Mercedes Schlapp

Trump’s Tulsa Rally Troubles Go Way Beyond the Pitiful Turnout

Posted by on June 21, 2020 at 12:16 pm. 1 Comments :

Donald Trump had several weeks to plan his return to the campaign trail after three months of a COVID-19 enforced lockdown. He chose Tulsa, Oklahoma, a deep red city and state that should have guaranteed a capacity crowd of glassy-eyed disciples. but things didn’t work out exactly as planned.

Donald Trump, Tulsa Rally

According to the Tulsa fire department, Trump’s rally managed to pack in a measly 6,200 of The Donald’s dimwitted devotees. That’s less than a third of the 19,000 people the arena can accommodate. What’s more, Trump and his campaign bragged repeatedly about having a million requests for tickets and they projected that there would be an overflow crowd of 40,000-60,000 out side the arena where Trump would give an additional speech.

However, the attendance turned out to be far less than projected. The overflow crowd never materialized at all, leading to the cancellation of the outdoor activities. If Trump thought that this rally would be his opportunity to turn around his polling slump (he’s losing to Joe Biden in every national poll, as well as in the crucial swing states), he must be mighty disappointed this morning. And his disappointment generally translates into fury directed at the “losers” responsible for his humiliation. Because, of course, it’s never him.

On Sunday morning Trump campaign advisor Mercedes Schlapp was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. She was there to attempt to put a positive spin on the previous evening’s fiasco. That plan didn’t work out very well either (video below):

Wallace: Your campaign said that more than a million people wanted tickets to this rally, but we all saw the pictures last night. The arena was no more than two-thirds full, and the outdoor rally that had been planned for the overflow crowd was canceled because there was no overflow crowd. Question: What happened?
Schlapp: When it comes to understanding how the rallies work, it’s a first-come-first-serve basis. Basically what the one million RSVPs include, it’s an opportunity for us to gather data, to get information obviously.

Schlapp went on to make absurd excuses about people having been too frightened by protesters to show up. But she didn’t explain how more than 90% of the predicted hundred thousand rally-goers were scared off by a few protesters, who were kept blocks away from the arena by the police. She also bragged about the number of people who watched online which, of course, included many Trump opponents and other curious independents. To his credit, Wallace wouldn’t let Schlapp deflect, and reminded her that Trump is always talking about the attendance at his rallies as a measure of his popularity. But now he isn’t popular enough to draw supporters in the right-wing hothouse of Oklahoma.

Wallace also disputed Schlapp’s false assertion that protesters prevented anyone from attending. Schlapp actually wants people to believe that Trump’s supporters stayed home because they didn’t want to expose their families to protesters. But exposing them to a deadly virus apparently wasn’t a problem.

More importantly, Schlapp’s reply to Wallace revealed what she considered to be the primary objective for the rally and the reason it should be regarded as a success. “It’s an opportunity,” Schlapp admitted, “for us to gather data.” Indeed it is. Everyone who requests a free ticket to the event is required to provide their name and other personal identification. That’s all entered into a database that is later used to contact potential voters. Trump’s campaign chairman, Brad Parscale made the same admission prior to the Tulsa affair, tweeting that this would be the “Biggest data haul and rally signup of all time.”

There’s just one problem. There are reports that an army of Tik-Tok users requested tickets that they had no intention of using. It’s hard to estimate the precise impact of this Trump trolling project, but there were thousands of interactions with the prank on social media. So somewhere between the 6,200 people who showed up at the rally, and the million who allegedly requested tickets, there an untold number of fake respondents. That means that there is a significant amount of fake data currently residing in the Trump campaign database. And that’s on top of the fake data that was there before this event. [NOTE: News Corpse is in that database, despite never having provided any information] So when the campaign begins its voter outreach they will be wasting huge sums of money and effort on ghost voters.

In the end, the legacy of the Tulsa rally will be that it revealed the softening support for Trump’s reelection, while simultaneously flooding his campaign database with bogus info. But at least he had the opportunity to soak up some cheers from his hardcore fans, while reinforcing his reelection themes of being able to drink water with one hand, stopping coronavirus testing, and defending Confederate statues. WINNING?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Donald Trump Just Made a Fantastic Argument Against Building His Idiotic Border Wall

Posted by on January 26, 2019 at 1:53 pm. 1 Comments :

Well, it took thirty-five days and cost about six billion dollars, and incalculable personal suffering, but the Trump Shutdown is now over (temporarily). To say that Donald Trump caved is putting it mildly. He folded like a counterfeit three dollar bill under pressure from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (who he calls “Nancy”). And true to form, he emerged from the White House to declare victory in an impotent display of pathetic groveling and forced bluster.

Donald Trump

During Trump’s concession speech he revealed another repulsive side of himself as he admitted that the purpose of his wall is to hurt already suffering refugees by killing any “glimmer of hope” they might have for safety and freedom. And on Saturday morning he followed that up with a Twitter tantrum that was rife with callousness and delusion. This tweetstorm featured one posting that stood out as being a pretty darn good argument against the vanity wall that Trump has been so obsessed with:

So if we have already turned away two “caravans” of asylum seekers, then why do we need to spend billions of dollars on a wall that most experts say will be useless? The next caravan can be handled exactly the way the previous two were, without the expense or the pain associated with shutting down the government in an infantile rage.

Trump has actually admitted that our current ability to secure the border is perfectly adequate. There can be no credible argument that there is anything resembling an emergency at the border. So his yappy whining has no purpose other than to salve his ego. But he won’t let that stop him:

Let’s set aside Trump’s deranged assertion that he didn’t concede. The larger point he is making here is that he finally recognizes that the shutdown he was proud to impose was actually causing great harm and misery to millions of innocent people. But in the same sentence he callously threatens to do it all over again, unconcerned about inflicting more pain. He’s like the bully who uses his victim’s hand to slap his own face while taunting “Why do you keep shutting down yourself? Why do you keep shutting down yourself?”

This isn’t the first time that Trump’s argument for his wall has backfired on him. While his original campaign promise was that Mexico would pay for wall, he has failed utterly to bring that about. Instead, he has since insisted that the wall is being paid for by several different means in addition to Mexico, including: It would pay for itself, presumably by reducing unspecified expenditures on law enforcement; The new trade deal between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, which has nothing to do with wall funding as all the financial benefits of such a deal go to private industry; And the American taxpayer from whom he is currently demanding payment under threat of shutting down our government or declaring an unconstitutional national emergency.

So that’s four different payments for the same wall. How is that not a con game that would land anyone else in jail? Especially since the wall isn’t needed in the first place as Trump has now conceded on Twitter. And along with that concession, Trump has provided a couple of tweeted endorsements that are as phony as a con man’s paid shills. The first is by Fox News regular Matt Schlapp, who also happens to be married to Mercedes Schlapp, the White House Director of Strategic Communications. And the second is a video produced by the Daily Caller News Foundation, which is run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. So these are hardly independent affirmations of Trump’s wall fetish.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The more Trump talks and/or tweets, the less Democrats need to make the case against Trump’s wall. He’s doing a mighty fine job of that all by himself. And the last person who would be surprised by that is special counsel Robert Mueller, who has seen Trump’s public statements as some of the most incriminating pieces of evidence against him, particularly with regard to obstruction of justice. This is just how Trump operates. He is so consumed by his narcissism that he truly believes that everything he says is brilliant and furthers his objectives. By the time he finds out how wrong he is, it will be too late.

Fair and Huh? Fox News Anchor Tells Trump Shill that She “Needs to Go on the Offensive’

Posted by on August 3, 2018 at 10:34 am. 5 Comments :

The evidence that Fox News is just Donald Trump’s in-house propaganda ministry keeps growing with each new day. The network seems to have no bottom with regard to blatantly biased support for, and adulation of, Dear Leader. And the argument that they have two separate types of programs – one that is opinion based, and one that is “news,” is repudiated on a regular basis by their own reporting.

Fox News Fair and Balanced

America’s Newsroom on Fox News is supposed to be one of their allegedly “straight” news shows. However, on Friday’s edition of the program Mercedes Schlapp, Trump’s White House director of strategic communications (whatever that is), was interviewed. The discussion included a question about the “contentious moment between Sarah Sanders and Jim Acosta of CNN.” That was when Acosta asked Sanders to acknowledge that the media is not the enemy of the people. Sanders pointedly refused to to do so – twice. And now Schlapp was being given another opportunity to set the record straight. But instead, she said this (video below):

“Fake news is dangerous. We know for a fact that many of these so-called news reporters go out there have a complete disdain for President Trump. It’s no wonder that we’ve seen that 90% of the media coverage for President Trump has been negative.”

Schlapp went on to whine about how Trump and company are helpless victims who have been mercilessly attacked by the all-powerful media. Poor babies. She cited blistering assaults with examples that they have been “called names” by journalists. Gee, Trump would never do anything so unspeakably hideous, would he? And to this pitiful rant, Fox’s host, Bill Hemmer (who is rumored to be a candidate to succeed Sanders as press secretary) said:

“I don’t think you should be defensive about this. You need to go on offense. And I know that’s a big part of why you came on today.”

Then they all had a good laugh when Hemmer asked Schlapp if she was “tired of winning.” What we have here is the Fox News anchor advising the Trump shill to be more offensive, as if that were possible. Just Thursday night at his cult assembly in Pennsylvania, Trump himself escalated his war on the press by calling them the “disgusting fake news,” and “horrendous people.”

Hemmer’s not-so-subtle coaching of Schlapp may have been an attempt to add a new clip to his audition reel for the job at the White House. After all, he’s facing stiff competition from three other Fox Newsers: Heather Nauert (currently stationed at Trump’s State Department), Kimberly Guilfoyle (Don Jr’s new girlfriend who was recently terminated by Fox for sexual misconduct), and Tony Sayegh (now on duty at Trump’s Treasury Department).

This abundance of candidates all from the same network shouldn’t surprise anyone. Trump spends much his day watching Fox News and is advised regularly by people like Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. Plus his brand, spanking new Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications is former Fox News president, Bill Shine. He was also recently jettisoned by the network for enabling and covering up the sexual misconduct of big shots like Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. So Hemmer would fit in nicely with this wholesome group of cretins, don’t you think?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.