I see people say this frequently and of course MAGA cultists promoting a ‘Trump dynasty’ (as if anyone but hardcore MAGAts really wants Don Jr, Eric, or “Queen Ivanka” on the throne) but I tend to doubt that Trump really cares just because he lacks the self-reflection to conceive of his own mortality. He intends to remain in office for life (and from an actuarial basis his odds of surviving through this term are barely more than even) and wreck his vengeance upon everyone he imagines to have wronged him, which at last count was anyone who has ever voted for another candidate or said something less than fawning about him.
That is the rub. To the extent that Trump has ever suffered any consequences for his actions, it is that he was not reelected in the wake of his disastrous handling of the pandemic and the constant churn of controversy, and the lesson that he learned from this (if any) was not to moderate his words and develop empathy for people other than himself but to just be even more Trumpy and hype up the hatred, anger, and fear. He has discovered the political truth that the bigger the lie the more people will believe it if they have sufficient motivation to do so, and that he can get away with saying anything if he repeats it often enough. And so have his acolytes like JD Vance, who you’ll recall went from comparing Trump with Adolf Hitler to being one of his loudest and most bombastic cheerleaders. Trump can bully Republicans into forcing a government shutdown and there are really no consequences to him (what, will he not be reelected?) even if it hurts the GOP in midterm elections (provided they don’t gerrymander districts to the edge of reason and continue to enact voter suppression laws in the states where they control the statehouse legislatures to virtually ensure overwhelming competitive advantage). The fantasy that somehow now voters are going to react en masse to a government shutdown with rejection of the GOP and all it stands for is basically a fever dream with no connection to reality.
Tesla’s key technology is convincing consumers to allow them to track every movement and sell it to overseas information aggregators. Same with OnStar and SiriusXM.
“Listen, here’s the thing. If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”
Same thing is true for fitness/body health trackers and corporate smartphone apps which collect your location, purchase history, and biometric data to create a consumer profile of you that will accurately predict your behavior better than your mom. And then they sell it to whomever will pay their fee, be it corporate marketers, internal security services, social credit ‘rating’ providers, and foreign adversaries.
It is just so odd to be a person of an age such that we can remember when it was a criticism to call someone a flip-flopper or a waffler. And when catching someone in an obvious lie could have consequences. I wonder how younger folk feel about such behavior.
It seems that a lot of ‘older people’ are just fine with Trump’s transparent lies and obvious bullshit. I don’t think it has anything to do with age; the American public has just been conditioned over the last 35 years to believe that there is no objective truth or intrinsic meaning to words other than what some celebrity says, and that respect, compassion, honesty, integrity, et cetera are qualities which make us weaker, and that the Abrahamic God wants you to vote for some ephemeral hack who behaves in ways entirely contrary to the teachings of His primary oracle for ‘reasons’.
This, of course, does not account for contractors (which is likely a multiple of these numbers) who don’t have pre-allocated budgets and will not be reimbursed or otherwise compensated for being effectively ‘laid off’ less than a week before Christmas. This is your party of “Compassionate Conservatism” who are all about “Family Values”, right?
I’m just waiting for when they decide to cut the VA and yank back veterans’ benefits because taking promised entitlements away from a group of people trained to bust down doors and knock over disfavored foreign regimes is always a good move.
It is just an errant thought but are we sure Mike Johnson isn’t a Stephen Colbert fan who isn’t trolling the whole country with deadpan parroting of conservative talking points? He’s just too perfect of an asshole to be real.
I’m desperately hoping the last eight years has just been a Rekall induced psychotic break and I’ll wake up as a simple construction worker married to a ‘Nineties Sharon Stone.
Agreed. I just want to weep when I read takes that suggest that this time, finally, Trump has really screwed himself with his core constituency. That’s just not possible.
Republicans demand to be misinformed, their media industry satisfies their need, none of them are the slightest bit interested in reality. Self-delusion is their superpower.
NPCs, I’m afraid. Without the magical power to attain personhood Through A Miracle of Coding that was demonstrated in Free Guy.
As of this moment (just before 6pm Eastern) they do have the 2/3 needed for this latest bill to pass. However, the caveat is that voting isn’t closed, so people can change their votes.
I wonder if Elon is shouting into a phone right now.
ETA: there’s nothing online yet that I’m seeing through search, so no link; I heard this on TV.
I caught Jake Tapper on CNN and some talking head, and a comment to the effect that Musk just this minute tweeted approval of the bill passing. No cite I can back this up with.
Anyway, I’ve been watching the vote counts off and on and it looks like the Democrats will save the day. Just checked – 366 for, 34 against. No idea what the Democrats got in exchange for saving the Speaker’s ass, and the rest of the country.
Interesting. The Internet has been hitting the #PresidentMusk thing REALLY hard today; the meme graphics are plentiful and designed to rile up Donald.
I wonder if Elon threw in the towel today out of a feeling that Donald may be edging toward a level of irritation high enough to require expelling him from the center of power…
It may have been just a) relief for midwestern farmers and b) additional disaster aid. Those were the last survivors of the original package, from what I last heard. (Could be wrong, of course.)
The Dems were decidedly NOT going for Donald’s wish of getting rid of the debt ceiling (which had been included in the package for a while). Their view is that he can do that himself during his own term, instead of trying to get it done now so he could blame Biden.