The Trump Presidency, Season 2

Jopsy Pendragon

The US was sorta nice, while it lasted.
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What I'm going to do about it is not a lift a finger to help any damned fucking moron who supported him when they lose their job, their healthcare, their home.... they voted to burn the country down. They can sit in the ashes.

Maybe then they'll wise up and vote for something else. If they're still able to.
 

GoblinCampFollower

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America moving on up from overthrowing governments for being unfriendly to American capital to:

I noticed a while ago bigots NEVER feel the burden of proof is on them. Is it a fact whether or not she's jewish, it is not a fact that there is anything wrong with that.. I'm sure this guy doesn't understand the distinction though. And bigots see their stereotypes as fact of course.
 

Free

A wink and a smile.
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Innula Zenovka

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Slate: Donald Trump’s Orbán Playbook Is Working Exactly as Intended

Evernote Link

I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time, and this is the third time I’ve ridden this escalator from democracy into a very dark place.

What we’re seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia, and particularly to what happened in Hungary. But Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it’s going to fail with tanks in the streets, it’s going to fail with some radical rupture, it’s going to fail with the normal ceasing to be normal. If you look at how autocracy works these days in the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the back of a free and fair election. Somebody who is a “populist”—you can call them whatever, a charismatic leader who promises to shake things up—gets elected. It’s often fair and square the first time. If you go back and you look at the election monitor’s reports from when Hugo Chávez was elected in Venezuela or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Viktor Orbán was elected the first time in Hungary, the election monitors all said, “Free and fair election. No problem.” And then as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power.

Their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people, so now we’re seeing immigration crackdowns, we’re seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we’re seeing attacks on affirmative action, we’re seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. What all that rhetoric is disguising, and this was true in Hungary, in Venezuela, and in Turkey, it’s disguising the real work of autocracy, which is removing all checks on executive power. A lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that’s where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.
 

Erich Templar

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Veritable Quandry

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I have always thought of it as tribute.

Transactional does not work because Trump sees everything as a zero sum game: there can only be a winner if there is a loser. Win-win isn't in his worldview.

Which is why he can't understand international trade. He sees US money going to imports as a sign that the US is "losing" money. Not as a sign that the US economy is strong enough that we don't have to produce everything, that we can purchase goods and services from other countries. But focusing on trade deficits isn't the problem. Labor exploitation in developing countries, lack of protection for intellectual property, environmental damage caused by underregulated manufacturing. These are issues to focus on. And they would increase costs of goods coming in, perhaps leading to more favorable prices for local goods. But it isn't simply the US "losing" money that it's citizens are spending.

That can be used to manage Trump. Mexico and Canada simply announced resources that they had agreed to with Biden as a way to defuse Trump's demands. He was appeased and got public credit, which bought us all some time.
 
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Innula Zenovka

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This may explain Trump's sudden concern about South Africa (I think it's free to read)

South Africa’s coalition clashes over Starlink as Elon Musk attacks equality laws
Elon Musk’s hopes of launching Starlink in South Africa are being delayed by fierce infighting within the country’s ruling coalition over Black economic empowerment laws the US entrepreneur has characterised as “racist”.

Foreign investors in South Africa’s telecoms sector are required to provide 30 per cent of the equity in a project to Black-owned businesses to qualify for a licence, a policy championed by the African National Congress to redress racial inequalities created under apartheid.

But Musk, who was born in South Africa, on Monday described the country’s policies as “openly racist”. US President Donald Trump also weighed in this weekend, saying South Africa’s government was “treating certain classes of people very badly”, a reference to a land expropriation bill also intended to address unequal ow
nership.
 

Noodles

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All this talk about how we don't know exactly what Musk is doing now that he has taken over parts of the government.

I got to thinking, it would be really funny if it didn't work out because his little Nazi Kids were not smart enough to figure out how it works enough to break it like he wants.
 

Casey Pelous

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Well it seems that Elon Musk is busy erecting an American Stasi, so an all powerful authority like the Ministry of State Security in the GDR and doing similar things. This is really, really bad...

To me, it looks very much like they are planning the biggest heist in history.