I like it @Son_of_a_Rich
I’ll refuse it as change from a purchase. It’s not legal currancy.
Coins: The Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 explicitly states that no coin may bear the image of a living president, or a deceased president within two years of their death
I still haven’t heard how - if all the elections and machines and voting are corrupt in favor of Democrats - all three branches of government are Republican.
I watched the opening remarks, but couldn’t take more than about ten minutes of the utter bullshit. The wife watched the whole thing and the Fox comments after.
I didn’t watch the speech, so I’m going to my usual sources this morning to get an impression of it. The content turns out to be pretty much what everyone expected. The usual lies about election integrity.
I’m concerned and disgusted that he’s got a national public platform to keep pushing these lies, and I’m wondering how this changes things. Despite the fact that to any rational person, he’s an addled, lying tyrant, he seems to keep getting his way destroying every norm and guardrail of American politics, and no one seems to be able to stop him. Will it push the needle toward getting the SAVE America Act passed at all? Or was it merely a display of how increasingly paranoid, desperate, tired, out of touch with ordinary Americans, and impaired he is? In short, was this performance a net positive or negative for him?
Bit of a rhetorical question for this thread, which is clearly in the ‘net negative’ camp. So I’ve been going to various news sources, including foxnews [dot] com, to try to get the general zeitgeist. I hope it’s leaning more toward this ms.now opinion piece…
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier that the speech would be shocking. True, but not in the way she meant. While the president’s goal may have been to destroy faith in our elections, it may have succeeded in destroying whatever faith is in the president.
The NYT pretty much debunked it completely as being a rehash of unsubstantiated nonsense and partial truths.
Just another moldy oldie that feels appropriate here:
“What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence, rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
–Carl Sagan
The argument that has been adopted by Trumpers is that the 2024 election was “too big to rig.” Trump is the most popular President in the nation’s history and conservatives are such an overwhelming majority in the country that corrupt commie Democrats can only win by cheating.
“Its true! Everyone I know voted for Trump!”
And, the Democrats cleverly lost the House and Senate, just to make the rigging seem more realistic, but were unable to rig the presidency due to the Trump wave, I guess.
I didn’t watch it either. My toenails really needed cleaning and I know everyone here will thank me for taking care of that task.
Paul Krugman’s take on it:
Donald Trump surprised me last night. I expected to hear lurid lies about the 2020 election. What he offered instead was mostly dreary innuendo that convinced nobody.
Which is not to say that his speech was free of lies. Indeed, more or less every word he spoke was a lie, including “a,” “and,” and “the.” But the most spectacular lies weren’t about U.S. elections. They were at the beginning, when Trump boasted about America’s place in the world.
Here’s the part that caught my eye:
We had transgender for everybody, men in women’s sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not anymore. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before.
In reality, one of the most spectacular consequences of Trump’s return to power and the mess he has made since has been a collapse of global respect for America. The chart at the top of this post is from Pew’s Global Attitudes Survey, but you don’t need a formal survey to know that the world increasingly despises the U.S. Just travel overseas and talk to people.
And it’s not just public opinion. Governments around the world, very much including nations that used to be our most loyal allies, are scrambling to reduce their dependence, economic and military, on an America that can’t be trusted and has also proved itself far weaker than anyone imagined.
…
This is trump’s legacy and greatest accomplishment: destroying the USA’s standing in the world. WTG, you piece of crap so-called president.
Besides his typical conflation of “respect” with “fear you’ll use deadly brute force to hurt me”, it is also a projection phenomenon that also captures the hearts of his followers: that if we pissed off whole world we must be doing something right. Because every negative perception about us is envy of our greatness by inferiors who don’t know their place.
See for example all the throwing around of the snarl word “Europoors” whenever comparative quality of life in EU vs. US is discussed.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world is right to not trust the USA anymore, because electing trump is now not a one-time occurrence that can be chalked up to ‘oops, we sure learned our lesson there’. Fool us once, shame on trump. Fool us twice, etc…
The really ironic thing about all this is that there was election interference (not tampering), for at least the past 10 years since the 2016 election, in the form of Russian (and possibly Chinese?) propaganda being pushed to social media outlets, especially Facebook. But it was ALL anti-Democrat and / or in favor of trump. Russia and China have to be loving what a bountiful harvest they’ve reaped from sowing the seeds of social media discontent.
I think its watching their reactions in real time triggers his “this isn’t working, time to improvise” instincts.
Just an anecdote, I was at the gym this morning on the treadmill, listening to a podcast. There’s a row of TVs showing various channels, like most gyms. Over 45 minutes, CNN ran a segment about his speech twice, with the chyron mostly saying there was no new information, and there’s never been evidence of widespread vote tampering. CBS This Morning ran a story once, with similar chyrons. Fox News didn’t run a segment about the speech at all over that 45 minutes. Which is likely the longest I’ve ever seen Fox News in the morning not mention Trump. So maybe I just got lucky with my timing, or maybe they’re actually taking the “Nothing to see here” route.
Fox is on the hook for over $700 million for lying about the election. No way they want to get close to this.
I was amused that NBC and ABC didn’t air the speech. And after CBS did, they immediately had somebody on to debunk it.
I watched: my summary - China interfered in the 2020 election to get Biden elected, and the deep state hid that from Trump. At least according to his own CIA, which is putting self serving summaries online at WhiteHouse.gov
Also, elections are very unreliable right now, and we can’t trust the results, unless Trump gets his preferred bill, the SAVE ACT, passed.
So, basically Trump is previewing his argument that the upcoming elections are “rigged” when the Democrats predictably gain ground in Congress.
Nothing newsworthy was said, and nothing new is going to happen. Remember when a president’s address to the nation during prime time was a solemn event?
However, it may speak to Trump’s increasing concern about the disastrous direction of his administration. If the democrats do take the House, then all sorts of activities are fodder for investigations.
His demeanor reminded me of his frequent pontifications while on criminal trial for fraud in New York. He’s scared. He’s a scared, desperate man flailing about in an effort to avoid the consequences of his actions.
Although ABC didn’t air the speech, the ABC affiliate in Connecticut did, as it’s owned by Nexstar Media. So the chyron was labeled News Nation. Presumably other Nexstar stations also aired the speech.
Same in St. Louis, although the station was Fox. At least since Nexstar bought the station (and maybe before) management tended to not use Fox News for their national news source unless it was unavoidable.
Out of curiosity, I went to whitehouse.gov to see what was on the site.
Upon loading, the site has an auto-triggered modal window saying ‘Election integrity documents are available for review’.
So I click the ‘View documents’ button, and I’m taken to an ‘Election Integrity’ page that has what looks like links to 4 articles near the top. I click on ’ China’s Acquisition and Exploitation of American Voter Data’ and nothing seems to happen- it doesn’t take me to that article page. So I try ’ Michigan Voter-Registration Investigation’. Then I see what’s happening-- it’s downloading zip files onto my computer. Very bad user interface web etiquette, to not make it abundantly clear that the link is a download, instead of to a web page or an anchor lower on the existing page.
And hells to the no am I extracting the contents of a zip file from the trump admin, and risk possibly downloading some spyware or something. I immediately nuked those zip files out of existence. Pretty sad when I can’t trust files downloaded from whitehouse.gov. but here we are.
Said by Paul Krugman:
You don’t even have to go overseas. Just come to Canada, where we love the new Trumpist America so much that an unprecedented boycott of US goods is underway. You cannot, for instance, buy any US wine or liquor in Ontario.
The second paragraph is absolutely correct. The Orange Doofus was infuriated when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke at the last Davos conference and made the case for reducing dependence on the US and forming new trade relationships around the world.
Here is CNN’s take on what those files do, and do not, contain: What Trump’s newly declassified documents do – and don’t – tell us about threats to US elections | CNN Politics
To paraphrase Shakespeare, it is Much Ado About Old Bullshit.
I couldn’t bear to watch a second of this speech. Did he say China normally or he has gone back to calling it GYNA?