The Trump observations thread

[Mimi]

[Dr. Medulla]

Spraypaint it gold and it'll be proudly on display at Del Boca Vista.

[Dr. Medulla]

[Mimi]

What the fuck are these people smoking?

[Sparky]

What the fuck are these people smoking?

I think it's the metal plate they put in his head.

All kidding aside, it's all the people like him denying that there was anything wrong with those who tired to overthrow our democracy on Jan 6 that just makes me feel sick and sad for our country.

[Spiff]

Yeah, I don't buy this anymore. I used to, but Trump amped up the drone war to unprecedented heights and got out of the iran nuclear deal which may still end us up with nukes flying around. By contrast, Biden has stopped 95% of drone strikes and ended the war in afghanistan. They're not the exact same and Biden hasn't been worse than Trump on these incredibly vital, life and death issues.

Trump was bad but Obama escalated drone warfare more than Trump did. He did it with a smile. People like that. You just need to have charisma and say the right things while being a "nazi" these days.

I hope Biden is actually anti-war. Who am I kidding, he doesn't even know what he ate for breakfast, and the war machine is pivoting to Russia and China. We've always been at war with Eastasia after all!

Have a nice day man. No need to get angry.

Ya know, I appreciate most of the things you've posted to show Biden's sinful past, but that crack about him not knowing what he ate for breakfast is a tired FOX News meme -- slander, really -- with no basis in reality.

That's not cool, IMO.

[Mark^Bastard]

I'm not American and have never watched fox news or heard that before, I thought I made it up. Or do you mean just that he isn't all there? I've seen numerous videos that show he is in cognitive decline that I'm pretty sure are not doctored.

[Mark^Bastard]

1/6 should certainly be condemned, but I don't see a bunch of idiots wandering around the Capitol for two hours as some existential threat to our "Democracy" (which we already lost a long time ago). The chances of them "taking over" the government/country was never more than 0%, and they wouldn't even have been able to do as much as they did if they hadn't been aided and abetted by sympathetic cops.

Just breaking this up a little by topic.to say it with less kneejerk unconstructive shittiness on my part, I think you and mark are understating some of the real deal nazis in that crowd. You had proud boys among others coordinating to assault the capital. Those are like, actual white nationalist terrorists.

Would it all have worked? I guess not. Because the cops and military would stop it, I guess. The same ones helping the crowd, as you say. I agree trump is an indolent sloth, but he spent four years encouraging white nationalists to prepare for a race war. That seems really bad to me! I guess it makes me a lib or something, but I think a president who encourages domestic terrorism and seems fine with seizing control of the government by force and eroding whatever shitty standards of "democracy" we have is both fashy and notably worse with potentially much worse consequences for the world if some of the few restraints on u.s. imperial behavior are fully cast away in favor of an explicit white imperial theocracy.

Robert Wright makes a point on foreign policy that actions the increase an extremely bad outcome by even an extremely small percentage are uniquely worthy of avoiding. His example is the potential for nuclear war with Russia over Ukraine. Not a likely outcome but result would be so devastating that even a .01% increase in the chances of it happening are worth avoiding. Trump is similar. What are the chances he (or his political followers) actually foments an armed insurrection of white nationalists? Probably not high, but it's such a bad outcome that even an extremely small increase in that chance is worthy of unique condemnation.

Again, my premise isn't that Biden and the Dems or are great, it's that Nazis are insanely bad and we don't want to increase the chances of them getting their hands on the keys to the American imperial car by even .0001% or whatever. And it's honestly hard for me to understand someone looking at trump and whats been going on to the Republican party and not think those odds are ticking up ever so slightly.

I'll preface my comments here by making it absolutely clear that I think we should remain vigilant when it comes to neo-Nazi and other white supremacist groups and never stop fighting them and everything they stand for. Having said that, I'm much more concerned about the institutional racism in America that ruins the lives of vulnerable people on a much broader scale than fringe hate groups could ever dream of doing—and there's simply no denying that there are few figures in contemporary American politics that have done more damage on that front than Joe Biden.





First off, it's not as if Biden doesn't also have a long, long history of racist demagoguery.



That's him bragging about his notorious 1994 Crime Bill, which would turn America into the most incarcerative society on the planet and disproportionately effect minority communities.



Biden is also arguably the architect of the post-Nixon era iteration of the inherently racist War on Drugs. When even Ronald Reagan rebuffed Biden for hs overzealousness in wanting to ramp up the drug war, Biden enlisted Strom Thurmond to help him craft even more Draconian legislation.



Thurmond was, of course, one of the most unrepentant racists of the 20th Century—which I'd say places one pretty high in the running for being the racist GOAT—in addition to being such a BFF to Joe Biden that he even gave the eulogy at Thurmond's funeral.

Biden's palling around with ultra-racists doesn't end there, as he bragged about having worked with segregationists as recently as the 2020 campaign.

Who is soft on borders? Certainly not Biden. He is finishing sections of the wall.

Not only that, but he (and Hillary Clinton) had the idea of a border wall...er, sorry, I mean, "fence"... a decade before Trump even ran for president.




Plus, there are even more kids in cages now.



We've established that Trump isn't good on being anti-war like his supporters and even some on the left often claim, but it's no contest as to whose record is worse here: at least as early as 1998, Biden was pushing for a war with Iraq. 1998. That's about a year before most of us became aware that a second George Bush existed.



When the Bush Administration did launch their disastrous war in Iraq, Biden was its biggest cheerleader on the Democratic side of the aisle. Anyone who was serving in congress in 2003 who voted in favor of the war should be a pariah afraid to show their face at the local carwash or grocery store. Instead, we put them in charge of the country.



Biden has also repeatedly bragged that the the Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995 that he authored with Tom Daschle was basically the Patriot Act six years before the actual Patriot Act. And yet he's somehow not a fascist?



And, as previously mentioned (and discussed extensively in another thread a few months ago), under Biden's watch we're now bogged down in a proxy war with Russia. A proxy war in which we're actively arming... neo-Nazis. As a result, we now have liberals openly chanting their support for Nazi battalions in the streets of major American cities.





While we're at it—like Trump, Joe Biden is also a rapist and decades-long pathological liar (and plagiarist).







In the decades that Joe Biden was destroying the lives of millions of black and brown people (plus murdering a million+ Iraqis), Donald Trump was mostly just fucking over other equally-sociopathic businessmen. When the protests and riots exploded in the wake of the George Floyd murder, yes, Trump certainly poured gasoline all over that fire—but the country was reckoning with a lot of problems that Biden either exacerbated or outright created.

Trump only had four years to destroy the country. Biden had four decades.

Great effortpost. Agreed 100%. But what I want to make clear is that I don't see this as picking a side over another. They're all fucked. That's the point. I don't buy that Trump is some abberation and now we can "get back to normal" or whatever BS the libs believe.

[Flex]

It's not that trump is an aberration, it's that he's an acute manifestation of a lot of systemic American illness. That's worthy of particular opposition, imho.

[Flex]

Also, I swear I have like half of a response typed up Howard, lol. You put in all the work, I always feel bad if I don't give a full response and then it seems like I didn't read your post or something. Little Duder wouldn't go down for an afternoon nap so catching up on work now, etc.

[Mark^Bastard]

It's not that trump is an aberration, it's that he's an acute manifestation of a lot of systemic American illness. That's worthy of particular opposition, imho.

I have no issue with that. I do find it odd when people are more upset about his mannerisms than his actual record though. He is both an acute example of what's wrong with the system, and also in a weird way an aberration in the etiquette of a leader. There was so much fixation on this, like as if the masters of slaves are okay as long as they know which fork to use for which course of their meal, and they keep the elbows off the table.

[Howard Beale]

I'm not American and have never watched fox news or heard that before, I thought I made it up. Or do you mean just that he isn't all there? I've seen numerous videos that show he is in cognitive decline that I'm pretty sure are not doctored.

Yeah, for the record, pointing out that Biden's mental acuity seems to be—at the very least—not what it once was isn't something that was started by Fox News or the Republicans. It was CNN/MSNBC and his fellow Democratic candidates during the 2020 primary, even his campaign hinted at it.






As you can see, concern about his memory/cognitive ability was discussed pretty openly by fellow Democrats and Dem-friendly media when no one thought he was going to be the nominee. After Obama stepped in to stop Bernie from locking up the nomination on Super Tuesday and got everyone to drop out and coalesce around Biden, any such speculation instantly became a "Fox News talking point" or "Russian propaganda" or what have you. Conservative media certainly picked it up and ran with it eventually, as would be expected, but they're not the ones who started it.

Also, I swear I have like half of a response typed up Howard, lol. You put in all the work, I always feel bad if I don't give a full response and then it seems like I didn't read your post or something. Little Duder wouldn't go down for an afternoon nap so catching up on work now, etc.

No worries, man. I'm glad we're able to engage on this stuff in good faith, the timetable isn't important.

[Mark^Bastard]

such speculation instantly became a "Fox News talking point" or "Russian propaganda" or what have you.

It is the lib version of pizzagate

[Spiff]

I'm not American and have never watched fox news or heard that before, I thought I made it up. Or do you mean just that he isn't all there? I've seen numerous videos that show he is in cognitive decline that I'm pretty sure are not doctored.

Not a FOX News viewer? Well, then, the corresponding point of reference is The Daily Mail for you, which an equally noxious media outlet.

The clips you've seen may or may not have been doctored, but a hell of a lot of them have been.

And for those that are not, I dare say that a camera crew following anyone on this message board for every waking moment, in just one day of speaking to crowds or individuals, I'll bet we would each have a dozen or so verbal blunders that could be edited back to back to make us seem like we are in mental decline, too.

[matedog]

In the decades that Joe Biden was destroying the lives of millions of black and brown people (plus murdering a million+ Iraqis), Donald Trump was mostly just fucking over other equally-sociopathic businessmen. When the protests and riots exploded in the wake of the George Floyd murder, yes, Trump certainly poured gasoline all over that fire—but the country was reckoning with a lot of problems that Biden either exacerbated or outright created.

Trump only had four years to destroy the country. Biden had four decades.

Great effortpost. Agreed 100%. But what I want to make clear is that I don't see this as picking a side over another. They're all fucked. That's the point. I don't buy that Trump is some abberation and now we can "get back to normal" or whatever BS the libs believe.

I get it that Biden did shitty things in the 70s-00s. 99% of all major politicians of the time did. Don't Ask Don't Tell, Crime Bills, blah blah blah. I'm not really sure what the greater point is? He was shitty then, so the policies he's moving forward today are shitty? I don't agree with that. I also take exception to Trump only fucking over "equally-sociopathic businessmen." He has a well documented history with housing discrimination issues and these generally align with his current policies, unlike to some degree, Biden.

I guess Howard's posts just reek of edgelord both sides-ism. Knowing Biden's history is important, but using it to undermine and equate him and Trump (or even saying he is currently more problematic than Trump???) is faulty at best.