you should ask stinky trump if he believes that the election in russia is rigged ... lol
Trump 2024
- Thread starter wildchild
- Start date
you should ask stinky trump if he believes that the election in russia is rigged ... lol
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/03/14/opinions/trump-dictators-putin-xi-erdogan-ben-ghiat/index.html
Opinion: Trump’s praise of dictators tells us all we need to know
Opinion by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
4 minute read
Published 6:52 PM EDT, Thu March 14, 2024
Editor’s Note: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University. She is author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” and she publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter about threats to democracy. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN —
Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Adolf Hitler, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Saddam Hussein: What do they have in common? All of these authoritarians have reportedly drawn praise from former US president — and now GOP presidential nominee — Donald Trump, who has promised Americans that he, too, will be a dictator “on Day One” of his time in office.
This is not just bluster. As a new book by CNN anchor and national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reminds us, Trump allegedly believes that even the most murderous dictators, such as Hitler, did good things. According to one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, Trump had Hitler in mind as an example of leadership to emulate during his time in the White House, including telling the military what to do as commander in chief.
Given the stakes for our democracy in the 2024 election, it’s worth considering why Trump continually praises dictators and who he is trying to reach with this kind of talk. Some of it is no doubt Trump airing his fantasies of the kind of authority he could exert as president. He praises Hitler, Chinese leader Xi, Russian President Putin and others because of their absolute power, not in spite of it. He repeats these leaders’ cult of personality propaganda in presenting them as so strong and feared that it is useless to resist them.
Thus Xi, in Trump’s telling, is “strong like granite. He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron hand.” And Putin is a “genius” for “taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking in,” Trump declared days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as though the fierce Ukrainian resistance did not exist.
Foreign autocrats are surely the targets of such compliments, especially those whom Trump sees as useful to his political or personal fortunes. The most obvious case is Russia, given Kremlin interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And the stream of adulation directed at Xi is likely not unrelated to the benefits Trump received from “doing services,” as he put it, for the Chinese government during his presidency. Trump-owned properties took in over $5 million from Chinese government-allied entities, per House Democrats.
But Americans are the most important audience for the stream of praise he directs to autocrats. Trump’s repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership should be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy. That is likely why he is explicitly making strongman rule his brand, telling Americans it is in their interest to allow him to save them from the supposed chaos and crime of democracy and give them an orderly authoritarian world under his control.
Propaganda is not just about getting people to believe this or that lie – say, that he won the 2020 election – but changing the way people think and feel and the associations they make when they hear certain words. Think of how Hitler’s relentless speeches and writings got Germans to associate “Jew” with disease and depravity to the point of making him popular for ostensibly saving Germany by persecuting Jews.
This is what Trump is doing with authoritarians. Trump uses his rallies and other public occasions to sell strongman rule to his followers, so Americans begin to see autocrats as positive and glamorous figures (“There’s nobody in Hollywood that could play the role of President Xi,” he gushed at a 2023 town hall in Iowa) who are doing good for their people and the world.
If Trump mentions these autocrats’ repression at all, it is to justify it, as when he lauded former Iraqi dictator Hussein in 2016 for being “good” at killing terrorists, or praised Turkish president Erdogan, introducing him in 2017 as “a friend of mine” who is “getting very high marks” for governing “very, very strongly.” At the time of this remark, Turkey was in a state of emergency, including the arrests of over 47,000 Turks, many of them civilians, as part of a government crackdown after the 2016 military coup against him.
Trump even presents leaders who are heads of failing rogue states, like North Korea’s Kim, as inspirational. “We fell in love,” said Trump of his relationship with Kim, whose state has reportedly earned 50% of its income from cybercrime in recent years.
American voters should take Trump’s enthusiasm for autocrats seriously. He is previewing the kind of leadership he will pursue if he returns to the White House and doing his best to re-educate Americans to tolerate — or worse, even desire — an approach to governance that, wherever it has unfolded, has created despair and division – and often placed nations on a path to destruction, as with Germany under Hitler’s guide.
Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, autocrats are united in their disregard for human rights and human dignity and their attempt to persuade people that it is in their interests to support governments that take their rights away. This seems to be Trump’s project as well. The former president may be telling us that he will only be a dictator for one day, but no authoritarian has ever relinquished power once he gains it and the strongmen he exalts have all been in power for many years.
Opinion: Trump’s praise of dictators tells us all we need to know
Opinion by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
4 minute read
Published 6:52 PM EDT, Thu March 14, 2024
Editor’s Note: Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history at New York University. She is author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” and she publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter about threats to democracy. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN —
Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Viktor Orban, Adolf Hitler, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Saddam Hussein: What do they have in common? All of these authoritarians have reportedly drawn praise from former US president — and now GOP presidential nominee — Donald Trump, who has promised Americans that he, too, will be a dictator “on Day One” of his time in office.
This is not just bluster. As a new book by CNN anchor and national security correspondent Jim Sciutto reminds us, Trump allegedly believes that even the most murderous dictators, such as Hitler, did good things. According to one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, Trump had Hitler in mind as an example of leadership to emulate during his time in the White House, including telling the military what to do as commander in chief.
Given the stakes for our democracy in the 2024 election, it’s worth considering why Trump continually praises dictators and who he is trying to reach with this kind of talk. Some of it is no doubt Trump airing his fantasies of the kind of authority he could exert as president. He praises Hitler, Chinese leader Xi, Russian President Putin and others because of their absolute power, not in spite of it. He repeats these leaders’ cult of personality propaganda in presenting them as so strong and feared that it is useless to resist them.
Thus Xi, in Trump’s telling, is “strong like granite. He runs 1.4 billion people with an iron hand.” And Putin is a “genius” for “taking over a country – really a vast, vast location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking in,” Trump declared days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as though the fierce Ukrainian resistance did not exist.
Foreign autocrats are surely the targets of such compliments, especially those whom Trump sees as useful to his political or personal fortunes. The most obvious case is Russia, given Kremlin interference in the 2016 and 2020 elections. And the stream of adulation directed at Xi is likely not unrelated to the benefits Trump received from “doing services,” as he put it, for the Chinese government during his presidency. Trump-owned properties took in over $5 million from Chinese government-allied entities, per House Democrats.
But Americans are the most important audience for the stream of praise he directs to autocrats. Trump’s repeated elevation of dictators as models of leadership should be understood as part of a re-education strategy: conditioning Americans to see authoritarianism as a superior form of government to democracy. That is likely why he is explicitly making strongman rule his brand, telling Americans it is in their interest to allow him to save them from the supposed chaos and crime of democracy and give them an orderly authoritarian world under his control.
Propaganda is not just about getting people to believe this or that lie – say, that he won the 2020 election – but changing the way people think and feel and the associations they make when they hear certain words. Think of how Hitler’s relentless speeches and writings got Germans to associate “Jew” with disease and depravity to the point of making him popular for ostensibly saving Germany by persecuting Jews.
This is what Trump is doing with authoritarians. Trump uses his rallies and other public occasions to sell strongman rule to his followers, so Americans begin to see autocrats as positive and glamorous figures (“There’s nobody in Hollywood that could play the role of President Xi,” he gushed at a 2023 town hall in Iowa) who are doing good for their people and the world.
If Trump mentions these autocrats’ repression at all, it is to justify it, as when he lauded former Iraqi dictator Hussein in 2016 for being “good” at killing terrorists, or praised Turkish president Erdogan, introducing him in 2017 as “a friend of mine” who is “getting very high marks” for governing “very, very strongly.” At the time of this remark, Turkey was in a state of emergency, including the arrests of over 47,000 Turks, many of them civilians, as part of a government crackdown after the 2016 military coup against him.
Trump even presents leaders who are heads of failing rogue states, like North Korea’s Kim, as inspirational. “We fell in love,” said Trump of his relationship with Kim, whose state has reportedly earned 50% of its income from cybercrime in recent years.
American voters should take Trump’s enthusiasm for autocrats seriously. He is previewing the kind of leadership he will pursue if he returns to the White House and doing his best to re-educate Americans to tolerate — or worse, even desire — an approach to governance that, wherever it has unfolded, has created despair and division – and often placed nations on a path to destruction, as with Germany under Hitler’s guide.
Wherever they fall on the political spectrum, autocrats are united in their disregard for human rights and human dignity and their attempt to persuade people that it is in their interests to support governments that take their rights away. This seems to be Trump’s project as well. The former president may be telling us that he will only be a dictator for one day, but no authoritarian has ever relinquished power once he gains it and the strongmen he exalts have all been in power for many years.
Most Americans don't like Trump and know everything they need to know about him.Most Americans think Trump was a bad President.
Trump isn't going to win because Americans like him or thought he was a good President.Trump is going to win because more Americans dislike Biden more than they dislike Trump and more Americans think Biden is an even worse President than Trump.
Mike Pence refuses to endorse your Messiah and Dick Cheney said this about Trump.
"He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He's a coward, a real man wouldn't lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it and deep down, I think most Republicans know it."
'Thank you Mike Pence': Conservatives celebrate as ex-VP refuses to endorse Trump
Former Vice President Mike Pence spurred celebrations Friday when he announced on Fox News he would not be endorsing Donald Trump's bid to regain the White House.
"It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year," Pence said. "There are profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues, and not just our difference on my constitutional duties that I exercised on January the 6th."
"Only FOUR of Trump’s 44 former Cabinet officials have endorsed him," noted former prosecutor Ron Filipkowski. "His VP won’t endorse him. It’s insane for any president to even have anything close to 44 Cabinet officials in one term. He['s] incompetent, insane, unfit, & his own former officials know that better than anyone."
Pence was not the only former conservative vice president to urge voters away from Trump. Moments after Pence made his announcement, the political group Republicans Against Trump released a video featuring former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump," Cheney said.
"He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters rejected him. He's a coward, a real man wouldn't lie to his supporters. He lost his election and he lost big. I know it, he knows it and deep down, I think most Republicans know it."
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He wont endorse Trump , yet....but be sure he will vote for him
As expected, Trump campaign's new fund-sharing agreement with the RNC --- he gets it all for legal expenses, and if there's any left the RNC gets it. Goodbye, downballot candidates.
Trump’s invite to major donors prioritizes the committee paying his legal bills over the RNC
https://apnews.com/article/trump-campaign-fundraising-rnc-c0e8f1e7b59f70c5237e13a3462e5790
Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee directs donations to his campaign and a political action committee that pays the former president’s legal bills before the RNC gets a cut, according to a fundraising invitation obtained by The Associated Press.
The unorthodox diversion of funds to the Save America PAC makes it more likely that Republican donors could see their money go to Trump’s lawyers, who have received at least $76 million over the last two years to defend him against four felony indictments and multiple civil cases. Some Republicans are already troubled that Trump’s takeover of the RNC could shortchange the cash-strapped party.
Trump has invited high-dollar donors to Palm Beach, Florida, for an April 6 fundraiser that comes as his fundraising is well behind President Joe Biden and national Democrats. The invitation’s fine print says donations to the Trump 47 Committee will first be used to give the maximum amount allowed under federal law to Trump’s campaign. Anything left over from the donation next goes toward a maximum contribution to Save America, and then anything left from there goes to the RNC and then to state political parties.
Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington, said that is a break from fundraising norms. Usually, Noti said, candidates prioritize raising cash that can be spent directly on campaign activity. Save America, on the other hand, is structured as a “leadership PAC” and thus barred from spending directly on Trump’s own campaign activities. Legal spending made up 85% of Save America’s total operating expenses during the first two months of this year, roughly the same as 2023, when such expenses were about 89%. It has spent $8.5 million on legal fees so far this year.
“The reason most candidates don’t do this is because the hardest money to raise is money that can be spent directly on the campaign,” said Noti, a former staff attorney for the Federal Election Commission. “No other candidate has used a leadership PAC the way the Trump campaign has.”
(Much more at above url)
Trump’s invite to major donors prioritizes the committee paying his legal bills over the RNC
https://apnews.com/article/trump-campaign-fundraising-rnc-c0e8f1e7b59f70c5237e13a3462e5790
Donald Trump’s new joint fundraising agreement with the Republican National Committee directs donations to his campaign and a political action committee that pays the former president’s legal bills before the RNC gets a cut, according to a fundraising invitation obtained by The Associated Press.
The unorthodox diversion of funds to the Save America PAC makes it more likely that Republican donors could see their money go to Trump’s lawyers, who have received at least $76 million over the last two years to defend him against four felony indictments and multiple civil cases. Some Republicans are already troubled that Trump’s takeover of the RNC could shortchange the cash-strapped party.
Trump has invited high-dollar donors to Palm Beach, Florida, for an April 6 fundraiser that comes as his fundraising is well behind President Joe Biden and national Democrats. The invitation’s fine print says donations to the Trump 47 Committee will first be used to give the maximum amount allowed under federal law to Trump’s campaign. Anything left over from the donation next goes toward a maximum contribution to Save America, and then anything left from there goes to the RNC and then to state political parties.
Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington, said that is a break from fundraising norms. Usually, Noti said, candidates prioritize raising cash that can be spent directly on campaign activity. Save America, on the other hand, is structured as a “leadership PAC” and thus barred from spending directly on Trump’s own campaign activities. Legal spending made up 85% of Save America’s total operating expenses during the first two months of this year, roughly the same as 2023, when such expenses were about 89%. It has spent $8.5 million on legal fees so far this year.
“The reason most candidates don’t do this is because the hardest money to raise is money that can be spent directly on the campaign,” said Noti, a former staff attorney for the Federal Election Commission. “No other candidate has used a leadership PAC the way the Trump campaign has.”
(Much more at above url)
And in the meanwhile this is how these Republican lawmakers are helping to Make America Great Again.
Marjorie Taylor Greene moves to oust Speaker Mike Johnson
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) threw the House of Representatives into chaos on Friday when she filed a motion to vacate the chair of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
Greene's petition marks the second time in less than a year that a House Republican has moved to oust their own speaker after Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) last year filed a motion to vacate that led to the downfall of former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA).