Don’t lose sight of why Trump won by [[Megan McArdle]]

Trump’s mandate isn’t as ‘powerful’ as he suggests. Here’s why. by [[Aaron Blake]]

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stephen E. Whicher (1959). “The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.327, Harvard University Press

via https://www.azquotes.com/author/4490-Ralph_Waldo_Emerson/tag/hate

A brief summary of Donald Trump’s plan for America by [[Kevin Drum]]

On one level, the reason is obvious: accountability. There’s a lot at stake...

except somehow for Donald J. Trump and some in identity politics...

How do they get around it? system 1 vs system 2

October 2, 2024 - PBS News Hour full episode

Breaking down former President Donald Trump’s rambling linguistic style by [[Steve Inskeep]]

Book Review: ‘Where Tyranny Begins,’ by David Rohde by [[David Greenberg]]

Looks like a good overview book of DJT's policies with respect to erosion of democracy in America.

read article Sun 8/25/2024 7:01 PM

Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him by [[Michael Tomasky]]

confirming my thesis that Donald J. Trump is a Boggart and can be banished using some of the same techniques as taught in Harry Potter

Trump Media Quietly Enters Deal With a Republican Donor Who Could Benefit From a Second Trump Administration by [[Justin Elliott]], [[Robert Faturechi]] and [[Alex Mierjeski]]

When stocks can become called "meme stocks" they cease to have actual value.

https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-media-truth-social-jedtec-james-davison-conflict-of-interest

What to Know About the Assassination Attempt on Trump by [[Michael Levenson]]

via Donald J. Trump on Truth Social

His grammar here just sounds "off" to me.

Much bleeding took place, so I realized then what was happening.

really?

Trump, on Social Media, Describes Being ‘Shot With a Bullet’ in the Ear by [[Michael Gold]]

Project 2025

Dans, Paul, and Steven Groves, eds. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise - Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project. The Heritage Foundation, 2023. https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.

ᔥ[[Clive Thompson]] in @clive@saturation.social) (accessed:: 2024-07-04 10:20 AM)

I'm reading the entirety of the #project2025 book: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

The intro lays things out very clearly -- full-blown attacks on trans and queer folks of any stripe; utter dismissal of climate change; disdain for any form of expertise and education (wonderfully incoherent, given the sparkling pedigrees of the document's many authors); economic thinking that's equally incoherent, if not at times magically-realistic; christian nationalism; and incessant, self-pitying grievance politics

Jul 07, 2024, 10:03 · Edited Jul 07, 12:42

https://boffosocko.com/2016/09/30/complexity-isnt-a-vice-10-word-answers-and-doubletalk-in-election-2016/

Discussed as part of "storytelling vs. logic" at FoTL

Graham, David A. “The Trump Two-Step.” The Atlantic, April 4, 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/04/trump-two-step-bloodbath-2024-election/677966/.

Evidence supporting Trump's doubletalk: https://boffosocko.com/2016/09/30/complexity-isnt-a-vice-10-word-answers-and-doubletalk-in-election-2016/

ref: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/16/trump-bloodbath-biden-november-00147453

Some of the first part of the Trump Two-Step sounds like the idea of "Schrödinger's douchebag".

How Trump has Funded His $100 Million in Legal Bills by [[Molly Cook Escobar]], [[Albert Sun]], [[Shane Goldmacher]]

Opinion - Donald Trump and the ‘Dune’ Messiah Have Some Things in Common by [[David French]]

Trump’s Newest Venture? A $60 Bible. by [[Michael Gold]], [[Maggie Haberman]]

Opinion - Trump Is Financially Ruining the Republican Party by [[Michelle Cottle]]

Special Features of Trump’s Bible by [[Andrew Singleton]]

How might this equate to the time at which Rome extended its citizen franchise to larger swaths of people and the attendant results which came about? particularly the shift towards an empire versus a republic?

These seem to have been happening in the case of America with Donald Trump attempting to become a modern day Julius Caesar. To whom is Trump indebted?

It would seem that people who spend too much time online experience more anxiety. Could it be that we've evolved to only be able to manage so many inputs and amounts of variety of those inputs? The experiencing of too much variety in our environments and the resultant anxiety may be a result of the limits of Ross Ashby's law of requisite variety within human systems.

This may also be why chaos machines like Donald Trump are effective at creating anxiety in a populace whose social systems are not designed to handle so many crazy ideas at once.

Implications for measurements of resilience?

Ungenerous to take Alter to task for context which he might not have the background to comment upon.

Does Alter call it a "platitude" from it's historical context, or with respect to the modern context of Donald J. Trump and a wide variety of Republican Party members who are anything but Christian?

The threat of physical violence is silencing those in power even on the right. We're already at war except for the bullets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/09/28/desantis-republicans-china-ccp/

While Donald J. Trump seemed to hold say over what was trending and the media was discussing, Philip Bump notices that Ron DeSantis seems to be trailing or perhaps riding the trends rather than leading them.

Is this because he's only tubthumping one or two at a time while Trump floats trial balloons regularly and is pushing half a dozen or more at time?

https://factba.se/trump/

Trump had a vlog?!?

This seems apropos to the situation in which I view Donald J. Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion/jack-smith-trump-indictment.html

Billy Sammeth, the Manager Fired by Cher and Joan Rivers, Tells His Side of the Story by Kevin Sessums

The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, No. IND-71543-23 (New York Supreme Court, County of New York March 31, 2023).

https://www.manhattanda.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Donald-J.-Trump-Indictment.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/03/30/nyregion/trump-indictment-news

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/30/us/politics/trump-tax-returns-takeaways.html

How is this sort of bloodsport similar/different to the news media coverage of Donald J. Trump in 2015/2016?

The similarities over creating engagement within a capitalistic framing along with the need to only garner at least a minimum amount of audience to support the enterprise seem to be at play.

Compare/contrast this with the NBAs conundrum with the politics of entering the market in China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/01/us/politics/trump-special-master.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/19/business/twitter-musk-trump-reinstate/index.html

That's it. I'm done.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/michael-flynn-maga-christian-trump/671852/

laudator temporis acti translates as "a praiser of times past"

Calls to mind:

Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti, vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat, dilator, spe longus, iners avidusque futuri, difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti se puero, castigator censorque minorum. —Horace's Ars Poetica (line 173)

Many ills encompass an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then miserably holds aloof from his store and fears to use it, or because, in all that he does, he lacks fire and courage, is dilatory and slow to form hopes, is sluggish and greedy of a longer life, peevish, surly, given to praising the days he spent as a boy, and to reproving and condemning the young. (tr. H. Rushton Fairclough)

In Horace's version he's talking about a old curmudgeon and the phrase often has a pejorative tinge. It generally is used to mean someone who defends earlier periods of history ("the good old days") usually prior to their own lives and which they haven't directly experienced, as better than the present.

Compare this with the sentiment behind Donald J. Trump's "Make America Great Again". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_America_Great_Again

The end of the passage also has historical precedent and hints of "You kids get off my lawn!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_kids_get_off_my_lawn!

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/06/politics/joe-biden-donald-trump-maga-republican/index.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/us/politics/trump-mar-a-lago-documents.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/26/us/trump-search-affidavit-release.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimes

Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/13/significance-new-steve-bannon-tape/

Did he just predict or was he tactically planning this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC3_VFFJlSY

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/patrick-henry-virginia-ratifying-convention-va/

While gerrymandering isn't brought up explicitly here, the underlying principles are railed against heavily.

Some interesting things applicable to the rise of Donald J. Trump hiding in here.

Interesting to read this in its historical context versus our present context. So much can be read into his words from our current context, while others can extract dramatically different views--particularly by Constitutional originalists.

Imitation can potentially help one become more empathetic.

Is there a relationship between this effect and one's mirror neurons?

Donald J. Trump is well known for is sad impersonation of impaired and disabled people. Obviously he has no empathy for them and it's unlikely that his re-enactments will create empathy for him. Is this a result of a neurological deficit on his part?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/24/virginia-thomas-mark-meadows-texts/

When presented with problems people are prone to gesture more with the increasing challenges of those problems. The more ways there are to solve a particular problem, the more gesturing one is likely to do.

What sort of analysis could one do on politicians who gesture their speech with relation to this? For someone like Donald J. Trump who floats balloons (ideas--cross reference George Lakoff) in his speeches, is he actively gesturing in an increased manner as he's puzzling out what is working for an audience and what isn't? Does the gesturing decrease as he settles on the potential answers?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2022/roger-stone-documentary-capitol-riot-trump-election/

Ryfe and Kemmelmeier not only show that this development goes much further back into the past and first appeared in newspapers (the quotes of politicians got almost halved between 1892 and 1968), but also posed the question if this can maybe also be seen as a form of increased professionalism of the media as they do not just let politicians talk as they wish (Ryfe and Kemmelmeier 2011). Craig Fehrman also pointed out the irony in the reception of this rather nuanced study – it was itself reduced to a soundbite in the media (Fehrman 2011).

Soundbites have decreased in length over time.

What effects are driving this? What are the knock on effects? What effect does this have on the ability for doubletalk to take hold? Is it easier for doubletalk and additional meanings to attach to soundbites when they're shorter? (It would seem so.) At what point to they hit a minimum?

What is the effect of potential memes which hold additional meaning of driving this soundbite culture?

Example: "Lock her up" as a soundbite with memetic meaning from the Trump 2016 campaign in reference to Hilary Clinton.

Rousseau was perfectly describing the intelligence and politics of Donald J. Trump when he described creatures which are like humans, but are "rushing headlong for their own chains". Trump was able to govern, but completely lacked the ability to imagine the consequences of any of his actions.

Not sure what name Rousseau gave these creatures. Which book was this in? Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men?

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/10/trump-lawyer-pence-biden-524088

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2021/10/trumps-new-social-media-platform-found-using-mastodon-code/

https://danallosso.substack.com/p/help-me-find-world-history-textbooks

Dan Allosso is curious to look at the history of how history is taught.

The history of teaching history is a fascinating topic and is an interesting way for cultural anthropologists to look at how we look at ourselves as well as to reveal subtle ideas about who we want to become.

This is particularly interesting with respect to teaching cultural identity and its relationship to nationalism.

One could look at the history of Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War to see how the South continued its cultural split from the North (or in more subtle subsections from Colin Woodard's American Nations thesis) to see how this has played out. This could also be compared to the current culture wars taking place with the rise of nationalism within the American political right and the Southern evangelicals which has come to a fervor with the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Other examples are the major shifts in nationalism after the "long 19th century" which resulted in World War I and World War II and Germany's national identity post WWII.

"Very fine" is a dog whistle statement here created by Donald J. Trump and indicates his approval of white power. See also:

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/08/very-fine-people-charlottesville-who-were-they-2/
• https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmaZR8E12bs

This is a painful burn by the writer Alex Beam.

Perhaps worth modifying for Donald J. Trump?

From the perspective of the American experiment and the evolution of democracy, Donald J. Trump was a dead white male who had the bad luck to still be alive."

Tangential to my particular study, but consider the idea of Donald Trump as being an imitator within this framing. He would frequently float ideas at rallies (cf. George Lakoff) to see what would get a rise from the crowed and riff off of that. In some sense he's not leading, yet imitating the mobs.

Trumps margin.

How can this gap be closed in the future?

Re: Sarah Palin

I can definitely see his point here about the rise of (white) populism here in America which pre-figured Trump.

Ha! This is almost exactly what I expected it to be about.

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Alan Jacobs</span> in re-setting my mental clock – Snakes and Ladders (<time class='dt-published'>07/01/2021 14:58:05</time>)</cite></small>

Is Donald Trump a form of nominative determinism?

Let's hope that the answer is a resounding "NO!"

Apparently he's invented the idea of a microblog? And he's got a /desk page?

What comes next?

But let's be honest, he was posting these short status updates like this just a few days after he got kicked off of Twitter. He's just got a slightly better UI now.

Oh, FFS!

Donald Trump invents blogging.<br><br> https://t.co/Wl06PnekU7

— Theo Priestley (@tprstly) May 4, 2021

hugely used in context

Apparently Donald Trumpisms are leaking into broader society, though even here it seems to be used ironically, thus also making fun of Trump himself.

A Wall Street Journal experiment to see a liberal version and a conservative version of Facebook side by side.

An interesting look at critical thinking applied to the example of Donald Trump's COVID-19 diagnosis and severity.

Interesting take on metaepistemology and the idea of "authoritarian muscle memory".

I don't recall seeing/hearing reporting on this tidbit at the time.

I'm not sure if I've seen the phrase "misinformer in chief" as a reference to Donald J. Trump before, but it's apt.

Keep in mind, however, that in official settings, he's more often reading from a teleprompter and reading words which have been written for him by someone else.

For exploration: consider Trump's "test balloon" language in front of crowds where he seems to be attempting to see what will get a rise out of his audience and supporters. What effect do these "what-about-isms" have over extended periods of time.

He failed on so many of his campaign promises that it's incredible. The fact that he actively killed one of the few he could have actually upheld is just keeping in line with his lies, lack of transparency, and lack of honor.

Sounds like rule by a petty tyrant or maybe a current sitting president.... is it something in our culture that lets us do this? Whatever happened to the idea of meritocracy?

And a solid reason why we can't have Trumps in power, because eventually a crisis will occur and it could be lethal at scale. See COVID-19 death toll in America.

And a solid reason why we can't have Trumps in power, because eventually a crisis will occur and it could be lethal at scale. See COVID-19 death toll in America.

What do you expect after they've spent four years doing the same thing day in and day out?

Finally the sort of competition that Trump can understand: it's a ratings race!

I nearly added it above in the opening, but Maha’s comment reminds me of it again. In a countercultural way, a web developer created a browser plugin that will re-format all of Donald Trump’s tweets to appear as if they were written in crayon by an eight year old: http://maketrumptweetseightagain.com/

While not technically annotation in a “traditional” form discussed in the text so far—though close from the perspective of the redaction technique mentioned above—, by reformatting the font of Trumps tweets, it completely changes their context, meaning, and political weight.

But if we're going to consider music as art, isn't a lot of the value and power of art in the "eye of the beholder"? To some extent art's value is in the fact that it can have multiple interpretations. From this perspective, once it's been released, Lamar's music isn't "his" anymore, it becomes part of a broader public that will hear and interpret it as they want to. So while Lamar may go back and annotate what he may have meant at the time as an "expert", doesn't some of his art thereby lose some power in that he is tacitly stating that he apparently didn't communicate his original intent well?

By comparison and for contrast one could take the recent story of Donald Trump's speech (very obviously written by someone else) about the recent mass shootings and compare them with the polar opposite message he spews on an almost daily basis from his Twitter account. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/teleprompter-trump-meets-twitter-trump-as-the-president-responds-to-mass-slayings/2019/08/05/cdd8ea78-b799-11e9-b3b4-2bb69e8c4e39_story.html

I wonder how better, big data being overlaid on virtual reality may be helpful to the currently marginalized in the future? Would it be useful to have shared data about businesses and practices that tend to marginalize people further? I recall an African-American comedian recently talking about the Confederate Flag in a (Netflix?) comedy special. They indicated that the flag actually had some worthwhile uses and reminisced driving on rural highways at night looking for a place to stay. When they saw that flag flying over a motel, they knew better to keep driving and stay at another hotel further down the road. In this case, the flag over the hotel not-so-subtly annotated the establishment itself.

I perceive a lot of social slights and institutionalized racism as being of a marginal sort which are designed to be bothersome to some while going wholly unnoticed by others. What if it were possible to aggregate the data on a broader basis to bring these sorts of marginal harms to the forefront for society to see them? As an example, consider big companies doing marginal harms to a community's environment over time, but going generally unnoticed until the company has long since divested and/or disappeared. It's hard to sue them for damages decades later, but if one could aggregate the bigger harms upfront and show those annotated/aggregated data up front, then they could be stopped before they got started.

As a more concrete example, the Trump Management Corporation was hit with a consent decree in the early 1970's for prejudicial practices against people of color including evidence that was subpoenaed showing that applications for people of color were annotated with a big "C" on them. Now consider if all individuals who had made those applications had shared some of their basic data into a pool that could have been accessed and analyzed by future applicants, then perhaps the Trumps would have been caught far earlier. Individuals couldn't easily prove discrimination because of the marginal nature of the discrimination, but data in aggregate could have potentially saved the bigger group.

So the better judgement of others has apparently kept Trump out of trouble?

TL;DR

This summary is not what Trump or even Barr have been indicating in their communications.

Barr's statement on the day of the release of the redacted report: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aHPFh2HfSM

Since the DoJ won't indict a sitting president, here's a direct suggestion of what Congress could do.

Not to mention the free media he was getting from the mainstream media who covered the spectacle.

I'm curious if the DNC would provide these numbers to those candidates? Is there potentially other sources for this data?

Is he really a "billionaire"?! I thought the Times' own reporting had refuted this pretty soundly?

Interesting that he dies on the same day that Trump declares victory over the death of NAFTA.

As pointed out in this sister article (https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/trump-isis-losers/527925/) Trump only seems to be able to put things into perspective by either winners or losers. He doesn't seem to be able to see any of the other subtleties.

Has it started again with nationalism, racism, and Trump?

I feel like this word captures very well the exact era of Trumpian Republicanism in which we find ourselves living.

The key words being "free press" with free meaning that we're free to exert intelligent editorial control.

Editors in the early 1900's used this sort of editorial control not to give fuel to racists and Nazis and reduce their influence.Cross reference: Face the Racist Nation from On the Media.

Apparently we need to exert the same editorial control with respect to Trump, who not incidentally is giving significant fuel to the racist fire as well.

Unpresidented is a great word for the Trump administration

Primarily people not really knowing how racisit and horrible he really was in addition to his inability to think clearly, logically, or linearly. He espoused a dozen or so simple aphorisms like "Build the wall," but was absolutely unable to indicate a plan that went beyond the aphorism. How will it be implemented, funded, what will the short and long term issues that result. He had none of those things that many others presumed would be worked out as details by smart and intelligent people rather than the "just do it" managerial style he has been shown to espouse.

Too many republicans, particularly at the end said, "he's not really that bad" and now that he's in power and more authoritarian than they expected are too weak to admit their mistake.

or in a number of tiny hands, as the case can sometimes be.

They just don't say very much or anything very good.