rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

nobody's saying these aren't bad times and they're the scariest of my lifetime atm but "unprecedented", idk about that. disregard for science and education has always been a problem in this country, hence the Scopes monkey trials - it's more visible now because everyone of these anti-science kook assholes has a megaphone via social media, and propaganda travels faster.

after all these years I still just don't understand why they had to keep hitting that monkey with that telescope

it's sad, he was destined to be a Rhode's scholar

xxp the scariest of your lifetime but not unprecedented?

'open' and 'flagrant' are enough to mark this administration as separate from all previous ones

just one example, the deliberate appointment of cabinet members actually opposed to the goals and ideals of the departments they represent?

the scariest of your lifetime but not unprecedented?

How old do you think I am, dude?

every thing I just mentioned upthread happened before I was born

just one example, the deliberate appointment of cabinet members actually opposed to the goals and ideals of the departments they represent?

^ the almost systemic appointment of etc

xpost the fact that there's precedent is pretty much WHY the Trump era is so infuriating, is because we have seen much of this before, know exactly what he's doing or trying to do, and having half of the country willfully believe he's not doing what he's quite obviously doing.

my point is it is unprecedented

...ok

We’ve done this a ton and it’s never so simple...there’s a long list of shit Trump has done that Nixon never did, too.

just one example, the deliberate appointment of cabinet members actually opposed to the goals and ideals of the departments they represent?

Hardly unprecedented, unless you've forgotten Ronald Reagan's Cabinet.

We’ve done this a ton and it’s never so simple...there’s a long list of shit Trump has done that Nixon never did, too.

― singular wolf erotica producer (Hadrian VIII), Friday, July 24, 2020 9:27 PM bookmarkflaglink

like wipe back to front

xp not to this degree

you know he does xp

Between Nixon, Reagan, HW and W there's very little malfeasance that's unprecedented.

xp not to this degree

that means it's precedented!!!!

the scariest thing about Trump, to me, is having cultivated a racist, heavily armed base that he frequently throws the kind of red meat to that even most extreme right politicians usually were reticent to give, and he is willing to use them like junkyard dogs and has them bite who he wants bitten.

using the presidency p much solely to enrich yourself personally and being blackmailed by Russian oligarchs for decades of money laundering is pretty OG you have to admit

where's the tax returns

he's not just a normal historical piece-of-shit republican president

Diverting military escorts to refuel at your golf resorts and purposefully, permanently separating 5000+ children from their parents also groundbreaking

Looking the other way while the planet is frying, also the opposite of what Nixon did

Diverting military escorts to refuel at your golf resorts

Stuff like this shouldn't be added to a list of why we should all be pins and needles about the coming coup.

I don't see a meaningful difference between Trump's relatively small-time personal grifting and all of Bush and Cheney's bros making billions off of Iraq.

I guess for me the difference for me is that those crimes were perpetrated in the name of something like a principle—an obviously perverted belief system, but basically ideological. Something that you can punch back at.

Whereas w Trump there’s nothing there. No values at all, and consequently nothing to fight. It’s like taking swings at a ghost. It’s worse, to me, in that regard.

I was unsure in 2016 if Trump wouldn’t actually be better than a Cruz or a Pence. I suffer no such illusions anymore.

I was always worried about a moment like COVID-19, not specifically a pandemic, but a national emergency that required leadership and he shits the bed and gets people killed.

the fascist stuff is stuff I thought he would tamp down when he took office and that he was just saying inane shit to get elected, but...nope.

"trump's relatively small-time personal grifting"

this is gaslighting. every bit of understanding of what elements of the law we can and will enforce has nefariously shifted under this administration

can we stop using the word gaslighting as a stand-in for "I disagree with what you're saying"

like it's pretty obv I'm by far not the Cap'n-Save-a-Milo of the board but I don't think he was attempting to psychologically manipulate you

I don't think it's wrong to say Cheney was a more successful grifter than Trump

fwiw I agree with a lot of what milo’s been pointing out about previous GOP administrations, but I also agree with what Dan S and others are getting at with regard to Trump’s creeping erosion of multiple institutions in a way that none of his predecessors had the imagination to attempt.

All that said, he still doesn’t get to keep being president after he gets his ass kicked in November.

grifting is the least of it

hope he will lose in November, can hardly wait

every bit of understanding of what elements of the law we can and will enforce has nefariously shifted under this administration

Bush's institutionalized use of torture is much more horrifying and important, for one thing, than Trump's grifting. The security state's expansion and its abuses are an 'element of the law' that was nefariously shifted, apparently permanently, to be continually used by Democrats and Republicans alike.

I see no evidence that Trump's personal abuses will be institutionalized, unless we think Joe Biden's gonna throw some business Hunter's way (I don't).

I was born in 1978. My main reason for thinking Trump is worse than Nixon et al. is that he is blatantly, profoundly horrible at foreign policy in a way that we haven’t seen since JFK.

It’s going to be a long road back up a steep hill to regain the lost trust from our allies, and that sucks

agree

fwiw, I don't think Trump has been beaten down in the courts. Despite a couple of SC decisions that don’t have direct bearing on him before 11/20 he has been entirely indulged.

N.B. I say this as someone whose long term plan remains not to improve America, but rather to simply get the hell out of America as soon as possible. So maybe I'm the worst traitor-to-the-cause of all.

All that said, he still doesn’t get to keep being president after he gets his ass kicked in November.

Am I misunderstanding that he gets two months to be president, wuthout any further fragmentary fear of checks and balances,after that?

your pedantry has stomped me once again

this thread is a crowded roomful of people staring at a clock while they jab their elbows into the ribs of everyone around them.

i do worry about those 2-3 months by the way. they will probably be critical months for coronavirus response.

is there any scope for changing the inauguration date or is that written into the constitution?

It’s in the constitution

Man that wasn't very smart. It's like writing a dependency into a core library (or something? you know what I mean)

Just think: until 1936 Inauguration Day was in March!

y'all

this thread is a fucking nightmare, ok? it's just a complete fucking nightmare. first y'all started circling around the aberration-vs-culmination debate that's been going on since 2016 (it's both), then neanderthal jumps in to ask people to please not use the word "gaslighting" because he disagrees with the context in which it's being used, and now tombot has jumped into shit-talk a in-thread-terms ancient post by unperson just so that he can express his personal repulsion and disgust at what unperson is saying

i understand we all got our own emotional shit right now, our own extremely heavy emotional shit, but for god's sake people need to start learning to take control of their own shit instead of putting their own personal shit on other people who, whether or not they "deserve" it, don't fucking benefit in any measurable way, none of us benefit from it

oh yeah we allegedly can't do anything about the president until november, so let's just spend the next three months telling people on the internet how wrong they are and how they're the real fucking enemy, right?

this board was in a fucking death spiral anyway. huge chunks of the best posters here have quietly walked away this year, and their reasons are their own, but whatever the reason, i don't blame them, i hope they're doing better than some of the people on this cursed thread, i hope they have some people who can support them and who they can support and who they can interact with ways that are better than this.

#onethread and it's fucking this one.

Counterpoint: personal compulsions aside, this and the Biden thread in particular are actually pretty easy to avoid.

My question for the post-Trump era (whenever that is) is how much of his bullshit will be easy to reverse? He's reviled by our erstwhile allies, might that actually make it *easier* to rebuild trust? And the SC and judges are one thing, but all his executive orders, can't they just be executive ordered away again? My biggest concerns on this front, per W., is the bullshit he's promoted that will stick around as stubbornly as TSA shoe screenings. Will whatever border wall has been built up bigger be ... taken down? Will the families he has rounded up on the border simply be ... released? The Iran deal, I don't know how you undo that undoing, but something like the Paris Climate Accord, can the US just ... rejoin it? The various vindictive tariffs, will the US just end them? And so on.

I did not ask people not to use the word "gaslighting", I asked people to stop misusing it. because gaslighting is a form of intentional, psychological emotional abuse, and Dan S accused milo of gaslighting simply because he felt milo was downplaying Trump's corrupt behavior.

accusing people of a form of emotional abuse simply to win an internet argument isn't something I'm cool with, even if that's not what Dan was intending to do, and I'm seeing it everywhere lately.

much easier to nitpick each other than punch the bullies. same as it ever was