Checkmate

you mean the postal scam scandal trump just did?

no one gives a shit if hunter biden smoked crack.

bryen, you got nothing.  everything you've 'predicted' hasn't come to fruition; john brennan and james clapper are still living their best live's. 

every moment that passes = blood on your hands

b-wrong.

Whatever happened to b-rad? Maybe he's Mr. Timpy.

Sweet!

Bryannity still hanging by his fingertips

"Bryen" is pretty psyched about this new Supreme Court pick.

Right up his ally.

The eviction will be televised 

"How many times does Flyen have to tell you guys?...

We’ve NEVER witnessed in our lifetimes such irrefutable smoking gun evidence of illegality!

I've told you this over and over now...It's like you never listen to me." - signed Flyen: Jan 2020, Feb2020, March2020, Aprl2020, May2020, June2020, July2020, Aug2020, Sept 2020, Oct 2020...

i thought tod was b-rad.

Bryen - I wonder what it is that compels you to make a fool of yourself over and over.  It truly is a curious thing.  You cannot possibly believe that anyone who planned to vote for Biden is now going to vote for Trump over this political hit job?  well maybe you do and that just sad.  bigly.  I waited in the rain this morning (in Florida) with my 18 year old daughter (and first time voter) for over an hour to vote Biden and blue down the line.   this scene played out all over Florida today - the fist day of early voting.  times up.  I'd say it's been fun but we all know the truth

There are opposing arguments ad nauseum on this site, you can pretend you don’t read them but we know you do. That you choose the simpleton news sources and ignore all intelligent opposing dialogue is of no consequence to anyone here, really. Sorry to see your foxies scrambling so hard to get noticed but the general public is smarter then that. I hope your Rushie lives long enough to see the eviction 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skFAQ7WPvYY

 of course you can’t be wrong when it’s only “opining” that your doing. Thanks for at least acknowledging that is what you are doing. Your supposed facts are a different matter altogether, 

>>>>>>>>this is checkmate

How much time will this move take?

  I say this with respect to you

you sir,  are a moron a fool and an asshole attention whore

Without posting complete bs that no one will read   Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

have a good day 

LOL any day now.... (not)

russiagate is the liberals' qanon. 

only after you answer my questions

>>>>>>produce an explanation as to why Joe Biden isn't guilty

Has he been indicted?

Lawyered up? Lol 

i don’t normally waste my time on pointless troll threads and have tried to help you see that you are allowing yourself to be poisoned but there is only one thing left to mention, to quote a phrase “you are a fucking idiot”

It’s a searchable database, I’ve answered before. So poke around, as you suggest 

Spend some time answering the questions others posed to you above and I’ll consider further comment on the matter. I’m curious to see if the answers I came up with for you match up. If they don’t match then I’ll know you are full of shit. Wait, I already knew that. Nm 

>>>>shaping United States foreign policy contingent upon how many millions he receives in thinly-guised scheme that his son plays the role of the bag man,

Nepotism and corruption?   Meh.   That's how the country has been run since the get go and Biden's rival is no slouch in that department.

Bryen, you do know that putting up 5 posts in a row is a sign of severe mental illness? Get help man.

Oops, sorry - 6. You are beyond cure.

Fuckin nut.

alcohol and loneliness leads to those type of above behaviors. 

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

for the fella pissing in the wind

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

for the fella pissing into  A STRONG HEADWIND  - hitching up the depravirt wagon

for the fella pissing in the wind

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

 Please answer a few questions so I might to begin to understand your point of view / depravity   No biblical or Grateful Dead references / diversions allowed 

do you believe in white supremacy?

do you support Qanon?

you hate gays?  Women?

do you work for a living   Are you a trust fund baby  are you rich?

Are you lonely?  Are you in meds?

climate change?

equality?

he who will never answer - nor have an original thought - Dflo found you a woman ( if u r into that kinda thing)  the deadier than thou nobodies club

FOTD of FOAD???  

{{{{{{{{Deadier Than Thou Nobodies Club}}}}}}}

Flo flowing

Is going with the flow 

the opposite of pissing in the wind 

Thank you for replying Bry    Wait you didn't...

not   Big surprise that you are unable to provide any foundation for your beliefs (hallucinations)

You are indeed deadlier than I, based in your righteous proclamation. I guess that is all the justification you feel you need 

I will not click any link of yours,  ever 

you are infected. I chose not to be 

i namaste for  your soul

Charter member

john bitch, kkk, proud boys and the {{{{{{{{Deadier Than Thou Nobodies Club}}}}}}}

People of faith should embody moral and intellectual integrity.

what is wrong Bry 

Can you believe people believe that bullshit?” Donald Trump said after a 2012 meeting with pastors who laid hands on him, according to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer and confidant.

“Those fucking evangelicals,” the president, smiling and shaking his head, told GOP lawmakers, according to Tim Alberta’s book, American Carnage. Trump believed, Alberta writes, that if he gave them “the policies and the access to authority that they longed for,” then “in return they would stand behind him unwaveringly.”

Clap on 

clap off 

 no heart attacks? Well then

maybe STDs from whores.  Wearing a habit?

Trump is also incredibly protective of any information about his health, viewing it as one of the last bastions of his privacy, say current and former senior administration officials. The president and his aides still have not made public why he made an unannounced trip to Walter Reed hospital for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon last November.

Speaking of the Supreme Court whores n stuff Mr anti abortionist

"It’s especially scary to me as a sex worker who also happens to have a uterus,” says Dahl. “I’d like the government to stay away from my sex organs and my personal health decisions!”

Hey, do you wear a mask  Bry?

A riddle 

Hey. If you round  the corner four times

are you back where you started....

<<<>>>you do know that putting up 5 posts in a row is a sign of severe mental illness?

LLTD had not one, but two different 7 run consecutive posts up in here. 

impressive.  

I'm assuming you suck at chess as bad as Cheeto sucked at being president.

Lol.

Trump isn't playing any 5d chess. He's eating checkers and claims to be winning because they are disappearing.

Remember in April when Bry posted the Paul Revere "one if by land" nonsense...like some Revolution was starting?

It's always right around the corner for these Qtards.

No chance Lucy pulls the football this time, right?

Please continue to hold your breath, though. 

I'm sure the goalposts will continue to move, even as Biden is being sworn in.

It's looking like a decent Biden sweep at this point, with a lot of senate seats likely turning  blue....

As a fuck you to the unethical republicrackers and their continued cut throat shenanigans, I'd love to see DC and Puerto Rico become states, and 2 justices added to the Supreme Court in the next 2 years...  that would be a nice wooden stick to the throats of these ghoulish racists, and end the conservative reign of terror!  

And I always thought Cult Boys game was golf...   a fine exclusive and expensive hobby that's well known for excluding certain ethnic backgrounds and religions, ah to be so superior...  i'm sure B-wrong would fully support T's constant cheating when he plays golf, it would pair perfectly with his inability to denounce racism, pedophilia, and T's continued attacks on women...

Yes, "Bryen" has been totally wrong about all of this so far, why stop now?

But yeah, it's all going to come out any day now.

So when Biden wins and Trump has to be dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming you'll admit you were wrong?

Doubtful.

U are right about one thing 

its over

why Joe Biden isn't guilty of treason by shaping United States foreign policy contingent upon how many millions he receives in thinly-guised scheme that his son plays the role of the bag man, thus affording him plausible deniability?

simple...he very well might be.

and in many other situations, so is trump. some people have blinders on and will deny "their guy" is corrupt because he panders to their select culture war issues, like they hate abortion or love trannies or some shit like that. some people will vote for the guy they think is least corrupt. some people will call a draw as far as corruption and vote for one of them based on other issues while acknowledging both of their corruption. some people will reject the absurd choices presented to us by a broken duopoly and vote third party or not at all.

it's already out, and by the way, they aren't disputing the veracity of the emails,

as far as i was aware we were still going on the absurd "hunter dropped his laptop off for repair, forgot about it and then some rando computer repair guy gave it to rudy", and the veracity of the emails was in very serious dispute. has there been a development i missed? what is the evidence that these emails are legitimate? 

The bombshell Biden story has now dropped off the front page of foxnews.com.

Check-mutt ... this story was a dog from the beginning with Rudy's fingerprints all over it.

>> what is the evidence that these emails are legitimate?  <<

My guess it was a Russian hack into Hunter's email account. But, they couldn't run with that, so they manufactured the laptop repair story. The whole thing is unraveling now.

Hahaha, yes Guy, when "Faux" News won't even go near it you know it's fucked.

"Bryen", to quote a movie, "You're reaching for shit now..."

Britt Hume, too. He used to be a journalist. I saw him jump on the Biden dementia angle last weekend. Wallace was not impressed. 

Thank you heater  for being so observant

It is true that we often annoy one another and I reject many of your opinions 

most of  all I allow myself to be annoyed by your ENDLESS squeaking the same thing over and over

It seems that you and Bry are of the same vain in not convincing anyone (you do throw out far more insults however)

if it makes you feel better / more righteous do as you feel you need to 

I actually did 7 posts in a row on purpose to highlight the absurdity and how annoying Bry is

I would like him to answer one question for once   Kinda bizarre

its a free country.   Black lives matter.   Bring up long_live_the_dead's sins some more..,

LLTD 

i said i like you. you stupid fuck. haha! 

Poof! Just like that the story is gone...must be a real smoking gun!

works better if you press send!

i acknowledge that you did say that, and i believe that I have said that I like you as well ( and I was thinking of those exchanges as I was typing  ...lol?)

 I will chill -  I am way too uptight  November please come .... and hell some live music would be nice within a year :-)  i am losing my shit ( assuming I ever had any lol)

( I did see a bs overpriced socially distanced show at txr Sunday - pretty much sucked, and does not count)

have a good evening all

((((((BS overpriced )))))))

I'm nominating Bry for Zoner of the Year. His threads never fail to excite.

Do you all think that he really believes this shit, or is it an act? Either way, it adds levity to these strange times.

Ha, fat chance.

Donald Trump Says China Will Pay for Stimulus Bill: 'They're the Ones That Caused This Problem'

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-stimulus-bill-china-1539467?utm_medium=So...1602773682

doesn't look like timpane has brought me up. good.

>>Donald Trump Says China Will Pay for Stimulus Bill:

Ha ha. Maybe he thinks they'll just forgive the $1.1 trillion we owe them and call it even.

Bryen

Bert 

Blair

nah, just a coiincidence

Well Fox has updated a story so we should be getting the next bry round soon enough 

^^^^    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/us/trump-taxes-china.html

In 2017, the company reported an unusually large spike in revenue

— some $17.5 million, more than the previous five years’ combined.

It was accompanied by a $15.1 million withdrawal

by Mr. Trump from the company’s capital account.

https://twitter.com/scarylawyerguy/status/1318723696027119617

"12 hours ago Trump called for his AG to open an investigation into Joe Biden

& it's been forgotten

b/c since then

he walked out of a 60 Minutes interview,

we found out he has a secret Chinese bank account

&

his flunkies can't find the parents of 545 kids separated at the border."

"Bryen":  Forget about Trump paying more taxes to the Chinese than to the US!

BIDEN is clearly the real criminal here!

Bahahaha, how's your house of cards coming man?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hBnwPycFUQ&t=28s

I love when I haven't even posted in a thread and read JR and Neds posts where they cry about me. Thanks for letting me rent space in your heads, guys.

Are you for real?

What's that chicken scratch above your name? Chinese translation for "fraud"?  Or "Putin is my master"? 

Take Karl Roves advice, bry, you are wasting your time with this..,,the voters want to hear about the economy,  not some small potato son of a candidate. It’s as they say,  absolutely curtains 

this thread is about the laptop - purportedly "lost" by Hunter Biden,   .

- that Rudy Guiliani found,

- that Rudy Guiliani claims has child porn,

- that Rudy Guiliani kept secret for the past several months

correct, byen?

And that the intelligence community says is bullshit and has Russian misinformation written all over it.  Yep, Hunter left a laptop and forgot to pick it up. Really?    

Sounds totally plausible......to fucking fools like "Bryen".

The deep state set Rudy up by sending...Borat?

It that Tweet real? Did that idiot just admit to laying on hotel beds with young ladies and tucking in his shirt?

What a friggin' joke that dude is.

a dick tuck?

Apparently Donald tweeted it then deleted it?

It's all over twitter so I'm betting it was real

possibly related:

https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani/status/1319031305120657410

https://twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/1319053744852566016

Lol

I don't want to wait two weeks

is whishing to observe a slow painful public castration of herr trump ok?

what a massive piece of fecal matter

truly mind boggling the depravity and stupidity and evil

Caption This Photo 

" Wait, please wait just one more minute honey, I almost got it "

LOL

What a luger!

yeah that creep had been quiet or absent for quite some time.

Haha, the legal eagle punk got punked back. He must feel like a fool.

Oh how the Worm has Turned for ol Batboy 

Borat( character) is genius and timing is empecable. 

Hahaha, ha!

These dirty old men are so stupid and gross.  Such a buffoon.

Really demonstrates how little the trump campaign has been able to come up with on the ultra spry and scrappy Biden. The sleepy dementia patient and the sons laptop.... what a joke..Imagine it was kushners laptop, would even fox care? No one cares because it’s the most ridiculous story in history. I’d say you heard it here first but you already know this.

Let's change the context a bit shall we, demonstrate how truly repugnant folks like Bryen, and others who exploit others tragedies, for personal or political benefit, truly are.....

“ When Trump hurls accusations against Hunter Biden, he instinctively knows that he’s pressing his current opponent’s greatest vulnerability, one achingly depicted in a profile of Hunter by The New Yorker’s Adam Entous. Having survived the car crash that killed his sister and mother, Hunter has lived with the scars that make everyday life a seemingly unwinnable affair. As a grown man, Hunter would hole up in his Washington, D.C., apartment, leaving only to buy bottles of Smirnoff. His father, then the vice president, would call several times a day; he would show up unannounced to prod his son out of his darkest confines, telling him, “I need you. What do we need to do?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/trump-waging-psycholog...

The biggest scam in the history of the world turns out to be a rich vicious asshole, attacking a broken person with a famous father...   charming...   

It’s a very sad article, hard to believe this is our president, it’s a total nightmare. Bry should have all of his gd memories erased from his brain for propagating such hatred

when is the  checkmate going to happen? i've been waiting

when is the  checkmate going to happen? i've been waiting

The best part about bringing along a date to the debate and assuming he brings up Hunter  is that Trump can only lose by mentioning it... Americans are just trying to keep their family healthy and healthy, keep food on the table, keep their health insurance, and make sure their kids aren't falling behind... This story only appeals to people who are already members of Trump's lunatic fringe.  It may be comfort food for his base... but from a sane voters perspective, there is nothing I want Trump talking about more than Hunter Biden, he clearly has no plan and his strategy reeks desperately of a man who is just trying to avoid the bracelets that await him if he loses. Even the First Lady seems to see the writing on the wall. 

Unfortunately he does have a plan. It doesn't involve winning the popular vote or even the EC. If he and his minions can sow enough doubt and confusion with the vote in a few key swing states, he will sue, and at the end of that road is the SCOTUS. Trump's SCOTUS. Wonder how they will rule? Remember Bush v. Gore?

When I say no plan, I mean no plan for our country for the next 4 years. Ya know that job that he was supposed to be doing for the last 4 years, making America great again...in between tweets of course 

plan or random?

you decide...

just vote timpane

 Trump can win via state legislatures;  (Bill Maher, 5:20 mark)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA9ak5rKmOY

>Remember Bush v. Gore?

all too well

wonder how Trump v Biden will be argued. Will Trump they claim there was fraud so Trump is the winner or declare no winner and just rule that  Trump gets to stay in power till 2024?

Bryen hasn't been invited back to the family Thanksgiving get together since 2016. 

At least this year there are Hunter Biden's personal emails to read while Fox News flickers in the backdrop. 

Yes Surf, I remember. I was on part of an excellent Dylan tour on the East Coast during that time.

We would go to the hotel after the show and watch the news and say "what the fuck is going on with our country?"

Strange days indeed,.........again.

Except we don’t have an excellent Dylan tour to hide out on

*play through

https://twitter.com/BoratSagdiyev/status/1319431436550561792

:)

A riddle 

Hey. If you round  the corner four times

are you back where you started....

Hunter Biden story picked up by other news outlets!

bry, you were right, other outlets are starting to notice!

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/10/23/hunter...

“It makes you wonder what Trump could have accomplished this year against Biden if he had focused on what’s front and center to voters and didn’t get so distracted and preoccupied by the sideshow.” 

But thats not nearly as fun as  dreaming up conspiracies is it

 If you don't know at this point that Joe is refuting the irrefutable, you won't ever know.

 Hey Flyen...You wanna fight? Why don't you stick your head up my ass and fight for air?

>>>declare no winner and just rule that Trump gets to stay in power till 2024?
 

no winner thing is a no go, multiple recounts or even a do over election would have to happen as on January 20th the speaker of the house would b sworn in as president until there is a definitive election outcome

They will declare Putin - oops, I mean Trump - president. He will then have 4 years to consolidate his power - for life?

Bry 

how do you achieve checkmate

when you only play checkers 

KING ME!

I'd be surprised if bry could handle hungry, hungry hippos.  Don't put the marbles in your mouth.

sorry the planet doesnt seem to care but look on the bright side, Bry, your precious news entertainment channel can keep calling the reporting on this a "Fox Exclusive"

Bryen was a Jarts champ!

Jarts in his shorts?

i used to love playing hungry hungry hippos with my kids.  Ahhh memories 

lost in space

that was a decent show too

Trump lowered the bar for ya, bry. No one gives a shit. Sorta would’ve been cool if trump just outlined a plan for our country... but like someone pointed out last night, it’s not about Joes family or trump’s family, it’s about our families and right now my father in law has a virus that the current president has told us is no big deal, under control, almost beat and not to worry. Fuck him and fuck you for attempting to enable the worst human being in our generation to remain in office. If you aren’t trolling and actually believe that trump is the best thing for our country and the people who reside here then you are a bigger asshole then you try to be here

If Grassley and Johnson are actually using the NY Post article as a "source"  they need to be voted out asap too. (#2 in the footnotes)

Even Fox news didn't want to touch it, which should immediately tell you something stinks "bigly".

Fish, I'm sending your family strength, hope, healing and love. I'm so sorry.

My friends brother passed 2 months ago and another friend, both of his parent that are in their late 60's, have been seriously struggling for the past month to recover. They are really depressed they are still feeling so awful.

Fishcane, sending your father-in-law, you and your family the strongest of warm healing thoughts. ((( Hope )))

Merri Girl, love to your friends ~ just trying to survive ~ damn.

Ex-Hunter Biden associate's records don't show proof of Biden business relationship amid unanswered questions

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-tony-bobulinski-joe-biden-...

Thanks MG, sorry for your loss as well. You too judit

lost in space

that was a decent show too

https://mobile.twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1321608055549775872

Tucker lost the evidence. 

Amazing!

This proves everything 

Didn't T's bossman, Putin, just exonerate Hunter Biden?      

I don't think Biden being a thief will really hurt him at all. Most people know that all politicians are theives and it doesn't seem to effect the way people vote for them. Trump is the biggest thief of all and he got elected. Maybe being a thief will help Biden.

I am sure that FedEx went thru all of that to find the missing papers of an envelope that was opened 

Voltaire from his 1765 essay, "Questions sur les miracles" 

“Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities, Can Make You Commit Atrocities"

I’m sure Bry has a safety copy in a safe.

Bryen.  Far be it from me to presume to speak for you

but as I don't recall you ever replying to questions about the basis of your opinions,

here is a "fun" commentary that might speak to your belief system   Choose to reply or not as is your god given right

My perception as a non intelligent observer is that you constantly deflect / change the subject.. 

do have a great day regardless.   I would guess that you appreciate the attention .....

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10217863616598627&id=1129518...

Still love my democrat friends and family but...You see it your way... I'll see it my way!

You see Trump’s arrogance, I see Trump’s confidence. You see Trump’s nationalism, I see Trump’s patriotism.

You hear Trump’s unsophisticated words, I hear Trump’s honesty.

You see Trump’s racism, I see Trump’s words being misconstrued and twisted by the media daily to fit their narrative.

You see Trump as a Republican, I see Trump as a Patriot. You see Trump as a dictator, I see Trump as a leader.

You see Trump as an Authoritarian, I see Trump as the only one willing to fight for our freedoms.

You see Trump as childish, I see Trump as a fighter, unwilling to cave into the lies.

You see Trump as an unpolished politician, I see Trump as a breath of fresh air.

You think Trump hates immigrants, I know Trump is married to an immigrant.

You see Trump putting an end to immigration in America, I see Trump welcoming immigrants to America LEGALLY.

You see Trump’s cages at the border, I see Obama’s cages at the border.

You see Trump with a struggling economy, I see Trump with an amazing economy until the Democrats shut it down.

You see the violence in the streets and call it “Trump’s America”, I see the violence in the streets of Democratic-run cities who are refusing Trump’s help and call it “Liberal America.”

You want someone more Presidential, I’m happy we have someone who finally doesn’t just talk the talk but actually walks the walk.

You and I? We see things very differently.

Copy & Paste if you agree

Ok now do hitler 

Unapologetically Repetitive :

In academic terms, this is called “my-side bias”—objective reality looks different through the lens of your home team. (Sometimes literally: A famous 1954 psychology study found that undergraduates at Dartmouth and Princeton Universities had completely different perceptions of a football game played between the rival schools.) In fact, this tendency to approve of one’s own side might become self-reinforcing. If someone doesn’t support Trump and all that he does, they might stop considering themselves a Republican, and thus stop showing up as one in surveys, says Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University. 
 

But another prominent scholar of the American right believes Trump support among men, in particular, is rooted in something more psychological. Many white men feel that their gender and race have been vilified, says the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Their economic prospects are bad, and American culture tells them that their gender is too. So they’ve turned to Trump as a type of folk hero, one who can restore their sense of former glory. Exposing themselves and others to the coronavirus is part of that heroism.

Or as Kurtis told me when I asked him how he felt about Trump getting the coronavirus, “Trump’s willing to accept that risk to win for the American people. And Joe Biden is sitting in his basement.”

Bryen buddy, are you a white man?  https://apple.news/AudOmNxucRH-5mzMylMR60w

restore my former glory 

This miasma of ill-defined but ever-present irony makes Trump virtually impossible to mock, because that job is taken. The real Donald Trump acts as if he’s doing an impression of some normal-looking, occasionally self-aggrandizing president we don’t know about. His supporters know this impression is fake. They don’t think Trump is the guy he pretends to be; they know he is the guy who pretends to be that guy, which is a hilarious thing for the president to do. Trump has effectively neutralized political comedy by shifting the place where jokes happen from the soundstage to the White House. The unsettling thing about this approach is that it works—not just as a way to defang satirists but also as a way to wield power.

https://apple.news/AhD9k8JdPR3axYWzuxi_LXQ

ok I'll stop now, have a day all 

Ok I lied. One more.....It has been bothering me. Why don't the trumps have a dog? Are they that inhuman?

dogs are the best!

not Camelot in the bizarre Trump house 

https://apple.news/AM9dCUpH8S-CtZYlF1t9UzQ

you know people need to have apple news to open those links?

<< buddy, are you a white man?  

Lol myo - I don't make any of this shit up, R Crumb is just The Best !

No I didn't turtle. Apologies

i live with my iPhone 

I don't want to post all the text   Will seek alternatives 

POLITICS

Why Many White Men Love Trump’s Coronavirus Response

More than 80 percent of Republicans think the president is doing a great job with the pandemic. Here’s why.

Kurtis, a young accountant in McKinney, Texas, likes the thing that many people hate about Donald Trump: that the president has left the pandemic response almost entirely up to local officials.

“He left it up to each state to make their own decision on how they wanted to proceed,” Kurtis told me recently. Most experts think the absence of a national strategy for tackling the coronavirus has been a disaster. But Kurtis argues that North Dakota, for example, shouldn’t have to follow the same rules as New York City. Kurtis voted for Trump in 2016, and he plans to do so again this year.

Some 82 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s coronavirus response—a higher percentage than before the president was diagnosed with the virus. This is despite the fact that more than 220,000 Americans have died, and virtually every public-health expert, including those who have worked for Republican administrations, says the president has performed abysmally.

Experts offer a few different explanations for the spell that Trump has cast over his supporters. The simplest is that Trump voters like Trump, and as is often the case with people we like, he can do no wrong in their eyes. “We might just as easily ask why Trump opponents think he is doing a horrible job with the pandemic,” says Richard Harris, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

In academic terms, this is called “my-side bias”—objective reality looks different through the lens of your home team. (Sometimes literally: A famous 1954 psychology study found that undergraduates at Dartmouth and Princeton Universities had completely different perceptions of a football game played between the rival schools.) In fact, this tendency to approve of one’s own side might become self-reinforcing. If someone doesn’t support Trump and all that he does, they might stop considering themselves a Republican, and thus stop showing up as one in surveys, says Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University.

[Ibram X. Kendi: The violent defense of white male supremacy]

Other wrinkles of our current political moment could further explain why so many Trump supporters approve of the president’s pandemic response. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the most consistent theme on the right-wing talk-radio shows she’s been listening to is a desire to trust people to make their own decisions, rather than trusting the government to make decisions for people. Shana Kushner Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University, pointed out that understanding the failures of Trump’s pandemic response might require intimate knowledge of other countries’ public-health systems—a tall order for the average person.

But another prominent scholar of the American right believes Trump support among men, in particular, is rooted in something more psychological. Many white men feel that their gender and race have been vilified, says the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild. Their economic prospects are bad, and American culture tells them that their gender is too. So they’ve turned to Trump as a type of folk hero, one who can restore their sense of former glory. Exposing themselves and others to the coronavirus is part of that heroism.

Or as Kurtis told me when I asked him how he felt about Trump getting the coronavirus, “Trump’s willing to accept that risk to win for the American people. And Joe Biden is sitting in his basement.”

T

his hero theory of Trump is a continuation of Hochschild’s earlier work. A professor at UC Berkeley, Hochschild soared to the best-seller lists with her 2016 book Strangers in Their Own Land, which came out before the election but proved timely in its focus on the minds of Trump voters.

For the book, Hochschild interviews an array of characters across Louisiana in an attempt to unearth what she calls their “deep story”: the emotional, feels-as-if truth of their lives.

Hochschild describes her subjects’ deep story in a metaphor of a long line of Americans standing on a hill, waiting to get over the top, to the American dream. But as they stand there, tired and eager, they see that certain people are cutting the line in front of them. Women, African Americans, and immigrants are getting ahead, boosted by the government and its affirmative-action programs. As Hochschild writes, they feel “your money is running through a liberal sympathy sieve you don’t control or agree with.”

Many white men, in particular, feel “shoved back in line,” she writes. Unable to draw confidence from their wealth, which is in many cases nonexistent, or their jobs, which are steadily being moved offshore, they turn to their pride in being American. “Anyone who criticizes America—well, they’re criticizing you,” she writes.

Trump, meanwhile, has allowed his male supporters “to feel like a good moral American and to feel superior to those they considered ‘other’ or beneath them,” she writes. Trump might not always represent his supporters’ economic self-interest, but he feeds their emotional self-interest. Trump is, in essence, “the identity politics candidate for white men.”

For a new book, Hochschild is talking with people in eastern Kentucky, another heavily conservative area. One trend she’s noticed is local white men’s lost sense of pride, and how they turn to Trump to restore it. To them, Trump seems to say, “I’m taking the government back and having it serve you,” she told me. “I’m your rescuer.”

[Adam Serwer: The nationalist’s delusion]

In Strangers, some of the Louisianans Hochschild interviewed were upset that women were competing for men’s jobs and that the federal government “wasn’t on the side of men being manly.” Some of her male Kentucky interviewees, especially those who have a family history in coal, feel even more strongly that men’s rightful place in the world is slipping away.

Men in this community, she told me, “are starved for a sense of heroism. They don’t feel good about themselves. They feel like they haven’t done as well as their fathers, that they’re on a downward slope.” Coal jobs have evaporated, and liberals, they feel, are making enemies of white men. “Their source of heroism, of status, is humming; it’s fragile,” Hochschild says. This analysis comports with some polls of Trump voters. An Atlantic/PRRI poll conducted in 2016 found that Trump supporters were more likely than Hillary Clinton supporters to feel that society “punishes men just for acting like men.”

As far as their leader’s pandemic response, Hochschild’s Kentuckians feel that Trump is doing the best he can, and as good of a job as possible under the circumstances. Though her subjects are worried about catching COVID-19, many see it as one of the unfortunate but acceptable risks of life. Confronting the coronavirus is a way to show stoicism and to feel heroic again. “I’ve heard it said that ‘This is hitting older people, and I’m an older person, but it’s really important to get back to work, and I’ll take the hit,’” Hochschild said. Her subjects think they can handle the virus just like Trump handles everything. “He’s a two-hamburger-a-meal guy,” she said. “He’s kind of a bad boy, and they relate to that.”

This part of Trump resonated with Kurtis, who told me he likes that the president “comes off as a man. He doesn’t come off as weak.” Trump’s strength is a benefit in the foreign-policy arena, Kurtis feels.

Joe Biden doesn’t give these men the same sense of restored pride. They feel the Democratic nominee is a Trojan horse liberal women and minorities are using to advance their own interests. Biden doesn’t present himself as a defender of white men, and they don’t see him that way.

Hochschild sees her new work as an extension of the deep story she began probing in Strangers. In that book, her interview subjects found their guy in Trump. Now her interviewees are coming to realize their hero is surrounded by enemies. He’s battling evil forces such as the liberal media, the impeachment, the Democrats in Congress, and the lawyers who indicted his advisers. But Trump is fighting all of those enemies—the left, the deep state, the pandemic—and he’s fighting them for his constituents.

The final chapter of this story, she said, is Trump becoming an almost Christlike figure to these men. “‘Look how I suffer,’” is how Trump presents himself, Hochschild told me. “‘I am suffering for you.’ And they say, ‘Thank you.’”

I first met Kurtis in 2018, when I traveled to McKinney, my hometown, for research for my book about outsiders. I wanted to try to figure out why Californians were moving to the Dallas suburb. Before they relocated, Kurtis and Crystal had been living in Long Beach, paying $1,500 a month for an apartment the size of a bouncy castle. Kurtis found himself constantly at odds with his fellow Californians, who would yell at him for saying that he didn’t believe in global warming or that he was voting for Trump. “It’s like I couldn’t walk around with my ideas,” Kurtis told me for the book.

Now that he’s in McKinney, Kurtis feels much more at home. Kurtis and Crystal bought a $325,000 house with a wraparound deck. They don’t get sneered at for their views, and they don’t have to recycle anymore. Their extended families have since moved out from California to join them there.

And Kurtis wishes people would see the side of Trump that appeals to him: No apologies, what you see is what you get. Trump speaks the way people do at a barbecue, not at a dissertation defense. Sure, Kurtis reasons, the pandemic has killed a lot of people, but what was Trump supposed to do? Besides, the left called him a xenophobe for shutting down travel from China and for dubbing it the “China virus.”

Kurtis’s father recently caught COVID-19 at church, which Kurtis saw as just another example of people knowing the risks but doing what they feel they need to do anyway.

I asked Kurtis what he thought about Hochschild’s idea, that Trump supporters feel like white men are unfairly vilified these days.

Kurtis deflected a little. “I don’t think it has to do with being white,” he said. He has other reasons, such as taxes and a possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act, for supporting Trump.

At the same time, he was tired of “white men [being] looked at as the cause of everybody’s problems. I’m not gonna apologize that I’m white. I shouldn’t have to go around feeling like I have this great debt of reparations.”

[Tom Nichols: Donald Trump, the most unmanly president]

It’s been good to have a leader like Trump, he added, who takes no B.S. and is there to kick ass. “I’m proud to be an American again,” Kurtis said.

Not all experts agree with Hochschild’s theory. Scott Winship, a sociologist and Director of Poverty Studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, says “it’s very questionable to explain overwhelming support among Republicans for Trump’s coronavirus response by pointing to whatever Hochschild’s white Kentuckians told her.” The income element, in particular, doesn’t hold up, he says: “Trump’s coalition in 2016 had higher incomes, on average, than the typical American.”

But other experts’ research generally supports Hochschild’s thesis. “People look down on us, and now is our time to win,” says Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and medicine at Vanderbilt University, summarizing what he has found is the attitude of some Trump voters. Given that the pandemic has disproportionately killed people of color, some white Trump supporters may write it off as a “them problem, not an us problem,” he says.

Trump’s supposed heroism and sacrifice aren’t typically the reasons his supporters offer when asked about his pandemic performance. Other explanations—the freedom to not wear a mask, the corporate tax rate, disdain for the leftward shift in the Democratic party—are more easily quotable.

But the central wound remains: “Ban men” is a socially acceptable thing to say. And men who attend Trump’s rallies sometimes tell journalists that they’re willing to risk their lives to show up for Trump. “If I die, I die. We got to get this country moving,” these men tell reporters. Or: “If I catch COVID, that’s the consequences of my actions, so I’m willing to take that risk and have a good time today.” They’re bravely confronting COVID-19, just like the president.

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CULTURE

Donald Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Total Camp

As the president shimmies to The Village People, he crystallizes the way that even sincerity and irony have become politically polarized.

If Donald Trump loses this election, maybe he’ll join The Village People. The 1970s band famous for leather chaps and questionable headdresses has become a wacky touchstone of this dour campaign season, and it’s thanks to the president. At his rallies, crowds have been warming up to “Macho Man,” The Village People’s 1976 single about having pride in a “big, thick mustache.” Trump himself, at the end of his speeches, has been dancing to “YMCA” with hand gestures that make it look like he’s mushing in an underwater Iditarod. The emergence of Disco Donald has led to a pro-Trump “MAGA” song, a Trump-mocking TikTok meme, and a clip of Anderson Cooper trying not to cackle as a crowd of Republicans grooves to music that grew out of San Francisco bathhouses and New York drag clubs.

As if it needs to be said: The Village People are, canonically, very queer. Around 1977, the openly gay producers Jacques Morali and Henri Belolo canvassed bars for singer-actors and placed ads that read, “Macho Types Wanted: Must Dance and Have a Moustache.” The crew they hired costumed themselves as sexualized, masculine archetypes: the sailor, the fireman, the biker, the Native American chief, the construction worker, the cop. They sang songs that celebrated the guy-on-guy camaraderie of gyms, military regiments, and Fire Island. The band’s pert rhythms and hammy slogans soon boomed in sports arenas and grocery-store aisles—but only after they first found an audience in gay venues.

The Trump administration has banned transgender people from the military, opposed attempts to stop sexuality-based employment discrimination, and denied visas to same-sex partners of diplomats. So it is haunting to see this particular president pick this particular band, and all it stands for, to amp his crowds. But there’s something oddly predictable about it, too. That’s not only because the Trump campaign has made awkward overtures to the queer community (Tiffany Trump’s flailing Pride speech, to give one example). It’s not only because Trump made similar use of Queen’s music in 2016. (Back then, a music-history professor told me that winkingly gay jock jams excel at summoning the “carnivalesque.”) It’s also because the Trump era has helped re-scramble American culture’s relationship to the aesthetic tradition known as “camp.”

The sight of Trump shoulder-swiveling to “YMCA” while entombed in his typical boxy suit sent me searching for Susan Sontag’s definitive 1964 treatise, “Notes on ‘Camp.’” The essay—really a bulleted list—tried to describe a “sensibility” that Sontag said united the writer Oscar Wilde, the ballet Swan Lake, and all “stag movies seen without lust.” Camp is very hard to nail down—it’s a know it when you see it sort of thing that’s more related to the viewer’s reaction than to any object’s intrinsic nature. But, Sontag ventured, camp’s attributes include the “spirit of extravagance,” “glorification of ‘character,’” and “sensibility of failed seriousness.” It leads people to say, “It’s good because it’s awful,” though not all good-because-they’re-awful things count. Crucially, if someone sets out to trigger a camp response, Sontag said, they were not actually camp. They were merely camping. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional,” Sontag wrote. “They are dead serious.” This distinction means that many things thought of as camp are really pretending to be camp—giving rise to a cheeky, mischievous aesthetic that is everywhere today.

Camp has often been associated with queerness, and Sontag made the case that this was because gay people sought to ingratiate themselves with a society that saw them as dangerous. (“Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.”) Reflecting on the way the über-campsters of The Village People have roused NFL fans and prom-goers over the years, you can see what she meant. But Sontag didn’t discuss the fact that campiness can be usefully ambiguous to people trying to disguise their true feelings and nature, as queer folks often have needed to do. Superficial spectacles that trigger the question “Is this serious?” can entertain broadly but signify different things to different viewers. And by lavishing attention on puzzling and preposterous objects, a community can develop a set of references that amount to in-group code.

Ever since (and even before) he introduced his presidential campaign with a gilded escalator ride in 2015, Trump has been widely acknowledged as camp. It’s obvious that he’s ridiculous; it’s not always obvious whether he knows he’s ridiculous. Swaths of the electorate look at him and see failed seriousness, pointless extravagance, and an elevation of style over substance—and can’t help but laugh. This includes not only his detractors but also many of his extremely online supporters, who lovingly aestheticize his hair and meme him as an action hero. By this point, Trump—or at least his advisers—know to play this up, and in doing so have turned camp into a trolling tool. Dancing to The Village People works as a pep-rally maneuver, hyping the faithful. It also works at generating fascination, distraction, and maybe even some fleeting affection from a broader audience.

Camp suits Trump’s larger rhetorical style, which uses jokes and doublespeak to advance an agenda that many Americans find objectionable when stated in plain language. Does he condemn white supremacy, or does he want racist militias to “stand by”? Does he really want to lock up Joe Biden, or is he just idly musing about doing so from the stump? Insist on clear answers to these questions, and his defenders might call you a scold. “The conservative brand of ambiguous irony looks to create asymmetries in how insiders and outsiders interpret what is being said, so that any statement that gets too much blowback can become someone else’s failure to take a joke,” wrote Dan Brooks in a recent New York Times Magazine piece, which further argued:

Brooks also notes how Trumpland’s aesthetic arose at a time when the cultural left acts more earnest than ever. His examples include TV series like The Daily Show, on which sarcasm, silliness, and nuance have been supplanted by righteous, overt skewering of the administration. Similar realignments have happened in other arenas too. Camp does still thrive across modern society—including in memes, rap songs, everything Ina Garten does. Yet it’s glaring that as the right wing gorges on camp and campiness, much of the queer-friendly popular culture of the late 2010s has taken a more sober approach. Even The Village People themselves seem to have taken note.

Wearing his signature cop helmet and white cravat in a recent video, Victor Willis, the last living founder of The Village People, explains that he asked the president’s campaign not to use his music. But Trump did so anyway, and Willis hasn’t taken any legal action, because it would be expensive and he’s likely to lose in court.

The video, however, is more devoted to clearing up misconceptions about his band’s music. “Macho Man” and “YMCA,” Willis says, aren’t about gay life, despite what many people think. Willis is straight, and he simply wrote these two songs as an expression of his own “street attitude” and his affection for the community center that took in young Black men like him. This assertion doesn’t fully square with the opinions of other Village People members. But by implying a mismatch between the creators’ intention and the public’s perception, it definitely heightens the camp appeal of The Village People. It also fits the way that a lot of entertainment once widely considered winking and frivolous has—whether explicitly responding to Trump or not—lately tried to project a deeper sense of purpose.

You can find a telling example of this shift if you go to the Spotify page for The Village People. The newest release you see there is by a buzzy 28-year-old gender-fluid musician named Dorian Electra. Electra recruited The Village People to sing on the title track for their second album, My Agenda, which came out this month. The song does not sound at all like “YMCA.” It pairs grunting guitars and hip-hop drums like Limp Bizkit did. Electra sings in a digitally manipulated warble with slight Vincent Price affectations. The concept of the song is that it airs the fever dream of a homophobe who fears the so-called gay agenda. “My agenda might offend ya / Out here flexing in my rainbow suspenders,” goes part of the chorus, which The Village People sing. At one point, Electra malevolently repeats Alex Jones’s conspiracy theory that government chemicals are turning frogs “into homo-sex-oo-alls.”

By enlisting The Village People for this one song, Electra highlights some commonalities between eras of queer pop. Electra’s new album is about macho, macho men—but it’s the macho, macho men of the politically regressive internet: alt-right video gamers spamming chat rooms with Pepe the Frog memes, incels in fedoras fantasizing about perfectly docile girlfriends. Like The Village People did, Electra lavishes attention on the aesthetic excesses and self-seriousness of expressions of masculinity in their era. But the difference—or one difference—is that Electra’s music is brutal satire. Sontag wrote of the camp eye as pleasure-minded and “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical.” Electra is disgusted, knowing, and super engaged. They are an outright protest artist with a message to deliver.

In this way, Electra is right on trend. In the 2010s, popular queer culture spent a lot of energy rendering as text what once had been subtext. The juggernaut phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race has thoroughly demystified the art of drag, turning a set of inside jokes and inscrutable surfaces into fodder for broad morality plays. Contestants are encouraged to use costumes to express their authentic selves; the viewer is lectured about the problems of heteronormativity. Similarly, the ballroom vogue scene—in which queer people of color study the straight world’s affectations to create brilliant, deadpan dances—has had all of its implications dissected and narrativized in TV shows and documentaries. There’s camp in FX’s Pose, for instance, but the aesthetic mostly serves as set decoration for televised fables about identity and oppression.

Pose is the work of Ryan Murphy, the famous Glee creator who, with a reportedly $300 million development deal with Netflix, now seems to churn out a new TV series or movie at a monthly pace. Though the subject matter of American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, Hollywood, Ratched, The Boys in the Band, and other Murphy works varies widely, each one mashes up old camp touchstones for didactic ends. Sometimes the results are so ponderous that one might argue they amount to their own camp. But the primary pleasure of his shows aren’t that you laugh at them, and Murphy himself rejects the term camp and prefers the term baroque: an apt label for the way he gilds piety with melodrama, comedy, and spectacle.

Each of the examples I’ve listed includes moments of deliciously campy entertainment; each of them builds productively on the struggles of queer people in past decades to simply exist in public without apology; each of them often succeeds as social commentary. The fact that “camp” was the theme for the 2019 Met Gala speaks to the extent to which once-snobbish disdain for excess and play has all but vanished. But if camp’s mission was to “dethrone the serious,” as Sontag wrote, the opposite is happening with much of popular culture. Meanwhile, the occupant of the Oval Office routinely trivializes the consequential—and amid the dire conditions of 2020, it’s clear why.

Trump has been campy for the entirety of his public life, but his reelection campaign feels like an aesthetic culmination. He is an incumbent posing as an insurgent, and with coronavirus deaths continuing to mount and his poll numbers looking grim, his sense of embattlement is palpable. One result of that comes in the form of bitter confrontations with the press and dark warnings about the election’s integrity. But his embattlement also colors the regular work of electioneering, which always involves upbeat rallies and hopeful promises. It is here that Trump’s campaign takes on the delusional cheer of a drag queen. See: the “YMCA” dances, the parades of boats festooned like Pride floats, the strangely punctuated promises to colonize the moon, the comedy roasts of face-mask wearers, and the boudoir-style video of Trump returning from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after being treated for COVID-19.

The Biden-Harris campaign, by contrast, has scrubbed itself of all but the mildest silliness: Biden’s exasperated mantra, “Malarkey”; Kamala Harris’s displays of joy; Cher’s surprisingly sweet update of Judy Garland’s “Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe.” The campaign’s ad aesthetic is folksy, stoic, and vanilla-scented; the 2020 Democrats’ slogan might as well be “Keep calm and vote.” Just listen to the official Biden-Harris song, “The Change,” which the pop singer JoJo and the writer Diane Warren created for the campaign. Over echoey, building piano, JoJo simply vows repeatedly to do something and be “the light.” The song is solemn, but its music and sentiment aren’t even intense enough to inspire obsession or revulsion. The feral commitment of a Trump rally—or the messianic bombast of the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns—has clearly been judged too risky.

The Biden sensibility, wanly sincere and hard to mock, speaks to how difficult it is to communicate honestly and broadly right now. When a plague is raging, democracy is under threat, and disinformation chokes out truth, one way to react is with misdirection, jokes, and hollow hauteur: the Trump path. Another might be in the high-handed satires and sermons of a Ryan Murphy product. Yet another is the careful triangulation of Biden’s crew. What would happen if someone engaged our era’s challenges without the armor of humor, indignation, or circumspection? Again, The Village People offer an example.

In March, the band released a new music video entitled “If You Believe.” It was meant to comfort a world panicked by the pandemic. The visuals were a pastiche of home-computer word art (“event canceled” says one slide), stock videos (doctors smiling, businesspeople fist-pumping), and archival news footage (Martin Luther King Jr. giving a speech, an astronaut walking on the moon, and, for some reason, the Twin Towers burning). As I watched, I put my hands over my mouth and tried to stifle every honest reaction I felt. It seemed heartless to think of this deeply felt attempt at processing catastrophe as camp. But then I remembered: “Camp,” Sontag wrote, “is a tender feeling.” That remains true even if, lately, it has been hijacked for callous ends.

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IDEAS

Melania’s Plastic Camelot

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s tell-all book about the first lady is as sordid as it is fascinating.

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is one of those patriotic Americans who went to work in the Trump White House, only to come soaring back over the gates, rejected by the host organism. Like many before her, she decided to write a book about her experiences, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady, and she proffers it to us as an act of public service, although possibly also as a comprehensive case for the defense if this whole acid trip ends up at The Hague. She is another member of Plastic Camelot, the ever-changing group of personal friends, celebrities, and weirdos whom the Trumps bring close to them and then, in the manner of bored kings, dispatch to the tombs. Maybe they’re no more disturbing a collection of advisers and jesters than the men and women on whom other presidents have depended. Who’s to say that Omarosa is so much worse than Henry Kissinger? She certainly has a better record on human rights.

Collectively, Plastic Camelot represents a pillar of the Trump family’s success: their awareness that a substantial percentage of Americans who can’t handle anything more challenging than Supermarket Sweep can be manipulated into holding the fate of the world in their hands.

Wolkoff managed to upsell her 15-year friendship with the first lady into a job helping produce the inauguration and then into a briefly held and unpaid position as her special adviser, and now into a book, which is as sordid as it is fascinating. It’s sordid in part because Melania doesn’t seem to have done anything cruel to Wolkoff; her problems were entirely of her own making. Still, at last we have a glimpse into the feelings and nature of our first lady, who has stalked through these past four years in high heels and a perfect blowout, her gaze pitiless as the sun.

[Sonja Drimmer: Melania Trump plays the role of medieval queen]

Ever since the dawn of the television age, the woman in the role of first lady has softened our understanding of the president, presenting him as a family man as well as a politician, and creating her own unassailably good and noncontroversial initiatives, things that call her to travel around the country, spreading goodwill and serving as kind of PR woman for the administration. George W. Bush bombed Iraq, but Laura Bush was a reader, and she seemed nice. You get to know the first lady in a hundred ways: wearing couture in Vogue and blue jeans in People; sitting on the couch of a morning show or next to the host of a late-night talk show, who treats her gently and laughs as she gamely makes a few scripted jokes. But here we are, possibly at the end of this administration, and Melania is as mysterious now as she was the day her husband bounded up the White House stairs to shake hands with the Obamas, leaving her to get out of the limo and trail behind him with her unwanted gift, the Tiffany-blue box matching the color of her outfit and nobody very glad to see her.

“I was there at the beginning,” Wolkoff tells us, as though she had witnessed the separation of the Earth from the firmament, not bumped into a model in the Vogue offices. The two women—both 32—were there because Melania Knauss had a meeting about a modeling job and Stephanie Winston worked in the events department. The friendship took off like gangbusters. They were Ethel and Lucy, Wolkoff says, Snookie and JWoww. “Philosophically speaking,” she writes, taking the matter more seriously, “Melania seemed to follow Plato, the Greek philosopher who believed in the control and mastery of emotion.” For her part, Wolkoff preferred “the philosophy of Plato’s best student, Aristotle.” Perfectly fine, but which one of them was JWoww? Wolkoff attended the Trumps’ wedding and Melania’s baby shower, and the two embarked upon what Wolkoff describes as a “lunch based” friendship, meeting regularly at one formal restaurant or another, Wolkoff the rushed working mother with too much on her mind, Melania the unhurried woman of leisure, immaculately dressed and groomed to “glam room” perfection—sometimes not even carrying a purse, bringing only her green American Express card.

Wolkoff goes to some lengths to suggest that she was a vaguely apolitical person when Trump entered politics, that she’d never even voted for president until 2016. But she also lets slip that she has known Michael Cohen “for years,” that Steve Mnuchin is a “family friend,” and that Mnuchin’s second wife, Heather, is one of her best friends. At Mnuchin’s third wedding, in Palm Beach, Wolkoff and her husband sat at a table with the Trumps. So she emanates from Trump’s world.

She describes Melania as sure of herself, unflappable, exceedingly strong, and deeply private. Despite JWoww, Lucy, and Plato, she can’t quite decide what kind of friend Melania was to her. At times she seems a good but somewhat distant friend, always remembering Wolkoff’s birthday with an arrangement of white flowers and always eager to listen to Wolkoff’s stories of work and family, but rarely offering any such stories in return. At other times, she describes a deep and singular friendship: “To the many, Melania is glacial and impenetrable,” she writes, “but to the few she was warm and sweet and I was her girl.”

Melania seems to have been content with her self-indulgent life of riches. She mostly stopped modeling once Barron was born, and after a couple of attempts at selling her own products—a skin-care line that was somehow infused with caviar, and a QVC line of fancy-looking costume jewelry for the peasants—she settled into a life of pleasure. She remains devoted to her son and to her parents, who live with her part-time in the White House. Wolkoff doesn’t present Melania as vapid, exactly. She’s too strong and too sure of herself for that. But she seems to have lacked professional or intellectual ambitions of any kind.

Her marriage to the grand buffoon has been the topic of endless speculation. In one sense it’s no puzzle: a model and a rich guy, fused together in a “cheaper to keep her” relationship. But ever since the beginning of the last campaign, we’ve been attuned to the atrocious way he treats her: apparently sleeping with other women soon after Melania had delivered their only child; bragging about his ongoing and abusive womanizing; allegedly paying off women to keep quiet about his dealings with them. (Trump denies the affairs and says he had no knowledge of the payments.) But while Wolkoff characterizes the marriage as an arrangement (whose isn’t?), she also presents Melania and Trump as having something I wouldn’t have guessed: affection, and perhaps also respect—two great dealmakers, tipping their hats to each other. When they’re out to dinner, Trump, the great narcissist, wants everyone to listen to him, but in particular he wants his wife to admire him. He will seek her attention if she seems not to be listening: “Hey, baby, did you hear that? Hey, baby, am I right?” He comes home at the end of a long day and is happy to see her.

Most telling, perhaps, is the advice Melania gives Wolkoff when she says she’s going to confront her husband about all the golf he plays on the weekends. Melania counsels her not to do it: He will golf anyway, and she will only introduce tension into the marriage. It seems that Melania does whatever she wants, Donald does the same, and on the occasions when the planets align and they’re in the same place, Melania makes sure that he is happy to see her. Although a wife, there is clearly something of the mistress in her: She never nags or wheedles, only soothes and welcomes.

One thing Melania did not want to do was go out on the campaign trail in 2016. She had other, more relaxing and enjoyable things to do with her time. “In Palm Beach. Wish to stay here. So gorgeous!” she would text Wolkoff, and “In the Caribbean—so gorgeous! Just want to stay here.” She made so few appearances during the campaign that many people assumed she had no plans to go to the White House, or possibly to stay in the marriage, if Trump won. But when she was needed, when there was a crucial job that no one else could do, Melania turned out to be a clutch player. The Access Hollywood tape came out just a few weeks before the election, and as with all sex-related scandals that emerge in the life of a politician, the country wanted to know: What does the wife think? How is she holding up? Is she humiliated? Is she staying? Anderson Cooper scored the big interview, and we imagined the familiar and ratings-goosing event: the downcast, middle-aged wife grimly forgiving her husband, talking about how all marriages have their painful moments and how the work ahead is what matters most to her. But this was nothing like that.

Melania was more like the triumphant girlfriend, not the heartsick old bag. She was serene, beautiful, and unflappable. She was unshakable from her talking points: The tape was unacceptable and Trump had apologized for it, but it was no big deal. It was just boys’ talk. “He was 59,” Cooper interjected—and she laughed prettily. “Sometimes I said, ‘I have two boys at home,’” she replied. “‘I have my young son and I have my husband.’” The real problem was the dishonest left-wing press that was organized against her husband. No matter what Cooper asked her, her hands remained calmly folded in her lap, and she had an answer for him: her husband was good and kind; her husband was a gentleman; it was the liberal left-wing media that were dishonest. Melania, it turned out, had the heart of an assassin and sound political instincts.

[Read: Donald Trump brags about groping women]

Wolkoff affirms what so many others have told us: that many in Trump World had no expectation of victory. On Election Night, they were as shocked and unprepared for the possibility of a President Trump as the rest of the country. They had no concrete plans for the inauguration, and a few days after the election, Melania asked Wolkoff to work on it. Flattered and excited, she agreed. The team she joined was disorganized, largely inexperienced in the ways of Washington, and lacking clear leadership. And it had a great big pile of money sitting there, at its disposal.

Wolkoff describes working the inauguration as the 13th labor of Hercules, but how hard could it have been? Even Meat Loaf was a hard pass, and booking Jackie Evancho to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” can’t have been heavy lifting. Page after page of the book is devoted to a frantic, granular accounting of the event, right down to the fact that she, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, footed the bill for the minibar M&Ms she offered to potential staffers when she interviewed them in her room at the Trump Hotel. She seems desperate to convince the reader of something with all of these carefully documented expenses. But what?

Would Melania even attend the inauguration? She did indeed, in an eye-catching Jackie K outfit designed by Ralph Lauren and high heels, seeming at times to be miserable. When she announced that she would remain in New York until Barron finished the school year, many people assumed she was never coming to D.C., but she really was planning to move into the White House—she was merely doing exactly what she wanted to do, and Trump didn’t interfere. She was not especially interested in assembling a staff, or in spending much time designing any initiatives, but Wolkoff was always on her, wanting to plan some grand platform of “social and emotional” learning. She’d determined that Melania could use her position to make profound differences in the world: for refugees, for children, for everyone. With her help (of course), she seemed to imagine that Melania could be like Michelle Obama.

Melania? Melania, who loves to luxuriate in her glam room, whose big activity is lunch and climbing into the back seat of an SUV and motoring smoothly away to pick up her child? Melania didn’t even go to any of Wolkoff’s food-allergy benefits! Or even RSVP to the invitations! Which stung, let me tell you, it stung. And it should have been a lesson that Melania had no intention of using the position as a matchless force for good.

[Alex Wagner: Melania Trump derangement syndrome]

Wolkoff is forever texting Melania about what needs to be done, one time receiving the message that she is in the residence, happily working on her albums, which just fries Wolkoff. The woman was scrapbooking when there were experts in social-emotional learning to be interviewed! She spends time trying to figure out the perfect restaurant for the first couple to have a Valentine’s Day dinner, but Melania tells Wolkoff that they don’t celebrate that particular holiday. Can you imagine anything more hilarious than Donald and Melania Trump gazing at each other over a slice of Valentine’s Day tiramisu? Meanwhile, the rest of the East Wing staff is driven to distraction by Wolkoff’s constant demands and imperious ways. They start treating her coldly and leaving her out of meetings. Wolkoff is furious when Melania doesn’t take special care of her. When Melania doesn’t arrange to have her stand at the very front of the group during a guided tour of the Holocaust Museum, she’s beside herself.

But the real villain in the story Wolkoff tells isn’t Melania at all; it’s Maggie Haberman, whom Wolkoff comes to hate with the fire of Vulcan. The book should really have been called Maggie and Me. Haberman and Kenneth P. Vogel publish a shocking story in The New York Times, “Trump Inaugural Committee Paid $26 Million to Firm of First Lady’s Adviser.” Wolkoff seethes with outrage and fear. She texts Melania, “URGENT! READ THIS!” She wants to sue the Times for defamation; she can’t leave the house; she composes a letter revealing that her time with Donald Trump was not for naught—she has learned the power of all caps:

Why would she imagine that a statement from Melania could repair anyone’s reputation? And what was at hand was an issue not of her reputation, but of proving that she hadn’t pocketed the $26 million. Melania gives her the sound advice to publish her receipts and papers and thus exonerate herself, but Wolkoff won’t do it.

After the inauguration financing comes under suspicion, Wolkoff leaves the White House and goes back to New York. She would later insist that she had been scapegoated by the administration and that the media coverage was “completely unfair.” Desperate for solace, she complains to Michael Cohen—breast of human kindness—who visits her apartment offering succor and calls her up several months later: “Hello, Steph,” he says. “The FBI and SDNY have the recording I made of our conversation.” He’d been secretly taping her during his mission of mercy. All of these people deserve one another.

Back at the East Wing, Melania soldiers on with her own dingbat set of initiatives (fighting cyberbullying? Was she punking us?), and making regular visits to pediatric hospitals and schools, which she seems genuinely to enjoy. With her fancy clothes and gentle way, she must seem like a fairy princess to the children, and they are drawn to her. They sit around her quietly as she reads them a Dr. Seuss book, haltingly and with a touching sense of triumph each time she gets to the end of a page. For those few minutes of the visit, and maybe for many years afterward, they must love her.

Her hatred for the press tops her husband’s, so much so that she wears the famous jacket—“I Really Don’t Care, Do U? ”—to visit children at the border, which causes the press, understandably, to lose its collective mind. But reporters probably wouldn’t have treated her any better if she’d worn a sackcloth and ashes. Unlike the sick children, they hate her.

Around this time, Wolkoff leads Melania into at least one long, sympathetic phone call and secretly records it. She seems to think that this recording is as consequential as the Nixon tapes, but the private conversations of Melania Trump and Stephanie Winston are not the Algonquin Roundtable. The longest of the excerpts Wolkoff has made public involves Melania bitching about the press—in exactly the same terms as Hillary Clinton is said to have used in private. The book has engendered the inevitable lawsuit, with the Justice Department suing Wolkoff for violating her nondisclosure agreement and breaching her fiduciary duty as an adviser to the first lady; Wolkoff has issued a statement averring that the suit is an attempt to silence her and is a violation of her “First Amendment rights.”

But Wolkoff has done the one thing that Melania would never, ever do. She has dropped her robe and stood naked in the footlights, and so she is rapidly becoming a bore. Unless she releases some shocking new conversation excerpt, she will plummet into oblivion, less than a footnote.

Melania, too, may be nearing the end of her term of national interest, as this acid trip must go the way of all acid trips, with a hard landing and a desperate need for a glass of water. She has left the lightest of imprints on the nation, and history will judge her by her willingness to stay by Donald Trump’s side as he rampaged through the country.

She really doesn’t care about any of that. She cares, principally, about herself. When Wolkoff explains that she will have to wear the clothes of an American designer to the inauguration, Melania is horrified. Her soul wounded, she cries out to the gods: “But I want to wear Lagerfeld!”

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LOL....checkmate? Indeed.

Tucker Carlson Claims He's Going To Leave 'Fallen Man' Hunter Biden Alone Now

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has speculated for the last month about alleged corruption surrounding the overseas business dealings of Hunter Biden, insisted on Thursday evening that he didn’t want to be involved in “pounding on a man, jumping on and piling on when he’s already down.”

This change in Carlson’s rhetoric comes after the conservative pundit claimed on Wednesday that Fox News had acquired a number of “damning” documents about Joe Biden’s son from a source, only to have the material allegedly disappear when it was shipped cross-country.

UPS announced one day later that the flash drive containing the documents had come out of its packaging, was located by a staffer and eventually turned over to a superior, who arranged for it to be sent to Fox. Carlson was full of questions regarding this explanation and continued to hint at a conspiracy.

He contended that “someone, for some reason, opened our package and removed a flash drive containing documents that were damaging to the Biden family.”

“We’d love to know who would do that and why,” said Carlson. “It would be helpful to see the envelope itself. But UPS says we can’t see it because they threw it away. So here we are. We got our flash drive back, and that’s great. What we’d really like are some answers.”

Following this statement, the Fox host switched gears and began talking about the substance of the documents themselves, saying that the network was still “assessing” them but that much of the material would not be revealed.

“There are a lot of documents about Hunter Biden’s personal life that we haven’t brought you and that we’re not going to bring you, and we should tell you why,” Carlson said. “One is the obvious answer: He’s not running for president.

https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/tucker-carlson-hunter-biden-leave-him-alo...

Even Fox doesn’t give a shit... bry is an army of one

Crazy! 

They investigated John Lennon too....

Joe Biden is a bigger man than Trump for not attacking candidates children.

Wish I could have seen some of those shows, but was busy playing 140 gigs a year back then

The cool thing about Jerry Garcia is that he would have never supported  Donald Trump for president 

Fox's lawyers: The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.” Fox persuasively argues, “that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."

Rest comfortably knowing that I’m as adept (or likely more so) at surfing the internet for information that supports all sides of an argument. Also rest comfortably knowing that This registered republican would never feel compelled to open a link of yours if my life depended on it

humor me and fuck off, thanks

As long as you fuck off in the process, I’m ok with whatever you wish to believe.

As if “being informed” began and ended with you. Lulz 

>>> 

Fox's lawyers: The "'general tenor' of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary.” Fox persuasively argues, “that given Mr. Carlson's reputation, any reasonable viewer 'arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism' about the statement he makes."

Rest comfortably knowing that I’m as adept (or likely more so) at surfing the internet for information that supports all sides of an argument. Also rest comfortably knowing that This registered republican would never feel compelled to open a link of yours if my life depended on it

humor me and fuck off, thanks

Fish

best post of the day

as an independent, I could not agree more

If trump wins it won’t make him or you any less of an asshole, so there’s always that. It only changes the date the entire planet gets to look at you and say “told ya so.” You heard it here first 

"Bryen" must be pretty bummed Weir will be on Ari Melber's show on MSNBC Monday, talking about getting out the vote.

Fake news, right?

Wasn't Bobby a founding member of Head Count?  They've registered millions to vote, just so Bryen and his cronies can try and block them from fulfilling their constitutional rights...   especially African Americans!  Kinda goes back to cult boys inability to denounce racism...

It's pretty easy to see how anybody who so comfortably denounces the majority of us Dead heads on this site, by being pompous, arrogant, and condescending, could so easily put his knee on a black mans neck....   

>>>>>What would you suggest our foreign policy be at that point, you know...with a common thief in the Oval Office? 

Yes, this has been the problem for the last four years.

poor bryen  - perhaps deep deep down, he is a decent human being,,,,

So Tucker says that all of the NBC reporters are going to be hired for government jobs if Biden becomes President?

 >>>>>Trump wins...make plans accordingly, you literally "heard it here first",

We certainly didn't hear it here from you first. We've been hearing from the psycho's sycophants for four years now. 

Makes plans accordingly - meaning we should arm up to defend against the fascist Trumpian militias?

Thanks for the warning, but are you prepared for your favorite authoritarian to lose? What then, grasshopper?

I recommend starving this troll. Crickets and tumbleweeds until he gets tired of posting to himself and goes away.

Granted it's fun to mock him.  

Don't think he'll ever get tired of posting to himself.

I bet he votes for Biden 

Anyone ever wonder about his posting style? Makes me think it's a bot of some kind. Lots of empty black, with a link inserted here and there. Really strange. And obviously not based in reality. 

He’s a bot alright...

i spot checked a couple of his links in the early days. Enough to know he is as full of shit as much as he is full of himself. Informed...loll