024 election. We know this. And now he can point to his drooling followers and say (except he'd say it in his dumb baby-talk way), "Look at this, dummies who will kill for me! We had that unprecedented crown in New Jersey. What was it? 100,000? I think it was 150,000, actually." (He's already raised it from 80,000 to 100,00 to 117,000, so by November it might actually be a million, who knows.)
And he'll say (again, flappy sphincter-mouth baby talk given), "Do the math!". Oh, hey! Great 3-word chant for his followers, who love those things and can't remember more than 3 syllables at once. So he'll say, "Do the math! A small state like New Jersey had 175,000 people there to hear me and see me and touch the hem of my tie to heal their leprosy. In a small state like that, 180,000 people is a lot. It's just proof that a huuuuge percentage of that state love Trump. They love Trump!"
And he'll go on (you know the drill) to say, "I told you then that my massive crowd was showing the country that New Jersey was turning red. And yet they say we only got 20% of the vote in New Jersey? When we were drawing those huuuuuge crowds? If that's not proof that they're cheating, I don't know what is. And then in the Bronx! New York, loves Trump! Loves him! I think it was among the bigger crowds that have ever gotten together in the Bronx, probably the largest crowd in the history of New York State. Nobody had ever seen anything like it."
"You want proof that New York cheated? Just look at that."
And along with claiming that such unprecedented numbers of people turning out to see Trump in these blue states proves that they'd turned red and were in play in the election, that the fact that Trump lost those states, or at least didn't get 49% is solid proof that the Dems stole ballots or something, he's got his minions out there with talking points, hitting the same messages.
They're claiming that every single state is in play. They're setting up the rabid disciples to believe it, "proving" that those states love Trump.
Lara Trump is already working on California.
NY bodega visit? Stocked with NY Young Republicans.
Atlanta (blue city Trump claimed was tampered with in 2020) Chik-fil-a? Black people come up to Trump and hug him and thank him! (As if Trump would let a random person touch him.) Stocked with plants, including the hugging lady who is a Republican Party operative.
Libertarian Convention? MAGA ringers sent in early to take all the seats so that all the speech clips would be ringing with applause and cheers. Sadly for Trump, the Libertarians weren't having it and the boos were loud and lovely.
NASCAR in North Carolina? Tell everyone that the cheers when your plane flies over are for Trump when they're really for Matchbox 20. Go around with a retinue behind you staging photo ops where you try to make it look like thousands or adoring NASCAR fans are all over Trump. Give the propaganda team a bunch of shots to lie about with Trump in front of a huge crowd. Weirdly salute once in a while so those shots can be made to look like it was a military event. (Since Trump actually hates the military.) Get the lazy Trump to do a bunch of these in one day. (I already saw a piece in the Daily Mail breathlessly gushing about all of this.)
The NASCAR one was in a red area, but that was for the propaganda reel. The campaign has been building all of these fake events of people (MAGA plants) "spontaneously" going nuts for Trump in mostly blue areas. so that they can go back and point to them as proof that the next election was stolen.
It would be easy to just write this off as Trump's ego and its constant need for feeding. And I'm sure that's a great side-effect. It would be easy to think that it's infuriating, but not important compared to other stuff the campaign is pulling. But these self-created spontaneous press opportunities could be the thing that proves to the MAGA base that Trump is right, and sets them off for Coup 2.0.
I hope CNN is happy for their ratings this year when Trump sends all of their anchors to the Donald Trump "Enemies of the People" Camp for Journalists.
I hope CNN and their friends are all happy with their 2024 horserace ratings and are comforted remembering them when their anchors are all rounded up and sent to the Donald J. Trump Camp for Enemies of the People. (On a side note, I hope that the 6 "conservative" Supreme Court justices think that the vacations and tour buses and hard, cold cash were worth it when they're rounded up and sent there right after.)
A lot of that ‘crowd’ looked suspiciously white for the Bronx, which is something like 50% Hispanic and 40% Black. So, where did the white faces come from? Paid? Bused in from Staten Island? Since something like 83% of the Bronx voted for Biden in 2020, this seems like another case of the Yam being to lazy to actually go out and campaign anywhere where it really matters.
As long as he keeps focusing on unwinnable states, like NY, Minnesota (where he lost by 200,000 votes) and California, that keeps him from working in states that really count.
The even more pertinent bit is that there were a sizeable contingent of PAB protesters at the rally, I watched the (now deleted) Channel 7 video and they were commenting on the fact that despite the counter protesters there was very little public animosity on display.
Or to apply math that means that the teeny tiny crowd was even smaller than one might guess from the drone shot.
Hi folks, new poster here. Will also have a pertinent name and all that as soon as I figure out how this works and such. Anyway, I hail from Germany and have been enjoying/co-suffering-with-y'all, this very genial mommyblog and the times you/we've been experiencing for the last seven years, especially. What prompted me to finally sign up here is a question, that hit me "out of the blue" a couple days ago, for which I just can't figure out a satisfactory answer: Why on god's green earth aren't the Americans of all 50 states not out in droves at least once a week to protest the friggin'GOP? As far as I can tell it doesn't seem to comport with the democratic, rule-of-law structure which supports those democratic principles any longer. At present all parts/proponents of that "Party" that are most visible seem to belong to a cabal of activists that are openly de-mobilizing the structures that keep a polity in working order, so to speak. By the looks of it, the main structure of this activism is presently based and anchored in the leftovers of what is now the GOP which seems to have adopted the crazy of the people that represent that body, including (and maybe even more so) in the "several states", as it were. Does anybody have an answer? Serious question. On an aside, it beats the hell out of me that it took so long for me to gain that insight: Protest the f***n GOP, they seem to me to represent some really ugly ideologies...
It's pretty simple, Americans lack the education and intelligence to apply critical thinking to our politics which are based more on tribal and cultural allegiance and emotion than rational analysis.
Take something that should be pretty obvious, like the dismal cost-benefit ratio of our health care system - we should have a national health care system as the current system only serves to enrich a handful of corporations and is Kafkaesque to the extreme. But when offered that as a solution, fully half of Americans will scream "SOCIALISM!" despite knowing someone or directly experiencing the maddening runaround to get treatment or payment approved by nameless bureaucrats in some insurance company that charges insane premiums for what little coverage it buys.
The absolutely worst feeling that came from the 2016 election was just how many absolute morons there are in this country, as anyone who knew anything about PAB should have known what kind of chaos and incompetence he would bring to our country.
Hi, thank you for your reply. Sadly, I tend to agree with your characterization for the most part. But on the other hand, I presume there be a sizeable chunk of Americans that would protest the ongoing shenanigans of the "GOP45" if they really understood what's actually at stake. Maybe it's messaging, as in "Project 2025": Let 'em know what they are actually doing with this "strategy". And why in the hell aren't there investigations into what looks to me to be an obvious conspiracy to infiltrate and capture the admistrative structure of the country to change the balance of power? Does it make a difference that they are doing it in the open as they are? Here in Germany they (the GOP) would have been having to answer some real deep questions about the obvious disconnect between their purportedly "democratic patriotism" and their projected and present behavior as a political party. Being in and from Germany, I'm conscious of the historical baggage we bring to the game, and, to be sure, we have the exact same problems with all sorts of political Crazy (and so-called political parties where the Crayzy's based), but still people find the urgency to "let 'em know" that we're not fuckin' around with that fascist bullshit again (knock on wood for things to stay that way). I just hope that Americans find their voices and appreciacion of the power those voices command when they speak in masses. That's why I think that shining a light on the GOP (or should I say xGOP?) has become an unfriendly entity at the least. Sorry, about the ranting, I will try to control it in the future :).
Hi, just to alleviate those feelings on your co-citizens somewhat: We Germans are no different in that regard, which has had me askeered for decades. Being proven somewhat wrong in this actually surprised me in a positive way. By which I mean to say that maybe many american folks still don't see the GOP as the dangerous org that it has become. Maybe the urgent warnings are taken as propaganda/partisan messaging (or same-as-every-elections- -reporting by the media), so too little attention is paid on the not-at-all-normal subject. I so hope that y'all get your shit together before you wake up one day and... I don't even want to think about it right now. Still hopeful though.
Part of the problem is that the media is controlled by people who promote a skewed version of what the stakes are in the mistaken construct of "impartiality". While the major media has addressed this on occasion, there are only a few outlets that are pushing the narrative of Competent Governance (Dems) vs. Authoritarian Demagogues (GOP) and add to that that the media landscape has become siloed so that most of the GOP voters and the party itself is existing in a propaganda bubble that would do Goebbels proud. Throw in a heaping dose of apathy by around 1/3 of the electorate and this is why it is practically impossible to get mass action on anything.
Also, history is not taught in our schools, and most people don't actually know how a democracy can be subverted from within. "Berlin Diary" by William Shirer is a in-the moment report of the actions of the Nazis to steadily tear down the structure of the pre-war democratic government and replace it with a police state with no internal restrictions on the actions by the party. Americans have little understanding of just how fraught the moment is, so the sense of urgency is completely lacking in the general populace.
I'm afraid I have to agree with your on-point analysis. But, as they say (allegedly), hope springs eternal. Also too, I have had very similar sentiment toward my fellow Germans over the last 3 to 4 decades, for equally similar reasons and have actually been "dissappointed" in a very positive way. I witnessed my first local anti-Nazi protest with support and turnout by "normal" non-"alternative" (used to be a thing here for a time). By the way: I wrote that formulation to have an excuse to state that cognitive dissonance actually has a "counterpart" of sorts, and when one experiences it, it's... like, "...and, oh! The sweetness of the air...!". Or something like that.
'Compare that with CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, who said the rally had “certainly a bigger crowd than I think Democrats would like to see, particularly given this is one of the bluest counties in the entire country.”'
Are they aware that people could commute to a rally like that from upstate or from Long Island? Who says they were all from the Bronx?
Where can I buy bags of flammable dog shit just in case? Not that I would ever attend a Trump public masturbation event, but it never hurts to be prepared. Cats here are no help.
If people used paper bags to clean up after their dogs, it would all be so easy, because, after carefully collecting said shit in a bag and knotting it up, they drop them on the sidewalk and walk away.
What is even more dangerous than the fact that non-insane-far-right outlets have shown over and over and over that they will just take whatever the Trump "media" team sends them and print it is this:
Trump is setting up the framework for his next coup attempt with this stuff.
So the Trump campaign is already laying the framework to deny it when he loses the 2024 election. We know this. And now he can point to his drooling followers and say (except he'd say it in his dumb baby-talk way), "Look at this, dummies who will kill for me! We had that unprecedented crown in New Jersey. What was it? 100,000? I think it was 150,000, actually." (He's already raised it from 80,000 to 100,00 to 117,000, so by November it might actually be a million, who knows.)
And he'll say (again, flappy sphincter-mouth baby talk given), "Do the math!". Oh, hey! Great 3-word chant for his followers, who love those things and can't remember more than 3 syllables at once. So he'll say, "Do the math! A small state like New Jersey had 175,000 people there to hear me and see me and touch the hem of my tie to heal their leprosy. In a small state like that, 180,000 people is a lot. It's just proof that a huuuuge percentage of that state love Trump. They love Trump!"
And he'll go on (you know the drill) to say, "I told you then that my massive crowd was showing the country that New Jersey was turning red. And yet they say we only got 20% of the vote in New Jersey? When we were drawing those huuuuuge crowds? If that's not proof that they're cheating, I don't know what is. And then in the Bronx! New York, loves Trump! Loves him! I think it was among the bigger crowds that have ever gotten together in the Bronx, probably the largest crowd in the history of New York State. Nobody had ever seen anything like it."
"You want proof that New York cheated? Just look at that."
And along with claiming that such unprecedented numbers of people turning out to see Trump in these blue states proves that they'd turned red and were in play in the election, that the fact that Trump lost those states, or at least didn't get 49% is solid proof that the Dems stole ballots or something, he's got his minions out there with talking points, hitting the same messages.
They're claiming that every single state is in play. They're setting up the rabid disciples to believe it, "proving" that those states love Trump.
Lara Trump is already working on California.
NY bodega visit? Stocked with NY Young Republicans.
Atlanta (blue city Trump claimed was tampered with in 2020) Chik-fil-a? Black people come up to Trump and hug him and thank him! (As if Trump would let a random person touch him.) Stocked with plants, including the hugging lady who is a Republican Party operative.
Libertarian Convention? MAGA ringers sent in early to take all the seats so that all the speech clips would be ringing with applause and cheers. Sadly for Trump, the Libertarians weren't having it and the boos were loud and lovely.
NASCAR in North Carolina? Tell everyone that the cheers when your plane flies over are for Trump when they're really for Matchbox 20. Go around with a retinue behind you staging photo ops where you try to make it look like thousands or adoring NASCAR fans are all over Trump. Give the propaganda team a bunch of shots to lie about with Trump in front of a huge crowd. Weirdly salute once in a while so those shots can be made to look like it was a military event. (Since Trump actually hates the military.) Get the lazy Trump to do a bunch of these in one day. (I already saw a piece in the Daily Mail breathlessly gushing about all of this.)
The NASCAR one was in a red area, but that was for the propaganda reel. The campaign has been building all of these fake events of people (MAGA plants) "spontaneously" going nuts for Trump in mostly blue areas. so that they can go back and point to them as proof that the next election was stolen.
It would be easy to just write this off as Trump's ego and its constant need for feeding. And I'm sure that's a great side-effect. It would be easy to think that it's infuriating, but not important compared to other stuff the campaign is pulling. But these self-created spontaneous press opportunities could be the thing that proves to the MAGA base that Trump is right, and sets them off for Coup 2.0.
I hope CNN is happy for their ratings this year when Trump sends all of their anchors to the Donald Trump "Enemies of the People" Camp for Journalists.
I hope CNN and their friends are all happy with their 2024 horserace ratings and are comforted remembering them when their anchors are all rounded up and sent to the Donald J. Trump Camp for Enemies of the People. (On a side note, I hope that the 6 "conservative" Supreme Court justices think that the vacations and tour buses and hard, cold cash were worth it when they're rounded up and sent there right after.)
Not to mention, but I will…
A lot of that ‘crowd’ looked suspiciously white for the Bronx, which is something like 50% Hispanic and 40% Black. So, where did the white faces come from? Paid? Bused in from Staten Island? Since something like 83% of the Bronx voted for Biden in 2020, this seems like another case of the Yam being to lazy to actually go out and campaign anywhere where it really matters.
As long as he keeps focusing on unwinnable states, like NY, Minnesota (where he lost by 200,000 votes) and California, that keeps him from working in states that really count.
There are more than 3,500 hateful bigots in the five boroughs, easily.
This story made me wonder how far I'd go to scream insults at Fudgy the Whale, and I didn't have a good answer--an hour by BART?
Iffen you go, don't waste the BART fare. Can you do any errands while you're near the screaming zone?
The even more pertinent bit is that there were a sizeable contingent of PAB protesters at the rally, I watched the (now deleted) Channel 7 video and they were commenting on the fact that despite the counter protesters there was very little public animosity on display.
Or to apply math that means that the teeny tiny crowd was even smaller than one might guess from the drone shot.
well, i wasn't until the sub-headline, but then an image of a small, mario-type, red and white mushroom popped into my head. so, thanks
Wow, that is vivid! I symphathize with your suffering...
Hi folks, new poster here. Will also have a pertinent name and all that as soon as I figure out how this works and such. Anyway, I hail from Germany and have been enjoying/co-suffering-with-y'all, this very genial mommyblog and the times you/we've been experiencing for the last seven years, especially. What prompted me to finally sign up here is a question, that hit me "out of the blue" a couple days ago, for which I just can't figure out a satisfactory answer: Why on god's green earth aren't the Americans of all 50 states not out in droves at least once a week to protest the friggin'GOP? As far as I can tell it doesn't seem to comport with the democratic, rule-of-law structure which supports those democratic principles any longer. At present all parts/proponents of that "Party" that are most visible seem to belong to a cabal of activists that are openly de-mobilizing the structures that keep a polity in working order, so to speak. By the looks of it, the main structure of this activism is presently based and anchored in the leftovers of what is now the GOP which seems to have adopted the crazy of the people that represent that body, including (and maybe even more so) in the "several states", as it were. Does anybody have an answer? Serious question. On an aside, it beats the hell out of me that it took so long for me to gain that insight: Protest the f***n GOP, they seem to me to represent some really ugly ideologies...
It's pretty simple, Americans lack the education and intelligence to apply critical thinking to our politics which are based more on tribal and cultural allegiance and emotion than rational analysis.
Take something that should be pretty obvious, like the dismal cost-benefit ratio of our health care system - we should have a national health care system as the current system only serves to enrich a handful of corporations and is Kafkaesque to the extreme. But when offered that as a solution, fully half of Americans will scream "SOCIALISM!" despite knowing someone or directly experiencing the maddening runaround to get treatment or payment approved by nameless bureaucrats in some insurance company that charges insane premiums for what little coverage it buys.
The absolutely worst feeling that came from the 2016 election was just how many absolute morons there are in this country, as anyone who knew anything about PAB should have known what kind of chaos and incompetence he would bring to our country.
Hi, thank you for your reply. Sadly, I tend to agree with your characterization for the most part. But on the other hand, I presume there be a sizeable chunk of Americans that would protest the ongoing shenanigans of the "GOP45" if they really understood what's actually at stake. Maybe it's messaging, as in "Project 2025": Let 'em know what they are actually doing with this "strategy". And why in the hell aren't there investigations into what looks to me to be an obvious conspiracy to infiltrate and capture the admistrative structure of the country to change the balance of power? Does it make a difference that they are doing it in the open as they are? Here in Germany they (the GOP) would have been having to answer some real deep questions about the obvious disconnect between their purportedly "democratic patriotism" and their projected and present behavior as a political party. Being in and from Germany, I'm conscious of the historical baggage we bring to the game, and, to be sure, we have the exact same problems with all sorts of political Crazy (and so-called political parties where the Crayzy's based), but still people find the urgency to "let 'em know" that we're not fuckin' around with that fascist bullshit again (knock on wood for things to stay that way). I just hope that Americans find their voices and appreciacion of the power those voices command when they speak in masses. That's why I think that shining a light on the GOP (or should I say xGOP?) has become an unfriendly entity at the least. Sorry, about the ranting, I will try to control it in the future :).
also, we're really fucking lazy. and self centered.
Hi, just to alleviate those feelings on your co-citizens somewhat: We Germans are no different in that regard, which has had me askeered for decades. Being proven somewhat wrong in this actually surprised me in a positive way. By which I mean to say that maybe many american folks still don't see the GOP as the dangerous org that it has become. Maybe the urgent warnings are taken as propaganda/partisan messaging (or same-as-every-elections- -reporting by the media), so too little attention is paid on the not-at-all-normal subject. I so hope that y'all get your shit together before you wake up one day and... I don't even want to think about it right now. Still hopeful though.
Part of the problem is that the media is controlled by people who promote a skewed version of what the stakes are in the mistaken construct of "impartiality". While the major media has addressed this on occasion, there are only a few outlets that are pushing the narrative of Competent Governance (Dems) vs. Authoritarian Demagogues (GOP) and add to that that the media landscape has become siloed so that most of the GOP voters and the party itself is existing in a propaganda bubble that would do Goebbels proud. Throw in a heaping dose of apathy by around 1/3 of the electorate and this is why it is practically impossible to get mass action on anything.
Also, history is not taught in our schools, and most people don't actually know how a democracy can be subverted from within. "Berlin Diary" by William Shirer is a in-the moment report of the actions of the Nazis to steadily tear down the structure of the pre-war democratic government and replace it with a police state with no internal restrictions on the actions by the party. Americans have little understanding of just how fraught the moment is, so the sense of urgency is completely lacking in the general populace.
I'm afraid I have to agree with your on-point analysis. But, as they say (allegedly), hope springs eternal. Also too, I have had very similar sentiment toward my fellow Germans over the last 3 to 4 decades, for equally similar reasons and have actually been "dissappointed" in a very positive way. I witnessed my first local anti-Nazi protest with support and turnout by "normal" non-"alternative" (used to be a thing here for a time). By the way: I wrote that formulation to have an excuse to state that cognitive dissonance actually has a "counterpart" of sorts, and when one experiences it, it's... like, "...and, oh! The sweetness of the air...!". Or something like that.
"... there are few places left in New York he can go without being pelted with bags of flaming dog shit."
It's gonna be a long summer.
Unfortunately, dog shit not in evidence as yet.
'Compare that with CNN reporter Kristen Holmes, who said the rally had “certainly a bigger crowd than I think Democrats would like to see, particularly given this is one of the bluest counties in the entire country.”'
Are they aware that people could commute to a rally like that from upstate or from Long Island? Who says they were all from the Bronx?
They were interviewing people there that said they'd never been to the Bronx before.
That video got taken down.
MSM: The 2024 campaign is a snooze fest we need some content.
Me: Well there's the 2025 plan to destroy democracy
MSM: booooring.
Me: Trump flat out promised to destroy environmental regulations in exchange for cash. Oil companies are writing legislation as we speak.
MSM: Nobody cares.
Me: Conservative justices on SCOTUS are blatantly pro Trump.
MSM: We covered that. We wrote 3 whole paragraphs.
Me: Um, some people are mad at Biden for things in the middle east he has very little control over?
MSM: Damn, now your on to something juicy.
"Me: Trump flat out promised to destroy environmental regulations in exchange for cash. Oil companies are writing legislation as we speak.
MSM: Nobody cares."
Hillary cares
"Your friends should know that Trump would sell out their kids' future to oil execs.
The media isn't telling them, so it's up to you. "
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1791477080254759376
She's been trying to warn us about TFG since 2015! Poor woman.
There's a new running mate possibility!
Hell, now that's NEWS!
" , and b) if CNN reporters are that thirsty for some excitement in this campaign, might we suggest reporting on — oh, spitballing here — "
French Kiss.
Although... some excrement rather than excitement.
You're welcome
Where can I buy bags of flammable dog shit just in case? Not that I would ever attend a Trump public masturbation event, but it never hurts to be prepared. Cats here are no help.
My puppy will provide you with as many as you want for free! I squirt of lighter fluid in each bag, and it’s showtime!
If people used paper bags to clean up after their dogs, it would all be so easy, because, after carefully collecting said shit in a bag and knotting it up, they drop them on the sidewalk and walk away.
Unfortunately, they use plastic bags for that.
Flinging shit over the fence from outside is preferred, no attendance!
I had a neighbor like that!
I'm in the west but, you guys gush about Duanne Read or whatever.
Let them delude themselves. We'll see in November.
PAB, RFK at the Lib meetup; I say good, let's have'em have a true debate of ideas and let's errybody watch.
3500 max.
I like Jim Dolan's old school reporter voice, the inflection and the cadence is 👨🏻🍳😘
"EYE witness News!" You sell that outcue, boy!
In short, a lemur bar-mitzva