Trump's legacies

 Thanks to Republican Anti-Vaxxers, the U.S. may never reach COVID-19 herd immunity.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Donald Trump’s refusal to get his own shot in public, and to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to convincing his base of the importance of getting vaccinated, “vaccine hesitancy“ among Republicans is raging. According to a Monmouth University poll conducted between April 8 and April 12, 43% of GOP respondents said they’ll never get the coronavirus vaccine (versus just 5% of Democrats). In a Quinnipiac University poll, 45% of Republicans said they “don’t plan” on getting the shot. Overall, states that voted for Trump in 2020 are lagging behind those that went for Biden when it comes to vaccinations.

Disturbingly, the focus group revealed that many people refusing to get vaccinated would use a fake vaccination card claiming they had received their shots. “One-thousand percent,” one woman said. “If I have a fake vaccine card, yeah, I can go anywhere,” said one man. Other participants said they‘d use a fake vaccination card to go on trips and attend concerts. Federal officials have warned that they will prosecute Americans who make, sell, or use falsified cards, and noted that the use of such documents could prolong the pandemic by letting unvaccinated people continue to spread the highly contagious virus.

What did everything that Trump did during the last few years have in common? Division. He was divisive on purpose.

What do Russia and China want? Disunion in the US.

He did more damage than 50 years of Cold War with Russia, and 20 years of economic war with China.

It's like a religion with those people. Seriously, between Trumpism, antivaxxers, climate deniers, etc, we might be witnessing the birth of a new and crazier sect of Christianity.

They can't be persuaded with facts, because it isn't about that. It's about belief.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas infiltrated the Flat Earth movement and detailed to them an experiment he'd personally done to measure the curve of the earth (under the guise of being a true believer). They tried to counter all his points, but he had controlled for all their explanations. Eventually they told him, "Well, you must have done SOMETHING wrong, you need to go home and pray about it."

They literally told him to pray the curve away.

Trump-Appointed Watchdog Finds His Admin. Cheated Puerto Rico on Hurricane Relief, Tried To Hide It

Trump committed genocide on his own people. Twice, at least.

Let the wildfires in California on federal land burn. Refused to let Bahamanians shelter in the US after Hurricane Dorian sat on the islands as a Cat 4 for 24 hours. Tried to withhold Michigan federal disaster relief in exchange for the governor taking a stance against mail-in ballots. Deported sanctuary seekers and other imigrants to places where they were murdered, deported unaccompanied African/Jamaican children to Mexico without Mexico knowing about it. Stop count of ICE deaths. Stopped count of drone deaths. Killed Iranian general (war crime.) Abandoned the Kurds. The coal ash pollution. The delay of medications sent by mail. The VA overseen by three Mar-a-Lago cronies. Stole PPE and ventilators. Sent unusable ventilators to hospitals. Brazilian president visited Mar-a-Lago and his entourage started testing positive for covid after their return. The Capital Gazette mass shooting after all his condemnation of journalists. The coal ash water pollution. The FDA changing the legal level of PFAS allowed in tap water (legal does not mean safe.) The FDA regulation rollbacks that led to multiple recalls of leafy greens infected by e.coli which can cause kidney failure and death. Etc. and etc.

The list is pretty damn long, spanning a wide range of different levels.

Many Trump employees got away with power abuses. Mike Pompeo shouldn't be one of them.

Trump DOES have multiple countries with warrants out for his arrest. Iran and Iraq issued one when he authorized an illegal drone strike on an Iranian military official (Soleimani) who was in the Baghdad International Airport, which is the largest airport in Iraq. Iran responded by launching missiles at US bases in Iraq and wounding 110 US soldiers.

Solemani was designated as a terrorist by the US (and nobody else) because he was working for the Iranian government. He was close to the Supreme Leader of Iran, and trained/helped many Iraq and Syrian backed militias that fought groups like the Taliban, ISIS, and occasionally the US and other foreign invaders. A month prior to Trump's attack, a US general was killed by Kata'ib Hezbollah which is an Iranian backed militia that operates in Iraq. They helped the US overthrow Hussein, but are now labeled a terrorist group after the US attacked one of their bases in 2019.

The only reason Biden is now 'pulling out' of Iraq is because of the terroristic actions committed by the Trump admin, which caused the Iraqi government to kick out US troops. Iran passed a unanimous decision to declare the US government a terroristic organization. It is clear these governments were working together and the US was just interfering in that. Trump turned the volume up to 10 though. That's why he has two warrants out for his arrest.

GOP Bullying the base in to donating monthly

 This is what GOP has become, high school bully in the Capitol.

GOP Threatens to Out Donors as “Defectors” to Trump If They Don’t Give Monthly

This is honestly way more insane than the title suggests. They are literally labelling people as "defectors" for not activating monthly donations. Imagine that. You're trying to give 50$ to the GOP and they hit you with "Oh that's cool, but unless you make that a MONTHLY donation, we'll have to tell daddy Trump you're a DEFECTOR and sided with the dems".

There's so many things to unpack:

• The GOP are totally OK using authoritarian language.
• The GOP have studied the data and decided that making their supporters fear the "wrath of Trump" is the best strategy going forward. This is worrying because that means this strategy is way more effective than we realize. We're joking about it being ridiculous and crazy, but they paid statisticians and marketers to study their demographic and this is their best plan.
• The implication is obviously that something bad would happen to "defectors" if Trump was to be elected in 2024 and you basically have to give monthly bribes donations to the GOP unless you want your name on some list or end up in a deathcamp or stripped of your right to vote.

This has to be illegal in some way? With the violence of language that has been used by Trump and the GOP in the last few years, they're practically insinuating that they will round up everyone who didn't give monthly donations and put them in some death camp once Trump gets elected. Not saying it would actually happen, but that's what they've been telling their supporters they want to do with democrats, and now they're telling them "unless you pay, you're our enemy from now on". And the paradox is that the more people that actually give money, the better chance they have of actually winning in 2024 and there is a good chance they enact even more voter restrictions and find new ways to prevent democrats and "undesirables" from voting.

We really live in a world where people in middle America are living a step above poverty while giving half their discretionary income to some megachurch so the pastor can fly on a private jet when he travels, and half to the GOP so Trump can keep his gold toilet.

I'm amused at the notion of telling people you'll rat them out, but only if they actually pay up first.

If the person chooses not to pay, their info doesn't go to Trump, and he doesn't find out they're "traitors" or whatever.

But of course that'd require critical thinking skills, so I fully expect that box will remain checked, and people will just donate less per month to continue to appease the Manchurian Mango.

Its all about projection. The conservative strategy is to get ahead of criticism by projecting exactly what they're doing onto their opponents with baseless accusations. Then when people say "wait you're doing that!" they claim that their opponents are pulling a "you too!"

The reason for all the Hunter Biden conspiracy nonsense was because Trump's own children were worse than all the accusations against Biden. Trump literally appointed his family to positions of influence in the government, which was what conservatives were claiming Biden was going to do.

The same thing happened in Germany... Germany in the 1920s was a democratic republic, but didn't have any built-in defense mechanism like the current FRG.

So the Nazi's could fairly openly show their disdain for democracy, and for many people that simply meant a return to the time of the Kaiser, return to a time when the German empire was a serious player on the world stage.

Little did they know they'd be getting a PTSD-addled mass murdering dictator who'd bring terror and ruin to the country.

Similarly, a lot of Republican voters just want a return to the glory days of the 50's, when (in their mind) everything was better, and they are willing to sacrifice democracy for it, because (in their mind) only the Republicans can bring back that golden era, so they have to rule.

Grifter Trump grifted campaign donors

 Trump Donors Fume Over Fine Print Which Allowed Campaign to Charge Their Accounts Over and Over

"In the final weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign was in dire need of a cash influx to combat the Biden campaign’s ad buys. The solution, according to a bombshell Saturday report from Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times, was to insert language into donor agreements that set up increasingly opaque recurring charges to donors’ accounts.

Described as an “intentional scheme to boost revenues,” donors had to read through the donation disclaimer’s fine print in order to understand precisely how much money they would be giving to Trump’s campaign. The disclaimer contained several pre-checked provisions which granted the Trump campaign permission to take additional funds from donors’ accounts as time went on. That meant potential donors had to actively scroll through the disclaimer and actively uncheck specific boxes in order to make a simple one-time donation."

From the original NY Times report:

"But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about $200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

These people are so deep in this cult that even after Trump has cleaned out their bank accounts, they STILL support him.

All these people probably should have watched fake news CNN because they literally showed the fine print while it was happening.

They also showed a fine print stating the money could be used for whatever the PAC chooses. AKA legal fees that Trump filed challenging election results or even legal fees regarding legal issues against him.

So theoretically the money they donated could be going to Trump's defense against his sexual assault accusers.

The Trump campaign reportedly cheated donors who thought they were making a one-time contribution, collecting recurring donations

"In what seemed to be an effort to bolster political contributions in the heat of the 2020 election against now President Joe Biden, the Trump 2020 campaign reportedly duped supporters into making recurring donations without their explicit or known consent.

An investigation of Federal Election Commission records done by the New York Times found that the Trump campaign, in the last two months of 2020, was forced to give hundreds of thousands of refunds in the amount of about $64 million. In total the campaign refunded $122 million, the newspaper said. 

Many of these accidental repeat donors believed they were signing up to give a one-time contribution, the New York Times reported. Some of the victims of this scheme, like 63-year-old Stacy Blatt, were cancer patients who found themselves unable to pay bills and rent because of the repeated donations to the Trump campaign, the newspaper reported."

Trump's emails were unbelieveable. An email from Jr. would say "I was just in the oval office talking with my father about his best supporters and he brought up your name" or "We were just going over the list of top supporters and my father noticed your name was missing. I told him I would reach out to you for him". It was funny to me but can you imagine how many elderly or simple minded people sent donations because they thought the POTUS knew who they were.

Trump’s Campaign Bilked His Fans Out of Millions Because of Course It Did

"Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.

Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony."

I wouldn't call it "genius" like the author does, but this just, encapsulates my reaction to the story. It's basically watching an abusive relationship these people are in, no matter what he does, no matter how much he scams, ignore those who devoted their careers to him (Pence and Gaetz for example), etc., they still worship him and think he's done nothing to hurt.

If you frame Trump as a mega-church, televangelist it makes a lot more sense. It's not an accident that Trump was associated with God and divine intervention. It also explains why far right Christians disproportionately supported Trump.

Trump campaign ‘repeatedly charged donors without their knowledge’

The man ran a fake University, a fake charity, and he made the RNC buy all the copies of stupid kids book. Cheating you out of money is a feature not a bug.

On the one hand to me it feels like nothing situation where a group of people who were ready and willing to be conned got conned, but in reality his supporters are poor and frankly can't afford any type of monetary loss. Also the children of Trump supporters are innocent and probably living in a worse state because mom and dad gave the rent money to Trump.

Man is it hard to trying to help people who refuse to be helped and go along with Trump.