Quote (IceMage @ Jan 19 2020 01:07am)
Trump failed on his first major legislative priority, even though Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare multiple times before he got in. Any Republican president would pass tax cuts and balloon the deficit... that's what Republicans do. You're some weird right-wing populist progressive so you don't care about the deficit, but that's what most Republicans cared about when the darkie was in office. He's passing NAFTA 2.0 and I'm sure he'll cut a lukewarm deal with the Chinese before the election. Big whoop. Good on him for passing some bipartisan legislation. The judges are one aspect of his presidency where he's been disciplined, because he doesn't give a shit about it. If he cared, I'm sure he'd find a way to fuck it up. I don't know what major foreign policy success you're seeing... the biggest issue is North Korea and he's made virtually no progress. He's given KJU meetings with almost nothing in return. Sure, Iran's struggling right now, but if the goal was to change their behavior, it's not working. The line about most successful modern president... lol ok Lou Dobbs.
Yes Trump has not been successful at
100% of his legislative agenda. Is that where the bar is set now? Instead of looking at whether Trump has been objectively successful and how his accomplishments stack up next to other presidents, you want to judge him on whether he's managed to enact his
entire agenda, something no president has ever done. When Trump was running for president, the media, you and me alike, were all wondering if Trump as president would either blow up the country or be a lame duck who can't get anything done at all. Instead we're now debating whether Trump got a perfect score or missed one in his long list of wins. The difference is that I moved on and accepted reality.
A foreign policy win by modern standards is a president who doesn't get us entangled in another foreign war with boots on the ground or take a bold intervention that backfires. Trump hasn't made North Korea voluntarily throw their nukes into the sea and open their borders and agree to be slaves to western imperialist powers? Is anything short of that a failure? Because if the question is whether we're better off today on the DPRK than we were under Obama, the answer is probably a minor improvement, a defusing of tensions and open door to bring them into the international fold that didn't exist until Trump set foot across the DMZ. I'd consider a
failure to be one where either US troops are getting blown up by IEDs on the streets of Pyongyang or Seoul got nuked. Because that would stack up compared to Bush, Clinton, Bush or Obama. Trump hasn't sent US bombers in to overthrow a stable government in the middle east and caused chaos and power vacuums that get filled by populist jihadi movements. Where he inherited pitched genocidal campaigns in Yemen and Syria, the conflict has been drying up. The worst you can say is that Trump's foreign policy has been moving at a glacial pace when it comes to ending the wars in Afghanistan and Syria and Iraq and Yemen, but at least they're moving in the right direction instead of accelerating again, and it does seem like he'll notch at least the end of one or two conflicts in his belt in time for the election.
If Trump was stacking up next to a modern president and wanted to just get par, he'd have to have invaded Iran with boots on the ground in a large scale intervention that has gone sour and gotten 1000+ US troops killed as we're stuck in a quagmire with the Iranian people turning against us and supporting guerrillas who rack up a death toll using IEDs on our occupation force with no exit strategy. Or he'd have to sit idly by while millions of people get slaughtered in one-sided ethnic cleansing as UN peacekeepers get overrun and refuse to reinforce them despite being able to do so without risking a wider conflict or stepping on another nuclear power. Then he'd be an
average president.
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Rather than tallying up the scoreboard one side or the other, let's just think about the health of our society and democracy. Trump's presidency certainly hasn't helped. He's turned the Republican party into a personality cult. Popular Republicans are the ones who mimic his behavior of lying and shamelessness. His voters are more disconnected from reality and angry than when he got elected. These are not good indicators.
The health of our society and our democracy depends upon each of the people in it, not just one man. Its pretty ironic to hold it against Trump that democrats and the media have made it their mission to virulently demonize him and pull out all stops on their reductio ad hitlerums and bring our country into major strife. You had him be targeted in the single most negative, smear-driven campaign in US history, where Clinton simply abandoned any policy messaging and went full blown character assassination. And the media gladly carried that torch and has been 95% negative, happy to throw accusations of throwing kids in cages, raping children, cozying up to neonazis, racist with a capital AIT, treason, russia russia russia, even taking time to behead him in effigy, spit on Melania and threaten Barron. And Trump is shameless? Shameless would be jumping from one smear to the next as soon as it gets discredited and debunked.
Our country is still in the grips of what will be remembered as a rather absurd chapter of US history, where democrats stirred up a monster in 2016 and inflamed the country in hopes of winning an election,
and lost. And still carried their derangement to its logical maximum. Years ago I was casually discussing how Republicans stirred up the frankenstein's monster of the Tea Party and set it lurching towards the election to get some wins and then it kept rampaging on past and causing collateral damage. That was a fluffy harmless kitten compared to what I see today. Tea Partiers weren't committing suicide terrorist attacks targeting politicians and the government while screaming about healthcare or immigration. Low level republican bureaucrats and campaign staffers weren't getting arrested with regularity for threats, attacks or leaks.
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The reality to accept is all the things where if it was a woman with a shrill voice in office, you would care. You either ignore these issues or spin ridiculous counter-narratives. And it's just a silly strawman to pretend I've predicted Trump's downfall on all these issues. Cultists seem to confuse this... covering or paying attention to wrongdoing by the president doesn't mean you are predicting his downfall. That's your emotional reaction to it, not what's actually happening.
It's also kind of silly to say "Trump's voters don't care about anything, therefore, he's done nothing wrong". That just shows what I say is true... it's a cult. You guys give him a pass on all of his wrongdoing. After he's gone maybe you'll slowly realize that he was a corrupt, massively incompetent, and insanely divisive president.
Credibly buying into every histrionic smear campaign and accusation hook line and sinker doesn't get negated by disavowing it after the fact and just saying you're "paying attention". I paid attention to the stories, and had plenty of longwinged essays where I deconstructed the evidence and looked at what the most logical and mundane explanations were, while you kept teasing insinuations of grand conspiracies and collusion with spooky Russians in that vain hope Mueller had something to find. I regularly took the skeptical voice and debunked on the facts and logic. You regularly posited the possibility of elaborate plots, followed by insisting that even if there's no 'there' there, you hope Trump gets nailed on it because he deserves it anyway. The reality was you didn't care if Trump did anything wrong, because you were so sure he did everything else wrong.
This post was edited by Goomshill on Jan 19 2020 07:17am