The American Dark Age (2016-2020) An archived history of the worst President ever

That was brilliant.

of course there are

NO CHAOS!! NO COLLUSION!!

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!

Oh, now you’ve done it. We’re all going to die.


That’s my senator!

There are not enough facepalm GIFs…

How does he manage to keep saying things that are somehow more stupid than his previous idiocy? He has a gift.

Certainly, Trump pours out untruths and whoppers at these events; the more defensive he is, the more he seems to unleash them. But I found myself reeling most at the end of my rally-watching marathon not from the lying but from the bleak and threatening world view offered by a President who is claiming credit for making America great, strong, and respected again, while terrifying his fans with the grim spectre of the scary enemies he is fending off. Even more than they did in 2016, these threats come accompanied by an increasingly grandiose rewriting of history. What’s happened since his election, Trump said in Pennsylvania, “has been the greatest revolution ever to take place in our country,” or maybe even anywhere in the world. His victory “superseded even Andrew Jackson.” “America,” he said, “is winning like never before.”

The biggest difference between Trump and any other American President, however, is not the bragging. It’s the cult of personality he has built around himself and which he insists upon at his rallies. Political leaders are called onstage to praise the President in terms that would make a feudal courtier blush, and they’re not empty words. These are the kinds of tributes I have heard in places like Uzbekistan, but never before in America. “Is he not the best President we have ever had?” the Mississippi senator Cindy Hyde-Smith enthused. (Trump then praised her for voting “with me one hundred per cent of the time.”) In Erie on Wednesday, a Republican congressman, Michael Kelly, gave the most sycophantic speech of the ones I listened to this month. Trump, he yelled to the crowd, is “the strongest President we have seen in our lifetime.” Addressing Trump, he said, “You are the best! You are the best!” Trump did not need to leave his “luxurious” life behind for the indignities of political combat, but he did. “I am so grateful,” Kelly concluded, “that an American citizen came out of nowhere to take the reins and reform and retake this nation.”

Is there a stronger word than despair? If one exists, that’s what I’m feeling.

Weltschmerz? Hmm, no I guess that’s more a kind of jaded ennui.

Penbladian?

Existential misery. The feeling that the world is going to shit and you have no recourse.

Get Off My Lawn: Trump Proposal Could Squelch Protests in D.C. (Bloomberg)

Donald Trump’s presidency has inspired massive protests, with hundreds of thousands of women marching on the National Mall and scientists swarming the White House fence.

But now the Trump administration is seeking to restrict protests by effectively blocking them along the north sidewalk of the White House and making it easier for police to shut them down. A National Park Service proposal also opens the door to charging organizers for the cost of putting up barricades or re-seeding grass.

The proposed regulation could curtail demonstrations on some of Washington’s most iconic staging grounds for protests, including the National Mall where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream”’ speech in 1963. It also includes Lafayette Square across from the White House and the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalks in front of the Trump International Hotel.

Minefields. Front toward enemy.

https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1050882721545764865

Full thread (Thread Reader)

[…]
Trump criticizes the media for saying he exaggerated when there’s a mere “2% variation” in his comments. He claims, “Actually we’ve UNDER-exaggerated.”

Trump is declining to conclude even though he’s at his conclusion. “They have to start building larger arenas in this country.” For the sixth time, he lies that he had 32,000 people at his election-eve rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

! Trump: “Robert E. Lee was a great general. And Abraham Lincoln developed a phobia. He couldn’t beat Robert E. Lee. He was going crazy.”

There was like no news in this rally and so Trump decided to offer some history. He says of Grant, “He drank a little bit too much. You know who I’m talking about, right?” “And he went in and he knocked the hell out of everyone. And you know the story. They said to Lincoln…” Trump on Ulysses S. Grant: “He had a serious problem. A serious drinking problem. But man was he a good general. And he’s finally being recognized as a great general.”

This is the white-person-claim cousin of Trump’s claim that Frederick Douglass is being recognized more and more.

Trump on Neil Armstrong planting the flag on the moon: “There was no kneeling, there was no nothing…there was no games. There was no games. BOOM. BOOM. Right, fellas?” This has been one of Trump’s weirder recent rally speeches. It was very low-energy and low-news, and Trump got to his concluding lines, and then he decided to just say Trump things.

https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1050901081537073155

What’s he… I don’t… I mean… What?

Okay, I refuse to get offended at the statement ‘Robert E. Lee was a great general.’

Robert E. Lee was a great general. Fighting for a bad cause.

Granted, in the context of Trump saying it, it slots in nicely with white supremacy. But the statement in itself is hardly controversial, any more than saying Rommel was great.