Thanks for this thread. This needed to be talked about.
Paul Krugman today:
I don’t really get it either, but you can’t argue with results. Trumpism is the largest and most powerful political movement in the last 50 years. My theory is that he is charismatic like a train wreck; you just can’t look away.
Wow. Really? I am impressed by the knob gobbling. This is what it has to be, right? He can’t really think that, can he?
Part of the knob gobbling, I believe, is to troll the libs.
That’s a great article, thanks for posting!
Paul Krugman is of course a Nobel-winning economist, and Mark Carney an accomplished banker and educated economist. Trump is an imbecile with the knowledge, goals, and motivations of a two-year-old toddler. Regardless of what happens after Trump disappears from the scene, Canada can never again have the same relationship we used to have with the US, and neither can any other country.
We’re in a whole new economic and political regime, and the change is permanent. The problem isn’t Trump, who will soon be gone. The problem is the millions of idiots who thought it was a terrific idea to vote for him, and who will continue to feel the same way. The US can no longer be trusted – about anything.
I disagree. What the Right has been propagandizing are all those orthogonal things. The lying, the rape, the preying upon children, the dishonesty, the stupidity, the ignorance, the malice; those are the things they’ve been trained to admire and that Trump exemplifies.
When my relatives were acquiring dementia, a nurse at their skilled facility told me that brain damage caused by Alz, etc., can exaggerate personality traits of the individuals. It can worsen or improve a person depending on many factors. Stress, illness, lack of stimulation, etc., are all variables that might cause a dementia patient to bring out the worse in their natures (as it does with all of us but they lose their coping skills, problem solving abilities, etc., which normal people possess….well, sometimes). I don’t quite know what this means for Trump, but the stress of the airflight, the confusion, the noise etc., might make him even more the idiot than he truly is….and even at baseline, he is certainly quite enough idiotic and erratic .
I agree. It’s a hard truth to accept, but the country I used to admire (despite its faults) is now one I really am ashamed of (despite some positive attributes).
It’s become clear that the worst 1/3 of US residents did not have a human parent to teach them that trusting a guy who refers to himself in the 3rd person and reflexively bleats, ‘Believe me!’ whenever he lies is strictly for Suckers, Marks, and Chumps.
I’ve never understood this objection. Trump is the leader of a cult of personality that’s taken control of the entire country. You don’t like him, I don’t like him, pretty sure nobody reading this right now likes him, but there are millions of Americans who are absolutely devoted to him, entirely based on his personality. That’s objectively charismatic.
Here’s the Cliff Notes of the WH Briefing…INSANE!!
I WATCHED TRUMP’S ENTIRE PRESS BRIEFING TODAY SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO
I know it’s popular around here to hyperbolically remark that every new Trump speech is the “most deranged speech you’ve ever heard,” but a select few of them actually fit the bill, no hyperbole.
That Christmas Eve White House address where he forgot to mention Christmas and spent the whole time talking about deadly South American snakes is a solid Top 3 Contender.
So was today’s White House presser celebrating his One Year Anniversary in office.
For starters, Agent Orange showed up a half-hour late, wielding a phone-book-sized stack of papers clipped together that just said “ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” which Trump held up and said, “We have a book that I’m not going to read to you– these are the accomplishments of what we’ve produced.”
And then having told the press room he’s not gonna read them anything in the “book” he’s waving at them, Trump launched into a rambling 1-hour 45-min incoherent mess that made a strong case for giving the man another one of those “preventative MRIs.”
Here’s some of the things 47 thought we would be proud of him for “accomplishing” this year:
• He held up several mugshots of Minnesota’s “WORST OF WORST” criminals, explaining that ICE had just rounded them up last week even though the mugshots we could all read said they’d been convicted last summer. One mugshot said the man was guilty of “Intentional Homicide,” which Trump read as “International Homicide.”
• Somalians stole $19 billion dollars. They’re very low-IQ people, but somehow they figured out how to steal $19 billion and spent it all on Mercedes Benzes. And Somalia isn’t even a real country. (Not sure how this is an “accomplishment,” just go with it. As we’ll see, Trump doesn’t appear to have any idea how this exercise is supposed to work.)
• Rep Ilhan Omar made $30 million without ever having a job. (she’s been a teacher, campaign manager, non-profit executive, Dept of Education staff, and City Council member. Most of “her” net worth is actually her husband’s.)
• Men in women’s sports is dumb, but not as dumb as Biden’s open border policies.
• All the oil companies are getting ready to “massively invest in Venezuela” (despite telling Trump last week that Venezuela was “univestable.”)
• Joe Biden is sleepy. And crooked. And the worst president we’ve ever had.
• Minnesota is full of the “toughest people around,” and all ICE wants to do is round them up and send them back to the mental institutions they came from, but they’re being abused by Don Lemon who’s a “loser and lightweight.”
• He really felt bad when “that woman” was shot, but some other lady was yelling “Shame! Shame!” like a professional opera singer, so that’s how he knows she was a professional agitator.
• ICE arrested “10,000 criminals in Minnesota.” (ICE has arrested around 3,000 people TOTAL in MN, 212 of which had severe criminal records.)
• He loves “Hispanic.” He did great– he did the highest. Nobody ever got numbers like he got, “from the standpoint of being a Republican.”
• He “won the entire border along Texas between Texas and Mexico,” which nobody’s ever done before.
• Joe Biden didn’t win the election—it was rigged—and “everybody knows that now.” Numbers are “coming out now that show it even more plainly—we caught him.”
• He’s very glad his fingers didn’t get stuck in that big clip holding all the papers together. It could’ve done a lot of damage, but he wouldn’t have showed any pain at all…even if his fingers fell off.
• He solved Biden’s “stagflation,” which was “the highest inflation in the history of our country.” (It wasn’t even in the Top 10, and Biden solved it before Trump took office.)
• Many of the biggest factories in the world are now being built in America. (Don’t ask how they’re both “the biggest” and also “under construction.”)
• The Democrats shut down the government but the U.S. still had 5% GDP growth. And nobody present has “ever heard of 5%.” Under Biden, inflation was so high that “nobody could calculate it.”
• SNAP was at $7 billion, but then it came out to over $51 billion because the previous administration didn’t have a clue—all they wanted was for men to play women’s sports—so they went to the Supreme Court, but everyone saw in the Supreme Court that men playing women’s sports doesn’t work, so he got $18 trillion in commitments for new investments.
• Drug prices in America were so high that we were basically “subsidizing the whole world,” but now we have Most Favored Nation Status, which reduces drug prices 300, 400, 500, even 600%.
• We had the best economy in history during his first term, but then Biden came in and ruined it all so now we have to build it all again.
• We slashed the federal budget deficit by 27% in one year (it was actually 2%), and that’s with all the murderers in Minnesota they had to deal with.
• Biden let in millions of illegals and almost all of them are “mentally insane killers.”
• California is a “disaster state” with a governor that is “doing a bad job.” And if Newsom ever became president, he’d turn the U.S. into Venzuela. (CA has the largest economy in the US and the 4th-largest in the world.)
• Investment in American factories is up 41%, which is a record. Nobody goes 41% up. You go 2% up. 1% up, you go down by 3%. If Kamala got elected, the 41% up would be 41% down.
• He fired 270,000 people from their “government bureaucrat jobs,” and all those people wanted to hate him, but then they all got jobs in factories making three times as much money and now they can all afford houses, so they love him for firing them.
• Nobody has come into the country illegally in 8 months. But before that, EVERYONE came in and they were so bad, they made our Hell’s Angels look like “the sweetest people on earth.” The Hell’s Angels are now considered a “nice, high-quality person.”
• That thing we did to the drug boats—we’re starting to do that on land. Land is much easier than water. Actually, water is incredible. We did it on the water, so nobody’s going into the boat business right now. Drugs coming in by water is down 97% now, which nobody has ever heard of before.
• ICE is going to “make mistakes” and “rough some people up” because the people they’re going after are really rough. But that lady they shot in the face—Trump felt really bad about it. Because he heard her dad was a Trump supporter–a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump. Loved Trump. And it’s terrible— he was told that by a lot of people. They said, “Oh, he he loves you.” He was a- Trump hopes he still feels that way because it’s a hard hard situation. But her father was a tremendous– her parents were tremendous Trump fans. (Seriously. “I feel bad about my goons blasting her face off because her dad loved me.”)
• Ilhan Omar is from Somalia. They say it’s the worst country in the world. If it’s even a country, which he doesn’t think it is. There’s no organization. They don’t have police. (they do) They don’t have a military. (they do) It’s “nothing but people running around killing each other and trying to pirate ships.” Trump can’t stand her.
• He was doing a great campaign against Biden. But then Biden pulled out and Kamala got in, which is just like if Dana White was doing a cage fight and in the middle of the fight, he replaced one fighter with a different fighter. But it didn’t matter.
• He “very powerfully” designated English the official language of the U.S.
• We made the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America because we have “92% of the shoreline.” Mexico “only has 8%.” (The U.S. has about 42%, Mexico about 52%, Cuba 7%)
• He’s trying to end birthright citizenship because it was originally intended for “the children of slaves.”
• He hopes SCOTUS will declare fentanyl a “Weapon of Mass Destruction” because 300,000 died last year, which is like "filling up one of those big football stadium five times.)
• We had a “very good success rate” of blowing boats out of the water—nearly 100%—and then we blew up their docks where they “stored all their drugs” and now we have a great relationship with Venezuela. Which is way better than before when they were sending Tren de Aragua to take over Colorado and chopping off people’s hands if they called the cops.
• You can now take your children, your loved ones, or even your lover to D.C. and walk down the streets and not be murdered any more. Because the military took all the fences down and got rid of the graffiti. And that’s why every town looks better when the military’s in it.
• Elections in Minnesota have always been corrupt. He “really feels” like he won it three times.
• Next month, he’s getting rid of cashless bail. Which reminds him of growing up in Queens and seeing bars on windows. Which reminds him of playing baseball in the park. Which reminds him of his mom. Who told him he could’ve been a professional baseball player. But those bars on the windows were the Democrats’ fault, so they took them down and now everybody lives on the streets.
• California “took down all their mental institutions” and that’s why “everybody lives on the streets” there now.
• Taking out Iran’s nukes was the “most successful anyone’s ever seen,” and CNN is fake news. He doesn’t know where they are, but they’re definitely fake. That’s why we’re respected on the world stage again.
• He ended 8 “unendedable wars” including India-Pakistan, which was “about to go nuclear” in his opinion. So he probably saved 10 million people.
• Ethiopia built the biggest dam in the world to steal all the water in “a little river called the Nile” from Egypt. And we financed it. Maybe it was a Republican president, but he doesn’t think it was. He thinks it was a Democrat president. But Egypt needs a lot of water for things like entertainment and travel and tourism, so Trump got their Nile River water back for them.
• He KNOWS that Norway “calls all the shots” over the Nobel Peace Prize—even if they say “we have nothing to do with it,” they’re totally lying—but he doesn’t care anything about the Peace Prize. Also that “Maria lady” is a very nice lady for giving him her Peace Prize.
• He just created the Board of Peace, which he “hopes will be amazing.”
• Biden completely botched the Afghanistan withdrawal. Which never would’ve happened under Trump because he’s “done more for NATO than maybe anyone.”
• We’re about to start building new battleships that are “100 times more powerful than those battleships in WW2.” And he renamed the Department of Defense the Department of War, “which everybody loves, by the way.”
• He withdrew us from the WHO because we pay way more than China, who has a lot more people. But we have a better military. And it’s being rebuilt because it was “horrible” that Biden gave it all away to the Taliban.
• The Paris Climate Accord is fake.
• He ended “the woke lunacy and restored common sense.”
• He ended the “Green New Scam” (his nickname for the Green New Deal, which isn’t a thing that’s ever existed).
• Tariffs are the greatest thing ever. And he had to invoke the CA emissions waiver to stop the San Francisco communists from regulating the auto industry and destroying automobiles and the entire country.
• Banned transgenders from the military, and gender ideology and Critical Race Theory from schools. But what Harvard’s done is terrible—they’re “very antisemitic.”
• Linda McMahon is doing a fantastic job abolishing the Department of Education. He ended Joe Biden’s Weaponization of Government and removed the “radical left Marxist” prosecutors like Jack Smith, who’s a son of a bitch. And Alvin Bragg is sick. And so is Letitia James. And so is Fannie Willis, but she wants to be called “Fawnie” even though it’s really “Fanny.”
• People accuse Trump of “weaponizing everything,” but he’s never weaponized ANYTHING. They did it to him first. Nobody’s ever gone through what he went through, and now he’s in a beautiful building called “the White House.”
• NPR and PBS were “very unfair” so he “closed them.” Because they were terrible. Just so terrible. BUT he brought back Columbus Day, which made the Italian people very happy. And he also brought back Social Security.
• California is dumb because they didn’t allow water in to put out the LA wildfires. They just dumped all their extra water into the Pacific Ocean.
• He issued new vaccine recommendations, and a new food pyramid, and provided $12 billion in aid for American farmers because they “got screwed by other nations” (aka "Trump’s tariffs). But drug dealers are “way down.”
ANNDDDDD…now I need to go poor bleach into my ears.
The things I do for you people!
That was a very fine compendium of insanity, thank you. I can’t even begin to comment on it, but on this one point, I must say that I just watched the Supreme Court where they had men playing women’s sports and I have to agree that it doesn’t work. So count me in for the $18 trillion for whatever it’s for.
The US government is under the control of a drunken monkey.
You are now insulting drunk monkeys.
Who are busy typing the works of Shakespeare.
Well if I check this link Russian energy exports to the EU have cratered - https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=EU_imports_of_energy_products\_-\_latest_developments
| Time | Oil % | LNG % | Coal % |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 Q1 | 57.1 | 21.2 | 45.5 |
| 2022 Q1 | 37.4 | 18.1 | 45.4 |
| 2023 Q1 | 17.2 | 12.7 | 0 |
| 2024 Q1 | 17.8 | 17.1 | 0 |
| 2025 Q1 | 11.3 | 17.1 | 0 |
| 2025 Q3 | 10 | 12.7 | 0 |
I’ve no doubt some leakage or Russian exports through 3rd party countries but even still.
Moderating:
This is a highly political thread, despite soliciting opinions – which are certainly a part of P&E. I’m moving it.
Please be mindful of our rules, even with the understanding this is a fairly loose thread. Thanks.
It truly is the blurst of times.
That is great to see. Thanks. I was mistaken on this one.
So kavorka is an actual thing. When I first heard the word on the old Seinfeld TV show I thought it was made up. Some rando said that Kramer “has the kavorka”.
And then there’s the down side.