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this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2025
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I remember stories from Trump's first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he'd calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.
The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.
None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what's going on behind closed doors. The "checks and balances" every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.
I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don't seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.
And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most ~~would~~ should consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.
Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.
Welp. This kind of makes sense. He's hard to read because he's obviously stupid but he isn't only doing obvious stupid things, so that reading meaning into his words and actions feels like reading tea leaves. I think he's kind of like a dumb, reactive bull and his handlers are goading him and corralling him into breaking only the things they want broken, or leaving him occupied with what they don't care about.
Sorry, I know it's unfair but trump is the responsibility of american society and american people. It's down to Americans to stop him, preferably before he unleashes war on the rest of us. It also needs to happen sooner rather than later, as it will only get harder to get them out.
I've got an idea. Aside from marching etc - Every sane person go outside and bang a pot at 8pm -- every evening. This is a safer way to protest, not too inconvenient but its loud, noticeable and gets reported in the news.
It's about 50/50 whether the US will be able to maintain any semblance of democracy.
The alliances are effectively dead already. Dropping military support to a country during an active war is a huge no-no. No one will ever trust the US ever again. It doesn't matter if there's a Democrat president in 2029, no one can trust the American people to not vote in a betrayer like Trump again. The first time Trump was president, it was like "they didn't know who they were voting for." Just a bump in the road of democracy. This time, Americans knew what they were voting for.
And we talk to Americans on the internet, we know that Americans don't respect their allies. The soldiers of allied countries that sacrificed everything in Afghanistan and Iraq doesn't even register with most Americans. There is too little sense of honour in the American population. Americans only care about money now, and that's not a motivation that can be trusted by anyone.
Sorry, but Americans are too untrustworthy for meaningful alliances to be possible.
I agree that how the US treated its allies is abominable (our abandonment of local guides and translators, who were promised a place in America for risking the lives of themselves and their families, to be murdered by the Taliban/ISIS should be persecuted as a crime - not to mention the minorities left to die to appease larger powers, such as the Kurds, Armenians, and now Ukrainians). However, most Americans don't know about any of this.
Most Americans are living in a bubble that hides or vastly distorts anything outside of it. Our media is hyper-focused on a narrow band of issues that gets guaranteed views (mostly culture wars that said media invented or spread in the first place) and only pays lip service to anything outside of that. For many, "news" means pithy one-liners and relentless attacks on the other side. They're told some minor issue is the single most important thing right now and are so whipped up they don't look outside to see the world is burning. The right-wing media is an endless parade of hate, while the left complains about said right while offering no solutions. Neutral media is a joke, and foreign news has no foothold outside individual posts being shared if they agree with a person's existing position. Major news gets cycled out after mere days and is quickly buried by the next meaningless story. It's a constant cavalcade of worthless noise that obscures any actual reporting.
If America could somehow shrug off the 24-jour news hype cycle and see what's actually happening in the world, I think you'd find there's a great deal of empathy in the populace - it'd be hard to stir up an audience if they didn't care about something. Sadly, I can't see such a thing ever happening - the biggest shakeup in news this decade was Fox being called "woke" and what was once tabloid trash becoming accepted sources amongst the right, even getting dedicated reporting positions in the government while traditional media was kicked out. So if anything it's only going to get worse, with the addiction to drama and outrage leading half the country even further into isolation and delusion.