#Trump is unfit for office

[tomorrowusa]

There is a lot of emphasis in the news media on Biden's age while almost nothing about Trump's fitness. This needs to change and we should be more active about holding news organizations to account.

In a four day period in September, the cable news stations mentioned Biden’s age 193 times while Trump’s age was mentioned just 56 times. (MediaMatters.org on September 29, 2023.) After this one sided coverage, these same media outlets then polled the voters about Biden’s age and found (surprise!) that voters are more concerned about Biden’s age than Trump’s age. It’s garbage in and garbage out.

There's just a 3.5 year difference between Biden and Trump. But Trump is not the fitter of the two. Being an epic blowhard and blabbermouth is not a measure of fitness.

After Biden concluded his debt ceiling deal with McCarthy in June, the extremist so-called House “Freedom” Caucus members complained that Biden “outsmarted” McCarthy in the negotiations. The House GOP’s most extreme members hate Biden and have zero incentive to tell the truth about Biden’s good state of health.

So even the most extreme Republicans had to admit that they were outfoxed by Biden.

On October 2, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) took to the floor of the House to denounce the deal that funded the government for forty five days Gaetz said: “It is going to be difficult for my Republican friends to keep calling President Biden feeble while he continues to take Speaker McCarthy’s lunch money in every negotiation.”

As for Trump's health, mental health in particular, the evidence of his debility is on full display.

Meanwhile, the mainstream press has largely ignored and downplayed Trump’s declining mental condition and increasing tendency to threaten violence. Probably the only mainstream media piece that accurately described the respective health of Biden and Trump was in the New York Times on June 4, 2023. The pertinent excerpts are as follows: “While in office, Mr. Trump generated concerns about his mental acuity and physical condition. He did not exercise, his diet leaned heavily on cheeseburgers and steak and he officially tipped the scales at 244 pounds, a weight formally deemed obese for his height. After complaining that he was overscheduled with morning meetings, Mr. Trump stopped showing up at the Oval Office until 11 or 11:30 a.m. each day, staying in the residence to watch television, make phone calls or send out incendiary tweets. During an appearance at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he had trouble lifting a glass of water and seemed to have trouble making his way down a modest ramp. Most striking was Mr. Trump’s cognitive performance. He was erratic and tended to ramble; experts have found that he had grown less articulate and that his vocabulary had shrunk since his younger days. Aides said privately that Mr. Trump had trouble processing information and distinguishing fact from fiction. His second chief of staff, John F. Kelly, bought a book analyzing Mr. Trump’s psychological health to understand him better, and several cabinet secretaries concerned that he might be mentally unfit discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him.”

He's gotten worse rather than better since leaving office.

These aren’t isolated statements. The highlights (or lowlights) of Trump’s deteriorating condition are as follows. Trump forgot who is currently president, and claimed “the Obama administration” recorded the length of his “border wall.” He even claimed **Jeb Bush** invaded Afghanistan and Iraq! Trump appeared confused when he said Jeb Bush was president during the Iraq War. “You know he was a mili — he got us into the, uh, he got us into the Middle East … Right?” In September, Trump mixed up Biden and Obama, and claimed Biden might start World War TWO. Trump even said you need a government photo ID to buy a loaf of bread. At the same time, Trump’s remarks have taken a dark turn and he has repeatedly threatened violence. Trump suggested that General Mark Milley should be executed. If anybody else had said that, they would be getting a visit from the FBI. The fact that this isn’t being treated as major front-page news is astonishing to me.

Trump makes threats to media moguls and they go easy on reporting his delirium.

The run away front runner for the GOP presidential nomination said Comcast, the owner of NBC and MSNBC, “should be investigated for its ‘Country Threatening Treason’” and promised to do so should he be re-elected president next year. Why does the press continue to cover up Trump’s poor health when he has promised to go after them? How can they be so stupid? It’s pretty wild that, of the two leading presidential candidates, the guy found liable for rape and who is facing ninety one criminal indictments isn’t the one who is facing calls to step aside for someone else to run. The mainstream media has lost all sense of scale and proportion. The media fixation with Biden as opposed to this clearly impaired guy is journalistic malpractice.

Psychologist Mary Trump, Donald's niece, called her uncle a "dangerous presence" on Australia's ABC earlier this year. She also said he was essentially "an insecure little boy who seeks attention".

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Ask your news providers why they are seldom mentioning Trump's mental health in their coverage. They should not be normalizing his threats against people and his bizarre erratic comments.

#donald trump #trump's deteriorating mental health #trump is unfit for office #mary trump #republicans #2024 gop presidential nomination #election 2024

[suzilight]

25 of the world’s greatest Civil War legal scholars have banded together and wrote to the United States Supreme Court that the drafters of the 14th Amendment in 1868 would be SHOCKED that Trump was not INSTANTLY DISQUALIFIED and banned from the ballot by his actions on January 6th.

VIDEO Michael Popok of Legal AF explains their key historical arguments and why they should defeat Trump’s half baked theories that a president can’t be disqualified without an act of congress.

READ THE BRIEF SENT TO US SUPREME COURT

2/1/24 This gives me hope. Thank you

I'm sharing it everywhere. It's the most positive thing I've seen in recent years.

14th Amendment, Section 3 reads:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

#good news #14th amendment #us constitution #us supreme court #amicus brief #25 historians #Trump is unfit for office #take Trump off the ballot #insurrection #disqualified

[scottguy]

"Biden will start WWII"

(Yes, he said, "two" that's not a typo.)

Projection in its most perfect form.

My guess is that it's also a 'Freudian slip' (accidetally saying aloud what you think subconsciously) since Trump essentially wants to be America's Hitler.

#Trump is a Nazi #trump is dangerous #trump is senile #trump is unfit for office #Youtube

[not-safe-for-democracy]

#trump #donald trump #rupert murdoch #ny post #wsj #editorials #unfit for office

[know-news-is-good-news]

Donny Boy was NEVER fit for political office and without the influence provided by Putin NEVER would have been able to sit-in for Putin in 2016 ! ! It wasn't Donny Boy running the country, it was Putin ! !

#Putin #Trump #Donny #Boy #Liar #unfit #for #any #office #anywhere #Only #wanted #by

[trmpt]

Joyce Vance

Civil Discourse

#trump #trump insurrection #trump’s big lie #unfit for any office

[sentinelleblr]

Trump's cognitive impairment worsens.

#trump #unfit for office

[originalleftist]

We in the US have an extraordinary opportunity this November- to vote in a presidential election where we know from experience how both candidates perform in that office. And it is frankly appalling that having lived through four years of Trump, that ANYONE could consider him a preferable choice. Have you forgotten the freezer trucks and mass graves full of covid dead? Have you forgotten Trump telling us to drink bleach? Have you forgotten the constant scandals, criminality, and public derangement? Have you forgotten Charlottesville? Have you forgotten secret police, and troops deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters so he could do a fucking photo op? Have you forgotten the kids in cages? Have you forgotten January 6th? You don't have to think that Biden's a saint. But just remember, and recognize that his opponent is probably the most unfit person to ever hold or seek that office. My God, why is this even a choice?

#US #Politics #Election #2024 #Trump #Biden #Vote #Vote Blue

[qqueenofhades]

Do you have any idea why people are so fixated on Biden’s age but not Trumps? I know he’s 81, but Trump isn’t exactly far behind at 77: in fact he’s the second oldest. This keeps stumping me: it’s not a big gap in age

There are a few reasons for this, yes. As you might imagine, all of them are very stupid.

First and most critically is the way Trump's violent extremism has been completely neutered, mainlined, and normalized by the mainstream media. That's why we still have said media largely treating this as a normal presidential election, instead of that of a successful incumbent against literally the most deranged, unfit, treasonous, criminally and civilly liable, already-led-an-attempted-coup, deep-in-hock-to-Russia, adjudicated rapist, 91-felony-counts-indicted career cheater, grifter, and failed businessman who nonetheless appeals to the still-very-powerful isolationist, racist, white supremacist, and Christian nationalist elements in this country. Crucially, he also appeals to the billionaire class that owns the media and who will benefit from Trumpian tax, economic, and labor policies (especially now that Biden used the SOTU to once more call for a minimum 25% corporate/billionaire tax rate). The media also openly wants Trump back in office, as all the shitass insane things he did (and will do) are good for ratings, and allows them to act like the Principled Truth Tellers, instead of shilling so hard for a greasy orange fascist that we may well lose our 250+ year old democratic republic if he, God forbid, is elected again. Profit is more, well, profitable than truthful reporting, so the media has been completely disincentivized to cover this in any accurate way. We presume they will all wake up with shocked Pikachu faces when Trump packs them off to concentration camps with everyone else he hates, as he has openly promised to do.

Because we're also starting from an underlying premise that everything is the Democrats' fault, this means the party should be blamed for running said successful incumbent for reelection, even if he has low poll numbers which have in fact largely been produced by the media's relentlessly stupid and dishonest coverage. I was reading an article in the AP today about how 15 major student/youth groups have endorsed Biden and plan to work for his reelection; even so, the author could.not.stop going on and on about how Zomgz Old Biden was and how supposedly most Americans thought he was mentally unfit for the job (which is a straight-up lie produced by the endless "Zomgz Biden Old!!!!" handwringing have been subjected to without end. Weird how that works). That is also why we have all those idiotic "Biden should step down!!!" opinion pieces by Very Smart Pundits, notwithstanding the fact that a) it would be completely insane, b) it would be completely insane, and c) somehow nobody seems to think that hey, maybe the Republicans shouldn't nominate an openly seditionist generally god-awful fascist shitweasel who has already been the worst thing to happen to American politics in the twenty-first century (I'd say also the twentieth century, but unfortunately that was when we had Reagan).

In other words, Trump is just taken as a given, while the media spends all its time attacking Biden, calling on Biden to step down, amplifying "concerns" about Biden's age, producing idiotic narratives about Biden, distorting or ignoring the things Biden has done, and then writing concern-troll navel-gazing pieces earnestly wondering why people don't like Biden. (Apparently people's opinion of Biden drastically improves when they learn what he's actually accomplished, but the relentless parade of lies somehow makes it difficult for them to learn what those actually are. Again, weird.) Likewise the endless coverage we get of Biden's smallest slips or stumbles, while the media resolutely ignores Trump's full-on recent descent into absolute raving dementia. Hello, double standards!

This is also fueled by a heaping helping of racism and misogyny, because if God forbid Biden does die in office, what happens? The vice president takes over! We have a clear and constitutionally established precedent for this that has happened many times before! Except, oh no scary!!!, Biden's vice president is a brown woman, and that means SHE WOULD BE IN CHARGE!!!! TERRIFYING!!! So all the scaremongering around Biden's age, aside from being generally dishonest and stupid, has as its implicit message that sure, maybe you're fine voting for an old white man, but are you really comfortable doing that if it means a brown woman might also have the chance to be president?? I DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD BE!!!!!

Anyway, yes. It's a complete straw man argument, it's fueled by bad faith and stupidity, and as with most things in the current American media environment, it's geared toward helping Trump win. Because you know. Something something BUT HER EEEEEEEEEEEEMAILS BUT BIDEN WAS OOOOOOOOOOOOLD.

#anonymous #ask #politics for ts

[wilwheaton]

Like many of you, I find it hard to wrap my head around the notion that MAGA primary voters are so sheltered from reality by the right-wing media propaganda machine that they would vote for a man accused of trying to overthrow the government and who got civilly adjudicated as a liar and sexual assaulter in the E. Jean Carroll case. Well, if they stuck with him after Jan. 6, 2021, I suppose the slew of indictments that follow aren’t likely to matter to them. Even if he racked up more indictments, these would simply be proof of elites’ vendetta against Trump! Sadly, millions will vote for him even if they acknowledge that he violated the Constitution and betrayed his office. For them, “I’m in it for the tax cuts” or “But the Great Replacement” provide sufficient justification for electing a dangerous, vengeful and utterly unfit candidate. Others afflicted with right-wing-media-induced delusion will go to their graves convinced Trump is a victim. Democracy remains at risk when tens of millions of people willfully abet an unhinged authoritarian’s return to power.

Republican denial

#fuck trump #fuck maga #republicans are domestic terrorists

[soberscientistlife]

Trump is unfit for office and it's hard to be President without a security clearance

#vote blue #vote democrat #vote biden #fuck trump

[tomorrowusa]

« I meet frequently with the president, and every single time I meet with him, he is just fine. How people interpret that is up to them.

But I engage with him frequently and — alert, sound, does his homework, reads the papers, reads all the read-ahead material. And he's very, very engaging in issues of very serious matters of war and peace and life and death.

So if the American people are worried about an individual who is, you know, someone who's making decisions of war and peace and has access to, you know, makes the decisions of nuclear weapons and that sort of thing, I think they can rest easy. »

— Gen. Mark Milley, retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff commenting on President Biden on 60 Minutes.

By contrast, Gen. Milley, a Trump appointee, publicly implied that Trump was a "wannabe dictator".

#mark milley #joe biden #donald trump #trump is a wannabe dictator #trump is unfit for office #trump is a danger to national security #election 2024

[liberalsarecool]

Mental decline + multiple court cases = loser

They are all losers.

These five turds can't mention how unfit Trump is for office because they can't admit the rotten state of the Republican Party.

[scottguy]

Trump is mentally unstable, senile, paranoid, and has a long history of rampant drug use. Check his White House pharmacy logs.

He has already tried to end democracy and will be successful if given a 2nd chance.

He has a long history of crimes and treason.

This is the end of the discussion over which candidate is more "fit" for office Trump versus Biden.

#trump is unqualified for office #trump uses drugs #trump is a traitor #trump will all Russia to start WWIII #trump is massively unfit for office - period

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jim Carroll at The Hot Screen, via Flux:

The felony conviction of Donald Trump on all 34 counts related to his hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels shows that the American justice system is capable of imposing meaningful sanctions on the lawless former president — if a criminal case actually manages to run its course. The verdict came despite a ceaseless barrage of propaganda from Trump and the Republican Party, including threats against the presiding judge, so that this outcome was hardly certain. Against significant odds, accountability has come for Trump, with the potential to unsettle what has been a neck-and-neck presidential race, and cause more Americans to grasp Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. The former president’s felony status is disqualifying, and Democrats and others must invest time and effort into communicating why this is so (for a rundown of the arguments they can make, this recent piece by Brian Beutler is an excellent starting point).  But just as important as the conviction itself is the contemptible and extreme Republican Party reaction that has exploded in its wake, as what most people view as the proper working of the justice system is being characterized by the Republican Party and Trump himself as a corrupt, rigged, and disastrous outcome that must be reversed at the earliest opportunity. More than this, though — the GOP is using the verdict to falsely proclaim that the entire justice system is corrupt, and as justification to plan radical measures to weaponize the justice system against their political opponents. In doing so, they show that they would rather burn down the entire edifice of the rule of law than see their party leader made subject to it.

We need to be clear-eyed about what these Republicans are saying, for they do not actually believe that the justice system is corrupt, and so to treat their claims in good faith is dangerous and self-defeating. As The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer observes, the problem that Trump and the GOP have with the verdict is that the system is in fact not corrupt, and has properly brought the former president to justice. But because their leader is a criminal, they must re-define the rule of the law itself to be the actual problem. This is upside-down, authoritarian logic, which basically reduces to saying that the law is whatever the Republican Party says it is. It’s a mentality that we have seen in countries like Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but which has now migrated to American shores, and been adopted by one of America’s two major political parties.

On top of this, the GOP is now using the verdict as an excuse to seek retribution against their Democratic “enemies,” even though the Democrats did not actually do anything wrong in the first place; rather, the Democrats are being scapegoated because the legal system itself worked as intended! In other words, they intend to use the everyday, apolitical functioning of the justice system that held their criminal leader to account to justify the complete subversion of the justice system to achieve anti-democratic political ends, such as jailing opponents on false charges. Doubling down on a convicted Trump, the GOP has consciously made criminality and lawlessness central to the party’s political identity, a fact that if widely understood should rightly appall and alienate a vast swathe of the American citizenry.

This Republican reaction to Trump’s conviction — highly coordinated, relentless, and nihilistic — should provide final confirmation that the GOP has transformed into an authoritarian party that rejects democracy and all of its constituents, which include free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, equality under the law, and the illegitimacy of political violence. Indeed, we should also understand that the extreme GOP unity in supporting a criminal president is in itself reason for alarm. As MSNBC host Chris Hayes remarked, “The lesson they learned is if you enforce this totalitarian unanimity, you can keep chugging along. And it is a wildly dangerous lesson. Because they will do this no matter what he does, and no matter how bad it gets.” We might say that “totalitarian unanimity” (what a great, if ominous, phrase) is the GOP’s battering ram against democracy, their answer to the rule of law: stick together, say up is down, and seek power by tearing down America’s institutions while issuing a cloud of lies, propaganda, and violent threat. Another way of looking at is one that highlights the GOP’s increasingly fascistic tendencies, as we might say that the party is attempting to will itself into power through a unified embrace of lies and a mass subversion of the rule of law.

The GOP’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s conviction, with its accompanying assault on the rule of law, should be seen as on a continuum with Trump’s attempted coup following the 2020 election, the ever-broadening GOP refusal to accept adverse election results in 2024, and the GOP’s use of violent threat to achieve political ends (as Trump has done in threatening a “bloodbath” if he isn’t re-elected). Individually, each of these strategies can be called authoritarian and anti-democratic — but to properly understand, communicate, and confront their collective threat, we need to more precisely describe this GOP effort to overturn America’s democracy for what it is: an insurrection against the U.S. government. In its denial of Trump’s conviction, the GOP is not simply aiming to overturn the verdict, but looking to overturn for all time the idea that any verdict can ever be considered settled if it goes against Republican Party interests (here, the calls to have the GOP-dominated Supreme Court somehow step in and make things right for Trump provides a blueprint for future tampering). If they can undo this, they can undo the prospect that any other Republican leader can be held to account for breaking the law. Such a principle, once established, would render the United States not a democracy but a one-party state, where the GOP could engage in any manner of political behavior — lawless or even violent — with impunity. 

If we view the Republican war on the Trump verdict as the latest campaign in an ongoing GOP insurrection, the Democrats’ failure to date to fully amplify the verdict is not just self-defeating, but a dereliction of duty. As I said, not only does the verdict disqualify Trump, the GOP’s reaction to it is an equally — or even more important — disqualifying development regarding the GOP as a whole. There is a fundamental error in thinking that this is just about Donald Trump, and that if the public simply hears about the verdict, it will form negative opinions about the former president and his capacity to return to the Oval Office. Such thinking ignores the fact that the GOP is actively trying to convince people not only that Trump isn’t guilty, but that American democracy is itself the problem! The GOP isn’t just engaging in aggressive politics — it’s engaging in an effort that, if successful, and in conjunction with the other insurrectionary efforts I noted above, would result in the transformation of the United States into an authoritarian, one-party state. For the Democrats to contest neither the Republican lies about the verdict, nor the accompanying effort to attack the rule of law, would be incomprehensible.

[...] It seems to me that the Democrats are being cowed by what is in part an epic bluff by the GOP, both in the case of the Trump conviction and with other insurrectionary strategies, such as the preemptive refusal to accept the 2024 election results. In fact, the Republican Party is far, far out on a brittle limb in terms of advancing ideas that are alien and bizarre to the American majority — for instance, the idea that the entire judiciary is part of a plot to “get” Donald Trump, or that Democrats only ever win elections through the illegal votes of millions of undocumented immigrants. To put it in more Trumpian terms, we could say that the GOP is advancing a high-stakes pyramid scheme, in which at each step the American public is being asked to provide the party with ever more outrageous deposits of credulity (this may be a major reason why Trump, with his business history of such schemes, has synched up so easily with the GOP’s fascistic forms of politics).

The fact that the GOP might yet succeed, in large part by convincing enough citizens of objectively insane and anti-American ideas, should clue Democrats into the fact that this insurrection is being fought in the realm of ideas and emotions, not through guns and bombs (even as Trump continues to intimate terrible violence to come should he lose in November). And though the movement challenging America is far wider than Trump, Democrats can leverage the former president to inflict devastating damage on the entire GOP and the anti-democratic movement it embodies. So many Republican politicians have mortgaged their reputations to the former president, hoping that his victory in November will be worth it. But by chaining himself to his criminality over the years, and particularly in the wake of this verdict, they have made themselves vulnerable to public opinion swinging decisively against a felon chief executive, with all the burning red flags that his criminal status raises. The GOP’s reaction to the verdict — to basically declare that Trump, and by extension the GOP, is actually above the law — is equally damning and disqualifying, showing that the GOP would rather abandon democracy than abandon their criminal leader. Trump is the deranged avatar of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist movement to overturn and replace U.S. democracy with a system that serves an ever-shrinking, self-serving, and radicalized minority of the population. 

In the Republican land of Good Is Evil and Evil Is Good, most of these brainwashed jackals wrongly believe that a clearly guilty Donald Trump is “innocent” yet declare systems that hold a fascist like Trump accountable to be “guilty”, such as the justice system that did their job correctly.

#Donald Trump #People of New York v. Trump #GOP Hypocrisy #2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections

[trmpt]

#big lie republicans #unfit for any office #lying trump goons #dangerous malicious gopers