Trumpton - the rant thread

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  • Donald J. Trump suggested that the election be postponed. BURN HIM
  • Quite.
    :naughty:

    With Unquenchable Fire...(very Biblical, that), and perhaps accompanied by a dash of the Worm that dieth not...

    AIUI, even The Mad God-King's own toadies and lickspittles are thinking that postponement is not a Good Idea. Maybe they don't want their mansions burned down by an angry populace...
  • amyboamybo Shipmate
    He can' t postpone the election - that's in Congress's court, and there's no way Pelosi will play that game.

    What he has done is cast a shadow on the outcome of the election, which I believe was his intent. He's going to be working hard to make sure his idiot base does not accept his defeat.

    Plus it's a nice distraction from the recent announcement that he fucked up the GDP so badly.
  • O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!

    (from The Tempest, by Shakespeare, though I'm not sure Miranda had the Mad God-King in mind...)
    :grimace:
  • I think Miranda had better taste.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    Donald J. Trump suggested that the election be postponed. BURN HIM

    No, no. He was misquoted. According to a comment in the Washington Post he was talking about something completely different. What he said was that he wasn't going be able to have an erection by November - he's going to need more time and a lot of help.
  • RossweisseRossweisse Hell Host, 8th Day Host
    Even Moscow Mitch said that a postponement wasn't happening. I think that may be a first.

    But I don't think that the president was serious. I think he was trolling us, particularly members of the news media. He does want to cast doubt over the legitimacy of the election if he loses, and he's setting the stage for that now.
  • PendragonPendragon Shipmate
    edited July 2020
    Especially as quite a few Republican politicians are endorsing the "postal votes will all be fraudulent" line themselves rather than encouraging the administration to put money into things like making sure that there will be the manpower available to process them.
  • Funny how nobody is suggesting inviting international election monitors ... probably because so many of the USA's local election practices are grossly undemocratic to start with.
  • Who would wish to voluntarily enter what appears to be a potentially toxic swamp?

    But it's a good idea, and, hopefully, someone might arrange it...
  • Funny how nobody is suggesting inviting international election monitors ... probably because so many of the USA's local election practices are grossly undemocratic to start with.

    There is a strongly justified precedent in the 2004 election:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election#International_observers.
    It will be interesting to see if the Democrats ask for it this time, especially as trump has already said that the vote will have been rigged if he doesn't win, and it's almost certain that it would have to be rigged if he were to win.
  • When there was the Bush v. Gore voting mess, former president Jimmy Carter, who's been involved with international election monitoring, said that the US system doesn't even meet the basic requirements for monitors to come in--it's that messed up.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    Donald J. Trump suggested that the election be postponed. BURN HIM

    Agreed!
  • O brave new world, that has such creatures in it!

    (from The Tempest, by Shakespeare, though I'm not sure Miranda had the Mad God-King in mind...)
    :grimace:

    She was looking at a group of traitors and attempted murderers as she uttered those words....
  • Amanda B ReckondwythAmanda B Reckondwyth Mystery Worship Editor
    Funny how nobody is suggesting inviting international election monitors.

    I'm sure Russia would be happy to oblige.
  • Funny how nobody is suggesting inviting international election monitors.

    I'm sure Russia would be happy to oblige.

    In 2000 Putin offered to come over and monitor the mess that followed Election Day.

  • As a neighbour to the north, I'd happily volunteer to be an election observer to ensure that all my southern neighbours got a fair shake. I even have experience. And, I'm more reliable than Putin.
  • PG--

    What's the catch? ;) What do you want in exchange?

    Perhaps you want *more* chaos, so that Canada can shed itself of its southern neighbor, and take over the land? Politely, of course. ;)
  • HugalHugal Shipmate
    Well if the price is right I will come over from Wales observe.
  • Re T saying the 2020 election will be rigged:

    He said the same thing about the 2016 election--even after he'd "won". He felt he should've gotten the popular vote, rather than Hillary getting it.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Golden Key wrote: »
    Re T saying the 2020 election will be rigged:

    He said the same thing about the 2016 election--even after he'd "won". He felt he should've gotten the popular vote, rather than Hillary getting it.

    Trump is not acting like a man trying to win an election. He's acting like a man who plans to steal an election.
  • RossweisseRossweisse Hell Host, 8th Day Host
    Well, he has never in his life done anything without cheating in some way, so far as I can tell. Why would he start now?
  • And/or he's hoping, on some level, that if he's outrageous enough, someone will kick him out of office and/or out of the election.

    For some time, I've thought some part of him desperately wants out of the job--one he never truly wanted. There's an episode of "Smallville" (Superman's childhood as Clark Kent) where he goes inside the mind of Lex Luthor--frienemy at that time, master villain later. Inside, there's a child version of Lex, maybe 10 years old or so. Good kid stuck inside a monster. IIRC, he and Clark got along well, but there wasn't much Clark could do to help him.

    Haunting.
  • How many times did Trump run for president before he won ? I am not convinced its true he didn't want the job - he wants to be a king.
  • I think 2016 was the only time he actually officially ran, but I think he considered it before. Summer of 2016, T and his then campaign manager both said T didn't want to do the work of being president, and would delegate everything. It also came out that his goal was to get enough publicity to force TV network moguls to renegotiate his contract for "The Apprentice".

    Of course, it will be interesting to see what Mary Trump (niece who wrote the recent book) has to say about that.
  • BoogieBoogie Shipmate
    “I’m glad he’s playing golf. I’d pay him to play golf for the rest of his Presidency. The country would be much safer and much better off if all he did was golf for the next 5-6 months,” tweeted Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran a brief and unsuccessful bid to oust Trump as the party’s nominee in the 2020 election.
  • Good idea.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    Vanity Fair published an article recently about the Jared Kushner directed group trying to come up with a federal testing plan.
    Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal. Today, as governors and mayors scramble to stamp out epidemics plaguing their populations, philanthropists at the Rockefeller Foundation are working to fill the void and organize enough testing to bring the nationwide epidemic under control.

    Inside the White House, over much of March and early April, Kushner’s handpicked group of young business associates, which included a former college roommate, teamed up with several top experts from the diagnostic-testing industry. Together, they hammered out the outline of a national testing strategy. The group — working night and day, using the encrypted platform WhatsApp — emerged with a detailed plan obtained by Vanity Fair.

    Okay, so far, so Republican. Assuming big business and guys with MBAs can solve any problem, even if they know nothing about the subject.
    Rather than have states fight each other for scarce diagnostic tests and limited lab capacity, the plan would have set up a system of national oversight and coordination to surge supplies, allocate test kits, lift regulatory and contractual roadblocks, and establish a widespread virus surveillance system by the fall, to help pinpoint subsequent outbreaks.

    The solutions it proposed weren’t rocket science—or even comparable to the dauntingly complex undertaking of developing a new vaccine. Any national plan to address testing deficits would likely be more on the level of “replicating UPS for an industry,” said Dr. Mike Pellini, the managing partner of Section 32, a technology and health care venture capital fund. “Imagine if UPS or FedEx didn’t have infrastructure to connect all the dots. It would be complete chaos.”

    The plan crafted at the White House, then, set out to connect the dots. Some of those who worked on the plan were told that it would be presented to President Trump and likely announced in the Rose Garden in early April. “I was beyond optimistic,” said one participant. “My understanding was that the final document would make its way to the president over that weekend” and would result in a “significant announcement.”

    Not bad. A little light on specifics and the devil is always in the details, but not a bad framework. So what happened?
    But the effort ran headlong into shifting sentiment at the White House. Trusting his vaunted political instincts, President Trump had been downplaying concerns about the virus and spreading misinformation about it—efforts that were soon amplified by Republican elected officials and right-wing media figures. Worried about the stock market and his reelection prospects, Trump also feared that more testing would only lead to higher case counts and more bad publicity. Meanwhile, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, was reportedly sharing models with senior staff that optimistically — and erroneously, it would turn out — predicted the virus would soon fade away.

    Against that background, the prospect of launching a large-scale national plan was losing favor, said one public health expert in frequent contact with the White House’s official coronavirus task force.

    Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

    That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

    So if this article is correct, the Trump administration* decided to ignore COVID-19 and sabotage testing because the virus was killing all the "right people".

    The article has been edited to include pro forma denials by White House spokesperson and serial fabulist Kayleigh McEnany.

    I'm x-posting this over in Purgatory because this is a serious matter deserving serious discussion.
  • How many times did Trump run for president before he won ? I am not convinced its true he didn't want the job - he wants to be a king.

    “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king
    And a king ain’t satisfied till he owns everything.”
    —Bruce Springsteen
  • The London Times reports some Republican insiders (unnamed) as suggesting that Trump doesn't really want to win in November but desperately wants not to be seen to have lost. Makes sense, in a twisted sort of way.
  • He must know he's been crap (the crappest ever?) at the job so surely he'd have saved more 'face' by saying he had other things to do, supporting whoever his party might put up and not running/standing/fighting/whatever for another four miserable years.
  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    He must know he's been crap (the crappest ever?) at the job so surely he'd have saved more 'face' by saying he had other things to do, supporting whoever his party might put up and not running/standing/fighting/whatever for another four miserable years.

    The time to make that announcement was January. The Republican National Convention is already going to be a clusterfuck. Throwing an actual contested presidential candidacy into the mix at this late date and undoing all the various state primaries and caucuses would be an epic-grade shitshow. (So very on-brand for Trump.)

    That said, Trump does seem to have done his best to work his way down to the bottom of the presidential rankings. At the start of 2020 he might have been passed off as a middling-bad president, someone in the Martin Van Buren or Benjamin Harrison class. The Trump administration*'s COVID-19 response had been one of the biggest policy failures in American history. The only comparable examples of total and complete policy failure from American history that I can think of are the Hoover administration's response to the Great Depression or the Buchanan administration's response to the Secession Crisis.
  • Is it too late for Meghan Markle to stand?
  • Re Meghan Markle:

    Hmmm...would her (semi-?) royal standing get in the way?

    I think that some American women who've married into higher-level, ruling royalty (Grace Kelly >> Princess Grace of Monaco; Lisa Hallaby >> Queen Nur of Jordan, etc.) were probably allowed to keep their American citizenship. (Even if kinda, sorta, maybe--Americans aren't supposed to have dual citizenship.) I suspect someone decided, however informally, that keeping on good terms with the newly royal women was in the interest of US foreign policy.

    I don't know what Meghan's citizenship status currently is. But I'm guessing if she ran for national office, there'd be a tangle--one of public perception, if nothing else.
  • She smiles with her eyes...
    :wink:

    The Mad God-King glowers with his...
    :scream:
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    Crœsos wrote: »
    That said, Trump does seem to have done his best to work his way down to the bottom of the presidential rankings. At the start of 2020 he might have been passed off as a middling-bad president, someone in the Martin Van Buren or Benjamin Harrison class.
    Looking at those two gentlemen's records, I think that is extremely flattering to Trump.

  • CrœsosCrœsos Shipmate
    edited August 2020
    Golden Key wrote: »
    Re Meghan Markle:

    Hmmm...would her (semi-?) royal standing get in the way?

    The U.S. Constitution specifies that "no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State", but since Markle is not (and to the best of my knowledge never has has been) someone who "hold(s) any Office of Profit or Trust" under the United States her title is no barrier. If elected she'd have to give up any benefit or payment therefrom, but that's a different question.
    Golden Key wrote: »
    I think that some American women who've married into higher-level, ruling royalty (Grace Kelly >> Princess Grace of Monaco; Lisa Hallaby >> Queen Nur of Jordan, etc.) were probably allowed to keep their American citizenship. (Even if kinda, sorta, maybe -- Americans aren't supposed to have dual citizenship.) I suspect someone decided, however informally, that keeping on good terms with the newly royal women was in the interest of US foreign policy.

    There's no rule against Americans having dual citizenship. The Oath of Allegiance sworn by immigrants naturalizing to U.S. citizenship requires that the oathtaker "entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen", but that's not a rule that applies to natural born citizens like Markle.
  • Golden Key wrote: »
    PG--

    What's the catch? ;) What do you want in exchange?

    Perhaps you want *more* chaos, so that Canada can shed itself of its southern neighbor, and take over the land? Politely, of course. ;)

    I look forward to the day that Canada and Mexico peacefully resolve their border dispute.
  • I believe the Duchess of Sussex is still a US citizen. I think she has indefinite leave to remain in the UK, but she would have to go through the same residency process as anyone else wanting to become British.

    If you marry into the direct line of succession, like Princess Grace did, I believe that it is expected that you will renounce your birth nationality so there is no question about loyalties, or the nationality of heirs. (And no monarchy is going to want to give foreign tax offices an excuse to go digging into their finances!!)

  • Crœsos wrote: »
    There's no rule against Americans having dual citizenship[/url]. The Oath of Allegiance sworn by immigrants naturalizing to U.S. citizenship requires that the oathtaker "entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen", but that's not a rule that applies to natural born citizens like Markle.

    And even that no longer requires the foreigner to give up their citizenship upon naturalization (and hasn't done for some time.) There are plenty of naturalized immigrants in the US with multiple citizenships.

  • Gone are the days when a female US citizen marrying a foreigner automatically lost her US citizenship. Nowadays even if she renounced her US citizenship she still has to pay US income taxes for 10 years after (and any of her children born before renouncing would have to do the same and they presumably cannot renounce until they are 18).
  • You're all off base with Markle. The next Republican nominee for President will be a revivified Larry Flint.
  • Golden Key wrote: »
    PG--

    What's the catch? ;) What do you want in exchange?

    Perhaps you want *more* chaos, so that Canada can shed itself of its southern neighbor, and take over the land? Politely, of course. ;)

    I look forward to the day that Canada and Mexico peacefully resolve their border dispute.

    :not worthy: :smiley:
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    You're all off base with Markle. The next Republican nominee for President will be a revivified Larry Flint.

    I assumed Meghan was meant to be a Democratic candidate, as an alternative to Biden.
  • Golden Key wrote: »
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    You're all off base with Markle. The next Republican nominee for President will be a revivified Larry Flint.

    I assumed Meghan was meant to be a Democratic candidate, as an alternative to Biden.

    She could still be the VP pick.
  • Furtive GanderFurtive Gander Shipmate
    edited August 2020
    I've just seen five minutes of an old 'Sliders' episode where the heroes are in a parallel world where the US is still under British rule but I didn't see how this happened.
    Golden Key wrote: »
    PG--

    What's the catch? ;) What do you want in exchange?

    Perhaps you want *more* chaos, so that Canada can shed itself of its southern neighbor, and take over the land? Politely, of course. ;)

    I look forward to the day that Canada and Mexico peacefully resolve their border dispute.

    Lovely. :)


    Crœsos wrote: »
    He must know he's been crap (the crappest ever?) at the job so surely he'd have saved more 'face' by saying he had other things to do, supporting whoever his party might put up and not running/standing/fighting/whatever for another four miserable years.

    The time to make that announcement was January. The Republican National Convention is already going to be a clusterfuck. Throwing an actual contested presidential candidacy into the mix at this late date and undoing all the various state primaries and caucuses would be an epic-grade shitshow. (So very on-brand for Trump.)

    Agreed; when I said "... he'd have saved more 'face' ... " I meant he would have, ie had he gone a different path then, so before the parties made their choices - too late now!

  • Golden Key wrote: »
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    You're all off base with Markle. The next Republican nominee for President will be a revivified Larry Flint.

    I assumed Meghan was meant to be a Democratic candidate, as an alternative to Biden.

    ohhh, sorry. I saw Royal therefore conservative.
  • Typically Australian?
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    Golden Key wrote: »
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    You're all off base with Markle. The next Republican nominee for President will be a revivified Larry Flint.

    I assumed Meghan was meant to be a Democratic candidate, as an alternative to Biden.

    ohhh, sorry. I saw Royal therefore conservative.

    Given the various reasons why the pair were given such a hard time by the Tory press, hardly.
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