Easy enough to explain: "Remember how in post-WWI Italy there was a guy who was angry his country didn't win enough in the war and instead of going to therapy, he created a new ideology out of nationalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism? It's like that, only in contemporary America."
To counter a Obama's popularity, the Rs openly embraced extremism, ostracizing anyone willing to engage in diplomacy. DJT was the perfect mix of arrogance, stupidity, and bigotry to be manipulated, and was an obvious-enough bad choice to win disgruntled voters, especially with Russian campaign support. He broke lots of norms and laws that kept politics stable and instituted a kleptocracy. Now he's doubling down on division and hatred, hoping now to install himself as cult leader of a theocracy.
The republic falls to wealth inequality. Rome, post WW1 Germany, and now Russia. The rich empower a dictator to protect their interests. That's how authoritarian leaders replace democracy with dictatorships.
I'm not religious but him making a Deal with the Devil is high on the list of possible ways I can see all this happening. And even if that was proved true the Christofascists would find a way to justify it!
Con man is the first to get white supremacists, make supremacists, end of times evangelicals and rust belt trade critics together in a violent cult bent on a military dictatorship able to finally take revenge on people whose only crime was to insist on equal rights and freedom for all.
They will probably both side it, downplay the worst and the bad, play up any moment when media called him being "presidential", avoid the issue. Like when they reduced the events of Spanish Flu pandemic to one or two sentences and only during our own pandemic it turned out that all of this happened before and was repressed in history books (COVID will also get repressed). He will be like Hitler, "he built autobahns and pulled out Germany out of Great Depression, trains run on time"and other lies
That's the play. They keep you confused and disconnected so what they say spoken very loudly and poorly is the only thing that(they can only wish) matters.
And he's broken like 12 or 13 Commandments. (There are some version differences in the list, it's weird. There's a list comparison somewhere on that Wiki thing.) However many there are though? He's broken them all.
I'll never understand cultism. How people can just totally throw truth and logic out the window and fawn over a tragically flawed human being as their leader. It's so severe, because at this point, after all he has done, he shouldn't even have 10% support. There's something seriously wrong with far too many people.
We need a blue tsunami in November. There's no 2nd chance on this.
As a Norwegian its a weird time when my fellow Norwegians look back on GWB (jr) as a good president. At least he tried to get more strings attached when bailing out the banks (shares in the banks etc). Bush could even string grammatically meaningful sentences together.
What? 50% of people are stupid at most. This is like that Starlord quote where he goes "I'm 50% human so the part of me that's dumb? That's 100% on you" and Iron man goes "your math is boggling my mind"
That's really only true if you think the mean of intelligence is the mark where everything below it is stupid. Stupid doesn't really have a defined range.
True, I suppose. I'm just a little wary of people who like to say "most people are stupid but not me!" Not that they did that but it's a risk. There's a whole Effect about it. Me? I'm a fucking moron
It's actually really easy to explain. "Hey, so it turns out that a *lot* of Americans are much dumber and meaner than you thought. No, no worse than that."
It's not Quite that simple, they're not all evil in the same way, so it's not like all the Evangelicals (Who are are a cult trying to cause mass suffering because they believe it will end the world) and all the Randian Objectivists (Who's moral philosophy opposes the very purpose of society and defines itself by greed) and all the Nazis (Who are fucking Nazis) got together in one big room together (Though there's a lot of overlap in their members), but that's the short version.
"So, global humanitarian crises and a massive international refugee rise has created the perfect breeding ground for nationalism worldwide and...wait... So, poorly thought out proxy wars in the Middle East and unregulated capitalism feeding the military-industrial complex...nope, let's go further back. In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
In a couple thousand years or less, I think historians will look back at this era and be able to boil it all down mostly to the effects of climate change, and the dominos falling from there
Honestly? We don't have to go that far back to completely change our history. Reconstruction. That was our biggest failure. Nearly every systemic issue we face, nearly every line of reasoning or culture spark points could have been cleaned up then if we had the balls to do what actually had to be done. We would still have issues of course but all the big glaring ugly ones we see today? Gone.
Oh Regan was bad but nearly every bad decision that happened under him hold it's roots in systemic racism and classism that were hold overs from failing Reconstruction. Literally. Plus my point was we had a chance to "fix" this we needed to be more ruthless in the post war clean up, to stamp out the BS ideology closer to Germany post WWII (but more so if your looking at current news). Outside the war any fix would take multiple decades and long consistent effort with opposition.
More than that, if there's one lesson for America, it's STICK THE FUCKING LANDING.
Every plan for war ought to begin with a plan for what peace and success looks like if you win, and better also come with the wherewithal to achieve it.
Bonus lesson: Bipartisanship kills. See Johnson blanket pardoning all confederates after Lincoln gets shot. Never pick a VP or cabinet from the other side!
We understand follow-through when it comes to athletic activity. The baseball doesn't go as far if your arm's trajectory was intended to stop at the moment you release the ball. That means you were slowing down before letting go.
As griffin said, plus a whole bunch of other factors would need to change. For one we never Desegregated. Not truly, I mean look at any major city anywhere and there's still hard line between black and white communities. Lincoln's VP was from the other side so when he was killed he just pardoned everyone. Then the compromise of 1877 made it so Reconstruction only lasted 12 years guaranteeing all the bad actors just returned to their positions of power.
Well, the bare minimum would've been 'Not let the existing slave-owning secessionists right back into governmental positions' and 'Fucking kick the Klan in the teeth and their supporters' and such
I don't think some people remember that he never wanted to do the job. He failed upward into the oval office. Guy never expected to win. And then it went to his head with all the other psychoses and... well now here we are
No, and that’s a dangerous take. He didn’t get into the race to lose. He didn’t do trips and rallies and debates and everything else because he didn’t want the power at the end of that particular rainbow.
Except years before his first run for president said he would only run if he thought he could win. This was forever ago but I remember it because he was always a trashy pos and he would pop in the news from time to time. Hell, even as a kid the paper and magazines were running articles and mocking him. Nothing about Trump was a surprise. He has literally been blabbing his plans for decades. Only his platform has changed as he flip-flops depending on what's profitable for him
He is a perfect example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The nine criteria in the DSM-V are in this picture:
And in my mind, he fits all 9. This is why he acts the way he does. Because to him, it is a universal impossibility that he's not the greatest at everything, it's impossible that he can't get whatever he wants whenever he wants it, and it's impossible that someone could hate him.
That, and he grew up in Norman Vincent Peal's church. He's the guy behind the power of positive thinking books, so he grew up being taught that if he said or believed something enough - whether it actually is or not - it's true.
For him it turned pathological, in combo with his narcissism. Unfortunately it's worked for him when it comes to gullible people. He says something is true and they believe it or even make it happen for him.
Even when he had the job, he didn't really do much. He wanted (and still wants) the titles, not the job. Leader of the Free World, Most Powerful Man On Earth...that's like candy to his ego.
I think the people saying he didn't want to are basing it on the look on his face when he realised he'd one. But that man's always got a look like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle; that's simply what his face looks like.
Yeah, he wanted to use the race for a money grab like everyone else who doesn't have a shot in hell does, and the rest of the fucking country was just like "God fucking damnit, I'm so goddamn tired of Clinton/Bush style Politics let's just vote for this fucking joke of a man and burn the whole thing down so the government actually pays attention to things we want" And that worked a little too well and too badly at the same fucking time...
I honestly can't believe that. He wanted, more than any one of us has ever wanted anything in our entire lives, to make Obama look like a fool. I cannot believe, at all, that his delusional ass thought for even a moment that he wasn't going to coast right on into the presidency and then slam-dunk this whole making america great thing, because if Obama could do it, he could do it 10 times better, and then everyone would know how much of a fool the person who insulted him was.
He insisted on doing something he had no clue how to do, purely because he's so massively racist he convinced himself it'd be easy if a black person can do it.
It's extremely plausible that he didn't expect to win but just wanted to use the whole campaign and everything as a way to boost his brand and then blame the "libs agenda" for when he lost. Then sell more garbage. President required more work and scrutiny than he needed
Yeah, I don't think the man is *capable* of imagining himself losing. He literally couldn't say "I tested negative for covid" because that would be saying something negative about himself.
He wanted to sit on the sidelines and talk about how he could fix everything and how stupid everyone else (especially Obama) was for not doing his ideas. What he learned after winning is that he can still stop do basically that whilst also enjoying the immunity and self-enrichment oportunities afforded to him by the Presidency
The above comment really is correct he never intended to win it was just a marketing stunt for his brand, but things quickly changed and evolved rapidly.
That only really makes sense in two circumstances: 1. Don has the brains to play 4D chess like that. 2. His narcissism would let him run for president then intentionally throw the whole campaign.
The whole "he never wanted to be" schtick is based on the look on his face when he won - I think it's a lot more likely that while he wanted to win, he wasn't enormously confident that he could.
It's the opposite of 4D chess, and the "he never wanted to be" comes from all the early people that were part of the campaigns start. It's brain dead simply, actually, have a fake run at president to increase his fame and brand. He gets to claim the title "former presidential candidate," whether he is successful or not. To everyone's surprise (including his team), he started resonating with the deplorables and just ran with it.
Exactly. It wasn’t “Shit; I’ve won! That wasn’t supposed to happen!”. It was “Shit! I’ve won! I wasn’t expecting that! WTF do I do now? I don’t know how to be president!”
So, slight correction. The Bible doesn’t say you shouldn’t lie. It says you shouldn’t bear false witness *against your neighbor*. Lying is fine. Lying in order to accuse or hurt people around you is not.
Like, for example, spreading rumors about people eating pets…
Exactly. You can tell your SO that their new outfit is good even if it's a lie. Telling the authorities that your neighbor's pizza parlor is used for human trafficking when you know it's not is a sin.
Yep, and telling the authorities that it is NOT being used for growing drugs, when you know it is, is not against the Bible, because it is about your neighbor, but not against them.
It all started when the weasel got into the large hadron collider... That's when we entered the dark timeline. Harambe was just one of the first to fall.
Youre missing a step, first there was a weasel that interfered with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that incident switched us to this timeline where Harambe was made a martyr and everything followed
It's kind of bizarre to me that that DID take off like it did. Just days before, maybe ten people outside Cincinnati even knew who Harambe was. Then, suddenly, he's the poster boy for.... WHAT, really? I never figured that part out. BEFORE the madness of 2016 gave memers something to attach him to, what was the angle?
First Bowie on the 10th. Then Alan Rickman 4 days later. Glen Frey of The Eagles died another 4 days after Rickman. Fuck 2016: https://youtu.be/CSWJq-jUTMc?si=1JNiTOksJeMpxf4z This video makes more sense if you're British.
"then he told us maybe we could drink bleach to cure that virus, but instead people starting taking horse dewormer. We collectively ran out of toilet paper as we baked bread for the first time, and when it passed we sighed in relief.. only to watch lunatics try to overthrow the government starting with the head of their own vice president."
It sounds like such an unrealistic made up story rather than reality.
And before all that happened, he went to Puerto Rico after a horrific hurricane & terrible flooding devastated most of the island. That brave man stood in the doorway of Marine One, and selflessly threw individual rolls of paper towels AT the Puerto Rican people and the best thing about it is he gave them a swell 10% discount off of each roll they caught If he beaned them on the head when he threw the towels, they got ×tra 5% off. /s
And when he got to White House, he asked the Director of National Intelligence to provide him a list of all of the top spies and soon after all of them started to “mysteriously” disappear.
Then he got caught having stolen hundreds of highly classified documents, lied about them, tried to keep them, gave back only some, and the FBI had to visit his house to take what he'd kept. They were stored in unsecured locations too.
And he threatened to lock up Hillary Clinton for having some confidential documents on her email server. But what HE did was OK, normal, covered by "Presidential Records Act" (false). Nuclear hypocrisy.
"But it wasn't just him, the others tore families apart and locked the kids in cages. They set machines in the water that would rip people apart trying to swim here. Even when we scrubbed him out of the oval office, they succeeded in stripping many women's rights to abortion. They banned books, passed laws that forced some libraries to become adult only or face lawsuits. They are pushing for laws that prevent a person from demanding a divorce. And they are trying to force cheeto on us again."
Oh yes. Trump is one problem... but the bigger problem is the complicit enabling Republican Party. Because if they chose not to support him, he'd have been tanked. He'd have been convicted in the Senate and been soundly impeached... unable to ever run for president. And it would've paved the way for expedited trials in federal court.
But no. Republicans defended him at every turn, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are traitors.
ShadeMeadowsArt
Pretty much~
AnonOmis1000
I'm an atheist and I'm more Christian than him
smorsdoeuvres
Perfect loop
TheWombatStrikesAgain
Easy enough to explain: "Remember how in post-WWI Italy there was a guy who was angry his country didn't win enough in the war and instead of going to therapy, he created a new ideology out of nationalism, authoritarianism, and colonialism? It's like that, only in contemporary America."
astarkfan
He makes biggots feel safe to be biggots.
Tarmaccian
To counter a Obama's popularity, the Rs openly embraced extremism, ostracizing anyone willing to engage in diplomacy. DJT was the perfect mix of arrogance, stupidity, and bigotry to be manipulated, and was an obvious-enough bad choice to win disgruntled voters, especially with Russian campaign support. He broke lots of norms and laws that kept politics stable and instituted a kleptocracy. Now he's doubling down on division and hatred, hoping now to install himself as cult leader of a theocracy.
abtei
can someone provide the source from this excerpt?
BayazTheBenevolent
Let me try: he is the consequence of Regeans policies. You can trace most evil in the modern world back to that man.
ThisGuyPostingThings
I feel like the easiest explanation is "people wanted a new Reagan but even worse".
JayEnfield
pr3viso
The republic falls to wealth inequality. Rome, post WW1 Germany, and now Russia. The rich empower a dictator to protect their interests. That's how authoritarian leaders replace democracy with dictatorships.
BuzzAldrinsPunch
In the history of stupid fucking cults, this is far & away the fucking stupidest.
yoyo42
I'm not religious but him making a Deal with the Devil is high on the list of possible ways I can see all this happening. And even if that was proved true the Christofascists would find a way to justify it!
crapolacoaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Links_between_Trump_associates_and_Russian_officials
singthedoomsongagain
You'd just have follow Michael Peña for updates...
Zixtank
"Donny's been lying" is the understatement of the century.
intercitydude
Con man is the first to get white supremacists, make supremacists, end of times evangelicals and rust belt trade critics together in a violent cult bent on a military dictatorship able to finally take revenge on people whose only crime was to insist on equal rights and freedom for all.
intercitydude
Er…male supremacists (typo)
xETM
it's the perfect loop!
GamiCross
I'm curious how history books will cover it...
SalmonTheWise
They will probably both side it, downplay the worst and the bad, play up any moment when media called him being "presidential", avoid the issue. Like when they reduced the events of Spanish Flu pandemic to one or two sentences and only during our own pandemic it turned out that all of this happened before and was repressed in history books (COVID will also get repressed). He will be like Hitler, "he built autobahns and pulled out Germany out of Great Depression, trains run on time"and other lies
AgnosticPaladin
Depends on how you vote in November.
mindstorm8191
True. History isn't written by who's right. Only who's left
petresun
That's the play. They keep you confused and disconnected so what they say spoken very loudly and poorly is the only thing that(they can only wish) matters.
Ladeduh
Fuck those captions!
cytherians
Seven Deadly Sins. Trump has committed all of them.
MAGA Everywhere: "So what?"
DukeDarkwood
And he's broken like 12 or 13 Commandments. (There are some version differences in the list, it's weird. There's a list comparison somewhere on that Wiki thing.) However many there are though? He's broken them all.
cytherians
I'll never understand cultism. How people can just totally throw truth and logic out the window and fawn over a tragically flawed human being as their leader. It's so severe, because at this point, after all he has done, he shouldn't even have 10% support. There's something seriously wrong with far too many people.
We need a blue tsunami in November. There's no 2nd chance on this.
ClessAurion
"You cannot explain Trump" ... but... but... the video just did...!
orp0piru
Penguin, in Batman
/gallery/holy-flashback-batman-WvRaotB#/t/current_events
ronnyhugo
As a Norwegian its a weird time when my fellow Norwegians look back on GWB (jr) as a good president. At least he tried to get more strings attached when bailing out the banks (shares in the banks etc). Bush could even string grammatically meaningful sentences together.
mity0k23
Statistically, 60% of the population is fucking stupid. Donny co-opted the feelings of the dumber half of that 60%.
GravyEducation
What? 50% of people are stupid at most. This is like that Starlord quote where he goes "I'm 50% human so the part of me that's dumb? That's 100% on you" and Iron man goes "your math is boggling my mind"
TypicallyVigo
That's really only true if you think the mean of intelligence is the mark where everything below it is stupid. Stupid doesn't really have a defined range.
GravyEducation
True, I suppose. I'm just a little wary of people who like to say "most people are stupid but not me!" Not that they did that but it's a risk. There's a whole Effect about it. Me? I'm a fucking moron
TheLastGreatAudit
It's actually really easy to explain. "Hey, so it turns out that a *lot* of Americans are much dumber and meaner than you thought. No, no worse than that."
Crowlands
Some of the most evil people in the world got together to put an easily manipulable deranged lunatic in power.
Crowlands
It's not Quite that simple, they're not all evil in the same way, so it's not like all the Evangelicals (Who are are a cult trying to cause mass suffering because they believe it will end the world) and all the Randian Objectivists (Who's moral philosophy opposes the very purpose of society and defines itself by greed) and all the Nazis (Who are fucking Nazis) got together in one big room together (Though there's a lot of overlap in their members), but that's the short version.
cmsport2
"So, global humanitarian crises and a massive international refugee rise has created the perfect breeding ground for nationalism worldwide and...wait... So, poorly thought out proxy wars in the Middle East and unregulated capitalism feeding the military-industrial complex...nope, let's go further back. In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."
SpamYarBlockers
In a couple thousand years or less, I think historians will look back at this era and be able to boil it all down mostly to the effects of climate change, and the dominos falling from there
RickWilde
You sound like a hoopy frood who really knows where their towel is.
ByMyOwnDesign
42
Cthulhuonabike
They said explain it to someone who was in a coma for ten years, not to someone with amnesia
lostlittletimeonthis
In the beginning there was Reagan...
williamtowel
Honestly? We don't have to go that far back to completely change our history. Reconstruction. That was our biggest failure. Nearly every systemic issue we face, nearly every line of reasoning or culture spark points could have been cleaned up then if we had the balls to do what actually had to be done. We would still have issues of course but all the big glaring ugly ones we see today? Gone.
stonecoldstevebuschemi
williamtowel
Oh Regan was bad but nearly every bad decision that happened under him hold it's roots in systemic racism and classism that were hold overs from failing Reconstruction. Literally. Plus my point was we had a chance to "fix" this we needed to be more ruthless in the post war clean up, to stamp out the BS ideology closer to Germany post WWII (but more so if your looking at current news). Outside the war any fix would take multiple decades and long consistent effort with opposition.
hufflesnuff
More than that, if there's one lesson for America, it's STICK THE FUCKING LANDING.
Every plan for war ought to begin with a plan for what peace and success looks like if you win, and better also come with the wherewithal to achieve it.
Bonus lesson: Bipartisanship kills. See Johnson blanket pardoning all confederates after Lincoln gets shot. Never pick a VP or cabinet from the other side!
MajorasTerribleFate
We understand follow-through when it comes to athletic activity. The baseball doesn't go as far if your arm's trajectory was intended to stop at the moment you release the ball. That means you were slowing down before letting go.
kanybal
What should've been done differently?
williamtowel
As griffin said, plus a whole bunch of other factors would need to change. For one we never Desegregated. Not truly, I mean look at any major city anywhere and there's still hard line between black and white communities. Lincoln's VP was from the other side so when he was killed he just pardoned everyone. Then the compromise of 1877 made it so Reconstruction only lasted 12 years guaranteeing all the bad actors just returned to their positions of power.
GriffinMann41
Well, the bare minimum would've been 'Not let the existing slave-owning secessionists right back into governmental positions' and 'Fucking kick the Klan in the teeth and their supporters' and such
GravyEducation
I don't think some people remember that he never wanted to do the job. He failed upward into the oval office. Guy never expected to win. And then it went to his head with all the other psychoses and... well now here we are
pookieeatworld
J
Imalwaysready
No, and that’s a dangerous take. He didn’t get into the race to lose. He didn’t do trips and rallies and debates and everything else because he didn’t want the power at the end of that particular rainbow.
blisfulloblivion
Except years before his first run for president said he would only run if he thought he could win. This was forever ago but I remember it because he was always a trashy pos and he would pop in the news from time to time. Hell, even as a kid the paper and magazines were running articles and mocking him. Nothing about Trump was a surprise. He has literally been blabbing his plans for decades. Only his platform has changed as he flip-flops depending on what's profitable for him
pookieeatworld
He is a perfect example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The nine criteria in the DSM-V are in this picture:
And in my mind, he fits all 9. This is why he acts the way he does. Because to him, it is a universal impossibility that he's not the greatest at everything, it's impossible that he can't get whatever he wants whenever he wants it, and it's impossible that someone could hate him.
vegivamp
Why did you link a picture of Elon?
coquuiicola
That, and he grew up in Norman Vincent Peal's church. He's the guy behind the power of positive thinking books, so he grew up being taught that if he said or believed something enough - whether it actually is or not - it's true.
For him it turned pathological, in combo with his narcissism. Unfortunately it's worked for him when it comes to gullible people. He says something is true and they believe it or even make it happen for him.
randomwalrus
For the first time in his long and sad life, he was actually making money, rather than losing it.
Shaodyn
Even when he had the job, he didn't really do much. He wanted (and still wants) the titles, not the job. Leader of the Free World, Most Powerful Man On Earth...that's like candy to his ego.
RunningInSpaces
He absolutely wanted it, for a long time, and waited for the right time. Her had studies and research done for decades.
victell
Same with musk and twitter, just kept talking shit for the fun of it.
SaltyAndBitter
For a guy who didn't want to win, he sure tried hard to use any method he could to win.
victell
It was a game to him. Like a dog chasing a car it never expected to catch.
jimicus
I think the people saying he didn't want to are basing it on the look on his face when he realised he'd one. But that man's always got a look like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle; that's simply what his face looks like.
CyberHexx
Yeah, he wanted to use the race for a money grab like everyone else who doesn't have a shot in hell does, and the rest of the fucking country was just like "God fucking damnit, I'm so goddamn tired of Clinton/Bush style Politics let's just vote for this fucking joke of a man and burn the whole thing down so the government actually pays attention to things we want" And that worked a little too well and too badly at the same fucking time...
Pansy1024
This is a great take.
Fatbird
I honestly can't believe that. He wanted, more than any one of us has ever wanted anything in our entire lives, to make Obama look like a fool. I cannot believe, at all, that his delusional ass thought for even a moment that he wasn't going to coast right on into the presidency and then slam-dunk this whole making america great thing, because if Obama could do it, he could do it 10 times better, and then everyone would know how much of a fool the person who insulted him was.
Shaodyn
He insisted on doing something he had no clue how to do, purely because he's so massively racist he convinced himself it'd be easy if a black person can do it.
PlanckEraWasMyBestEra
Also, I think Seth Meyers' joke at the presidential dinner thing back in 2012 (I think it was 2012) really did get to him.
pyroshen
It's extremely plausible that he didn't expect to win but just wanted to use the whole campaign and everything as a way to boost his brand and then blame the "libs agenda" for when he lost. Then sell more garbage. President required more work and scrutiny than he needed
XEndeadX
Yeah, I don't think the man is *capable* of imagining himself losing. He literally couldn't say "I tested negative for covid" because that would be saying something negative about himself.
Youhavinagiraffe
He wanted to sit on the sidelines and talk about how he could fix everything and how stupid everyone else (especially Obama) was for not doing his ideas. What he learned after winning is that he can still stop do basically that whilst also enjoying the immunity and self-enrichment oportunities afforded to him by the Presidency
stulfer
The above comment really is correct he never intended to win it was just a marketing stunt for his brand, but things quickly changed and evolved rapidly.
jimicus
That only really makes sense in two circumstances:
1. Don has the brains to play 4D chess like that.
2. His narcissism would let him run for president then intentionally throw the whole campaign.
The whole "he never wanted to be" schtick is based on the look on his face when he won - I think it's a lot more likely that while he wanted to win, he wasn't enormously confident that he could.
stulfer
It's the opposite of 4D chess, and the "he never wanted to be" comes from all the early people that were part of the campaigns start. It's brain dead simply, actually, have a fake run at president to increase his fame and brand. He gets to claim the title "former presidential candidate," whether he is successful or not. To everyone's surprise (including his team), he started resonating with the deplorables and just ran with it.
jimicus
Ah, so less an intentional throwing of the campaign as a campaign that wasn't really taken seriously until suddenly it looked like it might work?
Yeah, I'd accept that.
nemesisx00
And he couldn't admit that lack of confidence to anyone, including himself. Because narcissism.
jimicus
Exactly. It wasn’t “Shit; I’ve won! That wasn’t supposed to happen!”. It was “Shit! I’ve won! I wasn’t expecting that! WTF do I do now? I don’t know how to be president!”
nicelyvillainous
So, slight correction. The Bible doesn’t say you shouldn’t lie. It says you shouldn’t bear false witness *against your neighbor*.
Lying is fine. Lying in order to accuse or hurt people around you is not.
Like, for example, spreading rumors about people eating pets…
SpamYarBlockers
Maga has a very limited view of who counts as a neighbor and who counts as an enemy
newsguycraigevans
Exactly. You can tell your SO that their new outfit is good even if it's a lie. Telling the authorities that your neighbor's pizza parlor is used for human trafficking when you know it's not is a sin.
nicelyvillainous
Yep, and telling the authorities that it is NOT being used for growing drugs, when you know it is, is not against the Bible, because it is about your neighbor, but not against them.
areve
You could be correct about the ten commandments. But there's a lot more about lying in the bible.
Keairan
Technically that means lying in a court setting, but close enough.
HEARTS0FSPACE
Have you read the other nine Commandments?
Gaelwyn
BigFatFailureTurtle
3 and 7 seem to be their favourites to forget.
DukeDarkwood
Christians see a set of rules. Trump sees a checklist.
HEARTS0FSPACE
Exactly!
Ambrosyus
Those Maga are really ignoring number 2
WizardofAnus
Only one they're collectively clear on until all the labor laws get repealed is keeping the sabbath.
Nofoxlefttogive
That's exactly why I refer to Trump as the golden calf.
Gaelwyn
https://i.imgur.com/QUWt0Hp.null
TheOneTrueZippy8
"So there was this gorilla in a zoo...."
CaptainQuarkk
I know people joke about it, but things really feel like they started going downhill after Harambe.
DownUnderDanny
thisisnotthedroidyourelookingfor
DICKS OUT!
Snooj
I just found out that my wife knew nothing of this story. I explained the whole thing to her, ending off with "and that's when the timeline split."
LootenetDan
Did you include the weasel in the large hadron collider?
TsubakiTragic
Harambe? Harambe would make a far better POTUS than trump could ever hope to be.
RockKickass
Harambe getting murdered is what put us in this timeline
davebeastly
It all started when the weasel got into the large hadron collider... That's when we entered the dark timeline. Harambe was just one of the first to fall.
MorayCup
El Psy Congroo
16KTS
If only we could stop the shooter. And prevent everything from going whack.
AlexanderElcazorro
"So when do we get to the current thing with Donald Trump?" Mr Incredible: We'll get there when we get there!
nojustsayitdont
Dicks out.....
TheWonderfulWizardOfOs
HandoB4Javert
MorayCup
Youre missing a step, first there was a weasel that interfered with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, that incident switched us to this timeline where Harambe was made a martyr and everything followed
jammer909
Actually, it started with a weasel in the hadron collider. Harambe came after.
W0lfsbl00d
In a literal way that meme did help add to the degradation of public discourse from the right and alt-right...
koops
Mikeiller
People bring up the gorilla, but I think we're over looking something even more important. David Bowie died just months before that.
BeachsideBarghest
The gorilla was more memeable. People were probably just sad about David Bowie, I know I was.
DukeDarkwood
It's kind of bizarre to me that that DID take off like it did. Just days before, maybe ten people outside Cincinnati even knew who Harambe was. Then, suddenly, he's the poster boy for.... WHAT, really? I never figured that part out. BEFORE the madness of 2016 gave memers something to attach him to, what was the angle?
coquuiicola
I'm still baffled by 'dicks out for Harambe'. I get that I'm old, but why dicks? Lol
KitchenComandante
First Bowie on the 10th. Then Alan Rickman 4 days later. Glen Frey of The Eagles died another 4 days after Rickman. Fuck 2016: https://youtu.be/CSWJq-jUTMc?si=1JNiTOksJeMpxf4z This video makes more sense if you're British.
BirdieBones
I thought there was a horse loose in the hospital?
CardeasIV
Hurry up waking from coma, or the 10 year mark wont be applicable soon
LariCheltsy
jzastrow
every day, it's what he would want
ComoSeIguana
CurbYourClassWar
ElectricSlideOrchestra
coothlesscthulhu
Leaveittojebus
pookieeatworld
KrondorMocker
pixelsnader
That would be Haram, bae.
mouseasw
Ambipolar
"And, to calm down after that let's rewatch Home Alone 2: Lost in New York for no particular reason.."
McJersey
Ah man I was just about to watch "Zoolander"...
Arbitrarynamehere
Let me finish this episode of Celebrity Apprentice, Meatloaf is about to get fired
TheDisembodiedFloatingHeadOfEdwardGRobinson
He was this timeline's anchor being.
ChaoticGoodViking
It's been downhill all ever since, makes sense.
DefaOmega
Damn good comment haha
NonFungibleUsername
So, all we need to do is send Deadpool to get us a new Harambe? Let’s Fuckin’ Go.
petrolhead1987
Puvaradivi
"then he told us maybe we could drink bleach to cure that virus, but instead people starting taking horse dewormer. We collectively ran out of toilet paper as we baked bread for the first time, and when it passed we sighed in relief.. only to watch lunatics try to overthrow the government starting with the head of their own vice president."
It sounds like such an unrealistic made up story rather than reality.
coquuiicola
I feel sad for all the abandoned sourdough starters once things got normal-ish. I'd adopt them all. 😄
my2micmacs
And before all that happened, he went to Puerto Rico after a horrific hurricane & terrible flooding devastated most of the island. That brave man stood in the doorway of Marine One, and selflessly threw individual rolls of paper towels AT the Puerto Rican people and the best thing about it is he gave them a swell 10% discount off of each roll they caught If he beaned them on the head when he threw the towels, they got ×tra 5% off. /s
LootenetDan
He told us we could inject bleach into our veins*
Gaelwyn
If someone made it into a movie, the plot would be so bad it'd end up on MST3K.
LordHelmetTheThird
And when he got to White House, he asked the Director of National Intelligence to provide him a list of all of the top spies and soon after all of them started to “mysteriously” disappear.
cytherians
Then he got caught having stolen hundreds of highly classified documents, lied about them, tried to keep them, gave back only some, and the FBI had to visit his house to take what he'd kept. They were stored in unsecured locations too.
And he threatened to lock up Hillary Clinton for having some confidential documents on her email server. But what HE did was OK, normal, covered by "Presidential Records Act" (false). Nuclear hypocrisy.
Puvaradivi
"But it wasn't just him, the others tore families apart and locked the kids in cages. They set machines in the water that would rip people apart trying to swim here. Even when we scrubbed him out of the oval office, they succeeded in stripping many women's rights to abortion. They banned books, passed laws that forced some libraries to become adult only or face lawsuits. They are pushing for laws that prevent a person from demanding a divorce. And they are trying to force cheeto on us again."
cytherians
Oh yes. Trump is one problem... but the bigger problem is the complicit enabling Republican Party. Because if they chose not to support him, he'd have been tanked. He'd have been convicted in the Senate and been soundly impeached... unable to ever run for president. And it would've paved the way for expedited trials in federal court.
But no. Republicans defended him at every turn, even in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are traitors.
Strategicgnomer
If half your nation are traitors.... That's just not a real nation, that's two nations.