A massive store devoted to President Donald Trump gear and other MAGA merch is closing, and it’s because even deep in a deep red state, fans are just not that into him anymore.
Slate recently visited the Trump Superstore just outside of Knoxville, Tenn., and found everything on sale at 50% off or more as the shop prepares to shut down.
“We’re not busy anymore,” one employee told Slate.
The Knoxville News Sentinel reported last month that the store was closing in part because its owner was moving to Florida. But owner Bill Hays laughed at that.
“The girl that reported that did not know what she was talking about,” Hays told Slate, adding that he’s not retiring or moving. “I don’t think she wanted to say we were closing for lack of business, but that’s why we’re closing.”
An employee named Dan was even more blunt, telling Slate that Trump “really is dwindling, dwindling, dwindling.”
When asked whether he meant Trump’s health or his popularity, Dan said the latter.
“You can see more and more Republicans are not happy with their life situation,” Dan said. “People really are saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to do a full load of groceries or I’m going to put my electric bill on a credit card this month.’”
Trump’s overall approval rating has plunged to historic lows, and affordability is a key reason. His approval rating on affordability specifically is now 43 percentage points underwater, according to The Economist’s poll tracker.
Even in Tennessee, where Trump once enjoyed massive popularity, his numbers are falling: Trump entered office with his approval rating 24 percentage points above water. Now, the latest polls show his approval at 47% and disapproval at 45% in the state, just 2 percentage points above water, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
Rest easy, MAGAts! The thing you elected twice, your cult leader, is doing just fine with his unprecedented graft, crypto businesses, pardons-for-payoffs, and other grifts he's been running to enrich himself to the tune of $2 billion since 2025. He has also asked that you STFU about "affordability," and high gas and grocery prices, and his endless war of choice with Iran. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
The water level at Lake Powell, the United States’ second-largest reservoir, has fallen to a record low, heightening concerns about the ongoing crisis in the Colorado River system.
The alarming milestone at Lake Powell, reached Saturday, comes about a week after the river’s other major reservoir, Lake Mead, also hit a historic low. Plummeting water levels pose a major threat to the Colorado River Basin, which is a key resource for wildlife, hydropower and more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states.
The historic lows come as the federal government and states that rely on the river — California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado — struggle to reach agreement on a long-term management plan for the dwindling resource. Persistent overuse combined with a record-dry winter and rising temperatures have been depleting both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Lake Powell’s elevation dropped to 3,519.91 feet (1072.9 meters) above sea level on Saturday, dropping just slightly below a previous record set in April 2023, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The lake is more than 20 feet (6.10 meters) lower than it was at the start of the year, USBR data shows.
The reservoir is now about 30 feet (9.1 meters) away from the point at which turbines would stop producing hydroelectric power. Federal officials warned in April that a “major intervention” would be necessary to avoid reaching that threshold by the end of this year.
USBR in July proposed a 10-year plan that includes major potential water cuts for Arizona, California and Nevada.
The crisis has been in the making for years. Both reservoirs are at the lowest they have been in nearly seven decades, and levels may continue to drop, USBR data shows.
The last time their combined storage was this small was in May 1957 when Glen Canyon Dam that holds back Powell was being built, according to a recent paper published by a group of academics and retired water officials. Powell began to fill in 1963.
The depletion has also impacted Lake Powell’s substantial tourism industry, forcing marinas in the reservoir to adapt. Boat ramps have closed or moved, new ones are being added and marinas have been temporarily relocated to deeper waters.
The southwestern US is experiencing a megadrought that has lasted since 2000, exacerbated by climate change (a term you don't see in the article above). With an incompetent, vindictive, and corrupt Malignant Fascist administration in Washington, DC, as a party to reaching a resource management plan, we can only say, "Good luck with that!"
In 2022, Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, purchased electric shock gloves for his officers after learning about them at a trade show. And his employees, he said, couldn’t get enough of them. “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands,” Glueck joked on a podcast interview a couple of years later. “They’ve grown really attached.”
The shock gloves, he went on to explain, allow their wearer to inflict pain without leaving the sort of marks that could look bad to witnesses or leave an officer vulnerable to lawsuits.
“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” [Ed.: yeah, you wouldn't want to have your brutality have any negative consequences for you!]
The gloves, manufactured by a company called Compliant Technologies, have been used by police, sheriffs, jail wardens, and even school resource officers for years. They’ve been described by groups like Amnesty International as “readily misused for torture.” And this week, ICE published a plan to order $20 million worth of them.
The device is called a GLOVE, which stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. It looks like a regular padded black utility glove, but when the wearer presses a small button on the glove’s wrist, it produces a painful electric shock.
“We have a saying: Feeling is believing,” Compliant Technologies CEO Jeff Niklaus said in one 2022 YouTube video. In promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts. Since then, though, it’s downgraded the language to “a Conductive Distraction and De-escalation device,” branding the technology on its website as “humane.”... (our emphasis)
In a better, more just world, everyone involved with these "de-escalation" torture devices should spend time in prison, from the Torquemadas at the company, to the local law enforcement seeking to cover up brutality, to ICE leadership who ordered $20 million worth of them, to every goon that uses them. But here we are... for now. That's the slippery slope to fascist America that we're on.
No comments:
Post a Comment