The Clown Train Approaches The Precipice, With Trump Stumbling
Trump has been insanely successful in winning converts to his totally disproven, baseless, reckless claims about election fraud, as polls show that about 70 percent of Republicans don’t think Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election.
Trump has so normalized dishonesty that his followers accept anything he says for facts. So it only makes sense that he is now laying the groundwork for claiming the 2024 election is going to be rigged, if he loses, that is.
“They used COVID to cheat. And they did a lot of other things, too. We’re not going to let that happen,” trump said about the Democrats as he basked in the glow of his victory in the New Hampshire GOP primary. “You can never forget history, because if you forget, you never, you never recover from it. And you repeat.”
For the record, trump has lost dozens of court challenges, his own attorney general found no evidence of widespread fraud, and reviews, audits and recounts in the battleground states where he contested his loss all said Biden won.
And after filling the air with his bullshit, trump took away the breath of anyone standing within 10,000 miles when he said, “I find in life, you can’t let people get away with bullshit.”
If there was ever any question about trump’s loyalties, he shamelessly put that to rest with a solid pronouncement that he is loyal to himself, always. The latest example has him promoting an economic crash.
“We have an economy that’s so fragile, and the only reason it’s running now is it’s running off the fumes of what we did,” Trump said in an interview. “And when there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months, because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”
Trump has been famously and totally wrong with his past, politically-dripping, doomsday predictions about the Biden economy. Before election day 2020, trump warned that a Biden election would cause the economy to collapse.
“They say the stock market will rule if I’m elected. If he’s elected, the stock market will crash,” said trump who insisted that Democratic policies would “unleash an economic disaster of epic proportions” and force the country “into depression.”
The reality is the opposite: The economy is not “fragile, there has been no depression while the nation has historically low unemployment, economic growth, shrinking inflation, rising wages, falling gas prices, a rising stock market and improved economic optimism
Continuing with his revision of reality, trump continues to claim the Jan. 6, 2021, bloody assault by his supporters on the Capitol was nothing much. His lies about the gravity of the uprising have consistently gained traction with his legions of zealots.
The truth about Jan. 6, 2021, is that thousands of trump supporters overwhelmed authorities and stormed the Capitol, resulting in numerous deaths.
As with voter fraud, trump and his lemmings want to convince Americans that Jan. 6 was largely a construct of the Democrats in an effort to discredit the Republicans, and trump especially and that those arrested in the melee are “political prisoners.”
Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chair of the House Administration’s Subcommittee on Oversight, is overseeing a partisan investigation into “what really happened” on Jan. 6. Loudermilk said “the truth” about the right-wing attack on the Capitol is still to be uncovered. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., also has joined in the effort to rewrite history. Johnson spoke at last week’s Capitol screening of a fake documentary, “The Real Story of Jan. 6 Part 2: The Long Road Home,” produced by the Epoch Times.
“We always say, ‘To the victor go the spoils,’” Johnson said at the screening. “The victor writes the history, and unfortunately, in November 2020, Democrats had the full sweep. They had all the levers of power, and they wrote the history of Jan. 6.”
The Epoch Times is a far-right, international multi-language newspaper and media company affiliated with the Falun Gong new religious movement. The newspaper is part of the Epoch Media Group, which also operates New Tang Dynasty (NTD) Television. The Epoch Times, blocked in mainland China, opposes the Chinese Communist Party and has supported trump. NBC News reported in 2019 that The Epoch Times was the second-largest funder of pro-Trump Facebook advertising after the Trump campaign itself. The Epoch Media Group’s news sites and YouTube channels have promoted conspiracy theories such as QAnon, anti-vaccine misinformation and false claims of fraud in the 2020 United States presidential election.
The faux documentary claims to provide “a closer look at the injustices done in the prosecution process, including depriving defendants of fair due process, long-term pretrial detention, the abuse of SWAT raids, advancing felony charges without substantial criminal evidence, mistreatment in jail, and more.”
Epoch Times journalist Joseph Hanneman purportedly “reveals shocking evidence of how the wide-ranging prosecutions of Jan. 6 defendants have been handled with injustice.’ The filmmaker claims to have taken “an objective look at what has happened ever since — and the fine line between justice and political vengeance.”
Most Americans, 55 percent, believe the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was “an attack on democracy that should never be forgotten,” with majorities of Democrats and independents holding this view. But most Republicans and Trump voters reject this view.
Of late, trump has been fixated on Nikki Hailey, after her respectable although losing effort in the New Hampshire primary. Trump inferred that Hailey isn’t qualified to be president because her parents weren’t born in the U.S. After the New Hampshire vote, trump warned that if Hailey is the GOP candidate, there will be “investigations.”
“Just a little note to Nikki, she is not going to win, but if she did she would be under investigation by those people in 15 minutes. I could tell you five reasons why already, not big reasons, little stuff that she doesn’t want to talk about, but she will be under investigation in minutes,” said trump to a crowd of his supporters.
Apropos trump’s mentor, the late, sleazeball lawyer, Roy Cohn, trump would not identify “those people” and would not expound on the “five reasons” for an investigation.
Trump, 77, often attacks Biden, 81, over his age and suggests that Biden is mentally unfit for office.
“He can’t put two sentences together,” Trump said on Friday. “Can’t put two sentences together. He needs a teleprompter.”
It’s trump whose diminishing mental acuity has been on parade recently. Last week, trump appeared to confuse Haley for Nancy Pelosi during a speech in New Hampshire, accusing Haley of failing to provide adequate security during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol. Trump claimed that Haley was in charge of security on Jan. 6, 2021, and that she and others had turned down his offer to send troops to the Capitol.
“Nikki Haley was in charge of security,” trump said. (She was not.) “We offered her 10,000 people, soldiers, National Guards, whatever they want. They turned it down. They don’t want to talk about that.”
Haley was not in charge of security and in fact, the former governor of South Carolina and a former ambassador to the United Nations, has never served in Congress and was working in the private sector during the Capitol riot. Trump has claimed that Pelosi rejected trump’s request to have troops deployed at the Capitol riot. There is no evidence that trump ever offered to have troops deployed to the Capitol, or that Pelosi, then the speaker of the House, rejected him.
Greg Gutfield, one of trump’s nausea-inducing, right wing, sycophantic Fox toadies, was all over Hailey for her comments that the New Hampshire primary is just the first primary and that she had a respectable showing. Gutfield inferred that Hailey should be graceful and withdraw from the race. If Gutfield means that trump would be gracious in defeat, he is living on another planet.
Trump continues to press his own interests, far ahead of the nation’s. He has been shamefully pressuring Republicans to put the kibosh on any immigration reform and aid to Ukraine and Israel. HuffPost reported that last week, trump reached out to several GOP senators to warn them to reject any deal.
“Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” a source told HuffPost. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president… He said he only wants the perfect deal.”
Last Wednesday, trump wrote on his Truth Social, conservative social media site, “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people.”
Trump is not, repeat, not the president and yet he is telling GOP senators how to vote on immigration reform and aid to Ukraine and Israel, the highest priority issues of the day.
One bootlicking member of congress, Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., refused to criticize trump’s meddling.
“I could probably go through any number of things that Biden is saying that are not constructive when he’s on the campaign trail, but that’s the nature of campaigns,” Tillis said. “So I’m not going to criticize President Trump or his positions.”
Another disgraceful lawmaker, the dishonorable Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said helping Ukraine is probably unnecessary because Russia will eventually just give up.
“I don’t think Russia’s going to keep going,” said Tuberville. “They have fought for two years just to try to get 50 miles in Ukraine. How in the hell are they going to go to Poland, Sweden, keep going through Europe? That’s not going to happen.”
Tuberville’s duplicity has been on stage before. He pushed a debunked claim that some medical centers operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs have been prioritizing care for migrants over vets because of an arrangement by the Biden administration.
Trump has normalized previously unacceptable forms of speech.
Last week, former New York GOP congressman Lee Zeldin described Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., ideas as “retarded.” Zeldin was on the Fox show hosted by Gutfield, who quickly comforted Zeldin that the slur was “OK” despite its obvious negative reference to people with intellectual disabilities.
“You can say that now, it’s OK,” Gutfeld said. “It’s now acceptable. I met with the associations and they said yes.”
Trump should be careful associating with words like “retarded” as he has shown increasing signs of diminished mental acuity.
Trump appeared to slur his words while speaking on his plan to mandate the death penalty for drug dealers. And speaking in New Hampshire on Jan. 22, trump was close to unintelligible when he pointed out that the Biden administration “is incapable of solvin’ even the sollest… smallest problem. The simplest of problems we can no longer solve.”
Trump also missed a beat when talking about his plan to invoke the death penalty for drug dealers.
“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on,” trump fumbled.
Trump has no need to worry because his tight crony, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said that Biden and trump should both take cognitive tests and that “Trump will whip Biden’s ass.” Cruz made his ill-mannered observation after criticizing Haley for not dropping out of the race and for calling into question trump’s mental abilities.
“I gotta say, some of the things she’s saying about his mental cognizance are just ridiculous,” Cruz said. “But there’s a reason for it. Joe Biden obviously has diminished massively, and so the left is worried about it. People recognize Joe Biden– you wouldn’t let Joe Biden handle the remote control on your television, and he’s got the nuclear codes, so the left’s talking point and the Democrats’ talking point is, ‘Well Trump’s old too and he’s diminished.’”
Haley questioned Trump’s cognitive state this month after the former president appeared to confuse her with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a rant about the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“I mean, look, we’ve seen him get confused,” she said. “He was confused about me having something to do with keeping security away from the Capitol. Clearly, he was talking about someone else.”
On Monday, Trump insisted he was “a lot sharper” than Haley and claimed she wouldn’t “even come close to winning” in an aptitude test against him.
Trump exhorted in a recent campaign email that he really loves his supporters. The message began with “This is President Trump, and I’ll never stop loving you.” He explained his undying love because “You stuck by me every single time the Radical Left tried to KICK ME DOWN. Even when they took my mugshot at the Fulton County Jail. I felt your love even when they RAIDED MY HOME. Through all the HOAXES, WITCH HUNTS, and FAKE INDICTMENTS, you never left my side! True MAGA Patriots like you are the only reason I’m still standing. I’ve just got one thing to say: I’LL NEVER STOP FIGHTING FOR YOU.”
Trump is certainly collecting a lot of love from his cultish following of court jester enablers, including Florida state Republican Sen. Ileana Garcia and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
Garcia had filed a proposed legislation that would have authorized up to $5 million for trump ‘s legal fees. Last week, Farcia withdrew the proposed bill after DeSantis pulled out of the race. With only two GOP candidates left in the nomination race, Garcia said the former president could “handle himself.”
Last week, Scott endorsed trump for president during a rally to celebrate trump’s victory. Scott joined trump on stage with the two other grinning Republicans who have quit the race, Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum.
Trump was livid over Haley’s refusal to quit the race but Scott was caught in an embarrassing bind because he endorsed trump while Haley had appointed him to the Senate seat. Trump took him time of victory to send a jab at Scott that he “must really hate” Haley at which point, Scott took to the podium to grovel, “I just love you!” Trump smirked at Scott’s fawning.
The display of unctuous fake flattery was nothing compared to the display of sycophancy in June 2017 when trump welcomed his newly-assigned cabinet. Going around the crowded room, trump called on his followers to kiss his ring and they dutifully followed with ridiculous words of praise.
“This is just the greatest privilege of my life,” said then Vice President Mike Pence.
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said, “We thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.”
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said ““It is so great to be here,” despite the fact that a few weeks earlier, Sessions offered to resign.
“It’s a new day at the United Nations,” said Haley, then the U.S. ambassador to the UN. “I think the international community knows we’re back.”
“I want to thank you for getting this country moving again,” said transportation secretary Elaine Chao, who resigned after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Since then, trump has taken to using ethnic slurs to refer to Chao.