Donald Trump calls wife Melania ‘Mercedes’ in CPAC speech

return2ozma@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 705 points –
Donald Trump calls wife Melania ‘Mercedes’ in CPAC speech
independent.co.uk
132

Can you imagine the wall to wall coverage had it been Biden who called his wife by the wrong name? It would go on for weeks.

Because it's Trump they'll be nary a peep about this from the "liberal" media.

Edit: Confirmed this morning - not a word about Trump's demented rambling on the front pages of CNN, NBC, NYT or WA Post. The GQP front-runner's inability to string a coherent sentence together or remember his wife's name should be front page news. If Biden tripped over a mic stand it would be.

Look at that Mercedes wouldn't be a wrong name, it would be objectification to the point of calling your wife a trophy car, not even a trophy wife... Or maybe I read it differently

Mercedes is an actual woman's name:

"The source of the name was Spanish businesswoman Mercedes Jellinek, whose father Emil Jellinek was a business associate of the company’s founder, Gottlieb Daimler."

No offense, but a thread of people not having read "Count of Monte-Cristo" is just scary to see.

You don't need need to read the novel. Plenty of movie and other media adaptations out there.

Only scarier. Also it's easy to read, no?

I haven't ready it yet, so I wouldn't know. I didn't grow up studying English literature. I've read plenty of Spanish ones, though.

What do you mean by easy to read? As in, easy to understand? 1,200 pages sound daunting for most people.

I meant the flow, Dumas is in general known for that.

Also French, not English, but he may be less known in Spanish-speaking countries, I didn't know that. Thought Dumas was somewhat of a classic everyone reads in their childhood, a bit like Jules Verne.

True, sorry, I just learned that the author was French. I guess it wasn't part of my curriculum. Maybe it would have been if I followed a more humanities focused path.

You would think French, being also a romance language, meant that Dumas was more popular in Spanish speaking schools. Or maybe my school just sucked :)

Not everyone has had the privilege of being raised by the landed gentry. Good day sir.

Ok I'll stop being an obnoxious dick now. First of all I just want to agree that I enjoyed the prose/flow of the Count of Monte Cristo. It was enjoyable to read but as a story I felt that it had some major issues and seemed to go on and on. Which I guess makes sense given it was serialized.

I think you're vastly overestimating how much the average person reads, and what sorts of books they read. In my experience, very few people have experience reading anything more challenging/obscure than something like 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird, which we were forced to read in high school and hated.

I think a good amount of people (myself for example) eventually fall back in love with reading and realize those books are really good, but in my experience the majority of reading most people do is non-fiction. I've read The Count of Monte Cristo because I quite like fiction and because I became aware of the story in high school through the movie, but reading a 1200 page revenge novel written almost 200 years ago is so far outside the interest of basically anyone I know.

I'm sure more literary sorts of people have had different experiences but I think my experience is a decent indicator. I grew up with privilege and have nerdy interests, so interacting with people who had the time/interest/access to literature was not unusual.

Even as a big fantasy/sci-fi reader Jules Verne hardly seems to be a "must read" these days. Certainly a name that is known and mentioned but not at the top of people's recommendations. But I generally hate all the fantasy/sci-fi I see recommended so maybe it's time to read some Verne.

Not everyone has had the privilege of being raised by the landed gentry.

Not me either, just asocial, ha-ha.

I think you’re vastly overestimating how much the average person reads, and what sorts of books they read. In my experience, very few people have experience reading anything more challenging/obscure than something like 1984 or To Kill a Mockingbird, which we were forced to read in high school and hated.

School program and literature similar to it are what I've read the least. My approach was to look through it 30 minutes at home and 5 minutes before the lesson, listen what others say, and try to improvise when asked questions.

Even as a big fantasy/sci-fi reader Jules Verne hardly seems to be a “must read” these days. Certainly a name that is known and mentioned but not at the top of people’s recommendations. But I generally hate all the fantasy/sci-fi I see recommended so maybe it’s time to read some Verne.

Yes, recommendations and "must read" are not what I'm thinking. Rather nature, power of human mind and human courage, scientific progress of course. These books are very captivating for boys. Seeing them mentioned in some matching context may be sufficient.

I’ve read The Count of Monte Cristo because I quite like fiction and because I became aware of the story in high school through the movie, but reading a 1200 page revenge novel written almost 200 years ago is so far outside the interest of basically anyone I know.

Yes, it scares me to think that most good things I've read, especially in my childhood, I haven't found and chosen consciously. Some were given to me by my mother, some by my father, some accidentally stumbled upon on the Web or elsewhere, some I've read, yes, after seeing movies.

That's irrelevant. Trump said "Look at that Mercedes". That's the sentence structure for an object. Not a person, no matter what their name is.

Oooh, serves me right for not reading TFA. Yeah, with context, it's clear he's objectifying her.

Edit: I saw the video. It's debatable that we said "look at that Mercedes!" There was a "wow" and a pause in between. Did he mean to say "look at that Mercedes?" Possibly. But it's also possible that he meant "Look at that, wow! Mercedes, that's pretty good!"

1 more...

Mercedes is the main character in The Merchant of Venice, it's been a woman' name for a long time. Could be his pet name for her?

Mercedes is a name, yes. The sentence structure fits more to speaking about an object though. Replace the name Mercedes with Ferrari and you see how it still works? I'm not saying his sentence structure is always correct but referring to his wife as a high end luxury object is something he would think is flattering (and many women would infact blush at being called so). Many others would feel objectified and think the speaker was a creep, hence the way I read it.

Did you just read the quote of what he said or did you actually listen to it? By the way he says it, it's clear he's using it as a name.

I would say the article even printed the quote wrong. They wrote, "Oh look at that Mercedes, that's pretty good."
They dropped a word and in my opinion got the punctuation wrong. I would quote it as, "Oh look at that, wow. Mercedes, that's pretty good."

"Oh look at that, wow. Mercedes, that's pretty good. Wow, she's good."

Yeah it's very clear he's referring to her, not a car.

Since when is Mercedes a high end luxury object? Its one car maker from Germany. Do they make some higher end models? Sure but hardly Ferrari, Lamborghini or Bugatti.

1 more...
1 more...
1 more...
2 more...

I'm baffled that people actually think the media goes after him for his speaking errors. A few people on the right do, but most of the MSM seems to still feel responsible for Trump's election and downplay Biden's mistakes.

It's literally the reverse, they try to frame everything as "this is a problem for Biden", even when he does things successfully, especially NYT really insists on framing everything as a problem. And then they completely ignore most of Trump's failures.

Don't forget that most of mass media companies has owners with a right wing leaning.

We probably consume different media. They talk about it (it's hard to really avoid it) but they're a bit more lenient in the analysis.

You guys are a good portion of my media consumption now, save for a few center/center-right youtube channels. Not many left of those, though. It might just be that I feel like you guys downplay it.

It's hard to ignore the fact that neither of them are fit to be running, but here we are.

2 more...

The GOP is about to nominate an old man who can’t remember his 3rd wife’s name who is facing 91 federal charges.

Not just some old man. An old RAPIST.

Honestly at this point I don't think you can get the GOP nomination WITHOUT being a rapist.

Who enjoys walking into the dressing rooms of underaged pageant contestants and also was friends with a serial pedophile who didn't kill himself

This cognitive debate between two geriatrics is just sad to see. I'm not American, our politicians aren't qualified for other reasons, but I'm so curious to see one of them die in office and the mayhem it's gonna cause when it happens. My stock market play would be completely different LoL.

Dying in office won't produce mayhem. We have a well established process for that. The VP takes over and fights with Congress over who gets appointed as the next VP. The only drama will be who fills that role.

Dying just before the election? Now that will be a clown show. If the vacancy happens after the party convention the ballots likely wouldn't be able to be changed. However, as you likely know we are not voting for President and VP directly, we are voting for a slate of Electors pledged to the candidates. Many states bind those electors to vote according to the popular vote, and those states would need to pass quick laws changing that process.

If it's the winning side whose candidate bites it, there needs to be a ton of coordination to all this. Because there is still a process to counting those EC votes. If some votes come in for the deceased candidate at the top of the ticket and some don't, they will likely be counted separately and as a result no one would technically have the majority.

We do have a weird way to resolve that, though: if the EC has no majority, the House votes on the President and the Senate votes on the VP. But the House vote has an additional wrinkle, in that each State's delegation gets one vote. So, all 50+ of California's members get 1 vote, and Wyoming's Lone member also gets a vote. The math there favors the Republican candidate, even if Democrats control the House.

It could also result in the Republican choice being President while the Democrat becomes VP, which would make for the world's most awkward Peformance Reviews.

If you don't think that the US president dying in office will lead to global upheaval, you're crazy. The stock market went nuts when the defense Secretary was hospitalized. There's global responses to tweets FFS.

The stock market fluctuating is not mayhem. It's designed to go nuts. Traders make money on volatility. I bet there is some high frequency trader who makes millions of dollars in trades every time Elon takes a shit.

Global upheaval is some country deciding to invade a US ally because we had an election and the fascist lost, even within our EC guidelines, but might take office anyway.

It's a reflection of sentiment, when it's going haywire that means the decision makers are nervous.

The US is clearly in a weaker position in terms of global influence than it's been in the past 30 to 50 years. Any and every opportunity that they offer Iran, Russia, China etc. Is obviously going to further destabilize in unstable situation. The US can't even get its budgets in order and face shutdowns on a quarterly basis. Throw a backup president into that situation and you don't think there's going to be major problems? That's beyond wishful thinking and firmly in the fantasy land.

Sentiment is not reality. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term. This means yearly financials are the only thing that really matter for investing. Do not worry about a 20-50% drop in prices. That appears to happen every decade or so.

Just because it "goes crazy", I guarantee you US Treasury Bonds will not go down in price. In fact, I bet they go up in price. Whenever there's large issues in the world there's a "flight to safety". US Treasuries are the safest assets around.

I'm fascinated by the ability to see how completely fucked up American politics has been for the past decade+, and honestly believe that a president dying in office wouldn't throw the government completely off the rails. It's barely on the rails right now.

But at least there is a clear sucession if a President dies in office. Yes, they are the backup, but continuity is not in question. Its happened before, the Republic survived. We haven't had any candidate die right before an election.

Well, there was RFK, he was killed before the convention and he wasn't the front-runner at the time anyway. But that 1968 Democratic Convention could be rightfully described as "upheaval".

Probably another porn star he cheated on his (then) wife with.

You're assuming he ever got told their name by the fixer before the poor girl was sent into the room.

As if they couldn't give them a fake name.

Like a stripper named "Mandy," you wouldn't assume that was her real name.

The guy who gave his daughter plastic surgery treats women as objects. It's not even shocking. It's not news. It's nothing. It's obvious. The weird part is, that people like him for it.

I usually manage to call my possessions by their correct names. Trump has dementia.

The number of people who don't seem to get that is staggering. He's shown clear signs of cognitive decline since at most 2020. I know mental health and elder care professionals that were noticing it as early ad 2016.

Just watch his interviews from around 9/11. He's still a stupid, pompous, narcissistic, lying piece of shit with delusions of grandiosity, but he could speak coherently and form complete thoughts.

It's likely only a matter of months before he finally sundowns with cameras on him, although I'm sure his handlers are trying their hardest to keep that from happening.

You could have said the same about George W Bush.

There are reels of him saying stupid dumb stuff as a president when he was coherent as governor of Texas.

You could have said the same about George W Bush.

People did say the same things about George W. Bush! He was a horrible president, too!

They like him for it because they wish they could do the same.

I'd like to believe that most of his voting base don't want to fuck their kids. Donnie was just raised in a... special environment, which produced his ah bigly brain

People don't "like him for it" they like him despite it. Just because people like an unlikable person doesn't mean they like everything about him.

They like him because he does the horrible things that they want him to do. He hurts the people they don't like.

The thought of the day that I get to watch Donald Trump finally stroke out on stage for good is honestly what keeps me going at this point.

They will probably come up with a conspiracy of why it is the Liberal's fault

"He meant to die of a stroke. He sacrificed himself to show the world just what the Jewish new world order is capable of, just like Jesus did. They have weapons they can use to kill any elderly, morbidly obese men they want. If we don't stop them by being super transphobic, you could be next"

No matter how he dies, magatards will claim it's an assassination, guaranteed.

Some witch named Mercedes is polishing his mushroom. That’s fine tho, I’m sure melanoma has a side piece.

I said this in another thread that I bet some stripper or Porn star was banging him on the side and he slipped again.

Just imagine if Biden called Jill Biden ‘Jane’ or the like - the media would be be all over him for days poking fun at his supposed dementia.

Considering Donald's well-documented desire to play the world's most disappointing game of hide-the-underfilled-cocktail-frank with his own daughter, maybe Eric is that side piece. Shit doesn't fall far from the ass.

Is his brain even going to last the nine months til the election? It feels like in just a month or two he will have degraded to saying the n-word on stage while talking about how bad he wants to fuck his daughter.

I'm actually not sure that would hurt his chances of winning

Republicans are fine with killing transgenders but saying the n word might be too much. Not ironical.

You mean, saying it loud.

Edit: Or more like, saying it out loud in public. Thank you, valutdweller013.

Outloud in public you mean, theres something weird about ones grandmother calling a small club a n-word beater. Especially since this is the same woman who praised my tolerance for having a trans friend in highschool, but then again shes the one who pointed out to me they were trans. I am dense as a fucking brick.

The cut before he says "Mercedes that's pretty good" kinda annoys me. Is there a full uncut version? Honestly it seems like footage manipulation, I'm not really sure that he is talking about Melania in that sentence.

Unfortunately he is not losing his mind just yet… he is in fact addressing Mercedes Schlapp who is actually in the audience.

I had to look into it because it also seemed to me that these were two unrelated sentences.

How he stings together sentences, even if the previous one was about his wife, this one could be about cars, and the next one might be about air in potato chip bags.

What are the odds that we just learned what he has been calling her at home for years?

What a...

Really, there are no words.

Mercedes is a word.

I am continually amazed by the USA. How does he get so much support? Why are all your candidates walking corpses? How did it get to this point?

Look around.

How did Modi get so much support?

How did Johnson get so much support?

How did Le Pen get so much support?

How did Meloni get so much support?

How did Erdogan get so much support?

How did Orban get so much support?

How did Netanyahu get so much support?

How did Wilders get so much support?

Awful leaders with popular support are by no means unique to the USA.

Billionaires and organised wingnuts love their corrupt puppets and unfortunately most people are very easily led.

There is no word yet. In a couple of decades we will be calling obvious stupid liars a "trump."

You people are overthinking this would your talks of dementia and objectification. Have you even considered that Mercedes could be her "stage" name ... or the name of wife number 4!

He was comparing her to a car most likely. Seems like something he would do.

While it does seem like something he would do, watch the clip, listen to his cadence. He is not comparing her to a car, he is using Mercedes as a name.