monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Is that your idea of good? An uncensored site which spews lies like Trump?

When they come for you, and they will, try not to soil yourself as you did the last 8 dozen times.

I don’t know about anyone else, but all these blockbuster revelations are making me wonder if the Hillary/Hunter ticket can survive it.

In Budapest, Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, says he is “rooting for another victory for Donald Trump”. In Rio de Janeiro, Jair Bolsonaro has been pictured in a Trump 2020 campaign hat.

Rightwing nationalist politicians around the globe are abandoning the usual diplomatic etiquette of hedging bets before foreign elections and instead are throwing their support firmly behind Trump in November’s US vote in the hope that he can confound the pollsters for a second time and win another four years in power.
[...]
For Orbán and other nationalist leaders, there may be concrete policy benefits in a second Trump term, but the biggest draw would be the immeasurable psychological benefit of having a politician like Trump occupying the world’s most important office. If Biden wins, it may be taken as a sign that the populist moment is over.
[...]
Aside from Orbán, the US president’s biggest European supporters are in Warsaw, where the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has pursued an agenda based on so-called “family values” that has involved a sustained anti-LGBT campaign. In June Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally, travelled to Washington for an endorsement from Trump just days before a tightly contested presidential vote that he eventually won. Duda has not yet repaid the compliment, though in August the PiS MEP Dominik Tarczyński compared Trump to John Paul II, the Polish pope, and wrote on Twitter: “Polish people will support you on November 3rd.”

Other admirers in Europe include Janez Janša, the populist prime minister of Slovenia, who takes a Trump-like approach to the media and his political opponents. After the Trump-Biden TV debate last month, Janša wrote that Trump had “won big”, and he has frequently praised the US president’s policies and speeches.

Some western European far-right parties, such as Spain’s Vox and the increasingly popular Brothers of Italy, have also spoken of Trump and his strategy as a direct inspiration. “It’s an inspiration in various ways: it’s about using patriotism to confront globalism,” said Iván Espinosa de los Monteros, Vox’s parliamentary spokesman and deputy secretary for international affairs.

“It’s also about defying political correctness – which has never been successfully challenged – and the ideas promoted by a very globalist left, which has imposed a series of mantras and ideas that everyone accepted and treats as absolute truths. But he has challenged that and he’s challenged it very successfully.”

A Trump loss, he added, would be bad news “not for Spain or for Vox but for the traditional western values that have made the west the best place to live in history”.

Before the US elections in 2016, Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League, travelled to the US and posed for a photo with Trump in Philadelphia. Trump later denied they ever met, but that hasn’t diminished Salvini’s admiration. Last week he declared his endorsement by wearing a “Trump 2020” face mask during a protest outside a tax office in Rome. He said that when it came to the economy, despite the coronavirus pandemic wrecking havoc, Trump was “number one”.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of Brothers of Italy and a former deputy prime minister, travelled to the US in February to hear Trump speak, and afterwards said: “This is the recipe we want to bring to Italy, where we too want to defend our products, our companies, our borders and our families.”

Perhaps Trump’s biggest fan among world leaders is Bolsonaro, who basks in his portrayal as the “tropical Trump”. The Brazilian leader touts a supposedly unbreakable bond with the US president, taking ministers to celebrate US Independence Day at the ambassador’s residence in Brasília and repeatedly posting photos of the pair on social media even as Trump’s re-election hopes fade. His politician son Eduardo has called for Trump to be given the Nobel peace prize and often shares Trump’s election propaganda on Twitter.

Observers say Bolsonaro seeks inspiration and domestic legitimacy from his North American counterpart. Bolsonarista officials trumpet Trump’s approval as proof that their rightwing revolution is on the right track and part of a broader global conservative and Christian movement being led by Washington.
[...]
For leaders in Hungary and Poland, who are frequently reprimanded by EU politicians for democratic backsliding, having the White House as an ally provides a powerful counterbalance to criticism from Brussels, particularly in domestic messaging.

“If Trump is on my side then nobody can call me a leader that is excluded from the foreign policy community,” said Péter Krekó, who runs the Political Capital thinktank in Budapest, explaining Orbán’s thinking.

(...)

Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.

Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

(...)

Trump's "joke" about having to leave the country if (when) he loses seem an unusual thing for him to voice. I can't think of another example where he has made an if/then formation like this where the "then" conclusion posits or pictures some end where he is powerless and in real jeopardy. That suggests he has been thinking of such a possible reality.

The Prophecies of Q

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.

Quote:

(...)

Conspiracy theories are a constant in American history, and it is tempting to dismiss them as inconsequential. But as the 21st century has progressed, such a dismissal has begun to require willful blindness. I was a city-hall reporter for a local investigative-news site called Honolulu Civil Beat in 2011 when Donald Trump was laying the groundwork for a presidential run by publicly questioning whether Barack Obama had been born in Hawaii, as all facts and documents showed. Trump maintained that Obama had really been born in Africa, and therefore wasn’t a natural-born American—making him ineligible for the highest office. I remember the debate in our Honolulu newsroom: Should we even cover this “birther” madness? As it turned out, the allegations, based entirely on lies, captivated enough people to give Trump a launching pad.

Nine years later, as reports of a fearsome new virus suddenly emerged, and with Trump now president, a series of ideas began burbling in the QAnon community: that the coronavirus might not be real; that if it was, it had been created by the “deep state,” the star chamber of government officials and other elite figures who secretly run the world; that the hysteria surrounding the pandemic was part of a plot to hurt Trump’s reelection chances; and that media elites were cheering the death toll. Some of these ideas would make their way onto Fox News and into the president’s public utterances. As of late last year, according to The New York Times, Trump had retweeted accounts often focused on conspiracy theories, including those of QAnon, on at least 145 occasions.

(...)

theatlantic

Cornyn says he broke with Trump on deficit, border wall, but kept opposition private

The Guardian had several reports, going back to 2018.

Schiff’s Latest Lie: Hunter Biden’s Email Report Came From The Kremlin

But in a letter Saturday to FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Chairman Ron Johnson disclosed that the shop owner, identified in media reports as John Paul Mac Isaac, told the panel directly that Hunter Biden dropped off the machine.

It would be a federal crime to mislead a congressional committee on such an important fact.

Mr. Johnson, Wisconsin Republican, said that on Sept. 24, the day after his committee issued a report on how Hunter Biden had profited off his dad, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, “a whistleblower contacted my committee and informed my staff that he had possession of a laptop left in his business by Hunter Biden.”

This would appear to discredit allegations from Rep. Adam Schiff, California Democrat and chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that the emails are a Russian disinformation operation.

White House Expert Scott Atlas Censored By Twitter

Social media company Twitter finished its week of apparently politically motivated censorship on its platform by banning tweets regarding the efficacy of masks from Scott Atlas, a member of the White House scientific team battling the coronavirus.

Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute, not only had his tweets removed, he was banned from tweeting until he deleted the tweets that Twitter for unclear reasons objects to. Here are the tweets in question:

Twitter is protecting the narrative and making sure people remain in fear.