Amidst terrible news like folks having great trouble affording food, there is a silver lining: all the gaslighting and ineptitude and graft is apparently wearing thin amongst some followers. That will mean Trump's power will decline, but his danger will increase.
Agreed, which is why I wonder that Al Green 's impeachment summary in congress has not gotten more support? Do they just wander the halls in between breaks and chat? Do lunch? Why has no momentum for support of impeachment occurred, what more needs to make this urgent issue gain momentum?
I suspect anybody who goes to a Trump rally these days is there simply to watch a train wreck.
I think it’s important for Americans to realize that if Trump were to be gone tomorrow, the problem of corporate criminal activity and lawlessness will still remain. At this point Trump is a rodeo clown and a puppet for corporate and a tonsillitis jockey for his boyfriend Vladimir.
A weakened Trump is almost no better than a strong Trump.
His weakness allows others behind the scenes, like Miller and others to steer an invisible agenda.
Chaos, anarchy, danger, unlawful detention and deportation, starvation and death through inability to buy food or get medical assistance will increase.
There's no use waiting for the mid-terms to change the situation. The situation will only get worse.
America will arrive at complete breakdown. The world will be at risk. China and Russia will wait patiently until their moment to do whatever.
Not only Trump but his entire regime need to be swept away before total collapse occurs.⁹
We may be at a point where we should be saying, the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know.
We gotta stop whining about Trump. Trump is merely a symptom of a much more insidious disease. That disease is corporatism and Republicanism. Unless and until corporatism and Republican depravity is demolished, things will remain the same. We can start by punishing billionaires and MAGATS.
There's no hope for U.S. THE REGULAR PEOPLE WHO GO OUT, WORK TO PAY BILLS GET, AND GET FOOD ON OUR TABLES FOR OUR FAMILIES. SOMETHING THAT THESE MAGATS DON'T DO. THEIR HARD JOBS IS TO LOOK FOR THE NEXT WAY TO SCREW THE AMERICAN AGAIN, and SOME MORE. AND ALSO PRESIDENT BIDEN HAS TO PAY and get BLAMED FOR THE THE DISASTER THAT THIS INCOMPETANT JACKASS HAS BEEN CAUSING. PRESIDENT OBAMA 🇺🇲 and PRESIDENT BIDEN LEFT A IMMACULATE SLATE WHEN THEY BOTH LEFT OFFICE. And someone says it was a disaster. WELL I WOULD IMAGINE IT WOULD IMAGINE IT WOULD BE someone that DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO RUN AN OFFICE. BC SINCE it TOOK OFFICE IT'S BEEN NOTHING LESS THAN A DISGRACEFUL DISASTER. And THAT'S SOOO 💯 PITYFULL ON the 🤡💩🐖👹🔱 running it.
David, I love you man. You are a beast. I've spent years being grateful for the courage and clarity of your voice. Thank you for doing what you do, and doing it so well, for so long. But, if I may, I'm increasingly disoncerted by posts like these because dude you know perfectly well that Trump being pathetically incoherent & rally crowds being bored & leaving early & rally venues being embarrassingly not filled, is nothing new. And that real-world pathetic-ness will continue and it will have ZERO bearing on whether or not this man & the movement he's unleashed is going anywhere.
My problem - not just w/ you but other wonderful, sane anti-MAGA pundits & writers is that I guess for you to continue to monetize you have to give people at least SOME hopeful news now & then. I get that. But is there any chance that in a sense that is a deal w/ the devil.? B/c you keep people feeling like there's hope & maybe eventually the tide will turn back to normality once people get sick enough of the long-term effects of this abnormality. BUT THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. Not when the messaging empires, in the digital & now A.I. age, can literally conceal for huge numbers of people across the country how others are suffering. If the legacy news gets dismantled (which it is), and there's only MAGA-funded media, people WON'T KNOW WHERE THE SUFFERING IS HAPPENING OUTSIDE OF THEIR NEWS BUBBLES.
And it's naive to keep thinking that the "ship will right itself" - that only happens when the government and news messaging remains essentially normal(ish). Not when the entire government is being gutted and de-fanged and accountability and regulation and oversight are quietly being dismantled. And news organizations increasingly can't stay viable if they keep printing the bad stuff.
What I don't understand is why - again, David, this isn't just you, its a lot of great antiMAGA/MAGA critics out there - but why do you guys keep titling a post as tho' normal people are in charge...when they aren't? What I mean is: so morally & ethically normal/healthy people's **observance** of the idiocy and the incompetence and animalistic sadism of this administration doesn't matter if the people w/ power and money are NOT normal, and are committed to cult-established ways of evading logic. And when dictatorial and dishonest governments take apart the mechanisms by which normal people would hold the administration accountable, then using our normal "well, this is all very abnormal and sooner or later even the MAGA people will start to realize that" IS. NOT. GOING. TO. MATTER. if the basic mechanisms of holding power accountable have been disbanded. I'm sorry, I know I'm not doing a good job of what I'm trying to say. Maybe just... read the Epilogue of Timothy Snyder's "ON TYRANNY." He talks about the 2 errors in thinking that could doom this beautiful country: one is the "politics of eternity" (or I'd say "the politics of mythology") and the "politics of inevitability" (or, I'd call it, "the politics of assuming that norms once attacked will re-assert themselves naturally"). -
Timothy Snyder explains so many crucial things in "ON Tyranny" (and in his newsletters - please follow his stuff. He's what we need, even if he isn't what we always want as we sip our morning coffee and scroll through our feeds ... .
Which is why the positivity in the tone of this article & then in these comments runs the risk, possibly, of creating a false sense of reassurance that keeps us from taking to the streets. Tons of decent anti-MAGA folks I know are like, "Oh, see? He just did something gross and embarrassing. NOW we'll see some backlash." No, we won't. That cult is in place. The mechanisms of accountability that would stop the cult are being dismantled. People of conscience are scattering out of governance and leaving power vacuums in the U. S. government that will not be filled by good and effective people with consciences.
I guess I just get nervous when I see all the great, fabulous anti-MAGA outlets I love (like Bulwark, Dispatch, Adam Kinzinger, et al. - studs, all of 'em) posts w/ headlines & thought-lines that falsely give people a sense that maybe things are turning toward the better.
Let's be real: they're not.
When the ACA subsidies don't come through and the long-term effects of RFK's attack on the public health system finally begin to kick in w/ increasingly viciousness, there won't be any normal government mechanisms left to really help people. The social safety network is being taken apart and the average person might eventually be suffering in ways that America has no real playbook to face.
And if the response to my saying things like that from fellow commenters is anything along the lines of "well, look, we have to cling to any positive tidbit in order to stay hopeful and fight!" Again, respectfully, please talk to people from Eastern Europe, Ukraine. Talk to Chinese dissidents. Talk to the people who've actually done this: we're gonna have to learn to fight even when we DON'T feel hopeful. You fight because what is happening is bad, period. Not b/c you're in an emotional place where you feel hopeful enough to get up some energy to be part of a winning effort. What if its a losing effort? What if it's incredibly, crushingly depressing? The cause is still worth fighting for. You fight AS the ship is going down.
If for no other reason, for your children to see you doing so..
We must not convince ourselves that in order to fight, there must be some signs that "the bad guys are cracking! their turning on each other!" That doesn't matter if in the meantime the 'bad guys' have dismantled governmental order and social safety nets. The bad guys can turn on each other all they want; it won't necessarily end the slide into the abyss.
We must not need tid-bits of good news to be able to survive this. The darker the news the harder the real fighters fight; that's how real historical fighting works.
So it's short-term satisfying to read, but ultimately it just doesn't matter when Trump goes in front of 100 cameras and ramble and looks like an idiot, this has been happening since 2015 and this movement is only growing stronger and the forces fighting it are leaving Washington and positions of power by droves. Talented gifted persons in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill and in the medical professions are leaving their professions. The power vacuums they leave will be filled.
So David, friends: really, does one unflattering moment at a Poconos rally ultimately matter? We all already know the incompetence is on display everywhere. None of his base cares. They likely won't even know about it in any significant numbers. And the right-wing media (imitating the worst parts of the left-wing media which for years did this as well) ... has been slowly chipping away at people's being equipped to unreality and perception-manipulation for decades now, and media messaging systems are undermining their audience's sense of reality so, essentially, whatever real-world bad news and horrific human suffering happens in the real world won't get reported - it won't matter how bad things are, in reality, on the ground.
I'm sorry to be negative, but as a professional historian I think we need to be careful about giving people false senses of hope, or efficacy, when neither is likely. At least not the hope that looks traditional and familiar. The hope is in DOING THE GOOD, the hope isn't in feeling like the good we do is looking like it will make change. What if it doesn't make the change we hope for in our lifetimes? Then we still fight - for our children and next generations.
David, again, I love what you're doing & this isn't a personal critique - I see it lots of places. MOST of your headlines/posts are appropriately warning-toned. Good. We need that. But let's go further: let's start talking about people like Vaclav Havel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Richard Wurmbrand. Let's look to enslaved souls who resisted their enslavers and developed the Underground Railroad. Let's look to Medgar Evers and the Little Rock 9 and SNCC and all those who suffered and died in the fight for Civil Rights in the U.S. Let's look to freedom fighters against the Khmer Rouge and in the Rwandan conflict and in Myanmar. Let's talk about Chinese and North Korean dissidents. Journalists the world over who have been exiled or imprisoned for uncovering the rot.
And Navalny. God help us, let's look to Navalny.
I'll stop. Sorry guys - forgive me if I've been undisciplined here, writing so much, and not even very well. Apologies if I've come across as unwise or insensitive. And obviously I'm not special and I could be wrong or short-sighted here, and if so - apologies. My heart, like all of ours on here, is just hurting.
It is difficult to respond to your post, Rome 410 A.D. but I want you to know that at least one person read it in its entirety. I empathize, hopefully accurately, with your position, even though I am unsure of the potential of taking this position.
I read David Pakman's posts precisely because he abstains, for the most part, from "BREAKING NEWS: HERE IS SOME TIDBIT THAT DEMONSTRATES THAT THE EVIL IS WEAKENING. WE'VE WON" kind of bullshit that so many engage in.
I agree entirely with your observation that they (they = MAGATs) have dismantled, gutted, or completely eradicated all of the governmental possibilities for redress. They have done this very slyly over the course of more than a decade and Americans should be very aware of what this means. When you cannot access accurate data about anything, because they have destroyed all sources of data, it is very difficult to plan anything. Law, civil liberties, international order all erased in your country. A personal militia to do the bidding of your failed tv celebrity president and, more likely, of those with more intelligence and even fewer morals than he acting behind the scenes.
That is what I see from outside your country. We have been warning you about the path being taking by those who seized power in your country but to no avail. We care about your country. But we fear more greatly for the fate of what is left of the Free World.
Perhaps the way forward is a combination of the "there's hope" and the "take it to the streets now even though we are doomed" strategies?
Sorry if my reply is a bit disjointed. I am writing this while in very significant pain on a very uncomfortable stretcher in the Emergency Department at a hospital. (But at least I don't have to worry about the hospital seizing my home to pay for my care!)
Amidst terrible news like folks having great trouble affording food, there is a silver lining: all the gaslighting and ineptitude and graft is apparently wearing thin amongst some followers. That will mean Trump's power will decline, but his danger will increase.
Agreed, which is why I wonder that Al Green 's impeachment summary in congress has not gotten more support? Do they just wander the halls in between breaks and chat? Do lunch? Why has no momentum for support of impeachment occurred, what more needs to make this urgent issue gain momentum?
I suspect anybody who goes to a Trump rally these days is there simply to watch a train wreck.
I think it’s important for Americans to realize that if Trump were to be gone tomorrow, the problem of corporate criminal activity and lawlessness will still remain. At this point Trump is a rodeo clown and a puppet for corporate and a tonsillitis jockey for his boyfriend Vladimir.
Incredible.
A weakened Trump is almost no better than a strong Trump.
His weakness allows others behind the scenes, like Miller and others to steer an invisible agenda.
Chaos, anarchy, danger, unlawful detention and deportation, starvation and death through inability to buy food or get medical assistance will increase.
There's no use waiting for the mid-terms to change the situation. The situation will only get worse.
America will arrive at complete breakdown. The world will be at risk. China and Russia will wait patiently until their moment to do whatever.
Not only Trump but his entire regime need to be swept away before total collapse occurs.⁹
We may be at a point where we should be saying, the devil we know is better than the devil we don’t know.
We gotta stop whining about Trump. Trump is merely a symptom of a much more insidious disease. That disease is corporatism and Republicanism. Unless and until corporatism and Republican depravity is demolished, things will remain the same. We can start by punishing billionaires and MAGATS.
it must be bad if maga fans are beginning to see through him and his lies
I'm sorry for Americans. Really.
I'm sorry for the people that didn't vote him, of course.
There's no hope for U.S. THE REGULAR PEOPLE WHO GO OUT, WORK TO PAY BILLS GET, AND GET FOOD ON OUR TABLES FOR OUR FAMILIES. SOMETHING THAT THESE MAGATS DON'T DO. THEIR HARD JOBS IS TO LOOK FOR THE NEXT WAY TO SCREW THE AMERICAN AGAIN, and SOME MORE. AND ALSO PRESIDENT BIDEN HAS TO PAY and get BLAMED FOR THE THE DISASTER THAT THIS INCOMPETANT JACKASS HAS BEEN CAUSING. PRESIDENT OBAMA 🇺🇲 and PRESIDENT BIDEN LEFT A IMMACULATE SLATE WHEN THEY BOTH LEFT OFFICE. And someone says it was a disaster. WELL I WOULD IMAGINE IT WOULD IMAGINE IT WOULD BE someone that DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO RUN AN OFFICE. BC SINCE it TOOK OFFICE IT'S BEEN NOTHING LESS THAN A DISGRACEFUL DISASTER. And THAT'S SOOO 💯 PITYFULL ON the 🤡💩🐖👹🔱 running it.
Just pathetic. Dangerously pathetic.
Not Foolin’ No One
Tucker Carlson, you’re just so confused,
With your pussified, juvenile views.
Your hair is a mess.
You need a new dress.
Get your nails done. Go shopping for shoes.
David, I love you man. You are a beast. I've spent years being grateful for the courage and clarity of your voice. Thank you for doing what you do, and doing it so well, for so long. But, if I may, I'm increasingly disoncerted by posts like these because dude you know perfectly well that Trump being pathetically incoherent & rally crowds being bored & leaving early & rally venues being embarrassingly not filled, is nothing new. And that real-world pathetic-ness will continue and it will have ZERO bearing on whether or not this man & the movement he's unleashed is going anywhere.
My problem - not just w/ you but other wonderful, sane anti-MAGA pundits & writers is that I guess for you to continue to monetize you have to give people at least SOME hopeful news now & then. I get that. But is there any chance that in a sense that is a deal w/ the devil.? B/c you keep people feeling like there's hope & maybe eventually the tide will turn back to normality once people get sick enough of the long-term effects of this abnormality. BUT THAT IS NOT HOW THIS WORKS. Not when the messaging empires, in the digital & now A.I. age, can literally conceal for huge numbers of people across the country how others are suffering. If the legacy news gets dismantled (which it is), and there's only MAGA-funded media, people WON'T KNOW WHERE THE SUFFERING IS HAPPENING OUTSIDE OF THEIR NEWS BUBBLES.
And it's naive to keep thinking that the "ship will right itself" - that only happens when the government and news messaging remains essentially normal(ish). Not when the entire government is being gutted and de-fanged and accountability and regulation and oversight are quietly being dismantled. And news organizations increasingly can't stay viable if they keep printing the bad stuff.
What I don't understand is why - again, David, this isn't just you, its a lot of great antiMAGA/MAGA critics out there - but why do you guys keep titling a post as tho' normal people are in charge...when they aren't? What I mean is: so morally & ethically normal/healthy people's **observance** of the idiocy and the incompetence and animalistic sadism of this administration doesn't matter if the people w/ power and money are NOT normal, and are committed to cult-established ways of evading logic. And when dictatorial and dishonest governments take apart the mechanisms by which normal people would hold the administration accountable, then using our normal "well, this is all very abnormal and sooner or later even the MAGA people will start to realize that" IS. NOT. GOING. TO. MATTER. if the basic mechanisms of holding power accountable have been disbanded. I'm sorry, I know I'm not doing a good job of what I'm trying to say. Maybe just... read the Epilogue of Timothy Snyder's "ON TYRANNY." He talks about the 2 errors in thinking that could doom this beautiful country: one is the "politics of eternity" (or I'd say "the politics of mythology") and the "politics of inevitability" (or, I'd call it, "the politics of assuming that norms once attacked will re-assert themselves naturally"). -
Timothy Snyder explains so many crucial things in "ON Tyranny" (and in his newsletters - please follow his stuff. He's what we need, even if he isn't what we always want as we sip our morning coffee and scroll through our feeds ... .
Which is why the positivity in the tone of this article & then in these comments runs the risk, possibly, of creating a false sense of reassurance that keeps us from taking to the streets. Tons of decent anti-MAGA folks I know are like, "Oh, see? He just did something gross and embarrassing. NOW we'll see some backlash." No, we won't. That cult is in place. The mechanisms of accountability that would stop the cult are being dismantled. People of conscience are scattering out of governance and leaving power vacuums in the U. S. government that will not be filled by good and effective people with consciences.
I guess I just get nervous when I see all the great, fabulous anti-MAGA outlets I love (like Bulwark, Dispatch, Adam Kinzinger, et al. - studs, all of 'em) posts w/ headlines & thought-lines that falsely give people a sense that maybe things are turning toward the better.
Let's be real: they're not.
When the ACA subsidies don't come through and the long-term effects of RFK's attack on the public health system finally begin to kick in w/ increasingly viciousness, there won't be any normal government mechanisms left to really help people. The social safety network is being taken apart and the average person might eventually be suffering in ways that America has no real playbook to face.
And if the response to my saying things like that from fellow commenters is anything along the lines of "well, look, we have to cling to any positive tidbit in order to stay hopeful and fight!" Again, respectfully, please talk to people from Eastern Europe, Ukraine. Talk to Chinese dissidents. Talk to the people who've actually done this: we're gonna have to learn to fight even when we DON'T feel hopeful. You fight because what is happening is bad, period. Not b/c you're in an emotional place where you feel hopeful enough to get up some energy to be part of a winning effort. What if its a losing effort? What if it's incredibly, crushingly depressing? The cause is still worth fighting for. You fight AS the ship is going down.
If for no other reason, for your children to see you doing so..
We must not convince ourselves that in order to fight, there must be some signs that "the bad guys are cracking! their turning on each other!" That doesn't matter if in the meantime the 'bad guys' have dismantled governmental order and social safety nets. The bad guys can turn on each other all they want; it won't necessarily end the slide into the abyss.
We must not need tid-bits of good news to be able to survive this. The darker the news the harder the real fighters fight; that's how real historical fighting works.
So it's short-term satisfying to read, but ultimately it just doesn't matter when Trump goes in front of 100 cameras and ramble and looks like an idiot, this has been happening since 2015 and this movement is only growing stronger and the forces fighting it are leaving Washington and positions of power by droves. Talented gifted persons in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill and in the medical professions are leaving their professions. The power vacuums they leave will be filled.
So David, friends: really, does one unflattering moment at a Poconos rally ultimately matter? We all already know the incompetence is on display everywhere. None of his base cares. They likely won't even know about it in any significant numbers. And the right-wing media (imitating the worst parts of the left-wing media which for years did this as well) ... has been slowly chipping away at people's being equipped to unreality and perception-manipulation for decades now, and media messaging systems are undermining their audience's sense of reality so, essentially, whatever real-world bad news and horrific human suffering happens in the real world won't get reported - it won't matter how bad things are, in reality, on the ground.
I'm sorry to be negative, but as a professional historian I think we need to be careful about giving people false senses of hope, or efficacy, when neither is likely. At least not the hope that looks traditional and familiar. The hope is in DOING THE GOOD, the hope isn't in feeling like the good we do is looking like it will make change. What if it doesn't make the change we hope for in our lifetimes? Then we still fight - for our children and next generations.
David, again, I love what you're doing & this isn't a personal critique - I see it lots of places. MOST of your headlines/posts are appropriately warning-toned. Good. We need that. But let's go further: let's start talking about people like Vaclav Havel and Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Richard Wurmbrand. Let's look to enslaved souls who resisted their enslavers and developed the Underground Railroad. Let's look to Medgar Evers and the Little Rock 9 and SNCC and all those who suffered and died in the fight for Civil Rights in the U.S. Let's look to freedom fighters against the Khmer Rouge and in the Rwandan conflict and in Myanmar. Let's talk about Chinese and North Korean dissidents. Journalists the world over who have been exiled or imprisoned for uncovering the rot.
And Navalny. God help us, let's look to Navalny.
I'll stop. Sorry guys - forgive me if I've been undisciplined here, writing so much, and not even very well. Apologies if I've come across as unwise or insensitive. And obviously I'm not special and I could be wrong or short-sighted here, and if so - apologies. My heart, like all of ours on here, is just hurting.
It is difficult to respond to your post, Rome 410 A.D. but I want you to know that at least one person read it in its entirety. I empathize, hopefully accurately, with your position, even though I am unsure of the potential of taking this position.
I read David Pakman's posts precisely because he abstains, for the most part, from "BREAKING NEWS: HERE IS SOME TIDBIT THAT DEMONSTRATES THAT THE EVIL IS WEAKENING. WE'VE WON" kind of bullshit that so many engage in.
I agree entirely with your observation that they (they = MAGATs) have dismantled, gutted, or completely eradicated all of the governmental possibilities for redress. They have done this very slyly over the course of more than a decade and Americans should be very aware of what this means. When you cannot access accurate data about anything, because they have destroyed all sources of data, it is very difficult to plan anything. Law, civil liberties, international order all erased in your country. A personal militia to do the bidding of your failed tv celebrity president and, more likely, of those with more intelligence and even fewer morals than he acting behind the scenes.
That is what I see from outside your country. We have been warning you about the path being taking by those who seized power in your country but to no avail. We care about your country. But we fear more greatly for the fate of what is left of the Free World.
Perhaps the way forward is a combination of the "there's hope" and the "take it to the streets now even though we are doomed" strategies?
Sorry if my reply is a bit disjointed. I am writing this while in very significant pain on a very uncomfortable stretcher in the Emergency Department at a hospital. (But at least I don't have to worry about the hospital seizing my home to pay for my care!)