Doing my part to spread the message. I've had several vehicles come dangerously close when they've passed me. A couple of birds flipped my way. Several shouts of "Right On!".
Posted on 08/06/2022 8:11:13 PM PDT by DoodleBob
My friend Donald Trump emailed me the other day with what he called “an exciting announcement”:
“I designed a BRAND NEW HAT, and I want YOU to see it first.”
The hat that the former president personally designed and is now offering exclusively to ME delivers a crisp three-word message: “Let’s Go Brandon!” It is, the email subject line announced, “Guaranteed to trigger the Libs.” And it can be all mine if, within the next hour, I donate $45 or more to his Save America joint fundraising committee.
Initially, I believed this calculatedly offensive hat was new to Trump’s merch collection because I had not seen it offered before. But a search of an email folder called “Trash,” to which I have various items automatically directed, revealed that he has previously offered me the same item several times since early July, and perhaps sooner, but these messages had been whisked away before I came across them.
Trump, who typically addresses me as “Friend,” has also offered me a chance to obtain a “Let’s Go Brandon” flag for the same low price of $45, or about ten times what either item likely costs to produce. Alas, his merch website does not currently seem to stock “Let’s Go Brandon” T-shirts, previously available.
The pitches for the hat—which I am increasingly skeptical is being offered just to me—all use the same language: “Biden is an absolute DISASTER and is ruining our country. Make sure everyone knows where you stand by proudly wearing this hat.”
According to an authoritative article last October from the Associated Press, the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” came into being as code for “F*** Joe Biden” after a NASCAR race in Alabama on Oct. 2. As an NBC Sports reporter was interviewing race winner Brandon Brown, the crowd began a chant that was difficult to make out. The reporter thought they were chanting “Let’s go Brandon!” when it actually was “F*** Joe Biden.”
The AP notes that “NASCAR and NBC have since taken steps to limit ‘ambient crowd noise’ during interviews, but it was too late—the phrase already had taken off.” The article continues:
America’s presidents have endured meanness for centuries; Grover Cleveland faced chants of “Ma, Ma Where’s my Pa?” in the 1880s over rumors he’d fathered an illegitimate child. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were the subject of poems that leaned into racist tropes and allegations of bigamy.
“We have a sense of the dignity of the office of president that has consistently been violated to our horror over the course of American history,” said Cal Jillson, a politics expert and professor in the political science department at Southern Methodist University. “We never fail to be horrified by some new outrage.”
But wait: The harsh heckling and ribbing that Cleveland, Jefferson, Jackson, and other U.S. presidents endured did not come directly from their political rivals. John Adams, who beat out Jefferson for the presidency in 1796 and then lost to him in 1800, did not lead crowds in chanting vulgarities targeting his opponent.
Jackson’s opponents nicknamed him “jackass,” but, according to the Smithsonian, “He liked the name so much that he used a symbol of a donkey in his campaign for a short time.” It would later become the symbol of the Democratic party. John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, who ran against Jackson in 1824, 1828, and 1832, did not sell their supporters hats making references to sexual intercourse.
Similarly, neither of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s two Republican opponents for president, James G. Blaine in 1884 and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and 1892, went around hawking merch that said “F*** Grover.” In fact, according to historian Henry F. Graff’s thumbnail sketch of the 1888 campaign, which Cleveland lost to Harrison, both candidates ran issue-focused campaigns with “dignity and understatement.”
Can anyone imagine Donald Trump doing anything to merit the use of either of those terms?
As with most things having to do with Trump, the Republican political establishment is fully complicit with his demeaning of the presidency through boorish conduct. Again, to quote the October article by the AP:
Republican Rep. Bill Posey of Florida ended an Oct. 21 House floor speech with a fist pump and the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon!” . . . South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan wore a “Let’s Go Brandon” face mask at the Capitol last week. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz posed with a “Let’s Go Brandon” sign at the World Series. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s press secretary retweeted a photo of the phrase on a construction sign in Virginia.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post had to issue a correction when it reported, due to an editing error, that a crowd drawn to a speech by Donald Trump Jr. in Georgia last September began chanting “Let’s Go Brandon.” The crowd chant was actually “F*** Joe Biden.”
Indeed, during a talk at Mar-a-Lago in November, Trump Sr. responded to chants of “Let’s Go Brandon!” by joking, “I still like the first phrase better, somehow more accurate.”
Curiously, the only person who seems to have paid a price for taking part in this denigration of norms is Brandon Brown, the NASCAR driver. His decision to partner with “LGBcoin,” a worthless cryptocurrency originally created to capitalize on the slogan, prompted a backlash that he now blames for the sponsorship difficulties that have forced him to give up his berth in several races.
“I’m still viewed as a political figure,” Brown told the racing publication Frontstretch. “I can be viewed as divisive because of the chant. It’s really hard to convince companies that, ‘Hey, that’s not me. That’s just what the crowd was chanting.’ It does make it hard.”
Last Sunday, July 31, at a LIV Golf tournament in New Jersey, Trump, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can be seen fist-pumping and laughing as the crowd breaks into a chant of “Let’s go Brandon.” The tournament was protested by relatives of victims of the 9/11 terror attacks because of the alleged involvement of tournament sponsor Saudi Arabia in the attacks.
The Republican delusion that portrays Joe Biden as a doddering and sinister figure led to an embarrassing tirade unleashed by GOP Rep. Troy E. Nehls of Texas on Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, insisting that he do something about the president’s mental health. “Sadly, he shakes hands with ghosts and imaginary people, and he falls off bicycles,” Nehls exclaimed. “Have you spoken to Cabinet members about implementing the Twenty-fifth Amendment on President Biden?”
Actually it was Trump who stirred talk among Cabinet members on the need to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment, following the insurrection that he led on January 6th.
Biden is the oldest president in our nation’s history, a childhood stutterer, given to occasional gaffes. But he has never been anywhere near as bumbling and inarticulate as Donald (“I have the best words”) Trump. The notion that Biden is unfit and Trump wasn’t rivals “Stop the Steal” as the GOP’s biggest lie.
Yet this is the level that the presidency of Donald Trump has taken us to: schoolyard taunts and the dehumanization of political opponents, open contempt for common decency as well as for the institutions of democracy, the wholesale injection of toxins into the body politic.
Put that on a hat and wear it.
Yes, this dude is a whiner.
At the same time, I think official Trump campaign gear with “Let’s Go Brandon” is a mistake. That phrase spontaneously caught on and became popular among Trump supporters, and therefore has a certain standing, an “of the people” sort of authenticity that is more valuable than anything that can come from a candidate or campaign. The official campaign should not appropriate it, as it automatically lowers its impact and value. Let it come from the people.
I pooped in the Vatican
but my butt's been wiped!
Doing my part to spread the message. I've had several vehicles come dangerously close when they've passed me. A couple of birds flipped my way. Several shouts of "Right On!".
Didn’t realize that.
I totally agree that the Bulwark is NeverTrumper Eric Ericson Rick Wilson Bill Kristol bird cage liner.
Nothing else it is good for.
You are so right and thank you for posting your thoughts.
Luders is complaining about spam that WinRed.com sends using the name of President Trump ( and his sons, etc.). IIRC all Republican candidates have to go through it for handling contributions, supposedly to satisfy FEC rules, process credit cards, etc., and 50% goes to the party establishment.
I get tons of spam “from Trump” ( nine emails in the last 24 hours) because I contributed to Trump twice in 2020 on winred.com. I have no doubt the RINO establishment thinks if their annoying emails using the Trump name make him look bad and turn off his contributors, that is not a bug but a feature. I have asked to unsubscribe repeatedly, and it has been ignored. I’ll contribute when I feel like it.
Wonder whether Luders contributed to Trump as part of his oppo research.
Anybody know how to contribute directly? The only way I know to avoid winred is influence people yourself on your own nickel.
Well all I can think to say is, “Let’s Go Bill”.
We haven’t had “Presidential” since Bush the Elder.
Nice to know they are still afraid of him, isn’t it?
Kristol is a grifter and a total ass. Just a Bushie. Shouldn’t even be giving him hits on the bulwark website.
Does the idiot not understand fundraising? I wonder what he thinks is served at those $10K-a- plate fundraising dinners.
I love how these so-called "progressives" seem to have no idea their 2022 "agenda" is pretty much summed up by watching a week of 1971 All in the Family reruns.
“Grover Cleveland faced chants of “Ma, Ma Where’s my Pa?”
After he won the election, his supporters answered “Gone to the White House. Hah, hah, hah.”
Ok, now that’s funny.
That's why I post the entire screed here vs have FReepers click through.
“The Right is finally giving the commies some bare knuckle love and they don’t know how to act. But the fact that we are laughing our asses off at them and the decrepit Bidumb administration are the hardest punches landed.”
I’m old enough to remember the “Daisy” advertisements against Goldwater.
Politics has been bare knuckles for years.
R’s backed off after the (accurate) Dukakis commercial about Willie Horton because the old media piled on with racism. Maybe R’s are back.
But where I live, the nastiest attacks by Republicans are in primaries against conservative candidates.
“The Right is finally giving the commies some bare knuckle love and they don’t know how to act. But the fact that we are laughing our asses off at them and the decrepit Bidumb administration are the hardest punches landed.”
I’m old enough to remember the “Daisy” advertisements against Goldwater.
Politics has been bare knuckles for years.
R’s backed off after the (accurate) Dukakis commercial about Willie Horton because the old media piled on with racism. Maybe R’s are back.
But where I live, the nastiest attacks by Republicans are in primaries against conservative candidates.
Perfect time to Get the CW2 on is when China is tied up invading some Asian country and Putin either still stuck in Ukraine or I guess Kazakhstan
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