It will go down in history as the “Bah! Humbug!” address.

But this was not an address by a self-confident man dishing out Christmas presents to the nation. It smacked of desperation from one who can feel the December windchill of opinion polls – a Reuters/ Ipsos poll on Tuesday showed just 33% of US adults approve of how Trump has handled the economy – dissent in his own Republican ranks and the Jeffrey Epstein files looming on Friday.

The speech also revealed Trump’s need for a reliable foil. Over the years Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been useful nemeses for a man and movement defined less by what they are for than what they are against.

  • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world
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    17 hours ago

    Blows my mind that even a third of people still support this putz - I knew the human race had plenty of assholes, but that’s absurd. Wonder just how many die-hards will be left at the peak of the massive recession Trump has set up to happen next year.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      The emotional equivalent of the “sunken cost fallacy” where they’ve invested so much of their identity in him they can’t back out now.

    • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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      15 hours ago

      Crazy that people think that 1/3 supporting a fascist pedophile is ‘nort that bad’.

  • TheDemonBuer@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    “Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump said, starting as he meant to go on by telling a lie: he claimed that inflation was the worst in 48 years when he took office, when in fact it had come back down to 3%.

    He went on to place blame at the feet of Biden, previous trade deals, immigrants and what he described as a corrupt system.

    Fascists can’t actually solve problems, even though they will tell you they’re the only ones who can. They don’t have problem solving skills, that’s why they’re fascists. They blame, deflect and scapegoat, and do it very aggressively and forcefully. Unfortunately, many people mistake that for strength. But fascists are not strong, they’re weak, and they try to compensate for their weakness by acting very strong, in very superficial ways. That’s why they are so focused on hyper masculine performance.

    REAL strength is not an over inflated ego, it’s not threats and cruelty, it’s not being ignorant and proud of it, it’s not unnecessary aggression and violence. Real strength is accountability. Weak people think it shows strength to never admit when you’re wrong, but that’s completely false. Real strength is owning up to your mistakes, but not so you can crumble into self loathing, it’s so you can learn from them and become better. Real strength is learning, it’s knowledge and understanding.

    You can’t fix a problem that you don’t understand, and you can’t understand a problem if you are unwilling to look at it honestly and critically, without bias. But that takes humility and weak people think humility is weakness, and they think arrogance is strength. The opposite is true. Humility is STRENGTH. That’s why fascists can never lead, because leadership takes real strength and they don’t have it.

    • SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      It would be something seeing the republicans having to remove him. I’m sure they’d make it into a giant show about how great he’s been.

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      21 hours ago

      God this would be ideal for this dumb fuck. That way he doesn’t die, but he lives as an idiotic vegetable for the rest of his life suffering. Also coincidentally did you know that Donald j Trump who is best friends with Jeffrey r Epstein is a child rapist? We’ve seen pictures and evidence in the releases so far and this is a well-known fact.

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        17 hours ago

        My friend had a large stroke. He can barely talk, he’s confined to a wheel chair, his hands are mostly useless, and he slumps over and drools on himself. The kicker is his brain it like he was before the stroke. Hes a prisoner in broken skin suit.

        That’s the life I want for Trump.

      • WanderWisley@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        The best/worst case scenario is he has a massive stroke live on TV but somehow survives but is wheelchair bound and has to use a Stephen Hawking style speaker in order to talk. It would be hilarious to have him wheel out on stage and with his robot voice say “the deep state did this to me!”

      • IronBird@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        i feel like it’d be better if he died in some embarrassing accident due to his own incompetence, tripping down the stairs of AF1 for example.

  • DarkFuture@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    I mean it’s his 2nd term, he’s almost dead, and it’s not like the treasonous Republican party is going to oust him.

    So all we’re going to get out of this is maybe some raised blood pressure because he’s a narcissist and narcissists don’t like knowing how many people don’t like them. Doesn’t really help us though.

    • JustAnotherPodunk@lemmy.world
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      7 hours ago

      Little more concerned about the damage he can cause in the next three years. Yeah. It’s his last term. But if the last year is any indication, we’ve got a loooong way to go.

    • D_C@sh.itjust.works
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      14 hours ago

      Maybe that raised blood pressure is the thing that kills him? If so then that’s quite helpful, so everyone wins.

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    23 hours ago

    Trump desperately hoping the mindset in the military is like “I would never follow illegal orders for only $1,775 dollars! Show me the money!”. Trump mistakenly believing he can buy and sell honour because he does not have any and cannot recognize it. He doesn’t understand how standing up for a principle doesn’t make you an automatic sucker or loser.

    • balsoft@lemmy.ml
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      1 hour ago

      Haha, stupid donald, ikr? The US military servicemembers will follow illegal genocidal orders for free, as long as there are brown people getting maimed or killed. The cheque would be a nice bonus at most.

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    1 day ago

    MTG is smarter than we’ve given her credit for.

    She was the first rat off the ship, and she’ll be playing off her ‘independent’ stance up until 2028.

    “MAGA listened to Trump, and we paid the price for supporting the wrong man! He wasn’t true to the cause but I am!”

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      24 hours ago

      Don’t give her that credit. She stopped getting what she wanted so she bailed. She was not the first rat off the ship either. She didn’t come to her senses or anything.

      That said, I support her efforts to splinter the party. Not because I agree with her but because it benefits me

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        23 hours ago

        It’s hard to give people you hate credit for good ideas, but learning from everyone is part of politics.

        George Patton was the general the Germans feared the most; he was also the one who studied their tactics the most.

        • glimse@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          I give her credit for sticking to the Epstein files and I give her credit for being vocally angry about the delays. I will not give her credit for being “smart”

          And again, not at all the first rat off the ship. She bailed when Trump snubbed her.

          • DagwoodIII@piefed.social
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            19 hours ago

            Nothing you cited disproves my point.

            In fact, you getting upset proves my point.

            You’d rather get angry about a man who has been dead for almost a century than consider the idea of learning from the enemy.

            America was a pretty racist country in 1945.

            Patton was no exception.

            • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world
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              18 hours ago

              Yeah yeah, I’m sure all those super smart fascists have all sorts of great things to teach us (/s), but as long as you’re so hopped up on learning shit how about you read something for once in this misbegotten thread and recognize the fact that Patton got removed from his post for being so antisemitic, so, no, he wasn’t just a man of his times or whatever the excuse is

              Fascists are not smart, period. If they were smart they wouldn’t be fascists. If they occasionally luck into effective behaviors and strategies, fine learn from those, but calling fascists themselves smart or strong or good or any crap like that is a harmful and misinformed thing to do because it builds their bullshit mystique and makes them more influential, and it is just not true under any circumstances. Their regimes always implode eventually and leave whatever society that was unlucky enough to have them in a worse place than before fascists came on the scene.

              I am probably more pissed off by this exchange than you deserve, but like, damn, there’s a dril tweet for this

              • DagwoodIII@piefed.social
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                18 hours ago

                . If they occasionally luck into effective behaviors and strategies, fine learn from those,

                Which is literally my point.

                And watching you get all upset and then agreeing with me is some of the funniest stuff I’ve seen all day.

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        23 hours ago

        She’s done very well for herself. National name, life time pension, and plenty of other benefits we can only guess at.

        Don’t mistake morality for intelligence.

        • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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          19 hours ago

          I found out that her pension is only $8k a year and she can’t start collecting it for another decade. When she resigned, everyone was talking about how it was planned since she’d now receive a pension, but the payment amount is peanuts.

          On the QAA podcast, they outlined that they think she quit because Trump was going to fund her primary challenger in 2026, Republicans are going to lose big in 2026, and if she won her seat, that’d put her in a position where she has to defend Trump as the minority party just after he paid millions of dollars trying to have her defeated.