Yesterday the head (bishop?) of the episcopal priests in New Hampshire told the priests to put their affairs in order and make sure their wills are up to date, because the time for rhetoric is over and it’s time to put their bodies between the vulnerable and ICE. I have long said that if there was a branch of Christianity I could tolerate if someone held a gun to my head and said I had to participate, it would be the Episcopalians – at least the one’s I’ve encountered – although I would probably die from their stem-winding Eucharist rituals.
It will never be the same. The only hope IMO is that we use the wreckage as an opportunity to rebuild a lot from scratch. But a political analysis I read the other day said that is far easier said than done. Right now in the aftermath of the murder of Rene Good there’s a lot of popular sentiment to abolish the border patrol and ICE, but in practice, it probably would not actually ever happen. Even if you redistribute the responsibilities to other agencies while recruiting and training a truly professional force and writing a coherent immigration policy, politicians would be subjected to endless caterwauling about open borders and so it would just be easier to leave the existing org in place and I think the existing org isn’t reformable. Multiply this by a hundred other examples and it looks pretty bleak. This is another thing I’d love to be wrong about.
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It never recovered from Nixon 2, so we’re sort of fucked now. The problem comes from the cognitive bias and dissonance suffered between those that voted for Orangban and those that didn’t.
I’m going to go a different direction for a moment. In Florida, under Chapter 415 of the Florida Statutes they have enacted a “vulnerable adult exploitation” law. In Washington DC they have the Adult Protective Services Act. For reference, both are mandatory reporting jurisdictions.
My point? You don’t have to be Freud to see Trump suffers from several mental health conditions, potentially up to dementia and\or Alzheimer. It certainly looks like Republicans are exploiting a mentally ill senior citizen to promote their own interests and agenda.
By appeasing is cerebral rambling and childlike functioning they have the keys to the kingdom. Someone gets shot in Minneapolis, no problem, billionaires got a tax break. The US military invades Venezuela, no problem, we now have a stacked supreme court.
I’ll say it again, it’s not Trump that worries me. It’s the motherfuckers pulling Trumps strings and all those who cheer when he dances close to the edge that make we want to get a passport…
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Trumpism will survive Trump in some form. Unless the next administration is Democratic and prosecutes all those hangers-on ruthlessly, those fuckers will always be gumming up the works and likely back in power the next time “40,000 people in rural Wisconsin” decide to make it so.
Trumpism is a cult of personality. There is no one in the Republican party that can out-asshole Donald Trump. Trumpism will morph into something else.
What will remain is a shitload of racist, misogynistic grievance laden…likely Christian…dullest tools in the shed who will have lost their mouthpiece. Where they go and what they do is anyone’s guess. My money is on succession.
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Yeah that is what I meant. It won’t be called Trumpism just like it’s no longer called “Tea Party” or “Reaganism” or “McCarthyism” but it will be a bunch of racist oligarch-loving Christo-fascist assholes just the same.
That’s interior problems. The USA will have huge exterior problems as well. USA under the Trump 2 administration has proven to be an unreliable trade and security partner. Trump is also withdrawing the US from a shitload of UN organisations and international treaties, effectively sabotaging international cooperation. Additionally, with Trump in lead, the US has beome an aggressive superpower with expansionist tendencies that does not care about international law and the sovereignty of other nations, and that even threatens with or alludes to annexation of land belonging to allied countries. It will probably take decades to build up trust again. If it even possible to get up to the same level as before. And unless more safeguards are put in place when/if the trumpist regime is replaced, I believe even close cooperation partners will be very wary and not show the same level of trust as before.
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Right; this is the new normal.
Safeguards and I also think aggressive prosecution of everyone who broke the law. No clemency. Without that no one will think we’re serious about staying on the straight and narrow. I’m talking Nuremberg-style prosecution including, if need be, tracking down fugitives internationally. This is not vengeance but simply reasserting the rule of law and disincentivizing anyone who thinks they might like to be the next Trump.
After justice is served we can maybe have a truth and reconciliation commission or something of that nature if it will help victims get closure. But not some misguided national spasm of “let’s all move on” or the lie that prosecution somehow makes the resistance as bad as the outgoing regime.
For a president who campaigned he would stop all foreign wars, he seems determined to bomb a lot of countries. Perhaps not getting the Nobel peace prize has made him say “fuck it then”, or more likely he just loves to espouse mendacious rhetoric, that the maggats lap up.
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Trump is a product of two men and one woman. His father, Fred Trump, Roy Cohn and his mother Mary Anne. They may have been dead for decades, but their influence is still alive and well in little Donald.
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People consistently make the mistake of trying to understand Trump’s mentality in terms of their own. As a malignant narcissist he is substantively different, motivationally speaking, from most other humans. He lacks shame and everything is transactional and devoid of moral valence apart from whether it pleases or threatens him personally. This is very unrelatable, and therefore difficult for people to find purchase with it. The closest you can come is to imagine how you would behave if you were dead inside, devoid of empathy, and totally self-absorbed, but had gotten by in life (and achieved narcissistic supply) because you have a highly intuitive grasp of one thing only: how to put one over on people, how to press their buttons, how to baffle with bullshit, to delay, deflect, parry and assault endlessly. It is a way of being that would put most people into a spiral of despair and alienation but not Trump, who does not yearn for connection in any meaningful way. If you can imagine yourself functioning like that you can kind of understand him out of the corner of your eye.
The shorter version is to just regard him as the enemy of everything good and just in the world and fight him to the death. Seldom does reality present us with such cartoon villains. At least there’s no moral ambiguity here. Just stop hoping somewhere in the back of your mind for Trump or any of his serious followers to see reason.
NYT: Do you see any checks on your power on the world stage? Is there anything that could stop you if you wanted to?
Trump: Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s very good.
NYT: Not international law?
Trump: I don’t need international law.
I saw this and was screaming into the void: WHAT morality? WHAT mind? It’s like saying, the one thing that restrains me is my pet leprechaun.
Also he may not “need” international law but it exists just the same. The only way that argument works with zero consequences is if he had either cognitive capacity or morality such that his decisions always align with international law. We already know that’s not the case.
This is not going to end well. Germany just sent to warships to help defend Greenland. They won’t be the last. The spectacle of us fighting NATO, effectively and decisively ending the world order we spent decades building … well at least it will give clarity to the rest of the world, I guess.
On the “bright” side, unconfirmed reports claim the Joint Chiefs are fighting this exactly BECAUSE it’s illegal. Maybe the military (or what’s left of competent military leadership) finally found a spine? Film at 11!
I suggest that the following is continuing fallout from Orange being shunned for the Nobel. Could be wrong about that.
Among the U.S. withdrawal highlights:
UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women
UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
Peacebuilding Commission
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The Orange Scrotum isn’t a normal human being, and trying to think of him in normal terms just won’t work. To use a Freudian term, he is pure Id. An eternal baby, consisting solely of “I want”. He has even less understanding of actual concepts than the glorified Elizabots being hyped as “artificial intelligence”, and no inclination to learn, because so many around him are licking his ringpiece for their own ends. He’s the ultimate Spoiled Brat.
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357 days. If the mid terms go the way predictions forecast, the House will fall under Democratic control, specifically committee leadership. The most critical ones are Appropriations, Oversight and Accountability, Judiciary, Homeland Security and Energy and Commerce.
Delay, defund and investigate. He won’t be able to kick a golf ball back on the fairway without oversight. The best part is the Democrats don’t need Senate control to do it. That should trigger a narcissistic collapse…