Sometimes he gets it exactly right:
There have been other occasions when he has not been quite as accurate:
Trump claims 300 million people died from drugs last year. (Only 62 million people died last year in the entire world from all causes.)
When Trump is right, he’s right
Better watch out, this isn’t fair and critical, therefore it’s hate speech and the Bondi Gestapo will be after you. Or at least claiming to. Trying to turn the screws with about 1% of the control, motivation, or ability that 1930s Germany had. Maybe they should be sending in their five things email to Elon so they can stay on track and Patel doesn’t perpetually look like he stepped on a balloon.
You’ve hit on the exact difference between them and Nazis – the Nazis were competent. These guys are just as evil, but they suck at everything.
Also, it’s a lot more difficult to control every means of communication in modern media, even though they try. In the 1930s and 40s, all you had to do is control propaganda through the newspapers, newsreels in theater, and radio. I’m sure Trump wishes he could go after anyone with force who questions him in the slightest if it was possible, like the ABC News reporter today.
You don’t need to be that competent…plenty of dictatorships fail the competency test yet remain in power.
I think they had to be somewhat on the ball to get established, though. They at least needed enough armed force to round up dissenters. In a country with the size and population of the US, that might be tough. Unless all the state, county, and municipal police forces decide to enforce Trump’s agenda, anyway. I have no idea how likely that is.
You at least have to be motivated. Trump sits on his ass, plays golf, worries about presentation and rule through proclamation instead of reality. He doesn’t care if the action he takes actually is successful, as long as he can present it as a success and make a claim that gets him praise from his sycophants and moves onto the next thing.
That’s why he spent more money paying buyouts with DOGE, wasted millions letting foreign aid go to waste rather than using it, spent nine figures in munitions to unsuccessfully bomb Iran, sunk the deficit further with his tax breaks to the rich, is paying national guard members to do gardening in DC, imposed billions in tariffs the lower and middle class have to pay, and paying ICE to round up everyone from prospective nurses to firefighters to send back to countries they haven’t been at since a child.
Billions and billions of dollars with no actual function to make anything better except presentation.
There are groups around Trump that are motivated.
The problem of low-information citizens (“voters”) has to be solved if self-government is to be viable. I mean, with widely disseminated agency of the populace. IOW, in agreement with publicly expressed dogma & actual, practical belief in this country, particularly on the left. The obvious solution would be “education”.
Except, as experts on public information messages know full well, they don’t work. They put them out bc it’s the only arrow in their quiver. My own preference, college for all… That’s a nonstarter. A pathetically lost cause.
Even if it solved the problem of low-information people, it would do so without solving the larger one of good governance. Crowd-sourcing turned out to be unreliably a good-decisions machine.
My take is, the goal of giving everyone skin in the game is all well & good if taken as aspirational. But should be taken with a grain of salt. If taken too literally, well, we have now glimpsed where that leaves us. I have no clue who the governing subgroup could even be. That is a separate problem at least as challenging as the one I have tried to argue we’re up against the wall with. Opinions differ who should rule. That’s the hard wall behind the first, soft, cushy one.
My technical term for the who-should-rule hard wall would be “casus belli”.
How many MAGA voters know that Vance compared Trump to Hitler?
You can just substitute the word “anything” after the first five words.
I see a lot of coping and seething in this thread. Basically, the left was in the process of doing all kinds of power-grabbing, thought-policing, heavy-handed policy making, fascist BS, and then lost power. So what did they do then? Why, they immediately started screeching that Trump and the Right are nazis! So now that America has spoken and fought back against LGBT/tranny propaganda, and vaccine mandates, and all the other hard-line ideology of the the left, you guys stoop to name calling and political violence. And the worst part is, you can’t even open your eyes enough to see it. “Everyone’s wrong but me!”
If America has truly spoken, the GOP wouldn’t be working so hard at gerrymandering. They have seen their own polls and have obviously realized they are going to lose the House unless they do some dramatic cheating. To put in another way, they will try to get a majority of seats from a minority of votes.
Try reading the first few pages of this nonsense…
It’s difficult to determine what the legal basis of that suit is. I would guess that the lawyers who filed it will be lucky to escape sanctions for filing a frivolous action. It seems more like a pro-Trump magazine article. The Times could probably get it dismissed with a simple motion, but it would be much more interesting if they choose not to. Since Trump is suing as an individual, he would have no immunity of any kind, and would have to respond to depositions and demands for discovery. He could not possibly avoid giving depositions since he initiated the suit.
You naively assume the rule of law applies when Trump is involved. That’s highly doubtful especially if it reaches SCOTUS.
Maga2028, everything you said is wrong and a deliberate lie you have chosen to believe. It pretty much guarantees you will have a miserable life, because the people who told you those lies want you riled up, angry, and full of hate all the time. That way you will always blame somebody else for the way the country sucks instead of them. So, it sucks to be you, and I’m OK with that.
Oh, and if this is self-righteous, I’m OK with that too, because if you can’t self-righteous toward neo-Nazis, well, what’s the point?
How’s the price of eggs?
In reading through these comments, which are EXACTY what one would expect them to be, I have one thing to say:
Next time, if your so-called ‘part of democracy’ allow you to, run a better candidate and go for the win. Then you can be in charge and make the decisions.
PS> Keep it up with the Hitler, Nazi, Gestapo comparisons. You know, those people that were responsible for the deaths of 6 MILLION people? Somewhere out there is another Charlie Kirk who deserves to be assassinated, amirite???
HECKUVA JOB, TRUMPY!!!
Oh, keep letting RFK cook and 6 MILION will seem like a quaint speed bump.
Ok, yeah, wow.
Not to mention how many extra deaths will occur because of the abrupt termination of USAID… If the USAID cuts remain as described (i.e. 80-+% of programs cut or ended) through 2025–2030, the figure of ~14 million extra deaths globally by 2030 seems plausible.
I am conflicted about that issue. The annual USAID budget was $35 billion – about a hundred bucks per year for every man, woman and child in the country. While I am OK with that for reasons both practical and humanitarian, if the majority of Americans are NOT OK with that, and convey that to their elected officials … well, I guess it disappears. That’s how a democratic republic works. It does seem to me that USAID would also lose a direct national referendum – at least at that high level of spending.
Sure, that’s short-sighted, but I think it’s probably reality.
Wasting what was already spent and discarded though was absolutely ridiculous. Large quantities of food that was already paid for but wasn’t distributed is absolutely ridiculous, especially with hundreds of thousands starving in Gaze.
The same way the abrupt firing of government employees through buyouts were ridiculous. No wrap up dates, no wind down, no plan, just cuts. That’s the issue with this moron, he’s the one causing fraud, waste, and abuse at an exponential level of damage despite being the one to claim he’s solving it.
And I’m all for national referendums, I would be curious to see how the voting would go if we put the Forbes 400 and their net worth up and asked the public if their merit to society has provided value they’ve leeched from the US infrastructure and the labor and consumer market and let the public set their tax rate and see how that one goes.
I agree with you. It seems like even when the administration has a reasonable idea, they execute it in the most inefficient, cruelest and least legal way possible. They may have needed to lay off many government workers who were unnecessary, but there was absolutely no sense in how they did it.
Trump is absolutely correct to tell Europe that they are financing the Russian war machine by buying Russian oil, but why did he make U.S. sanctions contingent on that? He can impose sanctions overnight, but they can’t create a new supply chain overnight.
The farmers he’s fucking, the guy who ran that Trump restaurant and is getting deported, the gov employees out on their asses, all the businesses who miss their yoinked immigrant hands – a lot of voters went for The Fuckstick because they thought he would NOT do what he said he would do.
Then there are the dim bulbs who believed his lies about peace and cheap eggs.
Overall there was no mandate to shut down USAID, though like everything else they LOVE saying, ‘you voted for us and this is what we want to do, so this is something you voted for.’
There was no specific mandate to do that, but they felt that they had a mandate to make government smaller and less costly, and they felt they were on safe ground with USAID because the majority of people would probably not support it if they knew it was costing them $100 per person per year.
If I had the same magical powers Trump arrogated to himself, I might have gone after that agency as well, but not without debate and the consent of Congress.
It’s interesting to me that these guys who want to cut the government never go after the FCC, which must be the biggest boondoggle ever. When I look at the actual charter of the FCC, I’m pretty sure I could handle almost all of its responsibilities by myself on my PC. (Of course, I’m exaggerating, but not by much. There’s no way they can justify 1400 employees.) The conservatives like the FCC because it gives them leverage. You’ve seen that Trump is constantly threatening to veto mergers or pull licenses unless he gets some quid pro quo, and you’ve seen that the religious nuts love the censorship powers.
To be fair, the FCC is basically self-financing, but all the revenues from regulatory funds would still be there without a staff of 1400 employees.
Meanwhile, they cut the IRS, which is probably the only government agency where every additional dollar spent on it produces more than a dollar in revenues. Makes no sense. I think this is maybe just some Trump vendetta, like his crusade against clean energy.
So if the Germans had voted to kill 6 million Jews that would be OK?
There’s a difference between what is right and what actually happens in a democracy.
If the solid majority votes for a government that will deport all the immigrants to Uganda and El Salvador, that doesn’t make it right. But that does make it happen if no branch of government stands against it.
And yes, if a cult candidate ran on a “kill the Jews and take their property” platform and got elected, that would probably happen as well, if he controlled both houses and the Supreme Court. That does not make it OK, but the only thing that prevents it in a democracy is the essential goodness of man. There is no other safeguard. Pray to whatever God you defer to that such a thing will never happen.
Probably not.
But I never thought the present situation could happen!
I am in favor of the goals of the USAID institution. (Well, most of them.) Making sure the world is fed and disease-free is not just charity (although there’s nothing wrong with charity). It is both good will for America in the geopolitical sphere (do we want those people aligned with China instead?), and a protection for Americans, because our country is not a sealed-off island, and borders do not defend against viruses and bacteria.
But the fact that I think it’s right doesn’t make it happen unless I can convince the majority of Americans of my position, and the liberals and progressives in America don’t seem capable of convincing anybody of anything. If thoughtful positions were the selling tool, Elizabeth Warren would be President. Since Donald Trump is President, liberals need to figure would what they are doing wrong, and to figure out what IS the selling tool.
I am filled with trepidation that the age of the American empire is about to collapse upon itself. For all America’s mistakes, we know “what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers.” (To cite Hunter Thompson.)
But we failed to do so.
USAID facts
Welp, amplifying what you just said, Scoop… even codifying our “norms” into laws, even adding enforcement aplenty, all measures are contingent in a democracy. That was always the bargain.
The “force” in enforcement is surely not an accident. There is power. We can spread it around, but somehow it rearranges itself into piles. There is no foolproof way to rule, & self-rule of whatever kind is necessarily one of those imperfect ways.
If you’re interested at the incompetence of Trump and DOGE in detail, there’s a very long column on what happened with the SSA earlier this year here:
Bottom line is, a bunch of unqualified early 20 something kids came into the administration, and a random social security journeyman with Dunning-Kruger guy tried to ‘lead’ the administration randomly.
It’s a case study in the type of incompetence Trump deals in. Anything that requires knowledge and detail is a lost cause for the train wreck he and his administration is.
That typifies what has happened. Even when they have a correct idea (the government is bloated), they have no idea how to fix the problem. All of a sudden they are firing arbitrary numbers of random people instead of taking the time to study the problem and devise solutions that cut the fat and leave the meat.
I’ve worked in similar systems in a large Fortune 100 company and the same issue occurs. In these large mainframe systems written in COBOL, there’s very little inherent knowledge of the system. No one writes COBOL anymore, programmers don’t comment code, architecture documents aren’t to be found, and so on. It sounds like at least they had the latter there – but what’s an early 20 something with virtually no work experience going to do – especially when they’re trying to find easy ‘wins’ in fraud. They couldn’t find any, because they don’t exist, so Trump made them up to say 120+ year olds are getting social security payments to non-existent bank accounts.
The company I worked at tried a similar ‘fix’ – hire an IBM contractor to read/fix the system for an outside perspective. Well, they couldn’t get it fixed as it caused downstream impacts, the code was 30+ years old and if the employer couldn’t attest to the usage of the code and if it was necessary or not (they’re the ones who *should* know the business requirements!) then no one does and they didn’t want to break something that causes unknown impacts downstream. Imagine that complexity exponentially in the social security system.
If John Doe back in 1987 made some reference to some random piece of code out in the ether that triggered something else and you have no idea the reason why he did it – because he was quick fixing some bizarre error in a legacy system based on memory, or some other restriction that existed at the time in the middle of the night that went caput – no one knows.
In the end, to fix things it takes knowledge and resources, no matter what the organization is, and every day it’s let to set for years and decades it only compiles technical debt that makes it more expensive and complicated to fix. Government, corporation, or private business – no one wants to invest in a thing that just ‘works’ to get it up to date as prevention down the line. And the people on top typically don’t want to hear it because these issues aren’t a part of the good or service they sell, so treat it as an HVAC system.
Looks like you were prophetic about the FCC. Disney/ABC pulled Kimmel over some fairly tame commentary, due to a future merger. The irony of ‘cancel culture’ now when it was only ever about spreading hate freely.
A) That is more than one thing.
B) Did it occur to you that we might be telling you exactly what you would expect to hear because we are telling the truth, and you realize that? The truth is consistent, although subject to new discoveries, whereas lies change pretty much every day, at least as far as Trump is concerned.
C) As someone else has said, Charlie Kirk did not deserve what he got. But he got what he thought others deserved, and was perfectly fine with that happening to them.
D) Act like a Nazi, get called a Nazi. And Trump has gotten a good start on the death toll with his botched handling of COVID, and his cancelling of USAID, and probably other things I have forgotten. He’s hard to keep up with that way.
You’re out of touch.
Wow.
Usually people make a big deal out of minor changes in polls, but this is not that. A shift from 74% to 49% in three months is seismic.
We haven’t even gotten to the bad shit yet, the stock market bubble is eventually going to collapse and everything is going to fall apart. You have existing electronics pricing going up due to tariffs and nothing grocery related going down in pricing. He’s going to continue to bounce from scapegoat to scapegoat in perpetual distraction in his own form of Nero as Rome burns.
Me & mom aged 70 & 90 got boarders. Our approval rate on boarder security is 100%. Roughly 10 out of 10 approve of our house’s handling of crime, health care, trade, the economy, the conflict between the Israelis & Palestinians, foreign policy, & immigration.
Speaking of which, we’re all quota’d out for now, but slots will come available in a few years, no doubt.