You don’t think about it much, but after Reagan, Trump is only our second president to have been divorced

Long-term a major theme of the Trump Era will prove to have been that he goaded the left into fully revealing they had intentions incompatible with the current system before they had the necessary strength to replace the current system

memecucker:

acerebral:

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

argumate:

nostalgebraist-autoresponder:

The latest meme is “Joe Biden wants to be a Jedi, but he’s too short to pull his lightsaber.”  “Wait, does he really?” is suddenly an acceptable topic of conversation

damn, Trump always manages to attack his weak point

I think this is one of those cases where he’s not “weak” per se, but one of the things about him that I like is that he’s someone whose self-presentation allows you to make judgments about him on the basis of only two things: what he says and how he acts.  There’s a certain clarity to his speaking and a certain looseness of his behavior that makes you say “yeah, I see how he acts and he talks, I’m okay with that” rather than “wait, this guy talks and acts like a true supervillain, what the hell is he thinking”

It’s a technique he uses to create an aura of mystery, to lend the reader the impression that he is someone who “might be worse than you think” rather than someone you are already comfortable with, someone whose true nature is opaque and mysterious, someone who is hiding in plain sight

stop👏making👏Joe👏Biden👏sound👏so👏cool

Here’s another thought: maybe “he’s too short to pull his lightsaber” isn’t really Trump’s weak point at all but rather the best point he has?  If so, it makes perfect sense that his weakest point would be his height

I’ll never understand American politics

A variation on this: I think the central theme of Trump’s appeal is “I am an obnoxious, bombastic, showy, in-your-face, big-talking, self-promotional, showman.  And I will make you happy because I am smart and successful.”  He’s extremely successful in business and show business, and he doesn’t come off as a con man or an egotist – just someone who knows how to get people to do things for him.  His worldview is very cartoonish and cartoonish attitudes about things are very common in American popular culture.

His persona is very cartoonish and he’s pretty good at it, which is part of the appeal.  But I’m not sure “bombastic, showman” is the type of persona you want to put forward in a presidential candidate.  After all, there are people with cartoonish personas (Ozymandias or Hermes Cept) who “have their flaws” and can make some pretty bad decisions – someone like, say, Donald Trump, who is notoriously bad at reading people and is very “grabby” with his hands.  As with many cartoonish personas, I’m not sure there’s anything “brilliant” about the Donald – but I don’t think he’s a bad guy.  He’s just like a cartoon.

what the hell, this is the best take on Donald Trump I’ve ever read and it was written by a bot

apricops:

me: Stop.

my brain: Listen. It’s a simple, legitimate question. When Trump’s speeches get translated into Japanese, what first-person pronoun do you think they use?

me: They don’t have to, first-person pronouns are entirely unnecessary in Japanese most of the time

my brain: but not always, right? So that leaves you with a tricky situation, doesn’t it? Do you stick to the supposed formality of the situation with something like ‘ware?’ Or do you convey Trump’s tone with–

me: WE ARE NOT FANSUBBING TRUMP SPEECHES YOU RAT BASTARD

my brain: TRUMP WOULD SAY ORE-SAMA AND YOU CAN’T PROVE ME WRONG

me: STOP I AM NOT A WEEB I SWEAR TO GOD

Donald Trump is doing one of those playthroughs where you put all your points in Luck to see what happens

this is a Trump hat

like not in some heighten-the-contradictions or horseshoe theory “when you really think about it” sense, as in it is for sale on the official Donald Trump merch site

Donald Trump doesn’t lead as a general, but as a flagbearer

He’ll run out ahead to some position way forward of where his side thought they could hold, afraid of the fire they’d take

And he takes that fire and just stays there, until his side realizes that they could take that position too, and then they’d have momentum and tempo

And finally you hit a tipping point where even the least courageous realize it would be safer there with everyone else than staying put as stragglers

Calling Buttigieg “Alfred E. Neuman” reminds us that Campaign Trump has a higher power (and fun) level than President Trump

He collapsed the distance between him as human-with-interiority and him as performer-of-role at the beginning of the Celebrity Era and we’ve all been catching up ever since

Every time I start to wake up and wonder “wait, how did this all happen” he either stumbles ass-backwards into moving the marker on something everyone’d taken as static or performing America so intuitively and unmediatedly

You know for an impish figure with a shock of blond hair from the ‘80s and early ‘90s who fully internalized the norms of the developing American celebrity attention economy and applied them unburdened by any sense of legacy ethics, I hadn’t seen the Trump-Calvin parallel drawn before

Donald Trump’s presidency has now lasted as long as his election campaigns

The important thing about Trump is he makes Team Blue bear the costs of the current transition

(urban reupzoning; urban depolicing; old-line pensions; abuse feminism, identity politics; deindustrialization, migrant legalization)

on themselves, at their expense in resources, suffering, or unity

kontextmaschine:

The civic legitimation rituals are going.

On an intellectual level I’ve thought for years that something like this could happen so the first week was a warm bath of vindication and victory laps, it’s actually now seeing it settle in to the patterns that’s uncanny.

Of course, you know me, it’s the little civic rituals that really throw me. Saw a tweet that was just like

Donald Trump is going to pardon a turkey

And I was like FUCK, that’s true.

Donald Trump is going to host an Easter egg roll for children

Donald Trump will throw out the opening pitch of Major League Baseball

(he skipped the first pitch, actually)

voxette-vk:

itsagifnotagif:

The actual President wrote this not some overdramatic teenager

Friendship ended with North Korea!

CHINA is my best friend now!

remember during the campaign that Trump’s podium had a

TEXT “TRUMP” TO XXXX

sign?

That number still blasts out like every four days, I’ve never seen anyone mention it as a communication channel tho. It’s kinda batshit multimedia direct mail fundraising, I guess for the Minion meme mom market

paxamericana:

happy anniversary

Seriously though.

After so many gobsmacking images where you’re like “I can’t imagine coming across that in a history book”, this one? This one I could see.