Friday, December 8, 2023

Voters’ Memories Crater: A Majority Now Believe Trump Was A Better President Than Biden

 

             


"Trump still pulls off his Pied Piper fix: blind loyalty is in, no matter what disgraces stain his character, motivation and seditious actions. His latest fascist obsessions, despite risking votes, signal our first truly Anti-president, the lord of misrule who destroys government in order to save it. That endless criminal disgraces (beyond fraud and rape) amps his primary approval number only speaks to crashing the guard rails. “Unfit to serve” barely captures this quandary". - Robert Becker, Wheels Come Off What Unifies This Country  - Common Knowledge and Common Values


"It boggles the mind that the American people are so foolish and uncaring about their country that this criminal ignoramus is the front runner for the Republican nomination and even leading Joe Biden in polls." - Comment in NY Times



Incredibly, a recent WSJ piece (p. A4, Dec. 6) on Joe Biden "going negative on Trump", also shows why: A majority (51%) of Americans in a recent Yougov/Economist poll now believe Trump was a better president than Joe Biden.  That's the guy, btw, who paved a road to recovery after Covid ravaged the U.S. with 1.2 million dead(thanks to Dump) and steered in more than 14 million new jobs as well as cash- based child tax credits.   To add insult to injury,  The WSJ notes the same poll found:


"Many voters remember Trump’s presidency in positive terms and think he would handle several issues better than Biden has."


Eliciting the question: WTF drugs are these morons on?  Have they totally lost their memory neurons, or did that ever have them in the first place?  They forget - or never processed that:


The orange traitor maggot incited the first attack on our seat of democracy in more than 200 years, i.e.


Should Trump Be Held Accountable For Fomenting Terror Strike On Capitol? Yes - No Less Than the 9/11 Terrorists


As Maureen Dowd put it in a recent NYT column:


"Why should I have to make the case that a man who tried to overthrow the government should not be president again?"  


Indeed!


So why in the hell would anyone in their right mind want to return to power a character who's already shown himself unfit to govern?  And in fact detests the nation he seeks to govern?  Having only recently vowed to "terminate the Constitution" and literally burn the country down while exacting vengeance on all those currently holding him to account for inciting an insurrection. 


 As for the clueless sleepwalkers who recall the Trump years as being halcyon and positive - "thriving" in the words of one congenital moron quoted in the WSJ.  Perhaps these yahoos need some timely reminding.  A little stroll down Trump memory lane with some of the major events:


Trump brought us to the brink of a nuclear altercation with North Korea. From April, 2017:


"They gotta be taught a BIGLY lesson! That punk Kim Jong Un can't get away with threatening me! I'm gonna bomb 'em back to the stone age!'


Trump's glorification of Nazis and antisemites led millions of them to come out of the woodwork and even march without shame, i.e. at Charlottesville VA in August, 2017


White Nationalists march onto the Univ. of Virginia campus in Charlottesville


Trump in June, 2018 had his goons - instigated by Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels' look alike Stephen Miller i.e.


                                         

Start caging migrant infants and kids- 


See:


That June 2018 post actually spurred me to write:


"This elicits the question of how much more debasement, abomination and outrage can be fired up before this malignant disease infecting our country is finally extirpated - every last trace. "


And yet a majority - merely 5 years later - now tell pollsters they want to put this malignant pestilence back into power?   What?  Have a majority now gone stark raving mad on magic mushrooms? Or have their brains just turned to mush from social media - or FOX News- overexposure?


Let's add to the list of Trump transgressions buried in the memory hole:


- Trump ran up the largest national debt since the Revolutionary War era (He added $9 trillion to the national debt in four years, as Nikki Haley pointed out in that GOP debate Wednesday night)


- He also ran four consecutive years of deficits. Yet the geniuses polled for Yougov/Economist assert he'd be better at the economy than Biden?


- He instituted tariffs on the goods from a number of nations that in effect exacted a blowback tax on Americans purchasing power.


- He never delivered on having Mexico build his much-touted wall for him.  And as for the border mess, as the WSJ noted yesterday(The Real Trump Risk for Republicans), he himself scuttled a draft bipartisan immigration compromise bill that would have vastly increased border security.


-He was prepared to invoke the insurrection act to shut down protesters in June, 2020,


And in that post I cited the words of historian John Meacham, to the effect Joe Biden was not on the ballot but WE as citizens were:


"I don't think Joe Biden is on the ballot but we are as a nation. We have a very clear choice in five weeks to decide what we love in common. Do we love decency, do we love democracy, do we love the rule of law. And if we don't do we just head off that cliff totally.."


That will more than hold next year too. And I don't give a damn what current or other geopolitical or economic distractions have Americans' brains on hold.


So yeah, as the WSJ piece notes, Biden is starting to go negative on Trump proclaiming as he did at a fundraiser in Boston last Tuesday:  


Trump’s not even hiding the ball anymore. He’s telling us what he’s going to do. He’s making no bones about it.


Trump clearly hoping a majority of potential voters will be dumb enough not to take him seriously and forget all the abominations he performed in his last go round. Or, vindicating what I've said before: "Americans have the political memory of gnats."


So Joe Biden is issuing a stark reminder of what life would be like if Trump turns out to be his rival-  especially given that freak show Reep "debate" Wednesday night with 4 also rans (Nikki Hayley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Chris Christie, and Ron Desantis). 


And further given the justice system will not likely be our salvation, especially after Trump will use all his appeals to delay any reckoning until after the election.  Hell, we can't even expect judges to act now to hold him in contempt after all his threats to judges and court recorders. I'm still waiting for the first judge to toss his ass into Rikers.   But let's face it, no disease or major medical catastrophe is gonna take this fungal maggot down.


The WSJ piece portrays Biden as giving an "apocalyptic picture of a second Trump term in speeches, fundraising appearances and on the airwaves." And other WSJ op-eds chide Biden and the Dems for "using Trump, the gift that keeps on giving" and "playing the fear card again, as with gutting the Affordable Care Act."  But what the fuck do you expect him to do after polls so show many have either lost their minds, their memories or their common sense?


Biden is also spot on correct that in a second Trump term, his predecessor will enact a nationwide ban on abortion (under GOP pressure)  and ship jobs overseas.   For those who missed the memo, either drunk or on drugs or buried in dumb social media (like Tik Tok) Trump has also been campaigning on aggressive plans to use his executive authority to influence schools and police departments in an unprecedented fashion.  The cockroach has also pledged to marshal the power of the government to investigate and punish his critics. And to find them he will have the tools still available under the Patriot Act and government fusion operations, to track every cell phone number and call....to whomever, about whatever.


The negative ad and speech moves come as Democrats have been calling on Biden to go negative on Trump, arguing that Biden’s efforts to promote his economic agenda aren’t working. That is putting it mildly. All that's occurred is that Bidenomics has been made the butt of jokes and regular takedowns in WSJ op-eds.   Like it or not, fear is the card to play as it is with abortion. Stoke enough fear to try to expose what these zealots plan - and what they have done in the past- to get Americans out of their post-Covid stupor.  In the words of Kate Bedingfield, a veteran of Biden’s 2020 campaign who served as White House communications director until this year:


They want to use this opportunity to start to remind people of what four years of Trump looked like and what it would mean if he were back in office,”


The WSJ column claims it isn't clear this newly aggressive approach will benefit Biden given "many voters have made up their minds about Trump".   Be that as it may, the effort must be made to try to deliver a political resuscitation to the low information swing voters.  


As for "the former president proving resilient against many attacks", that's only because Biden has not yet recruited the best attack dogs. As I noted before the person to get back in that capacity is Rahm Emmanuel. Get him back from his Japan envoy mission where his talents are being wasted and put him to work creating novel modes to savage the Dumpster and reduce his poll numbers. While perhaps restoring American brains and sense.  


But the latter can't occur so long as congenital imbeciles - like Matthew Schmitz - are able to spout brain- infesting piffle like the following in the NY Times -to account for why so many Americans don't see Trump as the existential threat the rest of us do.:


"Trump is often denounced as a “threat to democracy” with radical and extreme policies. But he enjoys enduring support because he is seen by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate."


"Unpredictable and pragmatic kind of moderate"? How about an unpredictable kind of unhinged prick and traitor? A bloody Hitler clone,  and fascist dictator wannabe.  But don't take my word for it, just go here:

by Heather Digby Parton | December 19, 2023 - 8:50am | permalink

— from Salon

Donald Trump believes in eugenics. He really does. Of course, his understanding of it is purely based upon his own belief in his superior genes and good "German blood." He's said it many times in public:


As well as a shameless Putin and Kim Jong Un lover who is determined to finish off American democracy  - but which too many in this country are ill-prepared to acknowledge? They'd rather buy into bunkum and flush this nation into history's toilet like the Weimar Germans did back in 1933.  Thanks to Butt brains like Schmitz it could happen unless more become alert to the threat and peddled babble-  like one NY Times commenter who wrote:


"This nonsense is refuted by Trump himself. Listen to his speeches which have very little of the moderation or middle class friendly policies this author claims to hear. He knows what his supporters want and he gives it to them. He preaches revenge and anger toward those who have thwarted him and toward those he scapegoats for their situation. It is the revenge and anger that get the most applause from his supporters not policies that might address their grievances.."


See Also:


 WSJ NEWS EXCLUSIVE


Excerpt:


President Biden’s political standing is at its weakest point of his presidency, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, with voters giving him his lowest job-performance marks and favoring Donald Trump for the first time in a head-to-head test of the likely 2024 presidential matchup.  Biden lags behind Trump by 4 percentage points, 47% to 43%, on a hypothetical ballot with only those two candidates. Trump’s lead expands to 6 points, 37% to 31%, when five potential third-party and independent candidates are added to the mix...

  Only 23% of voters say Biden’s policies have helped them personally, while 53% say they have been hurt by the president’s agenda. By contrast, about half of voters say Trump’s policies when he was president helped them personally, more than the 37% who say they were hurt.

Things were thriving under Trump. This country is a business and it needs to be run by a businessman,” said Aimee Kozlowski, 53 years old


by Heather Digby Parton | December 9, 2023 - 8:20am | permalink

— from Salon

Many breathless headlines have appeared in the mainstream media over the past couple of weeks about the impending dictatorship of Donald Trump if he were to win the election next fall. All the major newspapers and magazines have finally begun to delve into exactly what Trump and his henchmen have in store to exact his revenge and enact the white nationalist agenda of the MAGA far right. It's about time. Let's hope they keep it up.

Here are just a few of the proposals that we know about. He plans to gut the Environmental Protection Agency and drill in Alaska under the illusion that somehow the "profits" will pay for Social Security and Medicare. (It's a totally absurd proposal.) He's going to use the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to quell domestic dissent and he'll ban homeless camps in cities and put the unhoused in "tent cities." And there are very detailed plans to round up millions of migrants and put them in detention camps before mass deportation. (We're going to have a whole lot of "camps" in America under Donald Trump.) He plans to pardon "a large portion" of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and "go after" Joe Biden and other political enemies using the Department of Justice as well as the media. And he's going to pull out of NATO, abandon Ukraine and back the right-wingers in the Israeli government. He will essentially declare war on blue states, particularly the cities where he plans to send in what amounts to an occupying federal force.


And:

by Amanda Marcotte | December 7, 2023 - 7:46am | permalink

— from Salon

Watching cable news is a frequent source of despair, but one especially fraught spiral occurred Monday while subjecting myself to "Morning Joe" on MSNBC. The segment guest was Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, who was promoting his magazine's thorough, frightening and entirely accurate warning that Donald Trump's goal is to end American democracy and replace it with a fascist system. A variety of Atlantic journalists from across the political spectrum contributed with heavily researched and smart analysis laying out Trump's agenda of ending the rule of law, using extra-legal violence to suppress dissent and securing his power so thoroughly voters will be unable to remove him peacefully.

There's been a surge of such reporting in recent weeks, from some of the most reputable publications in the country. On Monday, the New York Times published a lengthy exposé of Trump's long history of admiring authoritarian dictators, even ones who use murder to silence opponents. This follows another investigation into the ominously named "Project 2025," created by a team of very smart but evil people who want to dismantle democracy and are working through the details of how to pull it off. The Washington Post has even tried to draw attention to Trump's plans through listicles that use bold fonts and short paragraphs, so even the drunkest uncle could probably read it — if he wanted to.

And:


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And:


by Amanda Marcotte | December 6, 2023 - 8:19am | permalink

— from Salon

Don't hang out with people who praise Adolf Hitler! It should seem like an easy guideline for anyone to follow, as well as the personal preference of most people. But for Republicans in Texas, asking them to stay away from neo-Nazis is seen very differently. To conspiratorially-minded conservatives, it is a "Marxist" plot against them. Which is why, on Saturday, leaders of the Republican Party of Texas voted down a resolution barring members from associating with anyone "known to espouse or tolerate antisemitism, pro-Nazi sympathies or Holocaust denial."

That that this even had to be put up for a vote is a sign that the "don't pal around with Nazis" rule is viewed by many in the Texas Republican Party as too onerous a restriction.


And:

by Clarence Lusane | December 6, 2023 - 8:47am | permalink

 


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