All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Username taken]

Right.

The other thing about Trump is that it's so hard to boil down his Presidency to a single throughline. Nixon you can identify salient points (Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, the visit to China). With Hitler and the Nazis, obviously the overwhelming point is the Holocaust.

With Trump, it's 4 crazy intense years of scandal. The Impeachment would have been a defining part for any President but for Trump it's about Scandals 11-20 at best. The Pandemic was the defining crisis of his Presidency but that came in his final months. And even then October with the Rose Garden Massacre, the insane stunts he pulled out, the lack of humbling and arrogance.

It's a lot.

Usually with biopics, real political figures and so on don't always have the most interesting lives and so on, and trying to find the key moments to build up and build around is hard. With Trump the problem is there's just too much stuff. And that's just the stuff we know and is in public.

The secret stuff is probably even more worse or more salacious. We got a hint of that in the Woodward Tapes.

The last 4 years was just insanity. What's insane about this is how said insanity became normalized.

One scandal after another and it seemed that no one cared. The callousness, belligerence, cruelty and yet people turned a blind eye (but then again looking at the voter turnout maybe they were just waiting).

Seriously, how can anyone vote Republican after that circus of a convention?

But as a POC, what struck me was just how much casual bigotry had become normalized. For good or for bad, the tone of the Presidency guides the tone of the nation and Trump's alt-right leaning fueled a lot of hatred. It also revealed just how nasty a lot of Americans are.

[Revolutionary_Jack]

Maybe Netflix will do a 6 season series about it, like they did about Queen Elizabeth. Just call it The Clown.

The thing is any artistic work of Trump has to avoid any of the trappings of "lives of Great Men" i.e. find an element of tragedy, pathos, and humanity.

The Trump Presidency is pure nihilism.

To do it consciously, it should be hard to watch, difficult to watch as you see the degradation of humanity and democracy on screen.

The way to do it is as a jet black comedy, like The Wolf of Wall Street, or The Creosote Episode from Monty Python's Meaning of Life. You should feel like taking a shower after watching that kind of show. Because it will be a story of entitely and completely horrible people doing horrible things and getting away with it. That's a hard sell.

[Godzilla2099]

Now Trump is complaining about missing military ballots in Georgia. So which is it Twittler? Too many ballots or not enough?!?

I would love to have a silent feed of Trump and his team just having a meltdown. Obviously I don’t want to hear his awful voice but just seeing the chaos would be fine.

He should ask the guy he put in charge of the USPS.

[Hypestyle]

I predict that there will be a highly aggravating series of commentaries from print and TV journalists (and some public officials) about “healing”, “having understanding”, “coming back together”, seeing each other as “not red or blue but Americans”—that’s all very nice-sounding, but…..

As far as ‘seeing somebody’, who they are, who their family is? I already get to see them. I have no choice but to see them. People who look like me have never had the option of simply “not seeing” what the majority - dominant culture looks like. Their political perspectives, their social standards, their beliefs on law, and ethics and fairness, work, leisure, art, theology. Everything that gets to be designated as culture or civilization. People like them get to be the majority of public officials at the statewide and national level. (This was once exclusively so even at the local level, until the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s). Families who look like theirs get to have their social sensibilities prioritized when it comes to the behavior of those public officials. Black families have always had to exist with the implicit knowledge that no matter how mundane, fractious or idyllic our at-the-moment existence may be, often times we can do little BUT observe as the white collective ponders what to do about the topics that they deign as paramount (what neighborhoods or tax brackets get tax relief, what cities to cut revenue sharing for, what companies to buy out or inflate the stock price, what social programs to cut, and oh, this highway would look really good here-- oh, y'all live here? Well, you gotta go now..), which historically, has frequently marginalized and outright ignored people who look like me.

People like the MAGA tribe get the benefit of phrases like economic anxiety, living in the heartland, suburban moms, as a cover for their whiteness that these folks vote in alignment with.

People like MAGA are the folks who get nervous when folks who look like me move in on the block or just come to visit. They call the police when we’re having a barbecue in the back yard. If my son gets lost in your neighborhood and knocks at the door, there’s a high risk of the homeowner assuming he’s a burglar and maybe he gets a shotgun pointed at him (Hello, Rochester Hills Michigan!!) maybe me or my family member is killed or maimed when law enforcement arrives. They feel emboldened to act as de facto police in any given situation. The MAGA folks have always felt comfortable to weaponize the police on behalf of their own racial anxiety.

I’ve seen these people all of my life. But now there’s supposed to be some kind of Kumbaya lunch where the other side talks about how they do things like go to work, run a small business, carpool, go to church, coach little league baseball, go fishing, volunteer at community events, and all of a sudden there’s supposed to be this light-bulb moment where I realize, “gosh, we’re not so different...”

No, Please. Miss me with all of that. Four long years and a CVS-RECEIPT-LONG list of outright kleptocracy and mayhem? and for 50+% of Caucasians, they can still be ride-or-die for a Half-wit Lex Luthor wannabe?

Any sort of "conversation" is going to have to go way deeper than mutual love of baseball and apple pie.

[DrNewGod]

And I hear the GOP saying well Trump did better in the popular vote this time around. Yes but a lot of those are Trump hardcores. How many of them are going to come out and vote for other GOp memebers in 2022 if the GOP tries to distance away from Trump. And how many are going to vote in 2024 when Trump is pretty much a joke in the history books?

Dudes with confederate flags are well accustomed to clinging to lost causes, especially when in the wrong.

One thing I will say is the Lincoln Project was a complete failure. Trump did better in Republican turnout and the Congressional Republicans over performed.

So the myth of the moderate Republican who will see reason is still a unicorn that nobody has ever actually seen

Could be. The final judgement on them probably won't be visible until we see what kind of GOP emerges. Sadly, I fear you are right.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

Honestly this election week will make a great miniseries at some point . We will have it shown from every perspective and Trump will come out looking as terrible as possible. If its true by Nate Silver that Biden has won PA , then Trump's refusal to concede will make an epic conclusion to that.

[Robotman]

He should ask the guy he put in charge of the USPS.

Haha love this response!

[Jack Dracula]

Because until the GOP is completely marginalized, they will use every dirty trick in the book to try and frustrate whatever agenda the Democrats try to implement. This is especially true at the state and local level where Republicans still hold most of the governorships and state legislatures, and could easily stymie the implementation of any legislation the same way they did with the Obamacare rollout. This is why there can be no compromise whatsoever with the GOP, we need to continue pressing them until they are completely exhausted as a political force.

Yes. The worst thing the Democratic Party could do now is ease up on the throttle.

[JCAll]

in all these 4 years, trump has never acted presidental. he was either lying, shitting on news networks for calling out his lying, bashing anyone who disagreed with him and/or kicking his own ass over something he did. it didn't help that his cabniet was full of corruption and self-serving toadies who were more concerned with pleasing trump than actually doing good for the nation.

remember when he served that sports team mcdonald's at the white house? that should tell you enough about the kind of president he was.

I expect that whatever rambling concession speech Trump is eventually forced to give will be followed with headlines reading "This is the day Donald Trump became President".

[PaulBullion]

Ugh.

It’s a great day to be an absolute piece of **** young person. Aaron Coleman has won his race and earned a seat in the Kansas House of Representatives, according to KSHB. A little refresher on the new 20-year-old representative: After winning his nomination, Coleman admitted to “bullying, revenge porn, and blackmail[ing] of multiple girls while in middle school,” after accusations had surfaced from former classmates. On the heels of this admission, Coleman said he would drop out of the race but then changed his mind, claiming that those actions were several years old and not who he was anymore. But then Coleman’s former girlfriend told the Intercept that in 2019, just a year ago, Coleman had tried to choke her after an argument—to which Coleman responded via text to his ex that he did not choke her, he only “smacked” her. Coleman then allegedly sent verbally abusive text messages to the young woman after they’d broken up. Now, Coleman is an elected representative of the very same women he admitted to harassing.

Coleman—who is a Democrat, unfortunately—won the election where he ran, unopposed, by over 3,000 votes; about 2,000 votes went to two write-in candidates, one Republican and another Democrat.

https://theslot.jezebel.com/a-scumba...source=twitter

[Godzilla2099]

People are already celebrating but I'm not so sure. There are still thousands of military ballots left uncounted.

Too early to party?

[KNIGHT OF THE LAKE]

People are already celebrating but I'm not so sure. There are still thousands of military ballots left uncounted.

Too early to party?

No. He has no path anymore.

[BeastieRunner]

Georgia is no stranger to blowing impressive leads.

Trump just went full Falcons on that lead with the new count.

[Jackalope89]

Ugh.



https://theslot.jezebel.com/a-scumba...source=twitter

Yeah, saw that article too and felt sick to my stomach that such a piece of crap got through. Let alone was allowed to run.

[Jack Dracula]

I look forward to the books on the Trump administration coming out over the next few years.
I’m sure we don’t know the half of how mental it actually was behind closed doors.