The most shocking part about such a dismal approval rating not even 8 months into a 4 year term is that on the back of his predecessor, he's enjoying a stock market at an all time high, unemployment at a 5 year low, and there hasn't even been a real national crisis yet.

Of all the hills to die on I would not of put bets on dorks with tiki torches. He LOVES him some alt boyz apparently.

They even dress like him.

You missed the bit where the two Congresswomen who were potentially "siding with North Korea's dictator" (huh?) were also black.

So good

This is what I find so odd. The dude is a 70 year old fat **** with a bad comb over. Even if you like Trump and find his ideas appealing, why the **** would you want to dress like him?

I like Santa Claus. It doesn't mean I'm gonna go out and buy a Santa Claus outfit.

EDIT: BTW, I dress like that motherfvcker on the left except I don't have a beard. I'm gonna have to go buy new clothes now. Thanks, dickhead.

They haven't received their marching orders yet. Now that the WH has released talking points, everyone will be in lock-stop come tomorrow.

Nah, a lot of them are coming to terms that they may have help elect a racist Nazi sympathizer. I know numerous Trumpkin voters that had no idea sites like Stormfront existed. When you tell them, they have the same look on their face as Cmndt. Lassard when he slowly realizes that Mahoney gave him a blowjob under the podium. Except in this case, the blowjob is real and Putin is the hooker.

Maybe there's the tiniest inkling of shame. But by October of 2020, they GOP will almost surely be united on a Fight Sharia Law and But Hillary campaign and they'll fall into line.

This is both a good and a bad post:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/...ump-revolution

OTOH I think it's utterly and inarguably correct that Trump's Razor is simply that he's a revanchist racist whose Presidency is just the embodiment of Fox News punditry anthropomorphized into a singular being. And far too long people have contorted themselves into false explanations that do a disservice to truth.

And yet even in this post we see the exact same phenomenon play out just on a larger playing field. Rather than assume we have a *growing* white supremacist movement emboldened by Trump, face the ****ing reality: we have a deeply pervasive white supremacist culture symbolized by Trump. The house is on fire Josh Marshall, and it has been since like the 17th century, and the country we hope to save is populated largely by revanchist racists, and the stark conclusion we may have to come to is that there may not be a huge appetite to be saved from racism. That the full truth of it is America is racist and most people simply don't care, they welcome it or are blank slates and literally couldn't care less where the boot lands, so long as its not on them.

I maintain the hope I'm wrong and this isn't true, but if we're doing this point, the Copernican view of America wouldn't be that we're led by a transparently racist baboon who stands opposed to our true values but that are our true values are like actually pretty ensconced in white supremacist assumptions, Trumpism is just a manifestation of that, and the idea it desires to be saved from it is highly specious. THAT is the simple assumption that makes all the motions of the planets, the sun and the stars fit neatly into place. Everything else to explain our arrival at the current moment requires the increasingly intricate and heroic assumptions like Ptolemy's geocentric model, like Americans are fair-minded and racially egalitarian by nature but bad elements are being emboldened by Trump. Instead, the simple assumption is that a vast majority of Americans either greatly desire or simply tolerate racism, and everything else after that requires far less complexity to explain what we observe.

Who could have imagined that when he kicked off his campaign calling almost every Mexican immigrant (some, he assumes are good people) rapists, murderers or drug smugglers

My Jewish parents, including my mother who lost something like 75% of her family in the Holocaust, went into a full throated defense of the confederate monuments. They then claimed their day was ruined because we got into a fight after I basically accused them of supporting white supremacists. They literally are becoming the people they spent their entire lives hating - now the enemy is BLM and liberals. The conservative brain washing is seriously strong.

50% of the country had their racism normalized yesterday. And it's only the first time. Next time it will be more expected of Trump, and have less shock value. The time after that, less. Within a short period, even the slightly racist people will be comfortable with it. They eat up liberal tears.

It's being overlooked all across TV and Twitter that who Trump is as a person is covering up the fact that he gets to cherrypick when to use it. Every one of his actions benefits him and his boss more than it hurts. He doesn't have morals, and therefore doesn't care what it takes to get from A to B. All he knows is controversy.

It's terrifying how he's giving birth to a vigilante movement. A force to be reckoned with. Because when the imminent Constitutional crisis hits, these Bannonites in power will be damned if they lose the war being waged against them. They'll be damned if McMaster digs through the administration pulling out the crooked weeds. And they'll be mother****ing damned if 10% of the country ever decides to revolt (as Trump knows we've been talking about for months) without a heavily weaponized militia there to re-resist the brown liberal resistance.

Yep, mass violence has just been introduced on US soil because they had a Presidential Permit and the others didn't. The us/them divide of hatred has been widened greatly. Might as well let "both sides" duke it out while the President claims innocence.

Right. The future is always hard to predict but count me in the 'it's gonna get worse from here, not better.' In the long term. Perhaps this week or this month will feel better. I get the sense normal people are emboldened a little bit today due to the harsh response to Trump but it's just a normal people feedback loop. I'll take it as true on its face that some Trumpkins feel a little bit bad, others have scurried away for a few days, that you can find this Charles Krauthammer take or that Paul Ryan tweet to feel like THIS, this is the one that starts the balling rolling back to sanity.

To wit:



But The Onion nailed this back in 2015:

‘This Will Be The End Of Trump’s Campaign,’ Says Increasingly Nervous Man For Seventh Time This Year

The Fox and Friends heuristic still stands. You'll know if I'm wrong if they are really harsh and jump off the Trump train this morning. More likely: they'll come out this morning and either totally apologize for him, perhaps tut-tut a little bit, maybe give him some pointers to smooth out his messaging but ultimately give him cover. If they don't offer a full-throated criticism, you can feel pretty confident Trump will survive basically unscathed. Maybe a blip down in his approval rating but the GOP will get every single one of those voters back once America is reminded of Hillary's emails or black NFL players are kneeling for the national anthem next month and certainly if not then, they'll definitely be back in 2018/2020 once the GOP gets back into full-time campaign mode and unifies a But Hillary / But Jane Sanders / But Fauxcohontas Warren campaign and that's that.

The key is to stop eagerly scanning your Facebook feeds to find the precise moment when America's old white relative racist fever subsidies (spoiler alert: it won't). Normal people have to motivate allies who aren't in the fever swamp. Basically no former Trumpkin voters are ever going to 'come to terms' with anything; they will never wise up; they will never change. Stop waiting. Cheering on race wars is what they wanted all along, and that is the plain truth for anyone watching.

I liked this line from the TPM piece:

This is a tough one, but how do we ration our outrage? If we're "the most appalled we've ever been" today, what meaningful words do we have left to use tomorrow?

Sadly gaslighting works, because we can literally take all the reactions today, remove X (where X is the current incident) and replace it with the rest of the alphabet from the past 7 months of his presidency, without changing the result.

It's always the worst we've seen yet. Just last week alone, nuclear annihilation was on the table.

Lie down with dogs you get fleas.

Wtf did he expect?

DVaut,

Great post on Trump's Razor, and I sadly mostly agree, but I have an important distinction to include/add (which then leads into some other thoughts). The vast majority of Americans are the blank slates you referred to. They aren't what the vast majority of Americans would call racist, in that they prefer equality for all... But mainly they care about themselves and they vote accordingly. They are the "good," people standing idly by. If you ask them, they love MLK Jr., and they support equal rights and they "have black friends," but don't expect them to speak up on current issues on Facebook.

To some extent we don't realize that such a huge percentage of Americans are this way because we gravitate to and surround ourselves with people that are intellectually curious.

The battle is being waged on the fringes pitting high minded liberals and intellectuals on both the left and right against white nationalists and nazis. I include the right because you'll see ex-GOP politicians and strategists speaking out harshly this week against Trump - they are what's left of the intellectual right. I fully admit that they discard that intellectual quality on many issues such as healthcare, tax policy, etc... But on this they agree, they're speaking up, and we need every ally we can get.

If we win, the majority will shrug and say, "See? We told you crazy liberals you were overreacting. America is invincible. Good always prevails here." But only if you ask them during a commercial. Don't distract them during the game or TV show.

If we are losing, at some point things will get so bad the brave ones jump on our side while the less courageous say, "Who could have possibly expected it to reach this point??? Nobody saw this coming!"

I have family who is saying that to me now, even as I remind them that I predicted this stuff in November. They didn't accept it then and they can't accept overlooking the signs, so they're forming an acceptable internal narrative. Even though I've predicted a lot of what's happened in our private conversations, they're still waving off my predictions of what's to come. I'm sure I'm not the only one here having that experience.

Even now, they continue to believe it can't and won't get worse, because America.

The question is, where is the line where they jump in and will it be too late? I think it will be, so I think it's imperative that we win by convincing people in that group to take small action steps (call people in Congress, donate a few bucks) that help us out without inconveniencing them for more than a few minutes.

The reason I think that is the play is that I have a feeling the line is somewhere around jailing or interning white people dressed like white collar folks. I think they'll ignore those conditions for Antifa, BLM, etc, as Fox News hails Trump for law and order success. The problem is, by the time they wake up, a lot of The Resistance could be in jail.

The other lines would be unrelated issues that cause them to turn on Trump and include the race stuff... Unemployment, gas prices, stock market, economic growth, health care, etc.

Last but not least, I'd say we have a combo draw here in that if Mueller comes through or Congress impeaches sooner rather than later, we can at least have a government that is not aligned directly with overt white supremacists.

I think there's at least a chance that yesterday's press conference triggered the beginning of a process that leads to his impeachment, on the belief that widescale protests on this particular issue could get us there within a few weeks... But they'd have to be huge, ongoing and long lasting. I don't think that's out of the realm of possibility.

True. I wouldn't cast things as hopeless and without progress. I think new movements like BLM, social media, anonymity online, cell phone video and such have made racism more open and harder to ignore for white people.

Trump is still shockingly racist for a POTUS. The stars aligned in a very bad way and this time Pat Buchanan won, but America isn't really a worse country. The media and the Democrats ****ed up this time. Still, the big change in America is that the thoughts of Buchanan supporters are exposed all around us. It's the same country where Buchanan came in second twice in a row. If you thought about it and many people did, that was a pretty awful sign at the time. If that situation is less tolerable now, that at least means there's more recognition of racism and pressure to confront it. I don't mean to imply I think progress is inevitable though. People have to fight for the world they want.

I agree on the a lot of the merits, save one. The scoreboard then about the kind of people we're talking about:

- pay lip service to norms of racial egalitarianism but
- don't count on them to do anything and
- actually, they'll just vote selfishly but
- they are 'good' people

For the dude asking, this is Netanyahu's son. As you can imagine, this is the general response here for the right-wing. I've read less "articulate" versions of this which basically assumes the rally was a quiet peaceful one from law-abiding oppressed right wing, with a few rotten apples.


https://www.facebook.com/yair.netan/...74?pnref=story

I put quotes around good on purpose. We agree there. These are what most of society would consider good people. "Joe sure is a great guy huh? Great wife, beautiful kids, he's a heck of a Dad!"

We can count on them to not be racist themselves but not to march against it. They may go beyond lip service slightly... Like they may tell a racist in Starbucks to STFU, but they won't be found marching in counter protests.

Also, I meant to include this in my initial take but the best evidence of the majority of people being blank slates is Obama winning twice, followed by this stuff. People are just clicking buttons.

I don't think people really vote that selfishly, at least not consciously. There's way too little connection between voting and any real life outcome. One way or another, if it's the result of cognitive dissonance or loyalty to some particular group or imagining it's the path to respect from one's peers, people vote based on what they think of as good. Everyone (almost) is a hero in their own story.

I agree with a lot of this, and I think that now that he's shown his true colors, if Trump makes it to 2020 he is drawing dead if it's a fair election. Obviously voter suppression, voter intimidation, and flat out cheating could change that. A lot of voters, barring something major that impacts them directly, back up their votes with reasoning like... "The other guys were in charge eight years, it was time for a change."

They're clicking buttons, and with two decades of demonizing Hillary, that played a huge role in which button they clicked. Now that Trump has outed himself as a racist (and even if they aren't paying attention now, this **** will be in every campaign ad in 2020), they will not vote for him in my opinion. That's if he even wins the primary.