Just Saying Who's Trumping der Fuhrer?

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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Is The Donald really Andy Kaufman in disguise? Whether he is or not, Trump's Cliftonesque antics have gained him some serious mileage, and all the while he has sliced up the electorate in previously unimaginable ways. Not only has he doubled down on his statements many times, but he has also flipped back on his base several times. The latest with having Don King tell minorities and white women that the white man has rigged the system against them.

The following is an excerpt from a longer article that goes into more detail about Andy Kaufman's 'death' and pranksterism.

For disciples of Kaufman’s Clifton character, the Republican nominee’s mannerisms are familiar. “When Trump walked onstage at the GOP convention, he looked like Tony Clifton to me,” says Kaufman’s brother, who has also played the Clifton character. “There was something about his walk and his stature, demeanor. Before he ever said a word, just walking to the stand to speak, I said, 'Wow. Tony Clifton.'… It’s the personality that the wrestler has and Tony Clifton has—Trump reminds people of that, I think.”

Fans have spotted other parallels between Clifton and Trump. “Their attitudes towards women are probably along the same lines,” says Vance, the science writer. Plus, there’s the swagger, the aggravated New Yorky accent.

“He’s got the pucker—the lips,” Vance adds. “He puckers up. I can’t believe someone hasn’t gotten rid of that with Donald. He’s got that pucker that’s exactly like Tony Clifton. Tony Clifton’s got terrible hair. But I think Donald’s got him beat on that. Just the brashness and the doubling down. If you ever watch Kaufman being Clifton, he doubles down. He’ll say something and then anger people [and] he’ll just double down. It’s really funny when he’s onstage.” Vance considers the present situation. “I guess it’s less funny now.”

Kaufman’s old friend Parinello is now an impassioned Trump supporter. Though he insists Kaufman had several un-Trumpian qualities (“There wasn't a moment in Andy's life when he cared about money—it just was totally irrelevant to him”), he sees lots of commonality. “Andy Kaufman and Donald Trump are two of the boldest human beings to ever exist on this world,” he insists. “That is no Hillary Clinton.” Of course, Clinton’s pitch to voters is rooted in her competence and stability—not exactly Kaufman-like qualities. She could probably run on the slogan “I Am Definitely Not Andy Kaufman” and soundly win.

Others compare Trump to Kaufman’s embattled wrestler character, who would challenge women onstage and offer them $1,000 to beat him. "On the campaign trail, Donald has been playing a very specific role from professional wrestling called the heel," observes Bob Arctor, a Kaufman fan who never met the man. The heel is basically the villain. "And Andy loved being the heel. He loved feeding off all that violent, hateful energy.… I sincerely believe he would have adored Trump’s performance throughout this election cycle."
http://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-andy-kaufman-disguise-election-502292?google_editors_picks=true​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Well, people, including me, were wondering if Donald Tweet was going to bulldoze Hillary in the same manner that he destroyed the Republican field of tin men. Perhaps this first debate is indeed definitively revealing the suspected game plan of the faux nationalist. Look at what the campaign for President has devolved to being distracted by. Having a Clinton involved means this is what is likely to occur, as a Machiavellian's dream Wizard of Oz scenario. Even Gennifer Flowers got back in the light.

... The next day, on Fox and Friends, he eagerly confirmed that he’d criticized Machado for her weight gain, walking farther into Clinton’s trap. Now he’s still going.

Machado is not without her own checkered past. She was accused of being complicit in an attempted murder in Venezuela, though she was never arrested or charged. She did not, it appears, act in any porn, though she did pose topless for Playboy and was filmed doing … something under sheets while on a Big Brother-style reality-TV show. The clip is more embarrassing than explicit.

Yet Trump’s method of broaching that is baffling. There’s the bizarre spectacle of a presidential candidate from the party of the religious right telling anyone who will listen to “check out [a] sex tape.” (Trump has a special attachment to the word “disgusting,” which he uses to describe a breast-feeding attorney and a bathroom break Clinton took during a Democratic debate.)

In a campaign of unprecedented moments, this is yet another. Machado’s sex life has nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is Trump’s comments about her weight and ethnicity, but by continuing to talk about her, he offers fresh reminders about what he said about her.

It also exposes some hypocrisy: Who is Trump to criticize anyone for salaciousness? This is the man who once said, “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and who has bragged about his sexual exploits (perhaps literally) ad nauseam. Trump is only reminding everyone of his double-standard on sex for men and women, which is plays into Clinton’s hands.

To see the sort of chaos Trump’s dark-of-the-night, spur-of-the-moment messaging causes, look no further than Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge’s appearance on MSNBC Friday morning, where she tried to blame Clinton for Trump’s tweets.

“It’s unfortunate that this issue was raised by Secretary Clinton during Monday night’s debate,” the Republican and Trump surrogate said. “She’s the one that jumped off in the ditch bringing back comments from the ’90s.” The defense makes no sense: Clinton didn’t make Trump tweet; even though she brought the issue up, he’s under no obligation to keep making it the story of the day; and this all comes as the Trump campaign distributes talking points encouraging surrogates to bring up comments from the ’90s.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/09/trump-tweets-alicia-machado/502415/​

Somebody should start a parody site of Twitter where one instead 'blows trumps'. A fun and interesting homage to the Roman Piso Theory as well, where people bend over and toot their horn in tribute to the emperor.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Maureen Dowd takes it to Trump once again. And to Hillary as well. I may be wrong, but she seems to be the most notable exception to mainstream commentators in her dishing of both candidates. In the case of Trump here, she is overtly inverting the conventional Old School cultural notion of Female Hysteria that Trump exudes in spades. Further below I have included an excerpt of Maureen ragging on Hillary, albeit that Hillary comes out ahead in the overall treatment, as if Hillary was an evil 'dog whisperer' taunting a whiny bitch - as opposed to calming it down.

LET’S stop being so hard on Donald Trump.

He has done us an enormous public service.

After this down-and-dirty battle of the sexes, we will never look at gender in politics the same way.

For centuries, women were seen as unfit to hold public office. Ambition, power and business were the province of men. Unlike gossipy feminine chatter in the parlor, manly discourse was considered impersonal, unemotional, forthright and reasonable.

Every minute of every day, Trump debunks that old “science” when he shows that the gossipy, backbiting, scolding, mercurial, overly emotional, shrewish, menopausal one in this race is not the woman.

Trump is surrounded by a bitchy sewing circle of overweight men who are overwrought at the prospect of a distaff Clinton presidency.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/opinion/sunday/girl-talk-at-trump-tower.html?_r=0
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BTW, 'distaff' is Old English for 'female'. It apparently stems from the old cultural norm of women literally spinning yarn onto a spindle, the so-called 'distaff'. But it seems to have a humorous additional aspect, in that the opposite term for 'male' was 'spear'. Hence 'distaff' might be taken as one without a 'spear'.

Dowd on Hillary, expediently "standing by her man":

No one worries that Hillary is not tough enough to be president. We know that she can pull the trigger, but does she know where to aim?

A Washington Post story about Hillary’s history of waging aggressive defenses against women who claimed that they slept with her husband painted her as stoic and relentless in trying to destroy the women’s stories.

Her longtime Arkansas friend Jim Blair told the paper her response to “bimbo eruptions,” as they were called, was: “These people are not going to run over us.” This, even though in case after case, Bill Clinton would later admit the women were telling the truth.


As former Clinton consigliere George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir: “She had to do what she had always done before: swallow her doubts, stand by her man and savage his enemies.”

Usually women candidates have the so-called virtue advantage, but Hillary does not because of her reputation for being shifty.
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Dowd finishes strong:

Trump’s team wants to prepare him for the second debate with an actual rehearsal — as opposed to coming up with zingers over cheeseburgers and Cokes. They want to toss him questions that will get under his skin, so that next time he doesn’t let his emotions get the better of him and go all PMS.

After working with psychologists to figure out how to goad Trump into an outburst in the first debate, the commanding Hillary saved the Machado provocation until the end.

Trump unraveled and kept unraveling all week. It culminated with a bout of hysteria and a series of middle-of-the-night tweets, including a supremely catty one at 5:30 a.m. urging people to check out Machado’s sex tape — offering no evidence that one exists — and her past. (Trump wasn’t so offended by sex tapes when he told Howard Stern in 2003 that Melania had shown him Paris Hilton’s sex tape and when he suggested in 2009 that a Miss U.S.A. contestant release her sex tape.)

Do you recall when Trump sent out a blizzard of six tweets in 2012 about the breakup of “Twilight” stars Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson?

One read: “Everyone is asking me to speak more on Robert & Kristen. I don’t have time except to say ‘Robert, drop her, she cheated on you & will again!’”

We should have known then that Trump was really a 13-year-old girl.​

Such as the Dog Whisperer teach us that dogs, at least, inherently respond only to quiet and calm strength in looking towards a leader of either canine or human nature. So what the hell went wrong with humans? I have suggested elsewhere that perhaps we have been victims of a mass form of Stockholm Syndrome for a very long time. In this manner the masses have had their otherwise normal psychological responses inverted through programmatic efforts from cradle through grave. And such as Trump can play a modern day Josephus, leading his nationalist zealots zealously over a cliff, certain that his empty rhetoric (proven by his past) will save them.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Here's an article noting the different standard that Gary Johnson has been held to in contrast to Trump. The ironic subtext of the article is about nuclear power, it's consequences, --- and left unspoken here: that there seems to be a 'clean', safer, and much cheaper nuclear alternative, that of thorium instead of uranium based nuclear power.

...
As the state’s dean of the political scene, Jon Ralston, often tweets about his home, “#WeMatter.” And the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository matters to Nevadans “bigly,” as Trump might say. It’s of particular concern to Nevadans because the repository would be within 100 miles of Las Vegas. It also factors in psychologically: Nevadans think, “After all the state has been through in recent years, lawmakers still imagine it as a toxic dumping ground?” It’s a deeply felt issue. As The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan sums it up, “Yucca Mountain is an issue that every national political candidate has been asked about in Nevada in recent years.”

As a major presidential candidate, you best be prepared to talk about Yucca Mountain. Trump, to an embarrassing degree, wasn’t.

SNYDER: You’re a proponent of more nuclear power plants around the country. We have 100 now. None of them are here in Nevada. Why should we have to store the waste 90 miles from here in a city that draws 40 million tourists a year?

TRUMP: Right. Well, as you know, I’m very friendly with this area. In fact, I have big enterprises here. And especially my building and the hotel ― Trump International. I will tell you ― I’m gonna take a look at it because so many people are talking about it. I came into town and everyone is talking about it. So I will take a very strong look at it and the next time you interview me, we’ll talk about it for five minutes.​
It’s classic Trump. First, he makes it about him ― As you know, I have “enterprises” here. Then he says he’s “gonna take a look” at the issue. No worries, it will be a “strong look.” So strong! Dude is gonna straight up use all his squinting muscles, really get in there, look the hell out of it. And then at some point in the future, the interviewer will get five whole minutes of time on the matter. It will be an honor, no doubt.

It makes you wonder if Snyder hadn’t gone through the trouble of briefly explaining the issue ― it’s about a nuclear waste site, dude ― whether Trump might have simply assumed that Nevadans were sitting on a mountain of cassava roots: “We’re gonna make so many fries out of it, it’ll be huge, we’ll sell them at the Sharper Image, we’re gonna make a lot of money for Nevada.”

Snyder, bless him, made a second attempt to draw out an answer:

SNYDER: But the concern is that if we had it here, that it would hurt the tourism industry, that people would be afraid of it. With your business interests here, do you share that concern?

TRUMP: Yeah, I’ve heard that. I’ve heard that. Well, I do ― I mean, I have a ― I have a very ― number one, you have to worry about safety. And it’s a little bit close to a very major population base so I’m gonna take a very strong look at it and I will come very strongly one way or the other. I will have an opinion.​
Oh, well, that’s good to hear, ace.

It would seem beyond dispute that Trump just doesn’t know anything about the issue ― the only facts he has at his command are the ones he’s inferred from Snyder’s inquiries.
...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry..._57f66bf9e4b0c1a524cbb0ea?section=us_politics
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I've posted a different part of this article to the Johnson thread, here.
 
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R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
This is pretty amazing that the following came out, but I guess the PTB figure that not enough people will catch on -- that Trump is best buddies and soul mates with the Clintons.

Speaking with Wolf Blitzer in November 1999 in video reviewed by CNN's KFile, Trump said Hillary Clinton had been through more public controversy than any women should have to bear.

"I think she's gone through terrible times," Trump told Blitzer in the interview. "I think she's been through more than any woman should have to bear — everything public. I mean, women go through this on a private basis and can't take it, she's on the front page of every newspaper every week with what went on in Washington."

A month before, in an interview with CNBC, Trump expressed a similar sentiment about Hillary Clinton and blasted the independent investigator Ken Starr as "a total wacko."

"I think she's a very, very good person," Trump said of Clinton. "I think she's had a very tough life the last few years. I mean, what could be tougher than that? I mean, can you imagine those evenings when he's just being lambasted by this crazy Ken Starr, who is a total wacko? There's the guy. I mean, he is totally off his rocker. And can you imagine being lambasted like that all day and then saying, 'Darling, what are we having for dinner?' It's gotta be pretty tough."

Trump also repeatedly dismissed and at times mocked Bill Clinton's accusers.

In a 2008 interview with CNN, Trump called the Lewinsky scandal "totally unimportant" and said it was "nonsense" that Republicans tried to impeach him.

In another interview, with CNBC in 1998 and first unearthed by the Washington Post, Trump called Clinton accuser Paula Jones "a loser."

In August 1998, Trump again dismissed Jones, and said Bill Clinton was actually the victim.

"I don't necessarily agree with his victims," Trump said to Fox News' Neil Cavuto in a clip uncovered earlier in the year by the "Daily Beast." "His victims are terrible. He is, he is really a victim himself. But he put himself in that position."

"These people are just, I don't know, where he met them - where he found them," Trump continued. "But the whole group — it's truly an unattractive cast of characters. Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, I mean, this woman, I watch her on television. She is so bad. The whole group, Paula Jones, Lewinsky, it's just a really unattractive group. I'm not just talking about physical."
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/politics/trump-clinton-sex-then-vs-now/​
 
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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
As I mentioned in the Cultural Degradation thread, the Trump (... err Clinton's) wrecking ball is showing the true colors of many Republicans, all the while it's becoming clearer that Trump has a strange brotherly dynamic with Russian leaders, with one demanding that Trump and himself even get a DNA kinship test, while claiming that a vote for Hillary will lead to nuclear war. This sounds strikingly like shades of Hitler's and Stalin's Non-Aggression Pact.

-- It has truly been a surreal cycle to watch. Many Republican elected officials are personally outraged and ashamed by something their party’s nominee says or does. So they distance themselves. But as soon as they face a whiff of blowback from some in the party, they cave and fall back in line. Then they offer up excuses and rationalizations, twisting themselves into pretzels to justify voting for a guy who some will tell you privately is a danger to the Republic. It’s happened over and over again now, and it validates what Trump himself said during the primaries: Many politicians are indeed craven and interested mainly in maintaining power for themselves, principles be damned.

-- And NBC-Wall Street Journal polling suggests that some rank-and-file Republicans who defected after the emergence of the 2005 video are coming back into the fold, too. “Some 83% of Republicans said in post-debate polling that they would vote for Mr. Trump in a head-to-head matchup against Mrs. Clinton, up from 60% in weekend surveys,” Monica Langley writes in the Journal.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ump-after-defecting/57fd7a23e9b69b059243020a/​

Of course, the Clinton Power Duo had their role in making Russia what it is today via their friend Larry Summer's debacle in helping steer Russia's emergence from the Soviet Union.

Trump is causing a similar schism in the American Jewish community, the sticking point apparently being over the Iran nuclear agreement - as relates to Israel's concerns. It seems that so-called Millennial generation Jews are finding it odd that their conservative elders are sticking with Trump. This has apparently given David Duke delight. Of course, back in the day, many entrenched German Jews poo-pooed that Hitler would really take any action against them, that it was all political rhetoric. Then, of course, the Jewish Agency and the Nazis made their so-called Transfer Agreement(s) and such, and we all ended up with Israel.

Welcome to the New Age, ... or at least the decades long process. Same as last time, 2,000 years ago.

On a related note, a walk down my city's main street yesterday, I noticed that the regional Republican office does not have a Trump sign in its window, instead filled with down ballot candidate signs. I don't know if this has been the case all along, or just after the latest scandal.
 
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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
The ironies in the following commentary by an ethics leader of the Southern Baptist Convention are quite profound, especially in light of my present blog page development effort to provide a secular explanation of what the End Times are about. This including why we are currently experiencing such polarization in politics and the wider culture. It's a scripted redux of the Biblical days, that is being reused ... because it worked the first time. And Trump is playing the role of a New Age false messiah, who is trying desperately to fail. Today he and his campaign cabal is even urging mass insurrection by the zealots du jour, because he 'prophetically' already knows that the election is rigged against him.

Irony of irony, it may well be, considering how many too close national elections we've been having lately, with such as all those unauditable computerized voting machines. Thankfully we ironically have our own people to sell us our End Times supplies, which we'll need because of the likes of Trump and his BFF, Crooked Hillary.

...
We know nothing new about Donald Trump. He has told us about his view of women, his view of sexuality, his views of marriage and family for more than 30 years. He has gloried in reality television decadence before reality television was even invented, in his boasts to tabloid reporters. He reaffirmed who he is over and over again, even during this campaign — from misogynistic statements to racist invective to crazed conspiracy theorizing.

And yet here stands the old-guard Religious Right establishment. Some are defending or waving this away, with the same old tropes they’ve used throughout this campaign. Trump’s not a Sunday school teacher, they tell us. Trump’s a new King David or pagan deliverer Cyrus. Trump is either a “baby Christian” or the kind of tough strongman conservative Christians need since the Sermon on the Mount isn’t realistic enough for the 21st century.

...
And, of course, they tell us, he will appoint judges and justices who stand up for unborn human life and religious liberty. After all, he promised us he would. Why Trump would be more faithful to vows to religious political activists than he has been to people named “Mrs. Trump,” they do not tell us.

[The deep disgust for Hillary Clinton that drives so many evangelicals to support Trump]

What’s at stake here is far more than an election. In the 1980s, many evangelicals quietly cringed when they saw the endless stream of hucksters called “television evangelists” on the airwaves around them. These figures cried on cue, sold their protein shakes and end-times emergency food packets, and peddled “anointed” prayer cloths in exchange for donations, all while explaining to us what political point God was making with natural disasters. When one after another fell into open scandal, it wasn’t just their prosperity gospel voodoo that was disgraced before the world, but the reputation of the entire church. And yet the damage done to gospel witness this year will take longer to recover from than those 1980s televangelist scandals.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...thing-he-has-snuffed-out-the-religious-right/​
 
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Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Well it had been speculated that we might see something like the Reichstag Fire before the election to garner a victory for Ill Duce Bag Du Jour, and with this event in North Carolina, it seems like maybe something of a trial balloon for staging more of these as we get closer in. Ironically, as Ill Duce Bag Du Jour carps more and more about the MSM conspiracy against him, the MSM is providing ever more coverage of Crooked Hillary's baggage of dirty laundry. Yes Ill Duce Bag, the elections are rigged, and you're part of the reality show circus.

On Feb. 27, 1933, a deranged young Dutch communist set fire to the German parliament, the Reichstag. The newly elected German chancellor sensed an immediate opportunity to eliminate the last freedoms of the Weimar regime in the name of public safety. “These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side,” Adolf Hitler thundered. “In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses.”

It goes without saying that Donald Trump is no Hitler — there is only one Hitler — and the firebombing of a Trump campaign office in Orange County, N.C., Saturday night was no Reichstag fire. But nevertheless there were some disturbing echoes of 1933 in Trump’s immediate response. He tweeted: “Animals representing Hillary Clinton and Dems in North Carolina just firebombed our office in Orange County because we are winning.”

There is so much wrong with that sentence it’s hard to know where to begin. In the first place Trump is not winning North Carolina — the Realclearpolitics average of polls has him down by 2.9 points. Second, you don’t refer to anyone — even arsonists — as “animals”; however deeply flawed, even criminal, they remain human beings. Third, and most importantly, there is no evidence to suggest that the arsonists were “representing” Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

Even if the attack was the work of local Democrats, it’s impossible to imagine that Clinton or the Democratic Party had anything to do with it. It’s just as likely to be a false-flag operation carried out by Trump’s alt-right supporters to implicate the Democrats. But Clinton rightly did not make any such allegation. All her Twitter feed said was: “The attack on the Orange County HQ ‪@NCGOP office is horrific and unacceptable. Very grateful that everyone is safe.”

Clinton’s reaction was as appropriate as Trump’s was not. Unfortunately this is part of a pattern in the past 10 days: As Trump has been falling behind in the polls, following the release of an audiotape in which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, his rhetoric has become more and more incendiary. He gives every indication of wanting to burn down America’s political house if he cannot be its leader.
...
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-e...unty-nc-firebombing--20161017-snap-story.html​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Just in case the October Surprise Reichstag Fires fail, Ill Duce Bag appears to have a replacement path, helping to compensate for the damage to his globalist branding empire, to personal recovery lined up.

Roger Ailes history of starting the Fox News empire for Murdoch, included doing that as a stated ambition during his employment inside the Nixon White House. Trump also now has Steve Bannon overtly running his campaign, although there is some debate that Trump's son-in-law, Kushner, is really in charge. Kushner, a Jew, has apparently taken some heat from his relatives regarding Trump's insane rhetoric, which is also causing concern in the wider Jewish community and is cutting across that polity in a reverse fashion than usual.

There have been rumblings for months that the media-obsessed former reality star’s endgame is to launch a media company after the election to capitalize on the support he’s received.

That theory gained more traction Monday as the Financial Times reported that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner spoke with a boutique media deal-making firm about the prospect of launching a television network. Kushner, who owns the New York Observer, contacted LionTree founder and chief executive Aryeh Bourkoff within the past couple months, according to the paper.

Trump denied last month that he’s had any talks about starting a media company, whether alongside disgraced former Fox News chairman Roger Ailes, who has recently advised him, or other conservative media figures. Ailes reportedly has a non-compete clause that could prevent him from launching a Fox News competitor.

But a source close to Trump told HuffPost the Republican nominee assumes Ailes would be involved in a post-election media venture, presuming that a compensation package large enough would entice him in.

“Trump is saying, ‘I’m not going to give up trying to be president, but just in case it doesn’t happen, I want to have a voice for me and my people ... we will not lose the voice we’ve built,’” the source said.

The Republican nominee often refers to “the stunningly large numbers of persons who voted for me in the primary,” according to the source.

Vanity Fair reported in June on Trump’s media plans and noted that Kushner said at a dinner party how “the people here don’t understand what I’m seeing” and that “you go to these arenas and people go crazy for him.” The New York Times added in August that Trump and Kushner had “quietly explored becoming involved with a media holding, either by investing in one or by taking one over.”
...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-tv-venture_us_5804d13fe4b0e8c198a8f3cb​
 
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Sgt Pepper

Sgt Pepper

Active Member
Really I think Trump's role is a distraction for all the corruption on Hillary's side.
Check the video above… probably won't be widely reported. The Hillary camp has many sycophants in the media (and donators) what with the way the DNC and MSM screwed Bernie Sanders.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Sgt Pepper said:
Really I think Trump's role is a distraction for all the corruption on Hillary's side.
Check the video above… probably won't be widely reported. The Hillary camp has many sycophants in the media (and donators) what with the way the DNC and MSM screwed Bernie Sanders.
Click to expand...
Yes, I agree that it seems that Trump's primary role is to grease Hillary's victory via distraction and other means. Besides Hillary though, he has served to destroy the Republican brand of nationalism, for better or worse.

But there is an aspect that, until recently at least, it seems that it appears that the harder he tries to lose the stronger and more tenacious his support is. And the craziness is all so interwound, one might speculate that the real goal is to cause everyone to lose faith in demo-crazy. Hail the Dictator, Hail the Imperium. None of this is organic.
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Well, we get to a subject that gets much more literal as to the topic of this thread. In the following excerpt on the global realpolitik around the Trump phenomenon, we might want to keep in mind the historical relationship of der Fuhrer to Uncle Stalin, and as to how that alliance turned out. Note the global parallels to the conflict between nationalism and globalism that I have been discussing in American parallels to the apocalyptic problem back in biblical times. And also, here, the Book of Revelation mentions a 'bear'.


....
The amusing irony is that leaders of the nationalist-authoritarian right in Europe campaign on a platform of national sovereignty while rubles jingle in their pockets. Marine Le Pen’s National Front requested a 27-million euro loan from Russia, according to the party’s own treasurer. Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader and Brexit engineer, has appeared on RT, the Russian government-subsidized media empire (it spends more on foreign broadcasting than any other entity except the BBC). Farage may be better known to American political junkies for speaking at a Trump rally in Mississippi.

There is a fascinating historical parallel here: Throughout the Cold War, Moscow subsidized the leftist fringe in Western Europe. Now it does the same with right-wing parties there—same tactics, different ideological players.

* * *

One massive difference is this: If Trump’s own words are anything to go by, not to mention the activities of some of his former advisers like Paul Manafort and Carter Page, Moscow may have made inroads in the United States (Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, once mooted to become Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, remains an adviser; he has been a regular contributor to the Russian-funded news channel RT and was a paid guest at an RT gala where he was seated next to Putin—odd behavior for a former Defense Intelligence Agency director with the highest security clearances). Never in its wildest dreams could the old Soviet politburo have imagined it would get a U.S. major party candidate so congenial to its interests. All it had to work with was poor, old Gus Hall, the Communist Party USA’s perennial hapless candidate!

Compared to the Clinton emails or Trump’s Access Hollywood scandal, this has been an underplayed story, given the grave implications of foreign intervention in an American election. While an FBI investigation into improperly managed emails has already significantly influenced the presidential election (with the Bureau’s most recent lead growing from an investigation launched by revelations in a British tabloid article), the Department of Justice has been oddly passive, at least in public, in the face of substantial evidence of political subversion resulting from an adversarial foreign government’s spending resources to affect that same election.

FBI director James Comey has been publicly inert over the astounding spectacle of a presidential candidate encouraging the Russian government to release the content of emails stolen from American servers, with that government subsequently complying. In contrast to Comey’s unprecedented volubility over the Clinton emails (a case in which no one has been charged), the FBI has been unusually dilatory with timely information about potential Russian involvement in the election.

We are now witnessing a curious phenomenon: The resurgent far-right parties in numerous Western countries, which harp incessantly on the sovereignty, independence, and world-historical uniqueness of whichever country they happen to live in, have self-organized into a transnational alt-right “comintern” that appears to be more effective than the leftist comintern of the Soviet era. No doubt this development was inevitable in the age of digital communication, but it has undeniably received a boost from the Kremlin. It also bears emphasis not only that Russia is attempting to influence politics in Western nations, but that this influence comes prepackaged with a specific ideological content. ....
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/10/trump-putin-alt-right-comintern/506015/
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Also, some more background history from the same. Note the involvement of Bill Clinton:

When German reunification was being negotiated in 1990, the soon-to-be-defunct Soviet Union believed it had a deal: In return for reunification and the withdrawal of Soviet troops, the Western parties to the treaty (the United States, the United Kingdom, and France) would agree not to push NATO membership into the former Warsaw Pact territories.

But this would change as the result of a mindless search for issues during the otherwise vacuous 1996 U.S. presidential election campaign. First, Republican nominee Bob Dole proposed early deployment of a missile-defense scheme that would likely have Russia as the potential “threat.” This, in the minds of Dole’s handlers, would surely lock in the Eastern European ethnic vote in big Midwestern cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

Not to be outdone in vote pandering, the incumbent, Bill Clinton, countered with a proposal to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. By 1999, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had joined NATO. Continuing in the tradition of bipartisan foreign-policy overreach, Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, invited additional countries to join the alliance, and by 2004, another seven countries joined, bringing NATO east of what had been the borders of the old Soviet Union.

It is too often forgotten that in late 2001, Bush withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a gratuitous slap at Russia in view of the fact that in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Russia both shared intelligence on Islamic extremist groups with America, and also granted the U.S. military transit rights over Russian territory for deployment to Afghanistan.

NATO’s overtures to Georgia were clearly the limit, as Putin demonstrated when he sent military forces against that country in 2008. The move also clearly telegraphed what he would do if NATO accession were offered to Ukraine, a country far more integral to Russia’s security than Georgia. Parts of Ukraine extend east of Moscow’s longitude, a fact that would certainly be riveted in the minds of a government whose people have ancestral memories of devastating invasions from the West stretching back centuries.
....​
 
R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Lofgren, the author mentioned above has an interesting article about analogies between Trump and Reagan and Trump and Hitler. He mentions Godwin's Law about invoking comparisons to Nazis. So first on what Godwin said before I excerpt Lofgren on Hitler and Trump.

Godwin has stated that he introduced Godwin's law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics.[2]

Godwin's law does not claim to articulate a fallacy; it is instead framed as a memetic tool to reduce the incidence of inappropriate hyperbolic comparisons. "Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the Holocaust", Godwin has written.[12] In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying that "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."[13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law​

I have a difference with Lofgren though as I believe neither Hitler or Trump were/is their own political stage 'directors', even as well as Trump brands and markets himself. But note below the mention of Trump's thatchwork pate as compared to Hitler's quirky mustache. As with the mustache, people have made fun of Trump's hair for a long, long time. People are highly 'visual', and the hair affect helped lend subliminal credence to the notion that Trump was a narcissistic buffoon to be discounted ... until it was too late. Maybe this was the point?

If my historical 'End Times' typology is correct the, Trump (win or lose the election) will ultimately be seen as a 'Futurist's' failed messiah, that will only stoke the nationalist flames even higher for the effective denouement in 2070.

Now for Lofgren, whose article first discusses a comparison of Trump with Reagan by Frank Rich. Lofgren states that Reagan was a passive [lifetime] actor (an FBI informant among other things), while Trump is an rather active actor. This doesn't mean that Trump can't carry someone else's aquarian water though.

...
And then there is the seething atmosphere of incipient violence at Trump rallies, something we have not seen from major party candidates in living memory. At this point, we can place Rich’s Trump-Reagan comparison into perspective: He doesn’t mention the violence, and suggests that a Trump presidency would merely be a comic-opera “train wreck,” likening it to a mash-up of the George W. Bush and Warren G. Harding administrations, with Trump being “manipulated” by underlings. Rich emphatically believes that Trump is not a would-be dictator like Hitler or Benito Mussolini, as he allegedly possesses neither the “discipline” nor “zeal” to be a successful fascist.

No doubt Rich, as a cosmopolite sophisticate, feels it is a bit down-market to use the word “fascist” for fear of having someone invoke Godwin’s Law. But, as he insists on making analogies between Trump and historical persons, he has opened the door to other, less flattering analogies.

That tense atmosphere of aggression and violence at Trump rallies — where have we seen that before? The almost masochistic exaltation of followers for the man of the hour? The nearly erotic manner in which some women seem to adore their hero and savior? And the open advocacy of torturing enemies of the state as he defines them? Or perhaps demanding that his followers swear an oath of loyalty, not to the state or the constitution, but to him personally? Yes, we’ve seen it all before, and it is a bit out of the range of the archetypal US glad-handing political hack.

To take the most trivial and superficial point of comparison, think of Trump’s ridiculous coiffeur: No 70-year-old man of any dignity would wear his hair like that, let alone a candidate for the presidency. In past times it would have marked him as a joke candidate like Pat Paulsen or Professor Irwin Corey.

Yet 85 years ago, an aspiring leader was mocked, even in his own country, for his silly Charlie Chaplin moustache. It did not impede his rise. This cultivated weirdness is a puzzling mystery, like the inexplicable, insatiable popular hunger for vampire romances. It is noteworthy that in posed photographic portraits, Trump, as Hitler did, takes pains to appear as the stern, square-jawed dominator and man of destiny: Again, hardly the aw-shucks nice-guy image most US politicians would seek to cultivate.
http://www.mikelofgren.net/trump-re...-rich-and-the-pitfalls-of-historical-analogy/​

End of part 1
 
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R

Richard Stanley

Well-Known Member
Part 2 of Lofgren's article:

The Hitler Analogy

Many people fall into the elementary error of believing that apprentice proto-fascists require a sort of mechanical discipline to succeed, and that fascist movements rise or fall depending on their machine-like efficiency. But this is to misconstrue the inner logic of fascism: It is not a clockwork mechanism, but a Wagnerian drama of a nation redeemed by a charismatic savior against insidious enemies.

Trump lies, lies grotesquely and lies so often that fact checkers have given up.
Hitler never claimed to be an administrator; the whole tedious business bored him immensely. He always insisted he had an “artistic” temperament in keeping with his failed ambition to be a painter and as a justification for his frequent bouts of laziness and inattention to matters of state. Albert Speer’s memoirs attest to frequent, impromptu automobile trips by Hitler and his retinue into the countryside for picnics to escape making decisions. His governmental administration was organizationally chaotic, and he frequently pitted rival subordinates against each other on the divide-and-rule principle, e.g., Army versus SS, Abwehr versus SD. This has also been a management principle of Trump’s throughout his career.

Hitler’s normal routine at the Berghof was chiefly rambling, soporific monologues about his own greatness or discussions of Wagnerian opera that segued into long evenings watching Hollywood movies (fun fact: Gone with the Wind was a favorite of the media-savvy Hitler and Goebbels). His situation conferences with the military at critical stages of the war were mainly one-sided harangues on the incompetence of his generals and the importance of will power and holding out to the last man, while completely ignoring the elementary military problems of time, space, weather and deployable manpower. In one of the most egregious blunders in military history, the German Seventh Army in Normandy couldn’t fully deploy because it had to wait for Hitler to get out of bed late on D-Day. At the bitter end, he preferred to study architectural models rather than attend to the defense of Berlin.

In sum, Hitler was an egomaniacal narcissist who liked to talk chiefly about his own greatness, and a careless administrator whose attention to detail was none too scrupulous — much like Trump’s financial legerdemain and serial bankruptcies. But he possessed a demonic charisma, paid careful attention to media presentation and regarded his rallies not as party convocations or information bulletins, but as aGesamtkunstwerk, a minutely choreographed dramatic spectacle designed to awe, intimidate and cement the devotion of his submissive followers. And this was a man whom mediocre German politicians like Franz von Papen or Alfred Hugenberg initially thought they could manipulate, just as Rich suggests Trump might be manipulated, or the way GOP hacks like Mitch McConnell now claim they will be able to control him.

There is one more point of correspondence: Trump lies, lies grotesquely and lies so often that fact checkers have given up. And, as we have seen, it is lying with a purpose, to defame and belittle enemies, to dominate, to confuse. Here we have an excerpt from Mein Kampf:

n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.​

Elsewhere in the same volume:

The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.​

One can almost hear Trump saying, “I love the uneducated!” Not to belabor the point, but according to a 1991 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once mentioned that her husband kept a book of Hitler’s speeches, My New Order, near his bed.

Does this mean that my analogy is more accurate than the comparison of Trump and Reagan? Not necessarily: Analogies may provide creative insights, but all analogies are flawed, because all historical events occur in the context of their time, and circumstances never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. But given the fact that the United States is already one of the most violence-prone countries in the developed world, the raw material at least exists for something resembling fascism to arise with the catalyst of an authoritarian leader.

Trump’s “New Order” would presumably be less Horst Wessel and more Lee Greenwood, with the entire production taking on the tacky, hustling quality of one of Trump’s casinos rather than that of the Wagner Ring Cycle at Bayreuth. But those who belittle fascist analogies on principle, and those cynics who, while not liking him, think a Trump victory could be a therapeutic catharsis for our corrupted democracy, might both be in for a rude awakening.
http://www.mikelofgren.net/trump-re...-rich-and-the-pitfalls-of-historical-analogy/​
 
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