I don’t agree that if Trump had shown some leadership during the pandemic that he would have lost his base. They certainly wouldn’t have voted against him, but they may not have bothered to vote. Whether or not he would have gained enough support for his leadership to offset the loss of voters is something we’ll never know.
This Trump pollster would seem to agree with my opinion:
I read this as “fury mascot” and honestly, it works better.
But did he lose the furry vote?
And (as my grandfather used to say) if your grandmother had wheels, she be a trolley car.
Trump, pre-2015, was known to non-New Yorkers as an equal-opportunity asshole. The adjective nearly always applied to him in news stories was “brash.” His sexism was probably as famous as his racism, for most outside that ~300 mile radius.
We know he was brought up to be a racist by (at least) his father, and that his core beliefs include his own genetic superiority (>>gag<<).
But the thing about Trump, pre-2015, is that no one thought of him as the Standard-Bearer for America’s white supremacists. They just thought of him as either a jerk they admired, or a jerk they despised. The standard-bearer for America’s white supremacists would have been, back then, maybe David Duke or Richard Spencer or one of a number of ‘famous within the w.s. cult’ names–but it wouldn’t have been Trump.
Post June 2015-announcement day, that all changed. Finally, the kitsch artists had someone to paint as their Handsome, Noble Godlike Figure of Worship. (>>gag, retch<<)
(That’s what I was saying in my previous posts, expanded a bit.
(I think we’re all on the same page as far as ‘Trump was always a racist.’)
I’ll agree that’s a fair characterization, and I appreciate the time you took to make the point crystal clear.
I guess what galls me is, Trump seized on the birtherism shit from practically the moment it was advanced by Corsi clear back in 2011. To me, that was just about the most bald racism imaginable. Yet many people in this country just shrugged and said, “Apprentice!”
I’ll join you with the gagging and retching. Everything about Trump makes my skin crawl.
Yes, and it’s interesting to look at contemporary accounts and see how seldom writers identified what Trump was up to as being racist. Birtherism IS racist, of course. Today, fair-minded people see Trump’s birther attacks on Obama as coming from a white-supremacist place of 'no black person can be a legitimate President,’ which is as racist as it gets.
But back in the day Trump seemed to skate by with being considered a sniper or gadfly or sharp-elbowed political commentator or such–you won’t find many 2011+ -era transcripts of CNN or MSNBC reporter-remarks, or mainstream newspaper articles, that called him out.
How has he pissed me off today?
Could we at least get a “No” for one of these?
Today is the first day that i have tried to read the last 700 posts ( which I had not before ).
Today is MLK Day.
I place this link here because… well… where else should it be…?
( Bono, you’re the first… even if you think I’m but the worst… )
The best cat in the world is still dead. Why did that poor sweet cat have to live such a short life while that asshole is still strutting around at his age. Why can’t he just have a stroke or something and die before @Morgyn’s beloved kitty dies as well. Fucking asshole has too much space in my head and I hate him for that too.
So anyhow, hubs’ friend got his first jab today because he’s going to move into an assisted living apartment and I scared him into doing it because those sort of places tend to want their residents vaxxed and he needed to do it before all of the vaccinations are reserved for black people.
When my mom referred to President Obama as a Black (expletive), I interrupted her to have this fun conversation:
Me: Why do you call him Black?
Mom: His father’s Black.
Me: What about his mother; what color is she?
Mom: She’s white.
Me: So, why don’t you Obama white?
Mom: {Stunned into silence}
That’s interesting and too heavy a thought for this early a.m.
All I signed up for was a cup of coffee.
From everything I’ve read Furries are pretty liberal.
It’s pretty clear to me who the real kingmakers are at this point though.
Trump goes against fox news by promoting the vaccine: many of his former supporters turn against him, even some of the CT lunatics now saying that Trump is part of a vaccine CT.
Trump sides with fox by repeating Tucker’s nonsense about how blacks are at the front of the queue for covid therapeutics: crowd cheers like it’s the Drain the Swamp all over again.
FOX has gone from adapting to Trump, to embedding themselves in his government to dictating republicans’ positions. Interesting though that they didn’t broadcast Trump’s rally – I think they are not sure yet who will get their support.
Although also to be fair, it was the obvious thing to do and any other office holder would have done the same thing. The best that can be said for Trump is that he didn’t actively sabotage or screw up the development of the vaccine, which for him is high praise. I’m a bit surprised for example that he didn’t direct all of the funds for vaccine research to one of his cronies.
Virtually any other office holder would not have dismantled the early warning system that Obama had established and would have been better prepared for an impending pandemic.
Yes, it’s an extremely low bar.
It’s an old mindset. In the American South I think they called it the ‘one drop rule’—if you have one drop of African blood, you’re black.
Of course we all have African blood (given that that’s where humans evolved), but that’s not a viewpoint likely to be taken up by racists.
Sorry to hear about your mom. I guess a lot of us have moms (and dads and others) who reason things out that same way. 
To play Devil’s Advocate, Obama’s admirers also played up his African American heritage, as an example of the diversity he represented, the breaking of color barriers at the top of the political heap, and how he overcame diversity to get there. The fact that his mom was White was not frequently mentioned by those who lauded him either. It goes both ways.
And yeah, I always thought it was a bit weird. I was a lot more conservative back then and never voted for him, but even I thought it was cool that we could elect someone who wasn’t your stereotypical White candidate. But everyone (left and right) were pretending as if he wasn’t White at all, when he was just as White as he was Black.
Yeah. I grew up in Dixie, so I’m well aware of the “one drop” rule and the racist nonsense (“The robin doesn’t mate with the blue jay”), not to mention the local love of the extra-biblical interpretation of “the curse of Ham”. Mom died in 2017 and Dad in 2018.