I actually despise Vance more than Trump for this very reason. Trump is who he is, a raging narcissist, racist, misogynist, and generally stupid person, all unlikeable characteristics, but weirdly done in an honest manner. He's transparently (though unintentionally) stupid in a way which should be readily apparent to everyone, which is why I almost get angrier at his supporters than him. Trump really believes Portland is burning down and takes Newsmax at face value because they do the important selling point to Trump validating their authenticity, loving him. If they love him, they must be telling the truth. So, stupid I get. Mean stupid is harder, but there's some wiggle room. On the other hand, Vance is not stupid. He knows better. He knows this bullshit about rent costs isn't true. He knows the Haitians in his home state weren't eating dogs and cats. He knows most of the tripe Trump is selling isn't true and doesn't care because he is a whore who desires proximity to the crown and will sell out the lowest branch of people available to achieve this status. He's very aware the statements he makes are both false and beneficial to his ambition up the political ladder. Guess which voice on his shoulder always wins? Perhaps in all of the hand wringing these days about the dangers of "liberal rhetoric" I should be careful, but I'll still say Vance is a political parasite of the worst kind. There are few kinds of people worse than those who will sacrifice others for their own gain, especially people who are most vulnerable and lack agency in our society, and no one fits this category more aptly than JD Vance. I can't wait for this phony sociopath to fail after hitching his wagon to MAGA, knowing how awful they are and still not caring if he gets something out of it.
So was Donald Trump always stupid or did something in him change? Did people not like him when he was just another New York billionaire and developer who'd call in to Howard Stern's radio show and have a cameo appearance in Home Alone 2? What the hell happened? I saw the first few years of The Apprentice and that Donald Trump didn't seem to be like this orange shitstain.
I think Trump always had those traits to some degree, but they were greatly amplified after he got fame on The Apprentice and then power as President. I've railed against AI that flatters a person so much they drive themselves into psychosis, but AI didn't invent being a lickspittle. Trump doesn't have the self-critical defenses against those type of people. And, yes, I believe some of that was purposeful Russian manipulation.
I was just addressing the issue you raised of their effectiveness from aircraft carriers. That's only relevant if they're being used from aircraft carriers which, if they're being bought and used within Europe by European NATO member countries, isn't the case... they're taking off and landing within Europe itself. My point was that European and other NATO countries STILL souldn't be buying them as the supplier, a US manufacturer, isn't reliable as the US can't be relied upon. The effectiveness of the F35 in terms of force projection from an aircraft carrier is thus neither here nor there.
He's always been a sociopathological narcissist. Always. He hasn't changed, we're just more exposed to him than before because we all have to live with a criminally dangerous sociopathological narcissist as the president. Remember, what you saw on TV in his show was edited, not the unabridged version.
His university professor at Penn said he was one of the dumbest bastsrds he ever had. Everything else he's done since then proves that.
I remember listing to something a few years ago that was focused on Lindsey Graham. One of thing things that they pointed out, relative to Graham, is that there are always people in politics who are malleable and have shifting positions and will suck up to the person they feel is the impost important or the most powerful in the room. Your description of Vance very much describes that type of person.
He had a lot of charisma, and that masks over a lot of bullshit and stupidity. And he is one of those guys who can just go on a talk for an hour or two, which most people can't. So to some, that masks his bullshit and stupidity.
I'm assuming you mean Sen. Kennedy from Louisiana. Here, I would disagree a bit in that his position is somewhat malleable, but I do think he is intelligent enough to know what is reasonable and when to keep his head down. [edit] Another way of saying this is that he is more strategic when manipulating facts than the others are.[/edit] Mind, he is a shit, but I think he is not in the same category that other others are. Now, if you are talking about HHS Sec. Kennedy, yeah, I agree.
Senator Kennedy definitely fits in the category of "smart people who play dumb for cynical political power", which I think is the category yoss was going for. He is highly educated but puts on this Foghorn Leghorn accent to strum the rubes. RFK Jr is not in that category - he's a weirdo who didn't have any guardrails growing up and doesn't understand normal human boundaries.
And the behind-the-scenes version of Trump was horrible. I'm reading Cue the Sun, Emily Nussbaum's book on the history of reality television. The section on The Apprentice reveals Trump's misogyny (openly talking about the bodies of female contestants, complaining that the women cast on the show were not "hot" enough), racism (using the n-word to describe one of the finalists, urging the producers to divide the contestants into teams by race), narcissism (too many examples to mention), and unpredictability (randomly firing the "wrong" person impulsively, leaving the producers scrambling to find footage that would justify the decision).
Trump has sued the BBC for $10b for defamation. The lawsuit was filed in Florida and Trump is arguing that the BBC influenced Florida voters by "deceptively" editing Trump's Jan 6 speech in a documentary that aired before the 2024 election so that his statement telling people to march to the Capitol building and his later statement telling them to Fight were immediately after each other without any breaks. Trump is arguing that the editing makes it appear that Trump's words triggered a riot (despite many of the people that marched on the Capitol Building did think that is what Trump did). What is especially odd about the lawsuit is that the documentary did not air on BBC America, nor was it available on the BBC's streaming service for Americans as it was geo-locked to the UK. The only way Floridians could have watched the documentary is if they had used a VPN to make it appear like they were in the UK. As a result, it is extremely unlikely that any voters in Florida actually saw the documentary and had their vote influenced. https://www.npr.org/2025/12/17/nx-s1-5646697/trump-sues-bbc-florida-britbox-porn
Yeah, the only people who should have seen it were people who were watching it illegally. They also would have had to click past a screen where they stated they had a UK TV viewing license which isn't available outside the UK anyway. Hopefully it will be dismissed with prejudice but it's American law so... y'know
I'm guessing that he is piggybacking on the BBC decision to fire executives based on complaints within the UK. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vn25d5dq7o
There's a huge political argument about that over here, in that it was caused by the ineffectiveness of the current chairman in not defending itself from the attacks, rather than any deficiencies in it's case against Trump#s attacks. That's why those people resigned... because they weren't allowed to simply apologise for what was, essentially, a relatively minor error and move on.
There's also some sort of review going on for the BBC, right? I heard speculation that the timing of the lawsuit was also likely the result of that review and to give the BBC's opponents some fuel to feed whatever changes they want. Is that accurate?
Defamation....He owes the bbc money for enhancing his popularity as a victim among the maga crowd and his reputation with others he has damaged himself so badly that that bbc thing doesnot even register.
He can't pardon people for state-level offenses either. But he still wastes time and generates traffic by doing so.