Lots of body bags from Venezuela will be a bad look for a campaign. The thought that this mental deficient could send U.S. troops to their death needlessly, at the behest of oil companies, infuriates me.
Snopes seems to be going out of their way in the linked article to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. One of the photos literally shows Trump coloring in one of the stripes of the U.S. flag with a blue marker in his hand. (And this was before AI became ubiquitous.)
Snopes take on this was as follows:
Yet, in another photo that was posted on Twitter by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, the president was shown with a blue marker on the table before him, along with a flag template in which the fourth stripe had been colored in blue.
Snopes goes on to say:
Yeah right. 
Like Trump has ever attempted to indulge or amuse anyone else in his life. And the picture shows him intently coloring in the stripe, not looking at anyone.
Playing the ump.
And even if Snopes was, seven years ago, implausibly going out of their way as you say, the still-alive minority of those who had dementia in 2018 do not talk, or post, as Trump does today.
He purposefully amuses his supporters at almost every rally.
And Trump indulges Vladamir Putin whenever he talks to him.
I do not mean to single anyone out, but posters here sometimes go to one of two extremes. One is to say Trump is a uniquely charismatic master of demagoguery without whom MAGA is nothing. The other is to say he is a senile idiot. The truth is in-between.
The truth is both. Trump is basically the evil version of Chauncey Gardener from Being There - he’s ignorant and simpleminded but serves as a blank screen for his followers to project their own narratives about him - as a “strong man”, a “great patriot”, a “man of faith” etc. What people see in him is rarely something that is really there.
I think it’s a stretch to say that he is purposefully amusing anyone other than himself at his rallies. He rambles, he digresses, he lurches from subject to subject. The closest he comes to purposefully doing anything is repeating anything that gets a positive reaction from the crowd.
I don’t actually think Trump is senile. I think he is lazy and incurious. In the case of the flag-coloring, I think he knows the American flag has the colors red, white, and blue, but was not too concerned which color goes where—along with possibly conflating the U.S. flag with red and white stripes with the “Blue Lives Matter” version.
Yes, this. For his followers he’s “all things for all people” because they ignore what he actually says and just project their fantasies onto him.
Thus the infamous “face eating leopards” effect; all these people who voted for someone who was obviously going to harm them, but are caught by surprise when it happens because they never listened to the actual words. Just their own fantasy.
Yes, it would be. That is why there must be no cameras allowed.
What, can you think of another way to prevent those body bags from being seen?
I’m pretty much the opposite. The blatant criminality of the Trump administration fills me with dread. I keep thinking, “how can these guys afford to surrender the power that protects actions that would put anyone else in prison?”
So Diaper Don not participating much in the success of his successor means to me that he’s simply not interested in something that will have no relationship to reality in January 2029.
This is what should keep us all up at night. The Trump administration is chock full of people who cannot lose power in 2029, as in, they will suffer life-changing and possibly life-ending consequences if they leave office. And they have considerable power to achieve their ends.
I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that they’ll succeed. But they will pull every lever they can get their greasy hands on, and probably invent a few new ones along the way.
Whoa. I wonder just how much spit wound up in his enchiladas.
I wonder what-all was in the crema.
I keep coming back to this, the next few years are going to be… interesting, in the (fake, I know) Chinese Saying sense…
I didn’t think of that. But I bet none. These are good guys. They are human though, that’s something MAGA’s don’t understand.
This is a crucial concern for all of us. They CAN’T lose—and they never had any regard for actual laws to begin with. So their potential range of actions is alarmingly large.
To accomplish this goal of forever power, they are likely looking to the lessons of the past. We know that several of them have an admiration for Nazism. One specific lesson of that group of 1930s power-seekers that the current ones may be operating on: The burning of the Reichstag. And this seems non-impossibly related to Donald’s recent remarks about his “ballroom”:
I agree. This is not something discussed in the public sphere at all, that I’m aware of: “we need to stop having Inaugurations at the Capitol.” (Even worried-about-bullets Donald conceded that his 1/20/25 ceremony could be at the Capitol, albeit indoors.)
If “something” happened to the Capitol, something big, then Donald could achieve his dearest wish: martial law in perpetuity. And if the “something” were timed right, he could rid himself of quite a few annoying opponents.
His ‘hold Inaugurations in the ballroom’ comments came out of left field for most of us. But maybe they are rooted in more wide-ranging speculative plans being tossed around in the inner circle.
It’s my understanding that food sabotage by angry staff isn’t that rare, which is one reason I avoid restaurants. Spit in the enchiladas isn’t as disgusting as some other things I’ve heard of, like scrubbing out toilets with steaks.
Maybe he was inspired by Zohran Mamdani’s decision to be sworn in as New York’s mayor in a private ceremony at an abandoned subway station.
Trump came close to winning Latino vote in '24
I know a Salvadoran immigrant, who is a Mexican restaurant part-owner, and voted for Trump.
Someone might suggest that the owner isn’t the one spitting. But I’m on the trusting side here. And does the cook/chef even know who in the party ordered what, let along whether they share?
I heard about this just an hour or so ago—my first thought was ‘he’s worried about getting shot.’ I guess the ostensible reason for that location is that it (supposedly) symbolizes the priority ZM will put on “workers’ issues” (such as transportation).
The Trump ‘ballroom’ idea does seem to me to be more about either rendering Congress semi-officially irrelevant, or (if evil plans are afoot) a necessity if the Capitol is simply unavailable.
Like the arch, it’s about creating a legacy. This is why so many Democrats will want the ballroom and arch torn down.