“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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.