Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Shadowferal]

Trump has had a shitty week…looking weak, and a loser, the gop defied him about the debt ceiling, even after he threatened them with getting primaried. Which means if he wants the debt ceiling raised he’ll have to try to get it when he’s in office himself. And that’s a fight he may lose since that reveals how fiscally conservative he really is with his obvious history of adding trillions to the national debt coming full circle.
So of course the bully wants to pick on someone smaller, and weaker. Enter Panama.

“The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable,” Panama’s president said.

Moments after President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on his plans to take back the Panama Canal, Panama’s president said Sunday that the canal will remain under his country’s control.

“As president, I want to clearly state that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjoining zone is Panama’s and will remain so,” Mulino said Sunday. “The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable.” Mulino went on to say that the canal is an integral part of his country’s history and that every Panamanian “carries it in their heart.”

[DarkTZeratul]

Trump has had a shitty week…looking weak, and a loser, the gop defied him about the debt ceiling, even after he threatened them with getting primaried. Which means if he wants the debt ceiling raised he’ll have to try to get it when he’s in office himself. And that’s a fight he may lose since that reveals how fiscally conservative he really is with his obvious history of adding trillions to the national debt coming full circle.
So of course the bully wants to pick on someone smaller, and weaker. Enter Panama.

“The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable,” Panama’s president said.

Moments after President-elect Donald Trump doubled down on his plans to take back the Panama Canal, Panama’s president said Sunday that the canal will remain under his country’s control.

“As president, I want to clearly state that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjoining zone is Panama’s and will remain so,” Mulino said Sunday. “The sovereignty and independence of our country is non-negotiable.” Mulino went on to say that the canal is an integral part of his country’s history and that every Panamanian “carries it in their heart.”

Not even president yet and he's already losing bigly.

[Somewhatconcerned]

The funding for pediatric cancer research, at least, immediately got passed as a separate bill.

Remember when you were all freaking out about this?

This is the first step towards cleaner bills, we should ALL be happy about that.

[DarkTZeratul]

Remember when you were all freaking out about this?

This is the first step towards cleaner bills, we should ALL be happy about that.

Spoken like someone with absolutely no fucking understanding about how politics actually work in the real world. Not to mention ignoring all the other things that DID get cut out of this bill, like criminalizing revenge porn, reimbursing low-income Americans whose benefits were stolen, and instituting cost-cutting reforms for healthcare. None of THOSE got individualized bills. You think we should be happy about that?

I have a feeling you're going to be just as giddy when the Republicans try to use the annual debt reconciliation for all sorts of things it's not really meant for while using what even Hollywood accounting would consider optimistic to balance it. Like they always do.

[Edge-]

Remember when you were all freaking out about this?

This is the first step towards cleaner bills, we should ALL be happy about that.

There's a reason a lot of this shit gets bundled together, actually many. Including simple practicality - trying to pass everything by line-item would leave Congress with little time to do anything else during a given session.

That's not anything to be happy about if you actually care about lawmakers doing the important work of lawmaking, which they've not been doing much of as of late and which has shown given the gross lack of proper legislative privacy protections online and in safeguards and AI regulation as other developed nations with (slightly more) functional lawmaking bodies have been doing.

[Malkiah]

trying to pass everything by line-item would leave Congress with little time to do anything else during a given session.

perhaps somewhat related, perhaps unrelated, but just curious:
can you name a single session in the last let's say 60 years where congress being unable to do anything else but facilitate the normal function of the country's operations would have been a bad thing?
has there been a single session where congress actually did any good or used its free time to accomplish anything notable or worthy?
and then, compare that to the number of sessions where having nothing better to do gave them ample time to get up some monumental fuckery that has caused nothing but woe and regressive of the development of the nation as a whole.

[Kaleredar]

Spoken like someone with absolutely no fucking understanding about how politics actually work in the real world. Not to mention ignoring all the other things that DID get cut out of this bill, like criminalizing revenge porn, reimbursing low-income Americans whose benefits were stolen, and instituting cost-cutting reforms for healthcare. None of THOSE got individualized bills. You think we should be happy about that?

I have a feeling you're going to be just as giddy when the Republicans try to use the annual debt reconciliation for all sorts of things it's not really meant for while using what even Hollywood accounting would consider optimistic to balance it. Like they always do.

The rubber muppet you’ve quoted has decide to try and go beyond cackling to trying to explain why his fat orange master does what he does.

It’s really not necessary; nobody asks the sniveling underling to explain the mob boss’ plan for a reason.

[Edge-]

perhaps somewhat related, perhaps unrelated, but just curious:
can you name a single session in the last let's say 60 years where congress being unable to do anything else but facilitate the normal function of the country's operations would have been a bad thing?
has there been a single session where congress actually did any good or used its free time to accomplish anything notable or worthy?
and then, compare that to the number of sessions where having nothing better to do gave them ample time to get up some monumental fuckery that has caused nothing but woe and regressive of the development of the nation as a whole.

The ACA, while heavily flawed, was a big step forward for health insurance bullshit, and the Consumer Financial Protection Act creating the CFPB as pretty solid.

Huge, massive, enormous things? No, not on the scale of the interstate highway system, not in a while. The yardstick now is, "Got an infrastructure bill passed finally doing some serious reinvestment in aging US infrastructure."

Republicans simply don't want to really pass any legislation unless it's a tax cut, and oppose just about anything else Democrats propose because "Democrats proposed it" so we don't get things like campaign finance reform etc.

[diller]

War with Panama soon?

President-elect Donald Trump threatened to reassert U.S. control over the Panama Canal on Sunday, accusing Panama of charging excessive rates to use the Central American passage and drawing a sharp rebuke from Panamanian President Jose Raul Mulino.

Oh he's talking about Greenland again as well, last time our prime minister said the US couldn't buy Greenland he called her a nasty woman!!!

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The rubber muppet you’ve quoted has decide to try and go beyond cackling to trying to explain why his fat orange master does what he does.

Didn't that guy used to claim he didn't vote for Trump and he didn't even like him?

[Kaleredar]

Oh he's talking about Greenland again as well, last time our prime minister said the US couldn't buy Greenland he called her a nasty woman!!!

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Didn't that guy used to claim he didn't vote for Trump and he didn't even like him?

It’s hard to keep these muppets apart. I sort of push them out of my mind.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Who says musk is going to be on any of these meetings?

Musk wasn’t elected to any position. He can’t be appointed to any official cabinet position.

Musk’s capacity is simply one of threatening that other people do what he wants for fear of primarying them. He has no actual power beyond that.

I think you underestimate the conservative ability to piss their pants and fall in line in the face of overwhelming money from an unknown astroturfed name.

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Ok, so you know someone who studied dementia as a disbility.

Maybe you have some fucking difficulty with reading comprehension however, because I specifically fucking said,

Yeah don't care what you said bruv, the entire thesis was on how people around and related to those with dementia both perceive and behave around those with dementia, which exactly what I'm talking about. I was there with them for a lot of their time writing their master's thesis. This isn't some 2 page undergrad paper, it was their entire body of work for 3 years. They basically ate, drank, lived and breathed this thing and I was there to support them through it. Then a couple of years after we separated, my father got dementia, and I knew exactly what was going to happen, and sure enough I felt every moment of living out that research, saw all the things happen with him that I'd seen with others.

Short version is, people are already taking Trump less seriously than they once were. Trump's entire power, all of his soft power, the ability to influence and manipulate politics to his will, comes from how he can whip people up. Elmo Musk has demonstrated that he can whip people into a frenzy far better and faster than Trump ever could. Trump only posts on his social media platform Truth Social, meanwhile Elmo posts to X to a far larger audience.

Listen I get it, you lived through someone with dementia, it was hard, that's exactly one of the things I experienced too. But the louder he screeches, the less people are going to take him seriously. Trump's conservative charisma always lay in being restrained in tone and unhinged in words.

[Gestopft]

perhaps somewhat related, perhaps unrelated, but just curious:
can you name a single session in the last let's say 60 years where congress being unable to do anything else but facilitate the normal function of the country's operations would have been a bad thing?

Should've gone with a lower number that 60, seeing as we're approaching the 60'th anniversary of some of the most important civil rights legislation in this country's history.

But aside from that, there were a few other things that were legitimately positive, if not ground breaking. I get that the last 50+ years of the Neoliberal era have been a disaster, and that "bipartisanship" has essentially been both parties agreeing to do what their donors want.

[Malkiah]

Should've gone with a lower number that 60, seeing as we're approaching the 60'th anniversary of some of the most important civil rights legislation in this country's history.

..... fine. the last 58 years.
also i'd argue that like the civil rights act, every piece of legislation anyone has mentioned thus far could be classified as an entirely presidential agenda, pushed for and largely spearheaded by the executive branch as a specific part of their campaign policy, and more or less foisted on congress.

point is, congress in the US doesn't do shit and it isn't essential for anything. if it was completely nullified and its nominal functional duties moved elsewhere (senate or executive branch) there would be no difference to the american populace.

[DarkTZeratul]

point is, congress in the US doesn't do shit and it isn't essential for anything. if it was completely nullified and its nominal functional duties moved elsewhere (senate or administrative branch) there would be no difference to the american populace.

The Senate is part of Congress. Also, getting rid of Congress and passing its duties off to, presumably, the executive branch (since the "administrative branch" isn't actually a thing) sounds like a great way to shortcut us straight into a dictatorship.

[Shadowferal]

Civics should be a mandatory class...

[Malkiah]

The Senate is part of Congress. Also, getting rid of Congress and passing its duties off to, presumably, the executive branch (since the "administrative branch" isn't actually a thing) sounds like a great way to shortcut us straight into a dictatorship.

....
if the lower chamber of congress were nullified and its nominal functional duties moved elsewhere (the upper chamber of congress or the executive branch) there would be no difference to the american populace.

despite the fact you seemed to enjoy being an overly pedantic shit when you damn well knew what i meant, and despite the fact that i had a complete brain fart which for some reason made me type 'administrative' instead of 'executive', do you have anything to add here?

i would posit that "dictatorship" is essentially impossible in the US anyways because the machinery of government and society is too large and sluggish and entrenched in its processes to facilitate a full blown takeover by either a single individual or head of an ideological movement.
the US is already an oligarchy and always has been, it was created to be one and has been very good at being one for the last 250ish years, a dictatorship is in direct conflict with that.
(this excepting the ways in which the two systems can be said to overlap, but for the purposes of this conversation i am going to consider them two distinctly separate entities)

you might occasionally get a figurehead that is a cult of personality that personifies the organizational or ideological heart of one aspect of that oligarchy (ala obama or trump which IMO are both basically just physical manifestations of the spiritual id of their respective parties), but i don't think you're going to get an assad, or mao, or saddam, or castro, or pol pot, etc etc... or even a putin or the like.

[PhaelixWW]

if the lower chamber of congress were nullified and its nominal functional duties moved elsewhere (the upper chamber of congress or the executive branch) there would be no difference to the american populace.

The "lower chamber of Congress"?

[Malkiah]

The "lower chamber of Congress"?

jesus of christ, the lower chamber of the congress, the lower house of congress... the house of representatives?
(wait, are people not aware of the names of... you know what, fuck it, i find this semantic quibbling exceedingly tedious)
it's 2 in the morning and i'm posting in between late night dungeon runs, i'll take it on as my mistake for any time my fingers type the wrong word in the thought spigot my brain is pouring.

still though, is it so very much to expect that people can grasp the colloquial use of "congress" to mean... fucking... not-the-senate?

[Shadowferal]

The lower chamber of the United States Congress is the House of Representatives. The Senate is the upper chamber.

[Malkiah]

The lower chamber of the United States Congress is the House of Representatives. The Senate is the upper chamber.

yes, it is. which is the thing i was talking about in the first place when i said "congress in the US doesn't do shit" because i thought it was pretty common parlance to refer to the house as just "congress" and conversely the senate as the senate.
(like seriously, tomorrow just ask someone you know apropos of nothing "hey what's the other government body that isn't the senate" and i think most people will say "congress" and not "the house of representatives")

maybe that's a regional thing, or maybe i'm personally insane in some fashion. either way i'm finding this entire digression with multiple of you people seeming like you don't understand what i'm talking about to be utterly baffling and i legit can't tell if you're being obtuse intentionally.