Trump 2.0 doesn’t have John Kelly, doesn’t have Steve Manuchin, doesn’t have any of the Jared and Ivanka faction. None of those guardrails are there, just yes men.
There is a bit of a self-correcting apparatus built into that kind of greed, though. The Kushner types are thoroughbred parasites; they still need a living host to keep sucking wealth out of. The newer breed of Trump sycophant is just ripping the copper wire out of the walls. We've hit the crackhead era.
Yeah, I'm afraid of this. I'm afraid of the US ending up being a husk of a nation akin to Russia. The worst Kushner-style parasites would do is mold the US into China, which at least resembles a functioning nation.
This current lot wants to steal and sell anything not bolted to the foundation and then sell the foundation to the highest bidder.
Maybe if he does enough damage and everyone really feels it for a while it will change things. I've always said the only way politics will change is if the Republicans actually get their way for once. Well they're getting their way now. Even Trump's first term was mostly the same as earlier conservatives--a tax cut and then pretty much nothing. This is just all of their extreme desires being carried out. Every republican is going to feel it.
They do, just Look into the conservative subreddit. Is insane. As a german i am exceptionally disgusted. cause if one half of the country enables a Dictator and the other half does nothing against it ... well history will judge, just like it judged ALL germans.
GW Bush was president for 5 years with a Republican House and Senate. Worth noting the entire global economy melted down toward the end of that period. So it's not like this hasn't happened before. Somehow they managed to re-frame that time period as "That time Democrats made a bunch of poors buy houses they couldn't afford" and their followers actually deeply believe that narrative.
Nothing? January 6th was unforgivable. Unfortunately, it seems legal if you have enough money, and thug followers who will rain death threats upon anyone who questions an Evil Chauncey Gardener.
At that point it may not matter for us. We can try to turn things around but there's no reason for our trading partners to ever trust us again. We've shown that every 4 years there is the possibility that a bunch of the dumbest citizens will get together to elect someone who will purposefully crash the economy and shit all over our allies.
The previous Trump admin looked at the contemporary CCP police state and tried to emulate its invasions of privacy and increase in state-backed violence against dissidents.
The current Trump admin looked back on the Wild 90s era of Russia and decided to use it and the discography of Lesopoval as a playbook.
100%. We are Russia already. Putin made the same deal with Trump he made with his own oligarchs. “Obey my commands,” (in Trump’s case, destroy America’s democracy), “and I will let you steal as much as you want from the American people.”
This is likely what the tariffs are really about. All they have to do is take short positions on stuff and then create bad news. We lose, they profit.
How you even come to the conclusion that kushner-style parasites would somehow mold the US into anything remotely like china is interesting. Something like gilded age 1880 USA makes more sense.
Thats what I'm thinking, is they want to make the American people so miserable and desperate, when Russia holds out thier hand, we'll all be stamped down to deny it. All other counties and allies cut off, they've been feeding how great Russia is for over a decade now, even when jokes of puton on a horse. It's basically an abusive spouse making the abuse normalized until the only options given are taken without any fight.
As someone from central Europe this is my greatest fear...
Trump will not be you Hitler he will be your Yeltsin, socio economic consequences for your country and people would be so devastating it's terrifying to even imagine....
I think this assessment is probably closer to the truth. There's a certain lack of drive and competence in the Trump camp that makes me doubt that he's our Hitler.
The terrifying thing for me, anyway, is the reactionary movement that'll accompany the US losing its position of economic dominance. The American middle class isn't exactly known for keeping calm in times of crisis.
I once said that its the job of each Republican President to make his Republican predecessor look statesmanlike, so the only question is will the next guy run as Chapo or Guzman.
I now think El Chapo would be an improvement, because he needs a functioning US economy that loves his product, whereas Trump just wants to destroy it all for laughing at his mushroom.
I worked with Kanye on Life of Pablo. Last time that you could say some honest people were around him. After a few folks tried to help him/tell it like it is...he pushed them away.
Yes, clearly his handlers understood that this go round. If nothing else, from Pence’s actions on Jan 6.
They’ve removed literally all impediments - anyone who could possibly talk some sense into him. Now they can just play him like a fiddle and he’ll stand up there like the good puppet he is and do their bidding full stop.
Kinda nuts how the only thing keeping him somewhat in-check the first time was the competing self interests of different factions in the White House.
As crazy as it sounds I think that is still happening a little bit. Vance is owned by Peter Thiel while Trump is owned by Musk. There's more overlap in their shared goals but there is still some head butting.
But crashing the world economy so they can buy everything up/be kings of the ashes is something the two corporate blocks fully align on. So hold onto your butts boys and girls, it's going to be one hell of a ride....
True, but keeping trump controlled and veiled led to public acceptance for a second term. If he was full force for the first term, there would be no second term.
I don't know. He staged a coup and people still reelected him. I don't know why, but there doesn't seem to be anything he can do to truly loose support.
I will never understand how the badly spoken, badly dressed, horrible business man, with terrible makeup, and the world's worst comb over has such a strong cult of personality.
During his first term someone remarked Trump is a weak man's idea of strength, a cheap man's idea of class, and stupid man's idea of intelligent.
This. And covid actually helped him. Esp with the magat nut jobs who insisted his economy was so great. Soo many people wanted to quit but stayed in their positions to keep him inline.
But at least self-enrichment required that the US continue to remain solvent. The current group of loonies is trying to dismantle the entire country.
This is why I longed for Romney after Trump was elected the first time. I don't agree with basically any of his politics, and I'm also ex-Mormon and inherently question his morals and motives, but I at least believed that he was doing and would continue to do what he thought was good for the US, even if I vehemently disagreed with that that actually was.
Can't really say that for anyone in charge right now, and that's what's scary and dangerous. It's like seeing a careless kid playing with a lighter vs. a known arsonist walking around town with a blowtorch and several jugs of gasoline.
Exactly as the founding fathers intended. They knew the government was going to be run by self-interested assholes. They built a system that was supposed to pit self-interests against each other in factions so that only common interest could be pursued.
Clearly, the founding fathers never envisioned fully-automated weaponized avarice. They thought we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot with muskets.
I imagine they tended to get in each other's way a lot as well. Too busy trying to get the dullard king's attention from whatever shiny object the previous supplicant had left behind to get in any significant power / money grabs.
Right. We didn’t make a big enough deal out of the fact that so many of Trump’s staffers from the first administration were either discarded or turned on him. That’s very telling. Now he is surrounded by Yes Men and sycophants
More than Jan 6th, they are just better prepared now. Trump 1.0 wasn’t prepared to make all the changes they wanted to do. Trump 2.0 came with a complete step by step game plan to dismantle everything very quickly and without any opposition. John Oliver explained it in detail.
Trump 2.0 also came with blanket immunity from prosecution for disregarding the law and any court orders he doesn't like provided to him by the US Supreme Court.
John Roberts' belief in 'Unitary Executive Theory', a holdover core belief he's held since he was a Council for Reagan whom he advised during Iran-Contra, led him to side with the other reich-wing nutcases on the Court on a ruling that holds that a President is immune from prosecution when exercising the 'core powers' of the presidency.
That ruling has created a monster that no one body or branch of our Govt will be able to easily reign in now. It should be no surprise to anyone that Trump is operating with impunity, because the USSC said he could.
It was a fairly large component of Harris's campaign ads. Now, why she didn't have one ad blasting his COVID response or listing terrible decisions he made in his first term is beyond me.
I spent the vast majority of early and mid 2020 desperately trying to make people understand that if he wins again it's going to be 1000 times worse because this time he actually understands that being president is not the same thing as running a business and that there are checks and balances and he has spent the last four years unilaterally removing every possibility of having anyone in his orbit that would be willing to try to stop him. Like John Kelly and Mike Pence are horrible, terrible people yet they refused to violate the constitution for him. Trump learned his lesson, and this time around way before the election he had already removed everyone but the most ass kissing sychophants.
There is literally no one who will even try to stop him anymore. Our country is done. We are fucked. We are completely fucked. And the number of people who don't realize this yet, the number of people who still believe that someone or something will be able to stop him is astonishing to me. We are absolutely goddamn fucked in every possible way. No one is coming to save us, no one is going to stop him. We will be an authoritarian oligarchy within 18 months
Not if every single non Trumper riots on the streets and oust him from his palace. This has been done before. Regimes have been toppled. All you need is the will of the people, not quitting en mass like educated democrats have been bred to do.
Problem is they've weaponized the stupidity of the Trump base to stand opposed to any rebellion on the left. We need a fair amount of the Trumpers to switch sides so it doesn't turn into a civil war.
Look I hear you and if this goes on, you will have a civil war on your hands. I don't see a way out of it, especially because there's too much emphasis on gun culture in USA. But look Asad was ousted, tyrants have been toppled, Indians kicked out the British after a bloody 200 years of exploitation. No system of power is so entrenched that it cannot be rooted out with enough death and blood. But that's it, that's a heavy price to pay.
On the flip side, I have to say — trump is and will be able to dismantle American relatively easily and legally-ish. If it's so easy, so bloodless and unobstructed for him to seize power and plant a dictatorship, what does it say about the system that made it possible? Maybe you guys need a civil war. And to rethink your elections, your executive bodies and how you give power to your leaders
And a lot of very wealthy and powerful people whispering in his ear. Trump's a man that is willing to make deals, you know he's happy to listen when Musk and Thiel start yapping, as long as there's a bag in for Papa Trump.
Yup, Trump's first cabinet had at least some people that were actually qualified for their positions, had at least some sense of morality, and stood up to Trump eventually.
They were obviously all replaced with unqualified loyalists that would never have gotten anywhere near the Oval Office in any other administration. It all points to the broader goals of Trump's administration of identifying and removing obstacles to Trump's authority.
As disastrous as many of Trump's orders have been so far, the real pain is still to come once power is more fully consolidated.
We made a huge deal out of it but his cult just buys into the whole "they were part of the deep state" or whatever BS Fox tells them to believe. There is nothing you can tell a Trump supporter that will make them stop supporting him
I think Trump is also being controlled much more than last time. So I think this is true to an extent I also think there are some wielding more influence on Trump than before.
And it also has people pulling his puppet strings with an actual plan. It's a slapdash plan that they have no idea of the ramifications of, but they have a plan.
Just wait until he decides to do a real war instead of just dropping apartment buildings in Yemen. Mattis was there to knife-hand him back into reason last time, now we have a roided up drunk.
Trump 1.0 did not expect to win so he had to chose every person who said yes. Many of them where extremists in their field but non of them where idiots like every person in the actual administration.
The scariest part is this isn't just about the tariffs, these yes men are in charge of the FBI and the military and who knows what else? If he doesn't get checked hard on this, he's going to push the limits even further with no one to tell him No. You know, we might see what happens when you try to stop a hurricane with a nuke this time around
Yes. Trump isn't much different. It is the people around him that are different. Loathsome as they were, they kept him in check on some of his stupidest inclinations and warned everyone they were keeping him in check and people like "Geiger_Capitol" still didn't pay attention.
Exactly. They attributed the insane ramblings and lack of follow-through in his first term to some brilliant 4D politicking. In reality, it was legacy Republicans and his hand-selected cabinet jumping on grenades at the cost of their careers to reign in his catastrophic stupidity. This all played out plain as day. Then in his second term, he elects the most sycophantic cabinet of incompetent, ignorant voodoo economics sympathizers he could possibly elect and GEIGER CAPITAL... WHOSE JOB IT IS TO FORECAST... THINKS THIS WAS A BIG SURPRISE.
This, my friends, is Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is antibiotic-resistant Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is being victim to your own bullshit and taking no accountability.
For fucks sake, there was a meticulously crafted plan to drive right through numerous guardrails starting day one, with the express intent of driving through those guardrails. There were paragraphs devoted to fury at the guard rails existing in the first place and blaming all of the imagined woes of modern America on the guardrails.
But Trump said he knew nothing about Project 2025 and it was longer than a tweet so the media dropped it.
We knew from the first Trump term that republicans would cry and/or get violent against guardrails existing. For four years there was a constant pattern of "Rumors say Trump is going to try to get around [guardrail]" and then there would be a response from the press secretary and Fox News propagandists making fun of conspiracy theories, that Trump would NEVER mess around with the guard rails. The mainstream media would fecklessly report those talking points. Then the next day, Trump would say "I'm ending that guard rail because it was made up by je... I mean woke liberal commuinsts" and then would. And then the next week, the same thing would happen with a different guard rail.
But that was four years ago so most Americans and the media ignored it.
Trump 2.0 is exactly what anyone with a brain should have known was coming.
"Geiger Capital" is the type of delusional dumbass that is running the show. Had ample fucking evidence to know it was going to be bad but for reasons passing understanding convinced himself it would definitely be good.
Judging from other wealthy idiots, "Geiger Capital" is, in short order, going to convince himself that it's actually good and besides Trump probably didn't do tarrifs anyway and also Harris would have done even worse tarrifs, and the next idiotic thing Trump is proposing isn't actually what he means. Then in 5 years when it's time to end the oligarchy, "Geiger Capital" is going to insist the economy isn't broken, we don't need to hike taxes back up on the wealthy or end the tarrifs, that's just insane, and also why didn't Democrats stop it if it was broken?
People have extremely selective memories on this shit. Basically everyone who has followed the Reaganomics blueprint gets a short term stock market bump, mostly from buybacks, and then the bill comes due and we’re left in worse shape. It’s just pillaging. Combine that with this insane trade war, in the face of already hot inflation it’s just a recipe for disaster.
Even the stated goals are nonsense. With low unemployment what are we even supposed to do with “millions” of new factory jobs? It just falls apart under even the lightest scrutiny
Basically the more liberal aligned ones. The more Bush era republicans, so basically the ones that didn’t come to politics purely from the culture wars and do have an understanding of how government actually works. People like Tillerson, Mattis and Chao.
Now you just have cult of Trump people who are basically Birchers in outlook.
Thank god someone forced that traditional party to evolve and transform into a party that focuses on tangible change rather than empty politicians words. Action is what matters most. Next up…. Democrats. We are watching it in real time. Amazing time to be alive and watching history in the making
In fairness the Republican Party was already well set up for this kind of conflict. Basically its entire post war history is a battle between capital B business interests and small holders.
If that was true, why such little action propelling the citizens of this country to a better future whilst ton of action trying to shut down trump at every turn? Can’t have it both ways.
If trumps focus was helping the rich small percentage of this country take complete advantage and that was also the narrative of the traditional party… why’d they fight him so hard at every turn and eventually lose the battle?
It’s a delicate balance for them. Their broader electorate are just rubes who are one the leash for cultural reasons but have no material interest in the policies of the Republican Party. The Fox News watchers if you will. The Trump break was representative of the rubes seizing the reins. Not dissimilar from when the small holders/birchers/evangelical coalition finally seized power from the big business republicans with Reagan, just less of a fight because they still had plenty of interests in common.
Why so little action? Because conservatism is about maintaining control and class position, its purpose is to classify the strata as it exists or existed. Its very nature is anti progress.
I agree mostly except the tail end. In nature fiscal conservatives do not want rapid progression but I wouldn’t go as far to say control and class position without roping both parties into that statement. The democrats have done very little movement fiscally in a positive direction for the American citizen but rapidly push sociological ideologies. Both parties for decades have slowly aided the top and stiffed the average citizen.
Happy to see some change even if it’s high risk. Americans voted for high risk high reward.
Not them specifically, that alignment. The old line establishment republicans who were put in there because he didn’t really know anyone else. I do think those types help sand down his rougher edges. There are no even quasi adults in the room now
Frankly, my respect for Jared has grown. The best parts of Trump 1.0 were his doing and he stepped back at the right time.
Let's remember, Trump 1.0 was a vehicle for a lot of Republican pet projects. They all knew he was a madman, but he would take them where they wanted to go. Getting off at the right stop deserves some respect.
How do u guys feel about Murica spending 5 TRILLION PER YEAR FOR NO HEALTHCARE? How do u feel about that 5 TRILLION increasing over 5% per year?
Its literally the biggest fraud in history. ALL Con policies come from 3rd world countries as it allows for unimaginable corruption. Muricans, ur getting fking milked. Murica will NOT exist in 20 years at this rate.
Trump 2.0 was buoyed by the billionaire class who wanted to cement their hold on government. My fears are this is a deliberate plan to deliberately wreck this country and turn it into the biggest yard sale.
I mean I don’t disagree, but he was probably the only one there that recognized the severity of the covid pandemic and turned on the cash faucet accordingly, even conceding that PPP loans were probably the kickstarter for inflation it likely headed off an even worse economic disaster (not that it wasn’t already, I’m only crediting moderating here, it’s all bad)
Steve Mnuchin was the architect of the last horrible tax revamp that got rid of write offs for anyone who wasn’t rich. I wouldn’t refer to him as a “guardrail”
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u/OregonHusky22 19h ago
Trump 2.0 doesn’t have John Kelly, doesn’t have Steve Manuchin, doesn’t have any of the Jared and Ivanka faction. None of those guardrails are there, just yes men.