You know your party is complete shit when your policy proposal is "big spending"

Still preferable to a party that talks a big game about "fiscal responsibility" and balancing budgets while in the minority, but spends like a drunken sailor whenever they're actually in charge.
Democrats are at least upfront about the fact that they dont give a fuck about the amount of debt with which they're willing to saddle the next generations.

One was in line with the exponential growth of the economy, the other isnt. These arguments fall flat on their face when you can understand something more complicated than compound interest.

Source? In particular: do these numbers include Trump's spending for covid?

In general: the economy did not grow by 33% during Trump's 4 years in office. In the 4 years from 2016 to 2019, it grew by 15ish percent. More broadly speaking, we have to consider times of crisis versus 'good times' when comparing these numbers. We can neither blame Trump for spending on covid relief, nor Obama for spending to deal with the Great Recession. This part of their debt needs to be factored out before we get a meaningful metric.

The bottom line is that the national debt is due to medicaid and SS, not muh Trump.

And that Biden and Obama were both 2x worse.

That's national debt due to medicaid and SS?

I'm confused. If you can just link the source it will be much easier to interpret.

I'll begin by responding to the bold with a GIF:



Trump empowered what you call "neocons", but a more accurate term is "hawk". Neocons support an aggressive foreign policy concerned with promoting democracy, whereas Bolton is just a hawk supporting what he believes to be a narrow American national interest. Last I checked Trump never appointed Rand Paul as Defense Secretary.... he replaced the principled hawks with more hawks who were not willing to resign over policy differences.

I don't agree with all of your characterizations, particularly the one claiming Democrats are now the hawkish party and the Trump-led GOP are the doves. Trump had his quirky views of being hawkish in certain areas like Iran and defense spending, while being rhetorically non-interventionist, while pursuing policies that were mostly tough on Russia. A president who leaves the Iran deal and assassinates the most important Iranian military leader cannot be called a dove. His policy was so incoherent that wherever you fall on the foreign policy spectrum, he offered up policy or rhetoric that you could grab onto if you wanted to support him. Libertarians wanted to support him because they hate being aligned with any establishment figures, and Trump was a disaster, therefore establishment figures opposed him, therefore libertarians had a kneejerk desire to side with him. And now we have another Democratic president withdrawing from another war that a Republican president started, as well as withdrawing support for the Saudi war in Yemen, and as always I'm loling at the libertarians.

Trump cemented the Republican party abandoning fiscal conservatism... so it doesn't make sense that libertarians would suddenly warm up to a Republican president on that front. The counter to "Democrats are moving further left on spending" is obviously "Trump didn't even pretend to care about deficits... he refused to cut a dime in SS/Medicare and talked about renegotiating America's debt, while passing a tax cut that increased the deficit".

Libertarians have always been a little wacky... and the Trump cult matches their conspiracism. Libertarians believed in the deep state before it was cool. Back when Trump was calling for Assange to be executed for harming US national security, they were supporting Assange. Trump hated the intelligence community and federal law enforcement because they revealed his corruption and contradicted him... libertarians were just happy that a president hated the same people they do.

To be fair, it's not just libertarians that have gotten on board. Guys like Glenn Greenwald and other online leftists have been anti-anti-Trump for years, for mostly the same reasons. They are contrarians who hate the Democratic party, the non-Fox mainstream media, the "establishment", etc. They hate America's security services. This hatred overrides any other considerations.

https://twitter.com/UrbanAchievr/status/1418918973710733315

Thread on a JD Vance article from 2016 on Trump and Republicans. Hard to reconcile how someone in good faith could write that in 2016 and run a full-blown Trumpist campaign for Senate in 2021.

I don't believe that Gallup is looking at registration numbers, they're asking what party individuals identify with at a point in time, so I'm not sure this explanation makes a whole lot of sense.

The death of the Republican party has been greatly exaggerated. Trump was a disaster, and the Republican party is still in a much stronger position today than it was in 2006.

I have to return the favor of "laughing at the bolded part".

And no, Trump did not empower the foreign policy hawks, there are a myriad of op-eds in the tyimes, wapo, atlantic etc. in which these hawks voice their displeasure at Trump's unwillingness to start new wars or play according to their rules and logic. There are legions of neocon political figures from the GWB era who broke with the GOP during the Trump years, or the party broke with them.

Appointing Bolton was a puzzling move and very much out of character for Trump, pretty much everyone said as much at the time, myself included. It was a huge misunderstanding which presumably came from a shared disdain for multilateral instiutions, but it became clear very quick that Bolton and Trump didnt agree on much else. Crucially, Bolton never really had all that much power, Trump was the one calling the shots and Bolton had very little sway over his FP decisions.


At the end of the day, Trump was dovish on North Korea, Russia, Syria and Myanmar. He spent a lot of time and effort invoking a general rethinking of America's relationship with China, recognizing them as the dangerous and clear-cut hostile force that they are, but did not actually start any overly aggressive measures against them. Redefining China is one of his greatest successes imho, under a president Hillary, it might well have taken 3-4 more years before this "awakening" on China.
He used some nasty rhetoric on Venezuela, but did very little against them, much less than he would have had support for among his party.

So the main pieces of evidence in support of Trump not being a FP dove are his actions on Iran and Cuba. Revoking the Iran nuclear deal was the correct move after the deal had proven a failure, funding Iran's proxy wars and geostrategic encroachment in the ME rather than spurring economic growth and liberaization in Iran. This leaves us with Cuba, on which Trump's stance probably came from a "fuck everything Obama did"-mindset rather than genuine hawkishness.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Jul 24 2021 10:46am