The Presidency of Donald J. Trump, Episode XIV: T-minus 97 Hours

lol 16:40 where 6 cops dive on one guy and punch him in his ribs full strength when he’s on the ground. more of that plz next time

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Very strange. They beat the snot out of one guy, the rest of the police are just standing around seemingly doing very little. I think they were overwhelmed and probably confused about what to do, but it does feel like they may have laid up a bit here. It doesn’t have to be fully intentional for them to take part in the coup, just have to give into white people a lot easier than they would anyone else.

That guy they beat up was probably an actual antifa.

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Like the joke about vegans, but for real: don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

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That seems to be a jpg

source

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Also, in another crowdsourcing failure, the dude from Chicago appears not to be the guy who threw the fire extinguisher.

Should i delete my earlier posts? Does it matter?

From the December 3 New York Review of Books.

At 2:23 AM on the morning after Election Day, Trump turned the key and locked American democracy into an undetermined, perhaps indeterminable, condition. When he declared an election that was still very much alive to be a dead thing, over and done with—“Frankly we did win this election”—he made the United States a liminal space in which a supposedly epic moment in its history both happened and did not happen.

Trump has long framed the immediate post-election period as a temporal no-man’s-land. Neither in his first nor in his second campaigns for the presidency did he ever commit himself clearly to accepting the result of the vote. Asked in the third presidential debate of 2016 whether he would do so, he replied, “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. Okay?” What is being suspended now is both the disbelief of his supporters in the possibility of his defeat and the very concept of a transition of power.

In this frame of mind, there can never be a result of the 2020 election. One thing we can be sure of is that for Trump and his followers there are not five stages of grief, leading from denial to acceptance. The furthest their sense of it can go is to the second stage, anger. Just as there is “long Covid,” there is long Trump. The staying power of his destructiveness lies in the way that disputed defeat suits him almost as much as victory. It vindicates the self-pity that he has encouraged among his supporters, the belief that everything is rigged against them, that the world is a plot to steal from them their natural due as Americans.

He has created for them a wide space to occupy, that great prairie of paranoia that stretches between what happened and what really happened. What really happened is what always occurs in every Trump story: he won big. Losing, for Trump, is not possible. It pertains to a category of humanity that he calls in The Art of the Deal “life’s losers.” As he exclaimed to his fans at one of his final rallies in Grand Rapids, Michigan, after showing them a video of Joe Biden stammering, “The concept of losing to this guy!” When you define your opponent as a contemptible wretch, that thought is inconceivable.

Usually, at this point, we get the postmortem. But there is no body. The malignant presidency of Donald Trump seems moribund, but also vigorously alive. Trumpism, after all, is a narrative of death and resurrection, in which bankruptcy becomes The Art of the Comeback and American carnage becomes American renaissance. Life after death is Trumpism’s governing trope. On its mental map, the point of no return can never be marked. We have, after all, already witnessed the Good Friday and Easter Sunday of Donald Trump. In a grotesque parody of the Christian narrative, Trump presented his contraction of Covid-19 not as a consequence of his own narcissistic recklessness but as a Jesus-like self-sacrifice—he caught the virus on behalf of the people. Trump “died,” was in the “tomb” of Walter Reed hospital for three days and then rose again and appeared to many. This fable seems to have worked for his supporters, electrifying them with its evidence of their leader’s indefatigability. The deaths of others—230,000 victims of Covid-19 by election day—did not prompt a turn against the president who presided over them. His base acted, rather, as the foil for his miraculous, manic display of vivacity in the last days of the campaign.

Article: Democracy’s Afterlife | Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

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I’d add a edit comment rather than delete.

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Seems like part of police reform needs to be some kind of deprogramming. Make them pass some kind of test to prove that they understand what America is supposed to be about.

Remember when Biden culled his secret service detail of Trump loyalists a month or so ago and we all just kind of ignored it?

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Biden should have a big ceremony in his first week and award Belichek the medal of freedom.

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Some have already noted this, but I think dems can get republicans on board to strike a mortal blow to antifa by arresting everyone who stormed the capitol.

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74 million person long waiting list for that class

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https://twitter.com/GeoffRBennett/status/1348980390816575489

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Ted Cruz making a strong case for himself as the next MAGA-friendly presidential candidate.

@BestOf

FUCK YOU SHELDON

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Of course he is. Cruz is a sociopathic career climber. He wants to be President and he doesn’t care how it happens.

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Evil people really can die?

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D&D is passé, Warhammer 40k is the preferred option for the realistically-minded, modern roleplayer!

(you basically play as fascists, though sort of unwittingly so)

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Rot in hell

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2021 looking up

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