Occam’s Razor: Trump is simply fucking stupid.
Trump may be (and indeed obviously is) simply fucking stupid. But he is also simply fucking dishonest. I think his simple fucking dishonesty exceeds his simple fucking stupidity.
However, as John Lennon famously said, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus; we therefore can conclude the Beatles are more bigly than Donald Trump.
Nothing like open pure partisan vindictiveness. Is this supposed to appeal to Trump voters in other states?
Is it purely a coincidence that Putin would have done the same thing?
This is yet another reason to get rid of the electoral college. There are a lot of Trump voters in California. But to a purely transactional “President” like Trump who only cares about re-election, none of them matter because he knows he has no chance of getting California’s electoral votes.
“Open pure partisan vindictiveness” is exactly correct. There’s no other explanation for an action like this. It’s even implicitly stated as such in the linked article (which is a straight news article, not an opinion piece).
Yep. While Clinton won California with a larger percentage of the vote than in almost any other state (only Hawaii was stronger for Clinton), California also had more individual votes for Trump than any other state except Texas and Florida.
The woman who complimented Trump’s smile is voting for Biden:
“Talk less, smile more”. Good advice. Look how well it worked for Aaron Burr.
Did this get noted yet?
I think that one of the things I resent most about Trump is that he is creating mistrust in our government agencies.
Before he was elected, he cast doubt as to the DOL numbers, claiming that they were cooked up, and that the real unemployment was “20, 30, maybe even 40%” (not a direct quote, but I’m pretty sure it was close, and I don’t feel like looking it up.)
Once he got into office, he said, “The old numbers were fake, we have the real numbers now!”
I didn’t much like Bush, but I had no reason to think that the agencies under him were straight up lying to me. Now I see info coming out about anything from nearly any govt agency, and I have to treat it as suspect, as being potentially no better than a Qannon tweet as far as its accuracy.
I think that the damage that Trump has done in the confidence in our governmental institutions will probably persist as long or longer than most of the other damage that he is done.
Now that we’re down to the last 18 days of the campaign…in hindsight, it’s not gone anything like what we thought. We (speaking broadly) expected Trump to produce a constant barrage of Hunter Biden & Burisma. That the Durham report would be the October surprise. Or the Unmasking Report. Or that there would be a vaccine released juuust before Election Day. That we would hear nothing but “Sleepy Joe” and “Doddering Old Senile Joe” every day.
But none of that worked out.
I’m tempted to watch a Trump rally just to hear exactly what the hell kind of case he’s making. As far as I can tell, it’s “reelect me because 2 million people could have died if we did absolutely nothing, instead of next to nothing.”
And in our free press
And in our scientists
And in our intellectual institutions
And in the BLM movement and minorities in general
And in immigrants, legal or otherwise
And in our international allies
This is indeed a puzzle. Which is bigger? It’s an unanswerable question.
This, all this. Now when I hear anything from the CDC or any other gov’t agency I just think yeah right, trump probably had some lackey write that. It’s really upsetting. I’m so tired of all this.
I did say “one of”.
But, to your points there, My trust has not been lost in the rest of your list there. I still have as much trust in those things as I did 4 years ago.
However, My trust in government agencies has been eroded, and it will take a while before I can trust that they have been purged of the bad actors that Trump has installed.
Really, Trump was just following the Republican playbook here.
“The government is terrible, and once we’re in power, we will PROVE it by appointing people to destroy the government.”
Trump (to Iowans!) “The media, the media is talking about some storm in Iowa and I keep waiting for them to report my Nobel Prize nomination and they never do!”
Somehow I always expect that reasonable people would hear that and say “what’s wrong here?” Instead, 5,000 people at a rally will cheer that kind of sophomoric stupidity.
If we ever get out of all this mess, there really needs to be a law that the president, no matter who that is, may not appoint political toadies to the USPS, NOAA, CDC, etc and is not allowed to prevent those agencies from informing the American public as to what the actual science says and slow down mail delivery for political gain etc etc.
We also need much stronger voting rights laws, among other things.
Of course the right wing but job Supreme Court will be there to strike down any law that provides Americans with accurate information and more voting rights time off to vote, more polling places, universal mail-in service)…so we may never get out of this mess.
A brush with death will do that to a man. I wondered from day one how Christie would handle getting COVID. I don’t wish death upon the guy, but if ever there was a come to Jesus moment for him, that should be it.
Christie’s been ratfucked by Trump from the beginning. He joined the Trump train early on presumably thinking he might have a larger role to play, only to be railroaded by Jared Kushner. Why he stuck around I have no idea, but he did. Maybe it was to make sure he survived “bridgegate” without prosecution.
But was it all potentially worth his life? He oughtta be thinking about that.