We are one month out from the Republican National Convention in “horrible” Milwaukee — well in Milwaukee in all events, editorial comments from Donald Trump not withstanding. There he will be crowned for the third time in a row as the GOP standard bearer. Third time’s a charm. The GOP managed to have lightning strike in 2016, they got their comeuppance in 2020 and rather than cut bait and swim away as fast as possible from Trump, they are now tying themselves to him, determined to sink the entire Republican party even as the candidate himself self-destructs. Yes, Virginia, for the first time in history the GOP is going to nominate a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist. And that’s the least of it, incredibly.
As to policy, don’t look for a lot of that next month. Trump is pretty policy lite these days. He does have one cockeyed idea about how an 85% tariff could eliminate the income tax. This idea has all the same earmarks of Trump’s shell company when he was forming Truth Social a few years ago. On paper it might sound somewhat remotely plausible but don’t look for it to get off the drawing boards.
So if not policy to attract uncommitted donors and sway Independents and undecideds, assuming such things still exist in this political climate, then what? Dunno, but this much can be said with certainty. He didn’t wow people over like he needed to during his Thursday surrender of the GOP.
Oralè Resisters
Convicted Felon Trump
Is bat shit crazy and officially
Is DONMENTIA #DONMENTIA #Like #USDemocrracy pic.twitter.com/vr7Emo6r2o— Ruben Garcia (@goRubenRuben) June 15, 2024
It behooves us all to get a lot of good PR people hired to deal with the sharks. As you heard, if sharks don’t know who you are, they’ll bite off your leg. I guess they’re having as many problems with the windmills as the whales. Sounds like it now, doesn’t it?
No, Trump doesn’t have a plan but he doesn’t think that he needs one. He’s counting on sheer voter ignorance and amnesia to get by. Here’s Charlie Sykes’ take. He poses the question of whether GOP ignorance is Trump’s superpower or his weakness. Trump thinks the former, it well may be the latter.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted an interesting detail in the new CBS/YouGov poll: Only 35% of Republicans say they know that Donald Trump has been indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. Almost the same number — 34% — say he has not been indicted.
This inspired my latest column over at MSNBC Daily.
Welcome, once again to Trump’s fact-free alternate reality universe, in which Trump is relying on disinformation, ignorance, and voter amnesia to propel himself back to the Oval Office.
On the stump Trump freely rewrites history, peddles bizarre conspiracy theories, and aggressively memory-holes the darker parts of his record.
Thus far, it has been working for him….
A recent poll of voters ages 18-30 found that many of them simply don’t know what Trump has said or done in the past.
A poll by the Democratic-aligned public opinion research group Blueprint found that less than half of registered voters under 30 had even heard of Trump’s call for a Muslim ban, his “very fine people on both sides” comments relating to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017, or his insistence that John McCain “is not a war hero” because he was a prisoner of war. Similarly, most young voters have never heard of Trump’s more egregious comments about women, minorities or his denigration of immigrant communities.
“It might shock those of us who eat, sleep, and breathe politics, but young voters really don’t remember the daily controversies of the Trump years and grew up understanding this kind of rhetoric as politics as usual,” Blueprint pollster Evan Roth Smith said.
In one sense, this voter ignorance is a kind of superpower for Trump. But it is also a potential weakness, especially because he is relying heavily on “disengaged voters” for his current political strength. A recent New York Times analysis found that Trump’s narrow polling lead “is built on gains among voters who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.”
But what happens when the disengaged voters become engaged or when tuned-out voters start to pay attention?
What happens when younger voters are told that Trump once said that two non-white congresswomen should “go back” to the “totally broken in crime infested places from which they came”? Or that in 2017, he said Haitian immigrants to the United States “all have AIDS” and that Nigerians would never “go back to their huts” after seeing the United States. The Blueprint poll found that huge majorities of young voters are actually bothered by the comments when they learned of them.
And what happens when voters get more details about Trump’s crimes, or are reminded of what and who he is? What happens when the memory holes are filled?
This is a potential opportunity not just for the Biden campaign, but also for the media. Trump may find out that a campaign that relies on ignorance and amnesia is far more fragile than it looks now.
Ignorance and amnesia, folks. And 85% tariffs. And we presume, ongoing commentary on the denizens of the ocean and their mental states and how that affects you and energy storage devices. Does anybody wonder why people of credibility left the birthday boy sitting there and walked out the door?
Musk will just love the idea. Most of his parts are made in China. What would happen to Tesla if you add 85% to the cost of a vehicle? If Elon had any brains he would vote for Biden, who is investing in America to regrow the supply chains at home without catastrophic shocks.
I hope President Biden focuses on explaining this strategy during his campaign. It’s working. The economy is booming and employment levels have never been higher. Maybe some of those billionaire CEOs who run rebranding operations for Chinese manufacturers will see the light, if not consumers.
85% tariffs. Sounds so absolutely moronic that without even being told, the world knows who said it. Did even one, single ‘pube pull Von Shitzinpants aside and say “ummmm, Von Shitzi, let me explain, AGAIN, just what a tariff is and what it does when used”. This is the kind of asininity that any and every ‘pube ought to at least say “Von Shitzi’s position on this subject is evolving” or something to indicate they are not a pack of single-cell organisms incapable of thought, let alone rational thought.
The depression such a policy would put this country into would be, bar none, the worst in the history of the world. So of course it was uttered by the bar none dumbest m.f. on the globe. Today, the award for the stupidest mother-f*cker in the world is—-yep, Von Shitzinpants who holds the record for number of days he won this award.
Oh, yeah. An 85% tariff will get rid of that pesky income tax but it will lead to voters paying extra on the items subjected to the tariff–because DOYC knows that companies won’t just eat those costs themselves out of the “goodness” of their corporate hearts–and the “middlemen” who sell those products, and pay more because of the extra charges from the companies won’t exactly eat *their* extra costs out of the goodness of their hearts. For all their “concern” about “Biden’s inflation” and the higher costs of everything at the grocery store (and other stores), the GOP, and Trump especially, don’t really seem too concerned about how those tariffs Trump’s touting will lead to even more inflation. Of course, Trump’s counting on the stupid and woefully ignorant to not understand basic economics and put him back into office and give the GOP control of Congress so that when the inflation from those tariffs does finally hit the economy, they’ll have solidified Trump’s dictatorship and they’ll give tax breaks to the companies (both the major corps and the middlemen) who, of course, will keep the profits they reap (much the way Big Oil’s been doing over the past few years) and NOT pass on their “savings.”
Stupidity has a cost…always has…always will.
One thing that I find particularly frightening is this-there was a little hootenanny with Von Shitzinpants and some CEO’s of various and sundry businesses. After the little event the attendees stated he was ‘meandering’ and ‘doesn’t know what he’s talking about’, etc. Here is what I find frightening: these dumb f*cks are running businesses and they ONLY NOW see just how f*cking stupid Von Shitzi is? Are you freaking kidding me? His “meandering” and the fact he most certainly does not know what the f*ck he is talking about were common knowledge to anyone knowing anything at all about the dipshit way before he came down that schlocky elevator. They’re just now realizing the man is an idiot? WTF?!? Why are these people running anything more complicated than a lemonade stand if this is their level of intelligence or rather a lack thereof?
If you’ve ever wondered why our economy tanked….EVER…it is because of the caliber of individuals running large business organizations.
I agree completely spike! Like the Germans pretended not to know what Hitler was up to. I wish there was a firing squad I could volunteer for.