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I Examined Donald Trump’s Ear — and His Soul — at Mar-a-Lago
By Olivia Nuzzi | Sept. 9, 2024
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-ear-campaign-assa
ssination-attempt.html
The Afterlife of Donald Trump
At home at Mar-a-Lago, the presidential hopeful contemplates miracles, his campaign, and his formidable new opponent.
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Pink. An ovular rose. Big and smooth. A complex commonplace instrument. And, as far as these things go, a rather nice one. Isolated from the head and all that roils therein, and to which it is, famously and miraculously, still attached, you have to admit, if you can: It is beautiful. In Palm Beach, sunlight streamed through the window to find its blood vessels, setting the whole device aglow. Auris Divina, Divine Ear, protector of The Donald, immaculate cartilage shield, almighty piece of flesh.
Donald Trump raised his right hand and grabbed hold of it. He bent it backward and forward. I asked if I could take a closer look. These days, the former president and current triple threat — convicted felon, Republican presidential nominee, and recent survivor of an assassination attempt — comes from a place of “yes.” He waved me over to where he sat on this August afternoon, in a low-to-the-ground chair upholstered in cream brocade fabric in the grand living room at Mar-a-Lago.
“Let’s see,” he said. He tapped the highest point of the helix. “It’s a railroad track.” He tapped it again. “They didn’t need a stitch,” he said. “You know, it’s funny. Usually, something like that would be considered a surreal experience, where you sort of don’t realize it, and yet there was no surrealism in this case. I felt immediately that I got hit by a bullet. I also knew it was my ear. It’s just a little bit over here — ” He used his hand to wiggle the ear. “Right next to — ” He gestured at the side of his head, at his brain, and raised his eyebrows. “It’s amazing.” He shook his head in disbelief. “And the ear, as you know, is a big bleeder.”
It did not feel surreal. Trump kept mentioning that. How unexpected it was, the matter-of-fact way in which he managed to process the attack as it unfolded. But on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was tethered to the Earth as if by cosmic cord. He could not be pulled into the void. He was so clear about each moment of that afternoon. At Butler Memorial Hospital, he said, he asked the doctor, “?‘Why is there so much blood?’” This was due to the vascular properties of cartilage, the doctor told him. “These are the things you learn through assassination attempts.” He laughed. “Okay, can you believe it?”
He can never fully see his own ear. He can never fully see himself as others do. I inched closer and narrowed my eyes. The particular spot that he identified with his tap was pristine. I scanned carefully the rest of the terrain. It looked normal and incredible and fine. Ears do not often become famous, and when they do, it is because they have suffered some sort of misfortune. Van Gogh’s self-mutilation. Mike Tyson’s cannibalistic injury to Evander Holyfield. J. Paul Getty III, whose kidnappers cut the whole thing off and put it in the mail. And now this, the luckiest and most famous ear in the world. If you were the kind of person inclined to make such declarations, which Donald Trump is, you might call it the greatest ear of all time.
An ear had never before been so important, so burdened. An ear had never before represented the divide between the organic course of American history and an alternate timeline on which the democratic process was corrupted by an aberrant act of violence as it had not been in more than half a century. Yet an ear had never appeared to have gone through less. Except there, on the tiniest patch of this tiny sculpture of skin, a minor distortion that resembled not a crucifixion wound but the distant aftermath of a sunburn.
This is, of course, part of the legend. When Ronny Jackson, the White House
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President. 
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Quote:The debate could have only gone better if Trump said the most efficient solution to the illegal migrant problem means resurrecting Hitler and the Holocaust. Then Trump winks and says, "Kidding! I'll deport the migrants." Sure you will, Fatso.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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We'll see what the polls say. 
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Quote:The polls say Trump has a 50% chance, but at any moment after the election, Biden could have Trump's brains splattered all over to show the world that Trump is 100% dead meat. Maybe Trump should hire his own security since Biden's Secret Service serves Biden, not Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
We'll see what the polls say.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
Trump lied his head off about abortion during the debate. What are the facts?
How late can abortions be performed in the US? A few facts:
• There are only seven states where abortion is legal in the third trimester.
• There are only 14 clinics in those states that perform abortions in the third trimester. They are expensive and time consuming.
• Based on extrapolations of CDC surveillance data, there are probably only about 1,000 third-trimester abortions performed each year. The vast majority of these are between 24-28 weeks.
• There are no records for this, but the number of abortions performed in the last two months of pregnancy is almost certainly close to zero and exclusively done in cases of severe fetal abnormality or danger to the mother.
• Needless to say, no abortions are performed after birth anywhere in the country.
Now you know.
https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-late-abortions-in-the-us/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The progressive era is over. Again.
By Kevin Drum | October 21, 2024 – 10:57 am
https://jabberwocking.com/the-progressive-era-is-over-again/
What happened to the confident march of progressivism that inspired lefty politics for the past couple of decades? It seems to have died out, replaced by a budding rightward movement in American politics.
The explanation is simpler than most observers think: This is what always happens. Episodes of progressivism are rare in American history and usually produce a backlash after a decade or two because they overreach and finally get too far ahead of public opinion.
1. New Deal progressivism was weakened by the war and finally collapsed afterward thanks to perceptions of destructive union activism; softness on communism; and hardline desegregation.
2. The counterculture of the '60s eventually broke on the shoals of good intentions that went too far for most Americans: busing as a way of fighting racism; a continued obsession with "root causes" in the face of rising crime; and a humiliating retreat from Vietnam. Combined with a failing economy it killed progressivism for a generation.
3. The same thing has happened this time but with different issues: the transformation of anti-racism into wokeness; trans activism taken to extreme levels; "defund the police"; and immigration softness that's become indistinguishable from open borders.
The American public welcomes the thrill of progressivism every few decades — but only just so much and only for a short while. Then they retrench. But the good news is that progressive gains are generally permanent. Our most recent surge of progressivism was modest by historical standards but still produced Obamacare, gay marriage, marijuana legalization, and, with an assist from the Supreme Court, growing support for abortion.
Now we're suffering through the usual backlash and politics is moving slightly rightward. Mainstream Democrats can either fight this or accept it. The former guarantees irrelevance while the latter delivers public acceptance at a modest price — thanks to the growing lunacy of the Republican Party.
It seems like the choice should be easy, right? But it never is.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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That's because you burn all your goodwill on bullshit and make everyone hate you.
And this time you became the pro-war party that represents the elites in the meantime.
I said it years ago...
FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY.
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Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
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Quote:If the Democrats start pushing for America to do something new, such as go metric (kilometers, liters, kilograms) Trumptards would be enraged that the Democrats are taking away their freedom to be dumbasses who don't use the same units of measurement as the rest of the world. I don't blame Trump for your dimwittedness. All he did is find you idiots and exploit you.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's because you burn all your goodwill on bullshit and make everyone hate you.
And this time you became the pro-war party that represents the elites in the meantime.
I said it years ago...
FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY.
--------------------------------------------------
Trump will be fine.
He will also be your next President.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s Followers Are Living in a Dark Fantasy
MAGA adherents deny and dismiss what they are a part of, but they believe Trump’s lies, and will support him until the end.
By Adam Serwer | November 4, 2024, 12:51 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/11/trump-campaign-cr
uelty/680498/
At a rally just outside Atlanta in late October, thousands of Donald Trump supporters lined up in the punishing southern sun to see their hero; some had driven hours from out of state. Vendors hawked T-shirts with slogans such as Say no to the ho, and Roses are red, Hunter smokes crack, Joe Biden has dementia and Kamala isn’t Black, sometimes chanting the phrases out loud to amused onlookers.
Hundreds of people still standing in the winding queue shuffled off into a disappointed crowd when told that the venue was now full. Many hung around outside, browsing the vendors’ wares or grabbing a bite at one of the nearby food trucks. They were there to see Trump, but also to enjoy the sense of belonging that comes from being surrounded by the like-minded. They were there to see and be seen, dressed in MAGA hats, MAGA shirts, MAGA tights. Service dogs decked out in stars and stripes, men in silk shirts printed with an image of a bloodied Trump raising his fist. As “Y.M.C.A.” blared from inside the venue, Trump supporters stopped their conversations to sing along and shape their arms with the chorus.
The first time Trump ran for president as a Republican, when I spoke with his followers I encountered a superficial denial of Trump’s prejudice that suggested a quiet approval of it. They would deny that Trump made bigoted remarks or proposed discriminatory policies while also defending those remarks and policies as necessary. What I found this time around were people who were far more deeply embedded in an unreality carefully molded by the Trump campaign and right-wing media to foment a sense of crisis—and a belief that they were being exploited by a shadowy conspiracy that Trump alone could vanquish. Whereas many supporters I spoke with at rallies in 2016 rationalized or dismissed Trump’s yarns as exaggerations or bombast, in 2024 they would repeat them solemnly and earnestly, as gospel.
The conspiracy theories, particularly surrounding immigration, are significant because they justify extreme measures—Trump’s promises to strip critical news outlets of their broadcast licenses, prosecute political rivals, and purge the federal government of “the enemy within.” Yet some supporters I spoke with also seemed either unaware or disbelieving of the plans that Trump and his allies have for a second administration. There is a disconnect between what Trump and his allies intend to do in power and what many of the people who would vote him in believe he would do.
This disconnect was apparent earlier in the 2024 campaign, when Democrats began attacking Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation “blueprint” for a second Trump administration. The agenda contemplates not only a political purge of the federal government, and a president who can order the Justice Department to prosecute his enemies, but drastic limits on abortion; drastic cuts to education, the social safety net, and efforts to fight climate change; and using federal powers to discriminate against LGBTQ people. Although Project 2025 was not affiliated with the campaign, it was largely a Trumpworld project, conceived by former Trump aides. Trump surmised that his own followers would not support what was in Project 2025 and distanced himself from it, posting late one night in July that he knew “nothing about Project 2025. I have not seen it, have no idea who is in charge of it, and unlike our very well received Republican Platform, had nothing to do with it.” (CNN reported that at least 140 people who worked for Trump were involved in the project, including six of his former Cabinet members.) Its architects were left to quietly reassure their fellow travelers that he was saying this for political reasons. “He’s running against the brand,” Russell Vought
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Matthew Yglesias | Oct 29, 2024
The most important context for this race is what’s happening internationally. The UK Conservatives got thrashed recently. The Canadian Liberals are set to get thrashed soon. The incumbent center-left party lost its first post-Covid election in New Zealand, and the incumbent center-right party lost its first post-Covid elections in Australia. The incumbent coalition in Germany is hideously unpopular. This means that if you’re asking “How did Democrats blow it?” or “Why is this even close?” you’re asking the wrong question.
The question of why all post-Covid electorates are grumpy and miserable is more interesting and hasn’t been the subject of as much work as it deserves.
Back when Obama was president and I was floating various slightly inflationary schemes to engineer a more rapid labor market recovery, some of the older people on his team would tell me I was underrating how much people hate inflation.
Looking at countries that didn’t have an election in November 2020, incumbents who were popular during the pandemic almost all became unpopular during post-pandemic inflation — the fairly obvious logical relationship between pandemic relief programs and pandemic savings and post-pandemic inflation doesn’t seem to get through to anyone, anywhere.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/27-takes-on-the-2024-election
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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