2d ago

Trump's return to MAGA rallies is a flop

www.salon.com Trump's return to MAGA rallies is a flop

Republicans have reason to worry if this is how Trump campaigns in 2026

“Americans must learn to adjust to a lower standard of living,” he told the crowd before suggesting a specific solution to prices hiked by his tariffs, which he continues to insist are a success. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils…You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”

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How much could one pencil cost, Michael? 10 dollars?
- Here's 20 dollars. Go see a Star War.

Are we great again?
- Not Great Depression level yet; just Severely Depressed now.
  
  Are we sure about that? They keep refusing to release the economic reports, and us having lost 30% of our economy sounds reasonable.
  
  Mediocre Depression
- Yeah we are great now.
  Can’t you tell, we have less pencils in our home and umm… pencils are made with lead, and that is bad for us.
  Oh, they are also made with wood and that can catch fire. So our homes are safer.
  Umm and uhh… You know, I could slip and fall on a pencil.
  So, yeah, We are great again.
  /s < if it wasn’t obvious.
  Also I know pencils are not made of lead, they are made of graphite.
  
  Mostly ceramic and wood, but you still have a sharp point.
  
  A feckin pencil
- Da! Da! You now have similar living standard as great power of russia. Too many poor? We have solution to that too - bestest solution, da.
  
  Sorry no dying in a wheat field for us. Now if theres a jungle with socialists in it…
- Yes, just with less pencils and dolls.
- Only if you lower your standard of living. Rtfa!
  /s

Americans must learn to adjust to a lower standard of living, he told the crowd before suggesting a specific solution to prices hiked by his tariffs, which he continues to insist are a success. “You can give up certain products. You can give up pencils…You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice.”
Trump thinks the economic problem is pencil addicts and spoiled little girls. The guy is a mental ruin.
- So are all his voters.
- Hopefully, this time even his brainwashed moron voters will be able to see through his bullshit lies.
  
  The problem is that even if at some level they realize this, self-deceit and denial is an easier way to deal with the feeling that maybe their whole world view has been a bad mistake, than admitting their whole world view has been a bad mistake and changing it.
  
  Too bad calling for a UN fair election monitoring/protection team is not a realistic or useful action.
- The guy is a mental ruin.
  The guy is horribly detached from the reality of normal people, like everyone who's born into wealth (or has been rich long enough to forget what it was like before). Remember that "how much does milk cost" thing?
  The guy is a mental ruin too, of course, which doesn't help.
- In his defense I do think little girls are spending way too much money on K Pop Demon Hunter stuff.... But that definitely isn't the issue with the economy. It's just everywhere. (I'm a teacher. Can we ban Six Seven and Bro as well?)

This is some how more out of touch than Dr Oz and his charcuterie board shopping trip. Yes, you don't need pencils, the suddenly luxury good in my economy.
- Why pencils, literally the cheapest writing utensil available? I could see if it was a good pen/pencil set or a laptop, but a piece of wood with graphite? It's less than a dollar.
  
  Probably some specific memory Trump has of seeing a cup with “too many pencils, why do you need so many pencils???” 40 years ago. Just like the doll thing. There are more modern, relevant examples of discretionary spending he could have chosen, but his brain is mush from 1985.
  
  I would bet a million dollars that he was looking at a pencil, probably somebody holding one, when he said it.
  
  Doesn't he only ever use Sharpies to write?
- It's very clear Donald Trump doesn't understand how the working class lives at all
  
  Trump doesn't understand anything except greed.

“Why is it we only take people from s**thole countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?”
Maybe because people from civilised countries can see that America is the real shithole?
But I'm sure bullying and betraying your EU allies and shitting on them is gonna make all the smart people emigrate to the USA.
What a moron. Just unbelievable.
- What a moron. Just unbelievable
  And yet, elected a SECOND time!
- It's because we're only barely above a shit hole country ourselves, so we're a step up for them, but decent countries won't lower themselves.
- "Why can't we get any Swedes?" Because Sweden is functional and we aren't right now. The Norwegians feel the same.
- Yeah, they come over here to buy jeans at a 1/3 the price and gun parts. Otherwise, everything else we sell here is cheap quality and tastes terrible compared to European options.

His "Let Them Eat Cake" Tour isn't going well? Who woulda thunk?

If (as he says) the economy is doing so well, why would people need to " learn to adjust to a lower standard of living"? Yet MAGA supporters just eat this stuff up without questioning.
- The MAGA supporters are probably thinking the avocado toast eaters need to lower their standards of living, not themselves.
  
  I still find it hilarious that something like avocado toast (and arugula, lol. And Dijon mustard) has ended up as a shorthand for snobbish effete youngsters who probably also drink their tea with a pinky in the air, but are unable to afford housing and healthcare and childcare, because they are just bad at managing their money and blew it all on these luxury items etc....
  I mean, avocados spread on toast. Soooo elitist.
  
  Just eat less avocado toast and then you too can have an $80k lifted 4x4 you only use to commute back and forth to work.

“They want us to go to batteries!” he jeered. “We don’t have battery content. So let’s go to batteries according to these morons that were in our country.”
What is battery content? Does he mean the raw materials to make batteries?
- We are in an age of portability, EVERYTHING uses batteries these days.
  And if we don't have the raw materials to build batteries, then we need to negotiate equitable trade deals with other nations. That's why we use diplomacy, and don't just impose our will on other nations.
  How did we end up up with the most ignorant person in America as our president?
  
  He's very memeable. They don't listen to his speeches they see shit on tic tok or some fascists YouTube or podcast and enjoy that he's mean to libs. They want politics to be a reality TV show and they got their wish.
  
  We're in an age in which abundant natural sources of power are easier and easier to get electricity from and batteries keep getting better. Imagine telling someone in 1500 that you could store the power of a water wheel, and use it for your furnace or to replace your horse, and it's at your demand.
  Even with fossil fuel generation, batteries help solve one of the major pain in the ass problems: that input has to equal output. Grid scale batteries mean you can make a day's power when it's convenient for the generation side rather than having to have capacity and the labor to spin it up on standby.
  
  ...what is battery content?

He's talking about dolls again?! I had to check the date... Yup.
- Oh, so that wasn't them quoting him from earlier in the year, he's literally rehashing the weird number of dolls thing?
  
  It's always 37 of them with him.
- He said the stupid pencil thing again, too.
  I mean, FFS. Does he have any idea what pencils even cost? And has he been told people are just using a crazy amount of them in school?
  This is like the "boomer math" thing with large screen TVs, avocado toast, lattes, and Netflix dialed up to eleven. I just looked on Amazon, and you can buy a box of 576 of them for $35.99. That's about 6 cents a pencil. Enough pencils for one child to use 37 of them per year for ten years and still have some left over.
  Does he think people are coming up short on things like health care because they chose to buy more pencils (and dolls) for their kids?
- I got the strangest deja vu reading this.
  
  Dude, me too. I read that quote and knew he talked specifically about pencils and dolls some time ago and thought it was just them adding it in for context on his previous statements about affordability/austerity.
  This dude is completely cooked.

I'm not going to say he's particularly wrong, but a) populists can't get away with telling people to cut back, they've already demanded you trade your morals, freedom, and touch with reality for greed, and b) greed isn't why people are mad, yes consumer goods are getting more expensive, but housing, food, and transportation along with raw materials have become unaffordable.
Panem et circenses. People will cheer for oppression if you ensure their needs are met and they aren't bored. No amount of circuses will replace the bread. And this clown doesn't really have the vigor he used to.

According to a new POLITICO poll, half of all Americans are finding it difficult to afford food. Even more damaging for Trump, a majority (55%) blames his administration. So Democrats were quick to pounce on his absurd advice. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona posted on X, “Trump needs private jets and an Oval Office covered in gold but your kid only needs one pencil.”
And because the president is nothing if not predictable, his speech eventually strayed from the economic gaslighting, quickly devolving into angry tangents about alternative energy, immigrants and other odd grievances.
In a particularly baffling moment, Trump attacked the concept of energy storage despite Pennsylvania having recently secured hundreds of jobs with a new zinc battery factory. “They want us to go to batteries!” he jeered. “We don’t have battery content. So let’s go to batteries according to these morons that were in our country.”
- In 50 or so years he's going to be a really fun subject for psych students to analyze

"Your daughters won't even want dolls once I get through with them."

"Please sir. Can I have some more?" "More pencils !!?!!".
- Step 1: No #2 pencils
  Step 2: No standardized tests
  Result: no more failing schools

So this joker can also make pencils disappear
- eww...
- The other guy did it better and with more class (took a sec for the reference)

Give up 37 dolls. Wtf
- I could never
  
  Once you get past 10 you got to start giving up a few dolls or the drama might get too great. It kind of gets messy to be honest. 37 is quite a fucking lot. This is why I don't join certain discords.

But they're all voting Republican again, because Brown Peepulz!
- Don't forgit us nasty non god botherers.
- It's also because their fathers father voted red, yada yada. They don't want to break tradition by using facts and science.

The syphilis has completely cooked his brain.
- Poor syphilis in that brain. 😔
  
  I hope the syphilis is okay.

Even his devoted were getting bored to tears by them while there was an actual campaign going on. Personally I hope he just keeps doing it for the rest of his life, and the crowds keep getting smaller and smaller.
- I can't wait until he's back at four seasons total landscaping again. Those are the venues he belongs in
  
  That was Roodles, but yeah.
- Eventually one of the only few ways to make money will be to get paid to attend his rallies.
- That would truly kill him if he through a rally and no one showed up.

So, we just get one gilded gold ballroom with a solid gold toilet now?

Migrants = more pencils, more dolls. I assume also more tacos.
What else? More, sofas, TVs, car repairs, house painting, paintings, house buildings, house cleanings, fruit, vegetables, meats, sweaters, shoes.
Do you know how to make shoes? Oh we're screwed!

Hopefully he forgets the bulletproof glass one day.

Trump marched onstage insisting he was ready to make America “affordable again,” a line crafted to evoke Reagan-era economic populism that instead conjured Jimmy Carter calling for personal austerity. Trump declared he had “no higher priority” before launching into his usual misdirection by blaming the rising cost of living on his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Keep blaming Biden! Despite assurances things would be fixed as early as the first day, the USA is still not in that great of a shape. How many people will allow Trump to quit taking accountability? Every day that we get more into a Trump presidency it should be harder and harder to blame your predecessor.
If Biden left this country in such a shambles that even the almighty Trump is unable to right the ship, then why the heck did the Donald say he could?
Our gullible countrymen ate it right up and a good amount continue to do so. Mortgaging your future to own the libs.
- Keep blaming Biden!
  They ALL fucking do it. I just saw that stupid removed Noem start off one of her non-answering "answers" with some bullshit about Biden. Thankfully the piece of shit got immediately called on it.
  Q: Why are you breaking the law when it comes to immigration enforcement? A: Well, President Biden....
  That stupid SpokesBarbie Karoline does it, too. Same with Mikey Johnson, and on and on.
  And I only wish it was confined to Republicans, but it doesn't stop there, sadly. Lots of so called independents, centrists and leftists, do it too.

As floppy as his sweats

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