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-4 points

2 months ago

Honestly, I think it’ll be really disappointing for conservatives and liberals alike. Conservatives because he won’t accomplish much, and liberals because all the alarmists won’t have anything to show for it.

But that’s the optimist in me. If he actually does half of what he’s talking about, strap in for some crazy inflation and unemployment turbulence.

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Doomsider@lemmy.world

7 points

2 months ago

Did you forget about his last presidency? Millions of Americans dead, huge increase to our debt, economic crash, loyalty oaths, refusal to help half of Americans who did not vote for him, ridiculous nepotism, elimination of half of citizens bodily rights, selling national secrets to the highest bidder, pay for play schemes up the wazoo, more lies than every previous president in history combined, steady increase in right wing terrorism, constant never ending culture wars, refusal to listen or accept briefings from advisors, travel bans, trade wars, praising of dictators, alliances dismantled, attempted coup, politicizing vaccines, demonizing healthcare professionals, refusal to transfer power, and of course illegally profiteering from office.

This list is nowhere near exhaustive and I think you may be wishfully naive in thinking he won’t accomplish anything. Well, more accurately, all his shit ass handlers will get project 2025 rolling. The top search result right now is pro project 2025 debunking the “myth” it would be bad for US citizens. You can’t make this shit up.

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0 points

2 months ago

wishfully naive in thinking he won’t accomplish anything

But he honestly didn’t accomplish much in his presidency. I went through your items below, but basically the things he actually did was:

tax cut - shot deficit way up, but we seem to have survived it
negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan - not sure why Biden didn’t stick to it, so maybe the timeline was too aggressive?
annoyed a lot of people

Most of the rest was pretty innocuous. I went through everything you mentioned in some detail, but in general, the main issues I had were:

transfer of power - probably won’t be an issue next time because it’s hard to argue around the 22nd amendment, and he’ll be 82 (same age as Biden is today)
trade war - we’re going to have some whack inflation if he gets his way
narcissism - this is the root of almost everything I dislike about him

But since we have term limits, I’m not worried about the first, and we survived the rest, so I think we’ll be mostly okay. Yeah, there will be a mess to clean up, but it seems even Congress isn’t so crazy as to let the exec burn the country to the ground.

My response to those items

Millions of Americans dead

Would’ve happened regardless, it’s just the nature of the pandemic. I’m not going to hang that on him.

huge increase to our debt

Yup. I also blame Biden, Obama, and Bush for this as well. It’s unfortunately a bipartisan issue (though Obama almost got it under control).

economic crash

Again, pandemic. It’s a “screwed if you do, screwed if you don’t” situation. I would’ve handled it differently, but I think Clinton largely would’ve done the same.

loyalty oaths, refusal to help half of Americans who did not vote for him

Yeah, that’s weird.

But honestly, most Presidents are pretty hostile to those outside their party (both left and right complain about obstructionism). I think it’s tacky, but ultimately, “not helping” people who didn’t vote for you isn’t a thing a President can realistically do.

ridiculous nepotism

Yeah, not a fan of that. That said, it’s pretty common in politics to appoint friends to important positions. I think Trump did it more than others, but not that far outside the norms AFAICT.

elimination of half of citizens bodily rights

That’s not something the President has much control over. The closest is Roe v Wade being overturned, but he didn’t bring the case to the court, he merely appointed justices when there were openings, and honestly, his picks were reasonably tame (way more mild than I expected).

selling national secrets to the highest bidder

Is this proven? I know about the classified documents case, but AFAIK there isn’t any proof yet that he actually sold anything. Still super sus, but I’m not ready to pin this on him until he’s had his day in court.

pay for play schemes up the wazoo

You need to be more specific here.

more lies than every previous president in history combined

Yup, this is absolutely a problem. That said, it’s kind of a President’s job to lie. I think Trump certainly abused his bully pulpit though, and I hope there’s a law around this that could stick him with something, because it’s not a good look for the POTUS.

steady increase in right wing terrorism

Source? I think a lot of this can be explained by COVID (i.e. people slowly going more crazy during lockdowns), not Trump himself. But I could be wrong.

constant never ending culture wars

I blame DeSantis and other conservative governors more than Trump here. That said, he certainly stepped up his rhetoric this campaign season.

refusal to listen or accept briefings from advisors

Also a problem, but ultimately, it’s the President’s call on whether to listen to advisors. Due to this, I think the office of President should be significantly restricted.

travel bans

Well, most were shot down.

trade wars

This is my main concern, because he seems willing to send inflation to the moon with his tariffs just to stick it to China or whatever. That said, Biden kept his tariffs, and I don’t think Harris would remove them either.

praising of dictators

Yeah, that’s really weird, especially his praise of Kim Jung Un…

alliances dismantled

Which ones? He claims he’ll pull us out of NATO, but he claimed that in the last election, so I don’t think he’ll do it (and not sure if he can?).

attempted coup, … refusal to transfer power

Yup, that was definitely not cool, and my concern about something like that happening (at least election denial) was why I voted Biden in 2020 instead of my normal third party vote.

politicizing vaccines

Clinton would’ve done the same.

demonizing healthcare professionals

Which ones, Fauci? He literally lied, and not just a little.

illegally profiteering from office

I’m not super well-read on this, but my understanding is that he crossed a lot of Ts and dotted a lot of Is.

That said, I’m definitely not happy with how he handled himself during his presidency.

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Doomsider@lemmy.world

4 points

2 months ago

Well it looks like we can both agree that round 2 Fascist Trump Boogaloo won’t be a positive thing and will instead be profoundly negative.

Let’s be clear your hope he won’t get anything real done is misplaced wishful thinking at best. Even if he can’t reach his goals he is an enormous piece of shit and those in his orbit that will be assisting him are often even worse.

It is allowing life to be breathed into a astro-turfed political movement created by the wealthy to openly oppress our citizens.

Stroking racial and gender divides does not settle tensions and instead ramps them up. Think about the next gay man who gets beat to death because of these bullshit culture wars. Think about the next young mother who dies because politicians are deciding their health options. Trump and his party own this shit.

Trump winning will just be another misogynist dagger in half our population continuing to set back rights and progress. The example we are setting for our daughter’s by even allowing this man to run is disgusting.

While I can appreciate your impartiality historians are not going to be half as kind as your are. In fact, I would say a lot of what you said felt more like an apology, giving the benefit of the doubt, and hand waving.

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-1 points

2 months ago

a lot of what you said felt more like an apology, giving the benefit of the doubt, and hand waving

A lot of it comes from Hanlon’s Razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

We can substitute all manner of things here for “stupidity,” like narcissism, shortsightedness, or laziness, and I think it would hold true. And when I look at what Trump did during his first term and compare this campaign to his previous campaign, it has the same sense of throwing everything into the kitchen sink hoping something will resonate with someone to get him elected. In his first term, he did and almost none of what he talked about in his first campaign. He barely scratched the surface on perhaps his #1 campaign promise: build the wall.

Everything looks like it’s coming from the same place: narcissism. Trump wants to be President because he wants the title, not because he has some larger plan to transform the US into something else. I don’t think he cares about Project 2025 at all, he just wants to be known as the “great deal-maker” who rescued the country’s economy and put it back on track. I don’t think he honestly cares about women’s reproductive health, LGBT issues, etc (in neither a good or bad way), he’ll pander to whoever he needs to pander to in order to get elected, but once he’s elected, I think his main focus is on leaving a legacy, and that means mucking about in the economy, not leading a coup and campaigning to make life suck for women and LGBT folk.

To be clear, I think Trump is absolutely dangerous, I just don’t think he’s dangerous in quite the same way as liberals make him out to be. I agree with economists that his policies (tariffs esp) will be dangerous for the US economy and could lead us into another recession. But I think there’s a good chance that either he’ll get gun-shy about the worst of the tariffs (we’re in a bull market, so he has no need to go hard to look like he’s “fixing the economy”) or the judicial branch will block the worst of the tariffs arguing that there’s no legitimate national security concerns. He’ll probably pass some sort of tax cut, which will increase deficit spending and cause some inflation, he’ll probably pass some BS laws that benefit Musk’s companies, and he’ll probably let Republicans get a token social issue bill through, but all-in-all, it’ll probably be a disappointing term like his last one.

I could absolutely be wrong, but I honestly do believe he just wants to play President again.

I do think a Harris presidency will be somewhat better, but only because she’s not speedrunning tariffs. I think she’ll also increase inflation a bit if she tries to do anything to ease it (i.e. “price gouging,” first-time homebuyer assistance, etc). But she doesn’t seem to be aggressively pushing for anything in particular, so as long as she doesn’t mess with things too much, we’ll probably be fine. Even her tax changes probably won’t mess with stuff too much, though I am worried about her tax on unrealized capital gains, but there’s almost no chance that’s actually getting passed, at least not in the form she seems to imply it will take (she’s been short on details).

Maybe this sounds like an apology, idk. I think Trump is dangerous, but not “democracy is at stake!” dangerous. He just wants to be in the spotlight once more. I also think Harris is dangerous, but only if she actually does what she promises, and I seriously doubt she’ll get anything near what she’s promising through Congress. So on the whole, Harris would be way better for both the economy and social issues than Trump, but even if Trump is elected, he’s not going to turn us into a fascist state or anything, he’s just going to drive up inflation a bit and maybe trigger a recession.

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Doomsider@lemmy.world

2 points

2 months ago

Yeah it does sound like an apology. You sit here hemming and hawing over the two-sides of the same coin fallacy saying one is perhaps slightly worse than the other.

You can’t even compare the two logically as candidates or human beings. I guess when you had a daughter who was raped and the police won’t take it seriously because of our fucked up culture it changes you.

I won’t sit here and listen to a detached armchair comparison of the economic outlooks if one gets elected over the other. Like that is what even fucking matters and in fact plays into decades of bullshit rhetoric the right has been pushing. The conservatives have never been better with the economy and that is objectively verifiable.

You pretend that Trump can’t break this country. That putting a buffoon in charge doesn’t denigrate our place in the world. That the women in our country will ever feel safe, that discrimination won’t reign supreme.

You act like it is no big deal because you are privileged. You think it won’t affect you and you know the fucked up part. It may not.

But it will affect a lot of others. People you probably don’t think about. If you did you wouldn’t be worried about the economics and status quo.

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0 points

2 months ago

The conservatives have never been better with the economy and that is objectively verifiable.

The fact that we’re even talking about the economy in a presidential race is honestly pretty ridiculous, the only impact the President has on the economy tends to be negative. Economic policy is a mix of the Federal Reserve policies and legislation, neither of which the President has a ton of control over. That said, Congress usually lets the President champion a bill or two.

Also, economic policy usually has a delayed impact, usually by a few years, so it’s often difficult to attribute economic changes to specific presidents. Yet, for some reason we give the sitting president the credit or blame for whatever happens, which encourages the President to take short-term measures to delay a recession.

You pretend that Trump can’t break this country

It’s possible he could, I just don’t think he’ll try to. He’ll certainly try to interfere w/ the economy (i.e. tariffs and other trade war nonsense), but I honestly don’t think he has plans beyond that.

I highly doubt he’ll have any impact on women, aside from perhaps those in the White House with him. He really doesn’t seem interested in getting involved in any of those issues, and he has even pushed back on legislative changes to abortion policy. It just doesn’t seem to be something he really wants to touch, but he’ll certainly take credit for the actions of others when he thinks it’ll benefit him (i.e. him bragging about overturning Roe v Wade, as if he actually had a hand in that at all…).

You act like it is no big deal

It is a big deal, and I’m really frustrated at the awful choices we have this year. Harris was dead last on my list of preferences when she ran for President, and her record as VP hasn’t changed my mind. I think she’s a terrible candidate, not because she’s a woman or any nonsense like that, I just think she doesn’t have good policies (or honestly any policies at all). In fact, I don’t even know what motivates her, she seems to also just say whatever she thinks people will like, but I guess she wins because she’s not nearly as extreme as her competitor. So it’s like picking between a soggy sandwich and obviously undercooked pork, one will make me regret eating it for the next hour, the other will make me regret it for the next day.

That said, Trump is way worse. Biden was my first vote for a Democrat for President ever, not because I liked him (he was almost my last pick when he ran for President), but because I thought he actually had a chance at winning my state since Trump is so disliked here. But no, he lost by 20% or so like every other candidate in my red state. I usually vote for a third party I agree with, but Trump’s first term changed that.

I’m absolutely with you that Trump is terrible. I just think he’s being made out to be a lot of things that he’s not, and that causes people to dismiss criticism against him. I think Trump is dangerous, not because he’s fascist or anything of that nature, but because he’s a narcissist, and not a particularly bright one at that. He seems to actually think crippling tariffs are a good thing, which is absolutely nuts! He would absolutely cause problems, but ones we can manage. On the bright side, hopefully it’ll demonstrate, yet again, that high tariffs are a terrible idea.

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