Donald Trump Appreciation Thread

[Gloucester Saint]

10 hours ago, Turkish said:

 

So in 200 years we’ve come up with 3 in the world. 

Context is key. You could argue if your family took up the right to buy scheme in the 1980s that Margaret Thatcher did - there’s a counter argument that the lack of re-investment into social housing has created the current crisis. Tony Blair’s government introduced the national minimum wage despite broadsheet claims it would cost 1.7m jobs (it didn’t) and the successful Sure Start centres, but many other policies carried on the Thatcher legacy of benefitting the middle classes and wealthy. 

So if you’re looking for politicians who really focused on the lowest paid and took a universal approach, you’re looking at Attlee/Bevan, and the consensus period up to 1976 when economic policies emphasised full employment and economics ran to the Keynesian model. Callaghan and Healey shifted to monetarism and public sector cuts to the role of the state to jump start an economy stagnating after the oil shocks, energy crisis and militant unions, and Thatcher accelerated that where you get to Lawson as CoE and the quote about unemployment being a price worth paying and the opening up of a north-south divide with de-industrialisation and shift to a heavily service-based economy. 

Edited Friday at 07:48 by Gloucester Saint

[whelk]

We can all be cynical but is consciences of politicians obviously reacting to public opinion, who moved us out of the Victorian era to the pretty fair society we have now

[badgerx16]

Trump threatenng to reduce military cooperation with South Korea because they didn't support the attack on Iran.

[spyinthesky]

1 hour ago, badgerx16 said:

Trump threatenng to reduce military cooperation with South Korea because they didn't support the attack on Iran.

And he is best buddies with the fully Democratic Leader of North Korea who consistently said they are preparing weapons of mass destruction aimed at the nasty USA and are testing the development of them in Ukraine

[inspectorfrost]

6 hours ago, badgerx16 said:

Trump threatenng to reduce military cooperation with South Korea because they didn't support the attack on Iran.

It gets better,

he's now threatening to bomb Oman for reaching an agreement with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran must be finding this hilarious

[Weston Super Saint]

Kenny had it spot on all those years ago.

https://youtu.be/xGMWZJlA0QA?si=NzoI2Tht-oRFcqvX

 

Edited yesterday at 16:42 by Weston Super Saint

[egg]

1 hour ago, inspectorfrost said:

It gets better,

he's now threatening to bomb Oman for reaching an agreement with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran must be finding this hilarious

It won't open. An open strait means no need for an oil pipeline to the med. 

[Turkish]

2 hours ago, inspectorfrost said:

It gets better,

he's now threatening to bomb Oman for reaching an agreement with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran must be finding this hilarious

What happens when you get a bloke who thinks he runs the world but the thinks the whole world is the USA

[Holmes_and_Watson]

3 minutes ago, Turkish said:

What happens when you get a bloke who thinks he runs the world but the thinks the whole world is the USA

You get a world series competed by a single country?

[Turkish]

4 minutes ago, Holmes_and_Watson said:

You get a world series competed by a single country?

Apparently so..:

[AlexLaw76]

The US is doing something genuinely fucking strange at the moment.

Trump has apparently threatened military action against Oman if it gets in the way of a deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Oman isn't some hostile state either, it's a long-standing US ally and has historically been one of the few countries capable of acting as a useful go-between when the US and Iran aren't exactly seeing eye to eye.

What's particularly bizarre is that only days ago, US officials were talking up Oman's involvement and its potential role in helping sort out the situation around commercial shipping through the Strait.

Then you've got South Korea. At almost the same time, Trump is ordering the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with the South Koreans, apparently because they're expensive and unnecessarily provocative towards North Korea, while once again talking up his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

Put those two things together and, regardless of what you think of Trump politically, there's a pretty fucking obvious question.

If unpredictability is supposed to be a tool of Trump's foreign policy, at what point does being unpredictable stop being the tactic and actually become the strategy?

People I know who live in Arizona went on their first ever political march recently, an anti-Trump one. They've never done anything like that before, but they're absolutely desperate for him to lose the mid-terms.

What worries them though is that, despite everything, there still seems to be enough support for Trump that whoever eventually succeeds him could potentially win the next Presidential election as well.

[badgerx16]

44 minutes ago, AlexLaw76 said:

What worries them though is that, despite everything, there still seems to be enough support for Trump that whoever eventually succeeds him could potentially win the next Presidential election as well.

If the Save America Act gets passed then plenty of non-MAGA people will find it much harder to vote.

[egg]

1 hour ago, AlexLaw76 said:

The US is doing something genuinely fucking strange at the moment.

Trump has apparently threatened military action against Oman if it gets in the way of a deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Oman isn't some hostile state either, it's a long-standing US ally and has historically been one of the few countries capable of acting as a useful go-between when the US and Iran aren't exactly seeing eye to eye.

What's particularly bizarre is that only days ago, US officials were talking up Oman's involvement and its potential role in helping sort out the situation around commercial shipping through the Strait.

Then you've got South Korea. At almost the same time, Trump is ordering the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with the South Koreans, apparently because they're expensive and unnecessarily provocative towards North Korea, while once again talking up his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

Put those two things together and, regardless of what you think of Trump politically, there's a pretty fucking obvious question.

If unpredictability is supposed to be a tool of Trump's foreign policy, at what point does being unpredictable stop being the tactic and actually become the strategy?

People I know who live in Arizona went on their first ever political march recently, an anti-Trump one. They've never done anything like that before, but they're absolutely desperate for him to lose the mid-terms.

What worries them though is that, despite everything, there still seems to be enough support for Trump that whoever eventually succeeds him could potentially win the next Presidential election as well.

The Oman thing is interesting, and if you read his words re bombing them,  he didn't mention them getting in the way of a deal to open the strait. That's the wide spread assumption, but not what he actually said. The strait won't open. 

The South Korea thing is odd, but I think it may just be punishment for their unwillingness to get involved in Iran, and leverage to get them to buy more US oil. 

Either way, he's nuts, but there's more in play here than appears at first blush. 

[benjii]

12 hours ago, AlexLaw76 said:

The US is doing something genuinely fucking strange at the moment.

Trump has apparently threatened military action against Oman if it gets in the way of a deal with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Oman isn't some hostile state either, it's a long-standing US ally and has historically been one of the few countries capable of acting as a useful go-between when the US and Iran aren't exactly seeing eye to eye.

What's particularly bizarre is that only days ago, US officials were talking up Oman's involvement and its potential role in helping sort out the situation around commercial shipping through the Strait.

Then you've got South Korea. At almost the same time, Trump is ordering the Pentagon to scale back military exercises with the South Koreans, apparently because they're expensive and unnecessarily provocative towards North Korea, while once again talking up his relationship with Kim Jong Un.

Put those two things together and, regardless of what you think of Trump politically, there's a pretty fucking obvious question.

If unpredictability is supposed to be a tool of Trump's foreign policy, at what point does being unpredictable stop being the tactic and actually become the strategy?

People I know who live in Arizona went on their first ever political march recently, an anti-Trump one. They've never done anything like that before, but they're absolutely desperate for him to lose the mid-terms.

What worries them though is that, despite everything, there still seems to be enough support for Trump that whoever eventually succeeds him could potentially win the next Presidential election as well.

He's a puppet used to deliberately destroy US and the Atlantic world order. It's not bumbling incompetence, it's sinister.

[badgerx16]

Old bone spurs was asked if the deployment of USS Abraham Lincoln in the Gulf had been too long, leading to health issues for the crew.

"Not long enough" was his reply.

[badgerx16]

The SC have rejected Trump's request that it reconsider it's ruling against him in the E Jean Carroll case.

[Gloucester Saint]

1 hour ago, badgerx16 said:

The SC have rejected Trump's request that it reconsider it's ruling against him in the E Jean Carroll case.

Good good https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74gekjgrllo

That is now a permanent judgement, nowhere else to appeal. 

[Holmes_and_Watson]

1 hour ago, Gloucester Saint said:

Good good https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74gekjgrllo

That is now a permanent judgement, nowhere else to appeal. 

FIFA?

[Gloucester Saint]

36 minutes ago, Holmes_and_Watson said:

FIFA?

He does behave like an Infantino.

[Gloucester Saint]

18 hours ago, badgerx16 said:

If the Save America Act gets passed then plenty of non-MAGA people will find it much harder to vote.

Struggling badly to get anywhere near through the Senate despite all of his tantrums and trying to demand a recall to pass it. 

[badgerx16]

19 minutes ago, Gloucester Saint said:

Struggling badly to get anywhere near through the Senate despite all of his tantrums and trying to demand a recall to pass it. 

As long as a handful of Republicans retain their backbones.

[whelk]

This summary of the midterms gives some hope for optimism:

So, in simple terms:

• 435 House seats — Democrats need a relatively small number of gains to take the House.
• 35 Senate seats — Democrats need 4 net gains to take the Senate.
• 36 governors — important for state politics and, in some states

And the interesting thing is that the political environment is currently looking considerably more difficult for Republicans than it did after the 2024 election, with recent polling and primary turnout suggesting Democratic enthusiasm has increased.