Which is Worse: BREXIT or TRUMP

elsewhere Trump

No, Treeship, if he wins, then the debt rating of the USA would immediately drop, the value of the dollar would plunge, we would have to find a way to immediately re-assure our treaty partners, our trade agreements would be in question, and every other aspiring superpower would start encroaching in whichever direction they felt like. The day after his election would make Brexit look like a dinkleberry. And instead of having two years to figure out how to deal before it really takes effect, the world would have two and half months. It would be a disaster for global stability. His inauguration could quite conceivably take place while a war is breaking out and a depression is settling in.

― El Tomboto, Friday, July 22, 2016 11:45 PM (four months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^ realistic assessment.

― Ⓓⓡ. (Johnny Fever), Friday, July 22, 2016 11:46 PM (four months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It honestly has nothing to do with what he actually does or what Congress tries to do around him. It has everything to do with the fact that he is a known liar and promise breaker who does not understand or believe in any of our institutions and cannot be relied upon by other states to heed promises that our country has made, like paying bills on time, or sending aid when allies are threatened.

― El Tomboto, Friday, July 22, 2016 11:48 PM (four months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

on the other hand I'm demonstrably bad at timing market "adjustments" and have also been both hyperbolic and myopically focused on the US in my economic posts for about a decade now (Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread)

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/14/trump-thump-whacks-bond-market-for-1-trillion-loss.html sez:

Fund managers at top bond firms and analysts on Wall Street are weighing whether the impact of Trump's win on financial markets will be similar to Brexit. European stocks sold off violently after the Brexit vote, but by mid-August had recovered all the losses. Even so, there is a great deal of uneasiness as investors wait for details on how Britain will exit the EU — not unlike the waiting game on what Trump will actually do as president.

Trump is possibly the least-seriously-taken President-Elect in history.

I suspect that, economically, there is more chance of Trump ending up as BAU than ripping up existing long-term agreements, making heavy-handed interventions in the domestic market, etc. Either is possible but the status quo works reasonably well for the majority of people he has surrounded himself with, if not the majority of his voters. It looks like more or less every facet of British economic life will be forced to change, even though the bulk of people in charge know it's a terrible idea. The US is obviously more powerful and less reliant on the good will of foreign corporations / the service industry to survive. Silicon Valley is probably not going to relocate to Mexico. The financial services industry that props up everything here could up sticks and relocate to Dublin, Frankfurt or Paris without much difficulty. Stocks rebounding but the currency still flatlined might indicate a belief that a lot of companies will be fine even if the country isn't.

The two are connected though - a lot of the Brexit economic fantasy is built on a juvenile Atlanticism where we offset declining trade with Europe by cutting a special deal with the US, so any move towards greater protectionism from Trump is negative. Trump is probably not going to start a war with Iran but, if he did, we'd probably be in on it - even more so if the US is the only friend we have.

NAFTA

i'm British and it's Trump, tho i suspect the nuclear missiles are an irrelevance and i can imagine him not being particularly disastrous for white middle-class Americans.

not because i think Trump will be worse for Britain than Brexit will, just because fuck Britain

Trump may well try to 'renegotiate' NAFTA but there is a difference between the most powerful actor in a tripartite agreement choosing to dictate terms to the others, with no change being an option, and being forced to go to the negotiating table in a position of weakness when the other 27 participants have a default position of 'go fuck yourselves'.

Trump's more embarrassing for Americans than Brexit is for Britons; the fact that he actually became president is such a stain on the reputation of the USA, and will be for decades to come, it would be hilarious if it wasn't so dangerous. Brexit, ugh, I almost don't want to think about it. Britishes, voted Trump.

I'm generally of a mind that Trump will essentially be Dubya 2.0 perhaps minus a new major war. For most things I care deeply about, he won't govern that much differently than a Romney would have or any of the other schmucks who were up to bat in 2016. Any of them were going to nominate new Scalias and slash taxes for the wealthy and generally fuck over everyone who's not already rich and white.

His campaign incitements and lasting damage there, it remains to be seen. It's not as if the GOP hasn't been a party of white supremacy for almost 50 years, it's just that the dog whistles became audible this year.

Brexit is probably more world-historical bad in terms of fallout but will seemingly have fairly little impact on my day to day life.

See, for britishes, Trump is great - reduce the US as a world-trading pardner, lets Brit trade do better.

But, hey.

British and its Trump. Suspect some of his actions will lead to worldwide economic depression. Can see a Lehnman style event, its likelihood has def increased and with central banks now sorta shot on what they can mitigate..

Because he will deregulate, which will lead to further bad practice, which will lead to self-implosion again or because he will actively intervene to mess something up in the short term? Both are valid fears but I think the former might be more likely.

Actually there is a good chance of either really. The impulse of a Trump admin will be of a bull in a china shop sort that will have consequences for all of us. He could equally luck out on doing a couple of good-ish things too. Pure chance.

(I am not that worried about climate change in the sense that Hilary or Sanders or anybody could've done a thing about for the next four years say...the earth will change dramatically over the next 50 years or so: Paris is too late, capitalism far too rampant)

British and Trump is worse. Brexit fucks up Britain (and people associated with Britain incl people from other countries who live here or have friends/family here). Trump could potentially fuck up everyone everywhere.

elsewhere and brexit is clearly worse

Brexit was an unnecessary disaster. Trump is a symptom, not the disease itself. Trump is worse, but the US was worse to begin with, so... I don't know what the biggest disaster is.

i think the simple fact that trump can be voted out of office in only 4 years means that brexit is worse

there's also a wider range of outcomes for trump, and i think the worst of those -- i.e. nuclear war -- aren't that likely. realistically the worst version of the trump presidency is prob somewhere between reagan and bush and though those were extremely awful (especially reagan) i still think there's a certain familiarity of sorts that makes those scenarios less bad than brexit.

In four years I can see half the left again crying that the dem nominee isn't everything they want and too focused on identity and say they don't want the lesser evil. And turnout will mean Trump will win once again. Hope I'm wrong.

Have you read anything around why the Dems lost this time around? (clue: it wasn't Bernie Bros)

why change a good story when you're a centrist concern troll anyway?

Warren Sisters to tank the American Republic for good in 2020!

2020 won't be 2016. Elections are different.

Except Brexit can be reversed, at some point in the future, if it is a disaster, or if the public mood changes significantly. That isn't to say that the referendum result can or should be overturned - it shouldn't, because it would inevitably feed a betrayal narrative that would feed disengagement from politics and make it all the more likely we get our own Trump. The big danger is that, having tanked the economy in order to gain the much vaunted 'controls on immigration', the drums start beating for even tighter controls, and that way real disaster beckons. There are still many different forms that Brexit could take and we don't know which one it's going to be, especially as the people driving it, both at the top of government and in the civil service, don't really believe in it.

Trump is worse - Brexit could be a disaster for the country's economy and social fabric and the wider economy probably isn't going to do great as a result, but Trump could be a disaster for the entire planet. The climate change stuff even in isolation is terrifying. There is virtually no problem you can look at, anywhere in the world, and think "this will get better in the next four years". Virtually everything is going to get worse. We can only hope that Trump is so obviously terrible and incompetent that millions of people turf him out in four years, but not so terrible that he causes real lasting damage. I'm not optimistic.

Le Pen is potentially much, much worse than both of them, even if these twin disasters are likely to feed her rise.

x-post: Also, I mostly vote for the far-far-left. The former communists. But I would never ever vote for the US far-left.

Frederik:

https://i.warosu.org/data/cgl/img/0087/01/1446719868821.jpg

Trump is worse than Brexit because there's still an option for the UK government to say, "never mind all that!" and remain in the EU. There is technically a mechanism for keeping Trump for the presidency but it has never been used before and would likely drop the country into a constitutional crisis and a state of disarray.

If the UK rolls back Brexit, the only consequences will be political for the MPs who endorsed it in the first place.

er, no

i mean sorry, i will stop using unnecessary sarcasm, but the Brexit referendum result can't simply be ignored without unforseeable and far-reaching political consequences, most of which will impact the MPs who didn't endorse the Leave vote

ignoring it is almost exactly as feasible as getting the Electoral College to debar Trump

Trump is worse than Brexit because there's still an option for the UK government to say, "never mind all that!" and remain in the EU.

Sorry what is this option?

If you look beneath the fine print on pg 32 of Brexit it's right there

I wrote in Establishment Democrats

just hope it was your own computer monitor

i think the simple fact that trump can be voted out of office in only 4 years means that brexit is worse

― J0rdan S., Sunday, November 27, 2016 3:30 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The fury and rancour that would accompany any decision to just ignore the referendum result would almost certainly dwarf anything we've seen over the last few months. The only way the government could row back would be after a seismic shift of public opinion akin to, say, a collapse in support for a war.

They might not be able to roll it back, but they could theoretically keep delaying the exit to an indeterminate point in the future, until either they are more prepared to exit or if by some magic public opinion shifts

really, no

I'm not sure that committing to years' worth of profound economic uncertainty is exactly a winning formula either.

hey theoretically we could make Trump the Queen and that would solve everything

Not saying any of it is good, but doesn't May need the approval of parliament to trigger the exit procedure?

that's for the courts to decide

altho even if the court eventually decides that yes, parliament has to take a vote, the government will win that vote for the reasons formerly described. any MP voting against triggering Article 50 will be telling their voters "i can't be trusted to follow a vote" - whether that's fair or not

Trump will have more effect on the world as a whole (as a hole?) surely so voted him worse

will he fuck tbh

As in you reckon he'll be quite isolationist?

as in brexit will cause ragnarok

The real world effects of brexit could range from 'clearly bad, but mostly confined to the UK and mostly bearable' up to 'breaking the EU and causing global financial turmoil'. The real world effects of Trump's presidency could range from 'clearly bad, but so hobbled by DC gridlock, Republican infighting, and Trump's inability to concentrate on anything for very long that it's mostly bearable until we can dump his ass in 2020 and patch up some of the damage' up to 'domestic US fascism, global economic chaos, and first use of nuclear weapons since 1945'.

It's much too soon to decide where either will end up on these spectra. I'm hoping brexit is worse than trump, because peak trump badness would so far eclipse peak brexit badness that we'd all forget brexit even happened.

xpost to fred: 'As Freddie Rumsen said to Don Draper: Do the work.'

do you realize how condescending (also ridiculous -- i mean you're earnestly quoting a platitude from mad men, so...) this sounds? aren't you an internet film critic?

idk i've come around. i like the central absurdity of someone from denmark lecturing americans on how they focus too much on issues like universal healthcare and the minimum wage.

History & ya don't stop (9/11? "Your towers are weak")
Taking Sides: Nas vs. Jay-z

We elected a reality TV personality to be President. Trump is worse. It's a national embarrassment and the world feels like a Philip K. Dick novel right now (one of the good ones too, not the ones dashed off in a 30 hour speed binge). we're already at Flow My Tears level, maybe the spirit plane will open up and Trump will bring about the VALISing of America.

far be it for a thick paddy to suggest that the yanks frankly dont have as good a handle on brexit as the rest of the world has on us politics

The PKD angle is increasingly apparent --like in The Man In The High Castle, I still get glimmers of other timelines---if I could find my old copy of the I Ching, could I find my way to the Hillaryverse? Shake out the recounts, let's just see what we get.

i would love to see an adaptation of Flow My Tears where it's Trump that wakes up in a universe where no one knows who he is.

Pretty sure we've blown past The Penultimate Truth levels already.

winter-lion: Yeah, I'm a film critic, amongst many other things - film criticism doesn't pay, so it's almost honestly flattering to be called an 'internet film critic'. I wish. What do you do?

I like Fight for 15. I like unions. I like all kinds of intersectionality. I like work and people who do the work. But what's the work done for universal healthcare? Aside from campaigning for Bernie Sanders, I've seen nothing. And of course, a winning campaign for Bernie Sanders wouldn't have brought about universal health care anyways, it would have had to go through congress. Better healthcare, that's a worthwhile goal, Obama provided that, Clinton and Sanders both fought for it, and work towards it can be done by everyone. Working for 'universal' health care, instead of for a change in congress, is strategically pointless. Bad work. And what's the work done by anti-drone people, apart from yelling about drones? The actual, anti-war work? It's stupid. Stupid stupid stupid.

Fred, here are some organizations I'm familiar with:

A good friend of mine works for an NYC organization called 'The Door.' It's a support organization for homeless youth. They provide health services (including sexual health), job training, tutoring, housing placement, support for LGBTQ youth. Which side of your artificial divide does this organization lie on? They're doing their best to improve homeless kids' economic quality of life. They're also doing so in a way which takes into account their identity.

Or what about the New York Legal Assistance Group, who I volunteered with after Hurricane Sandy. NYLAG provides no-cost legal services to low income New Yorkers. Here are some of their divisions: employment law; tenant's rights; legal health; foreclosure prevention; lgbtq law; immigrant protection. Which side? They advocate for civil rights; they also help reduce people's medical bills and try to keep them from getting kicked out of their houses.

What about the work people did towards challenging the legality of the Bush administration's torture policies? Or the people that spends hours and hours writing briefs about the legality of targeted killings (drones). I guess they should quit. It's stupid, stupid, stupid. There's no possibility Trump is going to tray and act in violation of either U.S. or international norms.

I have no idea how you form your opinions. Do you not realize that their are thousands of people who work everyday to try and slightly better the conditions that many Americans are forced to endure due to a lack of money? Healthcare reform didn't materialize out of thin air. Don't think the U.S.'s wartime abuses couldn't have been worse. But hey, who gives a shit about the people still stuck in Guantanamo Bay, right?

I'm an immigration lawyer. A significant portion of my clients are undocumented youth. The rest are their families.

It doesn't seem as if you're at all reading what I'm writing. I just wrote I like intersectionality, but now the identity/class discussion raging through the us left is somehow my artificial divide? I like all the work you're mentioning - though I'm convinced the drone people could better spend their time elsewhere - but it's quite weird you're even bringing it up. Did you not read my rant that started this? Here, I'll quote some of it:

Even worse than that, though, is the pathetic state of Anti-Establishment Democrats and their complete inability to do anything but play into the hands of Russia/Right-wing/Rapist conspiracists. The substitution of a principled, organized, and critically thinking part of the US left party, with the Green/Jacobin/Intercept axis of idiocy and purity politics is such a disaster on a global scale; what should be a driver of progress instead a circle of people who only take their heads out of their recta to shout 'drones', then stick it right back up again.

We're discussing two different things, and you're shitting on me for talking about something else than you want to talk about. Writing briefs, offering legal services, that's great! Honestly! But Treeship complained about his friends having the same discussions over and over, and I wrote an answer to him saying what else he and his friends could do, and sorry if I didn't include 'go to law school like the winter-lion' in my answer.

i was responding to this "'class' politics becomes about either purity politics... [paragraph continues]." it doesn't. it encompasses a whole range of discussions, from how to deal with the transition to post-Fordist economies, to gentrification, food security, carceral and educational privatization, etc. don't set up a straw man you're unwilling to defend. and if you just hate internet marxists, say so.

people who work in successful community organizations like the ones i mentioned treat these discussions with a lot more levity. you need humor when you're faced with constant disappointment. they have nuance. it's why i mentioned them. but when your clients are universally poor, you also understand that poverty grinds on people in similar ways.

look, i don't know how institutional change is realized in denmark, but a statement like this: 'but what's the work done for universal healthcare?' is remarkably ignorant. did the concept descend from the heavens? one of the first arguments i had with my wife was about a news report. it detailed how some corporation in columbus ohio or some place was funding a huge percentage of the city's affordable housing. she was like 'that's great, good for them.' me, i thought it was terrible. isn't that supposed to be the responsibility of the state?

ignore class and you ignore what i think is one of the central questions of our political era: what should be private and what should be public. who steers climate change efforts? who regulates telecoms, banks and healthcare companies? who fills in the gaps of the social safety net? are my clients imprisoned by the federal government or by a private corporation? consequently, delegitimizing a huge portion of the left (which you do incessantly) matters. you might have huge problems with greenwald's arrogance, jacobin's whiteness and the green party's all-around incompetence, but they're contributing to discussions that republicans have been trying to drown in free-market ideology for years. and yet, instead of trying to imagine a reasoned discussion about how certain approaches to economic justice engage in whitewashing, you just dismiss people. why?

and btw, i wouldn't recommend anyone go to law school. if they're gonna do it, they will.

Despite currently living in the US eight months of the year, I voted

i'm from elsewhere and TRUMP is worse

Afaict, by voting to leave an international free trade agreement and quasi-democratic political union, and continue not participating in a currency union, Brits didn't actually vote for someone who promised to build a literal wall, ban a religion from entering their country, repeal an attempt at a national health care plan, abandon any efforts at combating climate change, etc.

Also, I'm half-drunk, so my evaluation of the situation may be lacking in nuance.

Brexit is a terrible decision that will unfortunately wreak havoc on a lot of people's lives for years and possibly decades to come, but Trump's election is an unparalleled travesty and pretty much a sign that humanity is quickly giving up on that whole stupid civilization thing we've been trying to get off the ground.

lion in winter, you're constantly referring to things taken out of context, and I'm not going to bother taking every half paragraph you quote and putting it together with the other half. This time you remarkably used a quote that included the word 'either' while ignoring their of course is an 'or'. A huge part of the explanation for why I dismiss the 'class' side in this argument I didn't create and didn't 'sow' is written right there: Because the US left has a pisspoor concept of class.

And you want to talk about delegitimizing? Who on the left joined up with Russia and wikileaks to undermine democratic institutions, journalists, organizers? It wasn't me. Are you really angry at them as well? How about Bernie Sanders who said we have to get beyond identity politics, while only talking about women wanting to be elected because they're women. Were you outraged at that as well? No matter what you think, I did not create this divide, no more than any recent US left created the concept of universal healthcare.

Afaict, by voting to leave an international free trade agreement and quasi-democratic political union, and continue not participating in a currency union, Brits didn't actually vote for someone who promised to build a literal wall, ban a religion from entering their country, repeal an attempt at a national health care plan, abandon any efforts at combating climate change, etc.

Oh, we'd have a wall if geography hadn't largely done the job for us. Our current policy on immigration, for the most part is that you have to be in one of a limited number of professions and earning substantially more than the average Brit to be welcome. Our policy on undocumented workers is that they should all be 'sent back'. Our policy on refugees is that as few as possible should be admitted and, where practical, we should probably err on the side of deporting them to countries where they face danger. This is admittedly better than the policy advocated by a noted pro-Brexit cheerleader, given a platform in the country's biggest newspaper, that they are vermin and should be killed before reaching Europe - something, in my experience, people are no longer afraid to say loudly on public transport any more.

Brexit doesn't necessarily change this but it is being read in many quarters (including the government, it seems) as a thumping endorsement of the idea that it doesn't go far enough. What it does, however, is bring millions of legal migrants previously excluded from these provisions into the crosshairs. The media campaign wasn't as overtly crass as 'ban Muslims' but spent an inordinate amount of time looking at the 'threat' from Turkey, Albania, Roma people, French islamists, etc if we did not 'take back control of our borders' I don't think my Muslim-American family in Texas are going to be deported any time soon and i don't think that my Polish, Italian, French, etc, colleagues are going to lose the right to live in the UK but the latter is probably more likely, the way things are heading.

In the background to the debate over national identity and sovereignty we have had a pro-Europe MP murdered by a Neo-Nazi who shouted "Britain first" while killing her and gave his name as "death to traitors" in court. The two biggest newspapers in the country explained away his motivations as being linked a fear of immigrants taking his family home and a black man seducing his mother. Another Murdoch darling, Louise Mensch, appears to be running with the theory that his trial was rigged to ensure a conviction. We have had people beaten to death in the street by teenagers for speaking Polish.

Trump is going to do nothing about workers' rights, human rights, healthcare, etc, and will probably make both much worse. Leaving the EU removes the only legal backstop to the UK following America down the same path.

As with Trump, the extent to which people were voting on blind prejudice or on other factors is the subject of debate but the issues with Brexit and the direction of the country as a whole are much more severe than leaving an economic union.

Trump has got to something about Denmark. Top priority.

I wasn't really saying that Brexit was a good idea, or that the UK doesn't have its own racism/anti-immigration issues, or even that the Brexit vote doesn't embolden the wrong people wrt the latter issues, just that it wasn't in itself a direct vote to elect a literal white supremacist into office, if we're choosing between these two.

Elsewhere, brexit

I wasn't really saying that Brexit was a good idea, or that the UK doesn't have its own racism/anti-immigration issues, or even that the Brexit vote doesn't embolden the wrong people wrt the latter issues, just that it wasn't in itself a direct vote to elect a literal white supremacist into office, if we're choosing between these two.

― Spiritual Hat Minimalism (Sund4r), Monday, 28 November 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Trump wasn't a 'literal' vote for it tho'. There was white supremacist stuff mixed in with policies on trade, infrastructure investment, tax cuts, Clinton's record in office.

Similarly Brexit was another bag of issues mixed in with open borders. For much of its life as an issue it was about sovereignty, it was a wing of that campaign that made it as an immigration issue and during the campaign it took on dark tones. Many (like myself) were pissy at the EU and decided to vote remain because it became apparent during the campaign it would turn into a racist shit-show.

Oh, we'd have a wall if geography hadn't largely done the job for us.

Not sure you mean that really. There might have a pointy fence but really the centrist-right governments we've had would not have done this. Blair/Cameron liked to put a happy-ish spin on things. A wall would've sent a wrong not very liberal message.

Nothing related to government policy on immigration has sent a liberal message since about 2007. I think the Mexico wall is mostly going to be pointy fence anyway.

I think the Mexico wall is increasingly going to be, 'the US is fucking insane and hates us, let's not go there'.

ok, maybe its too on the nose. The NHS is privatized by a back-door, that kind of thing. xp

A lot of the mexican border already does have pointy fence!

Reserving judgment until I see what Fred thinks tbh.

I've already said Jill Stein is worst of all, Tom.

Blair/Cameron liked to put a happy-ish spin on things. A wall would've sent a wrong not very liberal message.

Cameron was standing there at the dispatch box making phoney connections between Sadiq Khan and ISIS sympathisers as recently as May, he was extraordinarily cavalier about whipping up the forces that would destroy his career literally a month later.

The history and mentality of Britain would have been completely different if it wasn't a literal island, so obviously this isn't a particularly fruitful line of conversation, but even the most rabid Brexiters aren't advocating the construction of a fence along the Northern Irish border. In fact that's pretty much the only aspect of Brexit that the government has explicitly clarified.

were considering it tbh

Trump wasn't a 'literal' vote for it tho'. There was white supremacist stuff mixed in with policies on trade, infrastructure investment, tax cuts, Clinton's record in office.

Similarly Brexit was another bag of issues mixed in with open borders. For much of its life as an issue it was about sovereignty, it was a wing of that campaign that made it as an immigration issue and during the campaign it took on dark tones. Many (like myself) were pissy at the EU and decided to vote remain because it became apparent during the campaign it would turn into a racist shit-show.

Regardless of individual voters' motivations, people who cast a vote for Trump for President were literally voting for Trump (a white supremacist imo, or at least someone who presented himself as such, whatever else he may also be) to become President. People who voted for Brexit were literally voting for the UK to leave the European Union, whatever else they might have been thinking of. I'm not sure what else 'literal' could mean here.

xp Yeah, my understanding is that the government 'clarified' that the intra-Ireland border would remain invisible, with Ireland helping winnow out illegal (in the UK's eyes) immigration, but some of the actual inhabitants of Calais-sur-Lee feel further clarification might be necessary.

I had forgotten that the Northern Irish Secretary was actually called James Brokenshire.

Do you really not see what the phrase "a literal vote for white supremacy" could mean, sund4r, or am I missing a rhetorical flourish?

Well, what I originally wrote was "a direct vote to elect a literal white supremacist into office", not "a literal vote for white supremacy", but I'm pretty cranky today so am probably being anal. Blame my first year students.

ooh matron

for me this is like a reverse Pascal's wager; no matter how unlikely u think Trump nuclear apocalypse is (personally I think it's highly likely--just think about how Trump would react to the next NK provocation) it's still infinitely bad, and I just don't see Brexit ending in nuclear war anytime soon

I think Trump firing nuclear weapons is a lot less likely than him sitting by (and exhorting everyone else to) if Russia nukes a former state.

The cool thing about trump is that there is no meaningful way to evaluate the risk because he is an unpredictable maniac

European (no, really) and Trump without a doubt. Not just because Trump is batshit insane, deeply disturbed and a true American idiot. Not just because he will do major policy damage (climate change, immigration etc). And not just because he could go nuclear, even though I don't think he will (but he might, in which case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) .

All that is bad enough. But for me it's because he's become the unlikely poster boy giving the go ahead to the masses furiously wanting to stamp their boots on the road to overthrowing democracy, civil rights, science, and any formerly basic human intrinsic like compassion, equality, altruism and empathy. It's spreading over the globe faster than a viral video or pathetic, hollow meme. It's good for laughs, sure, but not meant to actually cross over into the 'real world'.
But Trump ís a meme. A meme has become president of the United States. And he's untouchable: facts don't matter, irrational behavior doesn't matter... Nothing matters any more. America got the clown it deserved, the rest (Europe is first) will follow. Because people are dumb fucking idiots who like to laugh and pull pranks with the fire brigade when their own house is on fire. The fire is 'kinda awesome and cool looking', despite not knowing where they'll live tomorrow.

In comparison, Brexit is dandruff you wipe off your shoulder. A hindrance but nothing to get too upset about. The British are too stiff and uptight to go all in, the Europeans will torture the UK for challops and spite but in the end it won't be as bad as imagined. Which is already really, really bad tbh, heading towards some utopian, isolated, very unbecoming nation. But personally I kind of saw that coming. America electing a fucking tool as president, a billionaire infant that is severely psychologically troubled? That, I did not see coming. But it's awoken million fascist zombies all over the world ready to copy his succes.

Tl;dr: Brexit bad, Trump catastrophic.

Utopian=distopian

Worst-case-scenario Trump presidency is infinitely, infinitely worse than anything Brexit could ever throw up.
But best-case-scenario Trump (GWB minus the regime-changing war) is better because Trump can be kicked out in 4 years whereas Brexit is forever

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Rigged.

otm

tbf its not like we needed any more evidence that yank voters are fuckwits

elsewhere and brexit is clearly worse

― identity politics rooted in tolkienism (darraghmac), Sunday, November 27, 2016 10:57 AM (six months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd like to change my vote pls

knew you'd come around

bump