by liberal japonicus
It’s a small drop in the ocean of crap, but the deranged post about Rob Reiner’s death on Trump’s account on Truth Social has me wonder. This Axios piece will get you up to speed if you were blissfully unaware of this. I would observe that seeing pieces like this makes me think that all those people who wrote ‘This is the day Trump became president’ articles lauding some miniscule effort on his part have repurposed their skill set.
Almost all of the pieces about Trump and Reiner neither (with good reason) link to the Truth Social post nor quote it verbatim. However, that’s a bit unfortunate, because after the accusation of Trump Derangement Syndrome, there is this:
He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,
If Trump actually wrote that, the section in bold is quite strange, because it sounds like what a third person would write. I realize it might be fanciful to think that cette espèce de merde orange would hold to discourse norms, and the whole process of referring to oneself in the third person (illeism if you want to know the technical term) is something we might expect of Trump and his inflated notions of self-importance, but to me, this really sounds like someone else is writing it.
I don’t want to suggest this is some incredible discovery. One has to assume that almost everyone with a social media presence has got a team of people churning out content. There was the controversy when it was revealed that George Takei had a team helping him with his popular facebook page. And Trump’s literacy skills notwithstanding, his employment of Tony Schwartz as the ghostwriter on Art of the Deal would certainly indicate a pattern. I’m wondering if we will ever get a look behind that screen. Are the writers true believers or guys (I have to imagine it is only men, not only because I can’t imagine Trump hiring women to write for him, though there could be some mashup of Kristi Noem and Caroline Levitt in the Trump Truth Social writing room pitching ideas, I suppose)
An open thread about US politics, if you can keep whatever you may be snacking on down.
HIs aides seem to think that MORE exposure of Trump being Trump will help him, but I don’t think his performance on prime time went over all that well with anyone outside the cult–and might have been a bit cringy to some cult members. I know Trump and Republican media have degenerated the tone of our public discourse and normalized behavior which should seem disgusting, but even with that, how many people like being shouted at by a red-faced, angry old man?
A number of people have reported that the real reason Trump is dismantling NCAR is to punish Colorado’s governor for not releasing Tina Peters from jail. Peters is the former Mesa County clerk and “the 2020 election was stolen” fanatic who was convicted of several state crimes associated with her providing unauthorized persons access to the voting machines in her care, and that person breaking the seals, opening the covers, and tinkering with the insides.
I skimmed some of the stories in the Wyoming press. Wyoming’s Congress critters either did not respond to questions, or said that they had not heard from the administration about the fate of the supercomputer center in Wyoming.
This is Steward Lee’s latest, on Trump’s war against the media, and in this case the BBC. There are various links throughout it, so I am splitting it into 2 parts in the hope that it doesn’t go into moderation.
Part 1
Stewart Lee: Trump’s BBC lawsuit isn’t about money. It’s about destroying a news providerThe White House’s dead-eyed shark has monetised his presidency so well that he can pay whatever it costs to discredit institutions that may threaten him.
Donald Trump is taking legal action against the BBC for defamation. Apparently the adjudicated sex offender and pussy-grabbing serial liar still has a reputation that can be damaged. Even if all the president of the United States had ever done was that weird hand dance to Village People’s YMCA and his ill-judged playground impression of the disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, it’s doubtful his reputation would have far to fall, but here goes. In other news, you can say what you like about Fred West but don’t criticise his patio-laying skills, which were exemplary.
There is now a terrible risk that, should Trump win the case, the BBC’s assets will be forfeited to him. This means he may own the Doctor Who franchise, and thus the Tardis technology itself, allowing Trump to turn back time in Britain on behalf of Nigel Farage, and return us to a homogenous warm-beer world of whiteness where you can hiss gas noises at Jews and say it was harmless banter if it even happened, which Richard Tice says it didn’t anyway, and he should know, as he keeps a close watch on British affairs from a sunbed in Dubai.
It doesn’t matter how much the improbable legal action costs Trump, whose pockets are bottomless, especially since he worked out how to monetise almost every aspect of the presidency. You can even buy a Donald Trump cologne for men called Fight Fight Fight, after the phrase the president cried out after surviving the near-fatal attack on his right ear. I’m bringing out a Donald Trump scent for the ladies. It’s called Fight Fight Fight Fight Fight Off Donald Trump’s Unwanted Sexual Advances.
Sniff the Trump scent hard enough and it may even erase the memory of the president’s penis, which, according to the adult film actor Stormy Daniels, looks like “the mushroom character in Mario Kart”, and is rumoured to have been the inspiration for the Can song Mushroom, after the group’s vocalist, Damo Suzuki, shared a urinal trough with the 25-year-old Trump in a Manhattan nightclub in 1971.
Trump’s legal action against the BBC is worth it whatever it costs, because it allows him to spend however long the case drags on for repeating claims about the unreliability of journalists, specifically the BBC. This gradual process of erosion of public trust in news providers will benefit Trump enormously should, for example, anyone ever write scathingly about his monetisation of the presidency. Cheap at half the price!
Is it possible that the death of accurate news reporting is just a side-effect of the Jeffrey Epstein case, and of dark forces trying to make sure whatever happened on Paedophile Island stays on Paedophile Island? And who decided to name it that anyway? It’s like Tracey Island but instead of being full of futuristic space-copter Thunderbirds saving lives, there’s just loads of middle-aged billionaires in toupees and Speedos leering at things.
Trump’s instinctive attempts to create smokescreens for his corruption don’t even have to make any sense. The son of film-maker Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle was charged with their murder last Sunday. Less than 24 hours later Trump took to social media to say that Reiner died “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” (capitals the president’s own) as if some vengeful Maga-supporting deity had used the Reiners’ killer as his own instrument of justice. Did Charlie Kirk, a kind of saint who only wanted to spread love and kindness to all humanity, take a bullet in the face for this? And yet Keir Starmer still seems to think he can do business with this dead-eyed great white shark of a man. He’s going to need a bigger boat.
Part 2
Predictably, the reliably unreliable Trump has already pulled the plug on the pathetically optimistic Starmer’s elephant-trumpeted $40bn Tech Prosperity Deal, as part of his attempts to ensure access to the soggy brains of ChatGPT-ravaged Europeans for his acquiescent social media propaganda platforms, all those royal breakfasts wasted. What lemming-like impulse compelled the Labour government to agree to making Great Britain an enormous energy-draining battery to power the servers that spread unregulated lies about Europe anyway, whose liberal democracy Trump openly declared this month that he intends to destroy? Here’s $40bn, Mr Starmer. Now open the oven and stick your head in.
Trump’s high-profile attempt to discredit British news providers goes hand in hand with the ongoing churn of social media accounts, many of which are just now unstaffed AI bots running helpfully from Russian addresses, mangling out unsubstantiated far-right propaganda designed to destabilise European democracies on now-unregulated American platforms. I’ve told the following story so many times even I am sick of it, and I love mind-numbing repetition: a racist auntie shared with me some Facebook flotsam in the form of an essay by an academic, explaining why Muslims are subhuman. I pointed out to her that neither the academic, nor the academic institution he belonged to, actually existed. “Yes,” she said, “but I still think the article makes a lot of good points.”
This abject stupidity, combined with hi-tech nuclear-powered propaganda, is what democracy is up against. And Starmer is sleepwalking into European liberal democracy’s online accelerated death spiral, like Billy Blackberry ™ ® from the Munch Bunch ™ ® happily lowering himself into a smoothie maker and thinking it’s a tiny foam-filled jacuzzi specially designed for anthropomorphised fruit-men.
Logically, Downing Street should turn itself into a massive content factory, flooding the internet with enough true stories about whatever positive news stories it can find, presented with enough wit and clarity to make them massively shareable, to counteract Musk and Putin’s propaganda. But the problem is Downing Street’s idea of working the internet is a TikTok clip of Keir Starmer standing near a tree. We’re doomed.
Stewart Lee!
Well, he does seem to be a steward of sorts.
Trump’s suit against the BBC looks like turning into an own goal. The BBC has filed discovery motions demanding Trump disclosure his taxes for the last decade or more (to substantiate, or not, his claims of financial harm), his medical records (to substantiate or not his claims of other kinds of harm). All that information he has been desperately trying to keep concealed.
Oops.
This would not be the first time Trump (or assorted other RW powers) drop a case as soon as it becomes clear how much discovery will reveal. Eg, the Fox News Network paid three-quarters of a billion dollars rather than let what Dominion had from discovery go public.