Today in Trump

[Master]

Trump 2024 and he should also get 2028 because the 2020 elections were rigged and stolen and there was no insurrection and there was no Russia collusion

Hell why not go all the way to give Trump presidency for life and USA just become a dictatorship.

[Master]

Donald Trump has asked the judge overseeing his federal election meddling case to step aside due to previous statements she made in court.

He said in a legal filing some past comments create a perception of bias against the former president.

The request for a recusal was filed to Judge Tanya Chutkan on Monday.

She is overseeing the case being brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who accuses Mr Trump of a conspiracy to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66782143

[Master]

According to a clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, recent comments Donald Trump made in an interview with Glenn Beck are not only alarms but also evidence that the former president has all the signs of being a "psychopath."

Speaking with the conservative host, the four-time indicted Trump said he may have no choice if he is re-elected but to lock his opponents away.

Specifically, Trump was asked, "Do you regret not locking [Hillary Clinton] up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” to which he replied, "The answer is you have no choice, because they’re doing it to us.”

In an interview with Salon's Chauncey DeVega, Dr. Lance Dodes, the supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, questioned Trump's ability to think straight.

"Trump's latest threats to place opponents in jail, including President Biden, fit with the limitless nature of psychopaths," he stated. "Lacking a conscience or morality to limit his sadism, and believing in his worth above all others, leads Trump to think he has the right to destroy anyone who does not submit to him."

Dodes then added, "Trump is an extreme outlier in human psychology."

Possibly just as worse are his supporters, Dondes claims, by first stating, "They lack knowledge of the history and techniques of populist tyrants and the inevitable loss of freedom and democracy from them. That is the sad history of people democratically electing such despots; they don't realize the level of malignant psychology behind the populist face."

He added, "They may not individually be as psychologically ill as Trump, but they lack the moral fortitude to risk their personal political fortunes by opposing him. Said another way, they would also support a less psychopathic leader if that were in their personal interest."

"After Hitler, there were still Nazis in Germany. And after Stalin, there were many longing for his return in Russia. We can expect that there will be Trump supporters even if he is finally imprisoned for his crimes, " he warned.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world...df5a81a0&ei=32

[NoSavingByTheBell]

Trump 2024 and he should also get 2028 because the 2020 elections were rigged and stolen and there was no insurrection and there was no Russia collusion

Hell why not go all the way to give Trump presidency for life and USA just become a dictatorship.

2028 was just a joke. Lighten up

[NoSavingByTheBell]

Alarmism and Chicken Little kind of stuff about the sky falling it's very easy to posture and claim and it gets people onto a kind of herd mentality bandwagon.... You know something they can all agree about even if it's delusional.....But this paranoia about Trump being another Hitler or Stalin borders on delusional that you see in the mind-controlled by the mainstream media general population or a kind of derangement syndrome and has no basis in reality unless you want to try to connect dots just for the sake of connecting them which the general public are definitely entitled to do. To claim to be afraid and fearful of someone and that they represent a kind of terrifying threat must be really infectious because everybody seems to have fallen for it. It must be out of sheer boredom or wanting to be a part of "doing the right thing" in their minds and it must really be infectious and doesn't say very much for the general population who truly believes that Donald Trump is like another Hitler or Stalin. The media has been hammering this since 2015 and everybody completely went for it and I can't believe it's 2024 and people are literally still this blind. When he wins the election people are going to claim that he rigged it like Hillary Clinton claimed he rigged it in 2016 and this was not considered to be a contentious statement when she said it.

You're all going to claim that Hunter Biden is the reason why Trump got reelected or that Trump rigged the election or that Vladimir Putin helped Trump win in 2024 and you will never think of those as conspiracy theories

Only conspiracy theories to Democrats are the ones that Republicans talk about but when they say that Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected or that there was Russian collusion then in their mind those are not conspiracy theories

I mean the brainwashing is total and complete and their rabid reactions like dogs frothing at the mouth when talking about Donald Trump being evil is a sure sign of the brainwashing being complete and total

[Master]

Trump 2024 and he should also get 2028 because the 2020 elections were rigged and stolen and there was no insurrection and there was no Russia collusion

Hell why not go all the way to give Trump presidency for life and USA just become a dictatorship.

2028 was just a joke. Lighten up

The whole sentence was a joke.

[Master]

In 2009, a study published in PLOS ONE challenged our understanding of belief systems.

Researchers placed participants into the confines of an fMRI scanner and presented them with a mixture of factual and abstract statements. The results were illuminating. Disbelief, it turns out, is cognitively demanding. It requires more mental effort than simply accepting a statement as true. From an evolutionary perspective, this preference for easy belief makes sense; a perpetually skeptical individual questioning every piece of information would struggle to adapt in a fast-paced world.

What does all this have to do with Trump supporters? Well, it’s far less cognitively demanding for them to believe anything their leader tells them. Any challenge to what Trump tells them is true takes mental work. This means there is a psychological incentive for Trump loyalists to maintain their loyalty.

Consider the unique predicament faced by individuals who staunchly support Trump and want him to again become president. From the moment Trump began his political career and his social engineering career, his supporters have been exposed to narratives — Trump doesn't lie, Democrats are communists, the media is an enemy of the people — that emphasize loyalty and trust in their political idol. These narratives often steer away from critical examination and instead encourage blind faith. When coupled with the brain's inherent tendency to accept rather than question, it creates an ideal environment for unwavering allegiance. No matter that Trump, time and again, has been revealed to be a serial liar, habitually misrepresenting matters of great consequence, from elections to economics to public health.

For example, in the Psychology Today article "Why Evangelicals are Wired to Believe Trump’s Falsehoods," I explain that the children of Christian fundamentalists typically begin to suppress critical thinking at an early age. This is required if one is to accept Biblical stories as literal truth, rather than metaphors for how to live life practically and with purpose. Attributing natural occurrences to mystical causes discourages youth from seeking evidence to back their beliefs.

Consequently, the brain structures that support critical thinking and logical reasoning don't fully mature. This paves the way for heightened vulnerability to deceit and manipulative narratives, especially from cunning political figures. Such increased suggestibility arises from a mix of the brain's propensity to accept unverified claims and intense indoctrination. Given the brain's neuroplastic nature, which allows it to shape according to experiences, some religious followers are more predisposed to accept improbable assertions.

In other words, our brains are remarkably adaptable and continuously evolving landscapes. For ardent Trump supporters, residing in an environment that prioritizes faith over empirical evidence can reshape the neural circuits within their brains.

Imagine these neural pathways as trails in a forest. The more one traverses the path of unquestioning belief, the clearer and more entrenched it becomes. The path of skepticism, however, grows over with doubts and becomes difficult to navigate. This cognitive reshaping primes individuals to accept, and even defend, far-fetched statements and suggestions presented by manipulative politicians.

This cognitive bias occurs when individuals with low ability at a task overestimate their capability. Translated to the context of understanding complex legal matters, some Trumpists might believe they have a superior grasp of the former president’s predicament and dismiss expert opinions, thinking they're immune to being misled.

The Dunning-Kruger effect becomes especially concerning in the context of polarizing issues, such as climate change. A research study from the University of New Hampshire in 2017, for example, revealed that a mere 25 percent of those identifying as Trump supporters acknowledged the role of human actions in climate change. This is in stark contrast to the 97 percent consensus among climate scientists on the issue.

This troublesome cognitive bias could be making it easier for Trump to deliver unchallenged falsehoods to his more uneducated followers. In some cases, not only are these individuals uninformed, they are unlikely to seek new information on their own. In their minds, they have nothing to learn because Trump and his acolytes have already told them what they need to know.

It is important to state that these phenomena are not exclusive to Trump supporters or any particular political group; this article serves as a broader reflection on the cognitive shortcuts that our brains favor.

If we aspire to build a society less susceptible to misinformation, we must embark on a paradigm shift. Our educational approach should pivot from passive acceptance of supposed “facts” to the exhilarating pursuit of questioning authority and healthy skepticism (as too much skepticism can also lead to irrational thinking). Recognizing that belief, in many ways, is the brain's default mode rather than a conscious choice, can serve as the first step in this cerebral revolution.

In conclusion, the unwavering belief in Trump, despite the felony charges against him, is not solely a political matter but, for some, a manifestation of our brain's intrinsic tendencies. Understanding this cognitive dynamic is pivotal in addressing the challenges posed by misinformation and fostering a more critical and discerning society.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other...70edd4d&ei=100

[TitoFan]

Trump 2024 and he should also get 2028 because the 2020 elections were rigged and stolen and there was no insurrection and there was no Russia collusion

[Beanz]

Alarmism and Chicken Little kind of stuff about the sky falling it's very easy to posture and claim and it gets people onto a kind of herd mentality bandwagon.... You know something they can all agree about even if it's delusional.....But this paranoia about Trump being another Hitler or Stalin borders on delusional that you see in the mind-controlled by the mainstream media general population or a kind of derangement syndrome and has no basis in reality unless you want to try to connect dots just for the sake of connecting them which the general public are definitely entitled to do. To claim to be afraid and fearful of someone and that they represent a kind of terrifying threat must be really infectious because everybody seems to have fallen for it. It must be out of sheer boredom or wanting to be a part of "doing the right thing" in their minds and it must really be infectious and doesn't say very much for the general population who truly believes that Donald Trump is like another Hitler or Stalin. The media has been hammering this since 2015 and everybody completely went for it and I can't believe it's 2024 and people are literally still this blind. When he wins the election people are going to claim that he rigged it like Hillary Clinton claimed he rigged it in 2016 and this was not considered to be a contentious statement when she said it.

You're all going to claim that Hunter Biden is the reason why Trump got reelected or that Trump rigged the election or that Vladimir Putin helped Trump win in 2024 and you will never think of those as conspiracy theories

Only conspiracy theories to Democrats are the ones that Republicans talk about but when they say that Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected or that there was Russian collusion then in their mind those are not conspiracy theories

I mean the brainwashing is total and complete and their rabid reactions like dogs frothing at the mouth when talking about Donald Trump being evil is a sure sign of the brainwashing being complete and total

The main problem with this argument is that you have taken an extreme and not very common opinion and used that to pretend it represents a general position for most people who can and always have seen Trump for what he is. Most people do not think he is another Hitler or Stalin. Still, the fact remains as a far-right populist he has expressed fascist sentiments and been much more eager to praise dictatorial leaders like Putin and Kim Jong Un than support more democratic and moderate elected politicians. The herd mentality delusion that you speak of is there by the truckload in an army of supporters who ignore the facts of a treasonous melting Barbie doll-like celebrity fleecing them of their hard-earned cash as a grifting felon doing his best to avoid facing adult reponsibility for his actions.

It seems rather than defend any of Trumps illegal, unethical and crass actions it is the default position of yourself and the other Trumpoids to claim "Trump Derangement Syndrome" which again is another projection that springs from the same kind of irrational hate Trump and his minions espoused for Hilary Clinton. Dribbly Trump has made a career out of frothing at the mouth. Most of what he says is toxic bubbly airhead bullshit.

[NoSavingByTheBell]

Alarmism and Chicken Little kind of stuff about the sky falling it's very easy to posture and claim and it gets people onto a kind of herd mentality bandwagon.... You know something they can all agree about even if it's delusional.....But this paranoia about Trump being another Hitler or Stalin borders on delusional that you see in the mind-controlled by the mainstream media general population or a kind of derangement syndrome and has no basis in reality unless you want to try to connect dots just for the sake of connecting them which the general public are definitely entitled to do. To claim to be afraid and fearful of someone and that they represent a kind of terrifying threat must be really infectious because everybody seems to have fallen for it. It must be out of sheer boredom or wanting to be a part of "doing the right thing" in their minds and it must really be infectious and doesn't say very much for the general population who truly believes that Donald Trump is like another Hitler or Stalin. The media has been hammering this since 2015 and everybody completely went for it and I can't believe it's 2024 and people are literally still this blind. When he wins the election people are going to claim that he rigged it like Hillary Clinton claimed he rigged it in 2016 and this was not considered to be a contentious statement when she said it.

You're all going to claim that Hunter Biden is the reason why Trump got reelected or that Trump rigged the election or that Vladimir Putin helped Trump win in 2024 and you will never think of those as conspiracy theories

Only conspiracy theories to Democrats are the ones that Republicans talk about but when they say that Vladimir Putin helped Trump get elected or that there was Russian collusion then in their mind those are not conspiracy theories

I mean the brainwashing is total and complete and their rabid reactions like dogs frothing at the mouth when talking about Donald Trump being evil is a sure sign of the brainwashing being complete and total

The main problem with this argument is that you have taken an extreme and not very common opinion and used that to pretend it represents a general position for most people who can and always have seen Trump for what he is. Most people do not think he is another Hitler or Stalin. Still, the fact remains as a far-right populist he has expressed fascist sentiments and been much more eager to praise dictatorial leaders like Putin and Kim Jong Un than support more democratic and moderate elected politicians. The herd mentality delusion that you speak of is there by the truckload in an army of supporters who ignore the facts of a treasonous melting Barbie doll-like celebrity fleecing them of their hard-earned cash as a grifting felon doing his best to avoid facing adult reponsibility for his actions.

It seems rather than defend any of Trumps illegal, unethical and crass actions it is the default position of yourself and the other Trumpoids to claim "Trump Derangement Syndrome" which again is another projection that springs from the same kind of irrational hate Trump and his minions espoused for Hilary Clinton. Dribbly Trump has made a career out of frothing at the mouth. Most of what he says is toxic bubbly airhead bullshit.

This is an extremely well written and well expressed post and I do agree with parts of it but in general I have a different opinion about the whole thing.

[NoSavingByTheBell]

Trump 2024 and he should also get 2028 because the 2020 elections were rigged and stolen and there was no insurrection and there was no Russia collusion

Hell why not go all the way to give Trump presidency for life and USA just become a dictatorship.

2028 was just a joke. Lighten up

The whole sentence was a joke.

Thx for your view.

[TitoFan]

This Trump Derangement Syndrome claim by Trump fans gets tiring. It also continues to ignore the fact that Trump has put himself out there... for the whole world to see and hear... with our own eyes and ears... FOR YEARS. Yet the same yadda-yadda-yadda about Trump haters being "media-blinded sheep" continues to get pushed out there 24/7. So what the hell. Let's make Trumpers happy and say "ok, you're on to us... we only form opinions based on CNN." LMAO!!

We've gotten enough visuals and sound bites from Trump to put together a TV marathon of tragic comedy. I could begin listing them now. But frankly I'd just be rehashing what's been said over and over and over and over again, ad nauseum.

Trump was a trashy human being BEFORE he became President... and nothing has changed. If others don't mind having a trashy human being as President of their country... all the more power to them. Me? I've always had higher standards than that.

[NoSavingByTheBell]

Trashy can surely be a legitimate descriptor for Trump. But when I think of the absolutely SATANIC George W Bush for example who killed indirectly 2 MILLION Iraqis by some estimates under the evil and false accusations that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction...... Well that is absolutely beyond the pale and much more satanic than anything Trump ever did. So I have no problems at all with admitting that Trump has at times been trashy. Sophomoric and trashy and immature and etc ... Not excusing it but when you put it in perspective compared to what other presidents have done, like George w bush, or his father Bush Senior, I think there's no comparison. And George Bush definitely LED his team using fear and intimidation and his father was the head of the CIA for 16 years and he definitely used fear and intimidation in his administration and something tells me most presidents do that and I am not excusing it.

And there are certainly hundreds of millions of people who have formed their own opinions against Trump and did not need the assistance of the CNN or MSNBC brainwashing.

But if it comes down to Biden and Trump, then Trump is the lesser of the two evils and we all have to respect each other's opinions. If somebody says Biden is the lesser of the two evils than I respect that opinion.

[Kirkland Laing]

Nothing to see here, just a top former Trump White House adviser, who happens to be married to Trump’s daughter, monetizing for personal gain the specific high-level, and allegedly inappropriate, government relationships he built up in office.Nothing to see here.(But Hunter!)

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/stat...39886686634205






Elon Musk Told Bari Weiss That Twitter Would Cater to China for Tesla’s Sake, Uyghur Genocide Has ‘Two Sides’



https://www.mediaite.com/news/elon-m...has-two-sides/



There are two sides to genocide and millions of people in concentration camps.

[Kirkland Laing]

Some excerpts from a new Mitt Romney kiss and tell book:

Some nights he vented; other nights he dished. He’s more puckish than his public persona suggests, attuned to the absurdist humor of political life and quick to share stories that others might consider indiscreet. I got the feeling he liked the company—our conversations sometimes stretched for hours.

“A very large portion of my party,” he told me one day, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” He’d realized this only recently, he said. We were a few months removed from an attempted coup instigated by Republican leaders, and he was wrestling with some difficult questions. Was the authoritarian element of the GOP a product of President Trump, or had it always been there, just waiting to be activated by a sufficiently shameless demagogue? And what role had the members of the mainstream establishment—*people like him, the reasonable Republicans—played in allowing the rot on the right to fester?

Shortly after moving into his Senate office, Romney had hung a large rectangular map on the wall. First printed in 1931 by Rand McNally, the “histomap” attempted to chart the rise and fall of the world’s most powerful civilizations through 4,000 years of human history. When Romney first acquired the map, he saw it as a curiosity. After January 6, he became obsessed with it. He showed the map to visitors, brought it up in conversations and speeches. More than once, he found himself staring at it alone in his office at night. The Egyptian empire had reigned for some 900 years before it was overtaken by the Assyrians. Then the Persians, the Romans, the Mongolians, the Turks—each civilization had its turn, and eventu*ally collapsed in on itself. Maybe the falls were inevitable. But what struck Romney most about the map was how thoroughly it was dominated by tyrants of some kind—pharaohs, emperors, kaisers, kings. “A man gets some people around him and begins to oppress and dominate others,” he said the first time he showed me the map. “It’s a testosterone-related phenomenon, perhaps. I don’t know. But in the history of the world, that’s what happens.” America’s experiment in self-rule “is fighting against human nature.”
“This is a very fragile thing,” he told me. “Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce.”
For the first time in his life, he wasn’t sure if the cathedral would hold.


In one early meeting, a colleague who’d been elected a few years earlier leveled with him: “There are about 20 senators here who do all the work, and there are about 80 who go along for the ride.” Romney saw himself as a workhorse, and was eager for others to see him that way too. “I wanted to make it clear: I want to do things,” he told me.
He quickly became frustrated, though, by how much of the Senate was built around posturing and theatrics. Legislators gave speeches to empty chambers and spent hours debating bills they all knew would never pass. They summoned experts to appear at committee hearings only to make them sit in silence while they blathered some more.
As the weeks passed, Romney became fascinated by the strange social ecosystem that governed the Senate. He spent his mornings in the Senate gym studying his colleagues like he was an anthropologist, jotting down his observations in his journal. Richard Burr walked on the treadmill in his suit pants and loafers; Sherrod Brown and Dick Durbin pedaled so slowly on their exercise bikes that Romney couldn’t help but peek at their resistance settings: “Durbin was set to 1 and Brown to 8. . My setting is 15—not that I’m bragging,” he recorded.
He joked to friends that the Senate was best understood as a “club for old men.” There were free meals, on-site barbers, and doctors within a hundred feet at all times. But there was an edge to the observation: The average age in the Senate was 63 years old. Several members, Romney included, were in their 70s or even 80s. And he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position—that they would do almost anything to keep it. “Most of us have gone out and tried playing golf for a week, and it was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna kill myself,’ ” he told me. Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and on his state.)
Perhaps Romney’s most surprising discovery upon entering the Senate was that his disgust with Trump was not unique among his Republican colleagues. “Almost without exception,” he told me, “they shared my view of the president.” In public, of course, they played their parts as Trump loyalists, often contorting themselves rhetorically to defend the president’s most indefensible behavior. But in private, they ridiculed his ignorance, rolled their eyes at his antics, and made incisive observations about his warped, toddler*like psyche. Romney recalled one senior Republican senator frankly admitting, “He has none of the qualities you would want in a president, and all of the qualities you wouldn’t.”
This dissonance soon wore on Romney’s patience. Every time he publicly criticized Trump, it seemed, some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity. “I sure wish I could do what you do,” they’d say, or “Gosh, I wish I had the constituency you have,” and then they’d look at him expectantly, as if waiting for Romney to convey profound gratitude. This happened so often that he started keeping a tally; at one point, he told his staff that he’d had more than a dozen similar exchanges. He developed a go-to response for such occasions: “There are worse things than losing an election. Take it from somebody who knows.”
One afternoon in March 2019, Trump paid a visit to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. He was in a buoyant mood—two days earlier, the Justice Department had announced that the much-anticipated report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller failed to establish collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. As Romney later wrote in his journal, the president was met with a standing ovation fit for a conquering hero, and then launched into some rambling remarks. He talked about the so-called Russia hoax and relitigated the recent midterm elections and swung wildly from one tangent to another. He declared, somewhat implausibly, that the GOP would soon become “the party of health care.” The senators were respectful and attentive.
As soon as Trump left, Romney recalled, the Republican caucus burst into laughter.


Few of his colleagues surprised him more than Mitch McConnell. Before arriving in Washington, Romney had known the Senate majority leader mainly by reputation. With his low, cold mumble and inscrutable perma-frown, McConnell was viewed as a win-at-all-costs tactician who ruled his caucus with an iron fist. Observing him in action, though, Romney realized that McConnell rarely resorted to threats or coercion—he was primarily a deft manager of egos who excelled at telling each of his colleagues what they wanted to hear. This often left Romney guessing as to which version of McConnell was authentic—the one who did Trump’s bidding in public, or the one who excoriated him in their private conversations.


Romney’s Senate office (Yael Malka for The Atlantic)
“It wasn’t for you so much as for him,” McConnell replied. “He’s an idiot. He doesn’t think when he says things. How stupid do you have to be to not realize that you shouldn’t attack your jurors?
“You’re lucky,” McConnell continued. “You can say the things that we all think. You’re in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can’t say.” (A spokesperson said that McConnell does not recall this conversation and that he was “fully aligned” with Trump during the impeachment trial.)



What bothered Romney most about Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that Trump had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”



https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...onnell/675306/



You can read it with the noscript addon.