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  • Current Events & Politics Moderators: deficiT | tryptakid | Foreigner

The 2018 Trump Presidency thread

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yea, I watched those yesterday. That twitter security guy seems like a dipshit. She's almost laughing at how stupid he is, but he thinks she's laughing because he is so "powerful" and that he is sending DMs to the DOJ.

As if the president of the USA would be sending DMs that could expose him. It's not as if he is Hillary Clinton...
 
Morninggloryseed said:
...and I am so excited for the extra money in Feb for 10 years. Go Tramp!
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i think your comment sums up a lot of feelings and political atmosphere.

a lot of core trump fans support him regardless of anything he does. they don't care about lies or hypocrisy or broken promises or the environment and the dismantling of the ~50 year old agency tasked with helping protect it or the corporate cronyism or anything. they're just all about trump and he can do no wrong.

there is a much larger group who aren't quite as wed to the cult of trump and may question policy but throw them an extra hundred bucks or two a month in a giant tax break and they're happy to ignore the costs.

it's a perfectly valid personal choice and it's also a perfectly valid vote but i think it's tragic that a lot of people don't care about anybody but themselves anymore, nor about the environment (hey, at least they'll all be dead when the shit really hits the fan) nor about compassion for others and etc.

you said elsewhere that a wave of conservatism was sweeping the west, liquidmethod? it seems to manifest in a wave of cynicism, greed and selfishness. obviously that's a generalisation but that's how it appears to me.

alasdair
 
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consumer said:
She is another neo con though Ali. I think the Dems need to put forward a non celebrity politician with runs on the board for supporting left / center leaning policy and offer up strong policy alternatives ready to go not slogans like Trump and government rushing through bills without adequate oversight or debate as the Republicans have on incredibly important things such as health or tax reform. Oprah is not the answer.
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oh, i totally agree with you. i think oprah would be a terrible choice for president. she's not the answer.

my comment was just a dig at trump's 'genius'.

:)

alasdair
 
LiquidMethod said:
Why do you think that leaked audio didn't sink Trump's chances in the election?
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because a lot of trump fans are willing to overlook some quite egregious shit, especially if they're going to get an extra hundred bucks or two in their salary because of a tax cut.

LiquidMethod said:
I'm also getting really tired of explaining this ad nauseum.
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then stop?

LiquidMethod said:
Trump so far has done well on his way to fulfilling his campaign promises. One of his major promises was that he was going to drain the swamp.
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and yet his transition team was - and his cabinet is - a who's who of corporate interest. the guy in charge at the epa seems determined to dismantle environmental protection in this country.

one of the main promises - if not the central promise - of his campaign was repeal and replace obamacare. it was going to be so easy! only trump knew how to fix healthcare!

so what happened there? his own party controlled both houses and he still couldn't get it done.

LiquidMethod said:
...I would like to hear an alternative theory as to why this is all suddenly happening and why it has nothing to do with Trump.
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you're making the claims so you need to back them up. honestly, you get so bent out of shape when people do this you really should try harder not to do it yourself. is the number of resignations (in context) abnormal? if not then it's a total non issue. i picked a couple or three of the cases you listed and had a look at them - they're all perfectly valid reasons for wanting to resign: age; etc.

you're the one who's claiming they're all related to trump somehow so you're the one who needs to back up your claim. "evidence mate". sound familiar?

LiquidMethod said:
As for being like, really smart and a stable genius lol he is trolling you all.
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you seem to be saying that with glee? i tend to set the bar a little higher when it come to president of the united states. but i guess this is just where we are now.

alasdair
 
^ yep.

here are a couple of charts which support the claim:



it will be interesting to see what happens as a result of the tax cut...

alasdair
 
You aren't considering the fact that many companies provide stock options to their average hourly empoyees.

For instance my father has done quite well with the UPS stock he received as a common employee...

And there is a rough correlation in your bottom graph

workers wages go up from just under 1.5 to just under 2.5 roughly a 67% increase

DJIA goes up from just over 1250 to just over 2250 roughly an 80% increase

When you see the biggest dip in employee pay the DJIA takes it's biggest hit shortly after.
 
JahSEEuS said:
You aren't considering the fact that many companies provide stock options to their average hourly empoyees.
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sure. but many? can you quantify that?

JahSEEuS said:
For instance my father has done quite well with the UPS stock he received as a common employee...

And there is a rough correlation in your bottom graph

workers wages go up from just under 1.5 to just under 2.5 roughly a 67% increase
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the bulk of that increase was from end 2012 to march-ish 2013. from there it's much flatter - perhaps 2.0 to 2.3 or 15%.

alasdair
 
JessFR said:
It might be that I'm really tired (so if I don't reply for hours after this post, thats why I fell asleep). But I don't see how what I'm saying here and there contradict each other.
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You're probably right - i guess i just don't share your cynicism. I think that climate change is heartbreakingly tragic, and i don't see anyone as deserving it.
I am very disappointed at the political failing on this issue though.
For over 30 years we've known about it.
It's no secret, and we have had a chance to convert to renewables - but the debate, the science and policy has been hijacked by the fossil fuel industry and the various political players it had bought and owned (basically the whole political establishment of the west, and the rest too).

Trump is one of the more extreme examples of nihilistic greed typified in the anti-environmentalist, anti-science fossil fuel lobby.
That's why i have huge issues with this sort of deregulated capitalism. It's indistinguishable from organised crime, and it's literally killing us all.

I'm not a utopian socialist - i don't think any system is perfect - but we have a very drastic problem here, and it requires some pretty serious solutions.

Trump tries to pass himself off as a disrupter of the status quo, but that's only in the sense that he's an antisocial deviant who is hostile to socially progressive politics, efforts to increase equality (between different classes, ethnicities, sexual orientations, genders etc etc etc).
Outrage is the only tool he has to work with, and it distracts people from the real damage he is doing, and divides communities for the sake of it.
He has nothing to offer the world besides fear, ignorance and greed. I'm glad he is politically inept, because his agenda is truly toxic.

Trump is the antithesis of what the world desperately needs. We need leadership to respond to the unfolding crisis.

Instead we have a divisive, inflammatory boorish idiot at the helm. Trollish culture wars are not political leadership, and trump just seems to be driven by his insecurities, grudges and petty bullshit.

His "shit hole" comments today sum up his whole "political career". Infantile, hateful, selfish vulgarity - and stupidity.
Trump is a fucking disgrace and i hope his fall from grace comes sooner rather than later. He's a fucking embarrassment.
He's capable of doing a lot more damage than he already has, and that needs to be prevented.

Like fossil fuels, the US needs to ditch this fossil fool.
 
Well said, sj. The biggest problem with trump going is that would likely put pence at the helm, and pence has truly repugnant and vile political goals that be wishes to force on everyone, and he's politically adept so he'd be able to advance his twisted theocratic agenda. Our only real hope is that the whole lot of them go down with trump - pence, ryan, and hatch are all monsters too but on different ways from trump. We're doomed almost no matter what.
 
In that case perhaps we're better off with trump until the next election. Knock him out and we might end up with someone equally bad but more competent.
 
^ I think any attempt to indict trump while he is still in office is fraught with risk.
I'm not very knowledgeable about US constitutional or criminal law, but an opinion i've heard several times is that it's not certain whether or not anyone really has the authority to arrest the president.
I'm not sure if that is true - but the other problem is that he may well be able to pardon himself.
Mueller and his team are very experienced and knowledgeable. I suspect that they will not make their move until it is clear that he cannot weasel out of it.

Now, I hope that the Mueller investigation is able to destroy Pence's career as well as trump's.

Wishful thinking, of course - and republican supporters don't seem to be troubled by voting for people with shady reputations (accusations of money laundering? Sexual assault? Paedophilia??? No problem!) but i assume that if any of them is convicted of a felony, it'll be the end of their political careers.

I guess it seems unlikely, but i don't think impossible.

If trump does go down for this russia business (relating to the election, not the money laundering - assuming that the two things are sepsrate - who knows?) - it seems quite safe to assume that the vice president would be implicated too, right? To the point, i would assume, that his career and reputation would be pretty well destroyed as well.
It seems unbelievable that a VP could be in the middle of something like this (whatever this is - we don't know the full details yet) and not be implicated too.

But time will tell.

Obviously i'm getting way ahead of myself, but its hard to understand - if trump does come unstuck for this very shady looking business - how the VP could come away unscathed.

But we are in unchartered territory. And, as above - the republican party seem to operate on a different set of values, a different moral compass, to anything i could possibly understand.

But basically i think the american people need to demand a hell of a lot more than this.
 
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If you wanna get rid of the president under the law you gotta impeach him, then congress undertakes an investigation and can bring charges and if found guilty, they can remove him from office by force. At which point, no, he can't pardon himself.
 
Yep, i think that - one way or another - they'll be sitting on this until he is out of office.
Then i suspect they'll pounce, and there will be a big list of defendants named trump.
 
they're using him to ram their wishlist through (that massive handout to the wealthy under the guise of a "tax bill", another massive handout ot the wealthy in the form of repealing the ACA, deregulating as much of everything as possible, selling off federal lands to their buddies, etcetc), because he's a convenient scapegoat that they can blame everything on, and they'll toss him under the bus when they're done raping the country and act like they're totally blameless in the whole thing. and ofc the gullible and willfully ignorant republican voters will eat it up. the trumpenproletariat are a different matter, but they're a minority so upsetting them wont really come with any kind of political cost.

trump could be removed from office at any time using the 25th section 4, but he's still a useful idiot at the moment. as we get closer to the midterm elections this year though we're going to see republicans start distancing themselves from trump in a effort to save their own asses, because if the democrats take both houses he will absolutely be impeached, and hopefully the whole administration will go down with him.
 
Yep, useful idiot is correct.
I suspect he's a convenient "non politician" figure that they can later claim was a complete anomoly, after he's attempted to implement all manner of unpalatable legislation, and voiced a range of extremely distasteful talking points.

Which isn't to say that i think the republican hierarchy have any control over what he does.

But he's a classic US president of late capitalism: disposable, plastic, cheap and nasty.
Dispose after use.
 
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