Nightwingdragon

Was working just fine, actually. We had constitutional protections at home, and Palestinians still at least had a homeland. Now we've got neither.

I mean he can sign it, it’s going literally nowhere.

This is incorrect. He can sign it, and Bondi will start bringing these cases to court. One would think that it would immediately stop there as the first judge she argues in front of dismisses the case for being blatantly unconstitutional and having her brought up on sanctions for multiple blatant violations of the defendant's constitutional rights.

But in this court system? I wouldn't be so sure. At the very least, I expect at least some people to get caught up in this dragnet and have their lives upended for years until the Supreme Court finally stops dragging their feet. But given this administration, this Supreme Court, and the number of MAGA judges that Trump can forum shop through, there is a non-zero chance this actually succeeds.

It wouldn't be the first time this administration and SCOTUS hand-waves away constitutional protections.

Hey, how's that "stay home and protest Genocide Joe" campaign working out for you guys?

The good thing is that means WA will be unaffected by this.

The bad thing is that that clause won't matter once Trump signs an EO banning it nationwide.

And on that note, why Kamala is quiet ?

Kamala Harris is the new Hillary Clinton. The GOP boogeyman and now political poison after she embarrassingly lost to Donald Trump.

Kamala Harris was deeply unpopular both before and during the Biden administration, and (sorry to say it, but it's true) she was largely picked because there was pressure for Biden to pick a minority female to "balance out" the fact that he was a white man. You know how some people, particularly (but not entirely) on the right, believe that affirmative action means that minorities end up getting positions that they otherwise probably wouldn't have gotten because someone needs to fill a "diversity quota" or whatever? That's how a lot of people felt about Harris -- picked not because of her qualifications, but because she was a black woman.

She's basically been the poster child for this as far as the GOP is concerned ever since. And not in a good way. Right now, with anti-DEI sentiment gaining traction in this country at a record pace and DEI initiatives becoming political battery acid, the last thing you want as the face of the movement is someone believed to be the poster child for DEI initiatives run amok.

I get it, he’s doing all kinds of shit that’s illegal now. And I get it, people need to stand up to him.

At the same time, let’s not do his work for him by treating it like a forgone conclusion he will do whatever he wants.

Have you not been paying attention? Have you seen even the slightest smidge of indication that anyone in power will stand up to him? Because right now, he's doing whatever he wants and being rewarded for it, and that doesn't look like it's going to change any time soon.

Sometimes politicians, law enforcement and just rank & file workers need assurance and official blessing to not comply.

And right now the official word they're getting is comply, be fired, or be sent to Gitmo/El Salvador. There is nobody in a position to be able to give them "an official blessing to not comply" even if they wanted to. If you want, I'll give you my official blessing not to comply. It carries just as much weight right now (read: none).

I don’t like how things are going at all, and want to be clear eyed about the situation. Still, lets not assume it’s all over, cause it’s not.

I wish I had your optimism. But right now, every political body that could stand up to Trump is either marching in lockstep with him or rolling over and playing dead. That optimism right now just isn't based in reality.

Dem voters got to watch their representatives stand up for them and make the case that Trump’s behavior was not acceptable.

So we managed to give him the equivalent of, what, a frowny face? A finger wag?

And he was voted back into office. Which means that as far as the voters were concerned, his behavior was acceptable. The ones who told him the first time that his behavior wasn't acceptable? They're gone now. They've resigned. They've been primaried. They've been replaced with MAGA sycophants who will be glad to respond to his behavior with thunderous applause while the ones who told him "no" the first time are now wondering if they're going to be a target on the Trump Revenge Tour.

And now we have states making it illegal to vote against their policies. We have the very real possibility of US citizens being shipped off to El Salvador. We have a federal government being purged of anyone who even might stand up to Trump happening in real-time. We have a federal government where Democrats not hold power in a single branch of government, and a Supreme Court that all but anointed Trump a king and have openly stated they intend to tip the scales in his favor because he deserves special treatment.

Like it or not, this is a fight that the Democrats cannot win right now. Fighting a losing battle under these circumstances isn't bravery. It's not sending a message. It's suicide. It is a battle that needs to be started from the ground up, taking advantage of small victories wherever we can get them. But as the saying goes, if you go after the king, you had best not miss. And going after the king when you're holding a half-empty squirt gun when that king is holding a nuke isn't going to work out very well for you.

It sucks, but sometimes doing nothing is the least bad option available to you while you wait for an actual opportunity to arise.

Here's the problem with it that people don't understand. First, the Trump administration has already declared that this is an intentional game of hardball that he is playing because he feels that Canada needs the US more than the US needs Canada, and intends to use that leverage to extract more concessions.

The original $1.3 billion was negotiated after Trump had already won the election and was basically Canada's opening bid in order to avoid this exact situation. The entire thing is basically checking off Trump's talking points and wasting resources on non-existent issues. And now Trump has already all but reneged on this. Twice. Canada was able to appease him by dangling the original deal in front of him like dangling shiny keys in front of a toddler the first time. Then they added more meaningless fluff like "fentanyl czar" and "joint strike force" the second time around.

The fact that it was negotiated in December is little more than semantics. A technicality that likely would never have been put in place at all had Trump not won the election. It was put in place as a way to pre-emptively appease Trump and it's already backfiring.

But Trump said he's going to revisit the issue in 30 days. What happens when Trump decides in 30 days that that's not good enough? What happens when symbolic gestures aren't enough? That is what happens when you adopt a policy of appeasement. Appeasement will not get Trump to back down. It will embolden him and make him come back and demand more. And eventually, symbolic gestures aren't going to be good enough.

Will Canada suddenly start being willing to pass Trump-friendly policies like Denmark just did in order to further appease him? Trump already got them to dedicate $1.3 billion to issues that don't even exist, he's already stated his plans to extract more concessions out of Canada, and Canada has already blinked twice. Why wouldn't Trump come back for more?

What happens when Trump decides that he needs part of British Columbia in order to directly connect Alaska with the continental US 'as a matter of national security'? Remember, that's exactly what he's doing with Greenland. What's Canada's plan? To appease him more? That's been working so well for Denmark. Or are you just gonna say "Oh, that section of BC was uninhabited anyway so it's not like Canada gave up territory it cared about. It was just symbolic."

This is what people have problems with. Canada did give Trump something. They gave Trump $1.3 billion to shut him up. Then they gave him the opportunity to come back and demand more and more and more instead of giving a forceful response from the get-go and sticking to it. This is Donald fucking Trump. Traditional diplomacy doesn't fucking work. Give this man a millimeter and it makes him believe he deserves the whole fucking light year. You cannot back down. You cannot blink. He only perceives these as "weaknesses" that he can and will attempt to exploit. Those symbloic, meaningless gestures are only going to keep Trump quiet for so long, and the next time will just cost everybody more and more. Because that's how Trump works.

Hey now, he issued those pardons for his friends and family like a genuine dictator there towards the end.

To be fair, every President has done this. Every president issues last-second pardons to friends, family, cronies, whoever when they're literally on their way out the door, when they no longer have to worry about the political blowback of such actions.

And in Biden's defense, a lot of the people he pardoned were people who either were already known to be or expected to be on Trump's hit list, and he was taking pre-emptive action to ensure they wouldn't be jailed on (no pun intended) trumped up charges. Garland's DOJ already spent an inordinate amount of time and resources on what amounted to a political persecution of Biden's son on relatively minor and inconsequential charges in order to give a supposed appearance of impartiality. What do you think would happen to these people under the Trump administration once he started the Trump Revenge Tour if he hadn't?

(And I'm not excusing Hunter Biden's actions. But let's be realistic. We all know the reason he was charged in the first place. The DOJ isn't going to waste that much time and resources over a weapons possession charge by a cocaine addict that literally happened a decade or so prior. That was a political hit from start to finish by a man who thanked Biden for the AG position by slow-walking Trump investigations while simultaneously finding something to charge his own son with in order to appear "independent".)

People don't seem to understand that there is a whole new order now. Previously, we said the President can't do X, Y, or Z, and we relied on long-standing norms, beliefs, and traditions as a self-enforcing mechanism. We told the President "You can't", and he said "Okay". But now, we're saying "You can't", and Trump is saying "Who says I can't, and what are you going to do about it?", knowing that the answer is largely "Nothing."

This is the way it works now.

Unless there is something directly in the Constitution explicitly saying that Trump cannot do something, then as far as Trump is concerned, he can and will do it.

Even if there is something in the Constitution explicitly stating that Trump cannot do something, Trump is going to do it anyway to see if anybody is willing to enforce it.

If nobody is willing or able to stop him, Trump essentially has the power to do it.

Even if a court ruling were to prevent Trump from directly shutting down a federal agency like USAID, what's to just stop him from firing the entire staff and saying "Sure, USAID can remain open. It'll just have zero employees.". Then what?

Remember, all of you "Genocide Joe" people who insisted you needed to "send a message" by staying home and allowing Trump to return to power: You Voted For This.

This is a message that should be at the top of every single comments section of every single article we ever see about the Middle Ease again. You voted for this.

You decided you needed to "send a message" that you were against the genocide. Because you were acting as if Kamala Hariss's supporters were taping pictures of Palestinian children to targets at a shooting range and gleefully firing away or something. Trump was openly saying he'd do it harder and faster. His position throughout the campaign was to just raze the whole place and turn it into beachfront property. People were shouting from the rooftops exactly what would happen if he returned to power. We were telling you that this protest would accomplish exactly nothing but making the situation exponentially worse for the people you claimed to be trying to protect. We were trying to tell you that you don't have to like Harris or her position on the conflict, but the reality was that she was the least bad option available for those who considered this their most important issue.

You ignored us. You taunted everybody with your "Genocide Joe" monikers and insisted that Trump would be "different". When we asked to explain your reasoning, we were told to go fuck ourselves. And you stayed home. And Trump won.

And what happened? We're barely two fucking weeks into his term and he's threatening to take over the Panama Canal, Greenland, and Palestine by force. The Palestinian people you insisted you were trying to protect are now about to lose their homeland. Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do. Everything we told you was going to happen is happening, except more of it and faster than expected.

We fucking told you. We tried to tell you to not shoot yourself in the foot, and you decided to put the gun at your own head instead. I'm sure the Palestinian people who are about to lose their homes are so fucking grateful for the "support" you've given them. This is your fault. You allowed Trump to return to power fully knowing what Trump was promising, what would happen, and the consequences of your protest vote. You were warned well in advance and decided to go down that path. As the saying goes, elections have consequences. And the consequences of your own actions are Trump returning to power, putting the genocide on overdrive, destroying US alliances around the world, and speedrunning the country right into a recession.

You voted for this.

Really, if nobody protested, genocide would have been super popular and Kamala definitely would have won.

So instead, you decided to vote for the guy campaigning on putting the genocide on a speedrun. That was bright. You sure sent a message. Yesiree. Message was heard loud and clear. Genocide is bad, but super-speed genocide is A-OK! I'm sure the soon-displaced people of Gaza are gonna thank you so much for your support.