The video embedded above offers exclusive behind-the-scenes footage of the current state of the Trump campaign.
What a spectacle! The Republican nominee offered a bizarre rant about how the New York Times and People Magazine were locked into a grand conspiracy with Hillary Clinton, the big banks and the (Republican!) head of the FBI. Evidence? He offered none.
NONE.
For a moment, I was tempted to call his tirade "Alex Jonesian," but in truth, Trump sunk below the Jones level. This exercise in conspiranoia went spelunking through those dark caverns of our collective psyche previously explored only by David Icke or Milton William Cooper -- and perhaps Julius Streicher. Honestly, I half-expected Trump to start raving about the underground UFO base near Dulce, New Mexico.
This, from a man trying to establish himself as someone who respects women.
Donnie, Donnie, Donnie. The truth would stick in your throat if ever you tried to tell it. (Needless to say, Stoynoff is roughly 30 zillion times more attractive than Fat Old Trumpy is.)
Meanwhile, the NYT seems to savor the idea of doing combat with Donald Trump in court. If they paper were party to a grand conspiracy, they'd be acting very differently, methinks.
Let me offer a few observations concerning Trump's threat to jail Hillary. First: Over what?
Trump keeps saying that Hillary deleted 30,000 emails (although his numbers tend to morph). Comey's report is clear: She did not delete anything, and there is no evidence that she asked for any deletions. Trump also still seems to be under the impression that a chemical "bleaching" agent was used. This idiot has no idea how computers work!
Second: Trump clearly is not a professional. Pros don't threaten. Pros simply do.
I've had to deal with several death threats over the past few decades. Only crazy people and blowhards make such threats. Since crazy people can be dangerous, one should never ignore a threat. But one should also understand that professionals never say such things.
Nobody threatened Frank Rosenthal, the man who inspired Martin Scorcese's brilliant film Casino. Rosenthal just turned the key in his ignition switch and discovered that he had engine trouble.
Pros don't threaten. Pros simply do. Only blowhards and crazy people issue threats.
No, I'm not saying that Trump's enemies should take any kind of illegal action against him. God forbid. Seriously: God forbid. We don't need anything else to swell the ranks of this nation's conspiracy buffs.
It would be much sweeter to see Trump land in long-overdue legal hot water -- perhaps for his apparent bribe of Pam Bondi, perhaps for the overall crookedness of his Foundation, perhaps for soliciting foreign donations for his campaign, perhaps for offering Ben Carson a deal for his endorsement, perhaps for keeping all of those foreign-born models in conditions resembling slavery, perhaps for using campaign contributions to fund his businesses, perhaps for the massive scam operation called Trump University, perhaps for his serial bilking of any contractors unfortunate enough to do business with him, perhaps for his illegal dealings with Cuba. Or perhaps -- and this is the big one -- for his treasonous collusion with Vladimir Putin.
Wouldn't you like to see Trump gain an orange jumpsuit to match his pigmentation?
Another Trump business failure. The increasingly toxic Trump brand indicates a quick death for the hotel he created out of what used to be the Old Post Office Building.
The 263-room five-star hotel in the historic Old Post Office building opened last month. But even with a prime location near the White House, swanky interiors, and aggressive promotion by the candidate himself, empty rooms have forced the hotel to reduce rates during a peak season.
Some of the issues even predate Trump’s presidential campaign: When the government inked a 60-year, $200 million lease with Trump in 2012, rival hoteliers took the unusual step of warning Uncle Sam that the deal could turn into yet another Trump business failure.
Those warnings look increasingly prophetic. While the break-even rate on the hotel rooms is more than $750 a night, by some estimates last weekend rooms could be had for under $500 per night — at a time when rival hotels were sold out weeks ahead of time. In his bid to win the lease, Trump promised to offer luxurious suites to lure business execs and diplomats, but many of the international elite appear to be avoiding it.
Last weekend bankers and dignitaries from around the world descended on Washington for the annual World Bank–IMF meetings. But just a few days before the conference, rooms were not only still available at Trump International, they were heavily discounted. On October 2, a deluxe room, with a rack rate of $805, could be had for as low $445 a night on Hotels.com. All other five-star D.C. downtown hotels were sold out.
For a five-star hotel in downtown Washington to have vacancies during major IMF meetings is a little like having empty rooms when the Super Bowl is in town.
In their April 16, 2012, letter to the GSA protesting the acceptance of Trump’s bid, Hilton’s lawyers warned that the government was setting itself up for a “devastating failure for the historical landmark with a business partner whose history of repeated failure demonstrates that it cannot be counted on to deliver what it promises.” Eighteen pages of the letter detailed Trump’s business failures and lawsuits against him.(Emphasis added.)
When -- not if -- Trump loses the property, I hope President Clinton finds some way to resurrect the plan of transforming the building into a Women's Museum. I can't imagine a more wonderful outcome. You know the phrase "poetic justice"? If Dante, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, Dickinson and Angelou collaborated for a year, they could not come up with finer poetry.
7 comments:
it is unfortunate that not many have discovered the irony of the Trump building in Washington that he crowed about during the second debate, was supposed to be a woman's museum instead.
Joseph! You uttered the words, "President Clinton"!
I'm telling you, it's going to happen.
Joseph,
I'm gonna go full contrarian right now and say this. I don't think Trump's done at all. Yeah, the early voting might hurt him, but then again it might not. There are some early figures showing GOP and Dem mail-ins in Michigan about even.
Everything's being thrown at him now. And if this doesn't bring him down, nothing will -- there won't be time left for anything to bring him down. And we know his base is gonna turn out like no one else; and their turnout only goes up with these attacks. Are there enough of them?
I think the race is gonna even up toward the last two weeks. And I think the rage that's building in him guarantees he's gonna be totalitarian right out of the gates.
I also think you /might/ be belittling the danger of his conspiracy theory. He's now saying everything is controlled by international banks. He's saying the country won't exist if Hillary's elected. He's setting the stage for an insurgency if he loses, and a purge if he wins.
Yes, his chances of winning have gone way down, but in the process his totalitarian nature has been revealed. This is the worst time for complacency or gloating. You could call this election the most momentous since the start of the Civil War, but I think that'd be an understatement. The whole Free World is at stake.
-P
P, you may be right -- especially when it comes to the evening of the race toward the end. At this point, I really don't want that kind of suspense, but I fear that we will have to endure.
As for the larger issue of the insurgency that Trump represents: History tells us that sometimes the revolutionaries simply lack the heart to go through with it. On the left, you have the example of the Decembrists and their abortive revolution against the Czar. On the right, you have the example of General Boulanger, whom I consider Europe's first fascist -- and, in some ways, a prototype for Trump, although the two men had very different personalities.
Boulanger could have ended the Third Republic in 1889, just as the Decembrists could have toppled Nicholas I in 1825. But civil war is a bloody, wretched business. After the snow bears its first red stains, the rebels must face that horrible moment when they ask themselves: "Do I REALLY want to go through with this?"
If more Americans knew what really happened in Spain in the 1930s, nobody in this country would romanticize revolution.
"If more Americans knew what really happened in Spain in the 1930s, nobody in this country would romanticize revolution."
That warning would work better if the adjective "right-wing" or "fascist" were inserted before the word "revolution". The left-wing revolution in Spain was a response to a fascist uprising which took place in reaction to a social-democratic election win.
Stalinist power in territory held by the Republic became largely "red fascist", but the Stalinists and Franco's forces weren't the only players. You've got to hand it to the agricultural collectives, the urban collectives, the anarchist CNT, and to some extent the POUM. People did change life for a short while, in the right direction. Romanticism about their revolutionary efforts is a good thing.
Once the fascists had had their uprising, they would probably have slaughtered just as many people if they hadn't met such resistance as if they had.
A fascist uprising in the US in response to a Clinton victory might well be victorious, at least in some areas, because the rise of social revolutionary feeling with the capacity to stop itself getting spooked is very unlikely in this world in which we live, a world full of impressionable young Facebook users who have no idea about who does what to whom. Millions of innocents would be likely to get killed. But if a fascist takeover is attempted, there needs to be resistance - and there needs to be support from abroad - because nobody ever stopped fascism by lying down and getting walked over.
It's unlikely that the US armed forces will loyally fight to retake fascist-held areas.
In the meantime, vote for Clinton! :)
Anon, Franco was indeed one of the worst human beings ever to live. But the fascist terror in Spain was made possible by the stupidity and overreach of the left. They betrayed the original goal of defending the Republic; they saw the war as their chance to spread some truly insane ideas.
For me, the key image is that infamous film footage of the Spanish communists (or were they anarchists?) who raided a convent, dug up the graves of several nuns and desecrated the corpses. ON CAMERA. The lefties were PROUD of what they had done. They thought that they had staged a propaganda coup. Those goddamned idiots actually thought that this hideous imagery would win the hearts and minds of average Spaniards.
I keep flashing on that footage whenever I see dunderheaded young American lefties (such as the BernieBros) operate under the delusion that their views are shared by the majority of their fellow citizens.
Oops, that was me - I forgot to type in 'b'. After the fascist CEDA party under Gil Robles had had ministers in the government but then been ousted by the Popular Front in the 1936 election, I think the far right would have tried to "finish it" with mass terror regardless.
Unlike in the civil war in Greece, there weren't many "worker priests" or "socialist priests". Spain was Opus Dei territory, and the church hierarchy mostly backed the fascists and big landowners. That doesn't excuse for one moment the actions of stupid arseholes who dug up and desecrated nuns' corpses. Certainly that kind of disgusting action provided grist to the mill of the fascists. Spain wasn't and isn't a centralised country culturally, and as a rule the fascists didn't view themselves as fighting for "Fascism" or "the Spanish nation". (The term "Nationalist" was adopted mainly to please the German Nazis, and is said to have been bestowed by Joseph Goebbels.) They saw themselves as fighting for Christianity against the godless communists. This species of fascism didn't just win in Spain; it comes down to Algeria, South America, and Belgium too, practically sacralising the widespread use of torture against "subversives", sometimes while intoning the phrase "Christ the King". What's emblematic for me in the left-wing revolution in Spain is the camaraderie and sharing that were evident both in the production collectives (some of which abolished money) and in the working class militias (mainly formed by branches of the anarchist CNT).
I dunno; maybe you'd put some blame on anticlericalism for riling up the fash, going back to the beginning of the Second Republic in 1931? But getting the priesthood out of the schools seems a lot better than letting them stay in. In Ireland they're still in, whatever the position is on paper.
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