It’s easy to dismiss QAnoners as a bunch of kooky conspiracy theorists, but the sad, scary fact is, they’re becoming more and more mainstream within his base.
Keep in mind that Donnie himself is being impeached because he pushed crazy conspiracy theories of exactly the sort QAnon pushes. There is really no daylight between them and them.
And scary to consider there is an actual “flat earth movement” with a significant following (CNN).
And the fact that he used to pose as his own publicist in phone interviews is just shameful. Even if we’ve heard this all before, it’s fitting to stop and recall every now and then that Trump could really be considered the “Father of Fake News.” If you’ve never listened to the surviving fake interview tape, here it is. Click on the video at the top of the article which is actually the audio of the call accompanied by photos. 100% Trump – bragging a mile-a-minute, but wait, Trump’s not really bragging because that’s not Trump at all; it’s actually a guy named John Miller who is praising Trump! NOT.
Personally, I’ve always despised people who brag and avoid them like the plague – so it’s especially disturbing to me that 63 million Americans voted for this boorish braggart.
Yes…no more idiot-proofing necessary. He’s the real crazy deal. Dumbed down supporters think it is sport or perhaps contrarian enough to piss of the ‘elite’ to be with T.
Reality Check…It is just plain nuts.
Dead on. This is the heart of it. While there are those who really believe he doesn’t lie or only tells the truth, a significant portion KNOWS he lies and love it, because he’s lying to the people they hate, and about them. Popular culture the world over celebrates tricksters, grifters, and con men to a certain extent, and Americans especially love their vigilantes. The GOP has for a long time sold itself as anti-government, standing up to the man, when in fact they ARE the man. They capitalize on this image, and Trump especially, turning that lying into a bizarre merit because they can’t separate deceit in the name of justice or protecting people from deceit in the name of garnering power or protecting oneself. So long as he’s lying to their enemies, that’s fine. But surely he won’t lie to them, right?
::sighs::
President Trump in a tweet on Sunday bemoaned the “stigma” of impeachment as Speaker Nancy Pelosi prepares to send House-passed articles of impeachment against him to the Senate as early as this week.
Portrait of a REAL president.
“A Very Stable Genius” — a 417-page book named after Trump’s own declaration of his superior knowledge — is full of similarly vivid details from Trump’s tumultuous first three years as president, from his chaotic transition before taking office to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation and final report.
[…]
In spring 2017, Trump also clashed with Tillerson when he told him he wanted his help getting rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a 1977 law that prevents U.S. firms and individuals from bribing foreign officials for business deals.
“It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump says, according to the book. “We’re going to change that.”
The president, they go on to explain, was frustrated with the law “ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign governments in faraway lands.”
[…]
Anthony Scaramucci, who served as Trump’s communications director for just 11 days, recounts the president’s response when he asks him, “Are you an act?”
“I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it,” Trump replies, according to Scaramucci.
[…]
Some details are more harmless than disconcerting. Early in his presidency, Trump agrees to participate in an HBO documentary that features judges and lawmakers — as well as all the living presidents — reading aloud from the Constitution. But Trump struggles and stumbles over the text, blaming others in the room for his mistakes and griping, “It’s like a foreign language.”
[…]
Trump was “verbally and emotionally abusive” toward then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, the book reports, and routinely complained she was not doing enough about illegal immigration and the border.
According to the book, “He made fun of her stature and believed that at about five feet four inches she was not physically intimidating. ‘She’s so short,’ Trump would tell others about Nielsen. She and Kelly would try to make light of it. Kelly would rib her and say, ‘But you’ve got those little fists of fury!’”
[…]
The duo opens one chapter with the case of Rob Porter — the former White House staff secretary who was ultimately pushed out of his job amid allegations of domestic abuse from his two ex-wives. After a photo surfaces on the Internet of Colbie Holderness, one of his ex-wives, sporting a black eye that she alleges Porter gave her, Trump offers a competing theory.
“Maybe, Trump said, Holderness purposefully ran into a refrigerator to give herself bruises and try to get money out of Porter?” they write.
[…]
Some of the modest details in the book end up having larger consequences. After Trump bungles his India-China geography and seems to dismiss the threat China poses to India, for instance, the authors write that “Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise.”
“Modi’s expression gradually shifted, from shock and concern to resignation,” they continue, adding that one Trump aide concludes Modi probably “left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner.’ ”
After the meeting, the aide explains to them, “ ‘the Indians took a step back’ in their diplomatic relations with the United States.”
Omg, he’s such a fraking nightmare. 
This is T. This is what he does to people who disagree with him, or tell the truth. He smears them. He will not be crossed…because T carries an armory of defenses and bully tactics.
And more examples on John Bolton, Les Parnas, Anthony Scaramucci, Gordon Sondland, Lt. Col. Vindman (someone he does not remember), McMasters (former NSC head), Tillis (Sec of State), Omarosa, Michael Cohen, Steve Bannon.
No one scares President Trump as much as people who used to work for him. They know the truth about him, and some of them tell it. When they do, Trump denies it and smears them.
It’s amazing how many people have turned on Trump in just his first term. He is a man who prizes loyalty above all else, and yet one toady after another has betrayed him.
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, is the latest. According to The New York Times , Bolton’s unpublished manuscript claims that Trump sought “to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” In response, Trump said that Bolton is trying “to sell a book,” and Trump’s defenders began smearing Bolton.
Jenna Ellis, one of the president’s attorneys, tweeted that “it is so sad that so many are willing to sell out America, our Constitution, truth, their integrity, and our great president just to score a book deal or five minutes of fame.” An editor at The Federalist said Bolton is just “mad Trump fired him for leaking and trying to start new wars.” Anonymous White House officials sniped to the Times that Bolton was a “disgruntled former
employee.”
…
That’s another favorite dodge. Trump, who claimed to have “the world’s greatest memory,” quickly forgets people when they tell the truth about him.
After Lev Parnas, the Rudy Giuliani associate who helped open doors in Eastern Europe, implicated the president in the Ukraine scandal, Trump said, “I don’t know him at all.” There are multiple pictures of them together. ABC News also released audio of a conversation in which Trump told Parnas and other associates to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanowitch.
…
When Trump doesn’t forget you, he insults you, fires you, and insults you again. Yovanovitch, making his claim of ignorance even more implausible.
…
After Trump divulged highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in May 2017, H.R. McMaster, one of the few honorable people to work for the president, denied it to reporters. In that moment, McMaster became McServant.
…
Trump hates the truth because he can’t control it.“Truth has a despotic character,” Hannah Arendt observed in 1967. "It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize … Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies."
After the release of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury , in which Steve Bannon is quoted as saying that Donald Trump Jr.'s infamous Trump Tower meeting was “treasonous,” Trump tweeted that Bannon "cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone."
It’s worth remembering, when Trump smears his former employees, that he hired them. He hired them not on merit but because they flattered him. “I often think of people by the way they treat me,” Trump told Howard Stern in 2013.
…
and Omarosa
Asked why she was hired, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, “She was very loyal to the president.” The president’s then-personal lawyer Michael Cohen said she had “admired and respected President Trump for over a decade.”
This is the same Michael Cohen who defended Trump for 12 years as his attorney, only to turn on him in an effort to reduce his prison sentence. In February 2019, he testified before Congress and called Trump a “racist,” a “cheat,” and a “conman.” Then he went to prison, like many other people who have worked for Trump.
Cohen became “a different person,” Trump said. He was “a fine person with a wonderful family” in April 2018, a “Rat” in December 2018, and a “Bad lawyer and fraudster” in March 2019.
How shameful. Strutting and preening while bullying the free press.
This is what facism looks like.
T was going in to a word-fusion tumble and Fox shifted away.
Nothing a sharpie can’t fix…arrggggh
No. Wait. Mr. President, that’s not your iPhone code, it’s the nuclear code. And that’s not your iPhone…
We tracked the lobbyists as part of an update to Trump Town, our database of political appointees. We’ve added the names of 639 new staffers with the administration and the financial disclosures of 351 political appointees who have filled different positions over the past year, and we tracked the careers of 338 who departed government during the same period.
The full extent of the lobbying industry’s influence is hard to measure because federal agencies decline to share details of recusals granted to officials who disclose potential conflicts with their new government roles.
And thanks @Keaton_James for describing all the lobbying efforts from T’s former Cabinet members, now working directly for the industries they were to protect the US from.
I came home and saw the video going around of Speaker Pelosi tearing up Trump’s speech and had to make my own… improvement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuuXZinPK2A&feature=youtu.be
T’s declaration of victory over being acquitted today…full of himself.
Some comments…
On Romney
Trump also suggested charging “rent” to South Korea for U.S. military forces positioned there and suggested that NATO countries owed America direct payments totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, a claim that left many in the room confused.
What had they done to so offend Trump, who would normally fawn over such decorated veterans?
They were explaining things like the importance of the post-World War II international order as a security benefit for the US, and that it wasn’t the military’s job to act as the president’s collection agent to shake down NATO allies who the real-estate mogul Trump believed weren’t paying their “rent.”
