https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowit ... -to-buy-us
Satire from The Borowitz Report
Denmark Offers to Buy U.S.
...“As we have stated, Greenland is not for sale,” a spokesperson for the Danish government said on Friday. “We have noted, however, that during the Trump regime pretty much everything in the United States, including its government, has most definitely been for sale.”
“Denmark would be interested in purchasing the United States in its entirety, with the exception of its government,” the spokesperson added...
It seems we taxpayers just paid for a Trump political rally, complete with paid audience.
https://www.businessinsider.de/trump-sh ... ?r=US&IR=T
Workers at a new Shell plant in Pennsylvania say were told they had to attend a speech by President Donald Trump in order to get paid, according to a report from the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.
Workers were also told "no yelling, shouting, protesting or anything viewed as resistance will be tolerated at the event. An underlying theme of the event is to promote good will from the unions. Your building trades leaders and jobs stewards have agreed to this."...
The president's rally-style speech, which a senior administration official described as "not a political event but an official event," included jabs at Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Vice President Joe Biden, calls for union leaders to support him in 2020, a warning that Democrats would take their jobs, and taking credit for the complex, which is still under construction and was first announced in 2012 when former president Barack Obama was still in office.
In addition to the ethical concerns of the speech, which was expected to focus on energy but instead transformed into a full-on campaign rally (despite being funded by taxpayer dollars, which are not supposed to go toward political campaigns), the Pittsburg Post-Gazette on Friday revealed another red flag: the workers in the crowd didn't attend Trump's event by choice...
Here's the official transcript of his speech.
https://www.rev.com/blog/donald-trump-p ... transcript
It's his usual rambling, semi-coherent, self-promoting gibberish. Things like this:
And in the last really great election, our election of 2016, you know, we did great with the union workers, great. But we didn’t do good with the leadership. The leadership said, “Well, we’ve always gone Democrat. Let’s keep going that way.” That didn’t work out too well for some of them, I want to tell you. I’ll tell you, and as Gretchen said, this would have never happened without me and us. This would have never happened. So I’m with you. I’m with you. Remember that.
And remember that Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania has the best numbers they’ve ever had in the history of the state, and that’s for a very good reason. And you know what that reason is? Hello, here I am.
He did his weird thing about wind power again, too. It seems that people mocking his stupidity did not teach him anything:
And then all of a sudden it stops, the wind, and the televisions go off. And your wives and husbands say, “Darling, I want to watch Donald Trump on television tonight, but the wind stopped blowing and I can’t watch, there’s no electricity in the house, Darling.”.
It seems he's still trying to live down that time he was the only world leader who didn't make it to the WWII memorial celebrations (sent his underlings to represent the US) when it was raining.
I was a good builder, I built it, I love building. In fact, I’m going to take a tour of the site. They said, “Sir, we were going to do it before the speech, but we’re waiting for it to stop raining.” I said, “Don’t worry about the rain. Do we have umbrellas? Don’t worry about the rain.” Umbrellas work very well, especially when they are made in America.
(unlike his MAGA hats, which are made in China?
)
He blatantly tells the workers to vote out their union leaders if they don't support Trump:
I’m going to speak to some of your union leaders to say, I hope you’re going to support Trump. Okay? And if they don’t vote them the hell out of office because they’re not doing their job, it’s true. Vote them out of office.
And, seriously, this is the US president's understanding of the economy?! No wonder he doesn't get it when people tell him that trade wars are not good for anyone involved. What he says about the Great Recession and the interest rates reminds me of when you try to explain something to an elderly person who has lost some of his/her cognitive abilities, and they have picked up some of the words but clearly don't understand how it all fits together and make up their own story instead:
We have a record that nobody’s ever had. Remember when I was running, I was saying, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to create jobs.” Everyone, big yawn. You know, we like him. Let’s give him a shot. What do we have to lose, right? I said that with African Americans, they had the worst crime rates, the worst education, the worst everything. They had like 10 things. I’m reading it off a list. I looked, I said, “What the hell do you have to lose?” But I really sort of said the same thing to everybody, because our country wasn’t doing well with Biden and Obama, wasn’t doing well, and they were pouring money in, pouring, pouring money in, and it wasn’t doing well. Even now, you see the interest rates, I’m paying a normalized interest rate. We should be paying less, frankly.
This guy’s made a big mistake. He’s made a big mistake. The head of the Fed. That was another beauty that I chose, but even with that, we’re paying a normalized interest rate. The nice thing is you get some interest from the bank. With President Obama, he was paying nothing. It’s easy to make money when you’re paying nothing. You’re paying zero. Easy. But even with that, our economy’s roaring, and his wasn’t. It was the weakest economy since the Great Depression, the weakest up. So we have it going. Our country now has the hottest economy anywhere in the world.
He even got them to respond a little like his campaign rallies:
Donald Trump: 00:54:26 I don’t want to do it too early. I did it very early with Pocahontas. I should have probably waited. She’s staging a comeback on Sleepy Joe. I don’t know who’s going to win, but we’ll have to hit Pocahontas very hard again if she does win. But she’s staging a little bit of a comeback. What a group, Pocahontas and Sleepy Joe. I don’t think they give a damn about Western Pennsylvania, do you?
Audience: 00:54:53 No.
In general, you can pretty much sum up his speech as: Trump good and great leader; Democrats and Obama bad. America wonderful; allies bad; Iran bad. Fracking is wonderful and any state that doesn't allow it is stupid. Andrew Wheeler and Rick Perry are great, please applaud them and what they've done. And the EPA is doing a wonderful job now that we're dismantling it - and we're also giving you the cleanest air and water you ever had. And now that I'm in power, we're going to bulldoze over environmental regulations and anyone who has concerns about the oil and gas industry, sideline and diminish alternative sources of energy, and generally do whatever we like, ignoring all other viewpoints.
One thing's for sure - Trump is the epitome of the Ugly American - that comes through even in his gibberish:
Because Americans can do anything, go anywhere, and outperform anyone. Nobody can beat us. Nothing can stop us, because winning is what Americans do. Winning is what we know best. We will keep winning, wining, winning.
I used to tell you the story about winning. I used to say that your great leaders would come to Washington and they would say, “President, we’re winning too much. We can’t take it anymore. The people of Pennsylvania cannot stand winning. We haven’t won for years and years, and now we’re winning too much. Mr. President, please, for the good of the people of Pennsylvania, stop winning. Stop creating all these jobs. Stop creating all this product. Please, sir. Please, stop winning.”.
I said to them, and I will say to them, “We’re never going to stop winning because nobody has ever won like what’s happened over the last couple of years. Nobody has ever won like you’re winning.” I’ve more than fulfilled my promises. Even they said, “He promised things, and he actually produced more than he promised.” That’s true. But we’re going to produce more and more...
This is just embarrassing, to be represented to the world by this arrogant moron.