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?
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…
