BeaverFever

How so?? By imposing the Magnitsky sanctions that Trump wanted removed? By denouncing Putin’s aggression compared to Trumps constant public praise and defence of Putin? No US leader in history has debased themselves in front of a foreign dictator they way Trump humiliated Americans by licking Putin sack to crack in Helsinki.

Let me be clear. America has ALWAYS used its role of “world policeman” selectively for its own interests. It has always bee happy to turn a blind eye to dictators and atrocities when convenient. It is false to say that America gets dragged in to foreign conflicts against its will. Every military engagement and diplomatic conflict the US has been involved in has been a deliberate and conscious choice for US interests. And let’s also be clear that when Americans participate in multinational forces, the US expects to be in command. They are not going to send US forces under the command of foreign generals so they definitely want to be largest force The US doesn’t want Europe or Canada to have larger militaries that can operate independently from the US. Americans want allied militaries to be completely dependent on the US so that the US can continue to be “the leader of the free world “.

America has long enjoyed playing the role of the world policeman and since its withdrawal Russia and China have stepped up their global aggression and influence peddling I’ve usually been a critic of American military adventurism and especially the Republicans absolutely criminal and disastrous Iraq invasion but this is the opposite extreme where Trump has basically handed the world to Putin, one of the few people in this world he seems completely unable to criticize.

Call me when someone is trying to overturn the results of the election based on vague reports

Fake quote. We all know what that reveals about Trump supporters. The quote cited from Oxford reference in your right wing drivel article is different than the one in the meme. See for yourself “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

Yeah you could say the same thing about Hitler or Charles Manson. It’s not the grand accomplishment you think it is.

Wrong again. He still could have vetoed it. And then Congress would have had a second vote to override his veto. But Trump signed it so as not to be a loser...yet again...

Hou clearly watched too much GI JOE and wrestling as a kid and you have no idea how the real world works. Let’s just set the record straight that you Trumpsters who believe the election was stolen by some grand and elaborate conspiracy are the minority opinion, not the mainstream. Therefore you are the batshit nut cases. It’s not because you believe something that just happens to be wrong in most people’s view, that’s normal. Its that you believe in something that everyone can see is clearly implausible and impossible and without any evidence or even credible proponents. Hwre is another perfect example of your idiocy. Several times now I’ve said unflattering things about Biden. I’ve Probably said more unflattering things about Biden than any conservative has ever said about any Republican because hero worship is a mandatory Republican trait. Biden is not my leader, he is not my hero and I don’t admire him. He’s not left wing either he’s just another American corporate patsy like most Democrats and every single Republican. You’ve heard me say that over and over yet you’re either too fucking stupid for it to sink in or you’re a liar. You’re a chicken shit coward because you won’t even make a friendly bet to change your profile pic if Trump doesn’t get a second term. Even though you claim to be 100% certain he will. So you won’t take a bet that you claim you’re guaranteed to win and wouldn’t even cost anything real if you lost. Coward. Oh well I’ll just stick to gloating when you’re humiliated on Jan 6 So to answer your #4 as well I’m 100% confident Biden will be pres ans Ive already pledged to change my pic if that’s not the case even though the Trump supporters here are too chickenahit. Oh and I also have a $100 GoFundMe donation bet with Sharky. Unlike you I have a pair of balls and a spine. Empty diatribe and name calling. Nothing of substance to respond to here (shocker).

In the real world you need evidence if you want to convince people of something, especially when you want to convince them of something that just on its surface so wild and hard to believe and implausible. You people just don’t understand that. You feel you’re somehow uniquely entitled to kust be believed and obeyed with no proof and without question.

It doesn’t cost that much to lie and selectively edit hidden camera footage to tell false narratives.

LMAO tin foil is in short supply these days that’s for sure! Does it make your head cold in the winter?

No there’s nothing to suggest there was any increase to fraudulent activity Mo sost Americans believe so either. Many /most of the officials who claimed fraud were Republicans so appointed by trump.

Trump lost fair and square get over it crybaby

Dismissing a case as baseless and for lacking credible preliminary evidence for a trial is not “procedural”

Interesting that Trump agrees with Democrats on increasing the payments to individuals, while the Republicans oppose it Because Socialism.

Oh but he didn’t veto it, he just signed it. You lose again MWOP MWOP I can’t really blame you though this time it’s really not your fault. Your Dear Leader is so unstable and erratic he pulls 180s on his 180s depending on his blood sugar levels and what he saw on Fox News in the last half hour so it’s really hard to be constantly apologizing for a moving target like that.

Video removed for violating terms of service. LMAO. Trumps POV alright! I know I know it’s that darn VAST WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY again! ?

Is Trump’s Coup a ‘Dress Rehearsal?’ Ben Jacobs9:00 A.M. ... Some prominent academic figures who study how countries fall into dictatorships are deeply concerned about what would come next. Daniel Ziblatt, a political science professor at Harvard and the co-author of How Democracies Die, told Intelligencer, “I think it’s pretty clear that there was a somewhat serious effort to steal this election. It’s not going to succeed. In that sense, the acute normative crisis has passed. It doesn’t mean our checks and balances have worked.” He pointed to what he described as “a chronic slow burning problem” within the American electorate, the “radicalization” within the Republican Party. “One can’t have a democracy [in a two party system] where one of the two parties is not fully committed to democratic norms.” Ziblatt described the current situation as an escalation of constitutional hardball, where political actors “sniff out weakness in constitutional structure,” violating long-standing norms if not technically the law. He pointed to the Trump-led effort in 2020 to have Republican-controlled state legislatures pick their own electors to throw victory to the president, regardless of how their states voted. The possibility of a step like this was always embedded within the constitutional structure, but no one, until now, had been willing to explicitly overturn the results of a presidential election that already had a clear and decisive winner. “I worry that this whole post-election process has been the dress rehearsal,” said Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky, the other co-author of How Democracies Die, citing Vladimir Lenin’s quote that the Russian Revolution of 1905 was the “dress rehearsal” for the October Revolution of 1917, which put the Bolsheviks in power. Levitsky noted that not only have Republicans found that “their base won’t punish this sort of behavior, they’ll likely applaud it.” He added, “none of this stuff can be unlearned.” Experts weren’t comforted by the slapstick nature of Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn the election, ranging from farcical conspiratorial claims to the hair dye dripping down Rudy Giuliani’s cheeks. “I think we do make a mistake that authoritarians are always as competent at the time as they appear in retrospect,” said Ziblatt. “Mussolini was a clown. Hitler was very lazy. It’s not as if they are always paragons of self-discipline and organization.” These two scholars both expressed real concerns about what they see as structural flaws in our current system — flaws that allow a political party, in this case, the Republican Party, to consistently win power despite failing to win a plurality of the vote (as Trump did in 2016). This undercuts the idea of a self-correcting two-party system where, as Ziblatt put it, “If one party goes off the rails, it will be punished at the ballot box.” .... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/historians-fear-trumps-failed-coup-is-a-dress-rehearsal.html

Sidney Powell's Key Election Witness Is A Pro-Trump Podcaster Once Sued For Fraud: Report Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman has been accused by North Dakota's attorney general of assuming false identities to "deceive people." A secret witness who lawyer Sidney Powell has promised would reveal presidential election fraud turns out to be a pro-Trump podcaster who was once sued for fraud, The Washington Post reported. Powell, a longtime QAnon believer, has filed a series of failed, typo-ridden lawsuits challenging the results of the presidential election. Powell has claimed in court documents that a witness — a former “intelligence contractor” — knows about a foreign conspiracy to attack the election. Powell said her informant’s identity could not be revealed in order to protect her life. But podcaster Terpsichore Maras-Lindeman of North Dakota, who confirmed to the Post that she is the informant Powell has referred to, served less than a year in the Navy in the 1990s and there is no indication that she ever worked in intelligence or as an intelligence contractor. Her affidavit submitted in Powell’s lawsuitis a slight rewording of one of her blog posts written more than a year before the election, according to the Post. A 2018 civil fraud case against Maras-Lindeman by the North Dakota Attorney General’s Office accused her of falsely claiming to be a physician, a Purple Heart recipient and a Navy intelligence veteran; using several aliases and social security numbers; and exaggerating her resume in a “persistent” effort to “deceive others,” according to the Post. A judge earlier this year ordered Maras-Lindeman to pay $25,000 in fines and attorney fees after she spent donations solicited for veterans’ wreaths and homeless shelters on herself. ????????? Another “expert witness” in Trumps fraudulent election lawsuits confirmed to be a kook, a die-hard trump supporter, and with a history of fraud. That’s in addition to the “expert witness” that was a convicted sex offender anf the ine who was a convicted criminal harrasser who kept sending sex videos to her boyfriends ex despite multiple police warnings. The rest were all die-hard Trump supporters long before they claimed to “witness” anything. How come not one of these people turns out to be normal or impartial?

Clearly the majority do not believe Trump won the election or any of these ridiculously absurd conspiracy theories that have now expanded to include a significant percentage of the Republican Party and many of Trumps own hand-picked appointees and cabinet members. If you don’t understand that you’re even more clueless than I thought, which is saying a lot. In the past I’ve pointed out the inconsistency of you righty conspiracy nuts...sometimes you pretend that the whole world agrees with you and anyone who doesn’t fall in line is some kind of brainwashed cult minority. Other times you claim the exact opposite, that the whole world has been fooled by a vast and sophisticated global conspiracy and only your select group of Trump worshippers know the real truth. In the past I’ve asked you to just confirm for the record which is your true belief but of course like a true coward you never answer and you’ll be a coward again this time and dodge the question again I’m sure.

If there’s a discrepancy between what you and you alone believe and what the rest of the world believes, the answer is not going to be that the entire population of the world from every race, religion, nationality, political belief, income level and social status has united like never before in human history to join in an elaborate and highly organized and coordinated worldwide conspiracy just to make you look bad. The kind of implausible bat-shit crazy conspiracy that nuts like you subscribe to doesn’t exist. You call these people RINOs for no other reason than they disagree with Trumps false election conspiracy claim. All of these people have mich more established credentials as conservatives and Republicans than Trump who isn’t really a conservative. You are too stupid to realize that in your mind you’ve made Trump into an infallible god where any person or group disagreeing with Trump even Trump appointees, is automatically wrong and their views don’t cou No you are not “too smart” you are too cowardly. If you’re so certain Trump will be president you have nothing to worry about, you chicken shit. I am confident that Biden will be pres and I have the courage to back up my words with a pledge. You are clearly to cowardly and unconfident. The world is “such a mess” because 40 years ago Thatcher and Reagan and conservatives (later joined by so-called “centrists” like the Clintons, Chretien and Paul Martin) have promoted trickle-down economics and let business people and billionaires make public policy decisions that have severely damaged 2 generations of working and middle class citizens. The Clintons and chretien-Martins of this world only peddled a “kindler, gentler” version of corporate servitude while conservatives promoted a crueler harsher version, but it all leads to the same place. BLM, Antifa and Trumpism are all different types of backlash against this same failed right-wing ideology

So it is impossible for Trump to ever be proven wrong is what you’re saying. if Trump says one thing and the entire world says the opposite then the entire world is wrong because Trump is an infallible god, basically And it’s a VAST WORLDWIDE CONSPIRACY!!!! Trump was a registered Democrat until 2009 but now any Republican who doesn’t kneel before him is a RINO?? Lol Yes you are all dummies As much as you want Trump to end democracy and be appointed dictator for life it’s not going to happen. You will see. Are you still avoiding taking my bet? Change your profile pic to a pro-Democrat image of my choosing if Biden is sworn in?

Exactly the point. And yet you election conspiracy nuts ate convinced that these Trump appointed Republican judges are conspiring to help Biden steal the election EVERYONE who is in a position to independently investigate and verify Trumps baseless election fraud accusations has said his claims are all bullshit. Many if not most are Republicans and many are Trump appointees. What else does it take for you to accept that Trump is wrong?

To he fair, some of the things listed below are really just bad sound bytes not db thoughts but still: The Dumbest Moments of the Trump Presidency For five years, we kept a Google Doc of the most deeply idiotic episodes of this monumentally stupid era. Now it’s time to share our work with the world. Henry Grabar and Ben Mathis-LilleyDec 23, 20205:45 AM The Donald Trump presidency ended, in a way, on Nov. 7. That was the day that media outlets called Pennsylvania, and thus the 2020 election, for Joe Biden. It was also the day that Trump tweeted his campaign would be holding a press conference at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia, only to follow up with a clarifying tweet that he meant “Four Seasons Landscaping,” a business located on the outskirts of the city near an adult bookstore and a crematorium. Yes, the campaign later claimed there was a reason why they booked this particular venue. So, yes, we don’t know for surethat the campaign actually meant to hold its event, at which Rudy Giuliani made luridly dishonest and fantastical claims about voter fraud, at the Four Seasons Hotel, only to book the completely unrelated landscaping company by mistake. But we know. When the story of this era is told many years from now, students and history enthusiasts will learn about Trump’s lies, corruption, self-enrichment, and abuse. What they may not grasp—and what even now is hard to comprehend—is just how stupid it was to live through. The president told the nation to inject bleach during a pandemic; his team altered the projected path of a hurricane on an official document, with a Sharpie, to help the president save face after an erroneous tweet. There were the dishwashers that had to be run 10 times. The blank pages that the White House pretended were important documents. A long, long time ago, Trump declared himself a “very stable genius.” By now, that phrase feels almost normal. But seriously: What? For almost five years, we have been collecting such stories with quick notes to our future selves—notes that, when we looked through them last month after Trump lost his reelection bid, read less as presidential history than the diary of a lunatic. We had to go back and make sense of them all, matching our mad scribbles to events that actually happened in the real world. And now we bring them to you. Critics sometimes alleged that the president’s bad tweets and Borscht Belt schtick were calculated distractions from his controversial policies and criminal personal conduct. We do not think that was the case with the following moments. They are the most absurd of the period’s tragicomic phenomena, the smallest dumb experiences of a big, dumb time to be alive. They are the most baffling pronouncements, grievances, and excuses of a president who never, ever did the homework—the deepest cuts of America’s mush-brain years. We share them here not so you may remember them, but so that you might—finally—feel free to forget just a little bit about the past four years. “His idiot doctor” Dec. 14, 2015: In December 2015, amid questions about what CNN described as Trump’s “self-avowed lack of an exercise routine and his indulging diet,” his campaign releases a statement from a doctor that purports to establish his physical bona fides. Despite Trump’s previous promise to release “a full medical report,” Dr. Harold Bornstein simply attests in a short letter that Trump’s lab work is “astonishingly excellent,” that his “physical strength” is “extraordinary,” and that Bornstein believes, “unequivocally,” that the candidate would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Bornstein, who looks like his picture goes next to the entry for “quack doctor” in the Big Book of Sitcom Character Tropes, later tells CNN that Trump dictated the letter. —BML “George Papadopoulos listing a Model U.N. thing he may not even have actually done on his résumé” March 21, 2016: With its candidate taking heat for having almost no familiarity with any subject related to the job of governing the United States, the Trump campaign releases a list of its alleged “foreign policy advisers,” including an individual named George Papadopoulos, to the Washington Post. The Post immediately notices that the top item in the “Honors and Awards” section of Papadopoulos’ LinkedIn page is a claim to have participated in a 2012 Model United Nations event in Geneva, i.e., a conference for college students. In 2017, after Papadopoulos is convicted of lying to federal agents investigating the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, the Post follows up and finds out that the organizers of the Geneva event have no record of Papadopoulos’ participation. —BML “The British airplane sexual assault witness guy” Oct. 14, 2016: Shortly after the publication of the Access Hollywood tape, the New York Times reports that a woman named Jessica Leeds says Trump groped her on an airplane in approximately 1980. The Trump campaign subsequently arranges for the New York Post to interview a British man named Anthony Gilberthorpe, who would have been about 18 at the time of the alleged assault. Gilberthorpe—who, in the years after this flight, said he went “trawling” the streets of Blackpool to hire underage boys for sex acts with Tory politicians—says he remembers being seated across the aisle from Trump and Leeds and that he recognizes Leeds in the news because he has a “photographic memory.” He claims to recall specifically that Trump did not do anything inappropriate to Leeds and says moreover that she was flirting with Trump and told fellow passengers, when Trump went to the bathroom, that she “wanted to marry him.” —BML “Michigan Man of the Year” Nov. 7, 2016: At a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump says that he was once named “Michigan Man of the Year,” a claim he goes on to repeat numerous times throughout his presidency. In 2019, CNN’s Daniel Dale reports that Trump may be referring to an invitation he received to give a speech in Michigan at something called the “Oakland County Lincoln Day Dinner” in 2013. No award was presented at the dinner. —BML “Former professional golfer Bernhard Langer voter fraud” Jan. 25, 2017: During a meeting with lawmakers, the newly inaugurated president says that German professional golfer Bernhard Langer was prevented from voting in 2016 because there was a long line of suspicious Latin American individuals ahead of him. Follow-up reporting reveals that Langer is not an American citizen and did not attempt to vote in the election at all; according to Langer, he heard a similar story from a friend and relayed it to someone who then told it to “a person with ties to the White House,” which would mean that Trump had been told the (obviously false) anecdote fifth-hand. —BML “Frederick Douglass getting recognized” Feb. 1, 2017: At remarks celebrating Black History Month, Trump ad-libs that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” The remark, and its present tense phrasing regarding a figure who died in 1895, has never been explained. —HG “U.S. aircraft carrier that White House declared deterrent to North Korea sailing in opposite direction” April 12, 2017: Fox Business broadcasts a recorded interview in which Trump tells the network’s Maria Bartiromo that the U.S. is “sending an armada” toward North Korea, a claim around which the administration builds a narrative about its tough, no-nonsense stance toward Kim Jong-un’s country. On April 13, NBC News reports that the U.S. is prepared for a preemptive strike on the isolated dictatorship. Two days later, however, the Navy posts a photo of the aircraft carrier and associated ships that purportedly make up the armada heading souththrough the Sunda Strait, 3,500 miles away from North Korea. Defense Newsreports that the ships, which never got anywhere near North Korea, are “taking part in scheduled exercises with Australian forces in the Indian Ocean.” Trump is subsequently swayed by Kim’s flattery campaign into essentially dropping all objections to the North Korean nuclear program. —HG “Exercise depletes the body’s reserves of energy” May 1, 2017: The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos reports that Trump “considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.” This echoes reporting by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, who wrote in a 2016 biography that Trump stopped working out after college and once told an employee that training for an Ironman race would kill him. Intuitive but obviously wrong, the Medieval-style “battery theory” foreshadows more consequential medical assertions that would later be made by the president about a specific kind of virus being no worse than the flu, disappearing in summer heat, and being vulnerable to the injection of bleach into the body. —HG “Fake phone call from Boy Scouts” Aug. 2, 2017: Trump tells the Wall Street Journal that a discursive, partisan speech he gave to a crowd of Boy Scouts at the organization’s national jamboree was, according to a call he received afterward from “the head of the Boy Scouts,” “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.” The Boy Scouts respond in a statement, “We are unaware of any such call.” —HG “Local milk people” Aug. 3, 2017: The Washington Post publishes a transcript of a phone call between Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Trump shortly after the latter became president. The conversation touched on an agreement Barack Obama had made to accept refugees detained by the Australian government, about whom Trump said: “I hate taking these people. I guarantee you they are bad. That is why they are in prison right now. They are not going to be wonderful people who go on to work for the local milk people.” Speculation about the meaning of “local milk people” ultimately arrives at the fact that many refugees in the U.S. work on dairy farms. —BML “Kept saying Thad Cochran was in the hospital when he wasn’t in the hospital” Sept. 28, 2017: Trump says at least six times over the course of a day that Republicans would be able to pass a bill to eliminate the Affordable Care Act were it not for a senator who is in the hospital. White House reporters determine that Trump is referring to Sen. Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who is recovering at his home (not a hospital) from a urological procedure—and who, crucially, would not have provided a winning vote for the repeal bill (which never passed), even if he had been present. —HG “Not sending the $25,000 check he promised to the father of a dead soldier until three months later when the Washington Post asked him about it” Oct. 18, 2017: The Washington Post publishes an interview with the bereaved father of a deceased soldier who says Trump personally promised during a condolence call to send him a $25,000 check but never followed up or delivered any money. (The Post was looking into the subject because Trump was engaged in a public feud with a different bereaved family that had been offended by comments the president made in a different call.) The man subsequently receives a check dated Oct. 18, which was the day the Post contacted the White House about the story. —BML “Fox tricks Trump into opposing his own FISA bill” Jan. 11, 2018: Trump complains angrilyon Twitter that the House is about to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA—a reauthorization that his administration has repeatedly endorsed. Forensic scrutiny by the watchdog group Media Matters reveals that shortly before the president’s tweet, the Fox & Friends morning show had run a segment critical of FISA for having allegedly been used to tap Trump’s phones during the Obama administration’s conspiracy to frame him for Russia-related crimes. Less than two hours after his original tweet, Trump sends a follow-up in which he pretends to have previously ordered changes to the bill to address his concerns and endorses its passage. —BML “Telling the stock market it had made a mistake by declining” Feb. 7 2018: LOL. —BML “German dad (dad’s not German)” July 12, 2018: Trump, in Europe for a NATO summit, says that his father was “from Germany,” a claim he goes on to reiterate at least twice more during his administration while in the presence of Europeans, at one point stating specifically that Fred Trump was “born in a very wonderful place in Germany.” As is well-established in the public record, Fred Trump was born in New York City. Fred Trump’s father was born in Germany—but this, too, is a subject that Donald Trump had lied about publicly, writing in The Art of the Deal that his father’s family was from Sweden in what was apparently an effort to keep the Trump name from being associated with Nazism. (Oops.) —HG “Voter ID to buy cereal” Aug. 31, 2018: At a rally in Tampa, Florida, Trump makes the case for voter ID laws by appealing to the ubiquitous use of photo IDs in American life and claims that “if you go out and buy groceries, you need a picture on a card—you need ID.” He would repeat the claim at least twice more. —HG “Wettest from the standpoint of water” Sept. 19, 2018: From the White House lawn, Trump delivers an analysis of Hurricane Florence, which killed dozens of people in the Carolinas, as “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.” —HG “Tim Apple” March 6, 2019: At an American Workforce Policy Advisory Board meeting, the president calls Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple.” The year before, he had called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson “Marillyn Lockheed.” —HG “Moon-mars” June 7, 2019: Triggered by an innocuous rhetorical question about NASA posed by Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto, the president describes the planet Mars, on Twitter, as something “of which the Moon is a part,” by which he means that missions to the moon are to be used as preparation for a mission to Mars. He adds that he believes NASA should focus its efforts on subjects such as “science.” —BML “Airports during the revolutionary war” July 4, 2019: Trump celebrates the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by praising how George Washington’s Continental Army “took over airports” during the Revolutionary War. —HG “Kidney has a special place in the heart” July 10, 2019: Trump signs an executive order related to kidney disease and thanks an audience of nephrologists like so: “You’ve worked so hard on these things, you’ve worked so hard on the kidney. Very special. The kidney has a very special place in the heart. It’s an incredible thing.” —BML “Windmills cause cancer” Aug. 2, 2019: Trump says he has heard that the noise generated by windmills causes cancer. (There is no known, or even alleged, link between wind turbines and cancer.) —HG “White House claiming they had to give G-7 to Doral because one of the other sites would have required oxygen masks” Aug. 26, 2019: The White House announces that a nationwide search has determined that the G-7 international summit, which the U.S. was set to host in 2020, can be held most effectively at the Trump National Doral resort near Miami. Trump later explains that Doral stood out from other contenders because of its ample parking and because its ballrooms are “among the biggest in Florida.” Chief of staff Mick Mulvaney claims at a press conference that one of the other potential U.S. sites for the summit was situated at such a high altitude that participants may have had to use oxygen tanks to breathe (?). (The White House later backs down from the decision, and the summit is ultimately canceled because of COVID-19.) —HG “Trump just said there are people in line for his rally and they are soaking wet” Sept. 9, 2019: During what is ostensibly a discussion with reporters about hurricane refugees from the Bahamas, the president begins describing supporters of his who are allegedly already standing in line for an upcoming rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, going on at some length about how the supporters waiting in line are “soaking wet.” The weather in Fayetteville at the time is clear and sunny. —HG “She’s got a son” Sept. 11, 2019: In the Oval Office to promote an anti-vaping initiative, Trump explains first lady Melania Trump’s interest in the subject: “She’s got a son, together, that’s a beautiful young man, and she feels very very strongly about it.” The boy in question, Barron Trump, is also his son. —HG “You know what the crime is” May 11, 2020: During a right-wing revival of the 2017-era theory that Barack Obama helped frame several people in Trump’s orbit for having connections to the Russian government, the president refers to “Obamagate” on Twitter as “the biggest political crime in American history.” He subsequently has this exchange with Philip Rucker of the Washington Post at a press conference: In summary: What’s the crime? “Obamagate.” —BML “Making up that he was throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium because he was jealous of Fauci” July 23, 2020: Hours before Dr. Anthony Fauci throws the ceremonial first pitch before the Washington Nationals game on MLB’s latest-ever opening day, Trump, in a fit of apparent jealousy, says that he has been asked to throw out the first pitchbefore an Aug. 15 Yankees–Red Sox game in the Bronx. After reporters determine that the Yankees have not made such an offer, Trump and his aides say that he will in fact be busy on the day in question with activities that have a “strong focus on the China virus.” He ultimately spends the weekend of the 15th at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey. —HG “A man who loves the interior” Aug. 4, 2020: Trump introducesSecretary of the Interior David Bernhardt by asserting that Bernhardt is “a man who loves the interior.” —HG “Forest cities” Sept. 29, 2020: Asked at his first debate with Joe Biden whether climate change was helping cause forest fires on the West Coast, Trump says the following: “In Europe, they live—they’re forest cities, they’re called forest cities. They maintain their forest. They manage their forest. I was with the head of a major country—it’s a forest city. He said, ‘Sir, we have trees that are far more, they ignite much easier than California. There shouldn’t be that problem.’ ” (During a previous outbreak of forest fire, the president had claimed Finnish President Sauli Niinistö told him that Finland prevents forest fires by raking the forest floor, something which Niinistö denies having said. It is possible, but not certain, that the comments derive from a belief that the real ecological concept of “forest management” involves sweeping and cleaning up in the way one might “manage” a real-estate property.) —BML “Kiss them all” Oct 12, 2020: One week removed from his hospital stay for COVID-19, the president pays tribute to Jim Morrison by telling a crowd in Florida he feels “so powerful” and wants to “kiss everyone in that audience.” Ha-ha, so goofy! And that was basically the last thing he said, and no one ever had to worry about him again. —HG https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/donald-trump-stupid-moments-dumb-comments.html

Here is a great synopsis of the great Trump failure: Donald Trump’s lengthy humiliation is a necessary gift to the world The past six weeks have provided many of us the enjoyable experience of watching Donald Trump losing – badly – in a drawn-out series of public humiliations and serial self-abasements. This spectacle has grown tiresome to some, especially to Americans who face the constant horror of more than 3,000 daily deaths resulting from their President’s incompetent pandemic response. They’d like someone to shut him up, or cancel his social-media feeds, or at least teleport us to Jan. 21, when he will once again become part of the U.S. background noise. But we should resist the temptation to change the channel. It is vitally important that the entire world witnesses his loss and humiliation, his embarrassing tantrums, and his flailing displays of impotence and weakness. To see Donald Trump as a pathetic loser is the most effective imaginable challenge to the phenomenon that’s become known as “global Trumpism.” It has nothing to do with political beliefs or actual leadership styles; strongman leaders drawing on distrust and intolerance have been a 21st-century phenomenon for a decade, most of them inspired and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin. But electoral support for such leaders, in those countries that still have functioning democratic systems, has been given a serious boost by Mr. Trump’s ascent. A vote for whatever party in your country that believes in a byzantine global conspiracy of immigrants, media, elites and religious minorities was previously a fringe protest move, a withdrawal from the mainstream. After 2016, it felt as though you were joining the winners. The most powerful job in the world had been won by one such guy, and you could see him every day, raining rhetorical blows upon all those liberals and foreigners and TV hosts. It was both enviably American and a form of anti-Americanism, and for many people, it affirmed their prejudices and justified a vote. In response, a number of world leaders built their candidacies in Mr. Trump’s image. Some, such as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, modelled themselves directly upon the reality-TV star, even going so far as to dismiss the COVID-19 pandemic as “fake news,” with deadly consequences. Figures such as Mr. Bolsonaro may still retain power for years, but their extremism will no longer receive mainstream sanction from powerful countries. The Bolsonaros of the world are left alone. “If he loses his main partner, his role model – because that’s what Donald Trump is – then he will be all alone,” Brazilian political scientist Dawisson Belem Lopes told The Washington Post. “Brazil has become an environmental villain. ... It will be a nightmare for Bolsonaro.” The appeal of Mr. Trump, and of his imitators in other countries, is not generally ideological. When I spoke to Trump voters in Florida and Ohio in his first successful election, they did not tend to parrot his elaborate conspiracy theories; rather, they talked about Mr. Trump as a successful businessman and as an effective leader. None of that was true, but as long as he was winning, it felt right. That’s equally true abroad. When two political scientists this year surveyed voters in Albania – a Muslim-majority country with a surprisingly large bloc of voters, around 30 per cent, who like Mr. Trump and want a local imitator – they found that what united those voters were these measured characteristics: “tolerance for strongman rule, homophobia, sympathy for Russian President Vladimir Putin, Euroskepticism, low levels of education, and perceptions that Trump has positive personal leadership qualities.” Other countries produced different results, but “tolerance for strongman rule” and “positive personal leadership qualities” remain big attractions. More important than Mr. Trump’s highly visible failure is the way it was delivered to him – not through impeachment or criminal charges, which would have looked to much of the world like political revenge and confirmation of his conspiracy theories. Rather, it was delivered through a functioning democratic system, in which his daily humiliations have been meted out not by a nebulous “deep state” but by senior figures in his own political party, by judges he had appointed, by trusted aides trying to break it gently to him, by voters who had abandoned him. For the past four years, state-controlled media in China, Hungary and other countries with authoritarian rulers have feasted on the daily spectacle of Trumpism. It sent a dual message: “They are no better than us,” and “There is no longer any point to the old struggle for democracy, for it leads to the same place.” The lasting lesson of Trumpism, for voters around the world, is no longer that it succeeded. It is that it ended in total failure, having accomplished none of what it promised, having left its supporters far worse off and having revealed the man himself to be a big-time loser. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-donald-trumps-lengthy-humiliation-is-a-necessary-gift-to-the-world/