All Things Trump: Is it over yet?

[Seabass]

[Tero]

I think that many on the right found Obama at least as repellent and offensive as the left finds Trump, but while Trump has inspired some entertaining rants, I don't recall anything approaching them during the Obama presidency.

That’s just the thing, you could still shoot all the guns and burn all the coal you wanted if you were a red neck in the Obama era. Nobody forced you to have abortions. You could read the Bible all day and make duckmaster duck whistles. We did not care. But we liberals offend rednecks just by aborting our own defective babies. And speaking foreign languages. Farmers were offended by us making them fill out paper work on howcthey use their land and water. Regulation!

[Tero]

Both sides! Teach the controversy!

[pErvinalia]

Oh ffs.

[JimC]

1 + 1 = 2

1 + 1 = 3

It would be quite wrong to choose one of these equations over the other, both deserve to be believed in...

[pErvinalia]

1 + 1 = 2.... #FAKEMATHS!

[L'Emmerdeur]

Yeah well, she's being very generous given on which side her bread is buttered before it's served on a solid gold plate.

Ms Craft’s husband, Joe Craft, is the billionaire president of one of the largest coal producers in the US.

He was also a leading critic of the climate change policies imposed by Barack Obama when he was in the White House.

[source]

[pErvinalia]

The fucking swamp can be seen from space now.

[JimC]

Yeah well, she's being very generous given on which side her bread is buttered before it's served on a solid gold plate.

Ms Craft’s husband, Joe Craft, is the billionaire president of one of the largest coal producers in the US.

He was also a leading critic of the climate change policies imposed by Barack Obama when he was in the White House.

[source]

A similar situation for a major Australian official, once public, would almost force the government of the day to suspend them, at the least.

What part of "conflict of interest" don't certain Americans understand?

[Scot Dutchy]

Not a thing.

[Scot Dutchy]

'You're fired!' America has already terminated Trump

The Mueller report looms but the president is doomed anyway – no one who screws the people so blatantly can win re-election

When the public fires a president before election day, as it did Jimmy Carter, Nixon and Herbert Hoover, they don’t send him a letter telling him he’s fired.

They just make him irrelevant. Politics happens around him, despite him. He’s not literally gone but he might as well be.

[Animavore]

Fuck off, Reich. These fucking people never learn to stop underestimating the stupidity, malice, and cultish devotion of a rather sick and dedicated portion of the US electorate.

[Tero]

Haha: ”Don’t get me wrong. He’s still dangerous, like an old landmine buried in the mud. He could start a nuclear war.

Yet even America’s adversaries just humor him. Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping give him tidbits to share with the American...

But I now get ”drain the swamp.” Like racism, other definitions have been redefined. Trump wanted to draiin the cabinet of people who want to regulate or control by other means. His regulators unregulate, his department heads unfund. School lunches? Cut then. Birth control? Cut that funding.

[Tero]

Trump sets up fake committee

[L'Emmerdeur]

It may be that some people have become inured to the constant stream of lies coming out of the White House. The article below asserts that the US media still hasn't come to terms with a presidency that swims in falsehood. I think that at a couple of points it strays into hyperbole, but overall it's not a bad dissection of the vast body of Trump's deceitfulness. Then there are those who are in denial: The ability to dismiss obvious untruths as 'arguably truthful' covers a multitude of sins.

'Lies, bulls**t and gaslighting: A field guide to Trump's reality-warping mendacity'

Donald Trump lies. A lot. This isn’t news. In December 2015, PolitiFact bestowed its annual “Lie of the Year” award on “the campaign misstatements of Donald Trump," and it wasn’t even close:

In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump’s -- his various statements also led our Readers’ Poll. But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy.

That was more than three long years ago, before a single vote had been cast in the Republican primaries. But now, with the 2020 race is off to the earliest start ever, the media has yet to adequately adapt to the sheer magnitude, intensity and sweep of Trump’s mendacity. ...

It’s not that Trump's lies are so strong, but that our system is so weak, reflected in its inability to cope with Trump’s often see-through mendacity, which takes three distinct forms: ordinary lying, bullshitting and gaslighting. Ordinary lying involves intentional false claims about the world. Bullshitting involves intentionally false claims and representations about oneself, a chaotic mix of true and false claims. (Salesmen do this all the time.) Gaslighting involves manipulating reality — not just with words, but also with actions — to undermine others’ ability to trust their own judgment and believe in their own sanity. (Abusers, cult leaders and dictators do this all the time). The aim is to redefine reality however they wish. Trump’s claim that “Hillary Clinton started birtherism, and I ended it” was his most succinct, over-the-top gaslighting quip of the 2016 campaign.

Looked at another way: A liar knows he's lying, while a bullshitter thinks everyone is bullshitting, and that if they think they aren't they're only bullshitting themselves. A gaslighter thinks he's uniquely entitled to gaslight everyone — and they're lucky to have him do it. The mentality of the bullshitter dismisses even the possibility of knowing the truth, and justifies all manner of what-aboutism, to avoid responsibility. The mentality of the gaslighter goes further — truth is whatever the gaslighter claims it is, and no one else has any say at all. Global warming is a Chinese hoax.

These last two mentalities are what sets Trump apart, but they defy description merely in terms of lying (or, more innocently, “false statements”). Recognizing these substantially different kinds of lying is essential in cutting through the overloading blur of falsehoods that Trump and his minions constantly spew. But ​the media so far has made only limited progress in dealing with the first of these, despite some early awareness that much more was going on.