We now have the story behind this infamous photo.
“It was at this point, towards the end of the summit, that Chancellor Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada got together with some of the allies and really wanted to press Trump directly to sign the communiqué, that talked about the commitment to a rules-based international order. Trump was sitting there with his arms crossed, clearly not liking the fact that they were ganging up on him. He eventually agreed and said OK he’ll sign it. And at that point, he stood up, put his hand in his pocket, his suit jacket pocket, and he took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table and said to Merkel, ‘Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,’” Bremmer described to CBS.
You know, right now Angela Merkel has a stronger claim to being “leader of the free world” than does the American president, and it’s annoying how little respect she gets.
This isn’t the first time Merkel, who has been chancellor since 2005, has had strange encounters with her male counterparts. In 2008, Italy’s former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi once tried to play hide and seek with the chancellor, and in 2009 he kept her waiting for a meeting while he chatted on the phone. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin famously brought a dog to a meeting with Merkel, who is known to be afraid of dogs. And former President George W. Bush surprised Merkel by giving her a shoulder rub in 2006.
She’s not progressive enough for me, so this isn’t an endorsement, but still…she’s so much better than Trump. And Berlusconi and Putin and Bush.
Oh, and Trump paid a visit to Minnesota yesterday. Duluth is way over on the other side of the state, though, so I didn’t go (yeah, that’s the only reason). He lied about a bunch of stuff, promised to win Minnesota in 2020, praised that great guy, Kim Jong Un, and praised himself.
“Our people are the smartest and hardest working. You ever notice they call the other side the elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t and I’m representing the most lovely and best people on earth — the deplorables. You remember that?”
Hate the elites…and by the way, I’m more elite than they are.
And people cheered. That’s the most chilling part. People still cheer this cheesy old liar.
Times have indeed changed when we want a German Chancellor to be leader of the world.
Susan Montgomery @1:
And rightfully so, seeing as this US “president” aspires to be like that previous German Chancellor that caused so much trouble.
I understand that it can upset people when one describes others as “crazy”. As a crazy person, though, I think it is important to acknowledge when individuals demonstrate that they are not just irrational, as we all are from time to time, but are irrational as a matter of course. Donald Trump is a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He is a Malignant Narcissist. If you refuse to accept that he fits this category, you will be confused by his behavior and motivations.
Once you see him for what he is, his actions become not only understandable, but entirely predicable. In short, his sense of self is motivated only to seek a sense of power in the reactions of other people. The only reactions he will seek to evoke are fear or admiration. He has no policies, beliefs, or values that he cares about in the sense of rational abstraction. He is completely empty. He, like all people with NPD, is a pathological liar. Not because he is hiding anything, but because he is hiding, literally, nothing. Nothing he says has any relevance to understanding him, because everything he says is an act to illicit a particular reaction from the people around him.
He lives in a world of complete fantasy which is solely focused on the reactions of the people who are in his presence at the moment. Research has already been done on people like this. He isn’t dangerous because he intends harm, he is dangerous because he doesn’t see anyone else as a person. Fortunately, the people in the Department of Deference will not allow him to do anything obviously insane, at least to the degree of launching a nuclear war, but he will play to the people around him and continue to do harm until he is stopped.
If only we had a Department of Deference. I apologize for the error.
At the moment Merkel isn’t even the leader of the EU. She has no vision for the future of germany, not to speak of the EU or the world. She represents a comfortable status quo. Her politics are dead center most of the time, sometimes leaning a little bit to the right. The guy who has a positive vision for europe at the moment is Macron.
But yeah, compared to Trump they seem outright political heroes, Trump really lowered the bar.
That’s why I said I don’t endorse her: I am so goddamned tired of right-leaning centrists.
Angela Merkel at least was willing to help with the refugees. The problem was, most other EU nations turned their back on the refugees, leaving a handful of countries to carry all the weight.
– – –
BTW, another lie debunked:
“No, asylen seekers are not a ‘burden’ for European economies: study” https://phys.org/news/2018-06-asylum-seekers-burden-european-economies.html
But The Donald an the rest will ignore this study.
– – – – –
He even lied about “parents of missing Korean war veterans” asking him to bring home the remains of their children…..those parents would all be more than 100 years old, but the idiot is either incapable of counting, or ignorant of the date for the end of the Korean war.
– – – – –
“He is completely empty”
-Can we scoop him out and have him stuffed for Mme Tussand’s cabinet?
Sometimes I like to play the “what exactly would constitute a fitting and cosmically just punishment for Donald Trump?” game. A painful death is clearly far too little, far too late. Bankruptcy, life imprisonment and everyone forgetting all about him is pretty much where I’m at now. With enforced veganism as an extra twist.
Re cartomancer @ 8:
(schadenfreude merriment) BWAHAHAHAHA!
– – – – –
Also:
” Immigrants Commit Far Fewer Crimes than Native-born Americans” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2018/06/20/immigrants-commit-far-fewer-crimes-than-native-born-americans/
Well, she certainly has my respect. At least she has the morals and the courage to speak up for democratic values. At least she’s not like the cowardly right-leaning centrists who appease Trump; she is center-right by conviction.
How long until people realize the ’emperor has no clothes’?
I could have sworn I read an article in the Onion or somesuch, talking about how Americans elected Merkel as the new leader of the free world. But I couldn’t find it, because it was buried among articles that were discussing the proposition in earnest.
“But the Emperor has no clothes!” declared a small child, who was immediately set upon by the crowd until security officers could drag her away.
@11:”How long until people realize the ’emperor has no clothes’?”
Oh I think the majority already understand that even in the USA. But it’s not enough – the emperor, in fact, is a fascist racist asshole and a very dangerous one. The problem is to get enough of the majority voting to outweigh the idiot trump worshipers. I think there is a fair chance that this will happen in 2018.
Of course the seats are all heavily gerrymandered so it will take a very good turnout. But if you won’t turn out and vote you are the problem.
By the way the lack of a capital letter in your presiden’t name above is not a mistake. I just don’t think he deserves to have his name capitalized.
cartomancer @ 8:
A fitting cosmic punishment would be where he goes unperceived. No one would remember him, mention him, or even think of him; he would be a total non-entity as far as anyone else was concerned. Regardless of how much of a spectacle he made of himself; No matter how much or what he screamed and yelled; He would go ignored because nothing he ever did could have even the least effect to anyone or anything and he would have full awareness of this fact.
Because repeating lies works. It will always work. Leading up to the 2020 elections, we’ll see his support go up as he and his thugs churn out more and more outrageous lies and FOX amplifies them so they reach every household.
Yes. I have for some time now trying to devise a plausible scenario where precisely that happens, preferably on live / streamed video, and ideally, in some situation where he “couldn’t” leave and an actual President could reasonably expect to be, if not the centre of attention, at least an involved / respected participant.
I’ve been unable to come up with anything plausible.
I’ve dreamed of him being ignored at the annual State of the Union address — not stony-faced silence, but actively ignored, as in the assembled audience (congresscritters, Supreme Court justices, press, …) talk amongst themselves and pay utterly no attention (before, during, and afterwards). Whenever he or his policies do come up, he is always referred to as “Donald” (nothing else — there are claims he hates that, considering it to be disrespectful). In this dream, the rudeness is a deliberate feature, not a bug.
Ed Seedhouse @14:
I try to only use the term “45” and avoid his name altogether. He deserves no respect at all.
I do wish she’d given him a black eye and said, “don’t say I never gave you anything, either.”
#NotMyPresident, and I’ll be forever grateful for that.
You know … all those thermonuclear warheads you’ve got stashed? Any chance you could stop maintaining those (more than you already do)? At least those over there Washington adjacent?
I am not looking for another “Leader Of The Free World” I think that is a trap and leads us in the wrong direction. we do not need another great leader at all. It has been great leaders that have done the most damage it is we the people of the entire world who must take control from all of these self-styled great ones. toward that end the jerk from Queens is doing an admiral job of convincing the rest of the world that the U.S. is not and should not be considered the leader. We only need advocates and delegates that we select and approve not some “Big Man” we need to follow.
uncle frogy
#8 and #15
I have exchanged e-mails with old college pals on this precise subject, and our preferred solution would be a great big stroke that deleted his ability to speak or control various bodily fluids. He sits there in a wheelchair, drooling, able to comprehend but not speak. Sorta like the old wheelchair-bound guy in Breaking Bad who couldn’t speak but could ring his little bell to communicate.
(The old guy eventually blew up himself and Gus . . . ding ding ding ding ding set off the explosives wired into the wheelchair and set off by the bell–a classic scene from Breaking Bad–after ding ding ding a bunch of times, Gus figured it out just in time to go kaboom.)
Here are “The 46 most staggering lines from Donald Trump’s Minnesota speech. Amazing how much of what he says is not just untrue but makes no sense, is a word salad. Where you hear it it seems to make some sense but when you read it it doesn’t.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/politics/donald-trump-minnesota-speech/index.html.
I remember last year that chilling thing where that dim wit in office was at a police thing. He told the police it was ok to injure and be rough with arrested suspects. The police cheered. The audience cheered. Then he turned on the reporters and urged them to flee and the crowd turned on the reporters with those blank shiny eyes and shit kicking grins. The reporters fled.
@ 24 Have Trump and Palin ever sat down to talk together on the record? There’s a part of me that kinda wants to hear that. It would be a bit like listening to two Echoes talking to each other, trying to make pre-programmed responses sound human.
“Can we scoop him out and have him stuffed for Mme Tussand’s cabinet?”
But who actually wants to scoop out that much bullshit?
“He sits there in a wheelchair, drooling, able to comprehend but not speak …”
The able to comprehend part seems amazingly unlikely since that would require a totally different brain. Strokes do not cause that kind of improvement, let alone to increase his intellect by that huge of an amount.
26
that is none of the most horrible scary things I have ever heard of. I would so like that to happen!
please dog!!
uncle frogy
Trump is a Real Life example of the Psychopathic Man-Child — particularly points B, C, and a smidge of F.
@Ed Seedhouse:
Ooh, very good, very subtle. Ssh, I won’t tell arsoul.