The goddamn Trump Administration (Part 2)

Roger Stone jumps on the bash Bannon bandwagon.

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In mid-June, the person contacted the ministers, a U.S. governor and a member of Congress via the Signal messaging app

Weird - it’s almost as if when some members of your administration go outside secure channels to communicate, and that’s public knowledge (and even normalized), the whole administration becomes less secure and more vulnerable to scammers (who don’t even have to try that hard as a result)…

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Well, more vulnerable to scammers that aren’t already part of the administration, at least.

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And New York but isn’t the solution to New York for him to endorse the republican because he keeps claiming anyone he endorses wins.

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tRump wants to rule NYC and DC?
with this recent pushback from Key West,
i reckon DeSantis will attempt a fascist municipal takeover soon, but then, what is the current state of florida, if not a testing ground for the larger authoritarian state?
tRump and MoRon may actually hate each other, but they are working in concert to establish the fascist dictatorship.

Link:

KEYS STRONG

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I think this part of what makes it a cult, that they are not influenced by facts and truth or even a coherent sense of morality or ethics… the core of their ethics is adherence to the cults ideology, which in this case is that Trump is here to take down the deep state on behalf of the American people (ie, his white followers).

I’m sure that some indeed know he’s guilty, but don’t care, because they are getting what they want out of him (a far right SCOTUS rubber stamping Trump’s agenda, a police state, pushing for enshrining a particular form of Christianity into law, etc). They know well that he’s likely guilty and that the evidence will show this. But as long as he’s delivering, and they are keeping the facts out of the public eye enough to have some plausible deniability, they’ll keep backing him. They might have to reject him if there is solid evidence of him actually raping children, though… It could still bring him down, because it’s something that many of the rank-n-file followers have made a key aspect of their political world view (all the Qanon stuff which harped on about satanic child murder, etc).

That’s the thing that they don’t actually know (the people empowering trump or backing him). It’s such a key aspect of Qanon, it could bring the whole house of cards down. The image of the cult leader does matter.

[ETA] Some commentary about this same topic from Splinter… it gets at some of the same points I’m trying to make here…

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And fired federal workers?

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Oh good. I’ve got an extra 100 bucks to buy the dip.

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I hate to say it, but I think that might be most voters, not just MAGA. I kinda get it, too. There’s just so much shit to deal with every day, for days on end. If I (and really most or all of us here) wasn’t such a policy wonk, I wouldn’t have time to deal with it, either.

American voters don’t vote based on policy. If they did, we’d have single-payer, universal health care; affordable housing; truly progressive income and wealth taxes; free childcare; etc. by now. So while we hold this democracy together that’s coming apart at the seams, we also have to figure out how to reach the average voter. It’s not policy, it’s not facts, it’s not science.

I think it might be giving most people a common enemy. What better enemy as the current administration shits the bed than billionaires? There’s what, 13 or so of them in the current administration?

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I think there is a difference between people not paying attention or voting for policy, vs. people treating Trump like a ā€œdear leaderā€ though… Not even all Republicans are in the cult of Trump, just a significant portion of the base. Most people might not be able to keep up with various policy debates/discussions, so they probably shape their vote on what they think they know about the party. Yes, they are voting out of some ignorance of what the party’s actually stand for, but they are not voting out of a sense of apocalyptic fervor for dear leader.

If voters don’t vote on policy, at least some of that is due to how politics is covered, too. It’s like sportsball or hollywood gossip, or some other kind of popularity contest, just another ā€œtwo sidesā€ conflict that the media believes will drive ratings up. Talking about the nuance of policy isn’t likely to get people who are tired at the end of a long day of work to tune in. And news is competing with more exciting fare. So, they attempt to make politics more exciting to get viewers to switch over to their channels.

For how to fix it, well, we need serious media reform of some kind. We need a public who isn’t just completely wiped from getting through their day and can spend time thinking through problems that face us all and how we can solve them. We need people to feel like all these institutions, public and private, aren’t just giant grift farms out to take us for what we’re worth and offer nothing productive in return. There is no easy way to get there, I know, but I think that’s what needs to happen. We need to convince people that democracy CAN work again.

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I agree completely.

It’s very dangerous to leverage and even stoke anger of a large group of people, but I’m not sure what else has the power to overcome the systemic advantages the wealthy have built up over the last 55 years.

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Given MAGA’s major characteristic is their willful dismissal of reality, I constantly wonder what they’d consider solid evidence they’d actually accept. I suspect it’s going to be highly individual, based on how disillusioned people are feeling about Trump generally, which could create some interesting fractures in MAGA.

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I don’t know where else to put this, but Missouri is trying to become a haven for billionaires. Especially new crypto bro billionaires.
https://archive.is/2025.07.08-103140/https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/government-politics/article_c52e7ef9-96f0-4a2f-ab9e-29a1bfca9b69.html

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The thing I don’t get about the whole Medicaid debate is the number of Republicans running with the ā€œpeople just sitting at home playing video gamesā€ line. It’s just so weird to me that they expect people to believe that able-bodied workers are somehow paying for everything they need just because of Medicaid. Where’s the money for the housing, food, and those video games supposed to be coming from?

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