For the uninitiated, the Mormon church has more than $200 billion in a “rainy day” investment fund they created using the tithes they demand from their members, with an estimated $7 billion more being added to their reserves each year from tithes and donations alone.
At least it’s better than his last term, where his personal doctor said he was the healthiest person ever (using language that clearly came from Trump himself) and the medical records were confiscated by his bodyguard.
Kind of like how he sued his old college to prevent them from sharing his grades - those are definitely the actions of someone who has nothing to hide.
Don’t forget Meta and other social media allowing (even encouraging in Twitter’s case) rampant misinformation to go unchecked, dismantling the very systems they built to combat it during Trump’s first term.
That, and their “1984 was a blueprint”-level invasive user tracking that allowed micro-targeting voters with propaganda to discourage Democratic turnout while inflaming Republican emotions. Russia might have written the articles, but Zuckerberg made sure they reached American eyes.
I didn’t mind it too much (the naming Kamela part - Biden staying in the race for so long with a dead campaign was a travesty). As Vice President she was already voted by the American people to be his successor, so making her the nominee was just asking the public if that was still the case. With so little time before the election, avoiding factionalizing the Democratic party was important - people will eventually get over their candidate losing and vote for the winning nominee, but there wasn’t time for a nomination and for those feelings to fade before November.
I only wish she’d kept the energy and progressive drive of the first few days of her candidacy rather than falling victim to the same advisors that ruined Hillary and Biden’s runs. This election should have been an easy win for even the lamest Democratic candidate, but it seems Democrats learned nothing from Obama’s success (well, unless you count “shut down progressives early before they gain momentum”).
It’s like punching someone in the face but then washing their car and acting like he’s a saint.
So the Biff Tannen comparisons work on more than just Trump.
doctorpyrotechnician
And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don’t respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn’t even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that’s not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.
I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be prosecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don’t know about any of this.
Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, “news” means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They’re told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don’t look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person’s existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It’s a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.
If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what’s actually happening in the world, I think you’d find there’s a great deal of empathy in the populace - it’d be hard to stir up an audience if they didn’t care about something. Sadly, I can’t see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called “woke” and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it’s only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.
Or decades of behavior before that. Fun fact, he was denied a permit to open a casino in Australia due to his clear ties to Russian organized crime* - in 1987.
* For those unfamiliar, Russian organized crime is deeply entrenched with the actual Russian government - hence the term “Mafia State”.
I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.
The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.
None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.
I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.
And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most would should consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.
Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.
To paraphrase an old tweet: “parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts”.
I think it’s more schadenfreude than victim blaming - that and a dash of Leopards Eating My Face. Those type of comments are usually under such stories as MAGA lawyers lining up to handle his nonsense lawsuits in order to ride his coattails to fame and wealth, only to be abandoned when they fail to get results. Victim blaming would imply they’re actually victims instead of grifters stupidly working under another grifter.