|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 22, 2024 23:53:01 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 23, 2024 1:15:25 GMT
This is utterly ridiculous. Even if he really had $500 million, he's way too cheap to spend that much money on his own campaign. In 2016, he only spent about $50 million. With this absurd claim, he undercut his credibility in court, too. put up or shut up
Trump now claims that he has almost $500 million in cash, but his lawyers recently told the appellate court that he has no means to post a $454 million bond.
One of them is lying, and you can expect the court to ask Trump’s lawyers about this.www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/22/trump-500-million-civil-fraud/Trump claims he has $500 million in cash, undercutting his lawyers Former president Donald Trump said he has “almost $500 million” in cash, days after his lawyers stated that it would be nearly impossible to post the judgment of nearly half a billion dollars in his New York civil fraud case. By Marianne LeVine Updated March 22, 2024
Former president Donald Trump claimed Friday that he had “almost $500 million” in cash, undercutting his lawyers’ previous statements that he would not be able to pay a bond of more than $450 million to secure a massive judgment in his New York civil fraud case.
Yet some legal experts suggested that Trump’s remarks could hurt his lawyers’ arguments.
Gregory Germain, a law professor at Syracuse University, said the post undermines his credibility and the credibility of his witnesses who testified that he doesn’t have the money.
“It definitely hurts him to say ‘I’ve got the cash, I just don’t want to put it up,’ ” Germain said. “It’s just very difficult to understand why he would do something like that.” |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 23, 2024 14:44:33 GMT
Romney is right, Trump’s increasingly violent statements just get dismissed. www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2024/03/23/trump-jan-6-rioters-rhetoric-campaign/“Calling them hostages is offensive in the extreme,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who voted to convict Trump twice in his impeachment trials. “He says outrageous things day after day and people just get used to it and dismiss it as being him the way he is.” |
|
Gem Girl
Pearl Clutcher
......
Posts: 2,686
Jun 29, 2014 19:29:52 GMT
|
Post by Gem Girl on Mar 23, 2024 21:20:55 GMT
If they had followed news over the years, they'd have known before he descended on the escalator that he's always been a terrible businessman, too. That so many people just took his word for it (or believed it because of a TV game show, for Pete's sake!) makes me SMDH. I hope they're finding out that he doesn't even own more than fragments of most of those buildings, and they'll wipe their eyes, wake up, and stop being sheep for him, at least in the privacy of the voting booth. |
|
Gem Girl
Pearl Clutcher
......
Posts: 2,686
Jun 29, 2014 19:29:52 GMT
|
Post by Gem Girl on Mar 23, 2024 21:57:38 GMT
This is utterly ridiculous. Even if he really had $500 million, he's way too cheap to spend that much money on his own campaign. In 2016, he only spent about $50 million. With this absurd claim, he undercut his credibility in court, too. He's pathetically trying to save face. He figures he's got nothing left to lose, I suppose. |
|
|
|
Post by Scrapper100 on Mar 23, 2024 23:44:48 GMT
Despite your insistence that "you can only see it one way, or at least you should" Not just the auto industry but the whole economy of the country. He is not calling for violence. Well I guess we are disagreeing but I did preface it with IMO. But thanks for the response. Sorry for the delay in responding. I ask earlier and was wondering if you agreed with Trump’s thoughts on Cheney that he posted: SHE SHOULD BE PROSECUTED FOR WHAT SHE HAS DONE TO OUR COUNTRY! SHE ILLEGALLY DESTROYED THE EVIDENCE. UNREAL!!!” Do you believe this to be true? I’m not a lawyer but I am sure there is a procedure for handling evidence. I know she has rebutted this claim and said no it was turned over to someone- I don’t remember her exact wording but why would she want to get rid of evidence when it proves what she says? I would bet it’s kept because they may need it again. Remember to that the witnesses were mostly Republicans, ones that voted for TFG worked for him or were members of congress that agreed with TFG 95% of the time including Cheney. Remember in the days immediately following 1/6 most prominent Republican congressmen spoke out against it. Then like a week later oh it was nothing and they started downplaying it. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 24, 2024 23:21:31 GMT
On this podcast, Trump said some really crazy things. He's normally at least a little restrained at rallies and in TV interviews. Apparently, all bets are off in a podcast. crazywww.meidastouch.com/news/trumps-batsh-t-crazy-new-interview-with-seb-gorkaHe started off the interview addressing the "bloodbath" controversy, which he claims was a comment limited to just the auto industry despite the fact that he said "the entire country" when he made the comment. To be generous, he was talking about the entire American economy becoming a "bloodbath" if he isn't elected, because Trump only offers fear. In this interview, Trump broadened it would even further by saying that the United States would cease to exist as a country after 2024 unless he wins the election. He was NOT talking about just the auto industry.
Then Trump, who hates the fact that the UAW endorsed Biden this past January, said that any auto worker who supports Biden or has voted for him in the past is stupid. Trump's entire argument to auto workers is, of course, based on more fear. He claims that the US auto industry will cease to exist in a second Biden term since he will allegedly mandate EVs, and Trump falsely claims that all EVs are made in China.
Trump then did what many predicted he would do later this summer as the campaign heated up - claim that Democrats were planning to rig and steal the election. He also claimed this in the summer of 2016 and 2020. I haven't heard him say definitively yet this year that Democrats were going to steal 2024, but he rolled it out early this cycle for Gorka.
Trump next addressed Jewish voters. This is part of his ongoing effort to splinter the Democratic coalition, which contains both Jews and Muslims, over the attack on Israel and war in Gaza. Trump has always framed his entire argument to Jewish voters in terms of Israel, as if that is the only issue they care about. In the past, he has always touted moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv as the reason American Jews should vote for him. Now he has a new rap. Basically, his argument is that his friend Netanyahu will have a blank check to do whatever he wants if he is president. He then said that any Jew who doesn't support him hates their religion and hates Israel.
Trump then went on a long riff about not getting enough credit for his covid response in 2020. This is unusual because he has shied away from talking about covid for well over a year after he was booed at a few rallies touting the vaccine, which is hated by his base. I think the reason why he is now starting to do this again is because people are posting clips about his various statements and policies every day from 4 years ago, and so he feels now that he has to defend his indefensible record on the pandemic.
Trump next addressed criticism he has been receiving recently because of Mike Pence's interview last week where he said he will not endorse or vote for Trump. That has led many, including myself, to point out that only 4 of his 44 prior Cabinet officials are supporting him this time. Trump has trashed many of his own appointees after firing them, which reflects on his competence. But he went on a long tangent in this interview where he said he didn't really know anybody in Washington back then so he appointed a lot of terrible people, but now he has everything figured out.
Next, Trump humiliated Gorka in front of his own audience. Weeks ago, Gorka claimed publicly that Trump confided in him who his VP pick was going to be, and made him pledge secrecy. Many right-wingers ripped Gorka over that, scoffing that Trump would only tell him when he has consistently told everyone else that he hasn't made his mind up yet. So when Gorka brought that up, Trump shut him down quickly and said he hasn't made the choice. Incidentally, I believe he has made the choice and did blab it to Gorka, but Trump wants all the people who think they are in the running out there campaigning for him and doesn't want to discourage them. He seemed a little annoyed that Gorka would clout-chase by spilling the beans.
Finally, Trump was asked who he thought the worst people in TV were today, and he went on a long diatribe about Joe & Mika with MSNBC's Morning Joe. He said how they used to be friends and he would appear on their show almost daily in 2016. As he correctly points out, that benefitted both parties because their ratings went up and it certainly helped Trump reach a broader audience. But Trump claims that he stopped going on their show because they were dishonest. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 24, 2024 23:28:18 GMT
Trump's crazy statements during covidwww.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/trump-covid-coronavirus-response-biden-four-years-video/“ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” blared Trump’s Truth Social account last Monday.
Let’s take a trip back, shall we?
This week, four years ago, Trump was in the throes of dangerous denial as his extravagant mishandling of the COVID crisis plunged the nation into almost hourly panic attacks. There were already about 18,000 reported cases in the United States, and more than 260 deaths.
Trigger warning on this one: On March 21, 2020, Trump tweeted, “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” which was as untrue then as it is now. Two days later—four years ago today, on Day 63 of the crisis—it was reported that an Arizona man died after intentionally ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a fish tank cleaner. Trump told a press briefing, “Parts of our country are very lightly affected.” Just a few days later, the country he ran, and wants to run again, reported more coronavirus cases than any other country.
These are just a handful of the nightmarish details drawn from March 2020, four years ago. The president’s vanity and lack of preparedness in those first 100 days of the pandemic allowed the virus to metastasize into the supersized public health crisis he’s now asking voters to forget. This period was also a showcase of his very worst traits in office: his reliance on spin and bluster, his aversion to taking responsibility (“No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said on March 13, 2020), and his magical thinking. He indulged in desperate blame shifting, bunk science, and mixed messaging—the antithesis of good public health leadership.
At the time, Mother Jones took on the enormous reporting task of meticulously cataloguing, sometimes hour by hour, the missteps, miscalculations, and cruelties of Trump’s response to the disaster unfolding on his watch. The resulting timeline makes for enraging reading, to say the least.
I also started to compile video clips of the absurdities and outrages. And the resulting video is both a time capsule of horrors and a teleporter for any voter who might be doubting whether they are better off than they were four years ago this month.
|
|
|
|
Post by Merge on Mar 24, 2024 23:48:31 GMT
Trump's crazy statements during covidwww.motherjones.com/politics/2024/03/trump-covid-coronavirus-response-biden-four-years-video/“ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” blared Trump’s Truth Social account last Monday.
Let’s take a trip back, shall we?
This week, four years ago, Trump was in the throes of dangerous denial as his extravagant mishandling of the COVID crisis plunged the nation into almost hourly panic attacks. There were already about 18,000 reported cases in the United States, and more than 260 deaths.
Trigger warning on this one: On March 21, 2020, Trump tweeted, “HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine,” which was as untrue then as it is now. Two days later—four years ago today, on Day 63 of the crisis—it was reported that an Arizona man died after intentionally ingesting chloroquine phosphate, a fish tank cleaner. Trump told a press briefing, “Parts of our country are very lightly affected.” Just a few days later, the country he ran, and wants to run again, reported more coronavirus cases than any other country.
These are just a handful of the nightmarish details drawn from March 2020, four years ago. The president’s vanity and lack of preparedness in those first 100 days of the pandemic allowed the virus to metastasize into the supersized public health crisis he’s now asking voters to forget. This period was also a showcase of his very worst traits in office: his reliance on spin and bluster, his aversion to taking responsibility (“No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” he said on March 13, 2020), and his magical thinking. He indulged in desperate blame shifting, bunk science, and mixed messaging—the antithesis of good public health leadership.
At the time, Mother Jones took on the enormous reporting task of meticulously cataloguing, sometimes hour by hour, the missteps, miscalculations, and cruelties of Trump’s response to the disaster unfolding on his watch. The resulting timeline makes for enraging reading, to say the least.
I also started to compile video clips of the absurdities and outrages. And the resulting video is both a time capsule of horrors and a teleporter for any voter who might be doubting whether they are better off than they were four years ago this month. Sssshhhh, if you say hydroxychloroquine was never effective, you're "silencing conservative voices." |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 25, 2024 0:06:47 GMT
truthFor the MAGAidiots in the back, yes— Donald Trump ACTUALLY said:
Mexico was going to “pay for the wall.”
Covid was going to “disappear.”
That if he loses there will be a “bloodbath for the country.”
And he 100% asked “medical doctors” about injecting “disinfectants… inside or almost a cleaning?” as a cure for Covid.
We know, because there are literal videos of him saying those things.
And truth is STILL truth.
No matter what you say to the contrary.
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 25, 2024 21:59:07 GMT
Crazy that in 2024 we have a candidate who is openly embracing being a mob boss. www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/opinion/trump-al-capone.htmlOPINION Trump’s Third Act? American Gangster. March 25, 2024 By Samuel Earle
In recent months, Donald Trump has been trying out a new routine. At rallies and town halls across the country, he compares himself to Al Capone. “He was seriously tough, right?” Mr. Trump told a rally in Iowa in October, in an early rendition of the act. But “he was only indicted one time; I’ve been indicted four times.” (Capone was, in fact, indicted at least six times.) The implication is not just that Mr. Trump is being unfairly persecuted but also that he is four times as tough as Capone. “If you looked at him in the wrong way,” Mr. Trump explained, “he blew your brains out."
Mr. Trump’s eagerness to invoke Capone reflects an important shift in the image he wants to project to the world. In 2016, Mr. Trump played the reality TV star and businessman who would shake up politics, shock and entertain. In 2020, Mr. Trump was the strongman, desperately trying to hold on to power by whatever means possible. In 2024, Mr. Trump is in his third act: the American gangster, heir to Al Capone — besieged by the authorities, charged with countless egregious felonies but surviving and thriving nonetheless, with an air of macho invincibility.
The evidence of Mr. Trump’s mobster pivot is everywhere. He rants endlessly about his legal cases in his stump speeches. On Truth Social, he boasts about having a bigger team of lawyers “than any human being in the history of our Country, including even the late great gangster, Alphonse Capone!” His team has used his mug shot — taken after he was indicted on a charge of racketeering in August — on T-shirts, mugs, Christmas wrapping, bumper stickers, beer coolers and even NFTs. They’ve sold off parts of the blue suit he was wearing in that now-infamous photo for more than $4,000 a piece (it came with a dinner with Mr. Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort).
Commentators have long pointed out that Mr. Trump behaves like a mob boss: The way he demands loyalty from his followers, lashes out at rivals, bullies authorities and flaunts his impunity are all reminiscent of the wiseguys Americans know so well from movies and television. As a real-estate mogul in New York, he seems to have relished working with mobsters and learned their vernacular before bringing their methods into the White House: telling James Comey, “I expect loyalty”; imploring Volodymyr Zelensky, “Do us a favor”; and pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state, “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.” But before, he downplayed the mobster act in public. Now he actively courts the comparison.
Mr. Trump’s audacious embrace of a criminal persona flies in the face of conventional wisdom. When Richard Nixon told the American public, “I am not a crook,” the underlying assumption was that voters would not want a crook in the White House. Mr. Trump is testing this assumption. It’s a canny piece of marketing. A violent mobster and a self-mythologizing millionaire, Capone sanitized his crimes by cultivating an aura of celebrity and bravery, grounded in distrust of the state and a narrative of unfair persecution. The public lapped it up. “Everybody sympathizes with him,” Vanity Fair noted of Capone in 1931, as the authorities closed in on him. “Al has made murder a popular amusement.” In similar fashion, Mr. Trump tries to turn his indictments into amusement, inviting his supporters to play along. “They’re not after me, they’re after you — I’m just standing in the way!” he says, a line that greets visitors to his website, as well.
Mr. Trump clearly hopes that his Al Capone act will offer at least some cover from the four indictments he faces. And there is a twisted logic to what he is doing: By adopting the guise of the gangster, he is able to recast his lawbreaking as vigilante justice — a subversive attempt to preserve order and peace — and transform himself into a folk hero. Partly thanks to this framing, it seems unlikely that a criminal conviction will topple his candidacy: not only because Mr. Trump has already taken so many other scandals in his stride but also because, as Capone shows, the convicted criminal can be as much an American icon as the cowboy and the frontiersman. In this campaign, Mr. Trump’s mug shot is his message — and the repeated references to Al Capone are there for anyone who needs it spelled out.
In an essay from 1948, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” the critic Robert Warshow sought to explain the unique appeal of gangster fables in American life. He saw the gangster as a quintessentially American figure, the dark shadow of the country’s sunnier self-conception. “The gangster speaks for us,” Warshow wrote, “expressing that part of the American psyche which rejects the qualities and the demands of modern life.”
It is easy to see why gangster fables appeal to so many Republican voters today. They are stories of immigrant assimilation and success, laced with anti-immigrant sentiment and rivalry. Their heroes are creatures of the big city — those nests of Republican neuroses — who tame its excesses through force but never forget God or their family along the way. In many ways, minus the murder, they are ideal conservative citizens: enterprising, loyal, distrustful of government; prone to occasional ethical lapses, but who’s perfect?
Mr. Trump knows that in America, crooks can be the good guys. When the state is seen as corrupt, the crook becomes a kind of Everyman, bravely beating the system at its own game. This is the cynical logic that the gangster and the right-wing populist share: Everyone’s as bad as anyone else, so anything goes. “A crook is a crook,” Capone once said. “But a guy who pretends he is enforcing the law and steals on his authority is a swell snake. The worst type of these punks is the big politician, who gives about half his time to covering up so that no one will know he’s a thief.”
It’s a worldview powerful enough to convince voters that even the prized institutions of liberal democracy — a free press, open elections, the rule of law — are fronts in the biggest racket of them all. This conceit has a rich pedigree in reactionary politics. “Would-be totalitarian rulers usually start their careers by boasting of their past crimes and carefully outlining their future ones,” Hannah Arendt warned.
The gangster’s brutality also taps into what Warshow and others of his generation saw as the sadism in the American mind: the pleasure the public takes in seeing the gangster’s “unlimited possibility of aggression” inflicted upon others. The gangster is nothing without this license for violence, without the simple fact that, as Warshow put it, “he hurts people.” He intimidates his rivals and crushes his enemies. His cruelty is the point. The public can then enjoy “the double satisfaction of participating vicariously in the gangster’s sadism and then seeing it turned against the gangster himself.” “He is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become,” Warshow wrote. Reverence and repulsion are all wrapped up.
Capone’s rise, demise and exalted afterlife don’t hold happy clues for Mr. Trump’s opponents. Dethroning a mob boss is never easy. “He was the 1920s version of the Teflon man; nothing stuck to him,” Deirdre Bair wrote in a 2016 biography of Capone. After he was arrested in 1931 for tax fraud, his mob continued to prosper for another half-century, and Capone himself, who was released after six and a half years in prison for health reasons and died from a stroke and pneumonia in 1947 at age 48, achieved a type of immortality. Mr. Trump will see in his story many reasons to be cheerful. “I often say Al Capone, he was one of the greatest of all time, if you like criminals,” Mr. Trump said in December. It was an interesting framing: “if you like criminals”? Mr. Trump has a hunch, and it’s more than just projection, that many Americans do. |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 25, 2024 22:10:01 GMT
Trump interfered in aid for Ukraine and told Republicans to vote against it. A former president injected himself into foreign policy in support of a dictator. Now, he's trying to inject himself into foreign policy with Israel. www.nytimes.com/live/2024/03/25/us/trump-biden-electionTrump urges Israel to ‘finish up your war.’ Former President Donald J. Trump, in an interview with a conservative Israeli news outlet that was published on Monday, exhorted Israel “to finish up your war,” mixing bellicose support for the government of Israel with harsh warnings that the Jewish state was losing international support by providing “a very bad picture for the world.”
But while Mr. Trump had typically harsh words for President Biden — he called Mr. Biden “dumb” — he offered no prescriptions for what the United States should do, or for what he would do, if elected, to bring the war in Gaza to an end or to advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The interview with Israel Hayom, a publication started by the conservative American casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, was released on the same day that the Biden administration allowed the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution demanding a cease-fire in Gaza.
It also came as former members of Mr. Trump’s administration have become more outspoken on policies that diverge sharply from President Biden’s. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a former senior White House adviser who led the Trump administration’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, took heat last week for calling the war in Gaza “a little bit of an unfortunate situation,” then adding, “but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.”
And David M. Friedman, who was ambassador to Israel during Trump’s administration, critiqued Vice President Kamala Harris on social media over the weekend for saying as many as 1.5 million Palestinians crowded into the southern Gaza city of Rafah had nowhere to go if Israel attacks. Mr. Friedman suggested that Gaza’s Palestinians could always emigrate.
“She ‘studied the maps’ and concluded that the people in Rafah have no place to go,” Mr. Friedman wrote. “It must have been an awfully small map — obviously left out Egypt and other Arab countries.”
Mr. Trump did not embrace the rhetoric of expulsion, but he told the Israeli interviewers that he planned to meet with Mr. Friedman to listen to his pitch that the United States recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, which has been occupied by Israel since 1967.
Mr. Trump’s main thrust, however, was a more mixed prescription for the Israeli right: Israel should finish the war in Gaza — “You have to get it done,” he said — and then move on quickly to “peace,” in some form, because “Israel is in trouble.”
“Israel has to be very careful, because you’re losing a lot of the world, you’re losing a lot of support,” Mr. Trump warned. “You have to finish up, you have to get the job done. And you have to get on to peace, to get on to a normal life for Israel, and for everybody else.”
The former president also delivered what appeared to be a critique of Israel’s propaganda efforts.
Asked how he would counter a rise in antisemitism during the Gaza War, he answered, “I think Israel made a very big mistake.” He continued, “These photos and shots, I mean, moving shots of bombs being dropped into buildings in Gaza. And I said, ‘oh, that’s a terrible portrait. It’s a very bad picture for the world.’”
Mr. Trump appeared to fault Israeli military officials for releasing such images of destruction. “Every night, I would watch buildings pour down on people,” he told Israel Hayom.
“It would say it was given by the Defense Ministry,” he said, adding: “I think Israel wanted to show that it’s tough, but sometimes you shouldn’t be doing that.”
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 25, 2024 22:34:50 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by revirdsuba99 on Mar 25, 2024 23:09:22 GMT
Has there been any doubt?!
|
|
|
|
Post by Lurkingpea on Mar 25, 2024 23:19:34 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 26, 2024 0:56:39 GMT
Not a crazy statement, but Trump is clearly disoriented. Does he know what year it is? Or who is the current governor? current governor |
|
|
|
Post by aj2hall on Mar 26, 2024 22:50:26 GMT
Trump is now selling bibles apparently. He's never been presidential, but this really shows how he is not worthy of the office. selling bibles |
|
|
|
Post by Merge on Mar 26, 2024 23:25:01 GMT
Trump is now selling bibles apparently. He's never been presidential, but this really shows how he is not worthy of the office. selling biblesMoving from mob boss to televangelist, apparently. |
|
|
|
Post by Lurkingpea on Mar 27, 2024 1:46:20 GMT
Trump is now selling bibles apparently. He's never been presidential, but this really shows how he is not worthy of the office. selling biblesThey will likely catch on fire if he touches them. I wonder if his handlers had to talk him out of having him superimpose his own face on the face of Jesus in the pictures. |
|
dawnnikol
Prolific Pea
'A life without books is a life not lived.' Jay Kristoff
Posts: 8,552
Sept 21, 2015 18:39:25 GMT
|
Post by dawnnikol on Mar 31, 2024 10:59:23 GMT
|
|
|
|
Post by crazy4scraps on Mar 31, 2024 14:45:02 GMT
The toaster was the best part! 🤣 |
|
