Trump Ready On Day One To Be Dictator, But Not Day Two, So It's OK
Day two is for flip ketchups at wall again.
Everybody is sounding the alarms about how Donald Trump and all his grundle-sniffing underlings are sending clear signals that Trump would use a second term in office to exact retribution on everybody who’s ever made his weenus look tiny, and that he’d probably refuse to cede power until the day God disposes of his soul in the proper cosmic wastebasket. And the right-wing media is furious about that.
They’re furious sane people who love America are drawing attention to it, and some of them clearly wish Trump himself would please shut his yap and stop saying the quiet part loud. Last night’s Trump town hall with Sean Hannity was like that.
Hannity asked him multiple times, are you going to be a dictator? “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” He replied:
“Except for day one,” Trump responded. Trump said on the “day one” he referred to, he would use his presidential powers to close the southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling.
Trump then repeated his assertion. “I love this guy,” he said of the Fox News host. “He says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?’ I said: ‘No, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.’”
Uh huh.
Earlier in the interview, Hannity had asked Trump if he “in any way” had “any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law to use the government to go after people.”
“You mean like they’re using right now?” Trump replied.
Which is exactly what Trump has been saying this whole time, and what he will use as justification to destroy the very Republic by touching it with his little stink fingers. MAGA Republicans and the man whose boots they lick rely on projection to claim that Democrats are persecuting their political enemies, that Democrats are interfering in elections, and so forth, therefore it’s only fair that Republicans must fight back. (It’s sort of like how they imagineer into existence woke drag queen schemes to prey on children as a pretense for mounting a war against LGBTQ+ people.)
All of this is very comforting.
Before Trump waddled out on stage, Hannity bitched and moaned that “hacks and the media mob” have been sending up flares about the ways Trump is openly saying he wants to defile America. “The people who hate Donald Trump, they simply have been and continue to lie to you.” Guess Trump hates himself. (One-hundred percent he does. And why wouldn’t he?)
Hannity proceeded to play a clip of Trump telling his adoring cows that “I am your retribution,” and acted appalled that “that’s become a controversy on the Left.” He whined that people keep writing articles about how we’re Ambien-walking into a dictatorship.
“Now, it’s Joe Biden who has been using the justice system, his DOJ, to inflict retribution against his political rivals,” Hannity added. There’s that projection and justification.
The Associated Press reported on this, using the headline “Trump declines to rule out abusing power to seek retribution if he returns to the White House.” Oh yeah, AP? Did he decline to rule out becoming a dictator who abuses his power to punish his enemies? This has been a paragraph about Jesus Christ, for fuck’s sake, AP.
Again, Trump has made none of his plans a secret. Look, here’s a link about how he wants to “come down hard” on the free press in a second term. The words are in quotes because he said them.
Meanwhile yesterday on Steve Bannon’s podcast, Bannon and Trump ass-gargler Kash Patel put on their menacing big man voices to make sure we all know that MAGA Is Determined To Attack In The United States (Again). “This is not just rhetoric,” said Bannon. “We’re absolutely dead serious.” He asked Patel if he’d be able to get the political prosecutions going from his likely perch as the head of the CIA.
Patel’s reply, in part:
“We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.
“We're going to come after you, whether it's criminal or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice and Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators because we're actually going to use the Constitution to prosecute them for crimes they said we have always been guilty of but never have.”
That’s fairly explicit.
Of course, the fact that Patel and Bannon in the year 2023 think the CIA would be the best place from which to launch these attacks on America suggests that Trump’s dumbest dipshits haven’t learned shit about fuck in the last several years.
But yes, this shit is scary.
However, we’ll note that on top of all the articles about how we’re slip ‘n’ sliding into dictatorship right now, there are also a whole crop of articles coming out about how ridiculous it would be to give in to fatalism about it. Read Greg Sargent. Read Charlie Sykes. Read Joan Walsh. “A Trump Dictatorship Is Not ‘Inevitable,’” her headline says, “as Long as We Step Up Now.”
We can absolutely beat the shit out of these infected ingrown MAGA pubes again, and once and for all.
Elsewhere in the Hannity town hall, Trump said he’s probably going to get 150 million votes in 2024. Also these things about how Joe Biden is senile:
“Nuclear weapons are the biggest problem we have,” he [said]. “And we have a man that can’t put two sentences together. We have a man that doesn’t know he’s alive. And he’s backed up by the media. The biggest problem we have is the media. The media’s fake. I came up with the term a long time ago and they won’t talk about it. If I did some of the things that he did, they would reinstitute the death penalty.”
Totally curious which things Trump would get the death penalty for that Joe Biden does. Would they give Trump the death penalty if he bought his fuckup son Donald Trump Jr. a pickup truck and fronted him a few payments? That’s probably the one.
Trump can rest easy in that case, because he doesn’t love Don Jr. and he never will, therefore he probably won’t buy him any pickup trucks.
This is a serious blog post about Donald Trump declaring his intentions to be a dictator, but we ended it by reminding Junior that his father doesn’t love him, because there’s always room for J-E-L-L-O.
[Guardian / Mediaite / Media Matters / video via Mike Sington]
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You know why I am confident that Joe Biden's mental faculties are just fine? Because EVERY administration has leaks from aides and staffers, and this one has not had a single leak from anyone saying that Biden is "missing a step" or anything to that effect.
Also, every Republican that has had to go into a negotiation with Biden--including Kevin McCarthy, who has no reason to lie to protect Biden--has said that Biden was very much a shrewd negotiator and on top of his game. I'd think if Biden had some mental slowness, it'd come out in contentious negotiations, and at the very least McCarthy would be at least tactfully suggesting that Biden isn't doing so great.
Compare that to Trump, who has had several dozen aides, apppointees and negotiating partners going public and for attribution saying "he's dumber than pigshit and has no idea what is going on around him." So fuck you media for even pretending they're on the same level.
With the departures of both Santos and McCarthy the Republican Party's margin in the House gets even slimmer.
I call it the Johnson shrinkage.