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Trump's Second Term: U.S. News and Politics

story said:
Yeah, I’m not disagreeing with you really, but it’s obvious that anyone who might follow Trump needs to be less clown-like and more statesmanlike. I can’t see such a person being less dangerous.
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I'm not so sure. A big part of the far right's success (not just in the US) appears to be a certain sort of bombastic bravado, some showmanship. The likes of Orban are not exactly 'statesmen' are they?
 
lazythursday said:
I'm not so sure. A big part of the far right's success (not just in the US) appears to be a certain sort of bombastic bravado, some showmanship. The likes of Orban are not exactly 'statesmen' are they?
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Yes, I think your right, the bombast is a big part of it (Hitler and Mussolini were also bombastic) but if the middle ground is to be brought in, not only the extreme MAGA types, then I think they’ll want to turn the volume down a bit.



Woah, here we are replicating the exact same conversation they’re having right now….
 
With apologies for cross thread posting, I think this post from Yuwipi Woman deserves consideration. The media falling into line is in the fascism playbook.


Yuwipi Woman said:
I decided to turn the news on at 9 pm. I was astonished to see nearly every channel fawning over Trump. I suppose it makes some sense. ABC is owned by Disney and they contributed to his campaign. CBS is owned by Paramount. NBC is owned by Comcast. We need to develop deeper information sources that are resilient to being taken over by the far right.

I also listened to a bit of Trump's speech. How can the Democrats just sit there and smile?
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story said:
But not surprising.

Money don’t make judgements based on anything other than itself. Trump is focused on the money, so he’s good for the money, so the markets go up.
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Well it's a little more complicated than that. A financial analyst will take so many factors into consideration before recommending investments at the institutional level. They're pragmatists at the end of the day. I've sat on trading floors before, it's pretty nuanced. Clearly the opinion (sadly) is that short term at least there's some serious money to be made here. I don't think anyone truly believed he would go this far, so fast though. But if you did, well then you're loaded today. And let's assume Trump had some idea of what he was going to do and his own investments must have skyrocketed or crashed, either way he's making money - he would have shorted some of them obvs... so would Musk and co.

That would be insider trading. Which is criminal of course. But he doesn't really care about the law now does he.
 
Petcha said:
Well it's a little more complicated than that. A financial analyst will take so many factors into consideration before recommending investments at the institutional level. They're pragmatists at the end of the day. I've sat on trading floors before, it's pretty nuanced. Clearly the opinion (sadly) is that short term at least there's some serious money to be made here. I don't think anyone truly believed he would go this far, so fast though. But if you did, well then you're loaded today. And let's assume Trump had some idea of what he was going to do and his own investments must have skyrocketed or crashed, either way he's making money - he would have shorted some of them obvs... so would Musk and co.

That would be insider trading. Which is criminal of course. But he doesn't really care about the law now does he.
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So pretty much what I said.
Thanks for filling in the detail.
 
Not sure what thread to post on now. But just heard on the news that loads of those January 6 people who are being released are going to sue the Government in a class action :D
 
lazythursday said:
I'm not so sure. A big part of the far right's success (not just in the US) appears to be a certain sort of bombastic bravado, some showmanship. The likes of Orban are not exactly 'statesmen' are they?
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There is some decent discussion of the 'rude guest' effect within populism (of all varieties) in the books in this thread
www.urban75.net

Reading Populism

There's been a bunch of books about populism recently, including a new one The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss by Marco Revelli (currently on offer). So a few of us have been discussing getting a reading group going on the Revelli book. However, considering that past reading group...
www.urban75.net www.urban75.net
 
Petcha said:
Not sure what thread to post on now. But just heard on the news that loads of those January 6 people who are being released are going to sue the Government in a class action :D
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What's your Mensa score? That should determine whether you should be on this thread or not.
 
Folks, respectfully, think there are better threads for this stuff. :)

breadandcircuse said:
What's your Mensa score? That should determine whether you should be on this thread or not.
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Skinny Ethel said:
Aldi had spicy meatballs in last Thursday. Should of got some it really annoys me when they do offers on new recipes for just a week. Whose faults that Benjamin Franklins? I say Pickmans
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story said:
This is the thing. People consider him stupid, but he really isn’t. He’s cunning. That’s better than clever for his purposes, and those of the people now riding his coattails.

If it’s expedient for him to study China, listen to and take advice from those who understand Chinese affairs, he’ll do it. His pride is not larger than his ambition.

He works very hard for what he wants, in ways that make no sense to normal people (we wouldn’t go there, just wouldn’t) and he ditches what doesn’t work for him without a backward glance (bankruptcies, unpaid wages, raped women). His system works well for him, he’s determined and committed, he’s clearsighted, he’s powerful, he has the support of the mega rich, and he’s free of any conscience. That’s a powerful combination. Think of him as a tool that can also be a weapon.

(Just to save anyone from making a whole post about it: tool fnar fnar)


He’s dismissed too easily as a twat, an orange Cheeto, all the stupid names that attempt to diminish his significance and impact. That’s self soothing. We ‘re fucked.

He knows what he’s doing and he’s now in a position to push it all through.

Hope for the Dems to wake up, for the left to bestir themselves, the rest of the world to curb him, it’s all pie in the sky now, or at least for the present.

If the US president were somehow a person who prioritised the climate emergency, there may be some hope. Instead we have a bunch of mega rich asset strippers hell-bent on profiting at all and any cost.



I’ll be watching with scant but blazing hope for a way back, but for now I’m just gritting my teeth and holding on.
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He's the perfect tool for these times, shifting the neoliberal order in ways that satisfy billionaires while persuading working class voters he's on their side against the devastation of their lives wreaked by the same neoliberal order. He's an empty vessel of self interest and revenge plus nothing deeper than what seemed to work when he was screwing people over as a property mogul and the rest. He and his hatreds and revenge targets will be at the heart of what gets done, but then there's not much else there. America first... with China. America... with, well who have you got? He's not a project, but he's got a project going on around him, he hasn't got a philosophy, just a series of predatory life experiences. And most of all, he leaves office in 4 years, so there's no sense of legacy or building something he will have to live with. He's an in the moment sociopath. Unions? Medicine? Environmental protection? Reproductive Rights? Not a great outlook.

Oh, hang on, that was a Trump rant, I should be on the 'other' thread. :D
 
Think non-voters still outnumber those who picked the candidate for either of the main parties; Trump's bombast seemed to mobilise slightly more than it put off this time, but he's still only reaching about a third of the electorate. Looking at the numbers turnout was down two percent on last time, so maybe even a weaksauce potential alternative like Biden was all it took to stop him. Should imagine a Bernie-esque candidate would stroll home with the sort of grassroots game he could get going, even with all the big money new media moguls on the attack.
 
Have now got around to reading that new Neel interview - the whole thing is very worth reading, but since it's long, here's a few bits I thought were worth pulling out to consider:
Nonetheless, only about 64% of the eligible population voted, which is lower than in 2020 but still historically high. Notably, Trump won the popular vote, becoming the first Republican candidate to do so in decades. But also remember that only about 245 million people were eligible in the first place, which is about 70% of the US population of 335 million. The ineligible remainder are either minors who cannot yet vote, felons who have been stripped of the right to vote, or immigrants who have never had a right to the vote in the US. So, as in any US election, the decision was actually made by less than half the population. And studies have consistently shown that the poorest of eligible voters are the least likely to vote, so the data is always biased upwards. For example, in the 2022 midterms, about 58% of voting-eligible homeowners voted, while only 37% of eligible renters did. In the same election, about 67% of eligible voters with incomes above $100,000 voted, compared to just 33% for those with incomes under $20,000.3 So, as in every election, I always implore people not to conflate voting data with raw demographics: if X percent of Hispanic voters, for example, cast a ballot for Trump, it does not mean that X percent of the Hispanic population supports Trump. If voting data demonstrates anything, it tends to demonstrate ideological shifts among the wealthier strata and changing patterns in non-voting among the poorer strata....



[January 6] was a very confused event, more a carnivalesque farce of insurrection rather than the real thing. But who knows. If rightwing forces gain more power in the future, maybe the event will be seen as something similar to the Beerhall Putsch: the farce prefiguring the tragedy, rather than the other way around. Those who thought that this indicated that Trump was “finished” simply don’t understand how politics works. They believe the liberal myth that those endowed with state power are required to exhibit a certain cordiality, which of course has never been true. Their attitude toward the criminal case against Trump was similar, believing that a felon could never be elected President. Ultimately, you have to remember that liberals are the type of people who put a lot of stock in things like the value of credentials, education, clean records: all the hollow cultural signifiers that can distinguish you from the working class. To them, the storming of the Capitol can only represent an inconceivable madness afflicting the body politic and signaling the breakdown of the hierarchies that are supposed to structure any reasonable society. And, in fact, it is in this attitude that we might find the genuine germ of Fascism, rather than in the confused scrawls left on the halls of Congress...


Imagine for a moment that you’re just an average American going to grab something from a drugstore. Imagine that you’re nowhere special: not in any of the big coastal metropoles or in the conservative “micropolitan” towns. Maybe one of those great, flattened cities that sprawl across the southern deserts. So you go into this Walgreens and let’s say you’re in Albuquerque, where the first thing you’ll see is one of the heavily armed guards dressed in olive green military fatigues deployed by the private security company hired by businesses throughout the central city. You pass the smiling mercenary and navigate through the line of maybe a hundred people waiting for hours to access the understaffed pharmacy where they’ll ultimately be told that the insurance company won’t cover the costs of the medicine prescribed by their doctor because it failed to gain a prior authorization ordered by the insurance company to keep down its costs. Maybe you overhear some of them chatting in line about how they’re worried their building will be sold to some real estate developer from Santa Fe who wants to triple the rent or how they had to flee homes destroyed by the devastating fire in Mora, and still haven’t received their FEMA payout. Others unconsciously rub at injuries suffered during 10-hour shifts at the Amazon warehouse just West of town near the border of the Pueblos, pockets full of ibuprofen.


You’ll make your way through the aisles, noting that every single toothbrush and tube of toothpaste is behind bulletproof glass. So is the candy, the laundry detergent, and of course the baby formula. The lone staff member is running back and forth from the registers to unlock different sections of the store, breathing heavy and about to collapse, and you can smell that subtle hint of ammonia on their sweat that hints at an endocrine disease—those plagues that have a special affinity for the poor. The thing that you came for is out of stock, as are any number of items, leaving nothing by empty cells with a price tag behind the glass as if the very air would cost you. You grab a bag of chips for no particular reason, and you wait for the cashier to return from their run, keys jangling like chains. After tax, the bag of chips costs you nearly a full hour’s work at the national minimum wage. Then imagine seeing these two campaigns: the Democrats congratulating themselves on their well-run administration that has seen “historic gains” for “working people,” and the Republicans doing nothing more than dipping a hand down into that deep, dark, well of blood that lies underneath the continent, drawing up a fistful of dripping hate.
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(LDC has already posted that last bit over on another thread, but it's good enough to be on a few different threads imo.)
 
Decent piece from Natasha Lennard:
theintercept.com

I Protested Trump’s First Inauguration. But I’m Not Marching Against Him Today.

There is little point in going to Washington today to oppose Trump’s return — Trumpism never left. There are more urgent tasks now.
theintercept.com theintercept.com
Eight years later, the start of a second Trump term augurs an authoritarianism more studied and honed. I am not in D.C. None of the anti-fascist, leftist crowds I know of, who convened en masse in the city for J20 in 2017, are there. There is no plan for a giant carnival of #resistance, à la the Women’s March, either.


While the severe cold, which has forced Trump’s ceremony inside, could be blamed, the weather did not stymie mass protest plans – no plans anything close to the scale of 2017 were made.


D.C. authorities have said that there are no known threats to the inauguration, and permitted protests are predicted to be far smaller this time around...

I won’t foreclose surprise — Luigi Mangione reminds us not to — but it’s likely that, even indoors, the inauguration will be a dreadful, expensive spectacle, drenched in fascist rhetoric and aesthetics, performed without disruption or notable protest.


The quiet is not necessarily a bad thing. There is little point in going to Washington today to register opposition to Trump’s return. Trumpism never left. No one in the halls of power in Washington is listening. And, above all, the terrain on which we fight Trumpist rule is the rough ground of everyday life. It’s where we’re already standing.

The absence of significant counter-demonstrations could be seen to signal a fatalism or acquiescence on behalf of Trump’s opponents — and, for liberal centrists and conservative “never Trumpers,” it may well be.


For left-wing movements, however, back-footed as we might be, skipping inauguration protests this year evinces a sober reckoning with the limits of certain tactics in certain moments, and, at best, a keener focus on where energies will be needed for the struggles ahead.


The last eight years, but particularly the second half of Biden’s presidency, proved what many on the left had feared: Liberal Democrats’ antifascist rhetoric was hollow.The outraged voices of the #resistance to Trump 1.0 have spent the last years pushing Trump-worthy anti-immigration policies, throwing trans people under the bus, backing Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, fear-mongering over crime rates, and pouring funds into police budgets rather than meeting people’s needs.

They licensed the very Trumpian politics they had vowed to #resist. Whether Democrats’ rightward appeals were ill-conceived electoral strategies or signs of ideological alignment with Trump is irrelevant; the violent political work done is the same either way.


Democratic Party subservience to Trump’s second-term agenda started early, with 48 House Democrats voting alongside Republicans to pass the Laken Riley Act last week.


The bill would allow immigration officials to indefinitely detain and potentially deport unauthorized immigrants accused — not even convicted — of minor crimes like shoplifting. And it would let the most Trumpist forces in American politics choose who to deport.


At this point, it is hardly news that we cannot rely on centrist liberals to form an antifascist front. I say this with no joy: Democratic mayors and governors, from New York to Atlanta, have all but signaled that they will offer no institutional protections for communities most vulnerable to Trump’s violent agenda. The left is small and disarticulated. The challenges we face are enormous and growing.


We find ourselves in a grimly defensive position. The task is urgent to build resilient communities, including rapid-response networks to defend neighbors and colleagues from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, or ensuring the wide circulation and accessibility of abortion pills and hormones.


Front-line communities have been doing this work — and long before Trump’s initial rise to power too.


Lest anyone forget, the pre-Trump years were no panacea for abortion access, immigrant rights, or health care, especially gender-affirming health care. Fossil fuel capitalism, austerity, brutal inequalities, and worker exploitation, racist policing, and the carceral state — these were the conditions of disaffection in which the far-right could thrive.


Now, if Trump delivers even a fragment of the authoritarian promises he has made, all these violences will intensify, as will the penalties for fighting them. Things can just get worse. It is a sign of seriousness that many organizers are focusing on community building and various defense strategies, rather than spectacular protests.
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hitmouse said:
Have now got around to reading that new Neel interview - the whole thing is very worth reading, but since it's long, here's a few bits I thought were worth pulling out to consider:

(LDC has already posted that last bit over on another thread, but it's good enough to be on a few different threads imo.)
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Thanks for that (and LDC). I missed it when it was posted before but it's good on those stupid people we've read so much about recently; those who didn't/couldn't vote despite (or because of) living in poverty.

I wonder what those stupid people should have done instead?
 
Sweet FA said:
Thanks for that (and LDC). I missed it when it was posted before but it's good on those stupid people we've read so much about recently; those who didn't/couldn't vote despite (or because of) living in poverty.

I wonder what those stupid people should have done instead?
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Yep, much as I don't want to revive the 'stupids' debate, particularly on this thread, I'd recommend that piece to anyone who thinks the Trump victory begins and ends in personal failure, idiocy, irrationality etc.
 
Dandred said:
View attachment 460512
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Other pages that have disappeared are the climate science page, and perhaps even more worrying, the white house page with the text of the constitution.

WASHINGTON – When President Donald Trump's team took over the White House website this week, it made quick work of taking down web pages that featured the country's founding documents and espoused the views of the previous administration.

A silhouette of Trump and a bold-faced "AMERICA IS BACK" message appeared on the homepage. New links to presidential statements and remarks appeared along with the text of a mountain of newly signed executive orders.

But what was missing from the revamped White House website was nearly as noticeable to frequent visitors: pages explaining the Constitution and Bill of Rights, promoting tourism, equity, internships and information about former American presidents of both political parties.
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www.usatoday.com

Where's the Constitution? White House says website will bring it back soon.

Donald Trump's team made quick work of taking down web pages about the founding documents \n and information about former U.S. presidents.
www.usatoday.com www.usatoday.com
 
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