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Trump Is Practically Begging For His Followers To Murder Us

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The greatest high Donald Trump has ever experienced was not “winning” the 2024 election.1 It wasn’t the birth of his children or sexually assaulting grown women or the time he spent with Jeffrey Epstein, raping little girls (allegedly).

No. The greatest moment of Donald Trump’s life was January 6th. That was the day he commanded a mob of violent terrorists to attack the Capitol and attempt to murder hundreds of his enemies. Trump watched the events unfold on TV and laughed and laughed and laughed. It was the most intoxicating drug imaginable for a malignant narcissist. People were willing to kill and die for him.

The sick, twisted, dying addict has been chasing that high ever since. He wants people out in the streets, murdering in his name. So. Fucking. Badly.

Look at Trump’s unhinged, even by his standards, post about Rob Reiner’s tragic death. He blamed it on “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” Trump went on and on about how the murders were actually all about him and how Reiner’s obsession with Trump is what caused him to be killed.

Trump’s post was oozing with barely concealed joy over the murder of Rob Reiner, a beloved figure whose legacy will long outlive the last vacuum-sealed Trump steak buried in a landfill, and Michelle, his wife. Trump was clearly hoping it was one of his followers ridding him of this meddlesome priest.

The most disturbing part of this is that there is a distinct pattern forming to Trump’s behavior if you know what to look for. I was already going to write about it and the Reiner post fits the pattern perfectly. Which is not really a good thing.

In addition to Trump increasingly calling for his enemies to be executed, last month, Trump pardoned all of the people involved with trying to steal the 2020 election through the fake elector scheme. The DoJ dropped the charges after Trump “won” the 2024 election, and yet, Trump pardoned them. Why? Because dozens of Republicans still face state charges.

The Constitution is very clear that presidents can only pardon federal crimes, aka “Offences against the United States.” Article 2, Section 2. The language is very specific. Those crimes committed against the entire country, not an individual state, can be pardoned. JUST those crimes.

Last week, Trump issued a pardon to Tina Peters, a Colorado county clerk convicted of multiple counts of election interference. All of them state charges. Colorado has rejected the pardon, but there’s a very real possibility the regime is going to push forward on this. The hope will be to get the Supreme Court to fabricate new law (like they did with “presidential immunity”) that gives Trump the ability to pardon state crimes.

What happens then, and how does all this tie together?

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Part of this has to do with Trump sending a message: If you help me rig elections, by tampering with polling machines or burning ballots or altering data, I will protect you. That is how most of the press is viewing these pardons. But it’s more than that, and this is the part they would prefer not to discuss.

It’s important to understand that since 2020, Trump has repeatedly called on his mob to come to his defense. He demanded massive protests for each of his indictments, hoping for a show of force to intimidate law enforcement. Nothing happened.

Trump has also been demanding the military and federal law enforcement shoot protesters with real bullets. He’s been doing this for years. Trump really REALLY wants people killed in his name. As I said, there’s no greater high for a malignant narcissist.

But what has been holding his faithful back from obeying the commands of the Great and Mighty Leader? Why have there been no Trumpian Brownshirts cracking skulls and killing activist leaders and prominent Democrats? Federalism.2 That separation of federal and state power that Republicans used to worship and now despise.

Trump has corrupted the federal government, and it is understood that anyone in his regime can commit any and all federal crimes with impunity. They will never be investigated by Trump’s breathtakingly crooked DoJ, and their crimes, when exposed, will be pardoned.

But fear of consequences at the state level has been keeping the right’s mob violence in check. The Proud Boys desperately want to rampage through Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Colorado and every state where they can beat and maim and murder liberals. They want to drive them away from the polls and chase them out of office. They want to enforce their fascist worldview on blue strongholds everywhere.

But they can’t because they will not be protected.

Even in red states, the militias and Nazis and assorted wannabe-Brownshirts do not dare take to the streets to attack protesters in large, coordinated ways. It will all be captured on cell phones for the country to see. Even the most entrenched, gerrymandered, voter-suppressed state government would not be safe if it allowed unchecked mob violence. And if Republicans gave it their blessing with pardons or a refusal to investigate what everyone can see happening on video? It’s hard to call yourself the “law and order” party when gangs of Nazis are beating up senior citizens with anti-Trump signs.

It’s one thing for red states to look the other way when federal agents violate the civil rights of American citizens. It’s quite another when it’s a bunch of incels screaming about how much they hate Jews.

This is why the Trump regime does not have Brownshirts spreading out across the country, attacking "No Kings” protests and assaulting college campuses and punching reporters in the face. He has no way to protect them. Yet. As long as his thugs face real consequences at the state level, they will not dare obey their godking’s orders.

But keep a close eye on Trump’s “pardons” of state-level crimes and how hard they push to make that law. If the most corrupt Supreme Court in history signs off on yet another novel legal theory fabricated from whole cloth, there will be an immediate explosion of street-level violence as Trump orders his foot soldiers to spill blood in his name. The dying junkie will never stop chasing his high.

We can only hope that even this Supreme Court will find Trump’s demands a bridge too far.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 321 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

1

It DEFINITELY was not 2016. If you look at pictures of Trump’s face that night, he was absolutely terrified. He didn’t expect to win. He didn’t WANT to win. It wasn’t until afterwards that he realized how much money he could make as the most corrupt president in history.

2

The Founding Fathers made a lot of really big mistakes but sometimes, you really have to marvel at the genius of the system they designed to keep tyranny from running wild. Their biggest mistake was assuming men of good intent would be elected instead of an entire party of white nationalist scumbags.

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DGA51
5 hours ago
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The sick, twisted, dying addict has been chasing that high ever since. He wants people out in the streets, murdering in his name.
Central Pennsyltucky
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Donald Trump desecrates the memory of Rob Reiner and everything else he touches.

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President Donald Trump speaks at the White House on Sunday, December 14, 2025.
Trump with more gold shit at White House Christmas celebration; Pool photo.

By now you have no doubt heard of Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social this morning about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner. I would quote the post here, but that would only further amplify its disgusting content. It’s hard to even paraphrase it. Essentially, Trump blamed Reiner and his wife for being murdered because they angered “others” by being Trump haters.

This was at 9:51 this morning. The Reiner’s son, Nick, had been arrested on Sunday night at around 9 p.m. By the time Trump posted on Truth Social, he had been booked and held on $4 million bail.

But look at me. I’m trying to establish a timeline about the deaths and arrest of the son as a suspect, but it makes no difference what Trump knew or when he knew it. His instinct was to lash out at someone he considered an enemy. That Reiner and his wife had died tragically from stab wounds did not matter to Donald Trump. He didn’t even mention that they had been murdered. He said they had “passed away.”

There, I did it. I quoted two words from Trump’s post. I’ve ended up doing my job the way that I have always done it – find the facts, use relevant quotes from interviews or, in this case, writings from the subject being covered. And all for what? I guess what I do with this column, what we all do every day, is try to make sense of this man as a form of self-protection. Somehow, if we can understand him and his movement, it will make us safer. But it’s like trying to hide a rock by wrapping it in a piece of paper. It can be done, but what you end up with is a rock wrapped in paper.

That is what is happening to this country, day by bloody day. We watch the news, we read the stories, we pay attention, but it’s as if we’re standing along a road somewhere watching a funeral procession go by. What we are witnessing is the burial of our country. After Trump’s outrageous desecration of Rob and Michele Reiner, even his supporters are left standing along the road with us, watching yet another procession of horrors. Here is a comment directly below Trump’s post on Truth Social from a supporter calling herself 45 Liberty Lady: “Terrible response to this tragedy. Unbecoming of the Office of the President. I voted for you three times but this is beyond the pale.”

CNN tried without success to get Republicans on Capitol Hill to comment on Trump’s post, reporting that Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson “are not addressing” Trump’s post about the killing of Rob Reiner, but instead are “offering prayers for his family.” You would be right to write off the reaction of these two as cowardice in the face of what they know will be Trump’s wrath if they speak out like 45 Liberty Lady, but looked at in another way, even though they are powerful leaders in our government who were elected by thousands of voters in their states, they are left watching their, and our, country take yet another blast from the death star that is Donald Trump.

The incredibly insensitive comment by Trump about the murder of Rob and Michele Reiner isn’t the only nail he pounded into the coffin holding the husk of our democracy. Trump held a Christmas celebration at the White House on Sunday where he addressed a gathering of distinguished guests who had been invited to see the way his wife, Melania, had decorated the White House for Christmas. After recognizing a couple of professional golfers in the audience and telling several golfing stories, Trump pointed to a woman in the audience and praised the way she looked because he believed she resembled his daughter, Ivanka.

Then he launched into a lengthy story about another person in the audience who had served as a physician’s assistant in the White House under President Obama and during Trump’s first term in office. According to Trump, this man, James Jones, had gone on an expedition to the jungles of Peru with Obama’s two daughters, and during the trip, he had been bitten by a viper of a type that kills 28,000 people each year in Peru. Let’s leave aside the fact that 28,000 Peruvians don’t die from viper bites every year. We have to push this little lie aside to get to the bigger lie that Trump was leading up to. When the doctor was bit, a Secret Service agent called back to the White House, where Trump’s favorite doctor, Ronnie Johnson, knew exactly what kind of viper had bit him and told them which anti-venom to administer, because of course, the Secret Service had anti-venom on hand in the middle of the Peruvian jungle, and the doctor with the Obama daughters survived. But he was “unconscious for months” and was given last rights three times, according to Trump.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Donald Trump story without an attack on environmentalists, “the animal rights people would say, ‘Oh, leave it alone. It’s such a wonderful viper.’” Big laugh at this line, then Trump continues, “Okay. Usually they say, ‘Leave it alone. such a wonderful, leave the sharks alone. Don’t touch the sharks. They’re wonderful. I love the sharks.’ Right? Uh, I don’t feel that way, but that’s okay.”

And then he launched into his regular paeons to his tariffs, which are not causing “affordability,” and the trillions of dollars foreign nations are investing in the U.S.A. because of him, and his record low inflation after all the problems caused by Biden, because, according to Trump, “They’re the ones that caused the problem. That’s all they’re do, they’re good at cheating in elections, very good at cheating. They’re professionals at cheating, because we won in 2016, by a lot. The election was rigged in 2020. We have all the ammunition, all the stuff, and you’ll see it come out. It’s coming out in, in truckloads.”

I will remind you that these were his remarks at the White House Christmas celebration party.

Over the weekend, two students at Brown University were shot dead and nine others were wounded. In the skies of the Caribbean Sea, a Jet Blue aircraft nearly collided with an Air Force tanker close to the airspace of Venezuela. Around the country in Illinois and North Carolina and Louisiana and California and in other states we haven’t even seen reporting from, masked federal agents who are not wearing personal identification, and in some cases, do not wear agency identification, are without warrants or probable cause arresting people on the street, shoving them into unmarked SUV’s, and driving them away to hastily arranged detention camps and holding them without charges, often denying them contact by phone with family members or lawyers. Some are immigrants without documents, some are immigrants who carry papers allowing them to live and work in this country, and some are American citizens who were unable to immediately prove their citizenship.

Donald Trump has ordered the deaths of 90 people in boats, calling them “narco-terrorists” without providing a shred of evidence that they were shipping drugs or committing terrorism.

Today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump continued to attack Rob Reiner, calling him “very bad for our country.” He told reporters that Reiner “was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned.”

This man, who refers to himself in the third person as “Trump,” is our president. Making sense of him isn’t working now, if it ever did. We are in a race between his unraveling and the unraveling of our country.

Boy, are we off to a wonderful Christmas Season, huh? I’m going to steel myself and cover the whole thing. To support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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DGA51
11 hours ago
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This man, who refers to himself in the third person as “Trump,” is our president. Making sense of him isn’t working now, if it ever did. 
Central Pennsyltucky
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It’s Trump’s Derangement

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Trump’s Cruelty After Mass Shootings Shows How Far We’ve Fallen

The awful feelings from this week’s mass shootings and the twin murders of Rob and Michele Reiner come in waves.

The feelings mix despair and frustration for a society that accepts that violence — even loss of life— as an acceptable trade-off for ideological alignment and personal anger.

It happens that our family is from Providence and we both attended Brown, so the television images were unusually familiar. Bondi Beach may be a half world away, but attacks on Jews are not new for us. And like many, we’ve held Reiner in a certain shared respect for his work in film and politics.

Unfortunately, these shootings not so different from violence a year ago on the campus of Florida State University, where our younger daughter teaches in the dance faculty. The Australian anti-semitism matches attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue and calls of hate in the streets and on the internet.

The frustration is that unending mass killings don’t prompt successful gun limitations, that despite’s thoughts and prayers, we refuse to shun hate and its carriers. Indeed, I had not planned to write about these incidents which we are following closely because the shared revulsion is widespread.

What changed that were postings and remarks by Donald Trump, who posted that the blame for the Reiner killings is the Reiners’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.

No Empathy for Non-Loyalists

Somehow this egocentric autocrat whom we have chosen to be the most powerful man in the country is showing us that for him, only those who agree with his politics, who accept his leadership as flawless, are worthy of his otherwise empty  powers of empathy.

Even as Republicans have started speaking out to say Trump’s remarks were both inhumane and cruel, Trump doubled down to add that he did not like Reiner’s politics. For that matter. Trump isn’t exactly in love universities, including Brown. Nor, despite his protestations about antisemitism, Trump’s support for White, Christian nationalism has been a source of serious discomfort for Jews.

There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.

Who besides Trump can’t find empathy for a couple apparently stabbed to death by their own son, as Los Angeles officials have alleged? How devoid of recognizably human feelings is Trump? How is this Trump, Scion of cruelty, a “leader” worth our respect, even apart from any of his policies?

How have we so walked away from “character” and “morality” in leadership to normalize Trump’s public behaviors?

If this is how Trump acts in a situation that just requires a moment of basic human solemnity, why should anyone be surprised about ordering the killing of shipwrecked smuggling survivors, or wrenching children from deportable migrant parents, or insisting that it’s perfectly fine to double and triple health insurance costs?

Students ought to be able to expect to attend classes without fear of mass killers. People should expect to celebrate religious and ethnic rites with worry about snipers. Parents ought not expect to be stabbed to death by their children.

Unless you’re Donald Trump it has nothing to do with one’s political outlook.


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The post It’s Trump’s Derangement appeared first on DCReport.org.

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DGA51
11 hours ago
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There is plenty of derangement syndrome to go around. It turns out that it is Trump who is deranged.
Central Pennsyltucky
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Sandy Hook Etc Etc

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You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There's not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we're busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend. 

It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. "If this is not enough to finally do something," we thought, "then nothing ever will be."

And it wasn't.

"No way to prevent this," says only Nation Where This Regularly Happens is the most bitter, repeated headline The Onion has ever published. We're just "helpless."

Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren't going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.

One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children. 

A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children-- our poor, fragile children-- must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America's past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents' complete control over their education and lives. 

Well, unless that person is challenging the parents' rights by shooting a gun at the child.

The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus-- but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like--but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.

The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the "school shooting industry," and it is worth billions.

That's not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, "They'll use this as an excuse to take your guns" even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn't done either jack or shit about taking anybody's guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, "Now that I'm reminded that the government isn't going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I'd better arm myself." 

Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence. 

We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can't even agree it's an actual problem. The "right" to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children. 

And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans' lives, like quality education and health care. 

It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren't going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren't actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.

The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It's exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry. 
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DGA51
2 days ago
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We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences--but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.
Central Pennsyltucky
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Why Calling Them "Fascists" Is Still Taboo (And Why You Should Scream It, Anyway)

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Ben Cohen over at The Banter wrote a piece about “The F-Word” aka “fascism,” and why it is 100% appropriate to call Trump and his wider movement fascists. The reason he dived into this “controversial” topic is that, for some reason, it’s actually still controversial to apply the proper label to a movement that is openly fascist and quite happy about it.

Here’s what Ben pointed out:

Robert O. Paxton is widely regarded as the pre-eminent historian of fascism in the English-speaking world. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism in 2004, he defined the ideology in the following terms:

Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

This was written over twenty years ago, long before the Trump era in American politics. But Paxton is describing Trumpism to a tee.

You can quibble about whether or not these people are Nazis, but, as I’ve pointed out recently, that won’t be the case much longer. The Nazis are going to take over the party. Soon.

But for now, quibble away. What you cannot quibble about is whether or not they are, in fact, fascists. The Trump regime fits the definition so closely, it’s practically a textbook example.

So why ARE we fighting over this?

Well, to be clear, “we” aren’t. We on the left have been very clear for quite some time that the American right has been moving in this direction for over half a century. Now that they’re exactly where we said they were going, two things are happening:

  1. The centuries-long project of protecting racist white men from consequences is working overtime.

  2. The decades-long project of the legacy press shitting on the left is having a temper tantrum.

I’ve talked about the centuries-long project a number of times. This is America’s refusal to hold racist white men accountable for the evil they do.

We should have hanged the treasonous “government” of the Confederacy. Instead, we let them go home.

We should have hunted down and killed the entire KKK for the murderous terrorists they were. Instead, we left the South and allowed them to enact a reign of terror for generations.

We should have shot every American found to be working for the Nazi Party. We were willing to put over 100,000 innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps, but racist white men working to destroy America? Well…that’s a different story.

The steps of the Capitol should have been red with the blood of violent terrorists on January 6th. Instead, they were allowed to go home, too.

America does not like to hold racist white men accountable for what they do. It’s unseemly. It’s unfair. It’s “un-American.” Accountability is for Those People and the left.

Of course, and I’ve written about this a whole lot as well, those days are over. The right has gone too far to play the “We have to look forward, not back, for the good of the country” card this time. 2029 is going to be a very bad year for the fascists and their collaborators.

Now, the second thing we’re seeing here is the legacy press protecting itself from having to admit something: We on the left were right all along. The Professional Left Podcast talks about this allllll the time. The legacy press has spent decades telling us that we were fucking idiots. Alarmists. Absolutely hysterical. You stupid libs and your “sky is falling” nonsense!

I’ve only been writing about politics for 15 years, and I saw the White Christian Nationalism coming a mile away. Did I have some special insight? Am I smarter than the extremely well-paid Jake Tapper and Chuck fucking Todd and insufferable Chris Cillizza? No.1 I am, however, not deeply invested in saving face by denying what has been right in front of me for my entire career writing about politics like they are.

For the legacy press to admit that, well, yes, the left was right all along, they would have to admit that they, the legacy press, were wrong.

These are the smarmy shits that helped the Bush regime lie us into the Iraq War. Have they apologized for that yet? No.

These are the miserable assholes that savaged Hillary and pushed Trump into the White House. Have they even admitted they were “overzealous,” much less lying through their fucking teeth? No.

These are the same fucksticks who hated Biden because he was booooring and attacked him over the dumbest stuff imaginable while pretending his age was the Greatest Scandal In American History and then immediately forgot that the age and health of the president were important when Trump limped into office and instantly started to die in front of us. Have they apologized for ushering in the age of American Fascism? No.

Of course, they haven’t. The legacy press does not apologize. They rankle at the idea of being held accountable. They speak truth to power, you see. How the fuck DARE you speak truth to them! You’re nothing but a fucking peasant and they’re the mighty legacy press!

So, yeah, that’s why they’re fighting tooth and nail against naming and shaming the American right. Partly because they would rather eat glass than admit we were right all along. But also, once they do admit we were right, they would have to start discussing the source of America’s deep divide and severe dysfunction: The Modern Republican Party and its base of brain-rotted bigots.

More than anything else, this is verboten. We can savage women. We can savage the LGBTQ+ community. We can savage Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, the mentally ill, the handicapped, literally any and all groups are open for criticism. But not racist white men indulging their inner fascist, the way teen girls go through an emo phase. They are swaddled in the protective cloth of eternal innocence and victimhood.

But someday soon, that protection will disappear, and the enablers will disappear with it. That’s when real change will come to America, and we will all be the better for it. Even the racist white fascists who will finally be forced to grow the fuck up.

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1

OK, yes. Obviously, I’m smarter than those assholes. But that’s not the point. 😁

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DGA51
3 days ago
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What you cannot quibble about is whether or not they are, in fact, fascists. The Trump regime fits the definition so closely, it’s practically a textbook example.
Central Pennsyltucky
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Indiana Republicans Kicked Mob Boss Trump In The Balls. Hard

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Sit right down and let your Ol’ Uncle Ogre tell you a story. A story about hubris and shooting yourself in your own dick because you just couldn’t shut the fuck up long enough to get what you wanted.

Once upon a time, the most corrupt and arrogant president in all of American history saw that after just a few months into his second illegitimate term in office, his party was going to be crushed in the midterms. They were going to be crushed SO badly, they would lose control of the House and quite probably the Senate. The House was the bigger problem, though, because Democrats would impeach his flabby ass for a third time.1

That could not be allowed. The first two impeachments were a huge embarrassment. A third one would be intolerable. No one may hold the Emperor president accountable!!

So the corrupt president, who runs his party like a cheap mob boss, ordered the states controlled by his equally corrupt party to redraw their congressional maps to lock in his power and ensure he wouldn’t be impeached, errrrr…lose the midterms.

Several states rushed to obey their mob boss. Texas. North Carolina. Ohio. Missouri.

But then there was Indiana.

Indiana Republicans didn’t really like the idea of mid-cycle redistricting. They already held a gerrymandered majority. Why mess with what was already working?

The mob boss president demanded it anyway and started to threaten Indiana Republicans.

Now, six months ago, that might have worked. The mob boss president seemed unstoppable. His march to total dictatorial power all but assured.

Six months is a looooong time, though. That was then. This is now. The mob boss president doesn’t seem so all-powerful anymore and Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So the mob boss president ratcheted up the threats, calling out Indiana Republicans by name. And then the death threats from the mob boss president’s death cult started to pour in.

Most Republicans buckle under that kind of pressure. See Joni Ernst’s craven decision to vote for drunken rapist Pete Hegseth. But for some reason, Indiana Republicans said, “Nah.”

So…more pressure, more threats. But the mob boss president couldn’t stop being an asshole and deeply offended a critical vote he needed:

This wasn’t going well. So more threats. It kind of worked? The Indiana House voted to appease the mob boss president. But what about the Senate? Lots of pressure was dumped on them.

The result of all the threats of violence and political retribution and primaries?

On Thursday, the Indiana Senate told the mob boss president to go fuck himself. Loudly.

21 out of 40 Republicans told the mob boss president to take a fucking walk.

Hilariously, the threats have been explicitly cited as the reason WHY Indiana Republicans told the mob boss president to fuck off.

Is Indiana uniquely resistant to mob boss tactics? Maybe. Maybe not. They were pushing back on Trump’s plan months ago, long before his precipitous tumble into lame duck territory.

Still, getting slapped down this hard by a completely Republican-dominated state is embarrassing. Remember, it is absolutely critical for a dictator to maintain the illusion of absolute power. Does this look like absolute power to you? Nah.

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The problem for Trump going forward is that this creates a permission structure for other Republicans to refuse the mob boss president’s demands. When he demands red states give the federal government full control over their elections, they are 100% going to refuse. They’ll have to. Ceding control of elections to the federal government is a one-way road. You can’t turn over all of your election infrastructure and then ask for it back because a Democrat is president.

Because that’s the risk they’ll be running. It’d be great if the regime could rig the elections as they do in Russia and Hungary. But what happens if a Democrat has control of that machinery? The risk isn’t that they’ll rig an election. It’s that they WON’T rig it. Free and fair elections are toxic to Republicans, after all.

But it won’t just be elections. There will be other things Trump orders Republicans to do that will benefit Trump and ONLY Trump. Why should state parties go along with that now? It’s clear the mob boss president is losing his power, and, hey, these Republicans will still have jobs to protect after Trump is long gone.

This is how a regime falls. Not always in big mighty strokes, but in little cracks that undermine the entire foundation until there’s nothing left but a sick and tired and dying old man screaming on the front lawn of the White House that all of this belongs to him and no one can take it away!

Maybe they’ll bury him under the wreckage of his stupid ballroom. But who would risk the rotten smell of his bloated corpse?

Anyway, don’t get too rah-rah for Indiana Republicans. They’re still awful people doing awful things, but for today, they stood up to Trump and hurt him in ways that really count. I’ll take it.

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There are 325 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

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Maybe a fourth because, Jesus fucking Christ, there is no end to the corruption and crime and violations of the Constitution.

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DGA51
4 days ago
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The problem for Trump going forward is that this creates a permission structure for other Republicans to refuse the mob boss president’s demands. 
Central Pennsyltucky
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