Trump Claiming Victory On Charlottesville, And I, Your Disinformation Expert, Am About To Have A Goddamn Stroke

Help her. Help the bombardier.

Anthony Crider; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:37, 9 April 2018 (UTC), CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Hi, it’s me again, your friendly neighborhood debunker who just watched democracy do a big stinking turd on the floor during last night’s debates because no one listens to counterdisinformation specialists!

AHEM.

Hey, Any *Famous Internet Debunking Emporium* Publish Anything Insane This Week?

So now we’re relitigating Charlottesville and what our former president Donald Trump, you know, the guy who had dinner with known creepy little shit and white supremacist Nick Fuentes and pals around with creeps like Stephen Miller and whose administration signaled to neo-Nazis through press releases throughout his presidency with a damn tractor beam, which nearly everyone seems to have memory-holed!  

So let me get this shit off my chest first. I have a lot of outrage to spare. WHAT IS EVERYBODY THINKING?

Here’s one way last night’s bullshit should have gone:

MODERATOR: Let’s turn to Donald Trump to ask him about how he feels about immigration.

TRUMP: Racism rocks and I hate human rights but I love talking about duct taping womens’ mouths and low taxes! Arglebargle fart noise!! Fascism über alles! 1488! *takes a shit on a copy of the Constitution and holds it up to the cameras*

BIDEN: Are you fucking kidding me with this bullshit? Why am I participating in this as though this man isn’t beneath us all?

 *Jill Biden, wearing a sequined cloak, wheels out a guillotine*

BIDEN (threateningly): Now c’mon man, let’s chat about the French Revolution. 

Instead, this is what we got: 

[Editrix here, interrupting. It is what we got, and it was bad! But I entreat you to open this tab for after; Joe Biden is onstage today in North Carolina, he is back, and we can all stop dying.]

DANA BASH: Thank you. President Biden?

BIDEN: You’re going to see he’s six-foot-five and only 225 pounds – or 235 pounds.

TRUMP: (inaudible).

BIDEN: Well, you said six-four, 200.

TRUMP: (inaudible).

BIDEN: Well, anyway, that’s – anyway, just take a look at what he says he is and take a look at what he is.

Look, I’d be happy to have a driving contest with him. I got my handicap, which, when I was vice president, down to a 6.

And by the way, I told you before I’m happy to play golf if you carry your own bag. Think you can do it?

TRUMP: That’s the biggest lie that he’s a 6 handicap, of all.

BIDEN: I was 8 handicap

TRUMP: Yeah.

BIDEN: Eight, but I have – you know how many…

TRUMP: I’ve seen your swing, I know your swing.

(CROSSTALK)

Golf handicaps. GOLF HANDICAPS! Like every democracy on the planet isn’t unraveling faster than a cheap sweater and our ocean isn’t on fire and we aren’t living through batshit weather swings and pandemics and the global forces of fascism aren’t assembling on Slack to talk about how they’re going to take all our rights away.

And then, of course, there was that moment during the “debate,” which was actually a campaign event for Trump the way CNN set it up and refused to do any sort of fact-checking whatsoever, when the moderators, if you want to call them that, brought up Charlottesville and that goddamned “very fine people” article that I wrote about just a couple of days ago. 

AHEM AGAIN.

Hey, Any *Famous Internet Debunking Emporium* Publish Anything Insane This Week?

And it went down EXACTLY like I warned about. Because of course it did! I’m an expert! LOOK AT THIS SHIT!

JAKE TAPPER: Thank you, President Trump.

President Biden, you have said, quote, Donald Trump and his MAGA Republicans are determined to destroy American democracy.

Do you believe that the tens of millions of Americans who are likely to vote for President Trump will be voting against American democracy?

BIDEN: The more they know about what he’s done, yes. The more they know about what he’s done.

And there’s a lot more coming. He’s got a lot of cases around the road coming around. He’s got – he’s got a whole range of issues he has to face. I don’t know what the juries will do, but I do know – I do know he has a real problem.

And so the fact that – could you ever think you’re hearing any president say that, I’m going to seek retribution? Do you ever hear any president say that, I thought it would write some good ideas?

What got me involved to run in the first place after my son had died, I decided – in Iraq – because of Iraq. I said, I wasn’t going to run again, until I saw what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia. People coming out of the woods carrying swastikas on torches and singing the same anti-Semitic bile they sang back in Germany.

And what did – and the young woman got killed, they spoke to the mother. And she – they asked him, they said, what – well, what do you think of those people? The people who wanted to get killed, the ones who tried to stop it, and the ones who said, I think they’re fine people on both sides.

What American president would ever say, Nazis coming out of fields, carrying torches, singing the same anti-Semitic bile, carrying swastikas, were fine people.

This is a guy who says Hitler’s done some good things. I’d like to know what they are. The good things Hitler’s done, that’s what he said. This guy has no sense of American democracy.

TAPPER: President Trump.

TRUMP: Jake, both of you know that story has been totally wiped out because when you see the sentence, it said 100 percent exoneration on there. So he just keeps it going.

He says he ran because of Charlottesville. He didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He ran because it was his last chance at – he’s not equipped to be president. You know it and I know it.

It’s ridiculous. We have a debate. We’re trying to justify his presidency.

His presidency, his – without question, the worst president, the worst presidency in the history of our country. We shouldn’t be having a debate about it. There’s nothing to debate.

He made up the Charlottesville story and you’ll see it’s debunked all over the place. Every anchor has – every reasonable actor has debunked it.

And just the other day it came out where it was fully debunked. It’s a nonsense story. He knows that.

And he didn’t run because of Charlottesville. He used that as an excuse to run.

GOD. DAMN. IT.

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!

You give these monsters one inch of “he said except for the Nazis, he said he condemned them” WHEN THEY WERE LITERALLY ALL SWASTIKA-CARRYING NAZIS, and they TAKE THE NAZI MILE.

This is not how you deal with bullies! You don’t ever let them set the terms of debate! You don’t ever let them change the topic! And if they do, you change the fucking subject back to what you want to talk about. FUCK THEM!!!

Trust me on the bullies thing, because I am not just an expert in disinformation and how to fight it. I am an expert in bullies with more than 40 years of experience dealing with them:

Here’s one thing I’ve learned over the years. When it comes to fascists, BULLYING WORKS. When it comes to elected officials not doing their jobs to protect us from fascists, BULLYING WORKS. You look at what makes bullies scared and then you double down on that, and then you double down again.

And what scares the shit out of fascist monsters is the power of the people. So get to it, for America. 

So are you mad about the fact that the Supreme Court is wiping their asses with our rights? Good! Organize protests! Make calls! Tell Alito’s office what you think of his work. Call your elected officials every single day if you can and let them know how much they are disappointing you and make sure you tell them very explicitly what you want from them.

Be gentle with the hapless interns tasked with answering the phone, but be firm. And don’t forget to tweet and skeet and post at electeds and appointeds directly and send emails too! Don’t let any of these fuckers hide from their jobs!

And the journalists and the factcheckers too.

Because trust me, the way things stand, you’re not going to like whatever comes after democracy — but if we don’t work together, we’ll all find out what it is.