Has Trump really entered his fat Elvis phase?

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Here's a list of the website links that I use.

This is what Jonathan Capehart said filling in for Lawrence O'Donnell last night:

"The crowd cheered, even if he wasn't playing to a full house. Retributions against whom, exactly? Voters who rejected the Trump brand of democratic values and hand-picked candidates? The lawmakers to impeach him twice? The federal and state prosecutors overseeing many investigations into Donald Trump? But even as Donald Trump enters his 'fat Elvis' stage, it's imperative to take his threat to democracy seriously. It's still not clear who's gonna stand up to him in a Republican primary." Raw Story

Trump has been compared to fat Elvis before. For example in:

Trump Just Took 1 Step Closer To Fat Elvis Tonight, Except the Suit’s Green

December 26, 2022 in Poliztoom

Is this a good comparison? 

I was curious about what the other superstar's late life was really like. I wasn't a fan but do know that he continued to perform as he gained a lot of weight. I didn't know about his drastic decline in health at the end of his life until I did a cursory web search. This is what I found:

Inside Elvis Presley’s weight loss battle: the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll gained 80kg (176 lbs.) during his final years following unhealthy food habits like the ‘Elvis sandwich’ and rumoured eating disorders

and

'Paranoid' Elvis Presley's tragic final days - gorging on cheeseburgers and sad regret

Elvis Presley was overweight, constipated, "paranoid" and "miserable" in the lead up to his death on the toilet - though he was able to have one last piano singalong with his loved ones before he died.

Alas, it seems to me that Trump is nowhere near being in his fat Elvis stage. This is how Grunge described his last years of life:

And yet, when Elvis died on August 16, 1977, he had become something entirely different from his former self. Dealing with addiction and health issues and having a difficult time adjusting to the shifting cultural climate of the '60s and '70s, Elvis died a Vegas showman rather than a groundbreaking rocker. This kitschy new incarnation of his identity at the time of his death — what many refer to as "Old Elvis" — led to him becoming a new sort of posthumous icon, with many claiming his passing was faked and that Elvis was either alive on a private island somewhere or abducted by aliens

Grunge reported:

By 1976, Elvis had become disenfranchised and unhinged, his drug use, bad health, and financial excess chipping away at his composure. He spent most of his time holed up in the elaborate den — nicknamed the "Jungle Room" for its exotic decor — of his Memphis compound Graceland. Most worrisome to his record label, RCA, was that the King had become entirely uninterested in going into the studio and recording.

Compare this with Trump who just gave what your could call a two hour paranoid rant or a rousing speech depending on your politics at CPAC. Trump has embarked on a national tour and shows no indications of his physical health being impaired.

Although he's been accused by critics of recycling his old litany of gripes and his dark vision of where the country is headed this isn't true. He has amped it up exponentially. His CPAC performance was high octane compared to his 2016 and his 2020 campaign which seems now in comparison to have been fueled by cheap gas. 

You can't even accuse him of singing the old songs. He has entirely new songs with lyrics that made the old tunes look lame and tame. If he was a singer the title of his new album and his national tour would be "Retribution and Revenge".

Jonathan Capehart is right about one thing even though I don't think Trump is really in his fat Elvis phase: It's imperative to take his threat to democracy seriously.

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The are briefs and there are briefs. One kind may be ominous for Trump.

 By Hal Brown

The other day I wrote about various kinds of blockbusters in 

Another Trump legal jeopardy blockbuster, give me a break (link).

This morning, trying to get a blog written in the 90 minutes before Xfinity shuts off the Internet for an upgrade, I looked at the articles on Raw Story, and found one that I wanted to share once I thought of an illustration to put together which conveyed my thoughts about it. Okay, the two kinds of briefs have nothing to do with each other so it is lame and from an often shared picture of Trump golfing he does at least occasionally seem to wear briefs.

Click above to read article

This story uses the word ominous though it could have easily called the new DOJ brief a "blockbuster".

The word ominous is used twice in the article.

Click above to enlarge image

My computer dictionary defines the word as "giving the impression that something bad or unpleasant is going to happen; threatening; inauspicious."

The thesaurus offers synonyms for the word:

threatening, menacing, baleful, forbidding, sinister, inauspicious, unpropitious, portentous, unfavorable, dire, unpromising; black, dark, wintry, gloomy, ugly.

Back to the word blockbuster. We all know what it means in terms of movies, but may not know that the origin of the word went back to the 1940's:

Click above to enlarge

Mar-a-Lago without Mar-a-Lago, lovely beachfront property.

What's more ominous for Trump than one or more briefs that could bust the entire block that he lives on? 

I am hyperbole adverse when it comes to describing the latest example of a, to use the language the MAGA's hate, caso legal contra Trump.

Even if, and hopefully when, Trump is indicted for a felony which has as its penalty a prison term, I'd hesitate to call this an ominous blockbuster.

I'd prefer not seeing hyperbole at all.  I'd like a straightforward headline that has the words  indicted, convicted, sentenced, and prison in it. 

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This Oregon Democrat survived an anxious election night in 2022, now faces a terrifying one in 2024

 By Hal Brown

Photo of author

If you are absolutely convinced that the United States is on the brink of being destroyed by those who want to make your personal life miserable, take away your precious rights, enable people you'd prefer didn't live in the same neighborhood let alone the same country with you, you only have three choices as to who to vote for in the primaries.

If you believe in democracy you vote for Joe Biden. If you are a fascist you have to decide whether to vote for one of the two strongest GOP candidates in the primary. 

The Republicans are divided and lines have already been drawn between those who support Trump and those who support DeSantis or any other candidate GOP not named Trump. This has been clearly shown in the competing conservative gatherings. See:

Dueling CPAC and Club for Growth events highlight divide within GOP ahead of 2024 from CNN

These are some of the things that Trump said at CPAC:

• the nation is in a "communism state of mind" 
• America is a "socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, thugs, Marxist radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants." He claimed that people in the country illegally are staying in the U.S. in "beautiful hotel suites."
• traditional Republicans are "freaks, neocons, globalist open borders zealots — and fools."
• he has the "personality to keep us out of war."
• “We are never going back to a party that wants to give unlimited money to fight foreign wars that are endless wars, that are stupid.” 
• "I am your warrior. I am your justice. For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."
  

More about the key moments from Trump's CPAC rant.

We know how Ron DeSantis has taken steps in Florida to turn his state into the sunny anti-woke fascist playground I depicted by making this illustration:

The are two basic groups of Americans:

People who want the country to be a tolerant inclusive society governed by civil servants who believe that all people deserve fair and equal treatment by those empowered to enforce the law. 

People who want the country to be an intolerant exclusive society governed by civil servants who believe that all people  not in their group deserve biased and unequal treatment by those empowered to enforce the law. 

We have no choice but to recognize that there is a significant minority of the population who fall to varying degrees into the second group above. The polls suggest that they don't represent a majority across the country but they do in some states.

The travesty of the Electoral College is that it is the least democratic form of electing leaders short of only allowing one candidate to run for each position which one can imagine. If we had each vote count equally across the states the country wouldn't be in danger of a fascist takeover. Nationwide polls show that the majority of voting age Americans are in favor of things that ought to lead them to vote for President Biden. Consider the results from this poll from prior to the 2020 election: 

National Survey Finds Bipartisan Support for Expansive View of Rights

Click below to enlarge:

There's no doubt that the next election will be the most anxiety provoking one many of us, meaning those who are reading this blog, have lived through. That is with the exception of one commenter who wrote this other day "Your ongoing fixation on Trump is quite sad. I hope you get help."

My friends in Oregon already had practice dealing with a potentially close election because a third party candidate for governor, Betsy Johnson, could have upended the chances of the Democratic Party candidate Tina Kotek and given the election to a far right candidate, Christine Drazen. 

I wonder about what it would be like to be put into an induced coma until after the election. Would I wake up to find we have a President Trump or a President DeSantis? Would I wake to find out the the GOP still controlled the House and won the Senate? Or would I wake up to be told that the Democrats won across the board? I'd be spared all these months of growing anxiety. But then I'd miss out on all the interesting discussions with my political junkie friends. Not only that, by the time I woke up nobody would be reading my blog.

I want to live my life to the fullest and at my age, approaching 80, would not want to give up the time until we know for sure the results of the 2024 elections.

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Another Trump legal jeopardy blockbuster, give me a break

 By Hal Brown

As recently as 1995 some prisons required inmates to break rocks. Not exactly blocks but close enough for my blog story. 

Click above to enlarge image

Donald Trump, if he ever does end up incarcerated won't be forced to break rocks. He'd be lucky to have time outside to play with his little putter.

Once upon a time in our memories of the 1980's we all had video players and because they dominated the market most of us frequented Blockbuster stores to rent our tapes or DVD's. Now there's only one left in the country and it happens to be in my state of Oregon in the town of Bend. 

The word "blockbuster" means a thing of great power or size, in particular a movie, book, or other product that is a great commercial success: for example: the latest Hollywood blockbuster. In the 1980's and 1990's we had true blockbusters like the Star Wars, James Bond, Indiana Jones, Terminator, and Die Hard movies and sequels. 

Apropos to Donald Trump, both the book and movie adaption of "All The President's Men" were blockbusters.

This morning I looked at the website Raw Story and this is what I saw:

Click to read article

Not only is this legal setback described as a blockbuster but it is referred to not merely as a big blow to his 2024 run, but a big, big blow.

What , then, is this gargantuan legal setback?

From the article:

A brief from the Department of Justice firmly stating that Donald Trump does not have "absolute immunity" is nothing less than a "blockbuster" and will open the door to a flood of lawsuits to be filed against the former president as he makes his third run for the Oval Office.

That is the opinion of former prosecutor Charles Colemen Jr. during an appearance on MSNBC's "The Katie Phang Show" early Saturday morning.

Coleman goes on (my emphasis added):

"A blockbuster," Coleman immediately shot back. "The decision cannot be more important or come at a worse time for Donald Trump. You are talking about someone who is looking forward to 2024 and trying to, as we were just talking about in your last segment, now, another challenge to Joe Biden to be president again, and he has to potentially deal with lawsuits from Capitol police officers as well as Congresspeople who feel like they've put them in danger with his rhetoric around January Six and what happened." " 

This is a big, big blow to Donald Trump and significant news," he added. "Because it opens the proverbial floodgates for lawsuits

Raw Story is my go-to website for breaking news and along with Salon and the OpEd sections of The Washington Post and New York Times, for original opinion. The title of the "blockbuster" article used the words of a legal expert so it was accurate, but reading their story was still a disappointment.

Charles Coleman is a legal analyst on MSNBC. He is a former federal prosecutor and civil rights attorney.  He spent 3 1/2 years as a senior assistant district attorney in the Kings County DA office. He has also served as a senior trial lawyer and civil litigation attorney for the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. (Reference)

I have no problem with his credentials. What does bother me aside from the words he used being part of the Raw Story title getting my hopes up is that he was really engaging in wishful thinking hyperbole.

I was going to paraphrase the saying about going form one's lips or mouth to God's ears to say from Coleman's mouth to Lady Justice's ears and make an illustration. Then I discovered that both Lady Justice's eyes and ears are covered.

What would I describe as a blockbuster and a big, big legal blow to Trump? 

The first thing that comes to mind is something along the lines of the Nixon White House tapes. But that was then and this is now. Those were audio tapes. Today, considering the nothing burger the Access Hollywood recording was, I wonder if a series of more compelling videos of Trump exposing all of his lies and felonies would be his undoing.

Certainly this could be described as blockbuster news, and I'll accept that this would represent a legal setback. Unfortunately, I'd have to equivocate on making a judgment as to whether this would inevitably lead to Trump deciding to abandon his attempt to be reelected. I'd give it a 50/50 chance.

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I'm still considering joining Truth Social

  By Hal Brown

I was ready to open a Truth Social account and try to post an abridged version of my anti-Trump and anti-DeSantis blog making it into an over-the-top tribute to Trump. I was even going to open a new free blog in an attempt to get Trump to "re-Truth" it. 

I thought that I might get him to start using Ron DeSnoozer as a nickname and then I could take credit for it and direct people to my actual blog. I opened a new dedicated email and that worked for step one of the verification but then in order to complete registering I needed a phone number which they would verify as step two. I tried some fake phone numbers I found online but none of them worked. I wasn't about to give them one of my two real phone numbers. I could still buy a $20 burner phone and try t complete my Truth Social verification with that.

This is how the blog would look under the illustration above.

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I hope President Trump  picks up the nickname Ron DeSooozer for his desperate rival. I think it is the best one yet. 

DeSantis makes the news by being an anti-woke warrior, like he can claim title to being a warrior of any kind, by promulgating one pissant policy after another. 

He stands before podiums with a plethora of cardboard signs and in his dull as dirt style announces his latest executive action.

DeSnoozer needs to stand behind his cardboard signs because he's nothing but a cardboard cutout of himself.

All Donald Trump has to do is be himself whether in a small group, for example showing his compassion in E. Palestine to residents abandoned to breathe in toxic fumes and drink poisoned water by the Biden administration, or he can address huge cheering rally crowds without a teleprompter for more than an hour. 

He never has to remind his audience what his message is with a sign on the podium. All he needs his the dignified presidential seal showing America who the greatest president in modern history is, and who will go down as one of the greatest presidents of all time.

I wrote this a few weeks ago:

Above: Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey

Currently I depend on various websites to report on what Trump posts on his Truth Social platform. For example Raw Story has a story about a particularly unhinged and wack-a-toon post:

Trump obviously hoped to make money from Truth Social.

He also no doubt wanted bragging rights about how many millions of followers he had there compared to when he was on Twitter.

The failure to achieve these goals have turned out to be irrelevant because Trump now has his own megaphone. He totally controls it. While not everything he posts there is widely shared in the media he can throw random shit at the wall and see what sticks in the media.  

Trump isn't on Twitter. Elon Musk, no doubt wanting him to start tweeting again to boost Twitter's statistics, reinstated him. His most recent tweet is from January 8, 2021 when he was supposedly permanently banned.

I doubt Trump would go back to making Twitter tweets because he has an agreement with Truth Social to post there six hours before he posts anywhere else. Not only that, but he would have to admit that Truth Social failed and Elon Musk had more business acumen than he did.

Just as all major media outlets have staff assigned to watching Fox News and keeping up with other right-wing media, and finding tweets to add to articles which are relevant to the subject being covered, they have staff assigned to monitoring Truth Social. It's nice work if you can get it, and can stand watching Tucker Carlson if you're assigned to Fox News, since you can do it from home.  

I could get on Truth Social for free. I could watch Fox News. I could check out all the online right-wing websites. I probably would come up with ideas for what I hope would be an original and perhaps particularly snarky take on something for this blog.

This would mean devoting a lot of time suffering through watching and reading, to put it bluntly, a lot of crap. I am retired and nobody has decided offer to pay me to do this, plus if they did it would have to be lot of money for me to even agree to devote a few hours a day to doing this.

If I joined the platform, aside from writing about Trump's Truth Social posts, I might wile away some time screwing around with Trump by replying to his posts with over-the-top fawning replies dripping with thinly veiling sarcasm aimed at stroking his ego. I wouldn't be critical of him, what's the fun in that? He'd probably never see my posts. All that would accomplish is trying to see if I could get kicked off the platform and that would only get me a subject for one blog.

The fun of flippant fawning would be to try to get Trump to "re-Truth" (his version of a re-tweet) a reply he thinks is complementary to something he posts when in fact it comes from someone who thinks he might be gullible enough to believe I am a member of his cult.

Therefore, here's my decision: 

Sorry, MSNBC, Raw Story, HUFFPOST, Daily Beast, et. al, I'm not going to accept bundles of cash to be one of your work-from-home right-wing media monitors. Besides, I figure most of you are using interns to do this.

Tempted as I am, I won't join Truth Social, and "truth" be told, part of the reason is that I am a little afraid I might enjoy posting there so much I'd become addicted to this useless endeavor.