Asshats or Assclowns? A serious look at distinguishing, where one pundit has noted a hat, you wear, a clown, you are. I believe the ending discussion is focused upon Assclowns. It's a long post, but please, stay with it.
It's not what you say but how you say it? Start with a screen capture of a web search return beginning:
click the image to enlarge and read
Of those three initially stated meanings, the ending focus will be on the first:
"Asshat is a bit milder and not so performative." Kelly tells Quartz at Work that he considers asshat an appropriate term for a person doing obnoxious things, while assclown is the correct ...
This gets into the nitty gritty of the point of the post. Not there yet. But, first, a quote:
So: Is he an asshat? Or is he an assclown?
Those
two delightfully descriptive terms are among the 1,400 words, phrases,
and meanings added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its most recent quarterly revision.
The most thorough record of the English language offers the exact same
definition for both nouns: “a stupid or contemptible person.”
But are these two epithets truly interchangeable? [...]
An assclown, wrote etymologist John Kelly in the blog Strong Language,
“is a pejorative pie thrown especially in the face of someone who,
wrongly, thinks their actions are clever, funny, or worthwhile.”
Examples of persons named as assclowns in the popular press include art vandals, Anonymous, and selfie-stick wielders.
As
with an asshat, an assclown’s identity derives largely from the
dissonance between the person’s regard for himself and the regard in
which others hold him. But how to draw a line between the two? Name
developer and brand consultant Nancy Friedman, who has written about asshats for Strong Language, says that of the two, an asshat “is more of an asshole and less of a joker” than his cousin the assclown.
Others
disagreed. “I see assclown as an appropriate putdown not just for a
run-of-the-mill jerk, but someone who revels in the performance of being
a jerk,” said linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer. “Asshat is a bit milder and not so performative.”
Kelly
tells Quartz at Work that he considers asshat an appropriate term for a
person doing obnoxious things, while assclown is the correct label for a
fundamentally obnoxious person. A hat is something you wear; a clown is
something you are. “Hats can be taken on and off, at least in
my mental imagery of the swears, while clown hits deeper at someone’s
behavior or being,”Kelly told us via email.
Both
terms derive their power from their associations with asshole, a word
of singular force in English. “Asshole” was first used to describe an
unpleasant person during World War II, explains Geoffrey Nunberg, a
linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and the
author of Ascent of the A-word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years. From
the beginning, it was an insult that punched up: US soldiers used it to
describe an officer who believes his status “entitles him to a kind of
behavior—to either abuse his men, or makes him more important than he
really is,” Nunberg told NPR.
By
the 1970s, the word had embedded itself in popular culture. It still
carried the implicit accusation that the asshole in question was abusing
whatever power he (or, less often, she) held, and failing to give
others the basic respect and decency required by the social contract.
An
asshole—or an assclown, or an asshat—is someone who doesn’t care, by
reason of ignorance or malice, if his conduct demeans or offends
another. It is about having a skewed relationship to entitlement,
something that can become glaringly apparent in the confines of the
workplace.
That's enough of a quote for purposes here. Last sentence, "the confines of the workplace, yes, and so what if the workplace happens to be the U.S. House of Representatives? (So yes, the table is set, and we now move to a presentation concerning House Republicans.)
Two million people watched this, and my intent is to make you watch it too - twenty-four minutes of assclown blood-boiling fear and loathing, to make a point (i.e., for a good reason):
(Some stuff in that thread will be in closing paragraphs, but first - Ghouls. fed by the NYT. Some say "Swamp." This IS Swamp. Big time Swamp. At the outset and onward, Dumping on Joe eighteen different ways while interspersing other Big Lie stuff. E.g., Johnson, saying Republicans are "pro-Women," because of our rabid GOP transphobia efforts it is us who protect womens' sports and the bathrooms,)
Please do watch it all. It is assclownery, start to finish. And they bring in the bench players, while the three HOUSE GOP varsity starters take the stage early. Should the Dems retch or laugh? This is theater done with ham-handed but clear and well shaped well sounded speech, (something Biden lacks and lacked for most of his career). They sound clearer, speaking sophistry while Biden speaks lower, slower, but with substance. Doing his job now with a NATO meeting.
These assclowns crow over an agenda which, rightfully, will never see daylight in the Senate. All show - No substance.
Shallow. Trivial. But seeing themselves as serious and important persons, each and every.
Now back to that EmptyWheel thread. Much there noted Trump, Project 2025, and his lie about it being separate and apart from him and his clean hands. Not so.
[Update - below within the text there seems a dead link, and I'd hide that thing too if I had anything to do with it - however, date of posting, two good links, here and here and if those go dead, try websearch of the title, and specify filetype:pdf]
It is possible to read “Mandate for Leadership:
The Conservative Promise” — an 887-page document proposing to remake
the executive branch, department by department, agency by agency, office
by office — as one more go-round in this Washington tradition. With
contributions by dozens of conservative thinkers and activists under the
leadership of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the book
announces itself as part of a “unified effort to be ready for the next
conservative administration to govern at 12:00 noon, Jan. 20, 2025.”
There is much work ahead, it states, “just to undo the significant
damage that will have been done during the Biden years.”
The
book has not been blessed by Donald Trump or his campaign, and the
authors emphasize that they want to help the next conservative
president, “whoever he or she may be.” But with so many former Trump
officials among its contributors, so much praise for him throughout its
pages (he is mentioned some 300 times, compared with once for Nikki
Haley) and such clear affinity between Trump’s impulses and the
document’s proposals, it is easy to imagine “Mandate for Leadership”
wielding influence in a second Trump term. It is an off-the-shelf
governing plan for a leader who took office last time with no clear plan
and no real ability to govern. This book attempts to supply him with
both.
There is plenty here that one
would expect from a contemporary conservative agenda: calls for lower
corporate taxes and against abortion rights; criticism of diversity,
equity and inclusion initiatives and the “climate fanaticism” of the
Biden administration; and plans to militarize the southern border and
target the “administrative state,” which is depicted here as a powerful
and unmanageable federal bureaucracy bent on left-wing social
engineering. Yet what is most striking about the book is not the
specific policy agenda it outlines but how far the authors are willing
to go in pursuit of that agenda and how reckless their assumptions are
about law, power and public service.
“Mandate
for Leadership,” which was edited by Paul Dans and Steven Groves of the
Heritage Foundation, is not about anything as simplistic as being
dictator for a day but about consolidating authority and eroding
accountability for the long haul. It calls for a relentless politicizing
of the federal government, with presidential appointees overpowering
career officials at every turn and agencies and offices abolished on
overtly ideological grounds. Though it assures readers that the
president and his or her subordinates “must be committed to the
Constitution and the rule of law,” it portrays the president as the
personal embodiment of popular will and treats the law as an impediment
to conservative governance. It elevates the role of religious beliefs in
government affairs and regards the powers of Congress and the judiciary
with dismissiveness.
This is where the subscription-walled online version ends, but from the full item, we continue"
And
for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the
administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the
federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may
be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for
Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking
it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool
for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.
“Mandate for Leadership”is not the
kind of book meant to be read straight through from beginning to end,
certainly not by any one person. (Trust me.) Each chapter features one
or more authors exploring a particular department or agency in detail,
so grasping the entirety of the book’s proposals would require deep
expertise in multiple fields — trade negotiations, environmental
science, diplomacy, nuclear power, to name a few — and in the
intricacies of Washington wonkdom. The book’s prose is dense, packed
with bullet points and bureaucratese, and reading about so many obscure
offices, page after page, left me sympathetic to its complaints about an
elephantine fourth branch of government. [...]
The mayhem of the Trump presidency’s early days might have occurred partly by design — recall Steve Bannon’s strategy
to “flood the zone” with an expletive — but it is not an experience
that the authors of this volume wish to repeat. The book’s existence is
an implicit admission that the Trump administration’s haphazard approach
to governance was a missed opportunity. [...] The authors wish to “assemble an army of aligned, vetted,
trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day 1 to deconstruct
the administrative state.”
That
deconstruction can be blunt. Portions of “Mandate for Leadership” read
as though the authors did a Control-F search of the executive branch for
any terms they deemed suspect and then deleted the offending programs
or offices. The White House’s Gender Policy Council must go, along with
its Office of Domestic Climate Policy. The Department of Energy’s Office
of Clean Energy Demonstrations is a no-no. The E.P.A. can do without
its Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. And the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be dismantled
because it constitutes “one of the main drivers of the climate change
alarm industry.”
Sometimes search and
destroy gives way to search and replace. At the Department of Health and
Human Services, for instance, the Reproductive Healthcare Access Task
Force, which the Biden administration created five months before the
Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, must be supplanted by
a pro-life task force that ensures that all Health and Human Services
divisions “use their authority to promote the life and health of women
and their unborn children.”The document also asserts that the
department should be known as the “Department of Life.” There is little
interest here in the notion that different states can reach their own
conclusions on abortion rights, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. Instead, the next
president should work with federal lawmakers “to enact the most robust
protections for the unborn that Congress will support.” (The focus on
life is somewhat selective; while urging the next president to work on
“restoring a culture of life in America,” the document also calls for
“finality” in dealing with the dozens of inmates on death row.)
One
of the book’s most frequent targets is D.E.I. — the diversity, equity
and inclusion infrastructure erected throughout the federal government
in recent years that “Mandate for Leadership” equates with racism. Just
about every corner of the administration, from the Department of Labor
to the U.S. Agency for International Development, must be scrubbed clean
of D.E.I., and the measures to accomplish this can be brutish. At the
Treasury Department, for instance, a new conservative administration
would identify and interview every official who has taken part in D.E.I.
programs to assess the scope of the efforts and ensure that they are
eliminated, and it would “treat the participation in any critical race
theory or D.E.I. initiative, without objecting on constitutional or
moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment.”
[...] Are you now or have you ever been a member of the D.E.I. party?
If
“Mandate for Leadership” has its way, the next conservative
administration will also target the data gathering and analysis that
undergirds public policy. Every U.S. state should be required by Health
and Human Services to report “exactly how many abortions take place
within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what
reason, the mother’s state of residence and by what method.” By
contrast, the government should prohibit the collection of employment
statistics based on race or ethnicity, and the Centers for Disease
Control should discontinue gathering data on gender identity, on the
grounds that such collection “encourages the phenomenon of
ever-multiplying subjective identities.” (Why the executive branch might
concern itself with the subjective identities of American citizens
becomes clearer some 25 pages later, when the document affirms that the
government should “maintain a biblically based,
social-science-reinforced definition of marriage and family.”)
The
portion of the book dedicated to the Census Bureau warns that the Biden
administration’s data collection “could be skewed to bolster
progressive political agendas,” yet “Mandate for Leadership” does not
seem to grasp how its own proposals could prompt the same concerns in
the opposite direction. It doesn’t take a conspiratorial mind to wonder
about this; the document states its goal forthrightly: “Strong political
leadership is needed to increase efficiency and align the Census
Bureau’s mission with conservative principles.”
Even a leader who declared
that he alone could fix things cannot accomplish all this alone.
Joining the next conservative president would be that army of appointees
marching to conquer the executive branch. One of the “pillars” of
Project 2025 is the creation of a personnel database — a sort of
“right-wing LinkedIn,” The Times has reported,
seeking to attract some 20,000 potential administration officials.
“Mandate for Leadership” maintains that “empowering political appointees
across the administration is crucial to a president’s success,” and
virtually every chapter calls for additional appointees to wrest power
from longtime career staff members in their respective departments.
This
is especially notable at both the State Department and the Department
of Justice, which are considered susceptible to unsavory influences, in
almost identical terms. “Large swaths of the State Department’s work
force are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative
president’s policy agenda and vision,” the book reads. Of the Department
of Justice: “Large swaths of the department have been captured by an
unaccountable bureaucratic managerial class and radical left ideologues
who have embedded themselves throughout its offices.” (Lesson: Beware of
swaths.)
It is, no doubt, the
prerogative of all incoming presidents to appoint officials who support
their agenda; in fact, since presidents are elected on their proposed
agendas, it is right that they would do so. In “Mandate for Leadership,”
longtime career civil servants are disparaged as “holdovers” with
suspect loyalties, lacking the “moral legitimacy” that comes from being
appointed by a president who is constitutionally bound to see that the
laws are faithfully executed. The book calls for the reinstatement of Schedule F,
a Trump-era executive order that would allow the president and
political appointees to convert many career civil service positions into
appointed roles, thus making those people easier to dismiss and replace
with loyalists. In a memorable euphemism, the book refers to this
effort as “identifying programmatic political work force needs.”
But
there is a difference between fostering a work force that is
accountable to the president and simply politicizing all aspects of the
executive branch, including areas that require specific expertise.
“Mandate for Leadership” leans toward the politicizing approach.
At
the E.P.A., for example, the document calls for a new science adviser
and at least six new appointees charged with reforming the agency’s
scientific research; qualifications for those roles should stress
managerial skills rather than “personal scientific output.” Throughout
the book, descriptions of new research agendas are often paired with the
explicit findings that such research should yield, whether on the
mental and physical damage that abortion inflicts on women or the
pernicious impact of taxes and regulations on minority-owned businesses.
Later, tucked into a discussion of the National Institute of Standards
and Technology at the Commerce Department — yes, the weeds are tall and
scratchy here — the document urges a new administration to ensure that
“any research conducted with taxpayer dollars serves the national
interest in a concrete way in line with conservative principles.” It’s
an effective sleight of hand: politicizing government-funded scientific
research by tying the national interest to conservative priorities.
The
administration of relief funds would also assume an ideological bent.
“Mandate for Leadership” looks askance at Commerce’s Economic
Development Administration, which makes investments to promote growth
and innovation in struggling communities and helps distribute emergency
funding. Ideally, the book says, a new conservative administration would
abolish the agency and send its resources elsewhere. However, if
congressional opposition makes that impossible, the Economic Development
Administration should instead “better align funding with conservative
political purposes.” There’s little subtlety: The book then argues that
providing agency funds to “rural communities destroyed by the Biden
administration’s attack on domestic energy production would be well
within the scope of E.D.A.’s mission.” If you can’t beat them, at least
make them work for you.
Despite its professed desire
to reduce the size and ambition of government “back to something
resembling the original constitutional intent,” in practice, the
document’s contributors are willing to build significant bureaucracies.
“Mandate for Leadership” calls for dismantling the Department of
Homeland Security, for example, and instead creating a major stand-alone
federal immigration department. It would piece together Customs and
Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services, as well as portions of the Health
and Human Services and Justice Departments to build a Cabinet-level body
employing more than 100,000 federal workers. This would be “the
third-largest department measured by manpower,” the book boasts.
Proposed
immigration policies include the “indefinite curtailment” of refugee
admissions, completing a southwestern border wall and deploying
“active-duty military personnel and National Guardsmen to assist in
arrest operations along the border — something that has not yet been
done.” It even imagines a new immigration-related revenue stream:
charging asylum seekers for “premium processing” of their claims, an
innovation that would offer “an opportunity for a significant influx of
money.”
The authors recognize the
bipartisan dangers of excessive political appointments in the executive
branch, but they worry about that mainly when their opponents are the
ones benefiting. “The desire to infiltrate political appointees
improperly into the high career civil service has been widespread in
every administration, whether Democrat or Republican,” the document
acknowledges. “Democratic administrations, however, are typically more
successful because they require the cooperation of careerists, who
generally lean heavily to the left.”
This
book does not call for an effort to depoliticize the administrative
state. It simply wishes to politicize it in favor of a new side.
Everybody does it; now it’s our turn. Get over it.
This attitude proves especially
consequential in the book’s treatment of the Justice Department, which
has “lost its way,” becoming “a bloated bureaucracy with a critical core
of personnel who are infatuated with the perpetuation of a radical
liberal agenda.” To find its way back in a new conservative
administration, “Mandate for Leadership” implies, the department must
become subservient to the White House.
The
document cites several reasons the Justice Department has “forfeited
the trust” of many Americans, including its promotion of the
Trump-Russia collusion investigation and the abdication of its duty to
enforce immigration laws. Therefore, a “vast expansion” of political
appointees across the department is required, beyond those traditionally
appointed to the office of the attorney general and deputy attorney
general.
All
such appointees must work closely with the White House; in fact, the
Justice Department and the White House counsel should act “as a team.”
And while the book notes that contact between the White House and the
Department of Justice traditionally occurs between the office of the
White House counsel and the attorney general or deputy attorney general —
a practice that aims to reduce the risk of political interference in
law enforcement — “Mandate for Leadership” encourages a new
administration to “re-examine this policy and determine whether it might
be more efficient or more appropriate for communication to occur
through additional channels.”
It is
more efficient and appropriate if the goal is to permit greater White
House pressure on the nation’s senior law enforcement officers. Even the
F.B.I. director, the document argues, must be as politically
accountable to the president as any other senior official. “To ensure
prompt political accountability and to rein in perceived or actual
abuses,” it asserts, “the next conservative administration should seek a
legislative change to align the F.B.I. director’s position with those
of the heads of all other major departments and agencies.” Trump has
complained that the F.B.I. and Justice Department have been weaponized
against him; these reforms would ensure their politicization.
After
all, when the Justice Department and White House must work as a team,
it is clear who serves as team captain. “While the supervision of
litigation is a D.O.J. responsibility, the department falls under the
direct supervision and control of the president,” the book states. Even
though the department will invariably face “tough calls” in its
litigation decisions, “those calls must always be consistent with the
president’s policy agenda and the rule of law.”
What
happens when the agenda and the law conflict? The answer is implicit
throughout “Mandate for Leadership.” At the Department of Homeland
Security, for example, the general counsel should hire more political
appointees to supervise the office’s career lawyers, because “the legal
function cannot be allowed to thwart the administration’s agenda by
providing stilted or erroneous legal positions.” The law must submit to
the president’s priorities. If not, the lawyers are doing it wrong.
[...] Ironically,
in this worldview, the people’s needs and desires can become
circumscribed. In the book’s foreword, Kevin D. Roberts, the president
of the Heritage Foundation, writes that the “pursuit of happiness” in
the Declaration of Independence should be understood as the “pursuit of
blessedness,” that is, that “an individual must be free to live as his
creator ordained — to flourish.” The Constitution, he explains, “grants
each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.” The
book ties this argument to the philosophical and legal concept of
“ordered liberty,” in which individual rights are weighed against social
stability.
The notion that liberty
entails the discipline to do the right thing, as opposed to the choice
to do whatever things we want, has a long lineage in American political
thought, dating back to the Puritans and the “city on a hill.” But in “Mandate for Leadership,” the answer to what we oughtto
do depends on the cultural and religious proclivities of the authors.
[...] Later, in a chapter on the Department of Labor, the book
suggests that because “God ordained the Sabbath as a day of rest,”
American workers should be paid extra for working on that day. “A shared
day off makes it possible for families and communities to enjoy time
off together, rather than as atomized individuals,” it says.
“Mandate
for Leadership” often strains to reconcile what we ought to do with
what the authors want us to do. In the same chapter on the Department of
Labor, for example, the book calls on Congress to require that for all
new federal contracts, at least 70 percent of contractors’ employees
must be U.S. citizens (with the bar rising to at least 95 percent over
time). Such a law is necessary, the book explains, “so that employers
can again have the freedom to make hiring Americans a priority.”
If
you want to make federal contractors hire more American workers, then,
by all means, propose such a law. But couching it as a way to provide
greater “freedom” to employers so they can do what the government is
compelling them to do debases the notion of freedom. And it makes the
book’s interpretation of “ordered liberty” seem more focused on giving
orders than protecting liberty.
That's a good place to stop. There is more, so access the original, if you can bypass the subscription wall. Using the item title in a search might provide a bypass. Credit:
Carlos
Lozada is an Opinion columnist and a co-host of the weekly “Matter of
Opinion” podcast for The Times, based in Washington, D.C. He is the
author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
As Project 2025 has gained notoriety — thanks to actor Taraji P. Henson and others — Trump has sought to distance himself from the effort. On July 5, Trump posted on Truth Social that he knows "nothing about Project 2025," has "no idea who is behind it," and has "nothing to do with them."
The
co-editors of Project 2025, Paul Dans and Steven Groves, both held
high-ranking positions in the Trump administration. Under Trump, Dans
served as Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management,
the agency responsible for staffing the federal government, and was a
senior advisor at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Groves served Trump in the White House as Deputy Press Secretary and Assistant Special Counsel.
Project
2025's two associate directors, Spencer Chretien and Troup Hemenway,
are also tightly connected with Trump. Chretien was Special Assistant to President Donald J. Trump
and Associate Director of Presidential Personnel, "helping to identify,
recruit, and place hundreds of political appointees at all levels of
government." Previously, Trump appointed Chretien to a position at HUD.
Hemenway also served as an Associate Director of Presidential Personnel and previously worked on Trump's 2016 campaign and Trump's 2016 transition team.
Project
2025's 922-page policy agenda has 30 chapters and 34 authors.
Twenty-five of Project 2025's authors served as members of the Trump
administration. Another Project 2025 author, Stephen Moore, was
nominated by Trump to the Federal Reserve but forced to withdraw "over his past inflammatory writings about women." Further, William Walton, the co-author of the chapter on the Department of the Treasury, was a key member of Trump's transition team.
All
told, of the 38 people responsible for writing and editing Project
2025, 31 were appointed or nominated to positions in the Trump
administration and transition. In other words, while Trump claims he has
"nothing to do" with the people who created Project 2025, over 81% had
formal roles in his first administration.
The
chapter on the Executive Office of the President of the United States,
for example, is written by Russ Vought. As president, Trump appointed
Vought to his Cabinet as Director of the Office of Management and
Budget. In that role, Vought authorized the rerouting of billions from
the Pentagon to fund Trump's border wall. In his Project 2025 chapter, Vought — a "self-described Christian nationalist" — calls for the abolishment of the Gender Policy Council,
an entity focused on "economic security, health, gender-based violence
and education—with a focus on gender equity and equality, and particular
attention to the barriers faced by women and girls." Vought is also
drafting Project 2025's "playbook" for the first 180 days of a Trump administration, which will not be shared publicly.
Trump appeared at a Mar-a-lago fundraiser
for Vought's non-profit group, Center for Renewing America, in August
2022, and declared that Vought would “do a great job in continuing our
quest to make America great again.” In addition to his key role in
Project 2025, Vought is the policy director Republican National
Committee's platform writing committee and a top candidate for White House Chief of Staff if Trump wins in November.
Gene
Hamilton, a top aide to Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions, wrote the
Project 2025 chapter on the Department of Justice. During the Trump
administration, Hamilton drafted Trump's infamous child separation policy.
Hamilton currently serves as Vice-President and General Counsel of
America First Legal Foundation, an organization run by top Trump advisor
Stephen Miller.
In Hamilton's Project 2025 chapter, he
advocates for the deployment of active-duty military to the southern
border. Hamilton also calls for an elimination of the Department of
Justice's independence from the White House, saying a new Trump
administration should "end immediately any policies, investigations, or
cases that run contrary to law or Administration policies." (This would
presumably include any cases against Trump himself.) He also proposes
using the Office of Civil Rights exclusively to prosecute "state and
local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and
any other private employers" who have diversity initiatives.
The
Project 2025 chapter on the Agency for International Development was
written by Max Primorac, the acting Chief Operating Officer for the same
agency under the Trump administration. During a 2019 State Department
conference on religious freedom, Primorac generated controversy by promoting Trump's reelection. After Trump lost to Biden in November 2020, Primorac told agency staff not to cooperate with the transition.
The flavor is unmistakable. If Trump were to truly be unaware of this stuff, he'd be a brick. He isn't. He knows. He lies about that, but lying is not alien to his nature.
Donald J. Trump damned well knows about Project 2025, and when he is seen declining to admit the truth about it, we yet again see Trump being Trump, as wholly untrustworthy as he is, has been, and will be.
Keep all this in mind, where it can be categorized as: VOTE BIDEN, with little difficulty because all that projected mischief dies if Trump is defeated. Biden can do it and the old saying continues to exist because it is sound advice; don't change horses in the middle of a stream. Just let the assclowns perform, somebody cares about them as if they were more than assclowns. Are they? Vote Biden and avoid finding out how bad they can be if in control of the Executive and Congress; with the SCOTUS Leonard Leo majority already assclown central.
____________UPDATE_____________
There is a People's Guide, Patty Murry has posted a reproductive-rights fact sheet, and there is a fact sheet for the elderly. Each strongly opposes Project 2025. And Trump will not defend his people in their ginning the thing up, tweeting he does not know them. He may wish you to believe he does not, but he had them in his administration. He gave them powers. He gave them paychecks. He propelled careers.
They kiss the hand, not biting, kissing. It fed them. Project 2025 is his bastard child, and no amount of lying will alter the truth of that paternity fact. Sink or swim with it, he should do so, but instead he debases himself by lying. His people. His project. His 2025 plan. So own it Donald. Running away won't work.
