Miscellaneous Trump (3 Viewers)

Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.

Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.

The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election.

Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.

Intelligencer appears to be gaining in popularity. It recently had its best month for internet traffic, with an increase of nearly 300% during August, according to data from Similarweb, and its articles have been shared on social media by the conspiracist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former Trump aide Roger Stone.


According to Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, the use of well-known figures to spread pro-Russian political messages represents a shift in disinformation tactics……

ProPublica is on fire!

Springfield officials have asked Trump NOT to visit Springfield. So of course he’s going.

I don’t even know what to make of this
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Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.

The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020.

The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.

“These ‘disputed’ tags are meant to alert a reader to false/misinformation, so it’s shocking to find that they may have the opposite effect,” Norris said.

Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and told to rank them from one to seven based on their truthfulness.

A control group saw the tweets without “disputed” tags; the experimental group viewed them with the label. Before and after seeing the tweets, the subjects were also asked to rank their views on election fraud overall.

The study found that Trump voters who were initially skeptical about claims of widespread fraud were more likely to rate lies as true when a “disputed” label appeared next to Trump’s tweets.

The findings meanwhile showed Biden voters’ beliefs were largely unaffected by the “disputed” tags. Third-party voters or non-voters were slightly less likely to believe the false claims after reading the four tweets with the tags.

Blanchard and Norris had expected in their study that the disputed tags would produce little change in Trump voters with high levels of political knowledge, given that previous research had shown politically engaged people can dismiss corrective efforts in favor of their own counterarguments.

The researchers did not predict the opposite possibility: corrective as confirmation. The knowledgeable Trump voters surveyed were so resistant to corrections that the fact-checking labels actually reinforced their belief in misinformation.

“Surprisingly, those Trump voters with higher political knowledge actually strengthened their belief in election misinformation when exposed to disputed tags, compared to a control condition without tags,” Blanchard said. “Instead of having no impact, the tags seemed counterproductive, reinforcing misinformation among this group.”……

MT15 said:

Springfield officials have asked Trump NOT to visit Springfield. So of course he’s going.

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I couldn't wrap my head around them double down on this. It mocked to the point it's a massisve meme online. It would make sense if Trump was burning the boat for Vance. You make your VP burn the boats by making him unpopular in his home state? Or maybe it's just a humilation kink.

J-DONK said:

I couldn't wrap my head around them double down on this. It mocked to the point it's a massisve meme online. It would make sense if Trump was burning the boat for Vance. You make your VP burn the boats by making him unpopular in his home state? Or maybe it's just a humilation kink.

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Sometimes it's just that simple.

J-DONK said:

Or maybe it's just a humilation kink.

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I keep tellin yall since 2016 that the Steele Dossier snippet about his "Moscow PP exploits" were absolutely true.

Its an aphrodisiac to him. ( the power to humiliate )

Grifters gonna grift...

I just like Trump totally worthless

They must have an entire team thinking up grifts and implementing them.

MT15 said:

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trump Coin worth less than ihs used depends

MT15 said:

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I still think Trump will be prepped to flee to a country without an extradition treaty on election night if exiting polling indicates he will probably lose. He's not staying in country if there's any chance he loses the election. He won't take the risk of more convictions and possible prison time. My money is on Russia or Venezuela. Putin would love to have Trump as a whipping pony in a perpetual propaganda parade, but Trump is psychologically impaired enough to think it would be a good idea to flee to Russia.

Is Donald Trump really a fascist? It’s a question that has been bubbling away since he first announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015 after a years-long campaign to brand Barack Obama an illegitimate occupant of the White House. Back then his questioning of Obama’s citizenship appeared overtly racist (“When I was 18, people called me Donald Trump. When he was 18 @BarackObama was Barry Soweto”).

So were his comments about Mexican immigrants at his campaign launch: “They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” Trump’s early indications that he would not accept the results of any election he did not win made him sound like an anti-democrat. And he told Hillary Clinton in their first presidential debate that if he became president, she would end up in jail, which is where he seemed to think his political opponents belonged. It was plenty. But was it fascism?.........

What Roth didn’t live to see is how Trump conducted himself after he lost the presidency. On 6 January 2021, two weeks before he was due to leave office, Trump encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol in a bid to prevent the congressional ratification of his election defeat. Though Trump claims he was not responsible for what happened next, the riot that followed – with his supporters storming government buildings and elected officials fleeing for their lives – echoed some of the darkest chapters of modern European history. This is how fascists behave when democracy stops working for them. It was monstrous. But it was also ridiculous. The mob seemed clueless what to do once they had breached the Capitol’s defences. They were dressed for a day trip, not an insurrection. Some – most notoriously the “QAnon shaman” in his horned raccoon headgear and patriotic face paint – looked as though they were headed for a kids’ fancy-dress party. If this was fascism, it was also a farce.

The question of whether a conman can also be a fascist – or a fascist also a conman – has become more pressing after Trump came within inches of becoming a martyr for the cause. On 13 July Thomas Matthew Crooks attempted to assassinate Trump at a campaign rally near Butler, Pennsylvania, grazing the candidate’s ear with one shot and killing a member of the crowd with another. A few weeks earlier, the New Republic – a left-leaning magazine – had published a special issue devoted to the threat posed by Trump’s potential return to the White House. Its cover pictured him with a Hitler comb-over and toothbrush moustache (based on a 1932 Nazi campaign poster), with the tagline “American Fascism: What Would It Look Like”. The image went viral..............

Here is the ProPublica article about the EPA under Trump. Throw this on the pile of his awful behaviors.

Donald Trump, who earlier this month threatened to jail his political opponents, upped his authoritarian rhetoric during a campaign rally at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

When speaking to supporters from the swing state, where both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have doubled efforts to capture the election count in November, Trump lamented the criticism aimed at the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority and said it should be "illegal."

"They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it," said the former president. "It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision"

Trump, who appointed three of the Supreme Court's six conservative justices, specifically praised the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade and allowing states to ban abortion, saying it "took a lot of courage." He said abortion will forever remain a state issue, not a federal one, and complained that Democrats are upset about it. "All they can talk about is abortion. That's all they talk about, and it really no longer pertains," he said.

"The issue of reproductive freedom certainly ‘pertains' to women all across this country, especially as we learn women are losing their lives under Donald Trump's extreme abortion bans," Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in statement after his speech.

The former president also slammed Harris' support for Supreme Court reform and baselessly claimed her efforts were an attempt to "rig the system." The push for reform arrived after a series of ethics scandals involving some of the justices' failure to disclose luxury gifts - private jet flights, superyacht trips, and more - from conservative donors. Trump claimed Harris "wants to pack the Supreme Court," and add up to 16 seats; the vice president has not endorsed such a policy.

Trump's remarks about jailing those criticizing judges and justices align with his previous sentiments that he would be a dictator if re-elected but only on "Day One" in office. His desire to squash any hint of opposition if he were to return to the White House was again on full display in a Truth Social post made in early September, during which he threatened to jail people "involved in unscrupulous behavior" this election.............