Why bother protecting this scum bag? 70% of the population would rejoice if he didn’t finish his term in office.
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It’s okay though because Lara told me his highness, the President donates his salary (again…!) to the Park Service or some other milquetoast thing.
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Trump’s opponents are doing quite a bit more than a shrug of resignation. He’s being shut down on in every possible way, as prosecutors pursue him. Also it does seem to be taking a toll on his supporters. Just like 20% of the population still thinks the sun revolves around the Earth, it’ll be pretty hard to get Trump approval under 20% too. But still, his approval rate is historically low now and going lower.
But I do agree that no one appears particularly surprised any more. In a way I think this drives Trump. A narcissist seeking negative attention as better than none, he has an inner passionate need to push the edge. Hence the completely unasked-for “trans ban” in the military that he didn’t even mention to the military, his weird comments to the assembled Boy Scouts, and so many other things.
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To be fair, to be able to carry out his agenda, he needs enough support with in his party. I think there is a reason he didn’t run, and that’s because he have enough party support. I think it indicates that the party is splintering along lines of the traditional GOP and the religious oriented GOP that emerged in 1980 with the Reagan revolution. I think if he had the support he’d need to already be president, he’d already have it. But while there are plenty of people who would back his anti-LBGQT and anti-woman agenda, it’s no longer a majority of the party, even if it’s still a vocal minority. This wing of the party can throw it’s weight around locally/state-wide, but not nationally, and they know it. I think if he became president, he would be another Ford. I don’t think he’d win re-election, because he’s too extreme for the other parts of the party, especially some younger, libertarian leaning GOPers who don’t care nearly as much about social issues as they do about tax cuts.
I could be wrong, of course, but I think that if the religious right could have won elections straight out, they would have. They’ve been trying and planning and the closest they got was W.
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I think you’re right that there is shock fatigue crippling us now. It’s hard to stay surprised and outraged all the time. I guess I just wish there were Democratic – and for crying out loud, Republican! – legislators recognizing that a President blatantly profiting off his office is a horrible precedent. Laws to prevent this should be a plank of every Democratic candidate’s platform in 2018 and 2020 until such behavior is made illegal.
And don’t you know – and I’m being stone-faced serious about this – that the “unasked-for ‘trans ban’” and other such off-the-wall actions are intentional distractions orchestrated by staffers like Bannon? The particular distractions you mention were to keep media attention off of Bill Browder’s damning Senate Judiciary Committee testimony last week:
If you’ve read Browder’s account of how Russia works, you’ll see why team Trump would be terrified for average Americans to be talking about it (I didn’t even see an article here on BoingBoing about this, though I might have missed it). It’s pretty obvious that Trump is deeply involved in Putin’s gangster economy, and his people want us all talking about Boy Scouts and transgender soldiers rather than “real” news. Every time something important happens, he lobs a messy poop grenade at the media and they willingly let it explode on them.
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Especially as it’s decidedly unproductive to constantly just be horrified at each day’s multiple rounds of news of terrible, immature, awful behavior coming from the government. I mean, I can see why people are semi-ironically nostalgic for George W Bush; he was incompetent, but in sort of a low-key aw-shucks sort of way with big obvious failures and fuckups opponents could point at. With Trump, to keep up, you end up just screaming incoherently at the non-stop shock, to the point where “hey, the President dictated a letter helping his son lie about helping Russia interfere with the election” isn’t a weeks’ worth of headline news, it’s just the 2pm awfulness.
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I don’t know that I believe it, by all indication he is also extremely incompetent but is more appealing as a foil to Trump and only as a foil to Trump.
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But… Trump isn’t taking a salary!
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SCNR: hashtag ScandinaviaIsACountry, hashtag SwissExeptionalism.
FTR, Switzerland and it’s berlusconiesque SVP clique is definitely allowed to play, and Fuck YEAH Finnish right-wing nationalists joined the party quite a while ago. Can’t speak for Norway and Sweden, they are under my radar, but Denmark is also quite good in the run. All those countries, however, have some things in common: they are comparably homogeneous and generally speaking quite rich.
Why do Objectivists always compare the US to Rome? It’s just not apt. We’re the barbarians.
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They also don’t mention that the Roman Empire survived for nearly 1000 years after the fall of Rome.
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IKR? What in the ever-loving fuck.
They only seem to care when it was the Ottoman empire who took over Constantinople, ignoring the fact that for about 400 years, the Catholic Church ignored or attacked the Orthodox church due to the schism. But a multi-ethnic/confessional army led by a Muslim who declared himself to be the new Roman emperor conquers Constantinople, and all of a sudden, it’s an attack on a supposedly coherent, united Christian world!
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In what way are we the barbarians? They were young, strong, becoming increasingly well organized and on the rise. We are no longer any of those.
The barbarians were culturally young, healthy and beginning to understand and use the power of their cultural youth and more importantly, were becoming organized instead of easily defeatable roving war bands with pathetic little chiefs who fought amongst themselves so often almost anyone could conquer them and who spent more time pursuing “blood feuds” with other tribes, it’s amazing they managed to organize at any point in time…
Rome, or if you prefer, the Western Empire, was decrepit, corrupt, riddled with Emperors who felt the entire project existed just so they could enjoy themselves (If golf had existed, the comparison might be even more apt and the Roman citizenry were concerned primarily with their entertainment and how much the current government was going to give them.
The West could not hold on to what it had, yet kept trying to expand and spent its treasure and armed forces in endless, pointless wars of conquest/reconquest with no clear objective when various generals weren’t busy fighting each other over who was to be the Emperor that week or leaving critical border areas unguarded as they raced their legions back to Rome to try to claim the purple…
The Eastern Empire, I think it can be argued, diverged very rapidly from what most people think of as “Roman” and in fact became a very corrupt near-theocracy with the Basileus as the direct representative of “Christ” on Earth in ways the western Popes could only salivate over.
Two centuries or less after the fall of the western Empire, the eastern was significantly different and Marcus Aurelius wouldn’t have recognized it as being Roman I suspect.
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And never mind the scruffy religious fanatic barbarians who sacked Constantinople in 1204, fatally wounding the Byzantine Empire.
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Well, that’s what they got for disagreeing on doctrine! See, when the western church did it, it was righteous and holy… when the scary Turks did it, it was a direct attack on Jesus himself! /s
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Another point to remember is that from the beginning, the Americans saw themselves as renewing the Roman Republic, holding heroes like Cinninnatus up as their role models. The citizen who does his duty and returns to a quiet life. It is a popular illusion, that the republic was decent and imperial Rome decadent. And in some ways, it was the bureaucracy that held Rome together despite the excesses of the princeps.
But when the Secret Service starts auctioning off the office, well, then we have long passed a point of no return.
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How is it allowed for the president to personally profit from his decisions like that?
in this case, on the surface, trump doesn’t profit directly. someone else ( joel anderson? ) owns the space, and that person gets the 130,000 a month.
https://twitter.com/PaulSonne/status/887527079532802048
want to speculate on kickbacks and favors though? it’s a situation ripe for corruption. ( like pretty much everything 45 does. )
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"Beach Haven ain’t my home!
No, I just can’t pay this rent!
My money’s down the drain,
And my soul is badly bent!
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no black folks come to roam,
No, no, Old Man Trump!
Old Beach Haven ain’t my home!"
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