Uhhh…I dunno, everything?
Well, there’s the one where he threatened to unleash the military, the police and biker gangs on his political opponents. The one where he made weird noises and claims about wind energy including that the noise causes cancer. The video of him in a meeting where he said “oranges” instead of “origins” three times. In the same meeting he said “we have to get rid of judges” and said his father was born in Germany. And on and on.
Plus the usual ongoing bizarre claims on needing to build the wall, its cost, its effects, and so on.
SHS rarely gives press briefings anymore because the WHPC keeps asking her for cites on all the odd claims POTUS makes.
If you haven’t heard about the incredible number of out-there things Trump has said recently (even more than the usual background number), you’re not paying attention at all.
When Trump leaves office, whether at the end of this term or the next, and the circle of political life goes on as always, there are going to be a lot of Lefties who will feel mercilessly cockteased. You have yourselves worked up for Götterdämmerung with all these increasingly bizarre hypotheticals and the reality is that the buffoon will just retreat to private life and make millions on the lecture circuit.
While I agree that Trump views his followers as pawns, I think that he does needs them on some visceral level. Holding campaign-style rallies during one’s presidency is not normal for a president. Trump clearly loves the adulation he receives during his rallies, where he can ramble on to a rapt audience hanging on his every word, and I see them as something of a comfort blanket to him.
Googling on the subject, others have also made the comparison between Trump and Jim Jones.
Here’s a piece dating from before Trump’s election victory by someone who has been researching the Peoples Temple for about 10 years. From the piece:
Here’s an article with quotes from Jim Jones’ own son Stephan Jones, who only survived the Jonestown Massacre because he was away from the commune that day at a basketball game. From the article:
This probably should be in its own thread, or a different, thread but I’m only on my second cuppa joe.
I’m a Leftie. I want universal, single-payer health care now. I want affordable education now. I want taxes for corporations and the wealthy to go up now so that they will have an incentive to invest their profits in the economy instead of hoarding it like Smaug – and provide workers with a living wage so that the workers can afford to buy things they are making, which will stimulate the economy. But I’m also a realist. Remember how we complained that Republicans are The Party of ‘No’, and how we complained that their idea of compromise is ‘We want everything we want, and we’re not giving an inch’? We do the same thing. We want the things I mentioned (among others), and many of us are not willing to bend. Many of us want a Star Trek transporter to get from Point A to Point Z, when it’s more practical to walk from Point A to Point B, thence to Point C and so on. It’s frustrating that The United States of America can’t have the things that every other Western country does, but we can’t get there instantly. Slow and steady progress toward the goals is something we can do. Leaping the Snake River Canyon isn’t going to work. We need to accept that we can’t have everything we want now, and that we need to progress methodically. ‘Slowly but surely wins the race.’
As for Crazy Uncle Don, I wish him a very long life… in an orange jumpsuit. But it’s not going to happen. He’s not going to be impeached, and he’s not going to be removed from office despite his obvious mental disabilities. He’s not going to spend any time in prison after he’s out of office. He’s going to go on the talk show circuit and rake in millions of dollars, he’s going to face fines and penalties for his crimes, and he’s going to spend his time fighting the courts until he dies. We need to forget vengeance, and just let the legal process grind him up for us – and get on with the business of progressing toward a better America.
That would not be ideal but I could live with it.
This not so much. Maybe if he gets heckled.
I think I see what he was trying to say, just very very inarticulately.* Maybe not deranged so much as a severe case of not being able to find the right words.
*rough translation: “If there was a well publicized wall, fewer illegal immigrants would try to make the trip, which they currently don’t realize how difficult and dangerous it is.”
And “truckers with clearance to enter from Mexico are sometimes ambushed by criminals who steal the trucks so they can get past the border.”
Trump will not become President For Life nor will he be dragged away kicking and screaming in cuffs. What I do see possibly happening however is his not following the example of other POTUS and getting out of the way, instead insisting upon leaving office on remaining Head of the MAGA Party, holding rallies and whipping up the base and preventing any classic Movement Conservative attempt at retaking the GOP on the rebound, but rather insisting that the GOP platform be whatever he spits out on a given morning and woe to whoever fails to follow every single time.
Here’s a Psychology Today article from 2012, well before Trump was running for president, by Joe Navarro, a 25-year veteran of the FBI, entitled “Dangerous Cult Leaders”. Here’s a quote from it:
The article has a list, compiled by Navarro from his studies, of fifty typical traits of pathological cult leaders. By my counting, Trump displays around forty-five of the fifty traits.
I can imagine in the final days, Trump/Fox News will begin a campaign distributing MAGA Kool Aid to the faithful. The pitch will be “Are you going to let these dirty Mexican invaders rape you and your family? It is much better to drink the MAGA Kool Aid and we can all go to MAGA Heaven together! We can rest in eternal peace together behind the beautiful Golden Walls of MAGA Heaven safe from the threat of vicious Mexicans and Muslims. Amen!”
I’ve been listening to that nonsense since his name first popped up as a candidate-The Republicans aren’t going to do jack shit.
When Trump claimed the other day that he didn’t know what Wikileaks was, I decided that the dementia had advanced further than any (well, most) of us realized. There was no reason, not even a Trumpian reason, to lie about that. I assume that his memory is simply deteriorating.
I have no confidence that the Republican party will not follow him into the abyss. Their degradation knows no limits.
^^I’ve listened to nonsense like that.
The accusation that he hits 45 out of 50 of the traits of a cult leader sounded implausible to me. So I clicked the link.
Yup, that list of 50 traits is pretty accurate. And while Trump hasn’t physically isolated his followers, he has helped psychologically isolate them by teaching them to reject all media except propaganda that makes him look good.
So you are an optimist?
People are reading too much into the “Trump cult.” Trump is popular with Republicans for the time being only because he is a sitting incumbent GOP president. The moment he leaves the White House, he becomes instantly dispensable. There are hundreds of demagogues who are better-looking, have a better-sounding voice, smarter, more articulate and eloquent, savvier, and better at playing the game than him. Republicans won’t hesitate to throw Trump under the bus the moment they have no need for him - he’s already said or done things that are objectionable to them, such as saying “Confiscate guns now, due process later” (something that Obama would have been fried for saying), etc. There are many Republicans and Trumpers who are already throwing George W. Bush under the bus, even though they were fiery supporters of Bush a decade and a half ago.
The GOP will discard and move on from Trump in an instant once he’s no longer POTUS, like an airline passenger at TSA screening who finds that their nail clipper isn’t allowed in their carry-on.
I agree with this.
But what’s to say he won’t distribute the kool-aid while he’s still president? Hmmm?
Of course the GOP will, but there are tons of Trump-lovers who aren’t GOP but vote for them as long as Trump tells them to. They believe what Trump tells them to believe. And right now, according to the numbers as I understand them, the GOP has no chance at all to win without them.
This. Let’s not pretend that the GOP will revert back once Trump is gone. They now know how far they can go and what they can get away with.
The sorts of people who will support and/or enable such authoritarian behaviour as Trumps will still be around. The GOP needs to be more than defeated in an election, they need to be shunned. They need to be rendered completely irrelevant to American politics.