Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Twdft]

snip: how US voting works

Here in Germany everyone living here is in a government database, basically you have to register your residence. A local agency doing the registering will provide Germans with their official ID card and passport. If you are an alien they keep record of your ID/Passport/resident permit status. Everyone is required to keep residence information up to date, eg when moving to another place.

Voting is organized locally, the local voting agency requests a list of all persons residing in their area old enough to vote from the ID database. And then sends out a letter with information about your polling place and how to do mail in voting. Yeah, it's that easy. To vote you have to show your ID/passport (EU citizens can vote in some elections) and they check if you are eligible to vote there and note that you did so you can't vote again an hour later.

You can in special circumstances lose your right to vote, I don't know at which point that information is checked. But very few people lose it, criminals can vote in prison.

[Gorsameth]

Also, the Lieutenant Governor of Indiana confirmed that Trump threatened to withhold all federal funding for Indiana if they refused to gerrymander their maps as he was ordering them to do.

In a sane world this would lead to impeachment.

Can you imagine if Nixon was still alive looking at Trump doing an impeachable offense every month and just sitting there thinking you became President in the wrong century.

[alach]

Trump’s handling of the economy is at its lowest point in AP-NORC polling

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s approval on the economy and immigration have fallen substantially since March, according to a new AP-NORC poll, the latest indication that two signature issues that got him elected barely a year ago could be turning into liabilities as his party begins to gear up for the 2026 midterms.

Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds. That is down from 40% in March and marks the lowest economic approval he’s registered in an AP-NORC poll in his first or second term. The Republican president also has struggled to recover from public blowback on other issues, such as his management of the federal government, and has not seen an approval bump even after congressional Democrats effectively capitulated to end a record-long government shutdown last month.

I honestly didn't expect it to get that low. I always thought there is about 33% of the population of the world that is just contrarian, anarchistic, or wacky that would support trump no matter what. Those who would stand by him "If he shot someone in Times Square." But here we are, 31% don't approve of what trump proclaimed himself to be the biglyest and bestest at.
And in other stupid people news, trump continues to do what he has done all his life, put his name on and face on things that aren't appropriate.

The NPS Put Trump's Face on Its Annual Pass. Now, an Environmental Group Is Suing to Stop it.

Genocide Backer and Narcissist Donald J. Trump Puts His Name on ‘US Institute of Peace’(I know its old news, but I love the headline.)

I sometimes complain that this forum doesn't support each other enough, basically responses are only given if there is an objection, so I just wanted to I say I 100% agree with this from yesterday and feel like it applies to most everything the Dingus-in-chief does.

I think we are giving way way too much credit to Trump, his brain is falling out of his ears when he isn't snoring in the oval office. The conspiracy theory that the right wing had about Biden is what is happening here, immigration is being run by President Stephen Miller, Foreign Policy in the Americas Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, economic policy Howard Nutlick I mean Lutnick etc. Trump is being kept busy with his renovations, ballrooms, rallies etc, Trump is basically a puppet president. That moron doesn't know how to circumvent laws or what laws are being broken, he hired people who he sees as "loyal" they give him his cut and he is kept busy.

The Trump administration runs like the mob except this Don is losing his step so the lieutenant run the show and the boss doesn't care as long as his pockets keep getting stuffed.

(i know its from a different thread. I didn't want to spam topics.)

[s_bushido]

In a sane world this would lead to impeachment.

Can you imagine if Nixon was still alive looking at Trump doing an impeachable offense every month and just sitting there thinking you became President in the wrong century.

Month? It's every day... -_-

If his actions had any consequence, he would have been in jail for the attempted coup half a decade ago.

[Edge-]

Trump’s handling of the economy is at its lowest point in AP-NORC polling

and republicans will do nothing about it so this is what they want

[Milchshake]

Lol the AP does free PR for Trump in their own article.

For Trump, declining to 36 percent approval is “good news.”


Compared to Biden, holding steady at 41% is “a source of concern,” for AP news.

[Edge-]

A 15% drop is "down slightly"? (losing 6 points)

[Rasulis]

a constant reminder that our greatest defense against these people is that they are by and large fucking incompetent

If they couldn't convince a grand jury which only requires majority decision and preponderance of evidence, how do they expect to convince trial jurors which require unanimous decision and beyond a reasonable doubt to convict.

[Mayhem]

A 15% drop is "down slightly"? (losing 6 points)

Exactly what I was thinking. That's a pretty impressive drop for half a year.

[Edge-]

@Mayhem

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/12/nx-s1...husetts-nevada

The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits against four more states as part of the Trump administration's attempt to access sensitive voter data. The DOJ is also suing one Georgia county, seeking records from the 2020 election.

The department has now filed suit against 18 states — mostly Democratic-led, and all states that President Trump lost in the 2020 election — as part of its far-reaching litigation.

For months, the Justice Department has been demanding certain states turn over complete, unredacted copies of their voter registration lists, including any driver's license numbers and parts of voters' Social Security numbers.

In court filings, the DOJ says it wants this personal information to check if states are following federal law on keeping accurate voter rolls.

But most states have refused, citing privacy restrictions.

This is one of the perks of our weird voter registration system. Democratic states can protect their voters information from bad-faith fishing expeditions by dishonest administrations like this.

[Zaydin]

Unearthed audio has the head of the RNC admitting that the GOP is facing almost certain defeat next year.

They are of course denying/downplaying it and boasting that the American people trust Trump, the country is better off with Republicans in charge and that they will win in 2026.

The first two are just objectively false: One only has to look at Trumps approval ratings to debunk the former and look at the state of the economy to debunk the latter. As for the third, Republicans got slaughtered in the off-year elections this year, Democrats lead on the generic ballot and Trump is historically unpopular.

While the midterms are 11 months away, a political eternity, as of now, the odds are highly likely that 2026 will be a wave election for Democrats.

[Mayhem]

@Mayhem

https://www.npr.org/2025/12/12/nx-s1...husetts-nevada



This is one of the perks of our weird voter registration system. Democratic states can protect their voters information from bad-faith fishing expeditions by dishonest administrations like this.

Yeah, I see why your system is necessary. Here, you'd need a lawsuit to strip even one person of their right to vote; everything else is automated, and considering every party is involved in the process, one party can't just fuck everything up because they're in charge. So whatever the government is trying in the US wouldn't be possible here unless it's already a dictatorship, but in that case, who cares?

Would it be possible for the government to just lock up democrats for as long as voting takes place? Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate the insight.

[Nymrohd]

In a sane world this would lead to impeachment.

Can you imagine if Nixon was still alive looking at Trump doing an impeachable offense every month and just sitting there thinking you became President in the wrong century.

If Nixon had gone to jail like he should have, none of this would have happened. Instead he was allowed to just resign and retire in all the comfort of a former president. He never even had to admit to fault. In short, it made clear what the upper limit of punishment is for a president.

[Poopymonster]

In a sane world this would lead to impeachment.

Can you imagine if Nixon was still alive looking at Trump doing an impeachable offense every month and just sitting there thinking you became President in the wrong century.

Nixon would already have had a stroke if he hadn't died earlier that year in 1994.
He'd have been screaming "ALL I HAD TO SAY WAS I FORGOT?"

[Draco-Onis]

If Nixon had gone to jail like he should have, none of this would have happened. Instead he was allowed to just resign and retire in all the comfort of a former president. He never even had to admit to fault. In short, it made clear what the upper limit of punishment is for a president.

Well it's a long list of people who were not held accountable in the name of "bringing people together"

The monsters of the civil wars got pardons some of which went on to form the KKK and commit massacres like Tulsa which they were rewarded for by getting into government.

Richard Nixon for what you guys have stated

Ronald Reagan for Iran contra

The right wing of this country have been getting away with it for centuries now because frankly the "opposition" is on their side. The people who fought against slavery were racists themselves just not to the extend of the slavers. The unitary executive and the current right wing media were from the lessons of Nixon. Ronald Regan became a right wing god even though he is one if not the worst president in modern history and so on. I would not be surprised that a decade from now Trump gets the Regan treatment because the United States refuses to learn from history.

[DarkTZeratul]

The monsters of the civil wars got pardons some of which went on to form the KKK and commit massacres like Juneteenth which they were rewarded for by getting into government.

Juneteenth wasn't a massacre, it was the day slaves in Texas found out they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and is used to celebrate the end of slavery in general.

[Draco-Onis]

Juneteenth wasn't a massacre, it was the day slaves in Texas found out they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation and is used to celebrate the end of slavery in general.

Doh brain fart I meant the Tulsa race massacre will edit.

[Malkiah]

Would it be possible for the government to just lock up democrats for as long as voting takes place?

a surprisingly trick question, depending on how you mean the word "possible".

legally/morally/socially/culturally - yes it's possible, since the entirety of the US government is set up in such a way that a 200 year old rough draft of a thinly veiled cash grab is the basis for the whole thing, and so US society treats everything like "if it's explicitly in the constitution then you can only do it if you can sound confident in declaring that's how you're interpreting it, and if it's not explicitly in the constitution then it's kind of wild west rules".
i've no doubt that if say the trump admin announced that democratic voters were a threat to national security and were going to be jailed that 50% of the US population would go along with that without batting an eye.

logistically is another matter entirely because rounding up 75-odd million people spread out over roughly 10 million square kilometers with the current armed service totals being only around 2.8 million.
even if you had zero civilian resistance and it was strictly an issue of finding out who votes democrat, sending someone to their house, rounding them up, and taking them to a detention center... you'd need every active service member to round up around 25 people each (if you looking at it as a purely mathematical problem).
how long and how much money would that take in a hypothetical where 100% of democrats are docile and offer up full cooperation?
how long and how much money would that take with literally any kind of resistance?

IMO it's more a physics issue than a philosophical one.

[Mayhem]

a surprisingly trick question, depending on how you mean the word "possible".

legally/morally/socially/culturally - yes it's possible, since the entirety of the US government is set up in such a way that a 200 year old rough draft of a thinly veiled cash grab is the basis for the whole thing, and so US society treats everything like "if it's explicitly in the constitution then you can only do it if you can sound confident in declaring that's how you're interpreting it, and if it's not explicitly in the constitution then it's kind of wild west rules".
i've no doubt that if say the trump admin announced that democratic voters were a threat to national security and were going to be jailed that 50% of the US population would go along with that without batting an eye.

logistically is another matter entirely because rounding up 75-odd million people spread out over roughly 10 million square kilometers with the current armed service totals being only around 2.8 million.
even if you had zero civilian resistance and it was strictly an issue of finding out who votes democrat, sending someone to their house, rounding them up, and taking them to a detention center... you'd need every active service member to round up around 25 people each (if you looking at it as a purely mathematical problem).
how long and how much money would that take in a hypothetical where 100% of democrats are docile and offer up full cooperation?
how long and how much money would that take with literally any kind of resistance?

IMO it's more a physics issue than a philosophical one.

Well, you certainly don't need to lock up all of them, just enough in swing states or close call elections. They only have to keep staying in power, not invading the country.

[PenguinChan]

So Trump wants to send $2,000 to citizens as a form of bribery in general, which is stupid (in many ways) but that's where I'm wondering: Couldn't they just offer $5,000 for every american who votes for republicans in the mid-terms and the next primary? I feel like since the republicans are wholly corrupt this isn't out of the realm of possibility and actually one that they may try and pull.