Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/10/26/news-about-covid-19-should-be-illegal-tweets-trump.html
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What a fucking whiny little baby bitch he is.
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Should be an election law violation!
Why not, no problem. If we treat it as seriously as all the election laws Trump and his administration routinely violate… literally nothing would change.
All the complaints Trump is having lately, about how the media are treating covid and associated deaths, is getting really weird. His whole thing comparing it to airplane crashes, and how the press don’t cover the deaths of 500 people dying in airplane crashes with the same seriousness was particularly divorced from reality. 1000 people die every day of covid in this country. As people pointed out, there hasn’t been an airplane crash that killed 500 people in almost 40 years. The 737 crashes, each of which killed less than 400 people, caused a worldwide shutdown of flights of that craft and altered aviation history.
All his other statements are equally divorced from reality. There’s no point in questioning if he’s lying, as it’s part of Trump’s whole fundamental disregard for reality. He doesn’t care what the reality is, as it’s bad for him. By continually denying it, he’s making even worse for himself, though. This has to be true, to some degree, even for his base. They’re starting to get sick. Hospitals in red states are now overflowing.
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You may smell fear but can he? Maybe he got that Covid-19 symptom.
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I’ve been thinking that if he stays in office, at this point, after what they’ve “devolved” to over the past few weeks – we’re done. The USA is done. Stick a fork in it, it’s done. I kind of thought this way previously, but now it’s beyond a shadow of a doubt – there’s just no coming back to anything resembling sanity, unless Biden is in office as of Inauguration Day. I actually feel somewhat certain that the country will fall apart, and potentially quickly.
Now, I don’t really expect him to “win” or otherwise stay in office at this point, but… can you imagine?
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Oh, for sure. I’ve only started to feel anything resembling optimism in the past few weeks. However, he still has 70+ days as the most powerful individual on the planet and he doesn’t really do stress well.
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I think that was true even without covid, but it’s true on more levels with covid, and to a more extreme degree. Right now, I’m increasingly worried about what’s going to happen even if Biden comes into power. Trump’s going to be actively burning the country down for the next three months, and blaming Biden for it. (And Trump’s base will accept that, despite the insanity of it.) He’ll not just have bad covid response, he’ll be actively sabotaging state covid responses - to a great degree than he is already, that is. He’ll step up calling for the imprisonment/death of state leaders for their covid responses, etc. He’ll sabotage treatments and vaccines in development. Things are going to be bad.
I can’t. I try, but I really can’t. My mind simply can’t traverse all the dimensions of horror that are realized if he stays in power. Even just looking at specific things he wants to do, the consequences quickly spiral out of control into madnesses I just can’t wrap my head around.
E.g. he’s been talking about instituting rules that allow for the summary dismissal of federal employees for no reason, in order to employ a loyalty test for employees. That is, replace competent employees with those who will tell him what he wants to hear, however wrong. Given that federal research is the basis for so much economic activity and impacts every private business, including - especially - farming, it would have ripple effects across the entire economy. We’d easily end up in a Stalinist situation where the data upon which we ran everything was broken for ideological reasons, resulting, similarly, in mass starvation and economic collapse. And that’s just as a result of one action Trump wants to take.
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I actually think he’s at a point of erratic where he would be ahem “taken care of” before doing anything particularly rash. By the military, not politically. And I actually think it could happen, even if/when Biden wins, because of what you describe as a very unstable period between now/Election Day, and January. The guy is nuts, and has the nuclear button. Or at least a fake one they whipped up for him…
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Trump likes to say ‘the biggest scandal ever’ is that his campaign was investigated by the FBI in 2016.
Then he demands that the Justice Dept. investigate Joe Biden.
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A woman who waited in line to vote in NY was asked if she was upset having to wait for 3 hours - she said I’ve been waiting for 4 years.
People are so sick and disgusted with Trump that they’d crawl over broken glass to boot his ass out of the White House.
Trump’s taking down a boatload of other Republicans with him.
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Maybe if the Fake News outlets would use the proper sciencey name for Covid-19, The Great Orange One wouldn’t have to correct them via Twitter. It’s the China Virus, ok, tiny amounts of Chinese soil was dried and then pulverized to a fine powder and then painted on Iphone cases, and then… um… VIRUS!!
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It’s worth remembering that the reason we can all laugh at this idiotic take is because a bunch of good civil rights attorneys defended the speech of incredibly unpopular and unpleasant folks to make sure real news is protected and nothing of this sort is even close to being on the table (at present).
Trump aspires to be the kind of dictator who can wave his hand and criminalize a bunch of speech he doesn’t like, but there are a few remainders of our better institutions that are preventing that from being fully realized. So write your check to the ACLU and don’t give them a hard time when they defend the speech of goobers you don’t like
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I’m gonna stop you right here. Before derailing this thread, this line of discussion really belongs here:
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SPLC deserves my meager philanthropic $ more IMHO. I like what the ACLU does, but they can be more like fire-fighters where SPLC just goes around doing controlled shrub burns and putting out cigarettes.
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Trump virus
Trump virus
Trump virus
Trump virus
Trump virus
Trump virus
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I’m sorry, your conspiracy theory still isn’t dumb enough for Trump to adopt. Also, there’s something of a causal chain there, and Trump can’t handle the complexity of those - he just makes baseless assertions.
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I don’t quite agree that the topic of the limits on Trump’s power to restrict speech are really that off-topic in an article about Trump musing about restricting speech, but if you’d rather not discuss it that’s fair enough.
Like I said, I think that our robust protections for free speech have been one of the few institutions that have held up over the last few years, and made a real difference in how this country was able to respond to his efforts at authoritarianism. I think we would all agree that Trump would criminalize speech he didn’t like if he could, and I am very thankful that his power is very limited in that regard.
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Apparently the Republican internal polls are just as bad as the rest, so he’s freaking out. (The usual caveats about polls.)
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