Sundowning in America: A Series, Part II

Donald Trump back in 2002 about the guy who may well have been his only friend: Jeff Epstein…

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Donald Trump back in 2002 about the guy who may well have been his only friend:

Donald Trump: ‘I’ve known Jeff [Epstein] for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life… <threads.net/@kstatebookworm/post/C_DM__…>


Deluded & demented, Donald Trump claims he has done more for Israel than David ben Yishai or Yehudah Ha-Maccabi. I have yet to find a single Israeli willing to say that Donald Trump is “the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had…. I have done more for Israel than any person, and it’s not even close.” If Kamala Harris were to, just once, lose her marbles to this extent…:

Donald Trump: ‘The highly overrated Jewish Governor of the Great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, made a really bad and poorly delivered speech talking about freedom and fighting for Comrade Kamala Harris for President, yet she hates Israel and will do nothing but make its journey through the complexities of survival as difficult as possible, hoping in the end that it will fail. Judge only by her actions! Yet Shapiro, for strictly political reasons, refused to acknowledge that I am the best friend that Israel, and the Jewish people, ever had. I have done more for Israel than any President, and frankly, I have done more for Israel than any person, and it’s not even close. Shapiro has done nothing for Israel, and never will. Comrade Kamala Harris, the Radical Left Marxist who stole the nomination from Crooked Joe, will do even less. Israel is in BIG trouble!… <https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113003710039708925>


What can anyone say, except that the New York Times and company are not in the business of noting any of the milliard things like this we see:

Well, first of all, he’s a total lightweight. And he shouldn’t be even having any access to possibly being president. The guy he’s been a terrible governor. They’ve had nothing but problems in their state. He has no capability. They call him coach. He’s a semi coach. You coach some football for a little while. This guy is a lightweight and he shouldn’t have access. And for him to say about project 25 is disgraceful. They know I have nothing to do with it. I had no idea what it was. A group of people got together. They drew up some conservative values, very conservative values, and in some case, perhaps they went over the line. Perhaps they didn’t. I have no idea what project 25 is, but they use it and they know it. Just like Charlottesville, totally discredited. They use Charlottesville. You know, Biden gets up all the time, says Charlottesville. He ran because of Charlottesville. We got he got run out of office by the Democrats. They did a coup on him. And he’s sitting someplace in California on a beach because he’s in California, crime ridden, crime ridden place. It’s not the same place. More people leaving than coming. And all of the things that these people have done. Kamala has been the worst. Everything she touched turned bad. California turned bad. San Francisco. You can’t walk into San Francisco. You barely can go into California anymore, people. It’s a state that’s in terrible, terrible crime. Trouble in every other form of trouble. Monetary troubles. It’s got nothing. Drugs all over the place. You go into Los Angeles, you can’t walk down the streets. It’s a shame between Gavin Newsom, but it was really more Kamala because she was your, district attorney in San Francisco. San Francisco is unlivable now. Unlivable 15 years ago as the most beautiful city, one of the greatest cities in the world. Today, it’s unlivable. It’s going to have to be hopefully be able to be brought back, if that’s possible. Kamala, who’s a Marxist and a radical left, frankly, she’s a radical left lunatic. And if she became president, if this country would turn out to be a big version of San Francisco or a big version of California itself. So these guys, they talk about that, they talk about all different things that they know are totally discredited. They have a thing with soldiers where I’m looking over the graves of soldiers and saying, horrible thing about dead soldiers from World War One. It was totally made up. It was a made up story. I confirmed that was confirmed, but my side of it by 26 people in the military that it never happened. They had one lunatic, talking about it, and they use it all the time. There’s nobody that loves the military more than me. Nobody did more for the military. I rebuilt the military. They gave away $85 billion of it away to Afghanistan in the dumbest and and one of the most horrible things that’s ever happened. Probably the most embarrassing moment that ever happened to a country that… [Brian Kilmeade: the last one in the room, and she was the last one in the room when that decision was made] …She was she was the last one. No chance of what she made the decision. She made the decision. And it was one of the most embarrassing decisions. Not Brian, not the fact that we got out the way they got out. I was ready to get out, but I was going to keep Bagram. That’s one of the biggest air bases in the world. It was one hour away from where China makes their nuclear weapons one hour away. Very important that we keep it. They left Bagram the biggest runway, most powerful runways cannot can handle the heaviest loads. This was designed billions and billions of dollars years ago. We gave them the keys. And now China occupies Bagram. We should have kept that. That was the one thing we should have stayed. Not because of Afghanistan, but because of China. And we gave it up. They took the soldiers out before they did. Soldiers first we left people we have to this day, we have people living there. They can’t get out. We 13 great people who I know the families, as you know, 13 great people killed 45, absolutely obliterated the arms and legs and hundreds of people killed during that day, people falling off planes, many people falling off planes from 3000ft up in the air. That’s like three times the height of the Empire State Building. President Trump you’re talking about sad to see you’re talking to them to listen to. Excuse me, but then I have to listen to a lightweight like this, get up and absolutely lie. But they all lied and they mentioned my name. I read where, and frankly, I watched where you said you groups that you said specifically I think they mentioned. Me 297 times. They mentioned the border. Once they mention crime twice, they don’t mention the economy because the economy’s horrible. They defrauded the people of our country with with the job numbers. You saw that 818,000 fake jobs they put in the roles. They thought they could keep it. They thought they were going to keep those numbers until right after the election, when they could announce a revision. But they weren’t able to do that because they had a leaker and somebody leaked the numbers. They were fraudulent job numbers, just like they have fraudulent crime numbers. The FBI didn’t include New York, Chicago and Oakland and a couple of other places that aren’t doing so well. If they would have included those numbers, they’re the worst crime numbers we’ve ever had… <https://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-rambles-off-topic-for-five-minutes-after-fox-friends-asks-him-to-reply-to-clip-of-tim-walz-dnc-speech/>


There is one thing Trump is more scared of than Melania: it is having to face reporters who ask real questions:

Paige Owens: Standing under a banner that read “Make America Safe Again” on Tuesday, Trump spoke about law and order and a so-called “Kamala crime wave” occurring at levels “nobody has ever seen before.” But when journalists tried to ask him about that claim, he got scared. According to The Detroit News, the Trump team had originally agreed to sit down for an interview with their newspaper Tuesday. However, after reporters pushed the former president about spreading lies about Michigan’s crime data, “a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech”… <https://newrepublic.com/post/185107/trump-abandons-interview-michigan-crime-talking-point>


Were this word salad to have been barfed out by a General-Purpose Transformer Large Language Model, I would judge it to have failed the turning test and not to be of human level intelligence, but just stringing words together according to some probability map:

Donald Trump: ‘Joe Bride. This guy. Is just the worst. The worst president in the history of our country will be a fading. [Long pause.] Nightmare. He’ll be a fading. A. I have fading memory. Joe Biden is forming, granting mass, think of. My life could have been so simple. I could have had 200 lawyers less. So simple. I would have had a beautiful life. But this is a beautiful life. This is far more beautiful. What’s better than being with you? Look at that beautiful lake? What is better? This or sitting on the Pacific or Atlantic. Which has sharks. You don’t have sharks. See, that is a big advantage…


No. Nobody knows what Trump is talking about:

Donald Trump: ‘We’re gonna bring up electronics, too. Electronics. We buy everything away. When you see the sophistication of the product I just saw at this place, electronics is peanuts by comparison…<youtube.com/watch?v=I1BaK6Hcexw>


Trumphole: November 24, 2015, was the day that the Trump campaign should have ended. All those who have kept it alive since are truly deplorable:

Stacey CKS: ‘Just a reminder—This should have been where it ended:


Grifters: JD Vance has decided to see if he can become as big and bold a constant liar as Donald Trump:

JD Vance: ‘The polls tend to radically overstate Democrats…. If you talk to insiders in the Kamala Harris campaign, they’re very worried about where they are…. The American people don’t buy the idea that Kamala Harris… is going to tackle the inflation crisis…. Giving Kamala Harris control over inflation policy, it’s like giving Jeffrey Epstein control over human trafficking policy… <https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1825167623383859667>


Grifters: WAIT! WHAT? I understand that things can look different to a child and a teenager than they really are, but even so?:

Jessica Winter: The Story That “Hillbilly Elegy” Doesn’t Tell: ‘Donna Morel, an attorney in San Diego… is a fact-checking hobbyist…. “Two generations ago, my grandparents were dirt-poor and in love,” Vance writes toward the start of “Hillbilly Elegy.” “They got married and moved north in the hope of escaping the dreadful poverty around them.” Bonnie and Jim Vance… Mamaw and Papaw, left their Appalachian home town… settling in Middletown, Ohio…. Vance describes Bonnie and Jim as “alone in their new city” and “isolated” from the family they felt closest to. He allows that Jim’s mother, Goldie, was “nearby,” but that Bonnie disliked her, and that she was “mostly a stranger to her own son.”…

“Hillbilly Elegy” doesn’t name Jim’s stepfather, Julius Blackmon, who had worked at Armco for years before Jim was hired there. (“Applicants with a family member working at Armco would move to the top of the employment list,” Vance notes in his memoir, without making the connection.)… Bonnie and Jim lived with Jim’s mother and stepfather at two different residences following their move to Middletown, according to the census records…. When Bonnie and Jim did get their own place, it was less than a mile away. And, when Julius Blackmon died, Jim was named the executor of his estate—yet another data point that contradicts the picture of estrangement that Vance sketches in “Elegy.”…

Bonnie and Jim’s marriage was, at times, deeply troubled—in Vance’s telling, both of his grandparents were violent, and Jim was a vicious drunk. But Vance praises them in his memoir and elsewhere for sticking it out. Later in the marriage, Vance writes in “Elegy,” they “separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate houses, they spent nearly every waking hour together.”… Bonnie and Jim—Vance’s flawed but heroic avatars of traditional marriage—entered divorce proceedings twice…. [On] March 22, 1955… Bonnie, then twenty-one, filed for divorce from Jim on grounds of “extreme cruelty” and “gross neglect of duty.”… The timing of Bonnie’s divorce petition is out of step with “Elegy,” in which Vance’s Uncle Jimmy compares the early years of his parents’ marriage to “Leave It to Beaver,” and says that, while their bond was always volatile, before the nineteen-sixties, “they were united, they were getting along with each other.”… In August, 1957, the divorce filing was dismissed “without record,” leaving no documented clue as to why. Bonnie and Jim went on to have two more children…. A quarter century after… Jim filed for divorce from Bonnie; Bonnie filed a counterclaim, and, in 1981… the court found Jim “guilty of gross neglect of duty.” Still, the couple did not divorce. Instead, they legally separated… <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-lede/the-story-that-hillbilly-elegy-doesnt-tell>

The line in “Hillbilly Elegy” at the end of chapter 3 about how:

Mamaw and Papaw eventually got their act together. Papaw quit drinking in 1983, a decision accompanied by no medical intervention and not much fanfare. He simply stopped and said little about it. He and Mamaw separated and then reconciled, and although they continued to live in separate houses, they spent nearly every waking hour together…

was always weird: they were legally separated for Vance’s entire life. And while there was a legal separation, was there ever a legal reconciliation?

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I am told that when he was in Iraq in the Marines JD Vance spent his time in an air-conditioned office typing up press releases. “REMF”, “Chair-Borne Infantry”, “Feather Merchant”, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Nothing could be stupider than claiming that Donald Trump exemplifies the U.S. Marine virtue of “Semper Fi”. Nothing could more demonstrate JD Vance’s REMF nature than claiming that he does so:

JD Vance: ‘I honor every member of every branch of our armed forces, but the one thing that I think the Marines really do well is we have the best motto. I’m biased with Semper Fidelis—always faithful, right? You hear Marines say it all the time, “Semper Fi”, and to me, what it means is that Marines are always faithful to our country. I want to expound upon it because I really do think that Donald Trump exemplifies that motto…

Nobody could be less like the positive self-image of the Marines than Donald Trump:

Donald Trump: ‘We gave her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It’s much better than the Congressional Medal of Honor because soldiers get the Congressional. And they’re in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal…

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