Did I miss anything?
Did he say any non-crazy stuff to anybody?
Did somebody glue his mouth shut?
Or {shudder} is he actually demonstrating self-discipline?
He was busy appointing crazy people to his staff, to make sure he gets every bit of the white male racist vote. Just wait until Stephen Goebbels has an impact.
His surrogate du jour neatly made up for it with the Says Who routine.
Rest assured, like a 2 litre bottle of Pepsi that has been dropped a good distance, but put aside for now:
He Will froth over and it Will be a mess.
Well, shortly before he was to get his first presidential candidate US intelligence briefing (yesterday) he appeared on Fox News and said that he doesn’t trust the US intelligence services as a whole and he wouldn’t use them.
This campaign is over.
I say that not because I’m a believer in polls, nor in Hillary Clinton, nor in future revelations regarding Russians/Manafort/RapeCase2k16/TrumpU, nor because of DJT’s phenomenally bad performance as a general election candidate, but because Donald, finally, has pivoted.
Many of you here reading this were right all along, as was Michael Moore in his piece as well as Sarah Ellison in her piece in Vanity Fair (Is Donald Trump’s Endgame the Launch of Trump News? | Vanity Fair): Trump did this as a media stunt. And it seems to have worked, hasn’t it? 
Donald has pivoted from being a reluctant Presidential candidate to being an enthusiastic media star. He now has an out, an exit strategy, one that will solve a whole metric fuck-ton of problems for him: the amount of money he, personally, has sunk into this candidacy ($43 million piled upon a lifetimes worth of bad calls). The amount of stress caused by running such an inept campaign. The difficulty in trying to layer on an entire career’s worth of job skills and knowledge set within a few month’s period. The emotional toll of all the coverage, especially as it turned negative.
And all this for a job he doesn’t even want in the first place.
Paul Manafort, it turned out, really was not doing his job. His job wasn’t to win Trump the Presidency, his job was to get Donald out of this freaking mess with Donald’s $43 million and little loss of face. Donald Trump doesn’t want the Presidency, Donald Trump wants to be a media sensation so NBC and everyone else can take him seriously. Anything Manafort did to win Trump the Presidency went against everything that Donald Trump wanted – so Donald authorized no TV time, did his Twitter idiocy whenever he wanted, and pretty much tried to make it impossible for Manafort to do the job Manafort thought he was hired to do.
So in comes Steve Bannon. And I can imagine the conversation going something like this:
*“Fuckers. I spent $45 million of my money and they did this to me. Hillary. Obama. The Democrats. Cruz. Manafort. NBC. CNN. Paul Ryan. The GOP. Megyn Kelly. That Muslim bastard and his son. McCain. I mean, the fuckin’ GOP! They robbed me, said I could get my $45 million back. So I took out a loan, a freaking international one and… well, never mind.”
“I get it, Donald baby. I really do. And you are completely right, Donald – you deserve better and they all deserve to pay for how they treated you… “
“…yes…”
“That’s right, baby. And I know how to do it.”
Trump leans forward
“Stop running to be President. Start running to becoming a media mogul. You don’t want that job, anyway - $200,000 a year, no sleep, and you see what these guys look like after 8 years on the job – you want to work that hard so you can look five times as bad at the age of 79? So you can do what when you step out? Build houses? Whine about things from your ranch near Houston?
"Nah, here’s my idea:
“You’re going to lose the election. I don’t have the skills to win you this contest, nobody who does is willing to join you, and it’s probably too late regardless. But what I do have, and what you have, is the skills to turn this election into a pre-media campaign for TrumpBart Media Properties – you are the face, the star, the people bringing in millions, tens of millions every night and week; me and the talented team at Breitbart media can bring the entire media experience to you, promoting your ideas, your voice, your face. We can take on those bastards at FoxNews – you for how they treated you, me for not being conservative enough. We can take on Hillary – the people will love us and in a couple of years, Donald… who knows? NBC will be left gasping in the wind. Obama? Who cares!
"And Manafort? Manafort will be crushed by the DOJ – if you win, you’ll take care of that, if Hillary wins, she will take care of that, if Obama takes over by martial law (and we predict a 60% chance of this occurring, by the way – this is why we need you), he will take care of that.”
“I just… I’m just tired of all this.”
“And you should be. You’re campaigning for the wrong job, baby. Look Donald, you do as I say and you’re going to be bigger than Limbaugh, more influential than NBC, richer than Bloomberg, the eventual owner of the New York Times… you do as they say, become President, and you get, what? An 8-year government pension? At the age of 79? Wow. Congratulations.
"So, yes, I can understand the pressure involved in publicly campaigning for a job that’s not big enough for you. But to energize you, to get you fully in stride, what you should be doing is campaigning to launch your media empire. Fuck the Presidency, it’s small potatoes. And at the end of this you will get back at everybody who has ever been mean to you, and richer than those bastards besides. Far richer. With a voice of your own, built by me and my team at Breitbart, attracting tens of millions every week.
"And here’s the kicker – you know all those goobs who have been sending in $20, $40 dollars every paycheck to support your Presidential campaign, all that money that can’t go back and rightfully repay that loan?”
“What about them?”
“We can spend all their money on advertising pre-selling this. Since the campaign can’t pay you back directly, we can do the following – big buys on Breitbart and our properties, to help fund the network. And, of course, we have to buy on network TV – you still need to reach people. But these network and internet buys are to build your brand – not the GOP’s, not Paul Ryan’s, not all those ‘down ballot’ parasites – you. Donald J Trump.
“In the end you still lose the election – not as bad as if you would have continued their advice, of course, because you were right in how to handle yourself and the GOPdiots couldn’t realize it…”
chuckles “GOPdiots. That’s good.”
"Yeah, you like that? Once we do this, feel free to use it - Paul Ryan would love that, right?
"But, back to topic, come November 9th, we will have invested $300,000,000 of our future customer’s money in 3 months to build your brand. We then take their pre-invested goodwill, put another <LARGE NUMBER> in, grab Hannity and some of your friends, and be Fox News’s Fox News.”
“Fuck me. Fuck Me. FUCK ME, I think this might work!”*
So now he has an end-game. An exit strategy. A way to keep his name front and center and a post-election plan come the inevitable loss.
And I think this will result in a more disciplined, at least media-wise, campaign. They still won’t GOTV or anything, and if I were the GOP I would despair of any potential discretionary dollars I was expecting from the Trump campaign, but you’re going to see even more Donald J. Trump on your screens and you’re going to see fewer crazy things… or at least the crazy things will become more focused.
Regardless, in the end, next year, at this time, expect to see the following:
(c) Copyright 2016 TrumpBart News. All Rights Reserved.
And this is why you haven’t seen craziness. Because Trump now has a campaign organization that is aligned with his original goals.
Puhleeze. It’s only Thursday.
This morning Trump tweeted"They will soon be calling me Mr. Brexit"
The world responds with a collective “HUH?”
Well, just in the past couple of hours, there’s TrumpNakedStatueGate.
Apparently some artist put a naked statue of Donald J… Trumps’s… in Union Square. The parks department removed it, and released a statement about their actions. The statement, in whole, read:
We’ll see if there’s any fallout for this.
What?! How will the SDMB continue obsessing over his zany hijinks?
Oh, right, this thread about his… lack of… hijinks.
Not just there. In multiple other US cities as well. Since there are pictures of a naked Donald Trump statue, I’ll spoiler this to protect the meek. And the prudent. You can’t un-see this.
I also am convinced that Trump doesn’t really want the job, but I’m also convinced that his ego wants him to say that he could have won. Trump’s been completely exposed as a conman developer. But as a showman, he is no con - he is the real deal. This guy knows how to put on a show, and I lean toward the conspiracy angle.
TrumpBart seems like a plausible theory. Bannon and Trump both love right wing conspiracies and they’re well-oiled machines in the art of dispensing unbelievable bullshit, and they have a volatile, hyper-reactive target market to work with. Trump and Bannon are part of the story; the other part of the story is the nut bar audience.
That’s really the biggest part of the story.
One small caveat: the name can only be his, so it’ll have to be Trump TV.
Does this count. An exchange between CNN’s Brianna Keilar asked Michael Cohen, a lawyer for Trump.
*Keilar: "Well let me ask you about this – so you say it’s not a shake up, but you guys are down. And it makes sense that there would … "
Cohen interjects: “Says who?”
Keilar: “Polls. Most of them. All of them.”
Cohen: “Says who?”
Keilar: “Polls. I just told you – I answered your question.”
Cohen: “Which polls?”
Keilar: “All of them.”*
He sat there with a dumb look on his face. It was almost as funny as the Donald tripping.
Though Trump himself was oddly silent, his campaign has been rocked by reports of Russian spying, forcing him to change up the leadership. This was a bad week for Trump, though not as overtly bad as last week. I hope he gets plenty more of these in the coming months.
That is what is amazing. He has a top advisor apparently in bed with the Russkies, he has to shuffle his campaign again, he gives a tepid speech in WI…
And it’s been a BETTER week for him. That’s amazing
I’m bummed that he hasn’t tried to explain the fake doctor note.
His excuses are more entertaining than the original gaffe, lie or fantasy.
And a ‘tip of the hat’ to poster JohnT. Very well done. I think off Broadway would work for that.
As much as my brain and logic tell me it’s over for Trump, something in the recesses of my mind wonders if he hasn’t lowered the bar so much that the public simply stops caring about anything he does. His campaign has undoubtedly desensitized us so much that outrage is almost dead, even among people who would ordinarily be outraged. The law of diminishing returns dictates that in order to inspire his “base” of kooks, he has to deliver increasingly insane statements and tactics. He won’t just double down, he will double down to the 10th power.
Oh, I forgot. Roger Ailes needs a job, right? He handles analog, Bannon handles digital, Trump expresses regrets, and we are off to the races!
© 2016, TrumpBart