Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Kaleredar]

i disagree with that as a blanket assertion because several conditions of that sentence ring false to me.
it certainly can be true in some instances, but i don't accept it as a universal truth.


interesting. i would find it absolutely fascinating if you could go into your view for how the cause-and-effect chain on that works, specifically with regards to how one arbitrary action can manifest an opinion mattering or not.
i'm also starting from the perspective that no opinion "matters" other than on the merits of itself, so it's a pretty long jump of faith to me even for the sake of conversation that any discussion can legitimately be cut off by just unilaterally declaring one side isn't allowed to have thoughts on a given subject.

i'm really not trying to start an argument with you here, you quoted me and made an assertion that i disagree with, but i fully grant you the right of having that opinion and of explaining, if you care to.


it isn't, but my view is that participating in an obligatory ritual that cannot change things is no different materially from not participating in an obligatory ritual that cannot change things. both of them are wankery, and i don't see any difference between them.

A couple thousand people “participating in an obligatory ritual” in this past election would mean Trump wouldn’t be president.

And if Trump wasn’t president, literally none of this would have happened.

Harris wouldn’t have had “just a little bit of DOGE butchering of government programs.” She wouldn’t have had “only a few cities would have the military deployed in them.” She wouldn’t have “only kowtowed to Russia a little bit.” She wouldn’t have “only created a few concentration camps for illegals.” Nope, literally none of it. Would have happened.

That a candidate like Harris can so fail to impress you and yet her competition is and has been objectively 1000 times worse is a rather damning indictment of your professed apathy.

[david0925]

Import beef? If I get to give a middle finger to maga while getting cheaper beef (haven't really bought it in 2025 due to not wanting to pay that much extra) I'm all for it

Yes. I'm spiteful at maga and want to see them suffer. You don't get to play the "I didn't know better" card for sympathy this time

[Muzjhath]

No, what makes you a doomer claiming that protest as a concept is worthless is this bullshit:

So, are people planning a general strike in case nothing happens?
You know
The or else bit

[Malkiah]

A couple thousand people “participating in an obligatory ritual” in this past election would mean Trump wouldn’t be president.

ok this is good start because it loops back around to the protests and to US politics generally, and i'd like to steer away from the philosophy of voting because i already know who will be involved in that derail and i already know everyone will just end up being annoyed by it, so let's leave off that now just for the sake of politeness?

my essential problem with your statement is that it's incomplete, because no if a couple thousand more people voted in the last election that would not necessarily mean trump wouldn't be president.
it MIGHT mean that, IF the couple thousand people who voted would have voted for democrats, and IF those people lived in specific states, and IF the distribution was such that it made the totals end up differently, and IF they didn't vote for harris for reasons you could talk them out of.
however, you have no way of predicting any of those factors to be true, and so your statement cannot be taken at face value.
for example, you could have had 2 million more people vote for harris in colorado, and trump still would have won. you could have had 2 million people vote for trump in california and harris still would have lost.

my point here is that i think you're misrepresenting your own argument, and in doing so making your argument very trite and veering into being factually incorrect.
you don't want MORE people voting, you want more of THE RIGHT PEOPLE voting and less of the wrong people voting, and i'm 100% totally on board with that idea.

so wrapping back to the issue at hand: does a "no kings" parade involving roughly 1.5 - 2% of the eligible voting population constitute an observably significant shift in the voting habits in 2026 and 2028?
for the sake of this hypothetical, assume there is no political followup to the parades because fundamentally that's my real issue and what i predict is going to be the outcome, and if i'm wrong on that prediction i'll be absolutely thrilled and it will totally change my calculus on this subject.
so assuming october 17th winds up in history as "gold star for saying you don't like trump out in public", how does that actually materially change anything?
i don't think it does, which is why i questioned by what metric you could classify it as "a success" which is the assertion that got me started posting here in the first place and thus far nobody has bothered to try to explain*

*special shoutout here to @Canpinter and you yourself for offering good and valid points about the broader impact the event could have generally, though "increasing political engagement" wasn't really part of the narrative of this protest so i don't know if you can give the event direct credit for a byproduct, as good as that byproduct may have been.
and even so, it remains to be seen if there's any observable effect here. i'll still be around and posting in 2 years, if the 2026 midterms are a true and honest bloodbath against republicans, i'll happily eat my hat on this one and you can keep me honest on that.

And if Trump wasn’t president, literally none of this would have happened.

i will completely disagree with you here and i think that even a cursory glance at recent history shows this simply isn't accurate.
for example, the ACA subsidies would still be expiring right now, and if harris were president and the democrats had 5ish member majorities in the house and senate the government would still be shut down right now over those subsidies, except it would be the democrats refusing to remove them and the republicans filibustering over it.
israel would still be committing a genocide in gaza, russia would still be fucking around with ukraine, like 500 people would still control 95% of the economic wealth in the US, fascism would still be deeply rooted in US society and metastasizing into every facet of culture and government... on and on and on.
i would strongly assert that the systemic problems in human civilization right now utterly transcend partisan politics, and literally all of this would have happened (if not necessarily over the next 4 years) except the tariffs and the specifically trump related circus nonsense.

Harris wouldn’t have had “just a little bit of DOGE butchering of government programs.” She wouldn’t have had “only a few cities would have the military deployed in them.” She wouldn’t have “only kowtowed to Russia a little bit.” She wouldn’t have “only created a few concentration camps for illegals.” Nope, literally none of it. Would have happened.

i'll agree that most of that probably wouldn't have happened exactly this way, but i'd also say that most or all of it would have happened sooner or later the next time a republican was president, which would have been 2028 or 2032 at the latest.
there is no evidence to suggest that voting in a democratic administration for a single (or even double) term stops US regressives, in fact i'd say you can only barely discern that it slows them down at all.

That a candidate like Harris can so fail to impress you and yet her competition is and has been objectively 1000 times worse is a rather damning indictment of your professed apathy.

that you think a candidate like harris would have done anything to truly stop the rising tide of fascism in the US is a rather damning indictment of your professed... i want to say ignorance, but i also want to give you the benefit of the doubt here and say naivety.

[Fugus]

So…

- We give 20 billion in cash to Argentina
- We give 20 billion in investments to Argentina
- And we are importing beef from them to give them more money.

All at the expense of the USA and its people. Well, that’s definitely MAGA.

Also of note, Trump stated when he thought America was great. He considered us great from the 1870s to the 1930s. AKA The Gilded Age and the age of the Robber Barons that led us straight into the actual Great Depression….

While we have Mike Johnson on TV studdering when he got pushback on lies when he tried to claim:

- He couldn’t bring congress in session until the Democrats approved his bill when they pointed out he could.

- He couldn’t seat the new congressman till in normal session when they pointed out he could seat them tomorrow at which point he pivoted to

- He was following the Pelosi rule when he was delaying her being seated citing how Pelsi didn’t seat a member for over 24 days for them to point out that the congressman at the time ASKED for it to be delayed and than Pelosi didn’t force a delay at all and he himself just seated 2 other members just before this. They just were his own.

God, I hope the Democrats have finally found their balls and don’t lose them again after this assuming we survive as a nation that doesn’t collapse after it…

[PhaelixWW]

i'd also say that most or all of it would have happened sooner or later the next time a republican was president, which would have been 2028 or 2032 at the latest.

Saying that every Republican presidential candidate would be just as bad as Trump is an unsupportable statement.

I mean, that's doomerism, for sure, right there.


Edit: Well, I'll back up a bit on this, since you did limit your list to a few cherry-picked things.

[Mayhem]

Saying that every Republican presidential candidate would be just as bad as Trump is an unsupportable statement.

I mean, that's doomerism, for sure, right there.

Well, that depends on who is the driving force behind what is going on. If it were the republican party (which I don't think it is), you'd be correct, but if it were sociopathic billionaires that have bat shit insane world views, then every republican president would be just as bad. Maybe not as flamboyant, bad-mannered, and openly stupid as Trump, but for the country and the world, just as bad.

[PhaelixWW]

Well, that depends on who is the driving force behind what is going on. If it were the republican party (which I don't think it is), you'd be correct, but if it were sociopathic billionaires that have bat shit insane world views, then every republican president would be just as bad. Maybe not as flamboyant, bad-mannered, and openly stupid as Trump, but for the country and the world, just as bad.

That's quite literally backwards.

[Fugus]

Again, outside of the Tarrifs, what is Trump doing that the Republicans haven’t wanted to do for decades?

Remember, the abuses, the tariffs, ALL of it, the Republicans can stop anytime they want. They just collectively agree and consent to it.

Trump didn’t corrupt anything, he just got them feeling comfortable showing it while they are probably hoping they can just pin it all on him later to avoid accountability for all the stuff they wanted and enabled.

They wanted all of this, they just don’t want the blame for it and what it causes.

[Breccia]

Again, outside of the Tarrifs, what is Trump doing that the Republicans haven’t wanted to do for decades?

Been loud about it. Trump is shouting the quiet part. As we've seen in another thread, it's okay for a Republican to praise Hitler, as long as nobody finds out about it.

[Malkiah]

Saying that every Republican presidential candidate would be just as bad as Trump is an unsupportable statement.

i don't believe that it is, at least not on its face, but that depends entirely on your definition of "bad" and so i think it would be silly for us to get into a "uh huh" "nuh uh" argument over it without first defining what exactly we mean by "bad" here.

i'll say this: trump and his administrations have been decorously "worse" in terms of adhering to social norms, i won't argue against that. trump definitely wears ill fitting ties and that's just a fashion faux pas that is deeply humiliating for the american people.
however in terms of policy trump is an indistinguishably bog standard republican in every single way, and i'd further assert that his administration and cabinet picks are no different than any other republican in the last 60 years in terms of the material harm they cause to the human condition.

in fact, i'd mostly go the opposite: i would posit that trump is less bad than his predecessors, because he's just out in the open about it and everyone can see it, whereas most especially 2000-2008 and 1980-1988 the reptilians were still wearing their suits made out of decaying human skin and most people are too blind and stupid to have seen through it, and so i've watched in abject fucking horror over the last 10 years as everyone collectively memory holed the reagan and bush years.

but again, the above two paragraphs... it really depends on what you mean by "bad".
when i think of a "bad" president, for me that means policies and actions and tone set in society and government that will last beyond their years in office and will measurably decrease the progress and prosperity of human civilization.

using that definition i don't think trump is worse or better than any other republican that has existed since... jfc... i'm going to say roosevelt.
though granted, coolidge hoover eisenhower and nixon at least each did one or two notable positive things.
nixon was the last time a republican was president that wasn't a complete and utter fucking ghoul without a single redeeming quality or act while in office, and nixon is the one that kick started the current strain of christofascism in US politics so i don't know that really cancels out having created the EPA.
so being REALLY generous i'll say 1970, that was the last time a republican wasn't pure unmitigated evil that made the world a materially worse place, and only just barely by the seat of his pants.

wrapping all that back around to the present day and the bit of text of yours that i quoted...
i vehemently disagree with any attempt to say that any modern day republican president would have a policy agenda any different from trump, by and large.
there would obviously by personal unique touches and some BS trump is doing wouldn't be happening, but then there would be other BS that trump isn't doing that would be happening so it'd all be kind of a wash.

[Fugus]

Been loud about it. Trump is shouting the quiet part. As we've seen in another thread, it's okay for a Republican to praise Hitler, as long as nobody finds out about it.

As someone living in North Carolina, they haven’t been to silent about it when they feel comfortable or when a Trump rally comes into town. Literally one of them shouting a Walmart employees with the hard R on their way to a rally.

Plus all the stuff I have told before about family and friends saying when it comes to this. This is who they always were, they just knew it wasn’t acceptable to outright admit it, now they feel they can.

Also barely seen any of my friends since last year at this point and have little desire to either for most of them. Have one who’s mindset is mostly nihilistic and that it doesn’t matter who wins. The others actively sold their own children out.

And they can’t honestly claim they didn’t. I warned them they were selling out their kids last year at a get together. I went over the facts of how they had already screwed up the first time around which they actually tried to distance themselves from after the J6 and then pivoted to supporting it after he was on the ballot again and how they kept trying to blame Obama for Bushes failures and Biden for Trumps failures while they gave Trump credit for Obama’s and Biden’s successes. Along with fact checking some of their cult approved talking points. Told them straight up, if they were backing him, they were fucking up and selling out their children and I wasn’t saying that as an opinion but as a statement of fact that I could prove. And if they didn’t believe me, they could fact check me for their children’s sake and even if they did agree with me, they should still look into it because I was giving actual verifiable facts.

Not one of them loved their kids enough to hurt their pride like that, they all decided they would rather be fuck ups than fathers if it meant a bruised ego from admitting they were wrong or having to hate on minorities less.

[PhaelixWW]

Again, outside of the Tarrifs, what is Trump doing that the Republicans haven’t wanted to do for decades?

I mean... doesn't this precisely run opposite your meaning?

He's doing things that the Republican establishment hasn't dared to do, if for no other reason than they don't share the same cult-like following from the "weak, poor, stupid men" who view Trump as their gilt mascot.

You say they've wanted to do it for decades... but they haven't, because something always stopped them.

[Fugus]

I mean... doesn't this precisely run opposite your meaning?

He's doing things that the Republican establishment hasn't dared to do, if for no other reason than they don't share the same cult-like following from the "weak, poor, stupid men" who view Trump as their gilt mascot.

You say they've wanted to do it for decades... but they haven't, because something always stopped them.

No, it didn’t stop them, they still were trying to. All Trump did was rip the bandaid off and just do it instead of trying to be slick about it.

They have wanted to gut social security for decades and instead were slowly choking off the funds to kill it without taking blame. He just did it overtly where they have to get the blame but they were doing it either way.

They were going after Medicaid and Medicare as well and were actively attacking it in ways that they could try and spin as not their faults. He just did it where they own it.

They still had all these things in their cross hairs and were still killing then. The difference is they wanted to be Little Finger and kill them while having plausible deniability when they died and either refuse to build something else because they liked it better without any system to address the issue or create another system to not actually address it either but could reliably extract wealth from the citizens through it. Trump is Jeoffry destroying while proudly proclaiming he did to make sure the whole world knows it.

Both were doing the same things, just one was trying to do it in a way that they could spin in an election while the other doesn’t care about the next election because he thinks he will either stop it, rig it, or die before it happens so they don’t care about it.

[PhaelixWW]

No, it didn’t stop them, they still were trying to.

Trying but not succeeding = stopped.

And I don't want to derail this too much, but some other time I'd argue that the career politicians in the GoP were more invested in maintaining the status quo (to preserve the boogeyman they used to drum up support from their constituents) than in actually achieving the goals that Republicans profess to want so badly.

All Trump did was rip the bandaid off and just do it instead of trying to be slick about it.

...because Trump is not a career politician. He's a narcissistic, venal idiot who appears to legitimately think that history is going to favor him.

[Fugus]

Trying but not succeeding = stopped.

And I don't want to derail this too much, but some other time I'd argue that the career politicians in the GoP were more invested in maintaining the status quo (to preserve the boogeyman they used to drum up support from their constituents) than in actually achieving the goals that Republicans profess to want so badly.



...because Trump is not a career politician. He's a narcissistic, venal idiot who appears to legitimately think that history is going to favor him.

Who said they weren’t succeeding? Social Security was already going to have accounts depleted it just got moved up and now they can’t claim they didn’t do anything to do it.

They weren’t stopped, they were still doing it, just in a slower fashion so they could attempt a claim at innocence as they swooped in to “save” them.

When it came to getting rid of immigrants, that was something they had no intention of doing. They didn’t want them gone, they wanted them politically isolated and easily exploited labor that they could use to break the backs of the workers above them.

They have been working bit by bit to dismantle the social safety net programs for decades and were successfully chipping away at them slowly.

Trump is them with the mask off more than anything. When it comes to these programs, he accelerated what was already happening and forcing them to own it instead of the slow bleeding “Not My Fault” approach they were already taking.

[Malkiah]

please please read this in the spirit of "like you, i was once unaware of a lot of shit in recent political history and i vividly remember the process of educating myself, and i am trying to share some of that knowledge with you with empathy and solidarity, not to be a prick or call you out or prove you wrong or score points"

He's doing things that the Republican establishment hasn't dared to do

this is actually untrue, almost everything trump has done in terms of policy or actual government administration is the next logical step in shit that was set up by the previous couple of administrations.
some examples:
1. in 2006 bush fired a bunch of US attorneys general for nakedly political reasons.
famously at the time the admin said that AGs "serve at the pleasure of the president" and asserted they could all be fired at any time for any reason.

2. bush instituted enormous tax cuts for the wealthy that utterly fucked over the lower class (as did reagan)

3. republicans attempted several times to destroy social security and medicare (as did reagan)

4. want foreign wars? bush did that first.

5. stupid jackassery in public? being a narcissistic lunatic who berated reporters, lied constantly, and made everything about him?
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jAHy1If531k

6. inept crony sycophant appointees who utterly pig-fuck their roles in major governmental departments?
allow me to enter into evidence: michael brown, john ashcroft, alberto gonzales, margaret spellings... fuck just go google bush admin members.
same goes for reagan, except instead his admin was top to bottom old department of state cold war ghouls (half of whom went on to be in the bush administration)

i could keep going on here, but there's just so many instances that are almost a direct 1:1 path from reagan to bush to trump.
literally NOTHING trump has done is new, he's just building off what republicans were establishing as their political agenda.

if for no other reason than they don't share the same cult-like following from the "weak, poor, stupid men" who view Trump as their gilt mascot.

You say they've wanted to do it for decades... but they haven't, because something always stopped them.

i think you have your cause and your effect backwards here.

what stopped them was that old guard of state department ghouls (ironically enough) who still had a power stalemate with the burgeoning religious whackjob contingent that nixon had opened the door to and reagan had flooded the party with.
back then those monsters (your cheneys and rumsfelds and powells and what not) still had this old cold war era notion of US imperial exceptionalism that made them obsessed with couching everything in this veneer of humanity. they were really attached to the "compassionate conservative" idea because it gave them cover for their evil and that was something they felt they needed.
they weren't willing to pull the trigger on a lot of things out of concern it would lose them votes because they still believed in a world where the US population would flip back and forth over Ds or Rs depending on the candidate or the zeitgeist at the time.

what changed was 9/11 and obama.
firstly they learned that US citizens didn't care anymore about rights, or due process, or freedom, or convenience, or the truth, or accountability.
a lot of these guys had been in politics during vietnam and had old and out of date ideas about how the nation would respond to war-mongering, 9/11 was their come-to-jesus moment when they realized they could fuck around and never have to find out.

then in 2009 a statistically significant portion of the US population lost their absolute fucking minds that a nigger was in the white house, and that not one single person in any level of US society did anything to push back against them freaking the fuck out over it.
the TEA party was an astroturf billionaire-backed social engineering project to fill the GOP with racist fanatical lunatics who had fully drank the libertarian fantasy kool-aid and would back the regressive political agenda with blind religious fervor.

and again, nobody did anything about it - no segment of US society pushed back on this. not the media, not the culture, not the democrats, not government institutions, nothing. the GOP actively injected itself with the worst elements it could muster and not only did they suffer zero pushback from it but they actually made incredible political gains and were able to cripple democrats for almost the entirety of the obama admin.
from 2008 to now the GOP has lost nearly all of the old guard, the entire operation has been supplanted by the new generation of regressives who buy into the ideology with feverish devotion but have none of the experience or understanding that came from that cold war era boots-on-the-ground imperialism that shaped the previous generation.

trump is simply the inevitable next step. a living, breathing embodiment of the US regressive ideology manifested in rancid flesh.
trump didn't arrive and turn fundamentally decent people into racist lunatic shitbags, about 50% of the US population are racist lunatic shitbags and after finding out for the previous 8 years that they didn't have to hide it anymore they just went whole hog on getting the best figurehead they could to embody their beliefs.

this is what republicans are. this is what republicans have always been, but started accelerating in the late 70s and going into overdrive in 1980s in terms of evolving from pretending to be human to just being mask-off about it.
this is all inevitable and inexorable, and it's also all that we have to look forward to until something happens that skews the voting demographics in the US.

[Fugus]

100% what he just said. I remember the 80s with all the racist stuff around me. When I hit the early 2000s I thought most of it was finally out of their systems outside of old people and a few dumbasses.

Then Obama won and they lost their minds, then Trump came and made them feel comfortable with the mask off.

Policy wise, the big change is they are being more honest what their policies are for and more direct in getting there. But the destination of what they were pushing us to has never changed on that point.

[Malkiah]

Then Obama won and they lost their minds, then Trump came and made them feel comfortable with the mask off.

man, i really do hate to quibble here over a pretty minor semantics thing, but i feel really compelled to push back against this.
i don't think trump came and made them feel comfortable with the mask off, i think trump came along because they had gotten comfortable with the mask being off, and trump is just what happens when the mask is off.

[PhaelixWW]

They weren’t stopped, they were still doing it, just in a slower fashion so they could attempt a claim at innocence as they swooped in to “save” them.

Sure. Slow. Like...

what is Trump doing that the Republicans haven’t wanted to do for decades?

...decades, right.

Because at various points, Democrats would succeed somewhat in pushing back against the threat.

We can quibble about "stopped", but I mean "stopped short of their ultimate goal", which I take to include stalling it out to decades giving time to mount a more effective defense and waiting for those aging conservative boomers to just phase out of US politics.