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ASPartOfMe
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25 Sep 2022, 9:27 pm

ironpony wrote:
A lot of people blame Trump for the extreme actions of his 'followers', but I feel that his followers are the real problem, and he is just one person. But everyone acts like his followers are mindless sheep that don't know any better or have no real accountability.

So many people who hate Trump give his followers the 'Nuremberg defense', and say it's all his faul that his followers did what they did. Stop giving them the Nuremberg defense people. They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.

They do, why do you think MAGA is a slur?


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25 Sep 2022, 9:45 pm

My message to the 75 million Americans who think that it's acceptable to vote for somebody who is fully vested in QAnon conspiracies, it might be time to review your priorities.

I am certain most of these Trump supporters wouldn't have supported Jim Jones or David Koresh or Marshall Applewaite yet they seem to have temporarily put their brain on freeze mode when it comes to pushing Trump back onto to the position of POTUS



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25 Sep 2022, 9:46 pm

ironpony wrote:
They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.


Who is?



goldfish21
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26 Sep 2022, 1:30 pm

cyberdad wrote:
ironpony wrote:
They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.


Who is?

trump's legion of red hatted cult members - his supporters.

ironpony has a valid point.. trump himself isn't going to go take an ar-15 to an FBI field office, or storm the capitol building and try to hang mike pence, or set pipe bombs around DC, or mail bombs to democratic lawmakers etc etc - he's a great big wuss. It's his cult loyal followers that are dangerous and there's no one more culty than the q ppl.

BUT, even though it's foot soldiers who pull triggers in hand to hand combat.. they still have a commander that winds them up and sets them loose. trumplestiltskin would still be culpable.


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26 Sep 2022, 3:17 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
ironpony wrote:
They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.


Who is?

trump's legion of red hatted cult members - his supporters.

ironpony has a valid point.. trump himself isn't going to go take an ar-15 to an FBI field office, or storm the capitol building and try to hang mike pence, or set pipe bombs around DC, or mail bombs to democratic lawmakers etc etc - he's a great big wuss. It's his cult loyal followers that are dangerous and there's no one more culty than the q ppl.

BUT, even though it's foot soldiers who pull triggers in hand to hand combat.. they still have a commander that winds them up and sets them loose. trumplestiltskin would still be culpable.


That's true too. While the real danger mostly comes from his supporters, Trump himself is still the one who is pulling the puppet strings...



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27 Sep 2022, 6:02 pm

I think its well established what you vote for when you vote trump
https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... loyalists/

People can choose to ignore the facts...pretend that Trump is no different to any other previous republican leader.



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27 Sep 2022, 7:54 pm

goldfish21 wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
ironpony wrote:
They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.


Who is?

trump's legion of red hatted cult members - his supporters.

ironpony has a valid point.. trump himself isn't going to go take an ar-15 to an FBI field office, or storm the capitol building and try to hang mike pence, or set pipe bombs around DC, or mail bombs to democratic lawmakers etc etc - he's a great big wuss. It's his cult loyal followers that are dangerous and there's no one more culty than the q ppl.

BUT, even though it's foot soldiers who pull triggers in hand to hand combat.. they still have a commander that winds them up and sets them loose. trumplestiltskin would still be culpable.


But I never see Trumpt actually commanding pipe bombs are AR-15 usage in public places though. So it seems like his followers are EXCEEDING his orders in a sense, and I don't think the commander should be held mostly responsible, if the followers are choosing to exceed the orders. If Trump is a commander, than he has lost the command of his army, so to speak, but people are still giving the ones who are exceeding orders, the Nuremberg defense.



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28 Sep 2022, 12:54 am

ironpony wrote:
goldfish21 wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
ironpony wrote:
They are a much bigger problem than Trump himself.


Who is?

trump's legion of red hatted cult members - his supporters.

ironpony has a valid point.. trump himself isn't going to go take an ar-15 to an FBI field office, or storm the capitol building and try to hang mike pence, or set pipe bombs around DC, or mail bombs to democratic lawmakers etc etc - he's a great big wuss. It's his cult loyal followers that are dangerous and there's no one more culty than the q ppl.

BUT, even though it's foot soldiers who pull triggers in hand to hand combat.. they still have a commander that winds them up and sets them loose. trumplestiltskin would still be culpable.


But I never see Trumpt actually commanding pipe bombs are AR-15 usage in public places though. So it seems like his followers are EXCEEDING his orders in a sense, and I don't think the commander should be held mostly responsible, if the followers are choosing to exceed the orders. If Trump is a commander, than he has lost the command of his army, so to speak, but people are still giving the ones who are exceeding orders, the Nuremberg defense.


trump intentionally doesn’t give explicit instructions on the crimes he wants people to commit for him. He’s very skilled with his words and speaks like a mafia boss being recorded by the FBI in order to have plausible deniability that he didn’t give ppl instructions to carry something out, yet what he actually wants done gets communicated by his tone of voice and body language.

That’s why you don’t see examples of him giving specific direct commands. He’s very careful not to sound like he’s guilty.


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28 Sep 2022, 1:22 am

It's very interesting to watch.
As he gets more desperate his ranting gets wilder and crazier. What he says is further and further from reality. The faithful toady along behind him regardless. But as the gap widens between the lies and reality and as he repeatedly fails to keep all of his lies lining up in agreement, some folks are beginning to fall off the bandwagon. The crazier it gets the smaller his audience, to some extent.


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28 Sep 2022, 1:34 am

ThisTimelessMoment wrote:
It's very interesting to watch.
As he gets more desperate his ranting gets wilder and crazier. What he says is further and further from reality. The faithful toady along behind him regardless. But as the gap widens between the lies and reality and as he repeatedly fails to keep all of his lies lining up in agreement, some folks are beginning to fall off the bandwagon. The crazier it gets the smaller his audience, to some extent.

That’s precisely why he’s gone full q.. those are the people that will give him attention.


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28 Sep 2022, 5:52 pm

New book: Trump nearly fired Jared and Ivanka via tweet

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Then President Donald Trump nearly fired his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner from the White House via tweet, according to a new book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Trump raised the prospect of firing Ivanka Trump and Kushner, who were both senior White House aides, during meetings with then-chief of staff John Kelly and then-White House counsel Don McGahn, Haberman writes. At one point, he was about to tweet that his daughter and son-in-law were leaving the White House – but he was stopped by Kelly, who told Trump he had to speak with them directly first.

Trump never had such a conversation – one of numerous instances where he avoided interpersonal conflict – and Ivanka Trump and Kushner remained at the White House throughout Trump’s presidency. Still, Trump often diminished Kushner, mocking him as effete, Haberman writes.

“He sounds like a child,” Trump said after Kushner spoke publicly in 2017 following his congressional testimony, according to the book.

In “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” Haberman chronicles the chaos of the Trump White House, with new details about how Trump resisted denouncing White supremacists and made light of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s declining health before her death in 2020 gave him a third justice on the Supreme Court.

But Haberman’s book, which was obtained by CNN ahead of its release on Tuesday, goes beyond the trials and tribulations of the Trump administration to document how Trump’s initial rise in the New York real estate and political world of the 1970s and ’80s permanently shaped his worldview – and by extension, his presidency.

“To fully reckon with Donald Trump, his presidency and political future, people need to know where he comes from,” writes Haberman, a CNN political analyst.

The book is littered with examples dating back decades that document Trump’s obsession with looks, his fixation on racial issues, his gravitation toward strongmen and his willingness to shift his beliefs to fit the moment. Trump tried to recreate the country to mimic New York’s five boroughs, Haberman writes, imagining a presidency that functioned like he was one of the city’s powerful Democratic Party bosses in control of everything

The aides and advisers who spoke to Haberman for the book – she writes that she interviewed more than 250 people – offer a damning portrait of a commander in chief who was uninterested in learning the details of the job, who expected complete loyalty from those around him and who was most concerned with dominance, power and himself.

Kelly, his former chief of staff, is said to have described Trump as a “fascist” – uniquely unfit for the job of leading a constitutional democracy, according to Haberman, citing several who spoke to the retired Marine general.

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich said of the book: “While coastal elites obsess over boring books chock-full of anonymously-sourced mistruths, America is a nation in decline. President Trump is focused on saving America, and there’s nothing the fake news can do about it.”

Haberman depicts all the organizations Trump has run – his businesses, his campaign and the White House – as dysfunctional and staffed by people who often disdained one another. His company executives referred to Trump’s company as the “Trump Disorganization,” according to the book, which includes examples of several unusual and eyebrow-raising business practices.

That dysfunction spilled into Trump’s campaign and ultimately the White House, where Trump churned through aides and Cabinet secretaries alike, dismissing the advice offered by his own staff.

When then-candidate Trump was under pressure in 2016 to denounce White supremacists like David Duke who were supporting his campaign, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was dispatched to urge Trump to be more forceful distancing himself. Trump was heard responding to Christie on the phone that he would get to it – but it didn’t have to happen too quickly, Haberman writes.

“A lot of these people vote,” Trump told Christie, before ending the call.

According to the book, several Cabinet officials believed Trump had issues with female leaders. He disliked former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and described her in a meeting as “that b***h,” Haberman writes.

Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper believed Trump’s push to withdraw US troops from Germany was purely out of personal spite, according to the author.

The book shows Trump’s failure to grasp basic policy concepts, such as Trump suggesting in an interview with Haberman that the Senate’s minority party could block legislation by skipping votes. “The vice president’s vote doesn’t count. It doesn’t count. You might want to check this,” Trump said.

When the House introduced articles of impeachment against Trump for the first time in 2019, Trump reacted with a familiar refrain, according to the book: “I’ll just sue Congress. They can’t do this to me.”

In the final year of his presidency, Trump tried to wish away the topic of coronavirus, Haberman writes, minimizing it publicly out of an apparent belief that things only existed if they were discussed openly.

Before Ginsburg’s death in 2020 created a last-minute Supreme Court vacancy that Trump filled just ahead of the presidential election, Haberman writes that Trump would make light of the justice’s deteriorating health.

Confidence Man” chronicles how Trump’s fixation on race, gender and religion dates back decades, shaped by a tumultuous period in New York City’s history.

“Racial is more severe in New York than it is anywhere else that I can think of,” Trump said in a post-presidency interview with Haberman, who writes that Trump “often seemed frozen in time” in 1980s New York and viewed tribal conflict as inevitable.

During the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, Trump’s fear of germs and illness led him to announce publicly he would require dates to take an AIDS test, and Haberman writes he called reporters to inquire if people he had met with might be gay – concerned because they had exchanged a handshake.

In the late 1990s, after Trump divorced Marla Maples, he had a relationship with a model, Kara Young, who was the daughter of a Black mother and White father. Haberman writes that after meeting Young’s parents, Trump told her she had gotten her beauty from her mother and intelligence “from her dad, the white side.”

Trump laughed as he said it, Haberman writes. Young told him it wasn’t something to joke about.

The former President remained focus on how those who represented him looked.

The book includes several examples of Trump’s lurid comments, including one episode in 2016 while he was prepping for a town-hall style debate against Hillary Clinton. Then-Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, playing the character of a young leader of a transgender student association, asked Trump his position on whether someone like her could use the girls’ bathroom.

“I have a question,” Trump said to a room full of his advisers, Haberman writes. “Cocked or decocked?”

The group gave Trump blank stares, Haberman writes, and he made a chopping gesture with his hand. “With cock or without cock?” he asked.


You’re blowing this’: New book reveals Melania Trump criticized her husband’s handling of Covid
Quote:
Former President Donald Trump’s top general feared he would authorize a strike on Iran as his presidency ended. His intelligence chief wondered what Russia had on him. A billionaire friend convinced him to try buying Greenland. A half-dozen top officials considered resigning en masse.

Even his wife, first lady Melania Trump, was “rattled by the coronavirus and convinced that Trump was screwing up,” according to a forthcoming book from New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser set to publish on Tuesday.

In a phone call with former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who maintained ties to the White House despite occasional criticism of Trump, Melania Trump sought help convincing her husband to take the pandemic more seriously.

“‘You’re blowing this,” she recalled telling her husband,” the authors write. “’This is serious. It’s going to be really bad, and you need to take it more seriously than you’re taking it.’ He had just dismissed her. ‘You worry too much,’ she remembered him saying. ‘Forget it.’ “

The razor’s-edge instability clouding Trump’s four-year tenure in the White House led many of his senior-most advisers to worry about the fate of the country. The volatility is laid bare in new detail in “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.” The reporting for the book included two interviews with the former President at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

Baker and Glasser write that many of the well-known fears about Trump’s presidency were in fact closer to reality than previously reported, leading to widespread attempts among those who worked for him to head off disaster.

The revelations could also foretell the presidency Trump might oversee should he return to the White House in 2025.

The book describes deep concerns among Trump’s national security team, led by Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and others, that the then-President would ignite a conflict with Iran in the waning days of his presidency or that he could stumble into nuclear war with North Korea.

One administration official told Trump before the 2020 election that if he lost, he should strike Iran’s nuclear program, the authors report. “Milley at the time told his staff it was a ‘What the f— are these guys talking about?’ moment,” they write. “Now, it seemed frighteningly possible.”

The tensions with Iran even permeated the walls of Mar-a-Lago. Trump told guests at a cocktail party over the holidays in 2020 that he was leaving early to return to Washington because of fears Iran may be trying to assassinate him to avenge the US killing of the country’s top general a year earlier.

Concerns over Trump’s behavior on the world stage began nearly as soon as he took office. More than simply a passing grudge, Trump’s desire to withdraw the United States from NATO was in fact a sustained effort that was “much more serious than people realized,” one senior White House official said – an outcome that could have dramatically altered the current war in Ukraine.

Following a 2018 meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland – after which Trump sided with Putin over US intelligence agencies who had determined Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election – the top US intelligence official was left wondering what Trump’s real motives were.

“I never could come to a conclusion. It raised the question in everybody’s mind: What does Putin have on him that causes him to do something that undermines his credibility?” Dan Coats, the then-director of national intelligence, reflected to associates afterward, according to the book.

And a months-long fixation with purchasing Greenland from Denmark went far deeper than previously disclosed, inspired in the early days of Trump’s presidency by a wealthy friend from New York, the cosmetics heir Ron Lauder.

“I said, ‘Why don’t we have that?’ You take a look at a map. I’m a real estate developer, I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different,” Trump told the reporters for their book.

Lauder proposed to Trump’s then-national security adviser John Bolton that he act as a “back channel” to the Danish government. Instead, top National Security Council aides engaged for months in secret talks with Denmark’s ambassador to the United States about Greenland.

Eventually, however, public revelations about Trump’s plans to buy the island prompted indignation in both Greenland and Denmark, scuttling any effort to enhance the US role in an increasingly strategic area. Trump called the Danish leader “nasty” for rejecting his idea and canceled a trip to Copenhagen.

Trump enjoyed friendlier relations with other world leaders, but often imposed his own brand of chaos.

Baker and Glasser report Trump once abruptly phoned Jordan’s King Abdullah II to inform him he was “going to give you the West Bank,” prompting the monarch to tell a friend he thought he was having a heart attack.

“I couldn’t breathe. I was bent doubled over,” he said.

And while Trump liked to frequently tout that then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe – who was assassinated in July – had nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump had actually explicitly made the request to Abe during dinner in New York.

“The President asked Abe over dinner to nominate him,” a senior Trump national security official says in the book.

Baker and Glasser describe previously unreported plans by members of Trump’s Cabinet to collectively resign amid the chaos, only to remain in their posts out of concern for whohe might select to replace them.

In encrypted text messages, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a top aide that five senior officials in the Trump administration – including the secretaries of Defense, Education and Interior – were on the verge of quitting amid a particularly chaotic period ahead of the 2018 midterms.

“Ok for the first time I am actually scared for the country. The insanity has been loosed,” she wrote in the messages.

Trump’s demands on his team included outlandish requests like abolishing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals after it blocked one of his immigration policies.


This is the man the is favored to win the Republican party nomination and a legitimate chance of being reelected. An indictment of America circa 2022.


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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 28 Sep 2022, 6:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.

kraftiekortie
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28 Sep 2022, 5:58 pm

Man....I wish Trump doing all this was on tape!

But then.....even in the face of being confronted with him on tape, he'd still deny it!



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28 Sep 2022, 6:01 pm

I wish Trump would take a trip to the Bermuda Triangle and invite his buddy Putin to join him.



goldfish21
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29 Sep 2022, 1:48 am

Crickets from trump supporters, I see.

I suppose it's quite difficult to praise the guy in this thread given the list of batshit crazy crap he said and did - and this is one of many lists.

Still, I expect the regular peanut gallery to come and defend the indefensible somehow. Curious to see what sort of pretzels they're able to twist themselves into.


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DeathFlowerKing
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29 Sep 2022, 7:51 am

And I wish he would take all of his supporters to the Bermuda Triangle too. I'm getting so sick and tired of his cult of fascist wannabes I wouldn't feel any pity for them at all if they were to just 'disappear'. I mean that.



goldfish21
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29 Sep 2022, 11:02 am

DeathFlowerKing wrote:
And I wish he would take all of his supporters to the Bermuda Triangle too. I'm getting so sick and tired of his cult of fascist wannabes I wouldn't feel any pity for them at all if they were to just 'disappear'. I mean that.

:heart: :heart: :heart:


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