[Wrongfully] suppressing minority vote is standard procedure here. This is normal.
In a nutshell…
Wait until next month…
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During the Trump 1 administration, an articulate and witty characterisation of Donald Trump circulated on the Internet, answering the question “Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” As the Trump 2 administration is now a fact, people have picked it up again, at it’s going viral. Again. I don’t know if it has been shared here before (couldn’t find it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not here; it could just be that the search functionality sucks), but it fits well in this thread. The link found at the bottom is just one of the many places you can find it - it is “everywhere”.
It is very hard to find favourite quotes, as the entire piece if full of quotable quotes from beginning to end. But here’s one that stings:
But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart.
Since it is impossible to compress the piece (it is its own summary), I have quoted the entire thing below. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s well worth a read. If you have seen it before, it is well worth re-reading. And I’d like to add that it’s not only British people that think like this about DT.
US voters have fucked around by voting for this “Jabba the Hutt of privilege”. So when will they find out, and how?
“Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?” Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:
A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.
Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.
Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.
There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.
And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.
So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.
• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.
Link:
nailed it, like he read my mind. Crass, witless, artless, charmless, cruel, petty, and stupid, a bully who always punches down, and the most egregious sin, he has no discernible sense of humour, and seems to think cruel petty insults are levity.
Don’t know the young youtuber presenting this, but he’s taking a closer look at teachers fucking around by voting Trump, and now finding out that Trump might actually do what he promised to do, namely cut federal funding to schools by getting rid of the Department of Education. Which will disproportionately hurt low income areas. Tragic.
Finally someone who actually understands how tariffs work. The people he talks to or use as examples? Not so much
The [Proud Boys] have lost control of their own name after the far-right extremist group subjected a Black church…
Here’s a FAFO of a different flavor:
Next up: A .gov website wherein every citizen must sign a loyalty oath to the current administration, enforced by the JD.
No loyalty except to the Party, no emotions allowed except fear, rage, and triumph.
Fuck around: lower educational standards, pay your teachers shit.
Find out: get a population with low reading ability.
Came across the Snopes article linked to below, where the question “Do More Than Half of Americans Read Below 6th-Grade Level?” is answered in the affirmative.
Q1: Does this accurately represent ground truth?
Q2: How does this manifest itself?
Q3: Are there any important caveats here not mentioned in the Snopes article?
Q1. IME, yes.
Q2. Limited employment opportunities, dependence on others for information interpretation, social isolation, off the top of my head.
Q3. No idea.
Speaking of which, I’ll go ahead and add more to this tragic pile…
- *Illiteracy has become such a serious problem in our country that 130 million adults are now unable to read a simple story to their children
- *21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022
- *54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
- *45 million are functionally illiterate and read below a 5th grade level
- *44% of the American adults do not read a book in a year
That sounds rather depressing. I note that Trump 2 stated that they will start dismantling the Department of Education, thus effectively leaving the definition of standards and how much effort to put into schooling, while they at the same time want to bring manufacturing back to the US, which will require a skilled and literate population. How is it possible that they can try to do two contradictory things at the same time, with a straight face? OK, you can argue that Trump himself is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but someone, somewhere in the system surely must be able to see how self-contradictory and self-destructive this is? From which pool of students do they think they can draw the future engineers, scientists, skilled workers?
They want to dismantle public education and replace it with government subsidized private education, where stuff like religious indoctrination is legal.
It’s all in the Project 2025 playbook.
I wonder how the atheists who voted for him are digesting this. You ‘spose cognitive dissonance / compartmentalization will rule the day?
My thoughts: Good riddance.
The new approvals cover Ivanka-branded fashion gear including sunglasses, handbags, shoes and jewelry, as well as beauty services and voting machines.
(source)
So, seems like they’re largely opportunistic product brands, of which at least some of them are what I would characterise as bullshit brands/products.
Edit: Oh, and voting machines? LOL! What a weird combination of irony, sarcasm, and self-refence via proxy.
I wonder how long it will take for Trump to piss off the Saudis enough that they pull their 2 billion dollars from Jared Kushner’s equity firm? I guess that’s the peril of tying your wealth to political grift.