2020 US Elections | Biden certified as President | Dems control Congress
- Thread starter Raoul
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Ah ok didn’t know you meant senate. I don’t disagree about your points on the difficulties of governing but I think you also have to consider that “x factor” in Bernie to lead mass movements. I think he’s serious about this revolution thing. How far those effects will be, I can’t answer that other than we’d have to see for ourselves.
Furthermore, I doubt a Warren or Biden presidency will see a lot of bipartisanship. There’s enough context out there to see how Republican voters view those two. In a post Trump world, there’s no going back to the old normal and I see things staying split for the time being. The one exception to this would be Yang as he’s shown to be palatable to voters across the aisle while also having many bold policies to satisfy the progressives. Yes, I know he’s not top of the polls but the guy has lasted this long and still gaining popularity even if little.
Remember when Obama worked across the aisle to accommodate Republicans?they will do this no matter what. That's how politics works.
You need to read A Warning by Anonymous because this simply isn't true, the American people (and the world) have been protected from the consequences of Trump's decisions by the people around him. It was an alarming read, I've read other books by insiders and I was still shocked by it. I expected some of his public personna to be an act and for him to be at least a bit more measured in private, but it appears he's actually a lot worse without a camera pointed at him. Loose cannon doesn't come close to describing him.
Yeah, I agree that bipartisanship for many things is dead, but at the end you need only 50 votes which means uniting the party and/or getting a couple of Republican votes, which is quite doable. I mean, Biden might get the necessary votes to extend Obamacare but Sanders won’t get the votes for single payer Medicare for all. Despite that they might not love it, I can see Murkowski, or Collins, or Romney or Mancin or Sinema voting for some extension of Obamacare, but good luck on convincing them in Sanders plan. Now, as good as revolutions look in fantasy settings, you still need the votes in the senate.
So yeah, I think that Biden will be a more efficient president. Of course, Bernie’s policies are better so on long term, even if he doesn’t implement them, it can be the start of something great, and slowly send the country to the left, and eventually make possible for some of those policies to be implemented in the future. Of course, there is the risk of a right wing mobilization similar to that of Tea Party after Obama.
In any case, I would have voted for Sanders or Warren, even if I would have knowing that they won’t be able to implement Medicare for all. feck status quo.
There’s zero doubt the GOP will work against any Dem but they will do it on steroids if Sanders is elected (same with Warren), since both would directly threaten the power structure that feeds the entire Republican ethos., and they will feel emboldened that they can tap into independents, where most votes currently exist.
That hasn't stopped progressive change before. Look at the push back during the Civil Rights era for example. The defiance against him will be there but it's going to happen sooner or later because the trend on the left will be turn to progressivism sooner or later. An attempt to go back to the old normal that will only lead back to another populist right winger and left winger especially as more and more people get left behind by our "great booming" economy and climate change.
That's a good point in terms of long term, but in the short term the political conditions for Sanders policies to be implemented don't exist since it would take a near super majority in both houses to deal with GOP and some centrist Dems attempting to block healthcare, education, green new deal etc. If the point is simply to move the overton window get these policies front and center before the public then that would be a more plausible reason to elect Sanders, as opposed to misleading voters that his policies would ever see the light of day if he were to get elected.
Every presidents' worst instincts have been constrained by the institutions they're fixed into, which is why the fear-mongering in that regard about Trump for years couldn't even claim to be (truthful) hyperbole but instead pure fantasy. Yet here we are near the end of his first term and rather than those people who predicted truly dystopian war scenarios accepting they were just a little unrealistic, they're just explained away by acts of heroism and fortune.
In any case, I'll correct myself with a clarification. Trump the individual is obviously a loose cannon, and was always going to be as such. And some of his political acts are right out of left field - often irrelevant, sometimes dangerous. Trump the president, however, isn't a terrifyingly unpredictable warmonger in the search of personal gain through expansive wars. He might well like to be but in the presidency he can't be that. You can still predict that at some point he might become that, and let the imagination run wild, but it carries a lot less weight for a significant chunk of voters than it did 4 years ago. What people have done tends to matter a lot more than what people might do, particularly in that arena, that was my only point.
Yeah and Republicans stopped trying to defeat him. It was really something.
Political aides who can be fired on a presidents whim are not institutions whose purpose is to restrain a wayward president, and they cannot be relied upon to be so. I don't know if you've read the book or not but I found it genuinely shocking, I'd suggest it is required reading for anyone thinking of voting for him in 2020.
The predicted disaster as a result of Trump's decisions has only been avoided by the actions of those around him. There is no guarantee that those people will be there tomorrow let alone for the the 4 years of a second term.
When the president is 10 minutes away from bombing Tehran and a TV host convinces him it's a bad idea, then "terrifyingly unpredictable warmonger" is a pretty good description of the president. That is the tip of the iceberg though, one of the more shocking things in the books was the fact he wanted the soilders he posted to the boarder to deliberately target and injure unarmed civilians in the migrant caravans to provide a deterent. Just think about that, a US president ordering the army to open fire on unarmed civilians whose only crime is being poor and wanting a better life.
I would never vote for Trump. But telling the people who might vote for him that he's a disaster waiting to happen and it's just good fortune that disaster hasn't yet happened carries a lot less weight than it did 4 years ago, when it was pure speculation. Now it's speculation mixed in with denial.
The president doesn't have that much power. The amount of restraints that exist everywhere he goes is the reason why despite huge differences in the people within the roles, the actions taken vary slightly, not hugely.
Obama was the change president that never was, because he never could be. Trump would've loved to drain the swamp and fill it up with his own swamp creatures but in the end he couldn't. They have the power for hugely influential individual acts but in aggregation, it's always much less than the opposition supporters speculate. And then they never correct themselves. Then parties switch and they believe the kind of fear mongering from the other side is absolutely outrageous.
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Thats making an argument that Gabbard would have the best chane of beating Trump
It looks like Gabbard's base (if such a thing actually exists) are the least likely to vote Dem, which is why she is being talked up for a third party run.
What more of a disaster is supposed to happen ? Actual thermonuclear war? He has created a multiple of disasters that do not have an immediate and direct effect to his voters..yet.
It really isn't, considering how little support Gabbard has in the first place.
Lots of people predicted specific war events that would be truly devastating in terms of loss of life, international and regional instability, etc. But somehow when those things don't happen it gets downgraded away from the objectively destructive stuff to the heavily subjective stuff, like "undermining the fundamental principles of our democracy and putting us all in danger" and all sorts, the kind of that has been said about every president from opposition supporters for decades...and then they say "what more could have happened?".
If you don't believe there were all sorts of doomsday scenarios predicted before and during his presidency that objectively have not come to fruition, I will sift them out for you. But I suspect you know it to be true deep down.
As always, there are people that occupy the extremities of any statistical distribution. Some of the scenarios have been far fetched , but for me personally what happened is slightly worse than what I expected.
To be fair, in the grand scheme of things not much has changed compared to Obama. There is the Trump show and he is a cnut while Obama was classy, but for the average citizen (or even people outside of US) close to nothing has changed. Not necessarily cause of Trump, but because the US has such a complicated system that is more on less in autopilot.
The only thing with long consequences is the appointment of young conservative judges. 1/4th of judges at the federal level now are Trump appointees, as are 2 supreme court justices, which in turn will make things a bit harder for progressives, but the other things more or less are as they were before.
Similarly, I wouldn't expect really big changes even if Sanders/Warren comes to power. Cosmetic changes yes, a lot of talk in the other direction, but things will stay more or less as they were. Changes go very slowly and for the most part status quo rules.
Your argument appears to be that it doesn't matter if you elect a stupid, narcissistic conspiracy theorist as president because there will always be institutions and people around him to stop him from doing anything too damaging. The constant stream of outrageous news from the Trump administration desentizes people to the seriousness of it but I'd say his presidency has already been a disaster for the US and to a lesser extent the rest of the world (Iran deal, climate change, trade wars, uncertainty around NATO, withdrawl from Syria betraying the Kurds etc), another 4 years of an emboldened Trump would undoubtedly be worse.
Depends... If your Xi or Putin I think your reputation and influence has gone up considerably in the last few years and would be likley to do so for the next 4 years if he wins re-election... I'd be making all my cyber security and "opposition research" capability available to trump asap if I were either of them... With A nudge and a wink and promice of a huge trump Shanghai / Moscow in 2024 (and diplomatic immunity for the many crimes he will inevitably be pursued for one he leaves office)
No, it’s making an argument Tulsi is only a Democrat because that was the best way to win elections in Hawaii.
Unless Mr anonymous comes out publicly and puts his name behind his self-aggrandizing claims that book will have zero impact on anyone.
Personally I wouldn't waste my money on that tripe.
How can an anonymous account possibly be self-aggrandizing? I understand completely the reasons for not giving his/her name, because Trump's MO is that of a guilty person, if you can't attack the message you attack the messenger (see the obsession with the identity of the whistleblower for evidence).
Because they are trying to profit and puff this up this completely unprovable self-aggrandizing narrative that no one can fact check.
Anyone that buys that book is a sucker.
Unless this/these put their names behind their claims they mean absolutely nothing.
I'm sorry you wasted your money.
1) how can a person who remains anonymous possibly be promoting themselves?
2) he/she has stated they are giving all the proceeds of the book to charity
3) it would be easy to disprove the claims in the book by the protagonists coming forward to deny the claims, which hasn't happened.
I didn't waste my money, refusing to believe something because it runs counter to your beliefs is another symptom of confirmation bias, read the book yourself then decide on it's veracity.
Yes it has been a disaster in the sense that a republican presidency is a disaster given your political leanings and sense of priorities. He's done some bad things that other republicans wouldn't have, and he's avoided doing some bad things other republicans would have.
The only thing you've mentioned that bears any relation to him being a loose cannon from a military perspective is the Kurds, and that undoubtedly is the case there, but you can't just breeze past the fact he did precisely the opposite of what people most feared...he didn't recklessly jump into another war, he recklessly pulled out of one. Which has its own consequences but is an entirely different proposition to the doomsday claims put forward.
And yes it has so far been the case that a stupid, narcissistic, conspiracy theorist has done roughly the same amount of damage, maybe less, than his Republican counterparts would've done. I would think someone like Mitch McConnell would be able to do more damage from that position if he someone wriggled in there. But in general the US democratic institutions are very strong and limit the president's power quite considerably. You can convince yourself that isn't the case before the 1st term but believing it now only increases the likelihood of a 2nd term.
Your analysis is too fixated on the institutional level, imo. You see the stop-gaps that have been put there (and it's true), but you seemingly miss the general erosion on ground level that has taken place, which is by far the greatest danger. The political divide among partisan lines that, on the Republican side, is married with openly racist and increasingly paranoid approaches to political and social matters.
The Trump presidency has been both the consequence and a catalyst of that. Sure, it's part of a larger development not dependent on Trump as such, but his presidency has taken the lead role in further mainstreaming it, strengthening it ideologically, and testing the waters for escalations on institutional level (Muslim ban and recent ICE campaigns), should opportunities arrive in the future.
My analysis from the outset has been focused on objective and specific acts and consequences - primarily military. I'm not arguing that Trump has done no damage, but there are significant areas where he was predicted to be incredibly dangerous, where truly devastating consequences were considered more than possible, which haven't come close to reality.
Personally I find that more interesting than the macro trends that are heavily filtered through a subjective lens and are dependent on a lot of assumptions and predictions. I don't disagree with many of the assumptions or predictions so I'm happy to pick up that conversation later. But if you go back to my original point, you'll see it was much narrower than what you've expanded it to.
I know, and my argument was that this narrow focus misses the real threat. I don't think one aspect can be discussed without the other, at least not when the underlying question is if Trump's first term has really been that bad.
Major part of the warnings about a Trump presidency have always been the expectable impact on US society, and on issues like climate change. If you talk of "fear-mongering" about a Trump presidency, but then only discuss those areas that support your stance, it's legit to point out there's something missing from the equation.
On climate change there has hardly been any ‘real’ difference between this and Obama. Just that unlike Obama, Trump removed all the pretense that he cares or is trying to do anything about it. Obama did feck all about global warming. In fact, no world leader has taken real steps on doing something meaningful about it.
I know that much was said about US leaving the Paris deal, but that hardly changes much. It was a voluntary agreement without real targets and without punitive measures. More like a pretense that they are doing something rather than something real that fixes this century’s biggest problem.
To be fair, Hillary had targets about going full clean energy, so who knows how things would have developed with her.
Not sure why you mentioned the military, since the president has absolute control there. He can even single handedly order use if nuclear weapons. This the least "checked and balanced" part of the executive branch. Only thing congress can do is stop funding of a prolonged conflict.
As for what people expected: he ran on a platform of isolationism, so it's not that odd that the US has not yet started any new conflicts.
As I said, I don't see the main damage in this or that particular polical outcome, but in the promotion and (further) mainstreaming of ideologies - partly backed up by policy - whose inner logic firmly points to much worse.
Whatever the systematic failures and pretenses of earlier administrations on climate issues, there's still a difference between that and the mix of full-on anti-science and political paranoia that Trump and the whole conservative movement have entrenched themselves in. I say that difference matters a lot in the long run, even if concrete policies may not differ much so far (taking your word for it, as I can't judge there).
Your last sentence reflects that pretty well, I think. For one side a learning curve isn't unthinkable, while for the other change is the enemy by itself.
MSNBC are finally waking up to a possible nomination of Bernie. They tried very hard to ignore him,especially Chris Matthews.
I'll believe it when Bernie is invited onto Morning Joe to tell the Coffee Klatsch NY elites how he is going to implement M4A.
Trump is also normalizing a lot of terrible behavior among society. Disregarding facts as opinions, promoting alternative facts, increase in xenophobia and nationalism, militias having someone to have unquestioned loyalty for, promoting really crazy conspiracies like Q and the “great awakening”, and overall just a sense of bullying.
That wasn't the underlying question I was discussing, that's all I'm saying. You're saying I'm narrowly focusing on a topic to answer a broader question, and missing the more important details. Instead I'm narrowly focusing on a topic to answer a narrow question.
I wouldn't try to answer the question of "how bad has Trump's presidency really been" as the majority of that is answered by predictable partisanship and the discussion becomes more about how well you can argue than the substance of the argument. And partly because of that I don't think the "how bad has Trump's presidency really been" question will be a particularly prominent one in voters' minds, for either side of the political divide, which was the only broader context my specific question was set in.
Like I said I'm open to discussing your broader question, but you don't need to re frame my question within that context and then suggest that was the context it was embedded into at the outset to get us there. It just wasn't.
I agree with the latter paragraph. How many people do you think were concerned about a catastrophic military intervention in spite of that?
If you think the president makes the majority of military decisions without the military's influence all over them, I'd think you're in the minority. He has absolute power but even dictators had to contend with the influence, intelligence and power of the military in major actions. Or to make it more specific about Trump, I'm sure you'll find lots of military interventions in "A Warning from Anonymous". Who has the power and who makes the decisions are correlated but they're not the same.
How do you explain the withdrawal from Syria that was done after one call with Erdogan and the whole military community including that actual troops in the field were taken by surprise and had to either destroy or leave behind their equipment? Like in some 21st century pathetic Dunkirk reenactment .
Sorry but as bone-headed as the manner in which Trump conducted that move certainly was, it was always on the cards no matter who the President was, and it was a result of Obama’s policy of allying with a group which has long been designated a terrorist organization by one of America’s most important NATO allies. No US President was ever ultimately going to severe relations with Turkey for the sake of Syrian Kurds.
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