Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Kaleredar]

i guess, just, other than "USA! USA! USA!" why is that the issue?
i am in no way suggesting china is "better" in any measurable capacity nor hand-waving anything you might have to list about negative qualities of the chinese government, but strictly as a matter of impartial observation when looking at it through the lens of humanity on the whole i don't really see what difference it makes.


fair enough, i don't really have a strong opinion on the whole thing in any capacity, i just found the notion of what the modern world would look like if the US were reduced to the mostly-ignored-backwater that it was prior to WW2.

It’s just a realistic appraisal of who stands to inherit the power vacuum currently.

Countries feel like they have to walk on eggshells dealing with trump but Trump isn’t a guy with a plan. China is equally hostile to dissent but they do have a plan that extends beyond enriching one guy. I don’t see the… I dunno, status of “the world” getting better so far as personal freedoms and so forth are concerned with China at the helm.

If the US is considered “cooked” in the leadership role then the EU better pull their big boy pants on.

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Only when "most countries" include all the most authoritarian countries. The USA is not remotely a world leader in freedom of the press. It's pretty shit, actually.

https://rsf.org/en/rsf-world-press-f...-press-freedom

The USA pretty consistently ranks significantly under most of Western Europe, and Canada/Australia/New Zealand. Currently the USA's listed as "Problematic". There's been a decline internationally overall that's observable in their rankings if you use the slider, but the USA's been slipping as much as anyone, and they certainly haven't been a world leader in press freedoms in decades, at least.

Better than China, sure. That shouldn't be the standard you're measuring yourself against. It's like saying "we're better on human rights and freedoms than Nazi Germany", as if that's a brag.

Unfortunately China is the next guy in line. And while I’m sure there are people within China that dislike the direction or authoritarian aspects of their government, any words of your condemning the Chinese government are going to find their way to far fewer sympathetic ears than are your condemnations of the current direction of the US.

[Malkiah]

I don’t see the… I dunno, status of “the world” getting better so far as personal freedoms and so forth are concerned with China at the helm.

OH! well... i mean yeah, i can see where you're coming from there and i wouldn't disagree with you.
in my mind, medicine and tech funding was not equivalent to "leader of the world in terms of culture and governance" so i didn't see any kind of connection there, i wasn't seeing the link that existed in your mind.

[Ivanstone]

i mean the problem i have with this response is that if you swapped 'china' with 'cuba' you could be saying the same thing, but cuba came up with a vaccine for a specific type of lung cancer and nobody else has managed that as of yet.

i don't think it necessarily matters if china is more or less "capitalist" or what their "freedoms" are so much as i find the question of what could happen when a different set of eyeballs is given that level of funding and encouragement, just to see what they come up with.

I'm not saying the same thing. Capability matters. Cuba is a tiny country with limited reach. China is not and are worse than the US on most metrics.

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Better than China, sure. That shouldn't be the standard you're measuring yourself against. It's like saying "we're better on human rights and freedoms than Nazi Germany", as if that's a brag.

Better is still better. One advantage the US has is that its not a top-down structure. The individual states do matter and not all of those are complete shit-heads. Even the worse US state is still better than a lot of places including China.

And if you'll note I did call the US a dumpster fire.

[En Sabah Nur]

The President...







... of the United States of America.

Such a busy man. True leader.

[Mekh]

The President...



... of the United States of America.

Such a busy man. True leader.

The fuck is going on with the eyes here?

[Belize]

The fuck is going on with the eyes here?

Trump's eyes were more soulless than literal rock, so they had to paint them black

[Edge-]

Such a busy man. True leader.

He needs his Executive Time after a long, hard day of working to undermine American interests and destroy America with the help of the Republican party.

Let old, racist, child raping grandpa shitpost some super low-quality, low-effort, shitty memes on the interwebs!

[Mayhem]

Trump's eyes were more soulless than literal rock, so they had to paint them black

This forum needs a like feature so bad.

[Edge-]

So what did the former bosses of the current Attorney for the District of Columbia think of her when she used to be a TV host at Fox?

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/04/nx-s1...eckless-maniac

A Fox News executive has called a prominent Trump appointee a "reckless maniac."

Another Fox executive said, "I don't trust her to be responsible."

A third condemned her for the "tendency to find random conspiracy theories on weird internet sites."

And a Fox corporate board member called a public statement of hers "insane."

The person they were talking about is Jeanine Pirro, now the United States' top law enforcement official for Washington, D.C. At the time, she was a top-rated star on Fox News itself.

Her colleagues made those remarks in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, when Pirro used her platform to amplify baseless claims that victory had been stolen from President Trump.

The exchanges are quoted in legal documents made public last month in a defamation lawsuit brought by Smartmatic, a voting technology company, against Fox News. Pirro is named as a defendant.

Ringing endorsements of her former bosses, it's a great thing they didn't need to be called as references.

Pirro, in a chance encounter aboard an Amtrak train, declined to comment for this story. Her Justice Department spokesperson, previously a Fox News producer who worked on her show for eight years, did not respond to written requests for comment.

Unsurprising.

How about her job performance?

Since becoming the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Pirro has made public announcements about the indictment of a Haitian gang leader, the D.C. homicide level reaching triple digits for the year and the takedown of an alleged fentanyl and PCP drug-trafficking crew. Last month, Pirro told prosecutors to seek the most serious charges available for people who had been arrested.

Yet not all those charges are sticking.

Judges are pushing back on what they call illegally obtained or flimsy evidence presented by prosecutors in court filings.

A grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department staffer for felony assault after he threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent patrolling the streets of D.C.

This despite the legal maxim that any good prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.

Another grand jury declined three times to indict a D.C. woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent, according to The Washington Post. Most recently, a federal grand jury in D.C. declined to indict a woman accused by Pirro's office of making threats against Trump.

When Trump named Pirro to be his U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., he cited her past work in law enforcement.

But he also pointed to her two shows at Fox, Justice With Judge Jeanine and The Five, which he called "one of the Highest Rated Shows on Television."

I wonder if it's her TV performance rather than her legal acumen that got her this job?

Trump has repeatedly promoted Pirro's books and Fox shows on social media, noting her unwavering support of him.

Ah, right, Donald has turned the Oval Office into QVC.

[En Sabah Nur]

The fuck is going on with the eyes here?

He posted a string of really bad AI videos that show him as great, and his "enemies" as supporters or taking part in a Sumo fight (Pritzker). I assume the eyes are a result of whatever they used. Its also him looking around, smug AF, set to "Hold On I'm Coming Home."

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He needs his Executive Time after a long, hard day of working to undermine American interests and destroy America with the help of the Republican party.

Let old, racist, child raping grandpa shitpost some super low-quality, low-effort, shitty memes on the interwebs!

inb4 one of the vanishingly small amount of cowardly right wing folks here posts to say he's a master at trolling and everyone is falling for it.

[btlcryct]

They're really pushing the 'trans is a mental illness' angle, to the point they want it declared that officially and ban them from owning firearms because of that declaration. The people that may need it for protection because others are assholes.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/polit...cond-amendment

[Edge-]

They're really pushing the 'trans is a mental illness' angle, to the point they want it declared that officially and ban them from owning firearms because of that declaration. The people that may need it for protection because others are assholes.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/polit...cond-amendment

surely the NRA will vigorously advocate legally in defense of the Constitutional rights of trans Americans

surely

because it's about the Second Amendment for everyone

and not just for conservative white men

[Kaleredar]

They're really pushing the 'trans is a mental illness' angle, to the point they want it declared that officially and ban them from owning firearms because of that declaration. The people that may need it for protection because others are assholes.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/polit...cond-amendment

And yet… Right wing people with guns are far more likely to commit violence than trans people with guns.

[Captain N]

And yet… Right wing people with guns are far more likely to commit violence than trans people with guns.

You mean like those guys who hide in bushes to shoot kids in the back for playing ding dong ditch?

And the MAGA Cult defended the shooter because the kid was "trying to kick the door in"

[Breccia]

They're really pushing the 'trans is a mental illness' angle

Anything to distance from mass shootings, because even they know they do the most.

There have been many mass shootings recently, the vast majority of them done by straight white males. The narrative will always be, if it's a straight white male, it should be ignored, but if it's anyone else it's because they're part of a group that's evil and dangerous. Black? Has to be drugs and crime. Trans? Blame it on mental illness.

Oh, and also, it's never the easy access to guns originally designed to kill large number of humans as quickly as possible, like AR weapons. Somehow, that's never part of the discussion.

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In the ongoing effort to fire everyone in the federal government, Trump installs AI in Medicaid to deny treatment to patients without a human signing off on the refusal.

The federal government plans to hire private companies to use artificial intelligence to determine whether patients would be covered for some procedures, like certain spine surgeries or steroid injections. Similar algorithms used by insurers have been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits, which have asserted that the technology allowed the companies to swiftly deny large batches of claims and cut patients off from care in rehabilitation facilities.

The A.I. companies selected to oversee the program would have a strong financial incentive to deny claims. Medicare plans to pay them a share of the savings generated from rejections.

Remember death panels? Remember Republicans claiming Obamacare would have death panels? Trump is now using death panels.

Y'all hypocrites.

[Edge-]

Privatizing Medicare, yeah boi!

Get fucked and die old people, the AI death panel brought to you by Republicans and Donald Trump says so.

Didn't a CEO of a health insurance company literally get shot in the streets over this shit?

[Breccia]

I thought I would live my entire life, never once citing kentucky-dot-com.

And yet, here we are. Part of an interview between the Lexington Herald-Leader and a tortoise wearing a tie.

Herald-Leader: I’d imagine you probably have just a little more free time now that you’re not Senate GOP leader. How do you spend your free or leisure time?

Mitch McConnell: Well, I still have plenty to do, but it’s more narrow and more focused. You know, when you’re in a leader job, you’re involved in everybody’s life — their personal problems, their political ambitions and trying to make everybody look good, and tough decisions, taking the heat.

I’m not doing that anymore. I thought the best thing for me to do the last two years was to focus on what I thought was the most important thing I might have an impact on, and that’s defense and foreign policy. I think this is the most dangerous period since before World War Two. There’s certain similarities right now to the ‘30s. Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill in 1930, widely believed by historians and economists to have taken the depression worldwide. Those who were totally anxious to stay out of all of what was going on in Europe were called “America First.” Sound familiar?

So what do we have today? North Korea, China, Russia, Iran and Iran’s proxies. They’re very different kinds of countries, but they have one thing in common: They hate us. So, when you talk about preparedness, we’re not prepared like we should be… with regard to Ukraine, what we need to do is avoid the headline at the end of the war, ‘Russia wins, America loses.’ It has huge worldwide implications, and for those who are concerned about the money, I think it’s important to remember that about half of the money was spent in this country, including in Kentucky, (with) 38 states modernizing our own industrial bases. We’ve sent older weapons to Ukraine.

Just to make it more clear how damning that is:

H-L: President Trump wants U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie gone. Do you agree with President Trump that Thomas Massie should be primaried?

MM: Look, my own view about the leader job, whether you’re the president or the leader of one of the parties, is the Ronald Reagan quote that I thought made the most sense. He had what he called the 11th commandment: Do not speak ill of another Republican. So that’s the way I’ve tried to conduct my career.

In that one interview McConnell said, about politics, multiple times, "I don't want to discuss that". But he led the interview with "Trump is doing to America what Hoover did to America". But he talked ill of Donald Trump.

"Where was that discipline when he was in office?"

Hiding in its shell. And some of it is still hiding in there. For example:

H-L: Do you think America is a better place today than it was around 10, 11 years ago, when Trump came down the golden escalator and announced he was running for president?

MM: You know, I’m not sure enough time has passed to start evaluating who made a difference and who didn’t. I thought a good bit about that myself, just in terms of whether I thought I made a difference. And I think, as you’re already aware, at the federal level it would be the courts.

Despite being as dangerous as we've seen since the pre-WWII era, he isn't ready to say yet.

McConnell has forfeit any authority for his opinion to matter, but his experience cannot be overlooked. Maybe it's a little obvious that a Reagan-loving Republican would say "we have to ensure Russia loses" but we are seeing more and more GOP members begging Trump not to side with Putin when it comes to conquering a country and killing its civilians. Something no American should ever have had to do, by the way.

McConnell was later asked about things like Gaza, firing the HHS lead, and taking 10% of US industries. McConnell sided against Trump in every question. Now that he's retired. He avoided every chance to say "Trump is wrong", only to disagree with each and every decision Trump has made that wasn't about packing the courts.

[Edge-]

I thought I would live my entire life, never once citing kentucky-dot-com.

And yet, here we are. Part of an interview between the Lexington Herald-Leader and a tortoise wearing a tie.



Just to make it more clear how damning that is:



In that one interview McConnell said, about politics, multiple times, "I don't want to discuss that". But he led the interview with "Trump is doing to America what Hoover did to America". But he talked ill of Donald Trump.

"Where was that discipline when he was in office?"

Hiding in its shell. And some of it is still hiding in there. For example:



Despite being as dangerous as we've seen since the pre-WWII era, he isn't ready to say yet.

McConnell has forfeit any authority for his opinion to matter, but his experience cannot be overlooked. Maybe it's a little obvious that a Reagan-loving Republican would say "we have to ensure Russia loses" but we are seeing more and more GOP members begging Trump not to side with Putin when it comes to conquering a country and killing its civilians. Something no American should ever have had to do, by the way.

McConnell was later asked about things like Gaza, firing the HHS lead, and taking 10% of US industries. McConnell sided against Trump in every question. Now that he's retired. He avoided every chance to say "Trump is wrong", only to disagree with each and every decision Trump has made that wasn't about packing the courts.

it's incredible how mitch mcconnell thinks he's not directly responsible for all of this through his leadership in the senate

i do hope his eventual passing is truly embarrassing and humiliating for him and highlights his destructive legacy for this country

[btlcryct]

I think I've seen something about AI making medical decisions. Oh yea, reminds me of this:

[Edge-]

figuring out legal liability for AI models making decisions is going to be so incredibly fun!