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Titanium Dragon


TD writes and reviews pony fanfiction, and has a serious RariJack addiction. Send help and/or ponies.

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Jul
19th
2016

More evidence that the Trump Campaign is secretly an elaborate practical joke on the American public · 6:48am Jul 19th, 2016

From Melania Trump (Donald Trump's wife)'s speech tonight:

Appropriate for a speech on a day focused on how Mr. Trump won't let anyone hurt you.

In all fairness, though, the newscasters did like the speech, though a few of them noted they liked it better when Michele Obama gave it in 2008.

Of course, there remains a Poem for your Sprog's take on things:

'Gosh darn it!' thought Donald: 'enough is enough!
Campaigning is draining and dreadfully tough!
I'm lost in a feeling of darkness and doubt -
I need to escape it! I need to get out!

'But how do I do it?' he pondered in plight:
'Perhaps there's a way if I package it right.'
'Let's ban immigration and build up a wall -
They're Muslims,' said Donald, 'and Mexicans, all!'

'Well that ought to do it,' he thought with a grin -
'I'll drop out tomorrow and shroud it in spin.'
His publicist rang as he readied for bed:
'Your ratings have never been higher!' he said.

EDIT: This post was originally marked "not pony related". Donald Trump's campaign has now used Twilight Sparkle as a defense for why the speech isn't plagiarized. In light of that fact, I have removed the not pony related tag.

Comments ( 38 )

personally I think tricking one of your opponents into rickrolling a national audience is a necessary qualification to be in charge of the CIA

:rainbowlaugh:

Now imagine Don vetting people for his administration as well as he vets his speechwriters.

And this was just Day 1 of the RNC.

I can't wait for the rest of it.

4100713
Which link isn't working?

I think it's a sad measure of how uninspiring a candidate Hillary is that she's tied with this surreal hot mess.

4100739 The picture that I can only suppose contains the speech. The rickroll works. That thing always works and never fails to load. It must be like a law of the internet or something.

4100744
Nah, she's ahead in the polls. She's just not ahead by a huge margin. It is hard to know for sure, though; the polls all have huge undecided/3rd party blocks right now, which is probably not going to actually happen (usually, third party candidates lose support by the election, and undecided voters make up their minds).

The Romney types are deeply depressed; they believed that the Republican party was all about their conservative principles, and have been violently disabused of that notion this election cycle. They had thought that the whole identity politics thing that the Republican Party was doing was for a minority of voters, not a plurality of their own party.

There's a substantial fraction of Republicans who hate Hillary with the fires of a thousand suns, so it is hard for them to bring themselves to vote for someone they've spent 25 years villifying. Some of them hate both of them, and are left having to choose between two people that they actively loathe.

Never forget, this is the same man whose campaign tweeted this:

pbs.twimg.com/media/CRLvYeaUYAEtT9T.png

Silly future: Trump takes Sanders on as vice candidate.

Does he have a vice candidate?

4100775 "Now supporters, I'd like you to remember that I'm just one assassination or impeachment from being the president now. Just saying." :rainbowlaugh:

Better than the allegations of plagiarism they just dropped against his wife. Apparently parts of her speech mirored parts of Michelle Obama's. Literally watching it now on CNN in the break room at work.

4100752
being only slightly ahead of trump does imply being uninspiring, and she does have the highest unfavorability ratings of any candidate in the history of the democratic party, and the second highest overall.

4100930

I am politically in favor of Hillary, like - on a rational level, I don't have any great misgivings about her. Yea, I want her to be less crony-capitalist but that's my only real complaint.

On an emotional level, I do not like her - and every time I sit and ask 'Why?' I have no good reason. 4 years ago when she was leaving the Department of State? Totally fine with her. 0 issues. And that hasn't changed - except the endless barrage of negative coverage due to the old attack machine that's been against the Clintons since 1992.

There are people who dislike Hillary for perfectly well thought out reasons. But a lot of it is just years and years and years of unrelenting attempts to paint her as bad forming a subconscious bias.

4100945
I tentatively have to disagree with that. From what I've seen, most people dislike her for being dishonest and not genuine, opportunistic and smudge, uninspiring and political. Remember that the most important demographic factor for her favorability is age, and lots of young people have only been interested in politics so recently that "years and years of unrelenting attempts to paint her as bad" can't really apply.

Some of it is bad media and some of it is sexism, I just don't think that it's a big factor.

4100752 "...The Romney types are deeply depressed; they believed that the Republican party was all about their conservative principles..." Um, I'm not sure which Romney you're talking about, but that's not Mitt. If the conservatives in the party had come out in the same numbers that supported GW, he would have won. Mitt's a nice guy and a smart business owner, but nobody really hangs the 'Conservative' label on him except by contrast to the current Democratic slate. There was a lot of 'Taking our ball and going home' in the Republican party eight years ago.

Still not going to defend Donald. Vote for, yes. Defend, no.

4100960
See, to me this is like 'But...' on the grounds that every single thing there (Except perhaps 'uninspiring', although Trump's sort of inspirational tacks frighteningly close to fascism) applies infinitely more to Donald Trump. The number of times the man has been found to be lying in the past year is ridiculous, but Truthiness gives more weight than Truth.

The Clinton's are insular, private, and Hillary isn't nearly so charismatic as Bill, but it's a far cry from Trump's willingness to say anything at all even if he said the exact opposite a week ago.

4100962
My political leanings aren't exactly hidden given my previous statement here, but I am genuinely curious since I know you to be a largely articulate person - why is it you are willing to vote for Trump? Were I a conservative I'd probably be part of #NeverTrump because I wouldn't trust for a minute he'd be following any set of principles but 'Whatever gets me the most media buzz at any given moment'

4100945

There are people who dislike Hillary for perfectly well thought out reasons. But a lot of it is just years and years and years of unrelenting attempts to paint her as bad forming a subconscious bias.

I think the quantity of news coverage also doesn't help her. There are moments when her mask slips, when you see the real Hillary, and you can tell she's not a nice person. Which is part of why a lot of democrats are also not quite willing to commit to her just yet, despite the other choice being Trump.

This year should be an absolutely one-sided, crushing victory for the Democrats. Instead, because they lack a candidate with real charisma, Trump might actually have a chance.

4101044
oh, certainly. I wasn't comparing her to Trump. Trump is worse. But people can dislike both.

4100962
Romney ran four years ago, not eight. And Romney is conservative, as opposed to a reactionary.

More importantly, the idea that large numbers of conservatives stayed home in 2012, delivering the election to Barack Obama, is a combination of johnning (We didn't really lose! We just didn't try!) and propaganda for a particular subfaction of the Republican party, the idea that the party will lose if they fail to appease them. The myth of the missing white voter is just that - a myth. Romney had more conservatives show up for him than anyone ever has. As Karl Rove noted, the conservative share of the electorate in 2012 is the highest it has ever been. There's no evidence of a mass walk-out by conservative voters.

Indeed, Romney only got about 1 million fewer votes in 2012 than George W Bush did in 2004. Romney's total would have still been enough to beat Kerry in 2004. But he was running against Obama in 2012 - and Obama got 7 million more votes than Kerry did in 2004 in 2012.

So at best, you're looking at maybe a million "missing" Republicans. But the reality is that most of these people probably don't exist - some of them probably moved over to Obama, but most of them are probably dead. Republican demographics aren't friendly - the Democrats have crushingly won the youth vote for a while now, and Republicans are, on average, quite old. A lot of the most conservative Republicans are also amongst the oldest Republicans - and old people have a tendency to die. The result is the expansion of the Democratic party as they suck in new voters, and the graying and shrinking of the Republican party, as old people die. We'd expect that at least 4 million of Bush's 62 million voters died - and it is actually probably somewhat worse than that, as Republicans are older on average than Democrats, and I used average deaths for the whole population. Thus, Romney must have created at least 3 million new Republican voters to even fall short of Bush's figure by 1 million.

The idea that there is some vast groundswell of conservatives waiting to be tapped is not borne out by the data

4100960
Actually, young people are the most vulnerable to such propaganda, as they see it as normal, while older people are probably more aware of the 25 year long campaign against the Clintons by the Republicans. The fact that it is straight-line Republican propaganda about Clinton suggests that is the source. There's no particular reason why those attributes would be more strongly associated with Clinton than other politicians.

Good news, this post is topical now.

Sean Spicer, RNC communications director and chief strategist, just quoted Twilight by name on CNN: https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/755455836240089088

You can't make this up. Nobody could make this up.

edit: Tara Strong responds.

4101269
Man, and I thought the rickrolling was surreal. Using something Twilight Sparkle said as evidence for why you didn't plagiarize your speech is...

Bizarre.

Twilight never plagarized her speeches!

I'm dying laughing. So they try to find an uplifting My Little Pony quote that sounds similar to what Mrs. Trump says, so they choose this:

This is your dream; anything you can do in your dreams you can do now.

Recognize the context? That's from "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?". That's not an inspirational quote, Twilight's telling the ponies of Ponyville that they are literally in a dream right now and can do anything to fight the Tantabus.

4101530 I'm assuming it's because she cannot tell the difference between reality and lucid dreaming. It must be strange, being a Trump.

Honestly I've been half-convinced the Trump campaign is a ruse for a while now. It would just be such a perfect twist.

4101486 I can only imagine this is the result of a bunch of interns scouring the internet for anything similar said by a "somebody" (as opposed to a nobody average Joe) to prove that people copy large portions of other people's speeches all the time purely by coincidence. And MLP is the best they could come up.

That or they're trying to cater to the crucial MLP vote. But if they want to do that, they would be better off having Trump promise to build a wall to keep the Changelings out of Ponyville. And he'll do it for free, by making the Changelings build the wall out of Changelings.

4102303
I prefer the idea that it was just the first thing that popped into his mind while he was panicking and now everyone in the office is stuck looking up MLP stuff to cover for him.

4102321 It could explain his fear of immigrants. Party Pooped's Yaks traumatized poor Trump. "Must build wall or Mexicans destroy!"

4101486 Fanfic idea: Twilight actually plagiarizes all her speeches from older historical records, and nopony notices since only she actually cares about historical equestrian figures.

4102558 Except that just seems so incredibly wrong. I can see her going to extremes if she so much as makes a typo in one of attributions, much less worse. Heck her accidentally not citing her source for a quotation by accident could send her into a ridiculous depression. "How could I be so evil as to steal words, and from Clover the Clever of all Ponies."

4102278
Yeah, pretty much like that. It would be so funny. So funny...

4103323 It all began simply, when nopony seemed to notice that, in the ten minutes of attributions and references at the end of one of her speeches, she didn't actually reference a 5th century letter between two mathematicians from which she took a particularly clever simile. Intrigued she decided to intentionally forget ten different references on her next speech. Rather than the first time being a fluke, as she was sure it was, nopony called her out this time either! Instead, they seemed glad that the speech reference section was much shorter this time around.

Now it was a challenge: She made sure that with each new speech she would cite less and less references, while taking whole paragraphs from older works. Instead of her being lambasted, ponies started loving all she was doing even more! And meanwhile, a strange feeling started to grow on her every time she went to give one of those plagiarized speeches. How could something so wrong feel so right?

And so on...

4104276 Oh wow, I think I can see it now.

:twilightblush: "This is my fetish, isn't it?"

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