Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Malkiah]

They won't have the following. As B-Fabulous on here said "There is no vice cult leader."

i think i have to disagree with that, given the way US regressives have traditionally rallied behind whatever monumental dipshit is the nominal head of the republican party at any given time.
there is zero difference between republican voters now and republican voters 25 years ago, they treat trump the exact same way they treated bush.
i'm quite certain if trump vanished they would just copy/paste their behavior to whoever the new figurehead was, because there is ample evidence that they do this over the last 50 years and almost no evidence to support the theory that they wouldn't do this.

note: i say "almost no evidence" because bush sr was a bit of a break from that pattern, but IMO that was kind of a specifically unique circumstance that i think is an exception more than part of a pattern.

[Kaleredar]

They won't have the following. As B-Fabulous on here said "There is no vice cult leader."

So long as they’re president that doesn’t matter vis-a-vis “still malicious, but somewhat competent.”

The best case scenario is that the dems comfortably retake the house and senate in 2026 and run hard obstruction and Trump serves out the rest of his term sporadically and impotently flailing about as a non-longer complicit congress attempts to damage control him and claw as much power away from him as possible. Then, going into the 2028 election he refuses to acquiesce to a Republican successor claiming he deserves a third term that Congress has moved to make even more impossible so the final actual GOP candidate has to deal with constant heckling and backlash from Trump, splitting the party while some charismatic democrat wins the presidency.


Trump kicking the bucket prematurely could actually be pretty troublesome. Vance takes over as president and turns his attention on a much more competent attempt to consolidate power in the hands of the presidency and GOP writ large, and no longer has the stink of Trump.

The GOP can (lie and) say they’ve “left that old blowhard trump behind, we’re definitely much more civil now” but know that the guard rails literally don’t exist anymore, as Trump has proven. As you note there’s no such thing as a vice cult leader, but moving forward there’s no unpredictable element of Trump in the mix thinking of himself first. With trump gone The gop is free to “manufacture” a candidate, free of the random unpredictable chaos of trump or the threat of him turning on them. They’ll tow the party line while knowing that there is no meaningful rock bottom, especially if they can act even just a little more subtly than Trump.

[fwc577]

The fact that MAGA Republicans struggle when Trump isn’t on the ticket tells me all I need to know about how well the Republican Party will do when Trump isn’t around.

[Dead Moose Fandango]

Hey! Uncalled for!

...he needs to live long enough to see the world turn against him and his empire crumble. Preferably, behind bars.

Meh. I'd rather he just dies painfully and quickly. There's 0.00009% chance he'll ever get any comeupance in this world. Maybe there's an afterlife, and if we're lucky, he's headed straight to Hell.

[Breccia]

As B-Fabulous on here said "

(flips hair)

Meh. I'd rather he just dies painfully and quickly.

Unlikely, he has access to the best medical care on the planet and is hiding from every shadow. By contrast, nothing can slow or stop his demonstrably worsening dementia. I'm just not sure if he'll have enough lucid days left in him when the consequences of his actions come crashing down.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

After a one‑day trial, a jury in federal court found Kyle Travis Colton, 37, of Citrus Heights, guilty of one count of receiving child pornography, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Sacramento announced in a news release.

Federal prosecutors said investigators searched Colton’s home and found his laptop with “copious images and videos depicting the graphic sexual abuse of young children.”

In the trial, prosecutors said evidence presented to the jury showed Colton downloaded the child porn from July 2022 through December 2023. A court document, however, alleges that that Colton was collecting child porn as far back as 2010, including while he was a school teacher overseas.

So, it's great that the dude was convicted... but I have a question...why only one count? By my reckoning "Copious Images and Videos" should mean "Copious counts"

[postman1782]

I would say I am shocked, but I'm not. Newly unearthed video of 17 year old Stephen Miller from when he was in high school saying that Torture is a celebration of life for Iraqis. He needs to be removed from the fucking whitehouse and have every house's yard he ever lived in, have their back yards dug up, I can almost guarantee it will be a graveyard of tortured animals.

[Valdhammer]

They won't have the following. As B-Fabulous on here said "There is no vice cult leader."

I think this is part reductive part wishful thinking. Other than the usual swing voters, the rest of the Republican base will continue to vote Republican and will be in the low-tax, anti-woke, anti-immigrant camp for the foreseeable future. They’re drinking misinformation from an endless spring of bullshit in the form of Fox, X, and other social media. They’re irretrievably zombified.

[DarkTZeratul]

I would say I am shocked, but I'm not. Newly unearthed video of 17 year old Stephen Miller from when he was in high school saying that Torture is a celebration of life for Iraqis. He needs to be removed from the fucking whitehouse and have every house's yard he ever lived in, have their back yards dug up, I can almost guarantee it will be a graveyard of tortured animals.

So first I want to say that yes, what he said is absolutely indefensible, and yes, he needs to be removed from the fucking White House for a whole host of reasons.

But with regards to this video, specifically, I think a lot of people say absolutely incredibly stupid shit when they're 17 and it doesn't feel right to use that against them 20 years later. There's plenty of awful hateful shit Stephen Miller is saying right now; we don't need to be digging up idiotic statements people made when they were idiotic teenagers.

[Milchshake]

PAramount continues to bend over for Mistah Trump.

Trump and NEPO BabY TAKE COLBERT




Paramount execs, My “This is purely a financial decision” t-shirt is raising lots of questions already answered by my shirt.

[Sunseeker]

I think this is part reductive part wishful thinking. Other than the usual swing voters, the rest of the Republican base will continue to vote Republican and will be in the low-tax, anti-woke, anti-immigrant camp for the foreseeable future. They’re drinking misinformation from an endless spring of bullshit in the form of Fox, X, and other social media. They’re irretrievably zombified.

While I agree that Republicans will fall in line behind any old Republican, much of MAGA are explicitly not Republicans in that sense and I guarantee large numbers of them, especially among younger voters, will stay home.

[Valdhammer]

PAramount continues to bend over for Mistah Trump.

Trump and NEPO BabY TAKE COLBERT




Paramount execs, My “This is purely a financial decision” t-shirt is raising lots of questions already answered by my shirt.

They did Stephen a favor. Late Night is dying and his show has been pretty terrible for years. Even if it was done to please Trump, I think Stephen will be better off doing something else.

[gondrin]

They did Stephen a favor. Late Night is dying and his show has been pretty terrible for years. Even if it was done to please Trump, I think Stephen will be better off doing something else.

Honestly, he should do what pretty much all the rest are doing. Streaming services and podcasts. I am pretty sure Netflix or someone will actively want him there. He will have a far greater freedom in what he can and cannot do.

Also, they aren't replacing it with anything so, who the hell knows what is going in that timeslot. Probably CSI: Alaskan Outback or something of that effect.

[Valdhammer]

While I agree that Republicans will fall in line behind any old Republican, much of MAGA are explicitly not Republicans in that sense and I guarantee large numbers of them, especially among younger voters, will stay home.

I think this was probably true in 2016 and maybe in 2020 too. I don’t know that it’s true today. I could be wrong.

But I will grant you one thing - no one else alive today is as comfortable effortlessly inventing and inhabiting his own reality, and this is a serious advantage he has over any other politician at present. You can imitate just about anything else he does, and you can beat the same ideological drum, but this one thing is his alone, and it’s very powerful.

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Honestly, he should do what pretty much all the rest are doing. Streaming services and podcasts. I am pretty sure Netflix or someone will actively want him there. He will have a far greater freedom in what he can and cannot do.

Also, they aren't replacing it with anything so, who the hell knows what is going in that timeslot. Probably CSI: Alaskan Outback or something of that effect.

I grew up on late night talk shows in the 80s and early 90s. I love them. I am sad TV is dying. I don’t think on-demand streaming is healthy. It’s neither cinema nor television - it’s content, and we now live in a world increasingly hollowed out by content.

[gondrin]

I think this was probably true in 2016 and maybe in 2020 too. I don’t know that it’s true today. I could be wrong.

But I will grant you one thing - no one else alive today is as comfortable effortlessly inventing and inhabiting his own reality, and this is a serious advantage he has over any other politician at present. You can imitate just about anything else he does, and you can beat the same ideological drum, but this one thing is his alone, and it’s very powerful.

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I grew up on late night talk shows in the 80s and early 90s. I love them. I am sad TV is dying. I don’t think on-demand streaming is healthy. It’s neither cinema nor television - it’s content, and we now live in a world increasingly hollowed out by content.

The last thing on the TV stuff since it is off-topic. The moment streaming caught steam and was, at the time, cheaper than cable and traditional forms of media, is the day that traditional TV was going to die. The cinema? Not so much as most people cannot replicate that experience with the sound system and the like.

But the fact you can stream to your phone, to a tablet, to a PC, to a smart TV or pretty much any device out there means that traditional networks either have to adapt or they will lose out. The upside to this is now you can pick and choose what networks you want. The downside is that if you want one show from one network, one show from another and so on, you'll end up paying as much or even more than you were before with traditional cable unless you go the piracy route.

On topic though, the MAGA part of the Republican party aren't Republicans. They are their own thing. They are what became of the Tea Party. They are literally a far-right nationalist movement. They only vote Republican because those politicians usually have policies that go that way but any Republican that isn't sufficiently "far-right enough" will not be part of it. Trump isn't a Republican in any sense of the term. He definitely doesn't care about fiscal health. He doesn't care about small government or anything of the sort. All he cares about is enriching himself at the expense of others along with making sure that anyone not like him is not around him.

The problem is, right now, Trump is where the money is for the GOP so they tend to go along with him as he also brings in a LOT of small donors. And for the GOP, they go along with it because without Trump and his donor base, they wouldn't win elections. So until Trump gets so toxic that the GOP is required to dump that donor base, and by extension, that voting base, the GOP will be the party of Trump. The moment he dies, the GOP will literally fracture into a whole mess of small political parties vying for control.

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Hey, you know Russ Vought, the guy in charge of OPM and basically enacting the budget. Well, he says he is "having fun" cutting funding from things like cancer research and children's healthcare programs.

What's not fun in that? /s

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/oth...4b80308e&ei=24

President Donald Trump's chief at the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, confessed that he's enjoying making drastic cuts as his office slashes funding for things like medical research into cures for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's.

The Christian Science Monitor reported on Vought's statements at their "Monitor Breakfast" on Thursday, in which he said his team was "very excited" about their "win" over the 2026 budget.

The new package before the House and Senate this week makes drastic cuts to public television, which includes free educational programming for children, among other things.

However, as the Huffington Post's Jen Bendery pointed out, Vought went so far as to say he was "having fun" as his team began planning massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health.

"He cited the National Institutes of Health, which is currently the premier biomedical research institution in the world, as one agency that 'needs fundamental reform,'" she noted. "The agency has already lost at least 1,200 employees and faces a proposed 40% cut to its budget under the Trump administration."

When Vought was asked what he meant by "having fun," he answered, "What's not fun?"

The highest spending as of 2024 went to neurosciences, genetics, prevention, brain disorders, biotechnology and cancer research, an NIH report said.

[postman1782]

So first I want to say that yes, what he said is absolutely indefensible, and yes, he needs to be removed from the fucking White House for a whole host of reasons.

But with regards to this video, specifically, I think a lot of people say absolutely incredibly stupid shit when they're 17 and it doesn't feel right to use that against them 20 years later. There's plenty of awful hateful shit Stephen Miller is saying right now; we don't need to be digging up idiotic statements people made when they were idiotic teenagers.

I'm sorry, I have never said, even at 17, that I wanted to torture people.

[gondrin]

And here is the normalization of being called a Nazi.

On Fox News, Gutfeld basically is saying what conservatives need to do is what Black people did with their "N" word. Reclaim the term and try and change the meaning of it. Stay classy Fox News.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainm...e774c907&ei=13

Viewers of Fox News are slamming Greg Gutfeld after the controversial prime-time host proposed that conservatives like himself should reclaim the term "Nazi" in the same manner that Black Americans reappropriated the n-word.

During Tuesday's broadcast of The Five, Gutfeld floated the concept to his co-hosts as a strategy to dismiss allegations of fascism. "You know what? I've said this before: we need to learn from the Blacks," he declared. "The way they were able to remove the power from the n-word by using it."

He continued: "It makes more sense to embrace the undesirable label rather than run from it, because the criticism doesn't matter to us."

Gutfeld then proceeded with an example of how he would employ the word among fellow conservatives, stating: "So from now on it's, 'What up, my Nazi?' 'Hey, what up, my Nazi?' Hey, what's hanging, my Nazi?'"

Jesse Watters seemed to chuckle along, while co-host Harold Ford Jr. , who is Black, swiftly interjected with multiple uncomfortable "hey"s. Fellow panelist Kennedy then remarked, "Nazi, please!"

"Thank God you did a hard 'i' there," Gutfeld responded jokingly, seeming delighted with the exchange.

The footage rapidly circulated online, leaving viewers stunned and revolted by what aired on television. Numerous people flocked to social media to condemn Gutfeld's remarks. "If Greg Gutfeld wants to be a Nazi, he should end his career like a Nazi," one individual posted.

"Greg Gutfeld is an unwatchable racist clown," one user expressed their disdain. Another added: "So they're just fully comfortable calling themselves Nazis now. Got it."

So now, without a doubt, Fox News Hosts are literally calling themselves Nazis.

I am shocked The Onion is still around.

[Edge-]

And here is the normalization of being called a Nazi.

On Fox News, Gutfeld basically is saying what conservatives need to do what Black people did with their "N" word. Reclaim the term and try and change the meaning of it. Stay classy Fox News.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainm...e774c907&ei=13



So now, without a doubt, Fox News Hosts are literally calling themselves Nazis.

I am shocked The Onion is still around.

"learn from the blacks" lmao

we're gonna hear about how this was a "joke" or something because he's a "comedian" or something, but this highlights a very curious and interesting lack of understanding of racism in America over something people didn't have control over (skin color) and the history of Nazism, which is a very voluntary ideology to choose to adhere to,

god damn man, a lotta white folk are still big mad they can't get away with saying teh n-word without some social repercussions anymore

[gondrin]

"learn from the blacks" lmao

we're gonna hear about how this was a "joke" or something because he's a "comedian" or something, but this highlights a very curious and interesting lack of understanding of racism in America over something people didn't have control over (skin color) and the history of Nazism, which is a very voluntary ideology to choose to adhere to,

god damn man, a lotta white folk are still big mad they can't get away with saying teh n-word without some social repercussions anymore

Honestly, this could have been a scene in Mel Brooks movie and it would have been hilarious as it would have meant to be not taken seriously.

Since it is real life, absolutely disgusting.

[Mayhem]

Paramount execs, My “This is purely a financial decision” t-shirt is raising lots of questions already answered by my shirt.

It is a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night, but also not related to the show's performance.

This sounds stupid, let's have a look at recent ratings.



Sooo Colbert is second in ratings and the only one that actually gained viewers compared to Q1 25.

So the financial decision was to lose money, but on purpose?

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"learn from the blacks" lmao

we're gonna hear about how this was a "joke" or something because he's a "comedian" or something, but this highlights a very curious and interesting lack of understanding of racism in America over something people didn't have control over (skin color) and the history of Nazism, which is a very voluntary ideology to choose to adhere to,

god damn man, a lotta white folk are still big mad they can't get away with saying teh n-word without some social repercussions anymore

You know, the learn from the blacks part isn't that shocking, it's stupid and of course racist, but not shocking, this here though "It makes more sense to embrace the undesirable label rather than run from it, because the criticism doesn't matter to us." that is fucking abhorrent.