I hereby take a timeout from moderating the blog to trying to write the daily Open Thread post. Moderating ain’t easy, especially when one is not a moderate. Can’t recall a year where there’s been more ‘working of the refs’. But, I digress.
Nobody Has Ever Seen The Likes Of This Trump Article Ever Before. Redundancy deliberate. This has been in my head forever, but didn’t think to write about it. Well, someone has:
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. But don’t worry—nobody has, ever. Or at least, that’s what Donald Trump would say if asked about, well, anything. It’s the ex-president’s favorite locution.
“Groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We’ve never seen anything like it—50, 60, 70 percent,” Trump said recently. (This is not true, though if it were, it would be unlike anything seen in American history.)
Once you start looking for the phrase in Trump’s speeches and remarks, it’s everywhere. “You know what [Election Day]’s going to be called?” he told a religious group this spring. “Christian visibility day, when Christians turn out in numbers that nobody has ever seen before.” He uses a similar idiom—the exact wording does vary at times—to describe the economy as it was during his presidency (“We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had never done anything like it”), and as he says it will be: “We’re going to drill, baby, drill. We’re going to close our borders. We’re going to do things like nobody has ever seen before. And we’re going to make our nation’s economy be the best ever in the world.”
Unlike some of Trump’s signature tics—“bigly,” “many people are saying,” “like a dog”—this one may not immediately come off as distinctive. But when I ran nobody has ever seen before through the ProQuest database, I found that about two-thirds of the roughly 1,500 occurrences were Trump’s. Among the ones that weren’t, most were literal, sometimes even accurate, instances: archival photos of the Monkees, new paleontological finds, Steph Curry statistical anomalies.
The use and abuse of the phrase illuminates Trump’s salesman instincts. The case is not only that Trump speaks in hyperbole, though he does. He also strives for novelty, telling people that whatever thing he’s hawking is entirely new to the human experience. This comes naturally, because he sees the world in absolutes and demonstrates very little interest in learning, so he may not actually know much about relevant comparisons.
Donald Trump’s sons want to turn their father’s growing bromance with the cryptocurrency industry into the new family business. So far, the project’s troubled rollout has succeeded in creating only one thing: a potential political liability for the former president.
Trump’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — have been teasing their plans to unveil a crypto startup called World Liberty Financial for weeks. But the launch has been marred in recent days by a series of apparent scams that have redirected fans to fake pages and compromised the social media accounts of other Trump relatives.
That has never happened with any Trump venture ever before. (Sometimes this stuff is just too easy.)
Wilmington: No More ‘Holding Cars For Ransom’. Maybe not a perfect settlement, but serious progress:
An ordinance before the Wilmington City Council could jump-start changes to ticketing and towing practices in Delaware’s largest city following a federal lawsuit over parking enforcement and booting practices.
The ordinance, sponsored by Councilperson Maria Cabrera, would empower the city’s finance director to waive all penalties, fines and fees associated with a vehicle if a tow company takes title of a car with the intention of scrapping or selling it. It’s expected to be the first in a series of policy changes spawned by the lawsuit.
The 18-page settlement shared with Delaware Online/The News Journal this week avoids a trial that was set to begin in July in U.S. District Court in Delaware.
A joint statement from the city and Institute for Justice attorneys, the latter representing Wilmington residents Shaheed and Dickerson, included in the court documents said the parties were pleased an agreement could be reached. The agreement also lays out that Wilmington will pay Shaheed $20,000 and Dickerson another $20,000 to settle the lawsuit against the city as well as paying the Institute for Justice attorneys $110,000.
Institute for Justice attorney Will Aronin said the new system makes sure “nobody loses their cars for parking tickets” by making sure “people never get in such a hole that they can’t get out.”
One important obstacle remains:
The Wilmington Fines and Fees Justice Team took issue with the ordinance not eliminating impoundment and immobilization of vehicles entirely, pointing to other states like Minnesota that have done away with using towing and impoundment as tools for parking enforcement.
“Other jurisdictions have already ended booting, towing, and impoundment of cars as a method of parking ticket enforcement, and it’s time Wilmington does the same,” said Lynne Kielhorn, a member of the Fines and Fees Justice Team, in the news release.
Aronin said eliminating impoundment practices couldn’t be ordered by the judge in the federal case, nor could the lawsuit force that change.
It can, and should, be added to the proposed ordinance.
What do you want to talk about?