Trump 2024 Campaign - The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly.

[YellowKing]

And it drives me to the point of outright rage that Biden was crucified for WEEKS over his low-energy but completely rational debate, while they are doing next to nothing to cover Trump's obvious mental breakdown.

[LordMortis]

[LawBeefaroni]

DJT shares were up like 10%. Then Trump did the Bloomberg/Econ Club interview and they plunged. Halted to the downside several times. Ended up down about 10%. A 20% swing, give or take. $1B or so in market cap for "the weave".

[LordMortis]

DJT shares were up like 10%. Then Trump did the Bloomberg/Econ Club interview and they plunged. Halted to the downside several times. Ended up down about 10%. A 20% swing, give or take. $1B or so in market cap for "the weave".

We called it sweaving when noticeably drunk divers change lanes in traffic and you back the fuck off or if you see it in your rear-view, you speed the fuck up.

[Alefroth]

Yeah, I checked earlier this morning at it was inexplicably at $33.

[Blackhawk]

I should market a shirt:

"It's not dementia, it's the weave!"

[Holman]

Trump also doubled down on tariffs in that economic interview. When asked whether other countries would impose tariffs on US goods and start a trade war, Trump just said No, they'll just build factories in the US to avoid the tariff.

He has also repeatedly claimed that the US was at its wealthiest in the 1890s when we had high tariffs. This is news to historians, who point out that the US was in an economic depression in the mid-1890s.

[Max Peck]

Here is the Bloomberg interview if you want to see Trump at his finest. Just don't read the comments or the live chat...

https://www.youtube.com/live/GX_IVnmoHUE?t=4705

The embed isn't working, probably because Youtube is still treating it like a livestream, so I've just posted it as a bare URL with a timestamp for when the interview portion of the broadcast began.

[Unagi]

I used to ride my bike late at night, at like 15 or so - with that song on my Walkman, taped off the radio.

[Smoove_B]

Rolling Stone has some thoughts:

Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait did not take it easy on Trump, and it quickly became clear that the former president has no conception of the mechanics of or the potential ramifications of the economic platform he’s running on. Bluntly, the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.

Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews.

Micklethwait didn’t weave along with Trump, however, repeatedly working to bring him back on topic and answer the actual questions. The grilling exposed Trump’s total cluelessness with regard to his own economic policy, and led Trump to attack Micklethwait as biased.

They then go on to detail the exchanges shared in the social media videos a few posts above (for those that aren't interested in clicking through).

[Holman]

If you can stand to watch the whole *39 minutes* of Trump swaying and listening to music while mugging his face at his "town hall," you should do so.

But this 40-second clip really captures Kristi Noem (Gov-DogMurder) desperately trying to play along and pretend it's normal when she clearly has no idea what is happening.

[hepcat]

He loves adoration more than anything else in this world.

If you want even more evidence of just how much of a goddamn idiot the fat ass orange doofus is, this piece from Rolling Stone on his sit down with Bloomberg is a good one.

[Smoove_B]

Enjoy your PEPPER BAR BAM

[hepcat]

You gotta sneak it up on me months from now as I’ll be randomly yelling that out again for at least the next 90 days.

[LawBeefaroni]

If you can stand to watch the whole *39 minutes* of Trump swaying and listening to music while mugging his face at his "town hall," you should do so.

But this 40-second clip really captures Kristi Noem (Gov-DogMurder) desperately trying to play along and pretend it's normal when she clearly has no idea what is happening.

Trump is unraveling in front of our eyes. He’s going to lose

There is a mich better than zero chance that he isn't going to lose. That's the scary thing. Not his DMT induced timeslip or whatever that was.

I still still think he was begging for someone to take a shot.

[Blackhawk]

Madness, cruelty, paranoia, megalomania, narcissism...

Caligula?

[baelthazar]

Music often becomes a refuge when people have dementia. My grandmother could do the same thing when she was suffering from it.

As to "He is going to lose" - Five Thirty Eight (my go to for polling analysis) still has the race at a near 50-50 split. How that can be possible is beyond me, but nothing will shake Trump's base away from him. My source: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/20 ... id=rrpromo

[LordMortis]

I don't recall seeing anything like this three weeks before an election.

Trump is unraveling in front of our eyes. He’s going to win

But I did my part. Now I just hope against hope that I'm just Smooving.

[Grifman]

Historian Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

October 15, 2024 (Tuesday)

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.

Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.

When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”

The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.

The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."

As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.

Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”

And therein lies the rub.

Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”

Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.

It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.

Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.

Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.

In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.

Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.

Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“

That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.

“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”

Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”

[LordMortis]

Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.

Noooooooo. That can't be.

[YellowKing]

I think a Vance presidency has been the plan all along.

[LordMortis]

By the PayPal Mafia and company? Definitely. He's their puppet. By MAGA, I don't think so. I think that's why Vance is trying to hide behind xenophobia, misogyny, and zealotry. He's trying to assimilate.

:Pic of Steve Buscemi saying hello my fellow MAGA:

[LawBeefaroni]

Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.

Absolute must listen:

[Kraken]

I wish every voter could be compelled to read HCR's columns for one week.

I think a Vance presidency has been the plan all along.

One conspiracy theory says that trump's new cabinet will promptly use the 25th to remove him in favor of Vance. He's obviously and genuinely mentally unfit, after all. How trump's hand-picked cabinet can be trusted to do that when we don't even know who they are is unclear.

[Blackhawk]

Historian Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

If you're going to quote entire articles instead of just offering important sections, at least give the link for proper attribution and references. Here.

[Grifman]

Historian Heather Cox Richardson yesterday:

If you're going to quote entire articles instead of just offering important sections, at least give the link for proper attribution and references. Here.

The problem is that I did not get it from that link or I would have included it. I got it from her Facebook page through the app, and I did not want to post a link to the crap that is FB and everyone may not be on FB. So that’s why I posted it that way.

But who made you the forum policeman? I don’t recall any rules such as this here. Chill out and don’t judge situations of which you are unaware. If you want to send me a PM with a suggestion, fine, that would be the way to handle it, IMO. But I don’t need this from you. Sorry, we get along, but your post just ticked me off.

[ImLawBoy]

We've long encouraged community policing rather than heavy-handed moderation, and we've also long encouraged posting excerpts rather than entire articles. While BH's post could have been more tactful, I tend to agree with its message.

Not trying to make this into a bigger issue than it is, but just adding some context.

[Smoove_B]

I don’t recall any rules such as this here.

More like a norm that has been encouraged for 10+ years. Similar to how people have asked that links to X/Twitter include text. Not only to help people that aren't going to click through but also as a way to make sure the information doesn't disappear (leaving a blank post) if the X/Twitter post is deleted. I'm not sure I get the shame/rage here, but I do know this (linking to source) has been an ongoing topic for quite some time.

Anyway, back on topic and Trump declaring himself the Father of IVF:

It’s unclear what precisely the former president meant when he made the comment at a Fox News town hall in battleground Georgia that was billed as focusing on women’s issues and had an all-female audience. But he has repeatedly returned to the issue – talking up his support for IVF – on the campaign trail, where he has given a long series of confusing or contradictory answers about his stance on abortion.

“We really are the party for IVF,” Trump told moderator and Fox News host Harris Faulkner on “The Faulkner Focus.” “We want fertilization, and it’s all the way, and the Democrats tried to attack us on it, and we’re out there on IVF, even more than them. So, we’re totally in favor.”

[Alefroth]

I wish every voter could be compelled to read HCR's columns for one week.

I think a Vance presidency has been the plan all along.

One conspiracy theory says that trump's new cabinet will promptly use the 25th to remove him in favor of Vance. He's obviously and genuinely mentally unfit, after all. How trump's hand-picked cabinet can be trusted to do that when we don't even know who they are is unclear.

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

[Smoove_B]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

It's a Constitutional grey area so we can only hope the Supreme Court will guide us correctly when the time comes.

(pauses for laughter)

You can read more here

[Alefroth]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

[Smoove_B]

It goes back to whether or not you believe Trump was the end game -or- a means to the end (Project 2025). I know his whole cult thing is popular and people believe it's going to die when he shuffles off this mortal coil. I think that's true for some of them, but I honestly believe there's a stronger movement to consolidate and seize absolute power among GOP members than to worship Donny Two-Tone. He helped them get to this point, mainly by giving them permission to act a certain way as elected officials. They can't ape his mannerisms or even come close to tapping into his charisma. But they sure as hell can enact the hateful laws and programs he bloviates about.

[LordMortis]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

I can see how his Heritage Foundation and Paypal Mafia cabinet would betray him the very moment they think can succeed. They can't succeed at this point. Either MAGA would eat them alive or the riots would start. I could more easily see them playing hardball in an attempt to get him to step down after being elected for promises of???? What the hardball and promises would be beyond a lifetime stay of out jail free for him and his brood, I have no idea. That alone would not be enough.

I honestly believe there's a stronger movement to consolidate and seize absolute power among GOP members silicon valley "founder" mega rich tech bros than to worship Donny Two-Tone.

[Max Peck]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

Given how lazy Trump is, who can say who will actually be hand-picking the cabinet. Vance can volunteer to handle that tedious busywork while Trump takes a well-earned golfing vacation at Bedminster.

[Alefroth]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

I can see how his Heritage Foundation and Paypal Mafia cabinet would betray him the very moment they think can succeed.

Do you think he'll pick a HF or PP Mafia cabinet? I can't see him picking anyone other than someone he can expect absolute loyalty from.

[Alefroth]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

Given how lazy Trump is, who can say who will actually be hand-picking the cabinet. Vance can volunteer to handle that tedious busywork while Trump takes a well-earned golfing vacation at Bedminster.

Maybe. I think he's well aware of the possibility and will be very involved though.

[Kurth]

That idea is going like wildfire on the social medias. I keep questioning how it will work and never get a solid answer.

I believe normally Congress would need to declare the President unfit for office by a 2/3rd majority vote. However, Section 4 of the 25th Amendment allows the Vice President and the Cabinet to jointly agree the President is unfit for office.

That's my point. I don't see how 2/3rds of Congress or Trump's hand-picked cabinet would betray him.

I can see how his Heritage Foundation and Paypal Mafia cabinet would betray him the very moment they think can succeed.

Do you think he'll pick a HF or PP Mafia cabinet? I can't see him picking anyone other than someone he can expect absolute loyalty from.

Of course he’d only going to pick a cabinet 100% loyal to him (not the country or the Constitution, mind you). That’s been his MO forever.

It’s why this talk of Vance taking over is lunacy. Vance isn’t using Trump (although that idiot probably thinks he is); it’s the other way around!

[LordMortis]

Do you think he'll pick a HF or PP Mafia cabinet? I can't see him picking anyone other than someone he can expect absolute loyalty from.

He's already promised Musk a position "as efficiency czar" and has been choosing from the HF and PP field as his advisors in a growing capacity since 2016. He is either getting loyalty or behind the scenes kickbacks.

[Alefroth]

He's said Musk wouldn't be an actual secretary though. Just some unelected, un-appointed cost cutting czar.

[Daehawk]

Bah all you are wrong. He aint even getting in there again. Harris is going to run him to ground. Then we can tar feather him.