“BAD THINGS HAPPENED!”: Your President tweets

November 7, 2020 • 8:30 am

Aren’t you glad this loon is on the way out? Ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades: this is the man preferred as President by nearly half of America.

BAD THINGS HAPPENED INSIDE. BIG CHANGES TOOK PLACE!

There are two lies in the three sentences above.

He takes down Philly:

I could go on, but you get the drift, as you’ve gotten it for the past four years. This is all very amusing—until you remember the havoc this guy can still wreak until Biden is sworn in. Pardons given, ultraconservative judges appointed, wonky executive orders issued, White House china broken. . . .

76 thoughts on ““BAD THINGS HAPPENED!”: Your President tweets”

  2. SAD, HE’S A VERY SAD LITTLE MAN. PATHETIC LOSER.

    I’ve no idea why he talks like that, I can’t say it feels cathartic to me. Ah well, it will all be over soon.

  3. Trump may be a loon to you and like minded people (with good reason perhaps) but unless these allegations are convincingly investigated roughly half the USA voters are going to feel cheated of their votes. That’s no way to run a democracy.

    1. These are allegations with little or no proof, unlike the Russian interference in the 2016 elections. I’m sure they will be investigated, but no amount of investigation will satisfy the moron-in-chief’s cult followers.

      1. Well, there are “bad things” that happened and were admitted and corrected. See, for example, the “typo” that gave over 138,000 votes to Biden in Michigan – eventually corrected to an order of magnitude less. There was the “software glitch” in Antrim County that moved 6,000 votes from Trump to Biden and flipped the county. It was discovered after the county clerk called BS on the results. Another “glitch” in the same software gave Democrats just enough votes to win the normally Republican county of Oakland, Michigan and flip the congressional seat. It was also discovered when the county clerk called BS on the results. Several “glitches” were reported with the same software in Georgia, and subsequently corrected.

        Now, I’m not alleging fraud, but this is brand new software, rolled out only this year. The software relies on humans typing numbers into boxes with no verification – which is how the 138k vote typo happened – enabling both errors and providing at least the potential for cheating. It would be easy to prevent such typos, but the software apparently lacks such basic integrity checks (such as requiring the numbers to be typed twice, and requiring the total vote number to be entered as well and confirming that the per-candidate counts equal the total). It is clearly not trustworthy software.

        It is used in 30 states, and in 47 countries in Michigan alone. That means the whole election is not trustworthy. I believe Biden won, but the problem is that there is no way for the public to know this. We just have to trust that they typed the numbers in correctly. We need to do better.

    2. How does one “convincingly investigate” a lunatic conspiracy theory based on nothing?

      I watched the TV machine last night and was exposed to the genesis of one of these “allegations” in Arizona. Rumor spread through the tRumpian protest crowd that illegal ballots were being taken into the building where votes were being counted. Dozens of these patriots had their cell phones out recording the crime in progress while shouting to raise the alarm.

      It was a Fox News crew.

    3. Unless there is ANY evidence buttressing the allegations, they do not merit “thorough” investigation, and, as far as I can see, there has been no evidence supporting them.

      Let the conspiracy-theorist loons think what they want, but they are NOT going to run the show. Seriously, you think every unsupported claim of a loon deserved “thorough investigation” to prop up our democracy. Sorry, but I disagree. If there are credible claims, investigate them. But these loons have no end to their stupid theories.

    4. I allege that you personally hacked the Senate race vote-counting machines and erased 41.235% of the Democratic votes. And back in the summer you personally fomented much of the violence after George Floyd’s death by releasing a secret air-spray drug created by the military to bring on feelings of rage. You did it by flying a crop-dusting plane over minority neighbourhoods. Many people are saying it.

      Unless these allegations are convincingly investigated more than half the USA voters are going to feel cheated of their votes. That’s no way to run a democracy.

      ….I trust you get my point. If you accept Trump’s evidence-free confabulations then you’re forced to accept mine too, at least if you’re being logically and morally consistent.

      1. For crying out loud, Saul! People aren’t supposed to know about the secret rage-inducing drug! You’ve ruined everything!!!
        /s

        1. Oh damnit! THat’s the whole ball of wax.
          At least nobody has cottoned on to the contrails plot. If they do that, we’re busted and our evil scheme will be ruined!

          Personally I blame Pizza Pedo Hillary, funded naturally by G___ge So_r__.
          YOoou know who I mean.

          D.A.
          NYC

      2. +1,000,000, Mr Sorrell – Till / Boss / Mr Harper.

        I cannot count THE number of times, in
        family law court, that I was PUT UPON
        the defense from allegations, from lies,
        from accusations ALL made against me,
        the Mama, none of which were true … …
        ONLY to find that the Opponent ( = the liar
        and my accuser ) had absolutely NO witnesses
        FOR them and their lies, never was ever
        put onto the defensive and, ultimately,
        through a bagazillion hearings and documents
        ( ” legal ” ones ), three trials and three
        appeals to my State’s highest appellate
        courts, W O N everything that Opponent
        wanted.

        NO one NOwhere investigated ONE DAMN THING
        IN RE Opponent, ALL o’which were T R U E.
        NO one. NOwhere.

        Blue

        1. ENTIRELY verisimilar to my colleague,
          Ms Coral Anika Theill of
          http://www.coralanikatheill.com … … my experience
          y1988 through y1994, with ” investigations ”
          IN RE FALSE allegations and accusations.
          With LIES. And courts ( which, by the way,
          ARE actually human beings, are NOT INanimates
          and STILL ARE ALMOST ALL male ones ) inside
          courtrooms.

          Talk about … … J I N X E D.

          Blue

    5. It won’t matter. The same people believed the Mueller report exonerated Trump and that the phone call was perfect in spite of being able to go and read them themselves if they chose. They also believed Hilary Clinton doing something nasty with emails in spite of the convincing investigations finding nothing.

      1. They also believed that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta were operating a child-sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping-Pong pizzeria — and never mind that the pizzeria had no basement. (One of the loons even went into the joint and fired three rounds from an AR-15 in an effort to put a halt to the non-existent sex-trafficking ring.)

        And let’s not even get started about QAnon conspiracists (at least one of whom, Georgia Republican congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, is headed for the US House of Representatives come January, and several more of whom had won Republican congressional nominations, but lost in the general election).

    6. This stuff has all the earmarks of the “stab-in-the-back” theory which Hitler rode to power. There was no “stab-in-the-back”, but it didn’t matter. If you repeat a lie enough, it is proof enough in the minds of fanatics.

      1. One sure sign of trouble to come would be an uptick in sales on Spotify of the Götterdämmerung cycle from Wagner’s Ring opera — wherein Siegfried takes it in the back from Hagen.

    7. State media (Fox News and other Murdoch outlets) have started trying to convince Trump to concede. They are saying on the air that Trump’s has no evidence of voter fraud and that the election was not stolen. Hopefully this has some dampening effect.

    8. “Half the USA voters are going to feel cheated of their votes.”

      Oh yeah, you mean the other half (actually less than half) of USA voters are going to feel cheated. Welcome to the club Republicans. As a Democrat, I felt cheated by Bush and Trump where they both lost the popular vote. Feeling cheated is a way of life in American democracy, especially where the Presidency is concerned; they’ll get over it, just like we did. If they don’t, oh well.

    9. And when they have been investigated & shown to be bullshit the Trumpettes won’t believe.

    10. I and friends with one of those trump voters— and there is NOTHING that will stop them from believing their hero wasn’t cheated out of this election. And there’s not anything folks can do about it.

  4. If the Trumps chose the most recent WH china it will probably really tacky and worthy of being broken.

  5. I envy young comedy writers. In just a few years of being the Greatest Leader Of All Time, dRumpf has provided material for decades.

    1. He’s not that great to work with: he’s too broad to sustain anything deeper than a few basic parodies, and he’s already so absurd that you can’t really go anywhere with him.

      I write comedy now and then and I have thought a lot about Trump-related humour. But I like meaty comedy series, and trying to write a script about Donald Trump is just impossible because, in short, he is not a credible character. As soon as you think about writing him into anything you realise that he’s not a believable human being.

      In comedic terms he’s a seventy-hour compilation of moronic memes and gifs that each last a few seconds. He is exhausting and makes no narrative sense at all.

  6. Read the replies. Some of them are hilarious.

    https://twitter.com/JoshhhCFC/status/1324856297985118209?s=20

    Doesn’t understand that Biden won’t be taking over until January 20th.

    https://twitter.com/b17raymo/status/1324876273496297475?s=20

    Doesn’t understand that the election counts people not square feet.

    I would also like to highlight this reply to the above

    https://twitter.com/Nethaji_2080/status/1325083274159468546?s=20

    It made mr laugh out loud.

      1. IMO, this should be a non-issue. They are just links. Happily browsers know how to display the content at the end of the links.

        1. Yes but it does stretch out the length of the comment section and makes it unwieldy.Da roolz say don’t embed videos and I think embedding images breaks the spirit, if not the letter, of dat Rool.

          1. I think that particular rule is misguided and the original intent was to prevent server-side overload from large video files. (As opposed to not wanting to take up space on the page.)

      2. I appreciate it, though. I’ve blocked the moron-in-chief and can’t see the replies! 🙂

  7. I keep saying it, but one would think the party of ‘life starts at fertilization not implantation’ would have an easier time understanding postmarked vs. arrival date. The whole ‘illegal votes’ thing is just nonsense. I need them to call this and be done with him.

  8. I had a horrible thought – what if Trump can pardon himself from all the impending charges of rape and tax evasion, etc, etc. that will otherwise descend on him when he is out of office…

    1. It’s an open question as to whether a president can pardon himself. If he does try, it’s likely to go to the supreme court.

      Also, the president can only pardon people from federal crimes. If New York State wanted to put him in prison for fraud, he can’t do anything about it.

      1. Trump could resign, and let Mike Pence act as president. Pence could then pardon Trump.

        Well, it wouldn’t surprise me.

        1. It wouldn’t surprise me if Trump did resign. I can’t imagine him wanting to hang around for two months helping the man who beat him to take over. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea: President Pence might be a bit more amenable to ensuring a successful transition, not to mention he might act a bit more responsibly with respect to coronavirus.

          1. not to mention he might act a bit more responsibly with respect to coronavirus.

            Not to be a wet blanket, but his record with COVID so far and his part record with the AIDS epidemic in his own state while he was in charge would suggest otherwise.

    2. Read the New Yorker article. He cannot pardon himself, nor can any President pardon him, on state charges. And several of the investigations going on that involve criminal charges are state investigations, particularly the one in New York.

      Presidents can only pardon people accused or convicted of federal crimes.

      As for whether a President can pardon himself for federal crimes (as Ford did for Nixon, which was legal), that’s a complex situation. See the New Yorker article, which I recommended for people with questions like yours.

  9. I find the use of the notion of observing — “observers” — to be a key insight to how this works.

    Robert Pirsig writes about a similar thing in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (yes, an old chestnut, but please hear me out). Pirsig talks of a sort of insecurity with how intangible rules play out in the universe. An insistence — or rather a preoccupation — with continuity — seeing every detail of a process to be assured of a truth. This preoccupation is described by Pirsig as a characteristic of individuals alienated by technology, but that’s another issue.

    Here, doubt is cast by the impossibility of doing every vote tally oneself. The old folk wisdom of “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”. That philosophy can work sometimes, but it is impossible for the election. We must rely — trust —on other people to do it for us. And that’s another link in the chain — trust issues.

    The victims are helplessly in the grip of the personality. I don’t think Trump cares about how he does it, he just pulls the strings he can find to get his way.

    1. “Robert Pirsig writes about a similar thing in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (yes, an old chestnut, but please hear me out).”

      For those of us of a certain age, it is not an old chestnut. But, assuming it is, at what point in the past did it become an “old chestnut”? (Apparently, to have an AOL email address is grounds for being embarrassed/ashamed, to hear Bill Maher bloviate about it.)

      1. Chestnut might be an imprecise term, if it was even chosen correctly.

        I was looking for an expression of something that blew my mind upon first reading, saw evidence of it all the time thereafter, kept reading it , but sort of grew out of it? Or learned enough in the meantime that the piece settled into a certain place but definitely was not the mind blowing epiphany I first experienced. I ought to add the book is one of my personal favorites.

  10. Remind me never to play tic-tac-toe with Trump. If I win I shall have Rudy Giuliani on my back, telling me that although I won the game, Trump is the real winner…

    But what if Biden turns senile quickly, and in two years people regret the passing of Trump?

    1. I trust that Biden will surround himself with honest people who care about our country. So, if Biden then turns senile, his Cabinet will have the good judgment to invoke the 25th Amendment, and then we’ll have President Harris.

      1. I really don’t see any evidence of Biden’s impending senility. Sometimes his stutter affects his delivery. But I do agree that he will surround himself with really good people (Mayor Pete? Eliz Warren? Amy K?) and Kamala is sharp as a tack

        1. A few of my friends used to say that it almost looked as though some presidents chose the worst possible vice president as an insurance policy against assassination. It is very refreshing to see someone choose a running mate who would be a very good replacement if needed.

          1. Two words: Spiro Agnew.

            Unfortunately for Dick Nixon, his “insurance policy” got cancelled when Agnew was forced to resign, then snuck back to Baltimore in the middle of the night to show up the next morning in federal court to cop a nolo plea on a tax-evasion beef.

    2. “But what if …”

      But what if whatifism is even dumber than whataboutism?
      After all, we do know less about the future than about the past.
      Granted, we sometimes can do something about ‘fixing’ future problems, but not changing the past. That’s my answer to your question.

  11. When people have strongly held beliefs, which they believe are true and right, and events take place that challenge those beliefs, they are very prone to embrace conspiracy theories. To them, what else can explain the questioning of something that is so obviously true? Throughout history, people with different cultures and political ideologies are susceptible to them.

    What makes the current wave of conspiracy theories so dangerous is that they are so widely spread, flamed by a cult leader that has no sense of decency or moral character. Even if the leader leaves public office, his followers will not leave him. This means that Republican politicians will not repudiate him because they need his supporters to win Republican primaries, if nothing else. I hope I am wrong, but I disagree with those who think that the party will abandon Trump once the election results become final. A sane Republican Party will only emerge when Trump loses his sway over the base. I do not see this happening in the near term. Trumpism will be the hallmark of the party for at least the next few years.

    1. “…explain the questioning of something that is so obviously true? ”

      But do you know of any other example of this in ‘western’ countries in the last 75 years which is anywhere near as bad?

      I think it is very much connected to the much higher degree of blind religious belief in US, with its giving of young children the pre-disposition to think authority to be a much better reason for accepting obvious nonsense as truth, and for ignoring very plain evidence that it’s not. There’s little reason to think that the rise of Christianity 19 decades ago is all that more natural than the rise of Qanon now, among ignorant people in both cases.

        1. Indeed. They’ve spent their whole lives cultivating the ability to believe what they are told in the absence of evidence.

    1. Fun trivia — maybe mistaken to point out :

      Cemetery Gates is a song by Pantera.

      Whoops —I mean

      Cemetery Gates is a F#&CKING KICK-ASS song by Pantera!

      ^^^ honestly — a classic metal song. Awesome tune!

        1. Re the tweet: It looks to me like a parody – the twitter page for CemetryGates89 seems to be mainly concerned with Rangers (Glasgow football team). Can anyone more knowledgeable about twitter than I am (ie, almost anyone) comment?

          Also, since the Smiths song misspells Cemetery as Cemetry, I’d assume that that is the song referred to.

  14. CNN seems to think they are getting close to calling this thing.

    How does the 4.2 million vote lead fill in all that illegal BS from Trump. There is no doubt the elections process in several of the states is very poor and slow. But that has nothing to do with illegal.

  16. Speaking of the post-election period to come, this morning Brookings discussed possible scenarios DT may come up with during the “lame duck” months.

    Pardon his friends
    pardon himself
    forgive tax debts
    William Barr investigate enemies
    Firings of key personnel
    “midnight rulemaking”
    repeal Obama-era rules
    install judges or executive branch officials by recess appointment
    Transition Sabotage
    Starting wars
    Further disrupting COVID response

    https://www.lawfareblog.com/last-hundred-days?utm_campaign=Brookings%20Brief&utm_medium=email&utm_content=99258818&utm_source=hs_email

    1. None of that is surprising, and about half of those “actions” he’s already done. He’s also a wimp who got a serious smack down. I just see him spending 90% of the next two months on the golf course…where he is today.

    2. Possibly.

      I could also foresee a scenario in which, once his court challenges fail, he simply abandons his job as president, decamps for the next couple months to Mar-a-Lago, and play golf — while making sure to sign pardons for his family and himself and for any minions he thinks he may have continuing need of during his post-presidency.

      1. I agree. We know he only cares about himself. Continuing to run (or ruin) the country after he’s lost the election just would have no benefit in his mind. That said, I hope I’m not just indulging in wishful thinking. Also, there are the rest of his administration and his followers to think about. Does his administration do damage with its head cut off? We’ll see.

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