You may have missed it but back in May Bill Maher made the point that Donald Trump behaves like the 1950s anti-woman stereotype of a know-nothing complainer. “If Trump was a man,” Maher said on “Real Time,” his HBO show,”he’d stop whining like a little bitch.” He referred to The Donald as “Lady Trump,” because “he’s a whiny little bitch.”
And thus was born the hashtag, #whinylittlebitch.
Personally, I avoid the B-word because it strikes me as inherently misogynist. I prefer to call women who behave like jerks or assholes, “jerks” or “assholes.”
But check out this report from a local newspaper in Roanoke about the way Trump behaved during a campaign rally there on Monday. If the hashtag fits…
[In] in the biggest room in the finest hotel in Roanoke, along with at least 1,600 chanting and cheering Trumpeteers, the candidate trained his attention-deficit-disordered thoughts on a purely apolitical topic: The room was too hot.
Trump’s whining is nothing new — as this 1990 cover from Spy Magazine attestsHe whined and whined about The Hotel Roanoke’s air conditioning. No kidding.
“I think this ballroom and the people who run this hotel should be ashamed,” Trump told the crowd. “I think it’s actually cooler outside than it is in this damn ballroom.” (It wasn’t.)
He boasted there were 1,000 people standing outside on the Wells Avenue side in 104-degree heat, listening to him on loudspeakers. (There weren’t; there were at most 50, according to a city firefighter who was outside, and the temperature never hit 100.)
Perhaps jokingly, Trump suggested he wouldn’t pay the bill — after his campaign apparatus commandeered a large chunk of the hotel for most of the day. Trump’s a tough guy, see. Nobody takes advantage of him. Especially, whoever runs the thermostat.
“I feel like I’m in a sauna. I don’t know what hotel this is,” Trump went on. “You let people suffer and don’t turn on the air conditioning. This is ridiculous.”
It was ridiculous, but not in the way Trump intended. The ridiculous part was him standing there wailing about it.
He suggested the hotel turned off the AC to save money. (It didn’t. The main ballroom’s air conditioning was set at 63 degrees. “We did have it set as low as it could possibly go,” said Michael Quonce, the hotel’s public relations manager. “It was running at 99 percent efficiency.”)
Trump’s comments were chintzy, low-rent, third-rate and wholly unbecoming for a major party presidential nominee. But they are pure Trump, full of narcissistic bullying, worrying about his own comfort, picking on an entity that can’t pick back.
For the record, the hotel doors were open for two hours before he began speaking, to let in thousands of Trumpeteers (some were shunted off to an overflow ballroom). People were packed in the main ballroom like sardines. Trump was standing under stage lighting. What does he expect? You don’t get meat-locker temps under those circumstances.
And part of it was Trump’s own fault. The temps in the room probably went up 10 degrees after he opened his mouth. (OK, just kidding on that one.)
Trump’s renaming of Lake Ontario has created a litmus test —
Yield, and rename it Lake America, at Donald Trump’s behest,
Like Google and Apple, which already capitulated,
Changing the name just like Dear Leader stipulated,
But there’s one defiant holdout — the original mapping site, Mapquest.
“They’ve invested heavily in AI labs. They’ve invested heavily in data centers. So, the first family has a financial stake in this industry, and as a result, the president of the United States is compromised.”
— “Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) on Monday said President Trump will likely not heed calls from technology leaders to implement guardrails on the development of artificial intelligence because of his family’s investments in the industry,” NewsNation reports.
“Young Americans today have never witnessed Congress authorize a war, they’ve never seen a U.S. administration balance its books, they’ve never watched a well-funded and empowered state department operate, and they see only mistrust between allies. They assume the situation is normal. It is not. … The real cost of forgetting the pre-9/11 world is not a country that has changed, but one that no longer knows it could be different.”
“We’re working through some political issues in Israel. I think we agree with them on the end state. They just have a crazy election, and that makes them a little irrational in certain regards.”
— Jared Kushner, quoted by CBS News, on the lack of progress in Gaza.
Reuters has documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
“Iranian strikes have damaged or destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at bases across the Middle East, and caused about $184 million worth of damage at U.S. diplomatic facilities, according to a Pentagon watchdog report,” the Washington Post reports. “The inspector general’s report to Congress on Operation Epic Fury — the Trump administration’s name for the war with Iran — also details the extent of U.S. munitions shortages, in the first comprehensive public accounting of the war, which is now in its seventh month.”
Half (50%) of U.S. adults say they are either very concerned (23%) or somewhat concerned (27%) about the possibility that AI will cause the end of humanity, a new YouGov survey finds. Another 39% of Americans say they’re not very concerned (21%) or not at all concerned (17%) about an AI apocalypse, while 11% aren’t sure.
A majority of Americans ages 55 and up and a majority of Republicans of all ages support the use of Flock technologies in their communities, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted from August 28 to 31. Split by age, party, education level and gender, no other demographic group had a majority of support for the cameras. Among age groups, younger Americans were the least likely to support Flock, with only 21% of respondents aged 18 to 34 in favor of the technology.
About one-third (31%) of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of how the U.S. Supreme Court is handling its job, according to the latest Economist/YouGov Survey, while 53% disapprove. Almost all Democrats disapprove of the Supreme Court’s job handling (12% approve and 79% disapprove), while most Republicans approve (63% vs. 26%). Republicans who say they’re MAGA supporters overwhelmingly approve of the Supreme Court’s job handling (73% vs. 19%), while non-MAGA Republicans are more closely divided (49% vs. 36%).
