It's at the end of the movie....Viggo Mortensen's character has become king...and the four hobbits that traveled and fought with him, bow...and he says, "My friends...you bow to no one." And then the Men all bow to the Hobbits.

nerd cred revoked

Aragorn:

Trump is strengthening our alliance with the kingdom of Gondor, I guess.

Dude....spoilers.

Oh man I'd completely forgotten that obama bowing was a thing in the griftosphere.

Let us not forget that Trump ****ing saluted a North Korean general.

But yea, sure, he bows to no one, OK.

I mean the guy licks putins sack every chance he gets. Ben garrison cartoons are not the best source of facts apparently.

Would even donald trump be dumb enough to lose 2 senate seats when he could just start with selling Hawaii first?

yes

So Trump is Frodo? So who is Sauron? And what happened to the ring?

(((Soros)))

Its not so much the praise. Its the fact that Putin went to some trouble to get him elected (and probably DID make the difference.)

Am I the only one who thought it was Jesus?

My immediate thought was Jesus. Then I was like, wtf about the McDonald's crown.

Something to consider is that Trump hates being shown up and is a big believer in revenge. I can't help but think Rosenstein big footing Trump's photo op with the queen and stepping hard on his love in with Putin will likely get Trump's ire up more than 90% of stuff. He'll definitely want revenge, but he may well shoot himself in the foot while trying to get it (see, eg, Comey testifying that help Trump was, to paraphrase, too terrible a thing to have contemplated in reopening the emails investigation.) In any event, it's important to note that Trump will want revenge and will push the envelope trying to get it.

Also, Trump never pushing back on the evangelicals is pretty amazing. Instead of business, evangelicals, and nationalists, Trump is trying to remake the primary GOP coalition as evangelicals, nationalists, the uneducated, and racists.

Along the lines of revenge on Rosenstein, House Rs are beginning impeachment proceedings on Rosenstein. It sems bizarre to impeach someone Trump could simply fire and there are long odds against it being successful, but the prospect of torturing Rosenstein with being the first ever executive branch official removed must amuse Trump.

Except the business people and rich generally are still in there.

Estate tax exemption doubled to $22M for a couple and obvious intention to eliminate it entirely if possible.

Corporate tax lowered from 35% to 20%.

Work for welfare

Military spending increase

Lowering federal employment

Appointing lots of judges who are not just conservative socially, but corporatist

Roll back offshore drilling regulations

Back out of Paris Accord

Roll back regulations on clean power

Repeal waters of the US rule

Trying again to privatize air traffic control

There's more, but really just the lowering of corporate and estate taxes and the general idea of deregulation wins him rich people. It's not just uneducated people that voted Trump. It's rich educated people. It's why the only district in LA County Trump won was in Beverly Hills. It's why Trump won in Newport Beach and it's why he's going to win in those places again in 2020. It also helps that a lot of old rich people are bigots who, like the rich farmers in the Central Valley, will cut off their noses to spite their faces if it means they don't have to hear 'press 2 for Spanish.'

Good post micro


The griftosphere is like kinky sex; if you’ve thought of it, someone’s done it.

Seems like this doesn't get enough attention!

Meh standard Trump thing to say and his supporters will suddenly agree. Nothing matters anymore.

There's a Daily Beast article with that same description.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-wa...xtbook-treason

Push back against what? 90%+ of evangelicals fell in line behind Trumpism.


Basically from 2001-2016 the business wing of the GOP has been playing a game of bait-and-switch with the deplorables: promise the marks that you'll deliver ethno-nationalist bull**** in exchange for tax cuts for the 0.1%. To make a Dvaut-style wrestling metaphor, Trump has basically been hot shotting the GOP: giving them pure distilled white nationalism right from the tap and not asking them to pay for it by supporting the Romney/Ryan agenda.

The problem for the GOP is what they do once Trump kicks the bucket and they're facing a constituency that's been fed a diet of freebase racism for years. You can't go back to a Romney/McCain/Bush model of polite dogwhistles; the crowd is expecting border walls and concentration camps and trade wars and all kinds of **** that is problematic for the business class that funds the GOP.

This article by Michael McPhaul (fmr. ambassador to Russia) does a good job pointing out a few things to be worried about in Trump's meeting with Putin. A couple things that stood out to me that I could easily see working on the orange dolt:

Article link

"Fourth, Putin is a persuasive storyteller. In my view, his interpretations of historical events are incomplete, skewed and wrong. But if you don’t know the facts, his arguments can sound persuasive. In his meeting with Obama in June 2012 in Los Cabos, Mexico, Putin articulated a forceful argument for why strongmen had to guide evolutionary modernization in the Middle East. He portrayed both Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak as such leaders and berated us for giving up on Mubarak too soon. He made clear that he would not do the same to Assad, not because he had a strong personal relationship with the Syrian dictator, but because there was no alternative. As I listened, I thought of dozens of flaws in his analysis. But if I didn’t know the history of the region or the academic literature on transitions from authoritarian rule, Putin would have sounded convincing. I worry about the lecture Putin might give to Trump about Arab culture or Crimean history. I’m not confident that Trump knows the details of these issues well enough to push back.

To tell his stories, Putin uses blunt, simple, colorful language. The change in rhetorical style between the refined Medvedev and cruder Putin was striking when they switched roles. Trump will like Putin’s style."

and

"Sixth, Putin is capable of the bold, unexpected move, sometimes for good and sometimes for bad. Putin has way more autonomy running the Russian government than Trump has in the United States. In convincing us that we needed a presidential summit in September 2013, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, Yuri Ushakov, emphasized this point, stressing that Putin liked the bold gesture if things were going well. Trump should be ready with smart answers to possible grand bargains such as Iranian withdrawal from Syria in return for our withdrawal. That’s a bad deal, even if Putin could deliver on it, since our retreat could allow ISIS to regroup and reemerge as a threat to our allies in the region and even us. But the proposal might sound attractive in a one-on-one talk with Putin, trying to get along. And we know how Trump likes deals."

What's going to happen is Putin is going to mesmerize Trump with stories, Trump will give up something similar to giving up the Korean peninsula military exercises ("or war games as I call them" much to the dismay of everyone involved in them), and will emerge with some bull**** slogan like FRESH START just wiping the slate clean with Russia for everything up to this point (like Trump will absent-mindedly say they never discussed the poisonings in the UK).

ok, why are they meeting? I sure as hell can't figure it out.