First, Donald Trump could not fill Madison Square Garden. Second, yes, the idea behind that line at the event was that it would be really funny if somebody were to murder Taylor Swift…
First, Donald Trump could not fill Madison Square Garden. Second, yes, the idea behind that line at the event was that it would be really funny if somebody were to murder Taylor Swift…
What more is there to say? Yes. Donald Trump is a fascist, attempting to generate stochastic terrorism to scare his political adversaries and the risk-averse into not opposing him. It doesn’t work with Liz Cheney, but it has already worked with a very large number of Republican office-holders, and a surprising—to me at least—number of plutocrats. Or should it be surprising to me?:
Donald Trump: ‘Let's put her [Liz Cheney] with a rifle standing there with [the] 9 barrels [of a firing squad] shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face… <bsky.app/profile/atrupa…>
Is there a theory of turnout behind this? Or is it just purely the end of all pretense at repression of the id?:
David Frum: This rally seems aimed at the crucial bloc of swing voters who like Donald Trump but worry that maybe he's not quite stupid and obnoxious enough. They need him and his team to squeeze out of the tube that one last plop of stupidity and obnoxiousness…
For Trump to manage to get Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) to denounce his event is something I did not expect to see:
Heather Cox Richardson: I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way. It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media…
First, Donald Trump could not fill Madison Square Garden. Meditate on that. Ultimately, no matter how hard his campaign tried, he could not fill Madison Square Garden.
Second, Stochastic Terrorism Watch: This wasn’t the worst of his dissing of American Hispanics. And, yes, the idea is that it would be funny to murder Taylor Swift:
Danielle Kurtzleben: ‘The opening speaker at M[adison ]S[quare ]G[arden] rally, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe -- jokes included calling Puerto Rico a "floating island of garbage" and saying "Travis Kelce might be the next OJ Simpson."
I presume it is not being covered because editors are telling their reporters “it’s not really the policy” and Republican tax-policy worthies are unwilling to comment because they claim “it’s not really the policy”. But why are those things determinative?
Normative: It is so, so bizarre that the core of Trump’s policy agenda is based on just lying about how tariffs work at the most basic, 101 level imaginable. It’s not controversial. It’s not even complicated. It’s just a lie. It’s like saying income taxes are paid by leprechauns. I know he’s been lying about this for years so it’s hardly “news” but given it’s his one core policy idea other than “police state for mass deportation,” it should be a prominent feature of all coverage that it’s based on a straightforward lie. And look, it HAS to be a lie. Yes, he’s a moron. Yes, he’s not a very good businessman. But it is not possible to be in business for five decades, however ineptly, and not understand that importers pay tariffs, or that the cost gets passed on. It just isn’t…
Wait until somebody tells Donald Trump that water is just fullof hydrogen, or that gasoline makes a dandy fuel-air explosive!:
Donald Trump: The one thing I can't get used to is hydrogen. You know, you know, the story with hydrogen, it's great until it blows up, in which case you're not recognizable. Even guys, strong guys like this, they call your mom or your wife. Is it a mom or? Oh, look at that. Oh, I know them. Very wealthy parents. That's nice. You know, I know them. No, your kids wouldn't be recognizable. That's not a good thought. How's my son doing? Well he tried the new hydrogen…
Now Donald Trump is blaming Abraham Lincoln for the US Civil War:
Donald Trump: Lincoln was probably a great president, although I’ve always said, why wasn’t that settled, y’know? it doesn’t make sense, we had a Civil War...
If this answer were to have been given by an OpenAI chatbot in response to this prompt, OpenAI’s valuation would have collapsed:
Q: Like my fellow Americans, my grocery bill has not gone down. Everything is still so very expensive. What steps will your administration take to help American families suffering from this inflation?
Donald Trump: ‘So, you know, it’s such a great question in the sense that people don’t think of grocery. You know, it sounds like not such an important word when you talk about homes and everything else, right? But more people tell me about grocery bills, where the price of bacon, the price of lettuce, the price of tomatoes, they tell me. And we’re going to do a lot of things.
You know, our farmers aren’t being treated properly. And we had a deal with China, and it was a great deal — I never mentioned it because once covid came in, I said, that was a bridge too far because I had a great relationship with President Xi [Jinping]. And he’s a fierce man and he’s a man that likes China and I understand that. But we had a deal and he was perfect on that deal, $50 billion he was going to buy. We were doing numbers like you wouldn’t believe, for the farmer. But the farmers are very badly hurt. The farmers in this country, we’re going to get them straightened out. We’re going to get your prices down.
But you asked another question about safety and also about Black population jobs and Hispanic population in particular those two. So when millions of people pour into our country, they’re having a devastating effect on Black families and Hispanic families more than any others. I think it’s going to spread to a lot of other places.
I think it’s going to spread to unions. I think unions are going to have a big problem because, you know, employers are just not going to pay the price. They’re going to—and it’s going to be—it’s a very bad thing that’s happening.
So they’re coming in. Many are coming in from jails and prisons and mental institutions, insane asylums. That’s like, you know, step above, right? Insane asylum. And whenever I go, Hannibal Lecter, you know what I’m talking about. They always go—the fake news. That’s a lot of fake news back there, too.
They always mention—you know, it’s a way of demeaning, they say, ‘Hannibal Lecter, why would he mention?’ Well, you know why, because he was a sick puppy, and we have sick puppies coming into our country. I figured that’s a lot—that’s better than wasting a lot of words. You just say, ‘Hannibal Lecter. We don’t want him.’ But. But they always sort of say, ‘Why would he say that?’ I do it for a lot of reasons.
But I do it because we are allowing some very bad people into our country. And they’re coming as terrorists. You know, you saw the other day, last month they had the record number of terrorists. I had a month — and I love Border Patrol.
Did you see they gave me a full endorsement two days ago? Border Patrol.
The Border Patrol. And they’re great. And, you know, they want to do their job. They don’t want to let these people come in. They look at them. They can tell. They can look at somebody, say good, bad. They say what’s coming into our country now, it’s having a huge negative impact on Black families and on Hispanic families and ultimately on everybody.
And we’re going to close that border so tight. It’s going to be closed. And I said the two things I’m going to do, first, we’re going to close that border—and people are going to come in. You want people to come in. We need people to come in. People are going to come into our country legally.
You know, it’s so unfair. You have people that are waiting on a system, in a line and they’ve been waiting in this line. You know how long? For years, 10 years, 12 years and they study and they take tests. And then people come. I actually say, ‘Why don’t you just go and just come on across?’ I tell people that it’s terrible, right? I said, ‘Go out. You’re incredible.’ They say, ‘What can I do to speed up the process?’ I say, ‘You know what, go to the southern border. I’ll see you on the other side.’ It’s so unfair.
But we’re going to have them come in legally. You have to see what they have to do. They take tests on, you know, who was the first one here? What date was this? What does 1776 mean? All this stuff.
And these other people are coming in and they’re affecting the school systems and they’re affecting the hospital system. I mean, if you take a look at what’s going on in Springfield, Ohio, a town of 50,000 people, they’ve just added 32,000 people. Illegal immigrants. And we’re not going to put up with it.
And we’re going to take care of your costs are going to come down, and you’re not going to have a problem with — because the biggest problem, and I’m hearing it from Black people and to a lesser extent right now, but it’ll be the same, Hispanic people.
And I’ll tell you what, our poll numbers have gone through the roof. With Black and Hispanic, have gone through the roof. And I like that. I like that. I like that. So we’re going to take care of it. You will be — I’ll tell you, if everything works out, if everybody gets out and votes on January 5th.Or before.
You know, it used to be, you’d have a date. Today, you can vote two months before, probably three months after. They don’t know what the hell they’re doing. But we’re going to straighten it all out. We’re going to straighten that out. We’re going to straighten our election process out, too. That’s going to be important, also.
So thank you very much, darling. We’re going to get it straight.
Donald Trump: I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlongged, he got hit as hard as you can get hit. Because he was sort of king of the woke, right? And yet he got hit…
Old grandpa with very serious cognitive and rage issues threatens to sue pretty much everybody:
Donald Trump: Now what happens is I won’t pay the bill for this stupid [A/V]company that rented us this crap. I won’t pay the bill and then we’ll have a story that Trump didn’t pay the bill to a contractor. No, when they do that kind of a job, don’t pay the bill. That’s terrible. If it goes out again, I’ll sue the ass off that company. We’re gonna sue ‘em…
and:
Donald Trump: So I think I’m going to sue [60 Minutes] actually [for interviewing Kamala Harris]. I think so. No, you know what, they can’t defend it and if they do and even if they win it’s going to be very embarrassing. It’s a very embarrassing moment for them, but the media is not pressing it. It’s so bad they should lose their license and take ’60 Minutes’ off the air…
Is it Trump who is cancelling his own campaign appearances on very short notice? Or is it his staff?:
Edith Olmstead: ‘Donald Trump has pulled out of two major interviews Thursday, after the Republican presidential nominee made several appearances this week that went disastrously awry. Trump had been scheduled to do an interview with NBC News’s senior business correspondent Christine Romans that would air Monday, but the plans for a face-to-face were apparently shelved. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday that one source suggested the interview had only been “postponed.” The former president also canceled his speech to an NRA convention on Tuesday in Savannah, Georgia. Convention organizers said Trump had a “scheduling conflict.”
Sundowning in America: This seems to me to get what is going on right now—and it is what everybody has no excuse not to be talking about for the next three weeks:
Jeff Tiedrich: Elderly Demented Golfer’s Handlers Are Terrified to Let Him Out In Public: ‘They’re canceling interviews and appearances as fast as they can: Imagine you’re a campaign manager. You send your candidate out to do a softball town hall, where he’ll answer easy questions gently lobbed at him by adoring cultists—but instead of smacking those softball questions out of the park, he decides instead to “make it a music” <washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/… confusing the shit out of his audience for 39 excruciating minutes, as he wobbles unsteadily…. Then your guy appears in front of a room full of women who are angry about the loss of their reproductive rights, and brags about being the hombre who ended Roe <washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/…. And then he gets up in front of skeptical Latino voters, and tells a guy who is speaking through an interpreter that people who need interpreters are destroying America <washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/….
Your worst nightmare is coming true, right before your very eyes. You had hoped to keep evidence of your candidate’s rapidly-increasing dementia under wraps—but now it’s advanced to the point where it can no longer be hidden. for f***’s sake, even the normally-compliant lapdog press is pointing it out <washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/14/…….
So for the next two weeks, it looks like it’s only hate-rallies for Donny, where he can spew all the batshit he wants — because the cultists feed off the crazy, and never question it. boats and batteries and Hannibal Lecter and hydrogen cars that explode your wife all to hell <msn.com/en-us/autos/news/it-explodes-tr…? Hey, whatever Dear Leader says is the gospel truth.
Have the New York Times’s editors finally stopped blocking their reporters from telling their readers what Trump rallies really are?:
Michael Bender: ‘In Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Sunday, Mr. Trump’s scripted remarks hewed tightly to the anti-immigration message that has become central to his campaign. He stayed on track for the first half-hour of the event before taking a more scenic route to the finish. After about 25 minutes, he told the crowd he wanted to tell “one quick story” about a friend with a car plant in Mexico. But he never finished his tale. Instead, he lost the thread one minute later as he complained that if he mispronounced one word he would be accused of being “cognitively impaired.” Then, he botched the phrase by saying President Biden was the one who was “cognitively repaired” and referred to the election as three and a half months away, not three and a half weeks.
About 20 minutes later, Mr. Trump seemed ready to wrap up his speech. He promised the crowd would see him again soon and said he was thinking about residents on the East Coast suffering after the recent storms. “So in closing,” Mr. Trump continued, “I just want to say Kamala Harris is a radical left Marxist rated even worse than Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas.”
Just what was Donald Trump thinking? Anybody know? You can watch dog-killing Dakota Governor Noem gently trying to guide him back onto track, by reminding him what he was just saying he wanted to do—to no avail:
Hafiz Rashid: Trump’s Surreal Musical Town Hall Detour Is Proof He’s Losing It: ‘Donald Trump, 78 years old, spent a baffling amount of time at his town hall just standing there and listening to music…. After a few questions and a couple of medical emergencies in the crowd, despite telling his supporters that he would take more questions… Trump stood onstage, swaying and occasionally pretending to conduct the music…. “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” played…. Trump then said he wanted to take more questions but changed his mind and asked for “YMCA” to be played, “nice and loud,” to wrap up the event. But strangely, the event didn’t end there. Trump continued to stay onstage as what seemed to be his campaign playlist kept playing, running through songs like “Hallelujah,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “Rich Men North of Richmond,” and “November Rain.” Then finally, he gave South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem a kiss and stepped offstage. It’s the latest, and strangest, example of Trump showing clear signs of mental decline, even as he insists otherwise…
Yet another sign that JD Vance’s family and in-laws should be thinking very, very hard about what is the right situation for his kids to grow up in. Casual verbal brutality about them to masses of strangers is not a good sign for what is going on. Not a good sign at all:
JD Vance: I’m surprised we made it this whole time without anyone really complaining. Maybe I can trade you my kids, you could knock some sense into them…
The right way to talk about your children to others is this: “Zeus and all you immortals! Grant that this boy, my son, may be like me, first in glory among the Trojans, strong and brave like me, and rule all Troy in power: and one day let them say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’…” It is not “maybe you could beat them up and make them quiet…”
Sundowning in America: Does Donald Trump not know what standard allergies are? Or does he hope his supporters do not know what standard allergies are?
Donald Trump: ‘I have just seen Kamala’s [health] Report and it is not good…. Urticaria… /a rash of round, red welts on the skin that itch intensely, sometimes with dangerous swelling.’ She also has ‘allergic rhinitis and allergic conjunctivitis,’ a very messy and dangerous situation…
Sundowning in America: JD Vance says the 2020 election results should have been thrown out as invalid because the Hunter Biden “laptop story” did not get wide enough media distribution:
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: In the debate you were asked to clarify if you believed Trump lost the 2020 election. Do you believe he lost the 2020 election?
JD Vance: I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with respect to the 2020 election, but we are focused on the future. There is an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I am much more worried in what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable, and…
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Senator, yes or no? Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: Let me ask you a question: Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysts have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Senator Vance, I am going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? That is the question.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Senator Vance, I am going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: And I have answered your question with another question. You answer my question, and I will answer yours.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I have asked this question repeatedly. This is something very important for the American people to know. There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election.
JD Vance: You are repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I am saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship—by the way, backed up by the federal government—in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes. I am worried about Americans who feel that there were problems in 2020. I am not worried about this slogan that people throw—“well, every court case went this way”. I am talking about something very discrete. A problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020. And, more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Senator, would you have certified the election in 2020. Yes or no?
JD Vance: I have said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised. When you have technology companies…
Lulu Garcia-Navarro: The answer is no.
JD Vance: When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that independent studies suggested affect the vote, I think it is right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that is a reasonable thing… <https://x.com/MeidasTouch/status/1844788902223073664>
Sundowning in America: No matter how much money Elon Musk gives Donald Trump, and no matter how much Musk abases himself to Trump, there is no way he is going to be able to get Trump to give him anything in return—no way he will be able to get Trump to be neutral rather than opposed to Elon Musk’s attempt to shore up Tesla’s stock price by portraying it as the wonderful revolutionary tech company of self-driving automobiles:
John Gruber: Donald Trump, Yesterday [October 10], on Autonomous Cars: Donald F. Trump, yesterday in Detroit: “Do you like autonomous? Does anybody like an autonomous vehicle? Know what that is? Right? When you see a car driving along? Some people do, I don’t know. A little concerning to me, but the autonomous vehicles we’re going to stop from operating.” This, on the very day Tesla was set to hold a high-profile event to promote autonomous vehicles. This, after Elon Musk dropped to his knees and begged for Trump’s approval — exactly as Trump predicted Musk would — at one of Trump’s Hitlerjugend rallies just last week. It’s almost enough to make you think Trump is only in it for himself and will eventually betray and humiliate every single person who believes he’s on their side, and that his screws are now so loose that it only takes days, not weeks or months, for him to forget who his ostensible oligarchic allies are… <https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/10/11/trump-crazy-talk-on-autonomous-cars>
>
Sundowning in America: Donald Trump, speaking in Detroit, does not realize that he is in Detroit:
Donald Trump [Speaking in Detroit]: The whole country's going to be like. You want to know the truth? It will be like Detroit. Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she's your president. You're going to have a mess on your hands...
Sundowning in America: ChatGPTrump1.0, prompted with a question about a $25,000 first-time homebuyer credit, winds up saying that immigrants have bad genes:
Donald Trump: That [credit] is going to drive the prices up, yeah. Your price is going to be $100,000 dollars more now. No, no, everything they want to do is wrong. First of all, you have to let the private sector do it. You just have to let them do it. She wants to go into government housing. She wants to go into government feeding.
She wants to feed people. She wants to feed people governmentally. She wants to go into a communist party type of a system. When you look at the things that she proposes, they're so far off. She has no clue.
How about allowing people to come through an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they're now happily living in the United States.
You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it's in their genes. And we've got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn't be here that are criminals. And you know one of the worst stats? 325,000 young children are missing. Can you imagine?…
Sundowning in America: Remember, JD Vance is on record wanting to criminalize abortion nationwide, and to allow state police to establish state-level menstruation registries:
Matt Christy: Sen. Mike Braun said interracial marriage ruling should be left to states: ‘During the press call, [Indiana Senator Mike] Braun [(R)] had been explaining how he felt Roe v. Wade, the ruling that legalized abortions, should never have been a federal decision and been left to states to decide. A reporter then asked Braun if he applied the same reasoning to decisions like Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws that made interracial marriages illegal. Braun responded:
“When it comes to issues, you can’t have it both ways. When you want that diversity to shine within our federal system, there are going to be rules and proceedings, they’re going to be out of sync with maybe what other states would do. It’s the beauty of the system, and that’s where the differences among points of view in our 50 states ought to express themselves”… <fox59.com/indiana-news/sen-mike-braun-s…>
Sundowning in America: Not only is Trump thinking and reasoning at a sub-fourth grade level, but virtually no Republicans are fazed by this at all:
Gary Legum: Trump Doing Race Science, Again: ‘Somehow [Trump] went from “subsidies encouraging builders to build more housing are a bad idea” to “Hispanic migrants are genetically predisposed to murder” in 159 words and approximately 24 seconds. It’s impressive, in its own terrible way. The modern Republican Party is like thiiiiiiiiiiis close to putting a eugenics plank in its party platform… <https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-doing-race-science-again>
Fascism: Yes, Trump and all the Trumpists knew that their January 6 conspiracy was an illegal attempt to perpetrate a fraud against the government of the United States of America in its constitutional operations:
Marcie Jones: October Surprise! Jack Smith's January 6 Motion Unsealed: ‘TL; DR: Trump knew he lost and said 'so what' if mob hanged Mike Pence…. His motley fake-elector crew knew all along that what they were doing was ill-fucking-egal. Like when… John Eastman, aka “P58,” emailed Mike Pence to beg him to consider “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act…. Or how the fake electors who Team Treason tried to solicit in Pennsylvania insisted on having conditional language on their fake certificates saying they weren’t the actual duly-appointed electors, and what they were signing was For Entertainment Purposes only unless Trump actually won his LOLsuit. One co-conspirator fussed to another, “if it gets out we changed the language for PA it could snowball.” Then there’s how co-conspirators were straight-out calling the fake electors “fake,” with what sounds like dipshit Ken Cheseboro emailing bluntly, “the votes aren’t legal under federal law”… <wonkette.com/p/october-surprise-jack-sm…>
Sundowning in America: JD Vance, remember, was not just a normal “Never Trump” guy, but had turned it up to 11:
JD Vance: ‘On Donald Trump:
[He] just so thoroughly failed to deliver on his economic populism (excepting a disjointed China policy)….
[He’s] Emperor Trump…. I turned down my appointment from the emperor….
I’m a “Never Trump” guy…. I never liked him….
I understand where Trump’s voters come from. But I also don’t like Trump himself, and that made me realize that maybe I’m not quite part of either world totally….
My god what an idiot….
[Trump could be] America’s Hitler… [or he’s a] cynical asshole like Nixon…
Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office….
I can’t stomach Trump. I think that he’s noxious and is leading the white working class to a very dark place….
if I [had] fe[lt] like Trump [had had] a really good chance of winning, that I might have [had] to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton….
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I'll say one thing in favor of Kristi Noem: she has demonstrated the skills to be a good attendant at a memory-care institution. At least if you can keep her away from her guns.
I'll say one thing in favor of Kristi Noem: she has demonstrated the skills to be a good attendant at a memory-care institution. At least if you can keep her away from her guns.