Rather than have one, long, wordle-rivalling post about the leader of the free world, I have taken to bite-size chunks as and when they happen.
Well. As you have doubt already heard, he has posted a memevideo thing depicting the Obamas as apes. This has been taken down, and the blame has been laid on a “staffer”.
What would YOU do if you had something racist posted on social media in your name? You’d be mortified and be quick to disassociate yourself from it and offer a sincere apology. That hasn’t happened. I dare say he finds it all very amusing.
Another snippet I learned today was that redactions in the Epstein files puzzlingly include the word “don’t” As in the line “Don’t forget to pull on your Tena pads, Sir!” Will have the first word blacked out.
Why? Because the millions of files needed to be cleansed of all references to the orange one – and every single short form of his name – Don, Donnie, DJT and …”Don T”….
Let’s remind ourselves the redactions are necessary to protect the victims. Also, appearing in the Epstein files thousands of times is no indication of any wrongdoing. No way.
Because of course a staffer had access to his social media account around midnight. If it wasn’t the Orange Shitstain himself my money’s on Miller.
I think it’s important to identify and itemise Trump’s serial (and parallel) ignomies. Thank you.
In reflecting a little on the title of your fine series of posts, I realised it belies the clear evidence that he has no standards.
Donald Trump claimed that the only thing limiting his power as commander-in-chief is his “own morality”. The wiki post on Trump and religion identifies ‘The Power of Positive Thinking’ as a key text in his life – an approach which seems to suggest seeing yourself in the best light always, taking no criticism, and moving forward without looking back at what you’ve done to others.
Trump is, apparently ‘inclined towards the cultural values of doctrines that are fundamental to Charismatic Christianity, which include prosperity theology, anti-intellectualism, Zionism, and messianism’. Those first two should be an alarm bell for anyone thinking Trump has standards that include thinking (to any depth) about the concerns of anyone but himself.
He is a teetotaler and I would bet he is also someone who has never taken drugs. These are admirable standards of behaviour but it makes his incoherence and mood swings all the more concerning.
I started to watch The Apprentice last night, the movie which details his race to the bottom in New York with the enthusiastic aid of Roy Cohn. It shows him early on drinking way too much in Cohn’s company and throwing up all over the place, and he seems to have given up the sauce at that point.
It’s brilliantly done, and the two leads are eerily real – Jeremy Strong as Cohn in particular. But about halfway through I started to feel a bit nauseous and switched off. Why am I wasting what’s left of my life watching these scumbags going about their business, I asked myself. I don’t normally have a problem watching scumbags in movies; I guess it’s indicative of the extent to which Trump has wormed his way into our psyches – or mine, at any rate – that I couldn’t take any more.
I thought he lost a brother to drink, which put him off for life. Having said that, we can’t believe a word he says so he actually probably had him killed for laughing at his hair.
I thought he never started drinking.
A bit of scumbaggery in movies can be entertaining, but with Trump, in real life, there’s just SO MUCH OF IT it’s nauseating.
As for this latest thing of posting a meme of the Obamas as apes on Truth Social. Of course it was him posted it.
That is what MAGA and Trumpism is actually about. Out in the open. Anyone who merely finds it an amusing bit of nonsense is a Cee You Next Tuesday like he is.
He dislikes animals, too. He’s a walking pot of psychopathology.
Trump is a bigot who has surrounded himself with fellow bigots. Quelle surprise.
I do love how the BBC now quote him verbatim. Including all of the nonsensical grammar. This zinger in the article about the racist post.
“I look at a lot of thousands of things,”
@leedsboy
That’s actually an excellent tactic of the BBC I reckon!
More zone flooding so people are less likely to talk about the stuff he’s actually done/doing; the endless grift, the Epstein files, Iran, Alex Pretti and god knows what else.
Yes. The post has done its job, making people talk about it at the expense of everything else.
Flooding the zone or not, attempted distraction from all of the madness or not, let’s just take a beat.
I don’t think anyone needs reminding of the history of the Trump family and the Black community and no one will be totally surprised by this, but for those of us who’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of thing in the past, its really very scary indeed,
Trump posting this with a knowing wink just further normalises racism in daily discourse. I heard from a relative’s 13 year old of it being shown around at school, accompanied by lots of sniggering and guffawing. On the other hand, if you’re the sort of person who bemoans the lack of ‘free speech’ and ‘invaders taking over our country’, and thinks poor Tommy gets an unfeasibly hard ride from the ‘liberal woke media’, then you’ve just had a massive massive boost this week. And it’s pretty clear that once we’ve all clutched our pearls and swooned, and moved on to the the next grisly Trump-thing, he’ll have gotten away with it again and he will do it again and the toxicity will embed a little deeper into our daily life.
Oh and that pathetic pushback from the WH displays their utter contempt for us – they couldn’t even be arsed to come up with a half-believable excuse.
I don’t think anyone needs to have it explained that this is racism and that racism is terrible.
But all of it is part of a cycle that demonstrably serves Trump – he’s taking advantage of our emotions to lead us by the nose to where he wants us, and away from where he does not. And we’re not obliged to fall for it.
Seeing racist memes is bad – particularly for anyone who has experienced racism or fears the racism of the future. But it’s not as bad as being shot dead in the street by cops who won’t even be investigated. Or being trafficked and abused by powerful people who won’t be punished. Those are the things that will eventually bring him down – the things he’s actually done, not the things he’s said.
All of which is precisely why he shared the meme. He knows exactly what the response will be – in fact, he’s counting on it. All the social media zingers, all the umbrage. This thread. It’s all priced in – in fact it’s the entire point. He’s a magician running a card trick, and you’re being asked to look at the wrong hand.
So, yes – it’s racism. Terrible, shocking racism. That much is a given. It’s the response that’s the only thing we control, and I say stop giving him what he wants, because we’ve had a decade of doing that and it very clearly doesn’t work. Keep the focus where he clearly does not want it; Epstein and ICE. Or don’t – each to their own.
I don’t think he’s that smart. Am sure he could go ahead and be a racist at any time. It won’t stop people demonstrating on the streets about ICE (another form of racism), might even encourage more to do so
I agree re his intelligence, but I think he has either low cunning or a lot of luck. He fires off a blizzard of memes, tweets, etc., and for whatever reason, some of them hit home, either among his supporters or his enemies, and he gets a lot of reaction, a lot of headlines, and we all forget about the previous headlines. What happened to ending the Russia-Ukraine war, or helping protesters in Iran, or rebuilding Gaza (for better or worse), or taking billions off the BBC? They were so many news cycles ago that he’s probably got no memory of anything he said about them. He’s moved on, and I expect he wants rows about online videos to ensure that we all move on too.
I’m not sure anything is going to bring him down – not racist videos, not Epstein, not ICE. What would he have to do that he hasn’t already done to make his lickspittle toadies among the Republicans think “Ooh, that’s a bit much. Let’s replace him with that political titan JD Vance”?
I fear Trump is going to stay in the top seat until old age finally carries him off. Even if/when he loses the next election, I doubt he’ll leave.
Of course, I’ll be delighted to be proved wrong.
He has a model that works – say what he thinks people want to hear, lap up the positives, denounce people that are negative (which his positives appreciate) and, when he goes to far, blame someone else and never apologise.
I don’t completely agree that specific things are designed to detract the attention from the deaths and trafficking but there is a blizzard of this endless social media crap and that either drowns or cancels out the noise of the real stuff. And they know it.
Obviously, compared to the hundreds of people the [Redacted] regime has caused to die, this is small potatoes (especially since the Obamas are wealthy and powerful people, rather than the poor and powerless who are subjected to the brunt of the systemic racism in operation daily). But I think this story is about America going forward. I don’t believe the U.K. P.M. or the leader of my own country would survive til next week if they posted this. [Redacted] has always been one to refuse to accept the blame – “The buck stops elsewhere” (and in this case the supposed staffer who did the deed, being unnamed and unpunished, it stops nowhere) – and now the same standard is being set for government behaviour in the States. It is in that sense, I think, that this is a pretty big deal..
I agree that this is a big deal. – a huge one. But, it seems more than half of the US don’t think it is.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make. We are going to see more of this in the UK, US, everywhere, because if the president of the US can post this stuff, why can’t anyone?
Thing is, they can do something this offensive a first time and once they’ve ridden out the condemnation, they can do it again and again with a bit less outrage each time, until it’s normalised.
Social media doing its thing.
For anyone who’s not seen it, Ian McKellen’s appearance on the Colbert Show was pretty spectacular.
I’ve watched it at least six or seven times in the past couple of days. It’s very powerful. MAGA heads unfortunately will not see it or if they do, would not realise that it is directed at the current administration.
Very true.
What an actor he is. Imagine being able to go from matey-chatshow-guest to Thomas-More-reciting-Shakespeare in just a few steps across a studio, and then keeping the audience spellbound throughout a 400-year-old packed with phrasing and terms that many of them were probably unfamiliar with. And all at the age of 86.
I saw him with Patrick Stewart in Pinter’s No Man’s Land. Truth be told, I couldn’t quite grasp what it was all about, but I could have watched the two of them for hours. Just extraordinary performances. For much of the show, you could have heard a pin drop in the theatre, we were so transfixed.
If only Trump and the MAGA faithful could understand this speech and take heed.
I saw him with Patrick Stewart in The X-Men. They were ace.
I saw the first staging of No Man’s Land at the Old Vic back in 1975 with two other theatrical titans, Ralph Richardson and John Geilgud, with Terence Rigby a highly effective hard nut. I didn’t really know what was going on then either, but the effect was the same: a transfixed audience.
The people who support Trump are unlikely to be watching Colbert’s show and almost certainly won’t know who Sir Ian McKellen is, though I suppose they might have heard of Shakespeare.
Yeah, they’ve heard of Shakespeare – his sisters did that You’re History song. One of them used to be in Bananarama.
Only one of them was The Bard’s sister. Was that the Bananarama girl?
Whose sister was the other one?
Marlowe’s.
Virginia Woolf’s.
Not too much to see – he’s a racist.
Absolutely no argument, he got it from his father, he too being a racist piece of shit.
Trump Jr. is also clearly a dictator, Trump Sr. presumably missing his chance…
… and so, we all must compromise ‘our’ country by getting rid of ‘our’ Prime Minister because of a decision he made (incorrect in my opinion, for what it’s worth) to placate this racist piece of shit.
Ter-and-rifc.
Ask yourself… what would the racists Trump Jr. and Sr. want?