#Drumpf is worst US president ever

[ruminationofthepast]

I don’t know what the hell happened to Inga Leonova. I feel very sad that she doubled down on crazy posts on Facebook.

What she doesn’t realize is that she is playing into what Putin, Jinping, Erdogan, Hamas, and Netanyahu all want. These dictators all want the Global Diasporas of Muslims, Jews, Palestinian Christians, Arabs and Allies all turned against each other.

We minorities need to unite more than ever.

The division over Israel-Palestine needs to end ASAP. Also the divisions will help get Drumpf re-elected president of the USA (or DeSantis elected president of the USA). We need to stop these divisions and get our fucking shit together before it’s too fucking late.

Islamophobia, Antisemitism and Anti-Palestinian Racism are all sides of the same Demon King that wants to wipe us out.

Also the firing of actors, directors, etc who call for a ceasefire is ridiculous. It will only make Antisemitism and Islamophobia WORST! Divide and conquer tactic is working against all of us since we have fallen prey to the oppression Olympics…

Fuck oppression Olympics!

Note: Inga Leonova is not at all responsible for the firing of folks who call for a ceasefire. I shared that fact because we are all interconnected.

[generallemarc]

If you're reading this and thinking "lol, those MAGA hats are so brainwashed" while calling yourself a socialist and planning to vote for Brandon the centrist because "Drumpf is Hitlur!", this applies to you. If you're reading this and thinking "lol, those socialists are so retarded" while disagreeing with Trump on everything but planning to vote for him because "Biden's the worst president we've ever had!", this applies to you. The orange man who said mean things on Twitter is not the end of American democracy, and neither is the octogenarian who's the living embodiment of the status quo. If your convictions tell you to support someone you despise because you believe current American politics to be analogous to either the Weimar or Russian Republics, your convictions have overridden your ability to think independently.

And for those who would call this a "centrist take", I guarantee you that my views on abortion, the death penalty or both are far more committed and further down the compass than yours are, and yet I can also guarantee that I'm far less extreme in my beliefs than anyone who uses "centrist" as a condemnation. You don't have to be a centrist to not be an extremist.

I do not understand the rhetoric of “Vote Blue/Red no matter who”.

No critical thought on who you’re voting for, no intelligent thought on their politics, good or bad. Just “Vote for the party line.”

Like… that’s cultish. That’s cult-like behaviour.

You’re in a political cult.

You’re in a cult.

[malenipshadows]

+ Woodrow Johnston, the vice president of McShane LLC who had been hired by the Republican Party to investigate election fraud, tried to recruit the Proud Boys for a November rally held at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, The Post reported. + In doing so, he contacted Sarah Ashton-Cirillo -- a liberal activist who was working closely with people on the far-right under a fake identity -- saying that they would "need to get the Proud Boys out" to Nevada, according to The Post.

[malenipshadows]

+ Miller will tell the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday (5-12-23021) that he was concerned before the insurrection that sending troops to the building could fan fears of a military coup and cause a repeat of the deadly Kent State shootings, according to a copy of prepared remarks obtained by The Associated Press. + His testimony, in the latest in a series of congressional hearings centered on the riot, is aimed at rebutting broad criticism that military forces were too slow to arrive, even as pro-Tr*mp rioters violently breached the building and stormed inside. + Miller will be joined by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who is also testifying for the first time about the Justice Department's role in the run-up to the riot.Miller will say he was determined that the military have only limited involvement, a perspective he says was shaped by criticism of the aggressive

response to the civil unrest that roiled American cities months earlier, as well as decades-old episodes that ended in violence. + The Defense Department has “an extremely poor record in supporting domestic law enforcement," including during civil rights and Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and 1970s and the fatal shooting 51 years ago of four students at Kent State University by Ohio National Guard members, Miller says in his prepared remarks. “I was committed to avoiding repeating these scenarios," he says. + Miller also denies that former pres-ident Donald Tr*mp, criticized for failing to forcefully condemn the rioters, had any involvement in the Defense Department's response. + Miller will be the most senior Pentagon official to participate in hearings on the riots. The sessions so far have featured finger-pointing about missed intelligence, poor preparations and an inadequate law enforcement response.  The Capitol Police have faced criticism for being badly overmatched, the FBI for failing to share with sufficient urgency intelligence suggesting a possible “war” at the Capitol, and the Defense Department for an hourslong delay in getting support to the complex despite the violent, deadly chaos unfolding on TV.

[bibliophilea]

The End - Ch. 1

Happy Holiday Truce, @mystyrust! Sorry to make you wait - I wanted to do something big, but I forgot to take into account two things: I am a slow writer, and this story became too big to handle as a oneshot. I do have big ideas for where I want this story to go, but we'll see how the story builds itself as I write! Happy Holidays!

If elements of this story seem familiar, that’s because they are! This is based on @lexosaurus‘s tags on @dannys-phucking-dead‘s post! I hope you enjoy!

ffn | ao3

>1< 2 3 4 ...

"Listen. I've met a lot of great asteroids. Really fantastic asteroids. And they've all told me themselves — they said that I was a great president. All of them said that — all one hundred thousand asteroids. I was there."

The camera switches to Tiffany Snow, sitting at the anchor desk.

"This is what President Drumpf had to say yesterday regarding NASA's claims that an unforeseen asteroid is approximately 21 days from hitting the Earth, creating an extinction-level event on par with what took out the dinosaurs," Snow states with a cheerful smile. "Polls suggest that approximately 48.2% of the population believe NASA's claims to be a hoax; 29.5% believe it's the end of the world; and 22.3% is undecided. Lance, can you tell us a bit about Amity Park's response to NASA's claims?"

The camera switches to a street view outside of Amity Park's capitol building. People crowd the streets, many of them yelling and holding signs. Some signs read "THE END IS NIGH". Others say "ASTEROID SHMASTEROID". A few say "DEFUND NASA". One sign says "[citation needed]".

"Certainly, Tiffany," Lance Thunder replies, nearly shouting over the crowd. "As you can see here, tensions are high in Amity Park. Citizens gather to make their voices heard amidst NASA's claims of doom and gloom. Hey, Bob, what do you think of NASA's statement?"

Thunder turns to a middle aged man beside him wearing a bright red cap. The man bends to put his face by the microphone Thunder is brandishing.

"It's fake news, is what it is! I mean, come on! How does a freaking asteroid come out of nowhere? It's a China conspiracy, I tell you!"

Bob nods, and Thunder takes back the microphone. "Well, you heard it here, folks. Amity Park's citizens think NASA's claims are a ho—"

"THE END IS NIGH!"

A woman wearing a sign with the same message butts in, snatching the microphone from Thunder.

"The Disasteroid cometh for us all! Soon it will be Judgement Day and all of you Non Believers will be found Wanting!"

Thunder squawks. "Hey! That is APN property! Give that back!"

The camera turns to focus on Thunder and the woman as they fight over the microphone, their squabbling barely audible over the feedback. Then the feed cuts back to Tiffany Snow.

"Wow Lance, looks like no one can break Amity Park's spirit," Snow says with a grin. "In other news, Congress has voted to defund NASA—"

The TV clicks off.

Danny carefully puts down the remote before he allows himself to shake. His fists clench, and he hides them under folded arms, lest they be seen bursting into ectoplasmic flame. His face feels taut, teeth clenched, eyes abnormally dry. Toxic green edges his vision, and he clamps his eyes shut, lest they be seen glowing green with his anger.

And oh, he is angry.

NASA is a world leader in space aviation and exploration, and Congress is defunding them. And for what? Because they told the truth? Because there's a humongous asteroid about to hit the Earth? They should be funneling emergency money towards NASA, not taking money away! The world needs NASA, now more than ever! Danny has seen the images NASA shared — the images the media doesn't dare share, lest the wrath of one President Drumpf befall them. He doesn't know how everyone missed it — it's huge and it's glowing green and no stars glow green like that — but now that everyone knows about it, there should be some sort of plan to stop it, right? Wrong! The president says it's fake news, and Congress follows suit, and the biggest space programs in the world can't agree on what to do about it when half the world doesn't even think it's real and oh god we're gonna die like actually 100% die and it's not ghosts it's not Pariah Dark it's a big fucking SPACE ROCK that's going to do us in for good and there'll be no more habitable Earth and no more Ghost Zone and we're all going to DIE—

A hand touches Danny's knee, and he gasps, eyes flying open, cringing away from the contact.

Through the green haze in his vision he sees bright orange and immediately shuts his eyes again. They can't see, can't see him freak out, can't see his powers freak out with him—

The hand touches his knee again, and he freezes at the touch, body tense, teeth clenched, eyes shut tight. Another hand touches his arm and he takes in a breath, shuddering as the hand slowly moves to his shoulder, and then to his back, rubbing large, soothing circles. Danny tries to time his breathing to the circles, like Jazz had taught him to, and slowly the blood rushing in his ears (when had that happened?) quiets to a dull roar.

"There we go Danny, see, just breathe. You're okay. You're at home, and Mom and Dad are out, and you don't have to hide."

Danny uncurls slightly at the sound of his sister's voice. He opens his eyes a crack — just enough to see past the green haze — and really looks this time. The orange isn't the same shade as his dad's jumpsuit — it's a lighter, more natural color, and it surrounds a face with concerned, green eyes. Jazz. Jazz is here, and she has her hand on his knee, and she's rubbing circles into his back, and he's kind of sort of getting the hang of breathing with the rhythm of those circles. He leans into her, and she bundles him into a hug, still rubbing circles into his back.

The front door opens, and Danny and Jazz both freeze. Jazz said Mom and Dad are out, but what if they're back? They can't see him like this, they'll find out!

Danny has half a mind to just turn invisible when their voices hit his ears.

"Man, dude, did you see what Congress did to NASA? That's so unfair!"

"It's totally unfair! They're just telling the truth! This whole administration is the absolute worst!"

Tucker. Sam. Danny relaxes slightly at their voices, but he doesn't turn around — doesn't want them to see him like this, either.

But it's too late.

"Woah, dude, you okay?"

"Danny!"

He hears them rush over to him — feels their worry and the warmth of their bodies as they get close — and tenses up again. He should be better than this, stronger than this! He shouldn't be freaking out about some dumb news report.

Not just a dumb news report, his brain helpfully supplies. We're all going to die. And there's nothing you can do about it.

All of a sudden, Jazz's embrace feels too tight. To constraining. Trapping him where he is.

He slips intangible and flees from Jazz, flees from his friends — flees upwards, up through the ceiling and through the roof and through the Ops Center, flees until there's no more house to flee from. He lands hard on the roof of the Ops Center, scraping his knees but it doesn't matter, hands scorching the metal but who cares, it's just the end of the world—

He pulls his knees to his chest and buries his head in them, his face screwing as he tries to get a hold of himself, tries to rein himself in, it's just the end of the world, just the end of Mom and Dad and Jazz and Sam and Tucker and school and movies and parks and people and everything and everyone he'd ever tried to protect—

"Bite this."

Danny feels something cool touch his lips, and he bites down — then coughs and spits as bitter rind and sour citrus burst in his mouth.

He looks up to see Tucker triumphantly brandishing a whole lemon with a chunk bitten out of it. Sam and Jazz stand to either side of him, varying levels of worry and amusement fighting for dominance in their faces. Danny spits again, and stares at the bits of rind and lemon pulp that vacate his mouth.

"What the hell?"

"Told you it'd work!" Tucker crows.

"A lemon?" Danny splutters.

"It's an... unorthodox grounding technique," Jazz responds, "and it normally isn't administered like that—"

"Point is, it works," Sam interjects. "How're you feeling?"

Danny stares at the three of them for a moment. Then he sighs and chuckles darkly. "The worlds going to end because too many people don't believe NASA about an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, and Tucker made me bite into a lemon. How am I supposed to feel?"

He sighs again, long, hard, and shuddering, and he lets himself fall backwards onto the warm metal of the Ops Center roof. Jazz lies down across from him, and Sam and Tucker lie to either side of him, all their heads nearly touching. The sky above them is bright blue, clear of clouds. Birds flit across Danny's vision, twittering as they chase each other before flying off to who knows where. Does it even matter? They'll all be dead in a few weeks.

"I don't want to die again."

The words slip from his mouth, and he feels his breath hitch, watches as his vision goes blurry. His hands begin to clench into fists — but then Sam and Tucker take his hands, massaging the tension from his fingers and palms, and Jazz runs her hand through his hair like she used to do when they were kids and he'd had a nightmare, and something in him breaks.

A sob wrenches itself from his throat, and he curls in on himself. His sister and friends move to hold him close, and he can't help but lean into their touch. They hold him as his eyes glow green, as his hands fist into the metal of the roof, as his sobs take on a ghostly tinge, nearly wailing his grief and his anger and his fear into the sky. He shudders as he cries, and feels as they shudder with him — feels as Sam and Tucker push their faces into his shirt, and as Jazz buries her face in his hair — feels as his shirt and his head where their faces lie become damp.

Crying. They're crying.

And it's his fault.

A wave of guilt washes over him, and he wants to pull away again, wants to force himself to stop crying, to be strong for them. But their grips on him tighten, and they speak to him, words warped by their own tears. "Just let it out," Tucker mutters into his back. "It's okay to cry," Sam whispers into his shoulder. "You don't have to hide," Jazz repeats into his hair.

But beneath their words, beneath their tight hold on him and the way they push their faces against him is a hidden plea: "Stay," they say.

Please stay.

So Danny stays.

Danny stays, and they cry together, and the sun shines down upon them from the clear blue sky.

*~*~*

Danny doesn't know how long it's been. Only that he's no longer crying, and that his friends and sister are no longer crying. They've melted into a cuddle pile of four, with Danny at the center, and the sun beats down on them from a different angle than before. Danny has wound up with his head in Jazz's lap, and she's playing with his hair. Sam and Tucker are on top of him, still holding his hands. Their weight is comforting.

Danny is exhausted. He just wants to fall asleep and deal with everything later. Crying in front of your friends and sister will do that, his brain helpfully supplies. So will the end of the world.

He sighs heavily and moves to sit up. Sam and Tucker get off him, still holding his hands, and Jazz helps him up, moving from playing with his hair to rubbing circles on his back. He smiles faintly at all of them.

"Thanks, guys," he whispers hoarsely. He really does have the best friends and best sister in the world.

Too bad they're all going to die in three weeks.

He frowns and sighs again, too tired to cry.

"It's heavy stuff, huh," Jazz says gently. Danny looks back at her, an eyebrow raised. She continues. "The thought of everything ending like that — it's really hard to think about. Hell, I'm having trouble processing it." She smiles gently at him. "It's okay to be scared and angry, and it's okay to be scared and angry in front of us. You don't have to hide."

"Okay, okay, I get it," Danny mutters. "No more running away."

"Good," Sam remarks. "Now, what are we going to do about everything?"

"What do you mean?" Danny asks.

"You know. The asteroid?" Sam raises an eyebrow.

"Oh yeah. That." Danny frowns down at the roof of the Ops Center. The metal is warped and singed where his hands had dug into it. "What are we supposed to do about that?" He looks back up at Sam. Her eyes bear into his, and her grip on his hand tightens.

"Look, I know this is hard for you. It's hard for me, too. But we can't just sit here and do nothing."

Danny frowns at her. He opens his mouth to respond, but Tucker gets there first.

"Look, I know we need to have this conversation, I really do. But can we have it inside? The metal's starting to get really hot." Tucker stands up, rubbing his free hand on his jeans from touching the roof.

Danny sighs and stands up, stretching the kinks from his back. Sam and Jazz stand up with him.

"On it," Danny says. "Everyone hold tight."

He feels Sam's and Tucker's grips tighten on his hands, and he feels Jazz grab his shoulder. With a poke at his core, he tugs them all intangible, slipping through the roof to the refreshingly cool interior of the Ops Center. He lets go of intangibility and lets gravity embrace them slowly, gently depositing them all on the floor of the Ops Center. Then he lets go of his friends' hands and steps forwards, turning so he's facing the three of them.

"So, what are we supposed to do, huh? Half the world thinks the asteroid's a hoax, and the other half either doesn't have the money to do anything, or is stuck in petty arguments about what to do and who's to blame and all that shit." Danny crosses his arms and frowns.

"Dude, you're the Ghost King," Tucker's quick to reply. "Doesn't that mean you can, like, do anything?"

Danny facepalms. "Oh my god, Tucker, I'm not the Ghost King. I told the Observants I don't want any part of it. And besides, even if I were, who's going to listen to me? Klemper? The Box Ghost? I'm sure they can convince the world to get its shit together!"

"Hey!" Sam interjects. "You can't just focus on what we can't do. We need to focus on what we can do, as a team."

"Oh, and what can we do, Sam? We're way out of our depth here! The four of us can't stop the asteroid from hitting Earth!"

"You're right, Danny," Jazz says. Sam and Tucker gape at her.

"But dude—"

"You can't just—"

"Hey, let me speak!" Jazz waits until Sam and Tucker close their mouths — Tucker with a perplexed look on his face, Sam with an expectant frown.

"We are out of our depth," Jazz states. "We don't have the resources or political pull here on Earth or in the Ghost Zone to make a significant difference." She pauses. "But we know someone who does."

It takes a moment, but Sam gets it first.

"Oh, ew, we are not asking him for help!"

"Wait." Tucker says. "Asking who for—" horror dawns on his face. "Oh, no. No no no. We can't! Why would you even think of that?"

"Think of what?" Danny asks, a little annoyed that he doesn't get it.

"Asking Vlad," Sam, Tucker, and Jazz reply.

"Oh, ew!" Danny says automatically.

Jazz rolls her eyes. "It's not like I want to talk to him either! I just think given the circumstances, we don't have much choice."

"There's always a choice, Jazz," Sam retorts. "He'll probably try and force Danny to stay with him in exchange for his help."

"Yeah, Jazz," Tucker adds. "He's a slimeball. Who knows how he'll try to play this to his advantage."

"But—"

"I think Jazz is right," Danny says.

Sam, Tucker, and Jazz stare at Danny, flabbergasted. Danny blushes.

"Well, it's like Jazz said — I don't want to, but I don't think we have a choice. We need his help. And besides," he says with a smirk, "the man is way too narcissistic. He doesn't want to die because half the world doesn't believe what's right in front of their faces."

"And we can use that to our advantage," Jazz adds. "He knows he'll need help with whatever scheme he's plotting, and there isn't enough time for him to be picky."

"So, what? We go to him for help, and threaten to walk if he tries to pull anything?" Sam raises an eyebrow.

"Exactly." Jazz and Danny grin at each other.

Tucker sighs and pulls out his PDA. "Alright, fine. One meeting with one seriously messed up frootloop coming right up."

Danny stares. "Dude, what are you doing?"

Tucker looks up. "Um, scheduling a meeting with our evil mayor?"

Sam shakes her head. "He's probably booked. We'll have better luck if we just show up."

Jazz nods. "He's probably expecting us anyways."

Tucker sighs and puts away his PDA. "Alright, fine. But can we take a moment to clean up? I don't know about you guys, but my face is crusty."

Danny looks at his friends and sister. Their hair is a mess, and their eyes are still rimmed red. Sam's mascara has dried after running down her face, and Tucker's glasses and Jazz's headband are askew. Danny figures he doesn't look much better.

He nods. "Alright. But after that, we have a meeting with one seriously messed up frootloop!"

[malenipshadows]

We must fight against Naziism resurgence in the West.

1. Trump calls CNN "the enemy of the people."

Cesar Sayoc sends pipe bombs to CNN.

2. Trump tweets about "anarchists and agitators."

Kyle Rittenhouse kills two people in Kenosha.

3. Trump tweets "LIBERATE MICHIGAN."

Six men try to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

But of course there’s more:

4. Trump says there is a caravan invasion coming.

Patrick Crusius grabs a gun, drives to El Paso and kills 23 people, quotes Trump in his manifesto.

Donald J. Trump is a stochastic terrorist. And here are FIFTY-FOUR (54!!) more examples:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blame-abc-news-finds-17-cases-invoking-trump/story?id=58912889

[girlbossblackbeard]

so i just got an email from melania about drumpf’s bday

there’s a link where you can “sign” his birthday card with a personal message, so naturally i said my name was “you disgust me” and wrote “you are one of the worst things to have ever happened to america” as my personal message and i encourage yall to do the same! here’s the link:

https://action.donaldjtrump.com/president-trump-birthday-card/?utm_medium=Email&utm_source=PU_1267&utm_campaign=20170609_87784_POTUS-Birthday-Launch_MelaniaTrump_JFC&utm_content=GOP_Birthdays&mid=87784&rid=33514330

you can just make up any email, i keysmashed and then put “@gmail.com” at the end of it and it worked. you can use a different zip code too if you really want. but i highly recommend you do NOT write any messages telling him to die or threatening his life as that can get you into serious federal trouble. tell him he’s the worst person ever and that you’d rather have a steaming pile of dog shit as president than him all you want, but don’t let your vitriol over him get you into actual legal trouble.

have fun!

[griffinguy24]

American Elections

So, ever since November, there's been a lot of hand-wringing to try and figure out how we managed to get Spraytan Mussolini in the White House, and, especially with Democrats, how to not make the same mistake in 2020. 

Now, I know that there usually isn't one underlying cause for any phenomenon, but I believe that there's a big factor that most pundits are overlooking. My observation is this: to win a US presidential election, you need a group of devoted followers. I'm talking rockstar level devotion, almost to the point of cult leader status. And, unfortunately, you can't win by virtue of the other candidate being terrible. 

With the Cheeto, we can easily see that. Everyone voting for Drumpf knew exactly who they were voting for. They were devoted to a degree that would almost be comical if the result weren't so nightmarish. Sure, those same devotees will suffer the worst under their chosen one's regime, but many of those people still believe in him.  Meanwhile, while Hillary had her own base, and a lot of political connections, she also has a large group of people who hate her guts instinctively and have harbored that disdain for the last 20 years or so.  

However, the same thing happened in 2008. Much of the Angry Orange's fanbase were similar to those who supported Obama. Well, not exactly, more like the Evil Opposite of Obama's supporters. But Obama also brought together a group of devoted supporters who would make sure to head to the polls to make sure their candidate got elected. Bush the Lesser had that as well, hard as that may seem nowadays.  

Both Obama and Bush 2 had a substantial group that disliked everything they did and would do anything to get him out of the White House.  There was a lot of discontent in the air, and it’s possible that they could have been ousted from the presidency.  However, voters didn’t really connect with Kerry in 2004 or Romney in 2012.  They didn’t have that devotion in their supporters.  Almost everyone who voted for Kerry or Romney wasn’t actually voting for Kerry or Romney, they were voting for Not-Bush and Not-Obama, and they lost. 

Compare that to the two most recent candidates who managed to win against a sitting President, Reagan and Clinton.  While the Carter and Bush 1 administrations did a lot of things that made the American people turn on them, both those candidates were charming and charismatic, and they were able to fire up their base. 

The point I’m trying to make is that, in 2020, Not-Trump isn’t going to be enough to win the election.  Whoever decides to step into the ring is going to have to prove themselves charismatic and able to win over a devoted base who will keep the momentum going.  Could Bernie be that person?  Maybe, I’m not sure, but I’m also not sure that Bernie could have won the general election... but that’s going from analysis into alternate history fiction.  We can’t just rely on the current seatholder’s awfulness to move the public.  If the alternative doesn’t look promising on their own, they’re not going to convince the public to vote for them

[queer-starling]

I can't keep up with all these ask memes man! But I'm loving it so no worries. Okaaay oversharing asks: 5, 15, 24, 25, 27, 31, 35, 58. Video games bc THERES EVEN MORE FRIGGIN MEMES to catch up on smh friend ilu tho no worries: 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 28

Haha, I’m glad you’re enjoying them! I am too! 

Answers under the cut because it’s a little long!!

OVERSHARING STUFF

5. Who had the biggest positive impact on you?

My Mother, most definitely.

15. Describe your ideal world.

In short, a world w/out drumpf as president. But forreal, a world where there’s equality for all races/genders/sexualities, living wages are a thing, higher education is affordable, global warming doesn’t exist, there’s little to no violence/crime, and everyone’s just pretty much at peace. 

24/25 I answered in a previous ask!

27. What’s the most physical pain you’ve ever felt?

Hiking back up Seven Mile Hole, out of a canyon. I thought my lungs were going to explode and that my legs were going to fall off. My roommate and i had to severely ration our water/juice, and we had to stop every

31/35 answered in a previous ask!

38. Have you ever experienced something supernatural or unexplainable?

Yes! A few things here and there, but more recently, the spirit of one of my dogs came to me! My mother has been grieving very much over his loss, so he came to me so that I could reassure her that he was fine and that he still loves her so very much, and that she did nothing wrong.

VIDEO GAME STUFF

3: Best game you've ever played?  BioShock Infinite!!

4: Worst game you've ever played? IDK tbh it was like this shamu game on the gamecube lmao

5: A popular series/game you just can't get into no matter how much you try? Ass Creed

6: A game that's changed you the most? Fuck....Tomb Raider 2013 (ther are so many tht have changed me tho lol)

7: A game you'll never forget? fuckign,,,,,,,The Last of Us

8: Best soundtrack? sooo many games come to mind but right now?? I’m loving the Uncharted 4 soundtrack a lot.

11: Hardest game you've played? Osu! Fuck that game and fuck my friend for being so gotdamn good at it. 

15: Which two games do you think would make an awesome crossover? I feel like, somehow...........someway............Transistor and BioShock Infinite could work. Somehow. Maybe. Idk, it;s the first thing that came to mind.

16: Character you've hated most? From what game? FATHER COMSTOCK

19: Which game do you think deserves a revival? Zombies Ate My Neighbours !

20: What was the first video game you ever played? Mortal Kombat 3!

22: If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do? Rise Of The Tomb Raider............i’d try to romance Lara,,,,,,,,,,,my goregeougs wife,,,(while also kicking ass lol)

28: Which character's clothes do you wish you owned the most? Elizabeth’s!! Her first dress is so pretty ;A; all of them are!

Thanks love! :D

[stokan]

The 20 Best Things of 2016

Fun fact: Many good things actually happened in the year 2016. It’s true! It wasn't all death and Trump, although as you’ll see, those two factors hang heavy over even the best of things. But just like every year, 2016 still managed to produce its fair share of great art, cultural triumphs, and viral delights. Leaving out, obviously, things from 2016 that it seems like I’ll probably love but have yet to experience (OJ: Made in America, Search Party, 20th Century Women, Fences, etc.), and TV shows I’ve already written about in years past (OITNB, Transparent, You're the Worst, Veep, etc) here are my top 20 favorite things from 2016, listed in no particular order:

1. Beyonce - “Formation” video

How upset old white people were about this should give you some idea of just how great it is.

When I was growing up, the biggest music video from the biggest female pop star of the day involved her dancing around suggestively in a Catholic school girl outfit. Trump may have won the election, but progress still remains undefeated.

2. Kendrick Lamar’s Grammys Performance

(Of course this isn't anywhere on the internet for me to link to. Because Neil Portnow.)

Kendrick’s performance was the performance that Kayne always thinks he is giving. It’s a performance that made everyone else who took the stage on Music’s Biggest Night seem like talent show contestants.

I don’t want to tell artists how to use their fame, but this is how they should use their fame.

3. Last Week Tonight - #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain

SPOILER ALERT: He didn't make Donald Drumpf again. In fact the viral success of this piece and lack of any resultant effect on Trump whatsoever does raise some big questions about the effectiveness of comedy in actually changing anyone’s mind about anything in 2016. But yet, like death from a thousand paper cuts, it definitely drew a little blood. And even though I really wish John Oliver had stuck with guns and only referred to Trump as Drumpf for the rest of the year, it was still a more thorough and effective attack ad than anything the Clinton campaign managed to put together, and that was basically their whole job. John Oliver can never be president, but the world is going to be a better place as long as he keeps trying to help decide who will be.

Also, says everything about 2016 that this piece now feels like it came out ten thousand years ago.

4. La La Land

Hey, remember joy? And love? And having hopes and dreams? Well La La Land sure does! The best and worst thing you can say about it is that it’s a pre-Trump movie. Maybe the last one ever in fact. But for my money, Damien Chazelle’s quest to Make Musicals Great Again is exactly the tonic we need right now. And it seems fitting the Oscars after the death of Debbie Reynolds are going to be headlined by a colorful and happiness-inducing musical about show business, complete with its own dream ballet. Sometimes the best way to reinvent an art form is to just do it the same way its always been done, only better and at the right time.

5. Olympic Swimming

When the Olympics began I barely cared. I was raised on the Olympics, but in 2016 there’s so much else going on it felt like maybe time has passed the Olympics by. And then the swimming started. And Ledecky destroyed all challengers. And Phelps proved that calling him the greatest swimmer of all time is still underrating him. And Simone Manuel made history. And Lochte Lochted. And Anthony Ervin spun an all-time Olympic athlete backstory into Olympic gold. And for a week there was nothing in the world more compelling than watch people swim laps in a pool.

So turns out the Olympics are the Michael Phelps of sporting events - the second you think they’ve slipped a bit is when they have you right where they want you.

6. LVL Up - “Pain”

Point: Rock and roll is dead

Counterpoint: “Pain” by LVL Up

7. Stranger Things

I hate the 80s. I hate supernatural shows and horror-based shows and “genre” shows in general. I hate homage as the starting place for a work of art. I hate culture’s obsession with nostalgia and youth. And yet I loved Stranger Things. It felt like nothing else on TV while feeling like so many other things all at once. It’s the show Lost wishes it could have been, and what JJ Abrams wishes he had made instead of Super 8.

Also: I hate that there’s going to be a season two. I hate that dialogue around the show seemed so #TeamBarb when clearly any sane right-thinking person is #TeamNancy all the way. I preemptively hate all the imitators Stranger Things is going to spawn. And I hate the Stranger Things backlash that’s inevitably coming and coming hard. But right now, in this moment, let’s all embrace a wonderful television ride and not worry about the demigorgons in the woods coming to put slugs in its mouth.

#KeepHawkinsWeird

8. Flossie Dickey

Sometimes you find true love where you least expect it. Like in an interview with a 110-year woman at a nursing home.

9. Sam Donsky on The Ringer

(Speaking of soul mates…)

In the age of Trump it’s more important than ever that we have writers brave enough to ask the tough questions. Like: Who would win the Oscar for Best Baby? What is the best night any celebrity has ever had at Madison Square Garden? And why does David Benioff always thank his wife by her full name?

From analyzing the Kim/Kayne/Taylor tapes like they're the Zapruder film, to asking 74 questions about a film no one saw or liked, 2016 was the year Sam Donsky officially made himself into this generation’s Woodward and Bernstein, if Woodward and Bernstein were mostly known for dissecting dumb pop culture on the internet. We may never fully understand why Trump won, but, also, what’s up with Chris Pratt’s vests?

10. Black-ish - “Hope”

A perfect piece of writing and a perfect argument for the continued existence of network TV.

That being said though, 40 years ago this would be a classic TV episode people would talk about for generations. Now, it didn't even get nominated for an Emmy. Maybe network TV is just beyond saving.

11. The People vs. OJ Simpson

It’s almost a cliche at this point to point out how many societal issues the OJ Simpson case touched on, but watching this miniseries unfold was a great reminder that looking at the the past is usually the best vehicle for exploring the present. To choose just one example, the scene where the jurors argue over what to watch on TV is a perfect encapsulation of how something like a Trump victory could some day be possible. And if Marcia Clark isn't a perfect Hillary Clinton avatar then I don’t know who is. My only complaints about a perfect eight hours of television are that it wasn't longer and that Sarah Paulson and Courtney B. Vance aren't eligible for Oscars.

12. Samantha Bee’s Donald Trump Conspiracy Theory

Look, I don't want to say that Full Frontal with Samantha Bee is the best and most important show on TV. That is has the best joke writers in the business. That it has the righteous anger and indignation that this year called for. That it’s going to be our guiding light for the next four years. And that it’s proof that giving The Daily Show to Trevor Noah was one of the dumbest decisions in recent television history. All I’m saying is that some people are saying that, and who am I to disagree? If I was going to make claims that outlandish, I guess the first pieces of evidence I would direct you to are this already iconic Donald Trump conspiracy and the show’s Harriet Tubman segment. But I’m not one to make accusations about things using facts and evidence. I’m no expert; I’m just a guy. A guy standing in front of samanthabee.com asking it to to love him.

13. David Bowie - “Lazarus” video

The ultimate mic drop.

They say Native Americans used to make use of every part of the buffalo. David Bowie was like that, only the buffalo was his life.

14. SNL

“Farewell Mr. Bunting”

Having enough trust in your audience and your vision to attempt this sketch is super inspiring. Getting people in 2016 to wait through two and a half minutes of build up in a viral video before it pays off feels like a miracle. And getting the feeling back in my face when I finally finish laughing at this is going to be really great.

“Black Jeopardy” This is what comedy can do when its at it’s best. It cuts to truths about America more clearly and cleanly than 1,000 think pieces ever could. Are comedy sketches eligible for the Nobel Prize in Literature now?

“Hillary Clinton/Hallelujah” And this is what comedy can do when it’s not comedy at all. When historians 200 years from now want to know what the days just after the election of Donald Trump felt like all they need to do is watch this. The best thing SNL has ever done.

15. Songs That Made Me Unsure Whether I Should Be Sad, Dance, Or Both

Christine and the Queens - “iT”

I have absolutely no idea what this song is about. All I know is it sounds like the feeling of being alive. Between this song and Marion Cotillard’s eyes the French really continue to have the whole beautiful sadness thing figured out.

Eleanor Freiberger - “My Mistakes” The best Rilo Kiley song of 2016. The world can change however it wants; as long as it keeps giving me new versions of the exact song I’m totally good.

Mike Posner - “Took a Pill in Ibiza” The exact opposite of me is an EDM-influenced song about taking drugs in a nightclub in Ibiza. Yet here we are. Turns out that existential melancholy translated into Douche from the original Neurotic Intellectual is still pretty damn relatable. And yes I realize this song came out in 2015, but this will always be the sound of 2016 to me.

16. Moonlight

Moonlight feels like a miracle. That a serious drama without any name stars about a poor, gay, black man coming of age could be made at all, yet alone breakthrough into the popular consciousness. That a cast this natural and flawless could be found, like an album where every song that comes on makes you go “no THIS one is my favorite!”. That there are two different sets of three actors so similar and so good that when I see them together doing press it hurts my brain because I can’t process that they were not ACTUALLY the same person at three different ages. That two people making small talk at a table in a diner could have a whole audience on the edge of their seats. That a no-name director with one prior little-seen credit could create the most powerful and well-made movie of the year. None of these things seems possible or plausible, and yet they're all true. This movie is a miracle. And its success gives me hope. To quote critic Dana Stevens, in the pitch-black year of Trump, Moonlight was a “crack in the wall that allowed light to shine through”.

17. Atlanta

In 2016, what even is TV? It’s basically anything now. And it’s everything. It’s whatever it wants to be. And no artist has yet risen to meet the challenge and possibility of our post-Louie world better than Donald Glover has. In 2016 Atlanta is TV, and TV is Atlanta. There are no rules. There is only what you can dream up.

What will season two of Atlanta be? It could be literally anything and no one would bat an eye.

18. Chance the Rapper - Coloring Book

Chance the Rapper is so millennial it hurts. Chance the Rapper definitely has strong feelings about safe spaces and Bernie Sanders. Chance the Rapper has never even considered doing something ironically. Chance the Rapper makes Lin-Manuel Miranda look like a cynical pessimist. Hell, Chance the Rapper named himself Chance the Rapper. And as a millennial, Chance the Rapper is the future.

And the future sounds amazing.

The future is like if Old Kanye had been raised on new Kanye and was actually good at rapping. (As the old saying goes: every generation gets the Late Registration it deserves) The future is like if Picasso painted with emojis. The future is earnestness being the new aggression. The future is Future being the past.

Hip-hop is dead, long live hip-hop.

19. “A Closer Look” on Late Night With Seth Meyers

I almost left this reoccurring segment off my list of the best of 2016 because it’s become such a constant part of my life that I assumed it had been around longer than just this year. Who knew when Jon Stewart retired that the new iteration of The Daily Show would be called Late Night With Seth Meyers? Or as I call it: Essential.

20. Revisionist History Podcast

Facts and knowledge really took a beating in 2016, but turns out both are still great if you just re-examine them rather then throw them out all together. Perhaps looking more deeply into our assumptions about the world can help us better understand human nature and the reality we all share. Who knew?

Of everything I experienced in 2016 this podcast is the thing I reference most frequently. I’m fun at parties.

[lisa-in-the-sky]

Can you explain that post about Bucky you made the one with the president I don't get it?😩😐🤔

HAH yeah so James Buchanan is pretty widely regarded by historians as just about the worst president in US history. he was president directly before the civil war and…basically didn’t do anything about it. like, one way or the other, he never really gave an opinion or tried to make peace or anything and now he’s seen as one of the worst presidents in history.

if you….don’t live under a rock (no offense anon! i know you meant this as a historical question) you know who is going to be inaugurated in about 48 hours and i’m saying that once that happens, James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes will no longer be named after the worst president ever. because drumpf.

side note: James Buchanan was also the only president to be a lifelong bachelor and this has led to a lot of speculation about his sexuality. :D

[useunknown]

Why I’m Afraid

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.” Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, Harpers, 1964.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men? Frankly, I do not know. I do not see, even now. Many, many times since it all happened I have pondered that pair of great maxims, Principiis obsta and Finem respice - "Resist the beginnings” and “consider the end.” But one must foresee the end in order to resist, or even see, the beginnings. One must foresee the end clearly and certainly and how is this to be done, by ordinary men or even by extraordinary men? Things might have changed here before they went as far as they did; they didn’t, but they might have. And everyone counts on that might.“ Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Reason #1: Because I’m a White Liberal Coastal Elite Unaccustomed to Losing

We joked the race would be called for Clinton by the time our election-watch party started at 6:30. Which was fine, because who wanted to watch Wolf Blitzer stall for five hours while vote tallies streamed in? A gleeful gmail thread counted down to the party. Who was bringing the kleenex? There would be tears of joy to mop up. We wondered if Clinton would find a maze on the inside of Trump’s head when she scalped him. A Trump piñata was going to be on hand.

We gathered at a friend’s Echo Park home, “I Voted” stickers slapped over our hearts, half-surprised the election wasn’t yet in hand. Trump and Clinton were still tracking even in Florida, but needless to say that would change when the urban areas started reporting. 

We were graduates of good universities, many of us working in or around Hollywood, who yes, read The New Yorker, and had been listening to Keepin’ it 1600 and joked about Donald Drumpf and told everyone they had to see Moonlight because it’s just incredible. We wanted more diversity at the Oscars and used the right pronouns when we talked about transgender people, and talked about firewall states and paths to 270 electoral votes and how as soon as Clinton won Florida and North Carolina, it would be over. 

We flipped between CNN and MSNBC, watching stables of pundits on expensive sets dance around touch screens as they tried to divine the arcana of obscure suburbs. Trump was winning in counties Obama had won in 2012. The pundits scratched their heads– the polls were getting some things unnervingly wrong. Every so often they’d give a projection, a picture of Trump appearing on the screen with his smug smile, a check mark under his name. The map kept getting more red, Trump’s electoral tally creeping towards 270. We looked at each other– what the hell was happening? We poured more wine as we realized Clinton wasn’t going to win Florida, or North Carolina, or Ohio, or Iowa. Even New Hampshire seemed to be in doubt. I pulled up pathto270.com on my phone and did the math... Wait a minute: if Clinton didn’t win Michigan, she was finished. We broke out a moments-away-from-being-legal pre-roll to take the edge off.

And then Wisconsin started to turn red. And then so too did Pennsylvania. Suddenly it was Clinton who needed to surge ahead in five different states. We changed the channel to Fox News because we suspected that MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki wasn’t being entirely upfront with us. Sure enough, they had already called Michigan for Trump. "It’s over, isn’t it,” someone said despondently.

Those fucking deplorables, in their fucking baskets. Did they realize what they had just done to our country? 

We looked at the Trump piñata in the corner. We were too devastated to go near it, or acknowledge how wrong we had been. I don’t think a piñata’s ever had the last laugh at a party– but it was that kind of night.  

Reason #2: Because I’m Sheltered from Injustice and feel Entitled to Happy Endings

All around me, in communities real and online, in group-texts with friends and conversations with strangers, there’s an unquantifiable sadness. At a hip Silver Lake coffee shop the day after the election, baristas had become de facto grief counselors, each customer arriving at the cash register with a sorrowful sigh.

“How are you?” 

“Oh... you know.”

Sigh. “Yeah.”

I was in Los Angeles on 9/11. The mood on November 9th, 2016 was bleaker. 

Losing elections is one of the despairs of living in a democracy. Every few years you’re liable to feel like your country has been wrested away from you, and that you’re powerless to stop it. But Trump’s victory left us feeling far more bereft than if McCain had won in 2008 or Romney had won 2012. 

Part of it is the dissonance between where we thought our country was and where we’ve found it. We had our phones out, ready to record the moment when we burst through the glass ceiling into an era of a more tolerant, cosmopolitan, liberal, inclusive America. After 43 white male presidents, we’d have an African American and now, a woman. John Oliver had joked during the campaign that if Democracy was a computer game and Clinton was completing women’s 100 year-quest to get the oval office, Donald Trump made for a fitting final boss. We could endure his white nationalist chauvinist worldview and categorical unfitness to be President when it seemed like his campaign was a gross-out Farelly Brothers comedy and his defeat was an afterthought. 

We had believed in a myth of the teleology of liberal progressivism and placed faith in the ultimate goodness of “the American voter.” Clinton’s victory would be the triumph of forward progress over restoration, togetherness over division, high roads over low ones, love over hate. 

So it’s no surprise we were crushed. When a Republican beats a Democrat, that’s politics. When it seems like the forces of evil have triumphed over the forces of good, that can feel like tragedy. Especially to people not used to the world treating them with indifference. Perhaps we’d been standing upside down the past eighteen months– the glass ceiling we thought we’d been looking up at was actually a floor, and we’d just fallen down through it. 

But there’s also something more sinister in the air. A cosmic foreboding. A greater trauma has taken place, something menacing and chilling that makes you think “something’s different this time.” My body is tense, an epigenetic voice that’s seen demagogues and persecution in another life, warning me to be on high alert because somehow, I know how this one ends. It was only a hundred years ago that my grandfather bribed a boarder guard and dressed like a girl to flee pogroms in the Soviet Union.

Reason #3: Because I’m Being Reactive and Underestimating America

Cooler heads will cite America’s resilience: “We’ll survive because we always do.” 

We’ve had bad presidents. It hasn’t meant the end of the republic. We’ve emerged from wars, economic downturns, and attacks on our freedom. We’ve seen demagogues, and rebuffed them. If a president’s terrible, he won’t get reelected. Everything’s cyclical. The system can be slow and ugly, but it reacts and corrects. 

This is by no means the first time a party has controlled all three branches of government. Republicans did it in 2000. They proceeded to lose Congress in the 2002 midterms, and narrowly lost their senate majority in 2006. They may have charged into a few ill-advised wars that killed hundreds of thousands of people and ballooned the deficit and accelerated global warming and brought moral shame upon us with secret torture prisons and warrantless wiretapping and aggravated wealth inequality with tax cuts for the rich and the deregulation of banks and fostered conditions for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression along the way, but that whole mess brought us Obama, and the republic survived. 

And when Democrats took the White House and a majority in the house and senate in 2008? Republicans curled up in an obstructionist ball for two years, and took back congress in the 2010 midterms. It is the greatest gift the founding fathers gave us– a system that errs towards gridlock, which has protected us against the forces of tyranny for some 240 years. 

The Cooler Heads will cite reasons why this will be the case for Trump. They cite the fact that Trump’s Republican coalition is unwieldy at best. That Trump isn’t even really a Republican– his campaign was against Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment as much as it was against the Democrats. Once the Republicans cut taxes for the wealthy, appoint a few conservative judges to the courts, roll back Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the Clean Energy Act, Trump’s coalition is going to start to fracture. 

Trump didn’t win the election because he broadened the Republican coalition and attracted new voters to the Republican party– he won because voter turnout was down. Trump had a million more votes than Romney in the states he won that Romney lost– Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Michigan (with Wisconsin virtually the same), but total voter turnout was lower than it was in 2012 in all of these states (except for Florida, where voter turnout was up 8% from 2012 and Trump outperformed Romney by 11%). Longterm demographic trends still favor the Democrat’s coalition, and if Trump governs as poorly as we fear, democratic voters will be ignited to turn out for the midterm elections in 2018 and to take Trump down in 2020.

The Cooler Heads will also note there are mechanisms for the minority party to obstruct the governing one from getting things done. The Republicans don’t have the 60 votes they would need to force things through the senate. Democrats will copy the Republican playbook from the past eight years and at the very least, they’ll manage to stop Trump from doing anything that puts the country in existential danger. 

As for Trump’s campaign of intolerance and the wave of white nationalism he rode into office, cooler heads will argue that while he may hold views that are racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic, he’s more empty vessel than ideologue. His rhetoric during the campaign was designed to make the election about identity. But it was a cynical marketing strategy, not an ideology. 

The Cooler Heads might even pontificate that a Trump presidency might not be all bad. I think they’re wrong, and getting there requires a cocktail of denial and privilege, but they might reason that while Trump’s a demagogue and a narcissist with designs to use the presidency to enrich himself and his family, perhaps he’ll have a business man’s savvy about running the government. Maybe he’ll pass a big infrastructure bill that doubles as a stimulus, with Democrats ensuring its inclusive and a chastened media monitoring for corruption and graft. He’ll promulgate business-friendly policies that enrich banks and corporations and increase wealth inequality, but the American economy hums as high corporate profits propel the stock market upwards.   

Mike Pence and Paul Ryan try to push through a radical Republican agenda, but run into gridlock. They don’t have the 60 votes they need repeal Dodd-Frank, they repeal Obamacare through budget reconciliation but delay when the repeal goes into effect because no one can figure out how to replace it, as Republican voters realize through a haze of misinformation that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing, that repealing it would mean no longer being able to afford their cancer treatment, and that everything they don’t like about Obamacare was the result of Republican obstructionism and sabotage. Republican lawmakers stop short of Trump’s craziest proposals, which do indeed prove politically unworkable.  If Silicon Valley keeps innovating and a policy of isolationism keeps America out of a clash between Europe and the Middle East, Trump could even end up being remembered as a middling President, a tier above George W. Bush and Millard Fillmore.

Reason #4: Because the Real Best Case Scenario is Actually Terrible

Even if Trump was a normal politician, his platform would be dangerous. His incompetency and illiteracy and the fact that he processes the world like a five-year old child is enough to spell disaster.

Trump’s stance on climate change alone could be, by definition, apocalyptic. If he walks away from the Paris Accord, it could be a decade before the world cooperates on climate change again. We could look back on his presidency as the moment when we accelerated environmental degradation and doomed the planet. 

Trump’s complete ignorance about diplomacy and geopolitics could also rapidly throw the world into turmoil. He’s exhibited minimal understanding of how the world works or America’s place in it. He’s volatile, reactive and vengeful in a fragile world that manages order only through predictability and diplomacy. Our allies are frightened they can no longer rely on American support, and if we drive them away, they’ll find protection elsewhere. 

Trump’s belief in protectionism will cut economic ties that foster cooperation and American soft power. Trump’s plans to walk away from the TPP will cripple American influence in Asia Pacific, and cede influence in the region to China, and his plans to declare China a currency manipulator and use Taiwan as a bargaining chip could escalate tensions with China and make Sino-US relations openly hostile. 

Trump and the alt-right’s categorical condemnation of Islam and hardline approach to fighting terrorism, including a Muslim immigration ban, the astonishingly unconstitutional Muslim registry, the resumption of torture and black sites, and even the semantic obsession with saying “radical Islamic terrorism,” threaten to alienate moderate Muslims and foster more extremism, while compromising American values and diminishing our standing around the world. Trump could be the buffoon who brings the clash of civilizations to fruition.

Trump’s volatile temperament is at this point well-documented. He’s reactive and vindictive, prone to late-night Twitter rants that spew invective without any basis in fact. What happens when he takes aim at a foreign leader? What happens when he decides to escalate a Twitter War into a real one? U.S. foreign policy has never been in more reckless hands, and the possibility for a misstep that threatens our security, weakens our standing in the world, or triggers an international crisis have seemingly never been higher.

There’s a current of fear sweeping America and Europe, as white people without a college educations outside of major cities who are culturally and economically alienated from the forces of globalization, who never recovered from the 2008 financial crisis and in whom a fear of Islam and terror have been ingrained since 9/11, are turning to right-wing nativist movements that promise a return to a more prosperous past. Countries across Europe are being strained by the influx of refugees, and nationalist parties in Finland (18% of the vote), Denmark (21%), Austria (35%), Hungary (21%), France (14%), and Switzerland (29%) are gaining support on the back of anti-immigration platforms that call out Islam by name. 

This is the sentiment that loomed over the Brexit referendum, which saw British voters upend polling expectations and vote to leave the European Union. On the day of the Brexit referendum polls showed a 3-4% lead for “remain” that was within the margin of error, only to have an unexpected victory for “leave” that was spearheaded by the turnout of non-college white people in the heartland, who longed to reclaim some imagined “past greatness,” felt the loss of “national identity,” and scapegoated immigrants for taking jobs and straining public services. Five months later, the US election has followed the exact same script. 

Trump spent the campaign stoking fears that America was hurtling towards the apocalypse. Now that he’s the president-elect it’s tempting to invoke the same kind of hyperbole. I’m nervous Trump’s administration is going to be one of unprecedented corruption and division, that serves one part of the country at the expense of others, that brings out the worst in us and represses what’s best.

But even in this scenario, the country would survive. Our system, our principles, our resolve have always allowed us to weather these storms. Progress doesn’t move in a straight line. We’ll survive this and come out stronger on the other side, because we always do. Sure the idea that Trump could be the end of the 240-year American experiment is the thinking of the paranoid conspiracist.

But god, if there was ever a moment to wonder if we’re in uncharted territory, it’s now. Because there’s something dangerous about the “we’ll survive because we always do” axiom: it holds true until it doesn’t. 

Because this Time’s Actually Different

There is a critical difference between the 2016 Presidential election and the 57 that came before it: we’ve never elected a demagogue like Trump to the office of the President. 

Of all the demagogues that have emerged in the course of US history–Huey Long, George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy, Charles Coughlin– Trump is the only one to seize our highest office. We’ve watched him closely for 18 months. He’s not bound by any norms, or decency or sense of shame.  His politics are dangerous.

In Trump, we’ve elected the tyrant our founding fathers feared and designed our democracy to defend against. The populist who could rise to power by appealing to base emotions and making promises to the working class that couldn’t be kept. Soon-to-be-boycotted by the alt-right founding father Alexander Hamilton warned that it was democracy’s greatest vulnerability in Federalist #1: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” 

A vengeful narcissist who believes he’s above our norms should not be in the Oval Office. Trump’s campaign followed a demagogue’s playbook– drumming up fears of terrorism and national decline, scapegoating minorities and immigrants, shamelessly lying and promising the impossible. He’s announced intentions to jail his opponents and sue his accusers, incited violence at his rallies and shown a preference for confrontation and vengeance over compromise or resolution. He’s declared the rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly to be annoyances he could do without. 

The institutions and norms that were supposed to keep a demagogue out of the White House have already failed us. This puts the United States in uncharted territory, and the possibilities of a Trump presidency should be considered in that light.

Trump’s consistently demonstrated a belief that the rules don’t apply to him. For 25 years as a private citizen, he stiffed contractors and creditors, committed infidelity and sexual assault, and evaded taxes. Most disturbing, Trump maintained during the campaign he wouldn’t accept the election results if he lost, a statement he modulated but never retracted. The peaceful transition of power is the most fundamental and singular political feat of American democracy. It’s the reason any of this works. If Trump was prepared to challenge these precedents as a candidate who was expected to lose, what might he do when he’s in office? It seems not a matter of whether Trump will abuse power– it’s how brazenly and destructively.

Trump plans to have his children run the Trump Corporation while he’s in office, and has put his children in charge of the transition team that will make all key hires for his administration, an unconscionable conflict of interest. I’m not about to pretend that U.S. politics haven’t always involved horse trading and corruption. I’m sure the alt-right has corruption anecdotes about the Clintons and the Obamas– but what Trump’s trying to get away with is unprecedented.

Never before has there been such an obvious channel for directly bribing the President of the United States. Foreign leaders with holdings in foreign companies could award lucrative deals to Trump Corp to influence U.S. policy. Trump’s recently opened hotel in DC seems poised to become a direct channel for foreign countries to bribe Trump, and puts him in violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clause. Trump’s children headed his campaign and have chaired his transition team– there is no separation between them and Trump. The idea that a “chinese wall” could exist between Ivanka Trump, who heads Trump Corp, and her husband Jared Kushner, who Trump has challenged anti-nepotism laws to bring into his administration, is ridiculous. 

When a company or foreign government meets with Trump Corp, it will be hard not to imagine it’s also dealing with the United States government. It’s a dangerous line that at best opens the door to unprecedented corruption and at worst leads to Donald Jr. igniting a cyber war when he threatens a well-connected Chinese Developer. As Matt Iglesias reasons in one of the most chilling articles written since the election, given Trump’s philosophy of rewarding loyalists and punishing his rivals, Trump could turn the U.S. into a post-Soviet style kleptocracy. A pay-to-play system in which fealty to Trump’s administration is necessary for doing business, while businesses that voice dissent find themselves on the wrong side of regulations, losing government contracts, or embroiled in federal investigations. 

He’s already begun to set the stage for this kleptocracy, with his deal with Carrier “to save a thousand jobs from being shipped to Mexico.” The narrative on the right is that Trump met with Carrier and convinced it to keep a plant open in Indiana, thereby saving a thousand jobs before he’s even arrived in office. Obama would have been pilloried by the right if he ever boasted about “saving jobs from leaving.” He can’t even get credit for creating 16 million jobs during his presidency. No matter that 6,000 Carrier jobs are still leaving, and that Trump has merely slowed the inevitable. This isn’t an economic policy– it’s a precedent for companies to hold the government hostage– “cut our taxes or we’ll leave.” But of even greater concern, Trump has taken the first step towards his kleptocracy, and disguised it in a triumphant and politically-difficult-to-argue-against story about saving manufacturing jobs. A world where he picks winners and losers, singling out private companies to reward or punish on a case-by-case basis. Like the most dangerous demagogues and paranoid psychopaths, Trump keeps a list of his enemies. He has shown no hesitation in using his Twitter account to attack them and seems to relish the power his tweets have to move markets. 

As for Trump’s unwieldy Republican coalition– I want to believe there are reasonable Republicans that might serve as a check on Trump. That party cooperation with Trump’s agenda will slow after they’ve implemented the top agenda items of the Republican establishment and done their best to erase any trace that Obama was in the White House. But if Republicans were too spineless to condemn Trump during the campaign, how can we expect them to stand up to him when he’s returned them to power, touts a voter mandate, and uses the oval office as a bully pulpit? 

These are the same Republicans that began undermining our institutions earlier this year, when they abdicated their constitutional duty to give a hearing to Merrick Garland. A week before the election, Republican senators were vowing to obstruct any Supreme Court nominees appointed by Clinton, abandoning any pretense that this was ever based on even the most rickety of precedents. Our institutions are all that hold our country together. When they cease to transcend any one person or party, our entire republic is threatened. 

Normally the losing party regroups after an election and begins to work towards winning back legislative control in the midterm elections. Bush lost his Republican majority in the house and senate in the midterm elections of 2002, and Obama lost his in 2010. But while a lot can change in two years, the 2018 midterm elections don’t seem to offer democrats that possibility. Republican gerrymandering will aid Republicans in holding the house for the foreseeable future, with many Republicans more afraid defeat will come from “getting primaried” from the right than from a Democrat challenger. In the senate, only eight Republicans are up for reelection, seven of them from solidly Red states, while 25 Democrats are up for reelection, ten of whom are from states won by Trump. 

Even more than gerrymandering or specific senate races though, the Democrat coalition faces a longterm structural and geographic problem. Democrats enjoy a voter majority, but their support is inefficiently distributed in a system that awards political power based on geography. For the second time in five elections, the Democrats won the popular vote and lost the electoral college. Clinton won California by 4.3 million votes, and won its 55 electoral votes– Trump won Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and North Carolina by about 800,000 votes, and won 108 electoral votes. Representation in the senate is also geared towards geography– the 40 million people in California get the same number of senators as the 600,000 people in Wyoming. The arithmetic of congress and the electoral college was set up to create a buffer between voters and their elected officials and to prevent any one region from becoming too powerful. But with democrats clustered in cities and on the coasts, the arithmetic currently cedes disproportionate representation to Republicans, and even as demographic trends favor the democrats, it could be a while before demographics catch up to geographic distribution. Add to that the fact that Trump can appoint a partisan crony to chair the federal reserve in 2018 to grease monetary policy in the run up to the election in 2020 and that Republicans will delay the repeal of ACA until after the midterms, and the Republican hold on power could end up increasing in 2018.

Trump’s early cabinet moves also portend an Orwellian state, rendering every department’s name into cruel irony. The Environmental Protection Agency will be led by a fierce climate change denier who works for the oil and gas industry, the Department of Labor will advocate pro-business policies that aid in worker exploitation, the Federal Trade Commission will encourage monopolization and consumer exploitation, the Department of Justice will condone civil rights abuse and exact revenge on Trump’s opponents. Trump has appointed a white-nationalist anti-semite to a Bismarckian role exempt from congressional approval, and seems intent on filling most other positions in his cabinet with plutocrats and alt-right loyalists. Instead of emptying the swamp, Trump’s filling his cabinet with muck from the bottom of it. People is policy, and Trump’s administration is shaping up to be an intersection of the Christian right, white supremacists, Trump loyalists, and cronies of the oil and gas industry.

And what happens when a demagogue who doesn’t play by the rules decides he doesn’t want to relinquish power? For now, a 60-vote supermajority is needed in the senate for key appointments and legislation, which will allow Democrats and key Republicans to moderate Trump’s agenda. But what happens when Trump grows annoyed with the filibuster, and pressures the senate to blunt the tools of minority opposition? And makes dangerous appointments with a 51 vote majority approval that turn the courts from a check on his power to a rubber stamp?  And declares war on the the press, limiting White House access to conservative media of his choosing, and expanding on the precedent set by his friend Peter Thiel in the lawsuit that ruled against the first amendment and led to the shuttering of Gawker? And helps the passing of discriminatory voter suppression laws (the 2010 reinstatement of which already helped to sway the election for Trump) under the guise of addressing voter fraud, and deregulates campaign financing, while making Breitbart a state-sponsored TV Channel to be transmitted to every home and be built-into every American-made iPhone, which by the way, will now transmit all of your private information to the Department of Freedom. On one hand, it sounds unthinkable. On the other, everything that’s happened since Trump declared his candidacy has seemed impossible– until it wasn’t. It may be time to assume the worst about him and prepare accordingly, rather than being surprised with every new offense that pushes us incrementally closer to an autocratic kleptocracy. 

This is all without even mentioning Russia. At the very least, it appears Russia hacked the DNC and leaked information in an attempt to sway the election towards Trump, with the Trump campaign taking advantage of the leaks that dogged Clinton throughout the campaign. Remarkably, Republicans who used to call themselves patriots are now happy to condone interference in an American election by a hostile foreign power. Which is insane. But at worst, all of this goes much deeper. Multiple intelligence agencies seem to believe that Russian intelligence taped Trump getting peed on by prostitutes when he visited Moscow in 2013, giving Russian intelligence blackmail to wield against him. This theory would hold that the Kremlin systematically coordinated with and funded the Trump campaign, working through Paul Manafort, who took over Trump’s campaign over the summer of 2016 before disappearing back into the shadows and whose ties to Moscow are well-documented, and it would mean Russia has a puppet in Washington DC for the next four years. Trump’s consistent pro-Russian stance, his obsession with Putin, and his nomination of Exxon Mobil CEO and Russian Order of Friendship Recipient Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State further suggests treasonously deep ties between Trump and Moscow. Trump continues to deny all of this, even the universally agreed upon fact that Moscow hacked the DNC. If there’s unrest in Latvia in the next few years, and Russia blocks security resolutions to intervene but moves in unilaterally as a peacekeeper, and Trump doesn’t do anything about it, we’ll know the tape is real.  

Because This Could Go From Bad to a This-Is-The-Darkest-Period-In-American-History Worse

There was speculation during the campaign that Paul Ryan and Mike Pence were more ideologically extreme than Trump. “Sure, Trump’s got some crazy in him,” the thinking went, “but at least he used to kind of be a democrat.”  If Trump was to end up being impeached, be it due to allegations of treason, perjury, violating the constitution, or demonstrating with finality that he’s unfit to hold office– or if he succumbs to a heart attack because of his incredibly poor health– there was an idea that the devil we knew might be better than the devil we didn’t. It was Pence, after all, who backed a law in Indiana that would force women to have a burial for their aborted fetuses, and spearheaded the charge to leverage Hurricane Katrina to pass policies that lowered labor standards and gave handouts to oil and gas companies.  

I’m offended by most of their politics, and would no doubt look upon their agenda in horror, but I’d accept this was our democracy playing out. Red vs Blue, D. vs R., hollywood liberals vs bible belt conservatives, with a lot of filibustering, fundraising, and shouting at each other on Sunday shows on the way to relative gridlock. But I would believe that no matter the appearance of corruption, religious fervor, or even bigotry, that they believe in democracy, the constitution, and the rule of law. 

But in Trump, we’re faced with a new set of concerns. I’ve spent a lot of words talking about alarming implications of Trump’s temperament, his policy views, and his incompetence. But the only scarier thing than Trump’s blustering incompetence is that he, and more likely Steve Bannon, are in fact maniacally competent. 

For the past eight years, Democrats and Republicans have had a philosophical battle over whether our system worked. Obama tried to navigate unprecedented partisan gridlock to pull levers that nudged the country in the direction of a progressive liberal agenda, even if the movement was sometimes slight. With the nomination of Hilary Clinton, Democrats continued to stake out a belief that change could be affected within the current system. The Republicans, radicalized with the ascendence of the Tea Party, became the party of revolution– they decided they didn’t believe the current system worked, and they wanted to overturn it. This made the Tea Party well-suited to be an opposition party, because it was always ready to play the game of chicken. Either it would get its way, or it would lose and take the whole government crashing down with it– and it was perfectly fine with either outcome. The Democrats would never have risked jeopardizing America’s credit to gain a policy victory, as the Republicans did when they threatened sovereign default unless Obamacare was repealed. But instead of being thrown out of power for needlessly threatening to throw the global economy into chaos, Republican lawmakers expanded their hold on both federal and state legislatures over the past six years. There was a time when conservative Republicans could at least be counted on to be patriots and believe in upholding the constitution, but Republicans have become the party that is willing to abandon those tenets for other ideological gains. 

The country’s susceptibility to autocracy is made more challenging by the  “post-truth” environment in which we now live. The fact that “post-truth” is now a term we throw around and accept is itself ludicrous and dangerous, but seems to be the only way to adequately describe the current political and media landscape. The polarizing impact of social media networks, the death of the local newspaper, the erosion of civil society, the divide between people with a college education and people without, between secular liberals in the cities and religious conservatives in the heartland, have made it so that Democrats and Republicans no longer inhabit the same reality, and have no mechanism for even communicating with each other.  As of 2016, 72% of Republicans still doubted whether Barack Obama was born in the US.  Over 60% of Republicans still didn’t believe global warming was due to human activities. If we can’t agree on objective facts, we open the door to unspeakable horrors, with no way to hold those who propagate them to account.

Republicans have denounced every news outlet that follows basic journalistic standards as an ideological arm of liberal elites. Meanwhile, many Trump supporters get their news from Breitbart, the propaganda organization of Trump’s top advisor, Steve Bannon. No US President has ever had a news organization for directly misinforming his supporters. State-run news organizations are hallmarks of autocracies.

The Great Con of the Republican party is that it relies on the support of people its policies don’t particularly help. It’s not just democratic campaign rhetoric that Trump wanted to cut taxes for the wealthiest 1% and deregulate banks and enrich businesses at the expense of their workers– that’s really the crux of their plan.  Trump added a populist spin that won him the election– but I’m against his policies because I’m confident they’re going to leave the country worse off. 

So the scary part of a Trump presidency happens when his policies fail to make a difference in the lives of his supporters. When it turns out that fixing health insurance wasn’t as simple as selling plans across state lines. When protectionist policies increase the prices at Walmart. When putting tariffs on Mexico doesn’t bring back post-WWII manufacturing jobs, but rather accelerates the pace of automation. When the Affordable Care Act is repealed and people can no longer pay for their cancer treatments. When Americans realize they’re worse off, and Trump faces a rising tide of disapproval and charges of incompetency, and begins to scramble to deflect his failures from his administration and place them somewhere else. 

This is the point when a lot of presidents would lose reelection. But this is where Trump and his demagoguery set up a different dynamic. Trump has proven uniquely adept at speaking to his supporters, and distracting them from policy by fanning the flames of intolerance and xenophobia. He has a strong cult of personality and commands blind allegiance from a base that puts faith above reason. They have perhaps been failed by our society-- left behind by our economy and education system, they are unequipped to understand their own self-interests or confront ideas that challenge them-- as Errol Morris mused, the "a stupid person is a person who treats a smart person as if he is stupid.”  Their shame leaves them angry, their resentment leads to tribalism. Those bright red Make America Great Again hats recall a tactic used by other fascist movements to identify their supporters– badges of allegiance that serve as a mechanism of deindividuation and embolden those wearing them to express their most base and intolerant beliefs.

But it may not just be a matter of incompetency. Trump has expressed his admiration for Putin’s regime, and Steve Bannon subscribes to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s theory that every 80 years America has a major crisis, when the system gets remade. Trump and Clinton were both viewed so unfavorably that the 2016 election was often framed as a contest between the lesser of two evils. But we may have actually seen the triumph of a deep-seated white-Christian authoritarian world-view. Trump might be inviting crisis. 

I’m afraid we’re about to see the most cynical version of disaster capitalism. Employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina (and documented by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine), where the Trump administration welcomes disasters and leverages them to implement policies that roll back our freedom, weaken our institutions, enrich government contractors and cronies, and try to remake the world order. I’ve already mentioned why Trump’s bluster towards Islam is strategically flawed– we risk alienating moderate Muslims we need as allies in the fight against radical Islamic terrorism, and ending up in some sort of clash of civilizations. But there’s another, scarier scenario– given Trump’s clear racism towards Muslims, the many mentions he made of killing terrorists and their families during the campaign, and his belief that the mistake in Iraq was not securing the oil– I wonder if Trump is seeking out this clash. If he’d invite another terrorist attack on American soil, blame Obama for being too soft on terror, and use it as an excuse to partner with Russia to create a white Christian world order that wipes parts of the Middle East from the earth. Scarier still, I’m nervous his supporters would welcome it.

It would seem I’ve assuredly veered into the realm of paranoia and conspiracy that I set out to avoid. I hope we’ll laugh about it one day– I’ll be happy to get a boozy, yuppie brunch in Silver Lake with all of my liberal elite hipster friends in two years, after the Democrats retake the house in 2018, a Sunday edition of the New York Times on the table with a headline “Trump Card: Congress to Begin Impeachment Hearings,” as Trump sits at 18% in the polls. We can laugh about how I was a directionless millennial– a “whiny loser,” as Trump would say– who was prone to conspiracy theories and didn’t have enough faith in American institutions, which truly do always win out in the end. 

But I can’t help but watch what’s happening and think we’re living through that fateful, chilling, divergent moment that will appear in history books. The kind of moment of which historians will ask, how did this happen and why didn’t anyone stop it? 

[malenipshadows]

The joy of the Biden-Harris election is sweetened by the knowledge the Democratic victory enrages the Cinnamon Voldemort and his sycophants!

[bostongreekgeek]

via @Laura sites...

via @Laura sites on FB not that any DrUMPf voters would read my post as I avoid them like the plague...but this is a small sample of what has happened...in less than 4 months of the worst presidency in history...Even dictators do not do so much damage to their country...and you voted for him...at least dictators seize power. _"Update for Drumpf voters. 1. He said he wouldn’t bomb Syria. You bought it. Then he bombed Syria. 2. He said he'd build a wall along the border with Mexico. You bought it. Now his secretary of homeland security says "It’s unlikely that we will build a wall." 3. He said he’d clean the Washington swamp. You bought it. Then he brought into his administration more billionaires, CEOs, and Wall Street moguls than in any administration in history, to make laws that will enrich their businesses. 4. He said he’d repeal Obamacare and replace it with something “wonderful.” You bought it. Then he didn’t. 5. He said he’d use his business experience to whip the White House into shape. You bought it. Then he created the most chaotic, dysfunctional, back-stabbing White House in modern history, in which no one is in charge. 6. He said he’d release his tax returns, eventually. You bought it. He hasn’t, and says he never will. 7. He said he’d divest himself from his financial empire, to avoid any conflicts of interest. You bought it. He remains heavily involved in his businesses, makes money off of foreign dignitaries staying at his Washington hotel, gets China to give the Drumpf brand trademark and copyright rights, manipulates the stock market on a daily basis, and has more conflicts of interest than can even be counted. 8. He said Clinton was in the pockets of Goldman Sachs, and would do whatever they said. You bought it. Then he put half a dozen Goldman Sachs executives in positions of power in his administration. 9. He said he’d surround himself with all the best and smartest people. You bought it. Then he put Betsy DeVos, opponent of public education, in charge of education; Jeff Sessions, opponent of the Voting Rights Act, in charge of voting rights; Ben Carson, opponent of the Fair Housing Act, in charge of fair housing; Scott Pruitt, climate change denier, in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency; and Russian quisling Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. 10. He said he’d faithfully execute the law. You bought it. Then he said his predecessor, Barack Obama, spied on him, without any evidence of Obama ever doing so, in order to divert attention from the FBI's investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russian operatives to win the election. 11. He said he knew more about strategy and terrorism than the generals did. You bought it. Then he promptly gave the green light to a disastrous raid in Yemen- even though all his generals said it would be a terrible idea. This raid resulted in the deaths of a Navy SEAL, an 8-year old American girl, and numerous civilians. The actual target of the raid escaped, and no useful intel was gained. 12. He called Barack Obama “the vacationer-in-Chief” and accused him of playing more rounds of golf than Tiger Woods. He promised to never be the kind of president who took cushy vacations on the taxpayer’s dime, not when there was so much important work to be done. You bought it. He has by now spent more taxpayer money on vacations than Obama did in the first 3 years of his presidency. Not to mention all the money taxpayers are spending protecting his family, including his two sons who travel all over the world on Drumpf business. 13. He called CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times “fake news” and said they were his enemy. You bought it. Now he gets his information from Fox News, Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, and InfoWars. More to come."_

[grgedoors02142]

'The Art Of The Fail': The Meme That Ate Donald Trump's Book

President Donald Trump’s business boasts in his book The Art of the Deal returned to haunt him after the GOP failed to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his Trumpcare health plan Friday. And the irony was not lost on many social media users, who quickly turned the title into hilarious memes.

To illustrate the GOP’s bill failure, memesters and commentators offered up new titles, such as “The Art of the Fail,” “The Art of the Bad Deal,” “The Art of the Ordeal,” “The Art of Repeal,” “The Fart of the Deal,” and even “The Shart of the Deal.” And that doesn’t begin to cover the comments...

@anamariecox http://pic.twitter.com/t3Iuh7jZja

— Tony Barnhart (@MagicTony) March 24, 2017

Hey, @realDonaldTrump , you should read this book a ghostwriter wrote awhile back. It might help.#TrumpCare #ArtOfTheNoDeal #TrumpIsAFraud http://pic.twitter.com/6voZ8cWByV

— Willie Opper (@wopper42) March 24, 2017

Vote pulled. We're winning. Trump is losing. Bigly. #TrumpCare http://pic.twitter.com/PCA5Ve65FO

— Billy Fleming (@JooBilly) March 24, 2017

“The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.” – The Art of The Deal.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2013

Smearing is easy young man, governing is harder!! #Obamacare #Trumpcare #killthebill #hamiltonmusical #artofthedeal @POTUS @realDonaldTrump http://pic.twitter.com/vYjYxxk9vH

— Mario Vega (@WroteMyWay0ut) March 24, 2017

The Art of the Deal 1. Don’t learn abt the deal 2. Take someone else’s deal 3. Let 3rd party offer worse deal 4. Beg 5. Give up on the deal

— Seth (@spllck) March 24, 2017

Welp, no need to ever buy a copy of The Art Of The Deal, because we just witnessed the book's entire premise fail in real time.

— Lily Herman (@lkherman) March 24, 2017

Is there a chapter in the Art of the Deal on having your bluff called?

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer @ericgarland the fart of the deal

— Heidi Hunt (@heidihunt33) March 24, 2017

Dang, I guess Ryan wasn't paying attention to the TITLE! "The Art of the Deal"#TrumpFail#Obamacare#FARTofTheDeal http://pic.twitter.com/OLWLtBkkYZ

— Resist Now ☮ (@ItIzBiz) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer Art of the Ordeal

— Ronda Zwierz (@PunnedIt55) March 25, 2017

Trump has blinked. So much for the Art of the Deal. #loser @realDonaldTrump

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March 24, 2017

You know that Art of the Deal strategy? It yielded six bankruptcies.

— Franklin Foer (@FranklinFoer) March 24, 2017

Home Depot just replaced firewood with copies of "Art of the Deal."

— Alan Spencer (@MrAlanSpencer) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer @ericgarland NOT to mention the book was written by Tony Schwartz who KNEW America was getting a bum deal w/a President Trump

— Free (@jjorfree17) March 24, 2017

@kalpenn he's an unbelievable closer

— Chris (@chall77) March 24, 2017

"Make empty threats. Ignore everyone. Hire incompetent people to do important jobs. Blow it all off and go golfing." - The Art of the Deal

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) March 24, 2017

More like the shart of the deal: Thursday vote on health care bill canceled https://t.co/ZylsiS3tWF http://pic.twitter.com/OzqAjZlxkt

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) March 23, 2017

The Shart of the Deal

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) March 24, 2017

Actor Jim Carrey went way out on a limb to post the most memorable dig, with visual that earned him lots of Twitter admonishments to “have some respect” for the president.

;^P http://pic.twitter.com/OKmF3aAJ3U

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 24, 2017

@kalpenn Drumpf's political capitol the first 100 days! http://pic.twitter.com/xd4P4CJBeX

— Dale Kowcenuk (@dkrussell61) March 24, 2017

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58d5a4aee4b03692bea62b40,58d51210e4b06c3d3d3e6c90

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ogSv8r

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

'The Art Of The Fail': The Meme That Ate Donald Trump's Book

President Donald Trump’s business boasts in his book The Art of the Deal returned to haunt him after the GOP failed to repeal Obamacare and replace it with his Trumpcare health plan Friday. And the irony was not lost on many social media users, who quickly turned the title into hilarious memes.

To illustrate the GOP’s bill failure, memesters and commentators offered up new titles, such as “The Art of the Fail,” “The Art of the Bad Deal,” “The Art of the Ordeal,” “The Art of Repeal,” “The Fart of the Deal,” and even “The Shart of the Deal.” And that doesn’t begin to cover the comments...

@anamariecox http://pic.twitter.com/t3Iuh7jZja

— Tony Barnhart (@MagicTony) March 24, 2017

Hey, @realDonaldTrump , you should read this book a ghostwriter wrote awhile back. It might help.#TrumpCare #ArtOfTheNoDeal #TrumpIsAFraud http://pic.twitter.com/6voZ8cWByV

— Willie Opper (@wopper42) March 24, 2017

Vote pulled. We're winning. Trump is losing. Bigly. #TrumpCare http://pic.twitter.com/PCA5Ve65FO

— Billy Fleming (@JooBilly) March 24, 2017

“The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it.” – The Art of The Deal.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2013

Smearing is easy young man, governing is harder!! #Obamacare #Trumpcare #killthebill #hamiltonmusical #artofthedeal @POTUS @realDonaldTrump http://pic.twitter.com/vYjYxxk9vH

— Mario Vega (@WroteMyWay0ut) March 24, 2017

The Art of the Deal 1. Don’t learn abt the deal 2. Take someone else’s deal 3. Let 3rd party offer worse deal 4. Beg 5. Give up on the deal

— Seth (@spllck) March 24, 2017

Welp, no need to ever buy a copy of The Art Of The Deal, because we just witnessed the book's entire premise fail in real time.

— Lily Herman (@lkherman) March 24, 2017

Is there a chapter in the Art of the Deal on having your bluff called?

— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlake) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer @ericgarland the fart of the deal

— Heidi Hunt (@heidihunt33) March 24, 2017

Dang, I guess Ryan wasn't paying attention to the TITLE! "The Art of the Deal"#TrumpFail#Obamacare#FARTofTheDeal http://pic.twitter.com/OLWLtBkkYZ

— Resist Now ☮ (@ItIzBiz) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer Art of the Ordeal

— Ronda Zwierz (@PunnedIt55) March 25, 2017

Trump has blinked. So much for the Art of the Deal. #loser @realDonaldTrump

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) March 24, 2017

You know that Art of the Deal strategy? It yielded six bankruptcies.

— Franklin Foer (@FranklinFoer) March 24, 2017

Home Depot just replaced firewood with copies of "Art of the Deal."

— Alan Spencer (@MrAlanSpencer) March 24, 2017

@FranklinFoer @ericgarland NOT to mention the book was written by Tony Schwartz who KNEW America was getting a bum deal w/a President Trump

— Free (@jjorfree17) March 24, 2017

@kalpenn he's an unbelievable closer

— Chris (@chall77) March 24, 2017

"Make empty threats. Ignore everyone. Hire incompetent people to do important jobs. Blow it all off and go golfing." - The Art of the Deal

— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) March 24, 2017

More like the shart of the deal: Thursday vote on health care bill canceled https://t.co/ZylsiS3tWF http://pic.twitter.com/OzqAjZlxkt

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) March 23, 2017

The Shart of the Deal

— Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox) March 24, 2017

Actor Jim Carrey went way out on a limb to post the most memorable dig, with visual that earned him lots of Twitter admonishments to “have some respect” for the president.

;^P http://pic.twitter.com/OKmF3aAJ3U

— Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 24, 2017

@kalpenn Drumpf's political capitol the first 100 days! http://pic.twitter.com/xd4P4CJBeX

— Dale Kowcenuk (@dkrussell61) March 24, 2017

type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58d5a4aee4b03692bea62b40,58d51210e4b06c3d3d3e6c90

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ogSv8r