rolling “Trump is gonna win” containment thread

RELEASE THE SNYDER CUT

jfc this mother fucker has been taking up way too much fucking real estate in my head for almost a decade now!

Like the fact I need to think about this pos for more than a second is sickening

here (Belgium) the headlines are all about the panic in the Democratic party, can Biden still be replaced - and the contrast with the stronger performance by the other guy (and how truth doesn't matter, it's only about motivating enough sponsors. Voters as well, but they matter slightly less with that Electoral College system)

and even if some editors' comments are all aghast at how he keeps behaving, I suspect they're all secretly hoping for another 4 Trump years because Trump equals clicks.

sigh

y'all, i guess i gotta ask, i gotta start taking this seriously

this was about the time in 2016 i really started freaking out about the possibility trump would win. everybody was saying "oh it won't happen, trump will never win," and i needed to figure out how to handle the eventuality. because my plan at the time for what happened if trump won was to not be alive, and that wasn't a good plan.

what i actually did was move from indiana to oregon and change my gender, which i think in retrospect was a much better plan. since i already live in oregon and i'm not changing my gender again, though, i guess i gotta figure out what happens in the highly possible event trump is elected president again in 2024

because in 2016 people were making all kinds of predictions for what would happen if trump was elected president and they were as off-base as the assurances that trump would never be elected president. a lot of my friends are worried about their safety, and i don't know to what extent i _should_ be worried

it's not just that i pass, it's that i'm out as a trans woman, and people where i live support me, people where i live celebrate me. i don't follow the news. i might live in a bubble, i don't know. what i know is that in 2020, donald trump sent DHS troops to portland to kidnap people off the street in unmarked cars. what i know is that when he was called out on this, he said that he was trying to "restore order", that he sent federal troops to portland to try and "restore order", and then after a couple weeks he declared victory and retreated. it's good that the democratic party has my back, as a trans woman. the democratic party is, i think, really politically ineffective on a national level, but it's good that they have my back. what i know is that my employer is openly celebrating me as a trans person, openly celebrating lgbtq+ people, which they've never done before, despite trans people very much _not_ being celebrated by certain organizations nominally linked to my employer. what i know is that even in 2019, when my employer _wasn't_ openly celebrating trans people, they had my back, 100%, when i came out and started transition, and they're not exactly an anomaly out where i live. what i know is that what protects me isn't the rule of law, but _people_. and i trust the people around me.

the republican party's platform, not just trump's, but the republican party's platform involves eliminating transgenderism, and whatever that looks like, it bodes pretty ill for me and the people i care about. trump's platform for 2016 involved building a giant wall across the southern border of the united states. he was _incompetent_. that's the main thing i took away from trump's administration. he was incompetent, and his party was incompetent. i don't think he's gotten more competent. the republican party, on a state level, is doing awful, horrible things. awful, horrible things in texas, awful, horrible things in florida, in ohio, any red state... red states are bad. red states are not safe for someone like me to live in, i don't think.

i feel safe here in portland. i'm employable. i'm not gonna get randomly hate crimed. our community... we know the risks and we work to mitigate them. the democratic party out here where i am, on a state level, on a city level, they're _not_ effective in terms of, like, actually running the state effectively. but i feel safe out here.

do i need to be making plans to leave america? i don't want to leave america. oregon is my home. i'm done with "transition". i can get estrogen if i need to. in practice i pass absurdly well, but all my non-federal id documents - birth certificate, driver's license, etc. - have me down as non-binary. if someone opens an official registry of trans people, i'm on it.

Yeah, totally understand those concerns. My kneejerk reaction is that on a lot of issues in the near term it matters more what state you live in than who the president is. Especially if the Dems end up with at least one house of Congress. But there are certainly things Trump can do through the administrative state — which Project 2025 is all about — and who knows how deep those could go with a pliable judiciary. (Possible silver lining is that the conservative judiciary is ideologically pretty deferential to states' rights and suspicious of the administrative state. But I don't count on them for ideological consistency, obviously.)

this all feels like being in a car going 10 miles an hour in the direction of a lake, and everybody in the back seat yelling 'uh can we not drive towards the lake', and the person driving insisting 'we have plenty of time to turn the car, quit being annoying', and then suddenly we're in the lake

polling seems to suggest that while Biden is likely to lose re-election, the Dem Senate/House candidates are all doing pretty well, so if it ends up as a Trump presidency/Dem Congress, idk, it might be a lot like the first term where everyone's pissed off all the time but little outside of tax cuts actually gets done. the scary thing about 2016 was the Supreme Court, and welp

the project 2025 stuff is terrifying, but I kind of suspect it's more likely to create an administrative logjam and mass exodus of competent people rather than throw us into a fascist state overnight, I wonder if there are any measured articles about it out there detailing what's possible and what's not

a lot of heavily armed, racist, homophobic, transphobic, woman-hating nasty people who have been hiding a bit since 1/6/2021 are going to feel empowered to pop back out and I worry about that more than what Trump accomplishes legislatively.

not to mention all of the people he's going to pardon.

continued living in Texas is feeling less tenable by the minute, but I have no idea what other workable options exist

basically if Trump gets to replace Thomas, Alito (and perhaps Sotomayor) with judges in their 40s, we can expect conservative domination of the court for at least another 30 years.

a lot of heavily armed, racist, homophobic, transphobic, woman-hating nasty people who have been hiding a bit since 1/6/2021 are going to feel empowered to pop back out and I worry about that more than what Trump accomplishes legislatively.

This. I spent a week in upstate New York for my son's baseball tournament last week and it was a bit unsettling. Of course there were the expected Trump signs all over the place, no surprise there in rural America at this point, but I was a bit taken aback by how much of hit was posted next to violent/terrifying shit. Not one, but two different houses had shot up dummies dressed in Biden gear next to their Trump signs. Lost count of flags with AR-15s in/on them. Even a noose hanging from one tree. I get this is nothing new in America, but the violent undertones ain't even undertones at this point.

Not necessarily violent, but stopped to get a quick lunch at one point at the only choice we had for miles and miles and miles. Expected Trump signs of course, but in a prominent display above the cash register they had mounted an old Cleveland Indians pennant, a box of Aunt Jemima mix and a sambo doll for the racist trifecta. Noped the fuck out of there and went hungry for another two hours.

fucking hell

are white people ever going to get tired of acting out their frustration at not being openly allowed to dominate everyone else with impunity??

Not in our lifetimes, for sure.

what part of upstate new york was this? that sounds like you stumbled into hell.

Jon! Wow.

The tournament itself was about 20 minutes south of Cooperstown (which in and of itself wasn’t bad! surprising number of pride flags!), but most of the horrendous shit we saw was in the further rural areas we drove through and to the place we stayed in Richfield Springs.

Yeah I mean I have been in Kingston and the surrounding Hudson Valley/Catskill foothills region for a week and pride flags have outnumbered the fash stuff

yeah i mean cooperstown is pretty far from kingston

this i know, honestly i was surprised there wasn’t more fashy stuff.

ok i guess i should kinda say why it's hard for me to talk about politics

i do have some pretty strong wonky tendencies. i'm not proud of them but it is how i think about politics.

the thing is that ideologically, i'm not really a radical at all. people talk about, like, pol pot or stalin or whatever and yeah i think they're awful. totalitarian single-party rule is bad. the thing is, i'm wonky in a way that makes it kinda impossible to talk about politics. because one of the really strong conclusions I've come to is that the united states of america doesn't _work_ politically

basically if Trump gets to replace Thomas, Alito (and perhaps Sotomayor) with judges in their 40s, we can expect conservative domination of the court for at least another 30 years.

― A So-Called Pulitzer price winner (President Keyes), Friday, June 28, 2024 7:40 AM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

like i genuinely don't see an america 30 years down the line that doesn't have some serious structural changes

moving from indiana to portland, i was struck by how _different_ the two states are

america is one country, though, not so much because of, like... a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, but because of the _money_. i guess that's my worry, and that's a very wonky worry, worrying about the _economic impact_ of a trump presidency

the states _don't_ run independently, all that stuff the states do relies on getting money from the federal government

there's kind of this desperate scramble every time the government shuts down, which is more and more frequently, to try and prevent shit from falling apart completely

a lot of heavily armed, racist, homophobic, transphobic, woman-hating nasty people who have been hiding a bit since 1/6/2021 are going to feel empowered to pop back out and I worry about that more than what Trump accomplishes legislatively.

― perpetually awkward, perennially unhappy (Neanderthal)

...i don't get the impression they've been hiding, haha.

the threat of violence is a reality i'm always aware of. there are a lot of people with guns. there have been mass shootings. if somebody decides they want to... reduce the number of trans people in the world by a double or triple digit number, there's nothing stopping them from coming here. the cops sure as hell aren't going to stop them.

we're aware of it. everything we do, particularly in groups, risk mitigation is part of the equation. that risk, honestly, doesn't change if trump gets a second term

yeah talking through this the immediate threat of violence with someone like trump seems strong but i guess my bigger concern is... the federal government is supposed to _do_ things, and republicans are just not very good at making sure those things get done. they see that as leverage to get their way... which only works to a certain extent.

that was what i saw most from the trump administration. every week there was a new permanently acting undersecretary of this or that, every week there was a new bunch of...

i am, basically, like anyone else, which means that i am inclined to go along to get along. 2016 was the point where i was no longer able to go along. trump? i can't go for that. no can do. even people who _support_ trump... when someone asks for the impossible, "going along to get along" isn't an option. trump and the republicans just absolutely have no idea about what is and isn't actually possible. like if you want to "eradicate transgenderism", you... you can do _a lot_ of damage by denying people access to care, you can hurt a lot of people, cause a lot of pain, but strategically, you're just not gonna get rid of trans people by making it illegal to get hormones. i don't want to talk directly about what would actually be necessary, but i will say, even though i worry about it, even though all of us worry about it, i think we're a long fucking way off from that point. to do that, you'd need everybody to go along with it. and i don't believe everybody _would_ go along with what would be necessary. i don't think enough people would go along with it to make it possible.

-

it's weird. if some liberal white guy said "well, the greatest risk of a trump presidency is that he'll wreck the world economy by defaulting on america's debts" i'd... well, i'd nothing, because i don't read those threads lol

i generally do think that's the most immediate risk of a trump presidency, though, and that's not... that's not an abstract thing, that's gonna be a profoundly destabilizing event when it happens. i'm personally waiting for _that_ shoe to drop.

in the long term though it doesn't make a difference. the democrats are just... unable to ensure that america can make the interest payments on its debt. and i do think that's a bigger problem than who gets elected president in 2024.

is that weird of me to say? am i being too punditpilled here?

wriggle wriggle wriggle

No consequences.

Kate, that's a great post, I honestly think it's just a mature viewpoint -- like, you begin by saying Pol Pot and Stalin are awful, totally obviously true -- but it's actually less mature thinkers who do their own punditry about this, ignoring or explaining away or what-abouting Pol Pot's awfulness, Stalin's brutality toward his own people. You are thinking about the stuff that matters most, imo, in a way that gets you clarity instead of venting your spleen.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/07/18/agreeing-to-our-harm-marilynne-robinson/

Immediately before my partner checked her phone and saw the Supreme Court ruling, we had been reading this long and thoughtful piece by Marilynne Robinson. I found it bracing, in the sense that it literally braced me for another fucking piece being jackhammered loose from the foundations of American democracy.

Marilynne Robinson is probably the only living American author who deserves the Nobel

hard disagree but i am in the minority there, i find her work totally unreadable

How do you feel about Emerson?

i haven’t read him since i was in high school so uncertain. it also has been more than a decade since i tried Robinson so maybe i ought to give her another go

I don’t know which American author i would choose for the Nobel.

I prefer her essays. She wrote one on Calvin twenty years ago that made me reconsider the received wisdom.

i loved housekeeping but i could never get through any of the later stuff or the essays. my eyes glaze over. its like homework. like wallace stegner. zzzzzz......

Next American Nobel winner has to be one of the "New Dylans"

Maybe Steve Fobert?

Forbert

i can't read john mcphee either. i read about 100 pages of the bible during the pandemic. never do that again, lemmetellya.

Immediately before my partner checked her phone and saw the Supreme Court ruling, we had been reading this long and thoughtful piece by Marilynne Robinson. I found it bracing, in the sense that it literally braced me for another fucking piece being jackhammered loose from the foundations of American democracy.

― The king of the demo (bernard snowy)

i'm intrigued but i'm also not a subscriber so i guess i can't read it.

it's the idea of the foundations of american democracy, i think. they aren't really what i was taught they were. i don't know. i read "democracy in america", or at least a chunk of it, some years back and the country it described was... i mean i think we're more like tocqueville's france than the america tocqueville observed. there's a lot to like about today's america, but there was a lot to like about the concert of europe too, you know?

i guess the thing that gets me about america is... i mean, the roman republic wasn't what i was taught it was, either. it was kind of crap, honestly. patriarchy, oligarchy, constant aggressive militarism... built on invading and looting the countries around it. one of their favorite "comedy" stories was "the rape of the sabine women". all of today's fash who idolize rome... i feel like they're living up to the _spirit_ of rome, both republic and empire.

i don't think america's foundations, either in its historical models or in its initial principles, were ever strong. i think america's people are stronger than its foundation. i could be wrong on that.

i say next american nobel winner should be jakob dylan

during the pandemic i read emerson's and carlyle's correspondence to each other and was enjoying them and then i made the mistake of reading more about carlyle and ewwww he was one of those insane gross race-theory racists with extra hate and disgust for jews and black people and i was like fuck your genius and why the fuck was emerson such a fanboy but maybe they just never talked about that stuff. emerson just dug his books. i mean i know everyone was racist back then but some of those genius-types were just pathologically yuck.

i can't read john mcphee either. i read about 100 pages of the bible during the pandemic. never do that again, lemmetellya.

I still think Murnane should win the gd Nobel, but now we are way off thread.

"i mean i think we're more like tocqueville's france than the america tocqueville observed"

i highly recommend the documentary America As Seen By A Frenchman if you haven't seen it. from 1960. its really good.

xp this is a safe space <3

yeah i'm not a big nature writer lover anyway so mcphee with the endless descriptions...ugh. i liked annie dillard when i used to read her decades ago. bruce chatwin? i think i liked bruce chatwin also decades ago. he was entertaining. i liked how he wrote.

Something I think about in terms of civil liability is how (before Monday anyway) the country should’ve filed a class action suit against Trump for emotional distress and probably shortening of life by a few years

thats something that doesn't get talked about enough, not to imply we need to talk MORE about Trump but what he's done to the mental health of this country has been a real travesty, everyone's pissed off and combative and terrified, possibly even more so if you're a Trump voter than someone who merely hates his guts

thats something that doesn't get talked about enough, not to imply we need to talk MORE about Trump but what he's done to the mental health of this country has been a real travesty, everyone's pissed off and combative and terrified, possibly even more so if you're a Trump voter than someone who merely hates his guts

― frogbs

it's complicated! it's like... i actually like neando's allegory of the lake. cuz it's not just that the car is heading towards the lake, but there's two people in the front seat fighting, one of them keeps trying to step on the brake, and one of them keeps trying to step on the gas, and like. it's great that someone is trying to step on the brake but the car is still going towards the fucking lake, right?

that's, i think, how trump has affected my mental health - like, it's not personal, he doesn't personally have that kind of power, but him getting elected... if you remember my posts in 2016, it fucked me up something fierce. like yeah. it did. and the _atmosphere_, whether or not he's actually _president_, the _atmosphere_ is fucking up everybody. in ways that don't get acknowledged. i see it every day.

and we just... you know. fucked up or no, people make choices, and if you support trump, you know, whether or not someone is a "good person" doesn't matter. that's a choice. and me, trump got elected and i moved out to pdx and i transitioned, and that was, i guess. like sometimes i joke that trump "transed my gender", and it's not _true_, a lot of things went into my gender stuff. part of it, though, is me trying to come to grips with trump's election, the way i chose to handle that. and that to me will always be more interesting - not whether or not trump gets elected again, but how people who _aren't_ in a position of power deal with that... difficult reality.

I haven't read Carlyle since grad school, and, wow, his style is near impenetrable. I guess this atheist has more tolerance for prose infused with King James rhythms than the average ILXer, but, boy, Carlyle is garbled AND an elitist -- the garble is to make him intelligible TO elitists.

I love Emerson, though. He's plainspoken with lightning flashes of poetry. "Circles" and "Self-Reliance" I still read.

xp

whenever "Trump Derangement Syndrome" comes up (especially when someone goes "TDS - I'M TALKING TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!" and then an audience wildly applauds), one of the many reasons i want to let out a blood curdling scream is that it's actually real! i think i have TDS! i hate that motherfucker! i don't understand how pathetic people have to be in order to kiss his ring! i don't understand it despite having lots of people in my family and upbringing who love him! i know all about them and their unique hyper evangelical fundamentalist christian backgrounds and it STILL doesn't make any fucking sense! if you even skim the gospels it's completely impossible to think any christian, ever, would ever support trump. it's like an eating competition level of hypocrisy piled on top of hypocrisy, paired with people who are so ready to be beyond help that they get persuaded by the likes of fucking charlie kirk.

as an aside i want to say fuck bose, because fuck paul harvey