I may be a little late to the “I’ve always known what trump was” party, but count me as another who’s been aware of what a colossal asshole and terrible businessman he was since the Spy magazine “short-fingered vulgarian” days.
I remember him being in the news for one of the times he went bankrupt in the late 80s, early 90s, and there was “how the mighty have fallen” talk that he was likely ruined and could not come back from his latest financial collapse. But the banks propped him up with loans or loan extensions or whatever, and he kept right on going. I remember a phrase often used in relation to him (it may have even been coined specifically for him): “if you owe the bank ten thousand dollars and can’t pay it, you have a big problem. If you owe the bank ten million dollars and can’t pay it, the bank has a big problem”.
I remember being amazed even then how he had some amazing knack for evading all responsibility and consequences for his actions. I’d swear he must have made a literal deal with the devil, except I can’t imagine that his black, shriveled little soul could be worth all that much.
As a result, several Trump-branded projects from 1998 onward received significant financing from sources with ties to Russia, most notably the Bayrock Group, a real estate company headquartered in Trump Tower and founded by the Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official Tevfik Arif, and Deutsche Bank, one of the few major financial institutions to still lend to Trump and which paid $630 million in penalties in 2017 for involvement in a $10 billion Russian money laundering scheme.
Yeah, I believe by then American banks had finally wised up and would no longer loan him a penny, so that’s when he turned to Russia for his financing needs.
So a friend pointed me to the r/conservative subreddit.
It’s heavily moderated, and you have to prove your conservative credentials to be allowed posting (or something; you need to have flair- don’t ask me how it works).
It’s in full civil war between those who would say “thank you” if Trump took a shit on their dining room table, and those more traditional conservatives who don’t like his foreign policy and how he’s ignoring constitutional safeguards.
That’s what still gets me. I decided Trump was unfit for office just by listening to him speak. Any reasonable person who listens to Trump pontificate for a few minutes ought to know he’s a liar who doesn’t know shit about shit. You don’t even have to do any research on him.
Virginia is an early canary in the coal mine. President Musk’s dismantling of the federal government has created huge unemployment in Northern Virginia. Northern Virginia taxes pay for a huge chunk of Virginia’s budget. Also unemployed Northern Virginians suddenly don’t have money to travel to rural Virginia or West Virginia for vacations so Trump voters in those communities are going to find out sooner, rather than later, how tasty their faces are.
So did I, and my family tells me they have only gotten worse since 19 mumble whatever. I also graduated from NC State, then left town and have rarely been back.
Exactly. Trump is a moron. But if you’re also a moron, maybe you can’t tell. And, not recognizing it, he appeals to you. Trump’s one proficiency is as a con man and he is skilled at that. (I do know Trump supporters that know Trump’s a moron, but they support him for tax cuts, deregulation, charter school vouchers, etc…)
Personally, I’ve been aware of what a crappy businessman Trump was since the early/mid '80s when I played high school football and watched him drive the USFL into folding. My teen-aged self saw him more clearly then than many adults do today and this was before Trump mentally declined to where he’s been the last several years. At least in the '80s, Trump could hold a thought and articulate it somewhat.
I’m in the party as well, and I don’t watch reality TV or had never seen the apprentice, but I know back we all assumed his first run for the presidency was just a joke I was aware that he was a fraud and known for cheating working people he owed money to. The folks in NYC talked about it somewhere I was exposed to it.
please feel free to share, since you are reading there anyway. Take one for the team!
Here are a couple. I don’t like Reddit in part because it doesn’t organize the posts well, and I hate the way the comments nest. So you sometimes have to spend a fair bit of effort to find what you want
The second one turns into a lot of debate about what a conservative is, whether you can be a conservative and not like Trump, whether someone who disagrees with anything at all done by Trump is really a leftist, etc.
It’s because morons can’t understand complicated explanations, but they can understand the stupid explanations another moron can come up with.
“Tariffs are a complicated issue involving protecting domestic producers, while not unduly driving up costs for domestic consumers, but can also involve international relationships, as one country tries to establish an advantage over another country…blah blah blah” they stopped listening 16 syllables ago. Versus, “China pays the tariffs! Everybody wins!”
I’ve never watched the Apprentice. Because I was sure of what a large amount of horseshit it would be.
So, if that ‘show’ is what brought people to believe that DJT is some sort of great business man, after failure, and failure and failure. I blame the American public for not having a freaking clue.
AND, the reason that Trump is POTUS is because NBC canceled his show. That’s it. He would have never ran if he still had his adoring morons watching him every week.
I do not choose to dwell on things past, I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!
Furthermore, Virginia holds elections for Governor and the House of Delegates this year. Northern VA was already pretty blue, but I expect it’s gotten a whole lot bluer in the last month. I don’t think the Reps have any chance at the Governor. The Ds already have a 2 seat majority in the HoD; I don’t know about their prospects to expand that, but it’s unlikely they’ll lose anything.