The Donald J. Trump Presidency

TOMORROW'S HEADLINE: Did President Trump look at the eclipse with no glasses to distract us from his Afghanistan surge?

Last night's speech was fine more or less. Now let's all get ready to watch him fuck it up when he goes off script tonight at his dumb rally event.

I saw last night's speech and thought Trump sounded completely unhinged. His supporters loved it. They see a tough guy who isn't PC.

I should be used to it by now, but I'm not.

it's almost satisfying that we now have a foolproof metric for discounting the views and opinions of a person for the rest of their existence. if anyone you know supports Donald Trump you can be 100% certain that they have a completely messed up worldview and you need to be skeptical of anything they say ever.

The bottom is going to fall out in the month of September. He is alienating too many Republican lawmakers and the stupidly politicized non-issue of the debt ceiling is going to be the final nail in the coffin.

it just occurred to me that i don't remember what Sarah Huckabee Sanders sounds like because i refuse to watch or listen to any of the propaganda coming out of this White Man's House.

her, Bannon, Kellyanne, Steve Miller, et al have really raised the bar for punchable faces.

To be fair that propaganda wasn't allowed to be recorded for a while there.

But yeah, I get all my news from the written word. There was a lot of snickering when I finally heard Kushner's stupid voice.

Same. I was reflecting on this yesterday and realized it had been months since I heard Trump's voice as well.

Somewhat unrelated, but today I was scrolling through the New York Times/Guardian/BBC front pages on my phone and legitimately started feeling panicky and sick.

A common feeling!

the news only serves to make me angry, but i feel empty if i don't "know what happened" in the dumb world each day.

I honestly check the news several times a day to see if the world is about to end.

at least we'll all get to die together

An aptly socialist approach.

I'm hoping for a massive, league wide protest from the players during the anthem this weekend. Maybe even hold up pictures of Kaep.

Then, counter protests from Trump supporters by refusing to show up & costing these dog shit owners money because none will stand up to this racist president.

Is Kaepernick good? Honest question.

Trump voters hate him!

Ned Braden wrote:Is Kaepernick good? Honest question.

like, as a football player? i duno

as an activist? he's great

Kaep as a player is significantly better than the hordes of white mediocrity that backup the star QBs in the league. all the teams in the league have adjudged that the PR hit they'll take from their fanbase for employing Kaep isn't worth a solid upgrade at the backup QB slot--this is the consensus view of football talent evaluators, not political activists.

LeSean McCoy even put it out their pretty plainly: https://www.si.com/nfl/2017/08/24/lasean-mccoy-colin-kapernick-national-anthem-protest

it's not that Kaep isn't good enough to play, it's that he's not so overwhelmingly good that teams will push through the "distraction" (read: death threats from their culturally conservative fanbases)

Trump tweeting about this stuff instead of being a president, and the subsequent media explosion just annoys me to high heaven, and the legitimate protest issue at hand seems to have mostly been forgotten. All these articles about whether the guy was blacklisted by the NFL just had me wondering is all. The only thing I've noticed in my daily, non NFL watching life, is that old civilian workers on military bases love themselves some American flag worship.

i have never once said the pledge of allegiance in school. i can't recite the national anthem. i never went to a high school football game. how people have deeply internalized a fealty to the flag (or any flag) is emotionally foreign to me.

i grew up in the Bush years (and am a student of history), so i intellectually understand how the rhetoric of an appeal to patriotism is employed to great effect, but it's still hard for me to believe that grown adults take it as a personal attack on their family when someone doesn't salute the flag at a sporting event. i have learned to understand it, but it still shocks my conscience.

Trump's comments, last week, turned the player's protest about police brutality and racial injustice into something else. He turned it into a Trump protest. That's Trump's talent. He can make anything about him.

Sad to see how easily the people he conned into voting for him continue to be conned by everything he says.

There is nothing you can say to them to get through to them.

It is, now and forever, everyone's fault but their own.

They will discover new enemies and reframe the situation in any way necessary to make themselves into the real victims no matter what the issue is. They have no positions or convictions aside from whatever is convenient or necessary to punish poor people and spite anyone they perceive as "liberal."

You already know this but it cannot be repeated enough, and if I'm not saying anything new here then please be my guest and take this chance to do what I can't.

Wish I could tell you that you're wrong and that there's something bigger.

2020 can't come soon enough.

In all honesty, this is exactly the sort of thing these idiots voted this nutcase in to do. The legislative agenda may be DOA but they're sticking it to those kneeling football players so who cares.