Donald Trump

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CHokKA said:
I'm going to level with you here. You're posting on a computer forum, yet you are doing all you can to sound more intelligent than the rest of us whilst falling flat on your face in the process. We're not in an Oxford University literature class where you attempt to one-up your classmates by reading big words from a thesaurus to sound clever. Regardless of whether the words you're using are appropriate for what you're trying to say, stringing them together into one incoherent babble of nonsense causes them to become incomprehensible, and it makes you look rather silly. I cannot imagine for one minute that you actually speak to people like that in the real world. If you did, I'd say that most people would just turn around and walk away from you. This isn't a personal attack upon you, just some friendly advice to tone it down. Perhaps you'll find some meaningful discussion in the process.

Anyway, that said, I'm rather curious to find from you why you support Trump (or so it seems) and what you think he's done right during this pandemic. You're very quick to jump on the rest of us for saying "negative" things about him, but nothing that's been said is a wild accusation, it is what's actually happened. You speak as someone trying to project intellect, so surely you've watched his briefings and come to a similar conclusion? Do you see how he comes across in each and every one of them? If not, go and watch a few now and pay attention not to what he's saying, but to how he says things. He's very defensive and it's difficult to hide his inability to deal with this crisis properly.

Then, if you pay attention to what he's saying, it's just the same thing at every briefing. It's an extended election rally used as a platform for him to showcase how amazing he is, and he won't allow anyone to get in the way of that. He dodges relevant questions and then waffles on about something completely unrelated but that's sure to highlight how amazing he's done something. He belittles journalists in a very rude and belligerent way, but he will not allow them to ask him the hard questions, he just dismisses it all whilst talking over them or telling them to be quiet. He makes everything about him at every opportunity so that the issues raised disappear into the ether. Deflection and false information are his weapons. He keeps making factually incorrect statements like how the US is the greatest at testing (which at the beginning they completely failed at due to rubbish kits), has had the best economy ever since he came along (again, debunked with actual statistics, some of which were posted a few pages back), discussing the use of bleach used inside the body to clean out the virus with an advisor and passing it off as sarcasm with the journalists (which even if it was, which is an epic reach, is a wholly irresponsible thing. Last night he said that without him they'd be at war with North Korea. Again, something completely irrelevant to say in a briefing that's supposed to be about COVID-19, but it makes him sound better than he actually is. His ban on travel from China was too late to be effective, and has been proven to still allow over 40000 people into the US, so that was nothing but a pointless move (laced with racism I hasten to add, given the context of things he was saying at the time).

I genuinely don't understand how people buy into all of this and support it. It isn't personal hatred of the man that makes me unable to buy into what he's saying. It's that he's morally, factually and politically bankrupt, and someone that's completely in over his head, and who can never own up to his mistakes. Regardless of how something plays out, he's done an amazing job, every single time. This is how he comes across at every briefing without fail, only more recently things have been headed downward at an even more alarming rate, hence why his last few were cancelled with him crying like a baby about how it's too difficult to endure them with the press being so "nasty". No, it's actually because you can't backup what you're saying with fact and you then try to get out of what you've said by lying quite blatantly. It's an absolute joke.
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Very good post
 
ChrisLX200 said:
Trump is a as frustrating as any 5-yr old kid you caught being naughty but claims 'I didn't do it! It was my sister!'. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence the kid still claims he diidn't do it. I'm sure many of you will know what I mean lol. 99% of children soon grow out of that behaviour, I guess a few don't even into old age.
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This is what happens with spoilt, entitled children with underlying mental health issues.

Although not millionaires I've had to hide my sister on Facebook due to her constant complaints about the vile behaviour of her children.

Given they excuse any misbehaviour from the children as being due to hunger or tiredness and I've seen her daughter slap her in the face and get what she wants as a result rather than being grounded for a week, I'm not surprised they have brats who respect nobody and only think about themselves.
 
This is a good article from the Irish Times

Irish Times

April 25, 2020

By Fintan O’Toole

THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”

This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.

Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
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Yeh because the only critically objective pieces they read are from the likes of Fox, breitbart and other scummy right whinger sites ;).

Critical objectivity isn’t Trump and his supporters strong point that’s for sure!!!! ;).
 
plasmahal said:
There is nothing objectively critical there.
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The quoting of Kemp, stating on 1 April that nobody knew that the virus could be passed on by people who didn’t show symptoms, was objective and invites the reader to make their own critical assessment. For example, my conclusion was that he is a lying asshat who’s wilfully endangered millions, just like Trump but on a smaller scale.
 
plasmahal said:
Is it though!!!!!!
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Yes. Very much so. This is how vast amounts of the world see America now.

The fact you cannot see anything objectively critical in it displays just how divorced from reality you are.

Trump has likely forever sullied the US presidency. Even if they can restore its respect, the abject stupidity and ridiculousness that Trump has infected it with, will take a long, long time to remove.
 
Jono8 said:
Yes. Very much so. This is how vast amounts of the world see America now.
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I'd agree with that statement but it the media that paints that picture and driving the divisions. Trump gives them plenty of ammo to twist to their advantage.

Jono8 said:
The fact you cannot see anything objectively critical in it displays just how divorced from reality you are.
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There is nothing taking a specific point and then analysing it critically. It's the usual name calling wrapped up in lots of words.

Thankfully i am divorced from the leftist reality you and others love to wallow in that feeds your TDS.

Jono8 said:
Trump has likely forever sullied the US presidency.
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It was sullied long before Trump. hopefully his presidency will lead to some sensible reforms of self reflection to get back to what the US presidency was over 50 years ago.

The democrats have failed again to try and change this situation and the US has again in 2020 got to bad candidates to choose from.
 
plasmahal said:
Thankfully i am divorced from the leftist reality you and others love to wallow in that feeds your TDS.
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"leftist reality" = Actual reality

"TDS" = To justifiably think Trump is objectively an awful person and is not fit to be president of the United States.


plasmahal said:
I'd agree with that statement but it the media that paints that picture and driving the divisions. Trump gives them plenty of ammo to twist to their advantage.
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No, they report on what he does and says, which is almost always stupid and/or ridiculous. No twisting is needed.

You literally only have to watch him speak. One doesn't need the media or anyone else to tell them what he is like. It is there for all to see.
 
Jono8 said:
"leftist reality" = Actual reality
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Nope...

Jono8 said:
"TDS" = To justifiably think Trump is objectively an awful person and is not fit to be president of the United States.
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I'd agree with that but in reality, TDS sufferers go way more overboard that being justifiably objective. Trump, Clinton and now Biden, none of them are fit to be the president of the United States.
 
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