The book also sheds new light on a symptom the Daily Beast has long reported on: his bulging ankles, which his doctors have said is the result of chronic venous insufficiency.
I can't wait for his legs to spring a leak like a waterbed and spray out a fine jet of blood during a press conference.
It's just like the end of W's presidency when everyone on the right was pissed off about what he did in Iraq and to the economy, then they proceeded to double-down on the nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance that made the GOP so popular with reactionaries.
It's a fundamental problem with their ideology, but they are so driven by their hatred and tuned up by the far-right media that they just keep digging that hole deeper. Ultimately, the ultra-wealthy know that fueling the fire of fascist rhetoric is a sure fire way of getting the brainwashed rubes to fight their class war for them.
Is MTG going to stop promoting the Great Replacement conspiracy theory? Absolutely not; in fact, I bet she leans even harder into it.
Not that it matters, because the effect is the same, but I wonder if he really did believe that stuff or if he did it knowing that it would facilitate a wealth transfer to the ultra-wealthy.
From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristen Kobes du Mez
Antecedents can be found in nineteenth-century southern evangelicalism and in early-twentieth-century “muscular Christianity,” but it was in the 1940s and 1950s that a potent mix of patriarchal “gender traditionalism,” militarism, and Christian nationalism coalesced to form the basis of a revitalized evangelical identity. With Billy Graham at the vanguard, evangelicals believed that they had a special role to play in keeping America Christian, American families strong, and the nation secure. The assertion of masculine power would accomplish all these goals.
By the 1960s, the civil rights movement, feminism, and the Vietnam War led many Americans to question “traditional” values of all kinds. Gender and sexual norms were in flux, America no longer appeared to be a source of unalloyed good, and God did not in fact appear to be on her side. Evangelicals, however, clung fiercely to the belief that America was a Christian nation, that the military was a force for good, and that the strength of the nation depended on a properly ordered, patriarchal home. The evangelical political resurgence of the 1970s coalesced around a potent mix of “family values” politics, but family values were always intertwined with ideas about sex, power, race, and nation. Feminism posed a threat to traditional womanhood, and also to national security by removing from men their duty to provide and protect and opening the door to women in military combat. In similar fashion, Vietnam was not just a national security issue, but also a crisis of masculinity. Civil rights, too, dismantled time-honored traditions and destabilized the social order. Representing federal government overreach or even an insidious communist agenda, desegregation also heightened the long-standing imagined threat to white womanhood, and to the power of white men to police social and sexual boundaries. The reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive.
Almost all of them are still too chickenshit to call out their dommy daddy publicly for this totally unjustified war though.
Some Republicans in the House were more blunt when speaking anonymously. The terms of the deal contradicted the talking points that the White House asked its Republican allies to use, Republicans told Politico.
One House Republican said the Trump administration was “lying to some degree” about the peace deal.
“The president didn’t mean to, but he effectively acknowledged he lost the war. It’s no longer worth the economic price. This is the way out, as ugly as it is,” another House Republican told the publication.
“He promised total surrender. And here it is,” a third House Republican said.
The problem is that Vance’s knee-jerk reaction to being challenged by a woman is to patronize or dismiss, and an all-female panel in front of an all-female studio audience wasn’t going to allow that. He’s also terrible at being, or even seeming, off-the-cuff and candid. When he said that Trump’s economic policies were going to “pay serious dividends” and Behar immediately asked, “When?” his smile began to wear thin as he hit back: “Well, Joy, what happens is that construction jobs build the factories and people go back to work.” It was condescending and weak all at once.
Yeah, that document is discussed pretty far into the article. CW: sexual abuse.
In the emails, Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.
Ransome’s credibility was not uncomplicated; she had made another claim that she possessed video footage of prominent men having sex with young girls in Epstein’s entourage. She later retracted the claims, saying she feared for herself and her family if she proceeded. But after a federal judge ordered the unsealing of some of the Giuffre case files in 2023, the document that connected Trump to the claim about abused nipples was among the material that came out. It was an unconfirmed allegation and had not been made publicly, but the disclosure led to some articles that were quickly lost in the swirl of election-year news.
Privately, [Bongino] seethed. In conversations with confidants, he lamented what the job had cost him: millions of dollars in podcast revenue, family time, his audience. He was getting torn apart over a strategy he had opposed from the start.
Poor baby. Is protecting the most powerful pedophile in the world not as profitable as you'd hoped? What a chode.
"I did kind of an oopsie and let a fundamentalist talk show host run the biggest army in the world."