

Trump keeps mentioning the “late great” Hannibal Lector. The serial killer featured in Silence of the Lambs and other books and movies.
He always emphasizes the joke from the end of the movie where Lector says, “I’m having an old friend for dinner…”
How does this relate to anything Trump could be talking about?
I think it’s a play on Venezuela emptying their prisons and insane asylums and sending them here, something which isn’t happening. So Trump is combining something he made up with an apocalyptic image. The shtick doesn’t really work, but Trump isn’t as finely tuned a demagogue as he used to be.
So I think what he was originally going for was something along the lines of, “There are people worse than Hannibal Lecter crossing the border,” but he gets distracted and rambles about how great Hannibal Lecter is, and he never gets to the point, which he just undermined, of actually saying that the people coming in are worse than Hannibal Lecter.
Also, the ‘late’ Hannibal Lecter did not die in any book, movie, or television show in which he was a character, and all the actors who played him are still alive.
Falling behind
A common theory about Donald Trump’s appeal is that working-class white people feel they fell behind as other groups pulled ahead. He recognized the sentiment and spoke to those voters’ concerns.
It turns out that those concerns are grounded in real economic changes, a new study from Harvard researchers shows. The researchers analyzed census and tax records covering 57 million children to look at people’s ability to rise to the middle and upper classes — their mobility — over two recent generations
Cutting in line
After Trump won in 2016, many journalists — myself included — turned to the sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s book on the American right, “Strangers in Their Own Land,” to try to understand what had happened. Hochschild provided a helpful analogy, one that resonates with the Harvard study’s findings.
It goes something like this: White working-class people in red states saw the American dream as a queue moving people to prosperity. Over the past several decades, thanks to globalization and other changes, the queue stopped moving. And other groups have moved to the front of the queue. As a result, working-class white Americans often believe that their shrinking mobility is the result not just of outside forces like globalization but also of other groups that supposedly cut ahead.
The Harvard study suggests that white working-class conservatives were right when they felt their own mobility had slowed, or even reversed, compared with that of Black Americans. (The researchers did not find significant changes for other racial groups.) The study also found that white people born into high-income families have seen their mobility improve — meaning the drop in mobility is restricted to the white working class.
Trump has benefited from that reality. He has tapped into the resentment many white voters feel toward people of other races with his inflammatory and at times racist rhetoric, such as when he suggested Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. He has also criticized rich elites — which includes people who gained mobility as the working class lost out. As a result, some working-class white voters flipped from the Democratic Party to Trump between 2012 and 2016. Trump continues to have strong support from those voters, polls show.
Of course, the evidence does not justify racial resentment. Economists say the queue analogy doesn’t reflect how the economy actually works. A growing, healthy economy creates more queues to prosperity; it’s not zero-sum, as the analogy suggests. In fact, the Harvard study found that white mobility had diminished least in the places where Black mobility had improved most.
And while Black mobility has improved, it has not improved anywhere near enough to eliminate wide racial gaps between Black and white people. Gaps have narrowed, not closed.
Still, Trump has tapped into many white voters’ fears that they have been left behind while other lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have focused on policies that help minority groups. The Harvard study helps show why Trump has been able to do that.
Insights for both sides
The new research can also help explain changes among Black voters. They have slightly shifted toward Trump since 2020, polls show. One possible explanation is that some Black voters’ economic gains have allowed them to focus more on noneconomic issues — such as abortion and L.G.B.T.Q. rights — on which they are more conservative than typical Democrats.
Experts not involved with the study said that it would reverberate across the political spectrum. “The left and the right have very different views on race and class,” Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor at Stanford, told me. “The value of the study is that it brings some unimpeachable evidence to bear on these questions.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/25/politics ... index.htmlHarris the prosecutor: executes babies
Harris and abortion
Trump said, “She wants abortions in the eighth and ninth month of pregnancy, that’s fine with her, right up until birth, and even after birth – the execution of a baby.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim that Harris supports the execution of babies after birth is false. She has never said anything to endorse post-birth murder, which is illegal everywhere in the country; Trump has frequently claimed that some Democratic states allow such post-birth executions, but that claim is false, too.
Harris and the number of migrants
Trump claimed that Harris “allowed 20 million illegal aliens to stampede into our country from all over the world.”
Facts First: Leaving aside Trump’s claim about Harris’ own responsibility for migration levels, the“20 million” figure is false, a major exaggeration. The total number of “encounters” at the northern and southern border from February 2021 through June 2024, at both legal ports of entry and in between those ports, was about 10 million – and an “encounter” does not mean a person was let into the country; some people encountered are promptly sent away.
Hates Jews: see link
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/p ... 235069397/rump has also called for the termination of the Constitution in order to overturn the 2020 election results following his loss to President Joe Biden. In December 2022, during one of his rants on Truth Social, he incorrectly called himself the “rightful winner” and claimed that “Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
After repeating his usual unfounded claims about mail-in voting, Trump launched into an appeal directed at Christian voters. “Christians, get out and vote!” yelled Trump. “Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years. You know what? It’ll be fixed! It’ll be fine! You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. I love you, Christians!” He added, “You gotta get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests