SummerSnow
SummerSnow's JournalThis is a very interesting op ed...(contunued)
Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, told a talk radio audience that Trump was a better presidential candidate than someone who "embodies the teaching of Jesus" because Trump fit the biblical preference for a "strongman" in government.
Frank Amedia, an Ohio pastor who briefly had ties to the Trump campaign, explicitly cast the president as a prophet receiving divine revelations: "I believe he receives downloads that now he's beginning to understand come from God," he said in July.
The authority that a cult leader exercises comes from his self-ascribed role as the one true information source for his followers. Competing ideas and facts are not just wrong; they are demonic.
Trump, of course, characterizes most media outlets as "fake news." He calls journalists "liars" and "sick people" who are "trying to take away our history and our heritage." In a May HuffPo/YouGov poll, a whopping 60% of Trump supporters agreed with him that the media are "the enemy" of people like them.
read rest at link....http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-aslan-trump-cultists-20171106-story.html
This is a very interesting op ed...
The dangerous cult of Donald TrumpBy REZA ASLAN
NOV 06, 2017
I am not the first person to point this out: There’s been a cultish quality to President Trump’s most ardent supporters. He seemed to acknowledge the phenomenon when he boasted that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose voters.
Throughout the campaign, and in personal appearances since then, Trump has harnessed the kind of emotional intensity from his base that is more typical of a religious revival meeting than a political rally, complete with ritualized communal chants ("Lock her up!"
.
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Trump's election victory, the zeal of some of his followers seems increasingly akin to a full-fledged cult.
I use the word "cult" in its pejorative sense, meaning a deeply insular social group bound together by extreme devotion to a charismatic leader. Such groups tend to exhibit a few common characteristics.
They are usually formed around an individual whom they've elevated to prophetic and near divine status.
During the campaign, Franklin Graham,Trump's most enthusiastic evangelical Christian supporter, dismissed his many moral failings by comparing him favorably to the flawed patriarchs and prophets of the Bible: Abraham, Moses and David.
* This is a long article, continued on next post
Trump is after McMasters....
Trump to Pompeo...
Trump: Mike I am hiring you as my SoS, don't fuck up Mike or you'll be fired too.
For the first time in years we have never seen an Administration
with 24/7 drama like this.Always some shiggy going on. Never a dull moment
Steve Bannon:
"Let them call you racists, "Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/10/politics/steve-bannon-national-front/index.html
Tillerson, Mnuchin, and Mattis have a 'suicide pact' where if one resigns, they all do
http://theweek.com/speedreads/728978/report-tillerson-mnuchin-mattis-have-suicide-pact-where-resigns-all*yeah right
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson brushed off reports that he was close to stepping down over the summer, frustrated over President Trump's fast and furious Twitter fingers and insufficient staffing, and one U.S. official believes he knows why Tillerson didn't resign, despite his annoyance.
The official told BuzzFeed News that Tillerson has a "suicide pact" with Defense Secretary James Mattis and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, meaning if any one of the Cabinet secretaries becomes the target of Trump's ire, all three will leave together. One way of getting on Trump's bad side would be by calling him a "moron," which NBC News says Tillerson did following a meeting in July at the Pentagon. When asked by reporters on Wednesday if he did call Trump a moron, Tillerson replied that he doesn't "deal with petty stuff like that."
Later in the day, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert denied that Tillerson ever called Trump a moron, with her excuse being that Tillerson would never utter such a word. "The secretary did not use that type of language to speak about the president of the United States," she said. "He does not use that language to speak about anyone." Catherine Garcia
http://theweek.com/speedreads/728978/report-tillerson-mnuchin-mattis-have-suicide-pact-where-resigns-all
* well he did not resign so the pact is void...lol
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