6813 replies to this topic

[andydp]

Random musing:

President Trump is scheduled to speak at the CPAC conference Feb 25 -28 in Orlando.

Tentative schedule of events:

President is introduced with heraldry trumpets, strobe lights and Vestal Virgins scattering rose petals in his path.

He then gathers up about ten US Flags and gives them a hump hug.

Walks to the podium for a 15 minute ovation led by screaming fainting women, wearing "you can grab this" tee shirts.

Begins a speech that includes,

Enter your sequitur here:

[LFC]

Mr. MyPillow gets his just reward for his Trumpsucking, a $1.3B lawsuit from Dominion.

Quote

Dominion Voting Systems is suing Mike Lindell—the Trump loyalist pillow salesman who repeatedly spouted absurd election conspiracy theories—for damages of $1.3 billion, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Daily Beast broke the news of Dominion’s imminent legal action last week. In its complaint, Dominion, one of the biggest makers of voting machines in the United States, alleges that Lindell repeatedly made false claims about the integrity of Dominion’s voting machines and said the company had somehow helped to steal the election from Donald Trump. “[Lindell] is well aware of the independent audits and paper ballot recounts conclusively disproving the Big Lie,” the complaint states. “But Lindell… sells the lie to this day because the lie sells pillows.” The suit also names Lindell’s company, MyPillow Inc., as a defendant. Lindell said he’s still investigating Dominion, and stands by his claims. Dominion is taking similar action against Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

[LFC]

LFC, on 22 February 2021 - 10:19 AM, said:

Mr. MyPillow gets his just reward for his Trumpsucking, a $1.3B lawsuit from Dominion.

MyPillow Boy is whining that people don't like buying things from traitors who support domestic terrorism.

Quote

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell doesn’t seem too keen on his portrayal in a recent lawsuit as an election falsehoods profiteer, so he wants to make sure Americans know that he expects to lose $65 million in revenue this year, after a host of retailers dropped products from stores over election conspiracy theories he parroted.

During an interview with Insider published Monday, Lindell said that a decision by well-known retailers including Kohl’s and Bed Bath & Beyond to stop carrying his products over his false election claims would hurt his pockets.

“Those stores combined did $65 million in business last year,” Lindell said. “And now I won’t have them this year, or any year. They’re done.”

The claimed losses come after the CEO and his company were sued for $1.3 billion in damages by Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology company that has been at the center of debunked conspiracy theories about election fraud.

[LFC]

Romney believes that Trump is the Republican front runner for 2024. He's right, of course, because they ARE the party of Trump.

Quote

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) predicted on Tuesday that ex-President Donald Trump, impeached last month for inciting the assault on the Capitol last month, would likely be the GOP’s contender for the presidency again if he were to launch a bid in 2024.

During a discussion at the DealBook DC Policy Project, Romney said that while he didn’t know whether Trump was indeed planning to run again, he was “pretty sure” the twice-impeached former president would win the nomination if he did.

“I look at the polls, and the polls show that among the names being floated as potential contenders in 2024, if you put President Trump in there among Republicans, he wins in a landslide,” the Utah senator said, also noting that Trump “has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party.”

[AnBr]

Quote

Trump “has by far the largest voice and a big impact in my party.”

He doesn't get it. It is no longer "his party."

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 24 February 2021 - 08:45 AM, said:

Romney believes that Trump is the Republican front runner for 2024. He's right, of course, because they ARE the party of Trump.

Romney is a voice in the wilderness. It makes me look back at his presidential run and wonder if he was the same man then that he is now. Was he really as "severely conservative" as he claimed to be or was that a posture that was required of him to gain big donor support? Not that he's my hero or anything. He still strikes me as an out of touch rich and isolated man with a certain sense of oblige noblesse. I just wonder how much was him and how much was campaign packaging.

[pnwguy]

golden_valley, on 24 February 2021 - 12:03 PM, said:

Romney is a voice in the wilderness. It makes me look back at his presidential run and wonder how if was the same man then that he is now. Was he really as "severely conservative" as he claimed to be or was that a posture that was required of him to gain big donor support? Not that he's my hero or anything. He still strikes me as an out of touch rich and isolated man with a certain sense of oblige noblesse. I just wonder how much was him and how much was campaign packaging.

I think he was "conservative" in the aspect of not doing anything to get in the way of rich people getting richer. That certainly animates the donor base. But in terms of human decency, I think his adherence to the Mormon ethic probably puts him at odds with the MAGAt base that wants to isolate and punish The Other. In particular terms of religious bigotry, Mormons have been subject to it for most of their existence, and I think it makes them more tolerant, and less fearful, of those with other religious practices. I don't see them getting crazy fearful about Muslims, for example.

[andydp]

I just came across this beauty from Aristotle. Too bad I didn't see it when the "previous guy" was president.

Worthless persons appointed to have supreme control of weighty affairs do a lot of damage.

Aristotle

[golden_valley]

Never mind...it's posted in the MAGA thread. Look for the golden statue of Trump. You can't miss it!

[LFC]

Marco Rubio's knob gobbling abilities may not be at Lindsey level (but the whose are?) but it's impressive nonetheless.

Quote

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who enabled former President Trump to run wild with false claims of election fraud that eventually led to the deadly insurrection at the Capitol last month, has no plans to stop Trump from spewing more fraud falsehoods during his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this weekend.

In an interview with CNN published Thursday, Rubio bragged that he plans to visit Trump at some point, noting that the former president is one of his “constituents.”

Staying true to his loyalty to Trump, Rubio praised the former president for supposedly bringing together “common sense wisdom and working class values” into the GOP, according to CNN.

Rubio told CNN that it’s “impossible” to envision Trump not having a major influence on the GOP.

“I don’t know how that would be the case or why we would want that to be the case,” Rubio told CNN when asked if Trump should have no role in the party going forward.

Rubio, who told CNN that he’s seen no evidence to suggest that the election was stolen from Trump, also had a nonchalant response when asked about the former president potentially preaching his election fraud falsehoods to his supporters at CPAC.

“He can say whatever he wants to say,” Rubio told CNN.

Rubio’s latest expression of his undying loyalty to Trump was made within the same week of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) having a tense exchange during a House Republican leadership press conference on Wednesday that highlighted the growing divide between Trump loyalists and those who have dared to buck the former president.

While McCarthy quipped: “yes, he should” when asked whether Trump should speak at CPAC, Cheney stood by her vehement criticism of Trump after the former president incited the mob behind the deadly Capitol insurrection last month.

“That’s up to CPAC,” Cheney said.

[LFC]

Trump is ramping up a Super PAC to attack insufficiently loyal Republicans. I would say this is the first step towards creating a new political party but a PAC is easier to create and much more ripe for grift so I wouldn't be shocked if Trump never really pushes to create a new party. He'd rather push the non-Trump Republicans to create a new party as he rakes in the benefits of the existing system.

Quote

Former President Donald Trump told political advisers Thursday that he’s tapped former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to run a future super PAC that will likely serve as a key fundraising arm in a midterms revenge tour, Politico reported late Thursday.

People familiar with the planning told Politico the decision had been reached during a multi-hour meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Thursday. Many of the former president’s top political advisers, including Donald Trump Jr., had joined Trump for the several hours-long meeting at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

Trump spokesman Jason Miller, who was present for the meeting, said in a statement that the former president would announce more details about his political operation “in the coming weeks.”

Many of the formal plans for Trump’s operation have yet to be finalized and some details remain unclear.

According to Politico, other Trump administration alums at meeting included former campaign manager Bill Stepien, former deputy campaign manager Justin Clark, former campaign manager Brad Parscale, and former White House social media director Dan Scavino.

Stepien and Clark are expected to review Trump’s potential candidate endorsements, following an earlier report that the ex-president would begin meeting with potential challengers to Republicans who have crossed him as soon as March.

Trump has endorsed several candidates up for election in 2022, including ex-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in the Arkansas gubernatorial race, and Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran.

Trump had already established a leadership PAC, Save America, which was formed after the election and had $31.5 million in the bank at the end of December, after blasting potential donors with calls to contribute amid false claims over a stolen election. Super PACs, however, have the freedom to raise and spend with few limitations.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 26 February 2021 - 02:33 PM, said:

Trump is ramping up a Super PAC to attack insufficiently loyal Republicans. I would say this is the first step towards creating a new political party but a PAC is easier to create and much more ripe for grift so I wouldn't be shocked if Trump never really pushes to create a new party. He'd rather push the non-Trump Republicans to create a new party as he rakes in the benefits of the existing system.

Absolutely. He doesn't have the discipline to actually create a new party. It's so much easier to make random statements when the someone pleases or displeases him and then direct some lackey to cut a check for someone who comes to Mar A Lago to kiss his... uhmmm... ring.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall wrote a post called Just F’ This Guy? (paywalled) after watching part of the Trump CPAC speech. Here it is in full but I think he makes a good point. Trump has been remarkably quiet, especially without his favorite toy Twitter. Notice that he hasn't even attempted to move to Parler. Despite his usual bluster and delusions he knows he had his ass handed to him by a wide margin in the election making him the biggest and most public loser in this century. At this point Trump's politics may very well just be typical Trumpian style grift, sort of a Trump University on steroids.

Quote

Even though I wasn’t the one covering it for TPM, I was waiting to hear ex-President Trump’s speech last night because he remains, even after the presidency, a looming presence in our national politics. I watched. I listened to him brag. I listened to his standard barrage of lies about immigration. And then I thought, “Fuck this guy. I don’t need to hear this.” I turned off the feed and went to work on a woodworking project.

This might be a normal response for some. But it’s not for me. When everyone else was treating Trump as a joke I said it was folly to ignore him. Within weeks of his getting into the race in 2015, I thought he’d win the Republican nomination. Indeed, long before Trump, in most everything written at TPM I’ve pressed a basic point. There is a breed of quaint liberal myopia that says that if we just ‘don’t give oxygen’ to awful people that will somehow make them go away, like a toddler who think covering his eyes means you can’t see him. We’re told we shouldn’t “amplify” the likes of Donald Trump. This is all congenial, well-intentioned nonsense – the sort of head in the sand thinking that lets you wake up one day and not now how we ended up with Donald Trump being President.

And yet here, nope.

Part of this may be fatigue. I want to be done with this guy. But I don’t think it was mainly that. I’ve wanted to be done with him for years. The centrality of Trump, what’s held so many of our attentions for years is the inescapable reality that he was President. He controls the FBI, the DOJ, the military, what other countries sometimes call the ‘power ministries’. He’s got the nukes. However terrible and absurd he may be what he says and what he thinks and even his mood really matters because of the awful powers he had acquired by being elected President.

Many times I’ve analogized the Trump presidency to living in a household with an abuser. Part of that experience is hyper-vigilance and attention to the actions and moods of the abuser. That person has the power. That person controls the violence. Absent that power, though, Trump’s lies and general crap don’t really matter to me as much. Absent that power, he’s just another entitled jerk who wants space in my head.

His recitation felt like the past rather than the future – like a one-time chart topper belting out the same standards at a tumble down venue for a nostalgia crowd. That was my impression from the part I did watch and it seems confirmed from what I heard from those who watched the rest.

But that still can’t be quite all of it since I think all of us know that the core issue of the moment is not the Trumpist past (good riddance!) but the Trumpist future. Driving Trump from office and securing the thinnest congressional majorities was a critical victory – a necessary but by no means sufficient step to securing democracy in America and a positive future. What is so existential about what Democrats are able to accomplish in 2021 isn’t just about ending the pandemic or restoring the economy or making progress on the numerous challenges we already faced at the beginning of last year. It’s about putting a series of tangible wins on the board that solidify a broad constituency for a democratic future.

That’s all still the case, the threat of a Trumpist future. But watching Trump’s performance yesterday left me more skeptical that that Trumpist future will include Trump himself. He seemed low-energy, flat, like losing power was a gut punch he hasn’t recovered from. I’m also not sure he wants to be back in power or really ‘do’ anything. What I saw was much more consistent with wanting to keep hold of the Republican party as a power base, as a source of money, perhaps as an insurance against prosecution. (To the degree he maintains ownership of the GOP any attempt to prosecute him or hold his family to account for civil infractions will inevitably be seen in political terms and thus be portrayable as a political attack.)

He can change all this. Defeat is usually a shattering experience for incumbent presidents. We know examples from the past of rejected presidents taking months or even years to get their sea legs back – all the more so for someone like Trump who seems to experience ego injury as something akin to annihilation. So perhaps it will change. It’s certainly too soon to tell. But after watching last night’s performance I’m not so sure.

[golden_valley]

LFC, on 01 March 2021 - 03:55 PM, said:

Josh Marshall wrote a post called Just F’ This Guy? (paywalled) after watching part of the Trump CPAC speech. Here it is in full but I think he makes a good point. Trump has been remarkably quiet, especially without his favorite toy Twitter. Notice that he hasn't even attempted to move to Parler. Despite his usual bluster and delusions he knows he had his ass handed to him by a wide margin in the election making him the biggest and most public loser in this century. At this point Trump's politics may very well just be typical Trumpian style grift, sort of a Trump University on steroids.

Will the Trump loyalists ever see that? And will those that might still want to claim the Republican label call him on it? The answer to both is probably no.