“The greatest speaker I think I’ve ever witnessed was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale,” Trump told CBN News back in September 2015 on his California golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
“He would speak the power of positive thinking. He would speak so much—and he’d bring it into modern-day life. He talked about success stories and people that were successful and became alcoholics, and then they conquered it…and I grew up watching that,” he said.
“He wasn’t reading. I’ve heard plenty of pastors and ministers that read. It’s not the same thing. Norman Vincent Peale would get up, and his arms would be flailing, and you hated to leave the church because you wanted him to go on further,” Trump explained.
Wow. That’s kind of insightful in a twisted way. He only understood the positivity in terms of self, though, as a narcissist would. He’s a firehose of negativity about everything and everyone else.
It is interesting to imagine little Donnie sitting in a pew, lightbulbs going off in his head, those words leading to the complete shitshow he is now. Frightening, really.
That depends on where people spend it. It will hopefully help the eviction problem, but that is a bandaid and makes the landlords richer. Spent on Amazon it will just make Bezos richer, and siphon a lot off to sellers outside the US. I doubt the runners in Amazon warehouses were in danger of layoffs.
Spent at Wal-Mart, same thing. The kinds of businesses that are failing because of all this are the ones that were suffering from the overall change in the marketplace to begin with; small or non-chain restaurants, local stores, all the businesses that corporations were destroying already.
Unless people go out of their way to spend where the money is needed, I doubt it will change much at all.
It’s a perfect example of the fascist right’s zero-sum game view of the world. Positive thinking for yourself = negative thinking for everyone else. If they go down, you go up relative to them. Of course, that’s not how the universe works, but that’s the mentality we’re dealing with.
It makes me think of The Ninth Gate, only on a national scale. Whoever is selfish and driven enough gets to meet the Devil. It’s a Polanski movie, so, fitting I guess.
That’s a really important point. Big box places and online took the lion’s share of stimulus money. To be fair we were told to stay in and shop once a week so that was going to happen. Hospitality and arts took a whopping 70% hit here. That’s not recoverable from without focused central planning. Household savings went up in the last 6 months (if you had money, what could you spend it on?).
Arts funding is so cheap and reaps rewards immediately and long term. I believe it was a great success in the New Deal (though I really only know the FSA photographers but I have been told that) and it’s an obvious and essential output for stimulus. Money is free to borrow for governments and they would be stupid to do what they did last time. That was an unmitigated failure.
So how long until this becomes the next phase in the Christization of Trump? “He did contract Covid for you, and on the third day he did rise and dominate the cursed China virus, yay verily.”
This was his best chance to turn his losing campaign around.
He’s hemorrhaging voters, his staff is all sick and pissed off at him, he’s running out of money - and he can’t hold rallies. Well - shouldn’t hold rallies - he’ll definitely choose to kill more of his supporters who are stupid enough to show up.
“I knew there’s danger to it – but I had to do it. I stood out front. I led. Nobody that’s a leader would not do what I did. And I know there’s a risk, there’s a danger – but that’s okay,” he said.
So there we go. No taped conversations, no second-hand gossip. Trump knew it was dangerous all along, and lied to the American people saying it wasn’t. That quote should be in the tool kit of everyone that interviews him from now til the end of time.
He is so horridly oleaginous and untrustworthy looking isn’t he? If you went to buy something and saw a salesperson who looked like that, you’d just nope the fuck out of there. He looks like someone repurposed the Johnnycab driverbot to sell penny stocks.
“I think this was a blessing from God that I caught it,” the president said of COVID-19 in a video message outside the White House on Wednesday.
Trump tested positive for COVID-19 last Thursday and spent three days hospitalized at Walter Reed medical center before returning to the White House on Monday.
Oily or falsely smug. I find that to be the case for a lot of evangelical Christians of a certain stripe, honestly. Ted Cruz fits the bill, and so does Scaramucci,
