We have to come up, and we can come up with many different plans. In fact, plans you don’t even know about will be devised because we’re going to come up with plans – healthcare plans – that will be so good.
— President Donald Trump
Category: Trump
The Dictator’s Playbook
- Address your base. Make it so opposition would be very uncomfortable.
- Hold rallies after you are elected, simply to rile up your supporters.
- Publish hotshot pictures, and today videos, of yourself physically beating up someone to show how tough you are and to lower the threshold of physical violence in your supporters.
- Find a common enemy, a scapegoat that can’t defend itself. Muslims in general are a good example. “The Media” portrayed as evil and dishonest is another example.
- Define opposition to your views as fake news.
- Define the attempt of discovering the truth of what happened as unpatriotic, or dishonest, or even criminal.
- Start attacking the Constitution and position it as opposed to the good of the people.
- Position yourself as the “only one who can solve these problems.”
- Equating your ambitions and goals with the “objectives of the people.”
- Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat……
Trump has been using all those techniques to rile up his base.
Hitler did the same thing in 1932 and 1933, and successfully took power of an entire country with a minority of supporters, because those supporters quickly resorted to physical violence, silencing of the media by threat of physical violence, and quickly and unconstitutionally usurping police power in all areas of law enforcement. Once law enforcement was taken over, there was no turning back. The country was a thug, and it beat up its people. Then it beat up other people. It took 12 years, and 60 million deaths, to stop that thug. Then it took another half decade of misery before that country started its recovery.
Trump is working the Hitler playbook like a master. 2017 is 1933. Everything is on track.
This time it’s called: Make America Great Again.
Modern Day Presidential
My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2017
This man is truly nuts. Yet, we elected him to the presidency.
Death by Jihadists
Here is a little chart I put together listing numbers of deaths by various, sometimes surprising causes:
| Cause of Death | Annual | Source |
| Islamic jihadist immigrants | 2 | |
| Right-wing terrorists | 5 | |
| Latex balloons | 5 | source |
| All Islamic terrorists (incl. US citizens) | 9 | |
| Crushed by vending machines falling over | 10 | source |
| Armed toddlers | 21 | |
| Lightning | 31 | |
| Lawnmowers | 69 | |
| Falling coconuts on beaches | 150 | |
| Hit by a bus | 264 | |
| Falling out of bed | 450 | |
| Autoerotic asphyxiation | 600 | source |
| Automobile crashes | 35000 | |
| Opioid drug overdoses | 50000 | source |
I agree that some of these are less than serious, and when I researched them individually I found various discrepancies. For instance, I could not tell whether the number of people choking themselves while masturbating (autoerotic asphyxiation) is a world-wide or US statistic.
Then there are the lawnmowers, those vicious killers. I just could not believe that number, but as I researched, I found that lawnmower deaths are mostly due to rolling over into ponds and creeks, and drowning in the process. Some are due to riding the lawnmowers on streets and being run over by cars.
But my point actually is that our president has us all frothing at the mouth about evil terrorists coming into the United States and killing us. The entire nation is debating what we should do about those terrorists, and we are spending massive amounts of time talking about it in the national media. The courts are choked with it, all the way to the Supreme Court. With a partial ban in place, immigration facilities at airports are affected, needing manpower. Let alone all the lawsuits that will be filed on behalf of people who think they were wronged. This entire frenzy was created by a single, obsessed man, who has used this as a vehicle to gain power and to aggrandize himself.
If we really wanted to save American lives, making Americans safer, we should think about some of the other causes of death in the chart above.
For instance, we used to have a problem with lawn darts:
Over a period of eight years, lawn darts had sent 6,100 people to the emergency room. 81% of those cases involved children 15 or younger, and half of those were 10 or younger. The majority of injuries were to the head, face, eyes or ears, and many had led to permanent injury or disability.
Wow, we were able to make America safer by banning lawn darts! Now those 6,100 people over 8 years, or 762 a year, are no longer getting injured.
How about we ban latex balloons! It will save five children a year from choking to death. Let’s create a frenzy about that! Those evil balloon makers!
If President Trump and all our politicians were REALLY concerned with the health and safety of Americans, they would work on solutions to the opioid abuse epidemic we are dealing with in the United States right now. But they are not talking about that.
Trump does not care one bit about the health and safety of Americans. He cares about himself, and himself only. And his actions and inactions show that loud and clear.
Killing Bears While They Hibernate – and Governmental Overreach
Why would our government craft bills that allow hunters to kill bears while they hibernate, or wolves and their young in dens?
There has been a public outcry about Trump’s initiative. Looking at it further, it’s less about bears and wolves, than it is about governmental reach and what conservatives call “wrongful seizure of authority.” Of course, this was supported by the NRA and the Safari Club International.
In reality, however, most of those practices were already prohibited to sport hunters under Alaska law, and some of them, including hunting coyotes in their dens and killing hibernating bears and cubs, were permitted to subsistence hunters even under the federal regulations.
The deeper issue all along was state vs. federal control of wildlife management. Despite support from scientific, environmental, and animal welfare advocacy groups, the federal restrictions were considered intrusive and unwarranted by many Alaskans. The state filed a lawsuit in January 2017 contending that the rules amounted to federal overreach, harming the ecosystem and citizens of Alaska. With the support of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Safari Club International, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) introduced H.J. Res. 69 in February 2017 to redress what he termed a “wrongful seizure of authority”:
If you read the Snopes analysis you will come away with the realization that as a result of this, no more or less bears will really be affected. It’s about Obama, and undoing his initiatives, relentlessly, one after the other.
Since Trump has no real convictions, or strategy, or vision other than self-aggrandizement, he will sign anything his special interest friends and kleptocrats will put in front of him.
Bears be damned.
Trump on Mueller’s Friendship with Comey: Bothersome
Trump remarked on “Fox and Friends” in an interview Friday that special counsel Robert Mueller is “very, very good friends with Comey, which is very bothersome.”
I find it bothersome that our President of the United States is appears to be very good friends with Vladimir Putin, and he does not find it disturbing that a foreign adversarial power appears to have messed with our elections in 2016. I find it bothersome that the president is not doing his duty, defending the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
What do you find more bothersome?
Adulation and Sycophants
This must be the weirdest cabinet meeting in the history of the United States.
Now, children, let’s all be grateful to be here. Could each one of you all tell me why you love me, and why I am so great?
Let’s all pledge allegiance to the supreme leader of our glorious and successful country.
This makes me feel so great, so successful, so powerful.
Ahhh.
Who does this? If this had happened to me at junior high school I would have cracked up. Who subjects grown adults to peer pressure to say self-humiliating crap on national TV?
General Mattis did not look happy sitting there and going through this ridiculous procedure.
Children, all!
Trump’s Claim of Vindication
Trump now claims that Comey’s testimony vindicated him, because Comey said that he was not personally under investigation by the FBI.
This is ridiculous. Just because the FBI wasn’t investigating him does not mean he didn’t do it.
That be like me wearing a hoodie on 5th Avenue in New York, shooting a passerby on the sidewalk and melting away into the crowd. Nobody knows who I was. So I am not under investigation.
Does that mean no crime has been committed?
That’s like saying a tree fell in the woods, and because the FBI wasn’t there to hear it, it didn’t make any noise.
Let’s just wait until they threaten to lock up Flynn for treason. When Flynn faces prison, he will sing like a bird, and Trump will stop tweeting.
Trump: The Leaker is the Bad Guy
Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2017
So Trump sure looks like he committed obstruction of justice. We’re not even talking about the underlying possibility of treason by his staff and possibly himself. We’re just talking about his efforts of the cover-up.
Yet, here he is, making it sound like that’s all okay because Comey is the bad guy for finding out about it and leaking it? Kill the messenger, and now the alleged crime somehow goes away?
The way I see it, Comey is a national hero. Without him, the American people would not know about the kind of shit that is going down in the White House – in the name of the American people.
If Trump is eventually vindicated, and Mueller finds that he did nothing wrong, great! I will accept that. In the meantime, let’s not get distracted about the messages and messengers, let’s observe the facts.
Trump lied blatantly and openly many times on national TV. You really think he just now stopped lying?
Think again. Trump is a disgrace to our country.
Faking It and How Stupid it Looks
We have all seen it when someone pretends they have done something, or experienced something, but they really haven’t. You might remember the scene in the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, where he talked about feeling a woman’s breasts. After a few descriptive comments, he says “two bags of sand” and the other guys all stop and frown. “Two bags of sand???”
I am a computer software professional. I may not know all the details of the current new programming languages, but I have done many years of programming. When somebody’s nephew at a backyard BBQ starts talking about his vast experience with computers, and how he is such an expert, it usually takes me about 10 or 15 seconds of listening before I know whether the guy knows what he is talking about, or whether he is faking it.
I am not unique in this. Anyone with special expertise in a given field has had this experience of running into an impostor who is trying to impress all the girls at the party by exaggerating his skills or expertise. To the expert, he just looks ridiculous.
When Trump traveled overseas a couple of weeks ago he met with the heads of state of the G7. Every one of those individuals, whether Trump realizes it or not, is at the very top of their profession and careers. They made it to the pinnacle of power in their own country. They are expert diplomats, savvy politicians and often have advanced degrees. Angela Merkel holds a Ph.D. in Physics, and is in her third term in office as chancellor.
What do you surmise the heads of state of the G7 think of Donald Trump?
The Trumps Lecturing us about Morality
President Trump’s son Eric Trump on Tuesday said Democrats are “not even people” to him after their obstruction of his father’s agenda.
“I’ve never seen hatred like this,” he said on Fox News’s “Hannity” Tuesday night. “To me, they’re not even people. It’s so, so sad. Morality’s just gone, morals have flown out the window and we deserve so much better than this as a country.”
Seriously? The most immoral man ever to reach high office in the United States has his son lecture us about the morality of 50% of the people in the United States?
This is the man whose father is the “grab them by the pussy” guy, who boasts that celebrities can get away with sexual harassment any time.
This is man lecturing us about morals, whose brother has his picture taken with the tail of an elephant he killed for sport.
This is the man with the dead leopard in his arms that he killed for sport.
This is man that tells us that Democrats are “not even people” after he was a Democrat himself not too long ago and could not even vote for his father as a Republican.
How can a person classify a people into two separate groups, people and not-people, simply based on political affiliation? Who are these “democrats” that he is talking about? The not-people. The immoral?
I have only one word:
Sick!
Trump, Coal and Tesla
After pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, Trump and Pruitt have been announcing that this would create lots of American jobs.
On Meet the Press on Sunday, Pruitt said that since the fourth quarter of last year to most recently, we have added almost 50,000 jobs in the coal sector.
This statement is completely wrong. There are only about 51,000 jobs in the entire coal industry in the U.S. Last month, 400 coal jobs were added. The entire U.S. mining sector added 7,000 jobs last month or 50,000 since the 4th quarter of 2016. Perhaps that was the figure Pruitt was quoting, but he carefully misquoted it so the numbers were vastly inflated.
Trump and Pruitt seem to be building up fossil fuel industries as massive job creators, which is just flat wrong. In comparison, just look at Tesla, just one company, which has over 1,800 job openings in the U.S. right now. Tesla is not known for its exciting benefits and great wages, but their high-pressure jobs in factories must be at least as good as coal mining jobs. If you had to pick a job, working in a coal mine or working for Tesla, which would you pick?
Coal is dead. It’s a dead industry, and no amount of deregulation is going to bring it back. Trump and the EPA can do whatever they want, we’re going to be buying less and less coal, and coal jobs will continue to disappear. The people are deciding, not Trump.
It’s all bluster.
The Confused Mind of Our President
The Justice Dept. should have stayed with the original Travel Ban, not the watered down, politically correct version they submitted to S.C.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 5, 2017
Check out the tweet above. At 3:29am this morning, Trump apparently couldn’t stand it anymore. He had to attack somebody. So he came after himself.
First, he called his Executive Order, which was found unconstitutional by the courts twice, a Travel Ban. Calling it that was exactly one of the reasons why it was struck down. So he reaffirmed the arguments of the courts here.
Then he threw the Justice Department under the bus. These are people who work for him, and under him. He tells the Justice Department what to draft, and then they draft it, and then he signs it. So telling the Justice Department it “should have” done something is like telling himself he got it wrong, or he didn’t know what he was doing at the time.
Then he made himself look like a fool. He, not the Justice Department, was who signed the Executive Order that was found unconstitutional. He was the one that signed it. It was his order, not that of the Justice Department. Is he therefore saying that he wishes he had done something different?
How would you like to work for a boss who attacks and accuses you on a whim, whether you deserve any blame or not? How would you like to work for a boss who does one thing today, and then blames you for him doing it tomorrow? Clearly, this man is not thinking rationally, at 3:29am. How can he find anyone to work for him?
And that is our President of the United States.
1932
“How many look up to him [Hitler] with touching faith as their helper, their savior, their deliverer from unbearable distress.”
—Louis Solmitz, Hamburg schoolteacher, 1932
2017
“President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor … and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible.”
— Official White House response to reports that Trump berates, insults, and belittles members of his staff.
A Neophyte, two Models and a Used Car Salesman Visit the Pope
What is with these outfits? Anyone? I thought we had the Trumpashians in the White House, instead it’s the Adams Family. And the Pope is not having any fun.
