https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/09/29/trump-mocks-hammer-attack-on-pelosis-husband-in-incendiary-speech/
The former president also called for retail thieves to be shot and said he’d use the DOJ to investigate “radical” local prosecutors.
Trump makes Bond villains look good by comparison.
“How’s her husband doing by the way?” and saying a “wall around her house” didn’t do a “good job” of protecting her 82-year-old husband from an intruder who fractured his skull with a hammer during a break-in last year—prompting laughter from the crowd.
Hillary didn't go far enough. Trump and his supporters aren't just deplorable, they're vile.
When I described him in 2016 as a "wannabe Lex Luthor comic-book villain", someone said I was exaggerating. The truth is that at the time I was somewhat exaggerating. That person made a fair assessment of what was an emotionally-charged reaction to the election results.
I dislike how accurate the description ended up being.
Like, who even says this shit for real? And who laughs at it? What even? I can't understand it at all; and it sort of scares me to know that I might one day randomly encounter someone in power who laughed when he said it.
IMO no Lex Luthor comic book villain would ridicule a handicap man, say "Why do you bring people like that here? No one wants to see that, the wounded" about a badly disable vet, rape a woman, or brag that he can "Grab them by the pussy", among a hundred other examples. I've never seen or met anyone in my entire life who is as disgusting, obscenely cruel a human being as Trump.
Go meet a couple more 'business men' and 'CEOs' you'll come to find these psychopaths are fairly standard issue capitalists
Honestly, when I said it, I had a specific image in mind. It seemed just as absurd as the whole situation, and my comparison was more a reflection of that than Luthor's character.
Image description: Entry for the word 'forty' from an old Superman-themed children's illustrated dictionary that uses both the word and numerals. Lex Luthor is running while wearing a hot pink and green super-villain costume of questionable taste. Behind him he pulls a rope attached to a simple yellow four-tier cart of what looks like full 12 inch pies, complete with crusts. The image has a light pink background.
Text content: Forty. When no one was looking, Lex Luthor took forty cakes. He took 40 cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
Deplorable is pretty good. One of the most annoying things was the cretins who didn’t really know what deplorable meant, just they figured out it was meant to be bad, and started calling themselves “proud deplorable!” and so on.
It wasn't good, no. Using an uncommon word like that made it easier for them to rebrand it than just speaking plainly would have.
Besides, "half of his supporters are a basket of deplorables" is a horribly inelegant sentence and she'd been in politics more than long enough to know that the right wing echochamber would remove the "half of" part from the collective consciousness and inflate their own numbers to make people believe she was talking about half of the population rather than 9%.
She could have called them give people and they would have hated her for it. The problem is maybe that in 2016, the media could still take that and run with it, since that kind of name calling was still fairly new. That and making Hilary run was so stupid, she wasn't gonna win that kind of media fight
Media in 2018: “we realize we gave trump too much coverage and basically got him elected to office.”
Media in 2023: “ TRUMP GAVE INCENDIARY SPEECH SAYING SOMETHING SHOCKING!! FIND OUT WHAT!!!”
Well of course. They make a shitton of money from the mere existence of Trump. It's the same reason places like Fox aren't actually particularly upset when a dem wins, it gives them free clicks
It's a Catch-22. He's a contender for the presidency and the former president who has a real shot of winning. He's also under indictment in multiple jurisdictions. The things he says are news, regardless of how stupid they are, because he's saying them to become president and avoid jail.
The first time around they didn't have to give him so much coverage early on in the primary race. This time, they don't have a choice because it's actually relevant news. That said, most networks have toned down coverage of Trump significantly. Actually most news orgs are more focused on the shutdown than the recent debate and Trump's bullshit.
As someone who supports Trump's legitimacy and normalization, can you describe your calculus when you say "He's a contender for the presidency and the former president who [sic] has a real shot of winning"? Which states will he win/flip? He's been found liable of rape and fraud, and can no longer do business in New York; he's facing a litany of charges in an ironclad RICO case where Co-Defendants have already plead guilty, from a DOJ with a 98% conviction rate on far less; and 100 polls will show Biden up by 20, but even Morning Joe rolls with the story of the bogus one off the jump. America, particularly American youth, are sick of it; it stinks.
Trump supporters of all shapes and sizes are struggling to imagine life after Trump!
And so the piece of shit continues to be a piece of shit. Though there is an irony in Trump mocking the ineffectiveness of a wall.
His voters are a disgrace. Imagine listening to this degenerate jerk whine and ramble and flatter himself and lie and bully people and think “oh yeah, I want this guy in charge”.
Where are his and his bases so-called Christian morals? Just when you think he won’t sink lower.
It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.
Joseph Heller, Catch 22
You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.
Joseph Goebbels
Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.
Christopher Hitchens
It's right there in the Bible....
"Do unto others first, before they have a chance to do unto you"
Right where they always were.
Luke 19:27
But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me.’”
Ableism is a huge systemic cultural issue, and like most other huge systemic cultural issues, Trump just exemplifies it. His entire 'value' lies in echoing condensed sound-bite versions of commonly-held antisocial beliefs. He's an empty vessel of a person, a human-shaped Pandora's box.
All we can really do is name those beliefs and actively work against examples of them in our own spheres of influence.
Physically disabled. He mocked a physically disabled journalist, Serge Kovaleski, who has a degenerative joint condition.
Trump, referring to his recent indictments, mocked President Joe Biden, saying, “Let’s indict the mother******,”
This might be the first time a running candidate used this language on campaign. The things he normalizes… so many.
To be clear, I say fuck and derivatives so much that I couldn't possibly count how many in a day. But this is a presidential campaign. He never stops pushing the envelope.
Trump loves violence. Not that he participates in much himself, he lets others do that, but it really gets him off. And it gets his followers off.
It's so depressing.
Someone with so little appreciation of violence has never even been in a fist fight. Too bad.
He'd be like Eric Cartman. Talks a big game, gets riled up and ready to fight, but cries like a baby on the first hit of his arm.
In Caro's biography of LBJ, he reveals that when Lyndon was physically bullied as a kid he would lay on the ground and scream and kick up with his legs. I imagine that Trump in a situation of actual violence would make LBJ look like Conor McGregor.
