"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
True but he won from it once and came pretty close the second time.
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
Remember the Thomas Nine !! (10/02/2018)
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago 2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy 2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE) 2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston 2020: Oakland, Oakland:2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana 2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville 2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
True but he won from it once and came pretty close the second time.
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
Saw a nice new Trump Vance 2024 sticker on a car yesterday. The only other non factory marking was a Jesus fish because of course.
You can be certain he'll claim the release happened because Putin anticipates him winning in November just like he claimed the stock market has been hitting record highs for months on end because he will be re-elected.
"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
True but he won from it once and came pretty close the second time.
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
Where I am at they never came down from 2020. After a couple of years they started either making changes to them to make them say 2024 or ponied up the money to buy new signs and flags manufactured in CHINA.
"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
True but he won from it once and came pretty close the second time.
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
Where I am at they never came down from 2020. After a couple of years they started either making changes to them to make them say 2024 or ponied up the money to buy new signs and flags manufactured in CHINA.
Trump congratulates Putin over deal that brought Evan Gershkovich home
Trump also seemed to lash out at the deal after it was trumpeted Thursday by President Biden and Vice President Harris, who met the freed prisoners in an emotional ceremony.
"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
True but he won from it once and came pretty close the second time.
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
Saw a nice new Trump Vance 2024 sticker on a car yesterday. The only other non factory marking was a Jesus fish because of course.
That's so weird (there's that word again!) because if most of the Trump/Vance voters had other bumper stickers, I would think they would be more like this:
or this:
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
Trump congratulates Putin over deal that brought Evan Gershkovich home
Trump also seemed to lash out at the deal after it was trumpeted Thursday by President Biden and Vice President Harris, who met the freed prisoners in an emotional ceremony.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
An
exasperated Judge Juan Merchan, in a scathing order released Wednesday
morning, denied former President Donald Trump's third attempt to kick
the judge off his New York criminal hush money case based on an alleged conflict of interest.
"Stated
plainly, Defendant's arguments are nothing more than a repetition of
stale and unsubstantiated claims," Merchan wrote in the three-page
order.
Earlier this
month, Trump's lawyers attempted to argue that Vice President Kamala
Harris' position as the Democratic nominee for president created a conflict of interest
for Merchan based on the judge's daughter's work as a political
consultant, rehashing an argument that Merchan denied twice in the past.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.”
Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges.
In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency.
The Trump campaign did not respond to queries about how this was calculated. We think we may have figured it out. It makes little sense.
The Facts
In April 2023, we fact-checked a claim by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income.” That statement came via a dubious statistic generated by E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Other economists were skeptical of Antoni’s math — a combination of two calculations involving purchasing and borrowing costs — and pointed to more reliable metrics, such as real disposable personal income per capita. Many such statistics are affected by the pandemic, adding to the complexity. But real disposable income per capital now is up about $3,000 since March 2020, just before temporary covid relief payments start showing up in the data and skew it for more than a year.
Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from.
In any case, the experts said Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.
Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, for instance, provided a spreadsheet of data on real personal income less transfer payments from the government per capita. “It has increased 4.2 percent between January 2021 and June 2024,” he said in an email. “A little more than one percent per annum. A solid performance.”
Eventually, we found one possible source for Trump’s figure. In a July blog post, Antoni offered an updated estimate of his statistic — that a typical family lost “about $8,000” in income over the last 3½ years, since Biden took office.
That’s still significantly lower than Trump’s $28,000 in the same time period. But the $28,000 number does appear in Antoni’s post.
Antoni focused on a July survey from Bankrate.com that found the average American said they needed an annual income of $186,000 to live comfortably.
“That’s a shocking figure — more than twice what the average full-time worker earns,” Antoni wrote. “Even in a household with two parents pulling in the average full-time salary, they’d still be about $28,000 short annually.”
Could that be the source of the $28,000 figure? It seems absurd, but after nine years of fact-checking Trump we’ve uncovered many slapdash figures. We sent Antoni’s blog post to a Trump campaign spokesman, asking if this was the source of Trump’s number, and did not get a response. Antoni also did not respond to a request for comment.
Oddly, when Bankrate.com conducted this same survey in 2023, Americans said they needed $233,000 a year to be financially secure. So in one year, the surveys indicated a $47,000 improvement — perhaps a sign that as inflation eased, Americans felt less stressed about their finances. A representative for Bankrate.com did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year the Treasury Department released a report that looked at what had happened to the purchasing power of American households since 2019, just before the pandemic. “As of the end of 2023, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, with an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year,” the report said.
That’s because, overall, wages have increased more than price inflation.
The Pinocchio Test
It’s never a good sign when a presidential campaign refuses to explain the math behind a new talking point. But it would be par for the course for Trump to misunderstand a random statistic in a blog post and try to twist it for political purposes. In any case, he’s ignoring the gains in income that have exceeded price inflation.
Dumb as dirt and delusional. Suckers. Suckers and losers.
‘This was a coup.’ Trump primes supporters to challenge a Harris win.
Amid a tight presidential race, Donald Trump has tried to delegitimize Kamala Harris’s nomination and undermine confidence in this year’s election.
From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.
“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said.
“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Trump administration and is now among his conservative critics. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”
While some of this is “just for show,” Neumann said, Trump and his allies are also setting up the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”
Trump has long insisted that his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power, and he has weakened faith in the U.S. election system despite widespread evidence that the results can be trusted. When asked to comment for this article, Trump’s campaign responded with a statement attacking Harris and again characterizing her nomination as part of a “coup.”
When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he falsely claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the Iowa caucuses, and he told his supporters that the general election was “absolutely being rigged” against him. After winning, he falsely said his loss in the popular vote was due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” In 2020, he baselessly claimed the influx of mail-in ballots amid the global pandemic led to widespread fraud that cost him the election, and as Congress gathered to certify the results, Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the process.
For months, Trump had boasted that he was on a glide path to victory in a rematch against Biden, and he told his supporters the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated. But he began ratcheting up his warnings about the election process when Harris began drawing massive crowds and surpassed him in several national and swing state polls, including some in which he had led Biden.
Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in a May interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
The overarching message, often pushed by Trump himself, is that the race has entered a make-or-break stage in which a shadowy Democratic apparatus is poised to steal Republican votes. While doing this, Trump has tried to deflect attacks that he is a threat to democracy by insisting that he’s the true protector of it, recently saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats “are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Through this year’s presidential campaign, Trump has portrayed himself as a victim of a Democratic power grab. He blamed his dozens of criminal charges on the Biden administration, accusing his original opponent of weaponizing the judicial system as a form of election interference.
Since Harris jumped in the race last month, Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about her integrity. He attacked her racial identity, accusing her of only recently identifying as Black, which is not true. And earlier this month, Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to manipulate a campaign rally photo to make the crowd look larger than it was. He called for her to be “disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and added: “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” In reality, Harris attracted a massive crowd.
In an Aug. 6 post on Truth Social, Trump presented a fantastical story that envisioned Biden, “whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him,” crashing this week’s Democratic National Convention to take back the nomination.
“They forced him out. It was a coup. We had a coup,” Trump said of Biden at an Aug. 9 rally in Bozeman, Mont. “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.”
Supporters at his rallies have embraced and echoed those sentiments.
In Montana, Carol Taylor, 62, said: “The people, the Democrats, are getting cheated, and they don’t realize it, because they’re not getting to vote for their candidate.”
“I think that it’s almost like a coup to get Kamala Harris in there,” said Rachelle Galinski, 55, at a Trump rally in St. Cloud, Minn.
Another St. Cloud rallygoer, 35-year-old Jose Chapa Jr., said: “The party that said they stand for democracy didn’t even let their people vote for who they wanted to vote for. It’s pretty sick.”
Replacing Biden on the ticket was within the Democratic Party’s powers. Though primary voters chose Biden, they technically elected a slate of delegates to choose their nominee. Once Biden dropped out, those delegates were free to pick a replacement, and they almost unanimously chose Harris.
Yet, conspiracy theories abound claiming the Democrats circumvented protocol to name Harris as nominee and warning they’ll do the same in hopes of defeating Trump. Experts in extremism warn that Trump’s use of terms like “coup” to describe Harris’s candidacy could rile up his hard-right supporters in ways similar to the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris’s swift rise has pierced the MAGA movement’s certainty of a win in November, they say, putting Trump’s most loyal followers on the defensive in ways that analysts say undermines faith in elections and heightens the risk of unrest.
Joe Walsh, a former GOP U.S. representative from Illinois who launched a long-shot primary challenge to Trump in 2020, said Trump’s attacks on Harris as an illegitimate candidate are resonating with his MAGA base.
“They’re latching on to this, that what the Democrats just did, that’s a coup,” Walsh said. “This is what I hear all day. That was the attack on democracy. That’s what they’re going to do to push back on the legitimate charge that Trump tried to overthrow an election four years ago. I come from MAGA world. It’s working. They believe it.”
On publicly visible message boards, pro-Trump extremists are careful to stop short of calling for a violent response, though they infuse their messages with battle references and pledges of “no compromise, no surrender.”
“National politics has been more or less upended in the past month,” leaving the country “in a much more volatile place,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a global conflict monitoring group.
Even before the tumult of July, Doyle noted, Trump and his supporters had been pushing the idea “of a corrupted system that was trying to prevent him coming back to power at any cost.”
But there’s also a lack of coherence in the messaging in these far-right corners of the internet, as many Trump supporters’ arguments seem divided on whether he’s likely to lose in November because Democrats have once again rigged the system — or if he’s likely to win and the media is misleading the nation into believing otherwise.
Dumb as dirt and delusional. Suckers. Suckers and losers.
‘This was a coup.’ Trump primes supporters to challenge a Harris win.
Amid a tight presidential race, Donald Trump has tried to delegitimize Kamala Harris’s nomination and undermine confidence in this year’s election.
From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.
“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said.
“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Trump administration and is now among his conservative critics. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”
While some of this is “just for show,” Neumann said, Trump and his allies are also setting up the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”
Trump has long insisted that his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power, and he has weakened faith in the U.S. election system despite widespread evidence that the results can be trusted. When asked to comment for this article, Trump’s campaign responded with a statement attacking Harris and again characterizing her nomination as part of a “coup.”
When Trump first ran for president in 2016, he falsely claimed that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stole the Iowa caucuses, and he told his supporters that the general election was “absolutely being rigged” against him. After winning, he falsely said his loss in the popular vote was due to “millions of people who voted illegally.” In 2020, he baselessly claimed the influx of mail-in ballots amid the global pandemic led to widespread fraud that cost him the election, and as Congress gathered to certify the results, Trump supporters violently attacked the U.S. Capitol and tried to halt the process.
For months, Trump had boasted that he was on a glide path to victory in a rematch against Biden, and he told his supporters the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated. But he began ratcheting up his warnings about the election process when Harris began drawing massive crowds and surpassed him in several national and swing state polls, including some in which he had led Biden.
Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in a May interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
The overarching message, often pushed by Trump himself, is that the race has entered a make-or-break stage in which a shadowy Democratic apparatus is poised to steal Republican votes. While doing this, Trump has tried to deflect attacks that he is a threat to democracy by insisting that he’s the true protector of it, recently saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats “are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Through this year’s presidential campaign, Trump has portrayed himself as a victim of a Democratic power grab. He blamed his dozens of criminal charges on the Biden administration, accusing his original opponent of weaponizing the judicial system as a form of election interference.
Since Harris jumped in the race last month, Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about her integrity. He attacked her racial identity, accusing her of only recently identifying as Black, which is not true. And earlier this month, Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to manipulate a campaign rally photo to make the crowd look larger than it was. He called for her to be “disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and added: “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” In reality, Harris attracted a massive crowd.
In an Aug. 6 post on Truth Social, Trump presented a fantastical story that envisioned Biden, “whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him,” crashing this week’s Democratic National Convention to take back the nomination.
“They forced him out. It was a coup. We had a coup,” Trump said of Biden at an Aug. 9 rally in Bozeman, Mont. “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.”
Supporters at his rallies have embraced and echoed those sentiments.
In Montana, Carol Taylor, 62, said: “The people, the Democrats, are getting cheated, and they don’t realize it, because they’re not getting to vote for their candidate.”
“I think that it’s almost like a coup to get Kamala Harris in there,” said Rachelle Galinski, 55, at a Trump rally in St. Cloud, Minn.
Another St. Cloud rallygoer, 35-year-old Jose Chapa Jr., said: “The party that said they stand for democracy didn’t even let their people vote for who they wanted to vote for. It’s pretty sick.”
Replacing Biden on the ticket was within the Democratic Party’s powers. Though primary voters chose Biden, they technically elected a slate of delegates to choose their nominee. Once Biden dropped out, those delegates were free to pick a replacement, and they almost unanimously chose Harris.
Yet, conspiracy theories abound claiming the Democrats circumvented protocol to name Harris as nominee and warning they’ll do the same in hopes of defeating Trump. Experts in extremism warn that Trump’s use of terms like “coup” to describe Harris’s candidacy could rile up his hard-right supporters in ways similar to the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris’s swift rise has pierced the MAGA movement’s certainty of a win in November, they say, putting Trump’s most loyal followers on the defensive in ways that analysts say undermines faith in elections and heightens the risk of unrest.
Joe Walsh, a former GOP U.S. representative from Illinois who launched a long-shot primary challenge to Trump in 2020, said Trump’s attacks on Harris as an illegitimate candidate are resonating with his MAGA base.
“They’re latching on to this, that what the Democrats just did, that’s a coup,” Walsh said. “This is what I hear all day. That was the attack on democracy. That’s what they’re going to do to push back on the legitimate charge that Trump tried to overthrow an election four years ago. I come from MAGA world. It’s working. They believe it.”
On publicly visible message boards, pro-Trump extremists are careful to stop short of calling for a violent response, though they infuse their messages with battle references and pledges of “no compromise, no surrender.”
“National politics has been more or less upended in the past month,” leaving the country “in a much more volatile place,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a global conflict monitoring group.
Even before the tumult of July, Doyle noted, Trump and his supporters had been pushing the idea “of a corrupted system that was trying to prevent him coming back to power at any cost.”
But there’s also a lack of coherence in the messaging in these far-right corners of the internet, as many Trump supporters’ arguments seem divided on whether he’s likely to lose in November because Democrats have once again rigged the system — or if he’s likely to win and the media is misleading the nation into believing otherwise.
Going down the drain. They get rich. To end kabala Harris’s war on energy. Your energy numbers will be quadruple. Ended the largest oil reserve in the world. Saudi Arabia.
Comments
I bet his campaign team would love to hide him away. The scripts sure have flipped in a week.
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
is maga tired of winning yet?
wait, when will maga start griping about this?
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
"Remember that all of this is a strategy. The politics of outrage and insult are the last refuge of a politician who cannot defend his own plans."
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
That is partly why the magats are so convinced that the last election was "fake" because they gauge everything off of rabid rally attendance and yard signs.
I will say that I don't see any tRump signs in my hood yet. I know we are still a few months out though.
1998: Noblesville; 2003: Noblesville; 2009: EV Nashville, Chicago, Chicago
2010: St Louis, Columbus, Noblesville; 2011: EV Chicago, East Troy, East Troy
2013: London ON, Wrigley; 2014: Cincy, St Louis, Moline (NO CODE)
2016: Lexington, Wrigley #1; 2018: Wrigley, Wrigley, Boston, Boston
2020: Oakland, Oakland: 2021: EV Ohana, Ohana, Ohana, Ohana
2022: Oakland, Oakland, Nashville, Louisville; 2023: Chicago, Chicago, Noblesville
2024: Noblesville, Wrigley, Wrigley, Ohana, Ohana
Trump congratulates Putin over deal that brought Evan Gershkovich home
Trump also seemed to lash out at the deal after it was trumpeted Thursday by President Biden and Vice President Harris, who met the freed prisoners in an emotional ceremony.
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Donald Trump loses 3rd bid to remove Judge Juan Merchan from hush money case
Merchan called the arguments a "repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims."
Trump's hush money trial: Biggest takeaways
An exasperated Judge Juan Merchan, in a scathing order released Wednesday morning, denied former President Donald Trump's third attempt to kick the judge off his New York criminal hush money case based on an alleged conflict of interest.
"Stated plainly, Defendant's arguments are nothing more than a repetition of stale and unsubstantiated claims," Merchan wrote in the three-page order.
Earlier this month, Trump's lawyers attempted to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris' position as the Democratic nominee for president created a conflict of interest for Merchan based on the judge's daughter's work as a political consultant, rehashing an argument that Merchan denied twice in the past.
continues.....
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Trump’s new absurdity: ‘Kamala price hikes’ cost a typical family $28,000
Trump cites “government” numbers, but economists say the math makes no sense.
“Did you know the Kamala price hikes have cost the average American family $28,000?”
— Donald Trump, in a TikTok video, Aug. 15
As a result of Kamala’s inflation price hikes, they’ve cost the typical household a total of $28,000. These are numbers coming from the government. They are not coming from me.”
— Trump, media event in Bedminster, N.J., Aug. 15
Former president Donald Trump rarely updates his political rhetoric — he’s using many of the same lines against Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 that he used against Joe Biden in 2020 — so it’s always news when a fresh talking point emerges.
In recent days, Trump has claimed that the “average American family” or the “typical household” has suffered a hike in spending of $28,000 under the Biden presidency.
The Trump campaign did not respond to queries about how this was calculated. We think we may have figured it out. It makes little sense.
The Facts
In April 2023, we fact-checked a claim by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) that “families have lost the equivalent of $7,400 worth of income.” That statement came via a dubious statistic generated by E.J. Antoni, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
Other economists were skeptical of Antoni’s math — a combination of two calculations involving purchasing and borrowing costs — and pointed to more reliable metrics, such as real disposable personal income per capita. Many such statistics are affected by the pandemic, adding to the complexity. But real disposable income per capital now is up about $3,000 since March 2020, just before temporary covid relief payments start showing up in the data and skew it for more than a year.
Now, just 16 months later, as inflation is easing, Trump suddenly touts a figure almost four times McCarthy’s number. Trump claimed these were “government numbers,” but economists we contacted scratched their heads about where this could have come from.
One economist suggested that Trump might have been taking total personal consumer expendituresand dividing by total households. But that doesn’t exactly match $28,000, and personal consumer expenditures includes items (stuff the government buys for people like health care, for example) that would exaggerate the impact.
In any case, the experts said Trump is ignoring income gains that have accompanied the rise in prices, putting the finances of many Americans in the net positive territory.
Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, for instance, provided a spreadsheet of data on real personal income less transfer payments from the government per capita. “It has increased 4.2 percent between January 2021 and June 2024,” he said in an email. “A little more than one percent per annum. A solid performance.”
Eventually, we found one possible source for Trump’s figure. In a July blog post, Antoni offered an updated estimate of his statistic — that a typical family lost “about $8,000” in income over the last 3½ years, since Biden took office.
That’s still significantly lower than Trump’s $28,000 in the same time period. But the $28,000 number does appear in Antoni’s post.
Antoni focused on a July survey from Bankrate.com that found the average American said they needed an annual income of $186,000 to live comfortably.
“That’s a shocking figure — more than twice what the average full-time worker earns,” Antoni wrote. “Even in a household with two parents pulling in the average full-time salary, they’d still be about $28,000 short annually.”
Could that be the source of the $28,000 figure? It seems absurd, but after nine years of fact-checking Trump we’ve uncovered many slapdash figures. We sent Antoni’s blog post to a Trump campaign spokesman, asking if this was the source of Trump’s number, and did not get a response. Antoni also did not respond to a request for comment.
Oddly, when Bankrate.com conducted this same survey in 2023, Americans said they needed $233,000 a year to be financially secure. So in one year, the surveys indicated a $47,000 improvement — perhaps a sign that as inflation eased, Americans felt less stressed about their finances. A representative for Bankrate.com did not respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year the Treasury Department released a report that looked at what had happened to the purchasing power of American households since 2019, just before the pandemic. “As of the end of 2023, the median American worker could afford the same goods and services as they did in 2019, with an additional $1,400 to spend or save per year,” the report said.
That’s because, overall, wages have increased more than price inflation.
The Pinocchio Test
It’s never a good sign when a presidential campaign refuses to explain the math behind a new talking point. But it would be par for the course for Trump to misunderstand a random statistic in a blog post and try to twist it for political purposes. In any case, he’s ignoring the gains in income that have exceeded price inflation.
Four Pinocchios
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‘This was a coup.’ Trump primes supporters to challenge a Harris win.
Amid a tight presidential race, Donald Trump has tried to delegitimize Kamala Harris’s nomination and undermine confidence in this year’s election.
From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris emerged as the surprise Democratic presidential nominee, former president Donald Trump began arguing that she was anointed through a “coup” rather than chosen by primary voters. After barely mentioning election integrity at the Republican convention in July, Trump is now casting the upcoming election as “rigged” against him and baselessly labeling any hurdle in his path as election interference.
“This was an overthrow of a president. This was an overthrow,” Trump said at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Saturday, referring to Harris replacing Biden on the ticket. He later added: “They deposed a president. It was a coup of a president. This was a coup.”
Trump’s efforts to undermine confidence in this year’s election are reminiscent of the tactics he used in the 2020 campaign and indicate how he could again seek to delegitimize the results if he loses, setting the stage for another combustible fight over the presidency, election and national security experts said.
“This is Donald Trump’s playbook: ‘There’s a deep state, they’re all out to get me,’” said Elizabeth Neumann, who served as a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Trump administration and is now among his conservative critics. “Even here — as he’s going to have to face a stronger, harder candidate to defeat — his default is, ‘Well, this couldn’t possibly be legal. This is a coup. This is wrong,’ even though there are no facts to back that up.”
While some of this is “just for show,” Neumann said, Trump and his allies are also setting up the “next version of ‘Stop the Steal.’”
Trump has long insisted that his political failures are the result of some malevolent force trying to keep him out of power, and he has weakened faith in the U.S. election system despite widespread evidence that the results can be trusted. When asked to comment for this article, Trump’s campaign responded with a statement attacking Harris and again characterizing her nomination as part of a “coup.”
For months, Trump had boasted that he was on a glide path to victory in a rematch against Biden, and he told his supporters the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated. But he began ratcheting up his warnings about the election process when Harris began drawing massive crowds and surpassed him in several national and swing state polls, including some in which he had led Biden.
Now Trump has refused to say that he will accept the outcome of the election if he loses.
“If everything’s honest, I’ll gladly accept the results. I don’t change on that,” Trump said in a May interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”
The overarching message, often pushed by Trump himself, is that the race has entered a make-or-break stage in which a shadowy Democratic apparatus is poised to steal Republican votes. While doing this, Trump has tried to deflect attacks that he is a threat to democracy by insisting that he’s the true protector of it, recently saying he “took a bullet for democracy” and that Democrats “are the real THREAT TO DEMOCRACY.”
Through this year’s presidential campaign, Trump has portrayed himself as a victim of a Democratic power grab. He blamed his dozens of criminal charges on the Biden administration, accusing his original opponent of weaponizing the judicial system as a form of election interference.
Since Harris jumped in the race last month, Trump has repeatedly sought to sow doubts about her integrity. He attacked her racial identity, accusing her of only recently identifying as Black, which is not true. And earlier this month, Trump falsely accused Harris of using artificial intelligence to manipulate a campaign rally photo to make the crowd look larger than it was. He called for her to be “disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE” and added: “Anyone who does that will cheat at ANYTHING!” In reality, Harris attracted a massive crowd.
In an Aug. 6 post on Truth Social, Trump presented a fantastical story that envisioned Biden, “whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him,” crashing this week’s Democratic National Convention to take back the nomination.
“They forced him out. It was a coup. We had a coup,” Trump said of Biden at an Aug. 9 rally in Bozeman, Mont. “That was the first coup of the history of our country, and it was very successful.”
Supporters at his rallies have embraced and echoed those sentiments.
In Montana, Carol Taylor, 62, said: “The people, the Democrats, are getting cheated, and they don’t realize it, because they’re not getting to vote for their candidate.”
“I think that it’s almost like a coup to get Kamala Harris in there,” said Rachelle Galinski, 55, at a Trump rally in St. Cloud, Minn.
Another St. Cloud rallygoer, 35-year-old Jose Chapa Jr., said: “The party that said they stand for democracy didn’t even let their people vote for who they wanted to vote for. It’s pretty sick.”
Replacing Biden on the ticket was within the Democratic Party’s powers. Though primary voters chose Biden, they technically elected a slate of delegates to choose their nominee. Once Biden dropped out, those delegates were free to pick a replacement, and they almost unanimously chose Harris.
Yet, conspiracy theories abound claiming the Democrats circumvented protocol to name Harris as nominee and warning they’ll do the same in hopes of defeating Trump. Experts in extremism warn that Trump’s use of terms like “coup” to describe Harris’s candidacy could rile up his hard-right supporters in ways similar to the lead-up to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Harris’s swift rise has pierced the MAGA movement’s certainty of a win in November, they say, putting Trump’s most loyal followers on the defensive in ways that analysts say undermines faith in elections and heightens the risk of unrest.
Joe Walsh, a former GOP U.S. representative from Illinois who launched a long-shot primary challenge to Trump in 2020, said Trump’s attacks on Harris as an illegitimate candidate are resonating with his MAGA base.
“They’re latching on to this, that what the Democrats just did, that’s a coup,” Walsh said. “This is what I hear all day. That was the attack on democracy. That’s what they’re going to do to push back on the legitimate charge that Trump tried to overthrow an election four years ago. I come from MAGA world. It’s working. They believe it.”
On publicly visible message boards, pro-Trump extremists are careful to stop short of calling for a violent response, though they infuse their messages with battle references and pledges of “no compromise, no surrender.”
“National politics has been more or less upended in the past month,” leaving the country “in a much more volatile place,” said Kieran Doyle, North America research manager for Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, a global conflict monitoring group.
Even before the tumult of July, Doyle noted, Trump and his supporters had been pushing the idea “of a corrupted system that was trying to prevent him coming back to power at any cost.”
But there’s also a lack of coherence in the messaging in these far-right corners of the internet, as many Trump supporters’ arguments seem divided on whether he’s likely to lose in November because Democrats have once again rigged the system — or if he’s likely to win and the media is misleading the nation into believing otherwise.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/19/trump-stolen-election-coup-overthrow/
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
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Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©
Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.
Brilliantati©