SlurredSpeech609 posted:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/us/politics/trump-biden-fundraising.html

kazil posted:

Trial stuff resumes at 2:15 et

kazil posted:

Trial stuff resumes at 2:15 et

deported to Canada posted:

It's said to include parts on "rape, erectile dysfunction, baldness and betrayal" although some points of the film are fictionalised, no idea yet

Infinitum posted:

Charging conference is where they push for federal charges?

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

If Trump is convicted in this case, Presidential immunity doesn't mean poo poo because the crimes were committed BEFORE he was President, AND they were committed to MAKE him President.

Trump's going to loving prison...

Lammasu posted:

The word "comedian" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Infinitum posted:

Charging conference is where they push for federal charges?

SilentChaz posted:

https://twitter.com/thedailybeast/status/1792850361922785684?t=TJYHChlp1AefGnb5OlZlQA&s=19

Trump campaign claims it will sue over new biopic

fondue posted:

He'll get some monetary fine that he'll never pay.

deoju posted:

Thanks, kazil.

Apollodorus posted:

What are these “Illegal Biden Trials” he’s talking about? Is that the poo poo with Hunter’s tax and/or drug issues? Because those seemed legal to me.

kazil posted:

kazil posted:

deported to Canada posted:

Trumps new flick could well be worth the watch, seemed to be well received at Cannes:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ggplvn5pzo

It's said to include parts on "rape, erectile dysfunction, baldness and betrayal" although some points of the film are fictionalised, no idea what yet.

Trumps team are already on the case with his campaign communications director Steven Cheung saying legal action would be taken "to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers".

So I guess this film doesn't really exist then?

kazil posted:

kazil posted:

thunderspanks posted:

his skin texture looks like a tangerine that rolled under the radiator 3 months ago and just got found when you were vacuuming

redshirt posted:

My Joe Piscopo Theory of Comedy:

Humor is inversely related to swoleness.

See, Joe Piscopo, Carrot Top, Dane Cook

thunderspanks posted:

his skin texture looks like a tangerine that rolled under the radiator 3 months ago and just got found when you were vacuuming

kazil posted:

3 DONG HORSE posted:

Will the Gorilla Lawyers save Trump from the Kangaroo Court?

would like to see this as a comic book cover. Kinda picturing a Gorilla holding Trump (like Tarzan would hold Jane) as they rope swing over a bunch of kangaroos.

idk i think it's funny

redshirt posted:

You stay up poo poo posting till 2 am and then show up to court the next day at 8:30 and not nap!

Froghammer posted:

"Did you say X?"

"What? No. Never."

"Well here's an email of you saying X"

repeat x 10

kazil posted:

All trial against Trump are actually secretly ordered by Biden and are thus Biden Trials.

Pot Smoke Phoenix posted:

I certainly hope a juror points this fact out.

Juror: "Ay, this piece of poo poo was up Truthing all night and then has the fuckin' STONES to sleep? I gotta work, I got kids, you see me sleepin'?"

Another juror: "Right? What the gently caress? He's guilty because he's a lyin' gently caress, now let's nail the prick and get the fuggoudah here!"

Foreman: "Yeah, gently caress dis guy. Alright, write down if you think he's guilty or not, and let's not gently caress around with dis poo poo."

Verdict: gently caress dis guy!

quote:

As the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump draws nearer, political professionals are detecting an unusual concern among some undecided voters: that if Trump returns to the White House, he’ll refuse to step down when his term is up.

Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”


Carpenter has a decade of experience running focus groups for Democrats, but he’d never encountered this fear in earlier cycles. “It’s not something we’d been testing for,” he says. “But what we’ve seen so far indicates a real concern there.”

Republican strategists have encountered the same thing. “It’s showing up in our focus groups,” says Sarah Longwell, the chief executive officer of Longwell Partners and publisher of the conservative website the Bulwark. “It happened just the other day.”

Longwell shared a video of a group of undecided swing-state voters who had been asked if they were worried that Trump might violate the constitutional amendment limiting him to one more term if he wins in November.

“Does anybody think he may not abide by the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution and leave office after the 2028 election? Anyone worried about that?” the moderator asked.

In response, seven of the eight participants raised a hand. A Pennsylvania man worried that Trump might go further and try to institute a dynasty. “I wouldn’t put it past him, now that he owns the RNC,” the man said, “to say, ‘Don Jr. is going to do the next term, and he’ll get two. And then Barron will get two.’ And we’ll just have some fake monarchy.”

As far-fetched as it may sound, the prospect of Trump overriding or simply ignoring the constitutional provision that limits a president to serving two terms seems to be pushing some undecided voters toward Biden, despite significant reservations about the incumbent’s age, turmoil in the Middle East and high inflation. Now strategists in both parties are probing to see how widely this sentiment has spread, particularly among the undecided voters likely to sway the election.


Trump supporters at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump supporters at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.Photographer: Leah Millis/Reuters
Trump’s own provocations appear to be driving the fear of a permanent presidency. One obvious example is the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters, with his encouragement, tried to halt the certification of the 2020 presidential election to keep him in power. Later on, in a 2022 social media post, Trump called to “terminate” parts of the Constitution in response to the election fraud he falsely asserted had taken place in 2020. Last December, Fox News host Sean Hannity invited the former president to tamp down voter concerns about Trump’s use of authoritarian rhetoric. Instead, Trump insisted he would be a “dictator” only on “Day 1” of his presidency. In a recent Time interview, he said that comment was made “in jest,” although, he added, “I think a lot of people like it.”

Trump’s flirtations with smashing limits on presidential power, while thrilling to many of his followers, alarm other voters, including some who once supported him. Lori McCammon, a grandmother in Alma, Wisconsin, voted for Trump in 2016 but says she recoiled at his recent comments and won’t be supporting him in November. She says she’s worried that Trump won’t cede power if he’s reelected. “Based on what I’ve heard from him and figures like Steve Bannon,” McCammon says, “this would be our last free and fair election.”

Strategists and pollsters say that, much like McCammon, many uncommitted voters don’t perceive Trump’s language to be jesting or ironic, nor do they view a potential power grab as a joke. “When we ask about his record on democracy, there’s a lot of general concern—even among Republicans—about what a second Trump term might be like,” says Bryan Bennett, a pollster with Navigator Research, a Democratic-aligned firm. Unease among non-Democratic voters is also evident in public surveys. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that 21% of independent voters and 8% of Republicans indicated that “preserving democracy in the United States” was the most critical issue facing the country.

The fear that Trump might do something unprecedented to undermine democracy is a new variable in an otherwise familiar race between two unpopular candidates who’ve faced off before. Several political professionals who talk to voters for a living say they’ve detected a fundamental shift in the way people view Trump’s motivations and intentions as compared with other politicians.

“Typically, when we raise concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical and want to do their own research first or think it’s an attack,” says Carpenter, the focus group director. “With Trump, that’s not true. Voters believe that he would try to remove term limits, and they’re nervous about what’s possible.”

Carpenter’s conversations with uncommitted voters have led him to believe that, beyond Jan. 6 and Trump’s inflammatory comments, this shift owes a great deal to a less obvious catalyst: the Supreme Court. Its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating women’s constitutional right to an abortion has caused voters to wonder what else that they take for granted might be changed or removed. “The dimensions of what constitutes a credible threat have expanded because of Roe,” Carpenter says. “Since that decision, you hear voters talking themselves out of the notion that an idea is too far-fetched.”


Trump at a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 US presidential election results on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump at a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 US presidential election results on Jan. 6, 2021.Photographer: Jim Bourg/Reuters
With Biden trailing Trump in most recent surveys—including in six of seven battleground states in the last Bloomberg News-Morning Consult poll—Democrats are eager to find and exploit any potential Trump weakness. Amplifying fears of a power grab is one possibility.

Recently, the liberal group Priorities USA asked 1,500 likely voters across eight battleground states to rank more than two dozen Trump statements or policies from “most” to “least” concerning. In results not publicly released until now, Priorities found that Trump’s “dictator” comment and calls to gut the Constitution ranked as the “most concerning” of all the options.


“Ultimately, we expect this race to come down to the clear choice that voters face—on abortion, the economy and protecting democracy,” says Nick Ahamed, deputy executive director of Priorities USA. “Trump’s promise of dictatorship will shape every one of these if he’s elected.”

Many Republican strategists agree. “That’s kind of the bet that the Biden campaign is making,” says an unaffiliated Republican pollster who asked not to be identified because he didn’t want to anger the Trump campaign. “That eventually people are going to become so frightened about what the next Trump turn will mean that they’ll move over to Biden.”

After months of playing coy, Trump told Time in April that he would serve only two terms. Yet this hasn’t placated opponents such as Ahamed, who point to organized efforts by the Heritage Foundation and other Trump-friendly venues to radically expand presidential powers. The American Conservative magazine published an article in March that argued for repeal of the 22nd Amendment, which it blasted as “an arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms—and on democracy itself.”


Trump at a campaign event on May 11 in Wildwood, New Jersey.
Trump at a campaign event on May 11 in Wildwood, New Jersey.Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg
The idea of repeal has a lengthy lineage. Ratified in 1951, the 22nd Amendment was largely a response to the unprecedented four terms served by Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which raised concerns about the potential for long-serving presidents to accumulate too much power and potentially undermine democratic principles.

The amendment has subsequently irked popular presidents and their supporters in both parties. In 1987, Ronald Reagan told television interviewer David Frost that he “would like to start a movement” to repeal the amendment, which he claimed interfered with peoples’ right to “vote for someone as often as they want to do.” Democratic House members introduced legislation to repeal the 22nd Amendment during Bill Clinton’s presidency and again during Barack Obama’s. Neither bill went anywhere.


Altering the Constitution would be extraordinarily difficult, requiring either a two-thirds majority vote in the House and Senate or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, after which any amendment would need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Even Trump’s most ardent backers don’t view such a scenario as realistic. They suggest that talk of repeal is aimed mainly at upsetting the former president’s critics. “It’s 100% about trolling liberals,” Bannon says. “It’s too much of a heavy lift to get states to ratify repeal—not that certain parts of the MAGA universe wouldn’t love it if we did.”

Still, the possibility that Trump might try to abolish term limits if reelected in November registers as a serious threat to a meaningful share of voters, despite his claim to the contrary. And it appears to be driving them toward Biden. In an April 21 NBC News-Public Opinion Strategies poll, 16% of registered voters named “threats to democracy” as the most important issue facing the country. Among them, Biden held a 67-point lead over Trump, 81% to 14%.

McCammon, the Wisconsin woman who once voted for Trump, now counts herself as part of this group. “I will vote for Biden even if he is in a coma,” she says.