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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Hell, forget the money - China is a major nuclear power. And Trump is just jabbing them with a frickin' stick.
Seriously. We have a reckless, supremely unconcerned leader who obviously doesn't give a single shit how much he upsets the global diplomatic scene. This is how wars start.
"We'll take the next chance, and the next, until we win, or the chances are spent."(*sigh*...) Where Trump is concerned, nothing surprises me any more. I hated him back in The '80s, and I utterly despise him now.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.The twitter thing depends entirely on if the talk is serious or if the Chinease take it seriously.
Trump may actually be a big help for the Dems in winning people over, the memory of the electoral can be pretty short and that means that the Republicans are how going to be responsible for everything, I don't buy that deflection onto the Dem will work for them, people know who the president is and that's who they blame. Look how fast people turned against Obama with 2010, it took two years before the folks who voted for change were angry enough to stay home due not having it instantly.
I'm still not convinced that Trump will be the candidate in 2020, if we see a Dem House in 2018 followed by Trump going nuts and being impeached by the Dems and Republicans I could see Trump going nuclear on the Republicans as a retaliation for the betrayal. Especially if Pence refuses to pardon Trump in an attempt to avoid having that hanging around his neck like Ford did with his pardon of Nixon.
A Pence candidate in 2020 being attacked by a Trump bitter about Republican betrayal, that's something we could very well stomp into the ground.
None of this should be counted upon but I honestly think it's possible, Trump could easily self destruct in the next few years and if the Republicans try and shelve him as damage control they will quickly learn that he's a very petty man.
edited 4th Dec '16 4:43:16 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Le Garcon Not if they seriously start demanding we pay them off with Money we can't give them.
@Captain Capsase True, China needs us more then we need them, but with Trump doing this blatantly stupid "I'm going to talk crap about China" crap, and with the Chinese Government not being a huge fan of being talked bad about, this could get ugly.
edited 4th Dec '16 4:42:23 PM by DingoWalley1
China can't demand that the US pay it the money it owes it, not only could it physically not do it (what would they do, try and seize Alaska?) they legally have no way to do it, international debt doesn't work that way, China can't call in the US debt.
Because the US doesn't actually own China debt, it has a contract to pay China instalments of money periodically because China has purchased a thing, that's it, China can't force the US to buy back the thing (which is governments bonds).
Also China getting rid of all its US bonds would destroy the Chinease economy.
edited 4th Dec '16 4:46:49 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranIt's a major longshot and herculean task for the Democrats to swing the 2018 Midterms. Were it to happen it would rank among the top ten party achievements.
The only one who will impeach Trump will be the Republicans, and they'll get rid of him in favor of Pence, And if the Republicans impeach Trump before 2018 Midterms, that might get them the House and Senate anyway which is what the Republicans really want, because then in 2020 they can gerrymander the districts again.
So a Trumpeachment depending on when it happens (if it happens) might not be to Democrats benefit.
My problem not necessarily here but with the greater discussion at large is that rural working class (read: white) Americans are these hapless rubes; these poor, unfortunate souls who, gosh darn it, just wanna put food on their tables.
I don't know about some of you, but in Central Arkansas, library cards are free, and bigoted whites who voted for Trump have the exact same access to information that I do. And having previously worked in automotive repair and retail parts for five years, I was shoulder-to-shoulder with these people enough day-in and day-out to not have forgotten them. And I still encounter them everyday. A lot of these racist, homophobic, sexists were my former playmates in school. I know them. I know them well.
I can't find the article right now, but a Mexican American journalist wrote an excellent piece about the double-standard being applied to various ethnic groups within the lower middle class. Of primary interest is how we've been sucked into this sentimentalist narrative of the tired day laborer, hence, the collective imagination insists that the good, hard-working folk from the failing coal miners' town who are victims of circumstance.
It's very important to pay close attention to the semiotics at work when we speak highly of the archetypal Regular Joe who drives an F-150 and who really loves fishing because it's implicitly understood that the archetype becomes invalid when Regular Joe turns into Regular José, Regular Park Soo Wong, Regular Abdul or Regular Lashawn. And the model minority archetype quickly falls apart particularly when said model minorities become the "wrong" kind of people (miserly Asians, Arab terrorist, etc.).
The outpouring over the white lower middle class is of course valid, but it doesn't look well in contrast to how Latino day laborers and their communities are seen as an invasion force that slipped into the country illegally, or how working-class black communities, when faced with crippling failures, are told to raise their kids better, lay off the drugs and generally clean up their act. In fact, this is a story has been told for almost two centuries now, and it was a particularly effective rallying point in favor of white supremacy both during the Reconstruction and during the inception of the Southern strategy. The Wars on Terror and Drugs were largely predicated by the false promise of protecting the Regular Joes from the riff-raff (again, read: people of color), and Bernie Sanders might have been the only one to adequately and substantially call out both Democrats and Republicans on pretending otherwise.
That's my hang-up about urbanite well-to-do journalists who say "we" forgot about the white working class. Who is "we"? I didn't forget any of them. Many Mr. Washington Post from Harvard and Mrs. The Atlantic from Yale did, but I certainly didn't. Or rather I can't.
Additionally, there are buttloads of Latinos who live in rural manufacturing towns, and while I know no one here said this, many American liberals seem to have willfully forgotten that a buttload of black people most certainly do not live in urban areas. If I recall correctly, Latinos voted in higher numbers this year, and slightly more of them voted Republican, at least in the primaries. This demographic shift should be a point of concern for both Republicans and Democrats.
EDIT: I'm not worried about the next four years or Trump himself so much as I'm deeply concerned about the community he attracts. And they've been here for centuries. They're just being more open now. This isn't going away with a single-term presidency, folks.
edited 5th Dec '16 12:34:06 PM by Aprilla
@Dingo Walley: It would honestly be a much worse if Trump actually tried to make good on his talk of "renegotiating the debt".
Much of the world economy is based on how stable US currency and debt instruments are. You mess with that and the consequences could be genuinely catastrophic.
edited 4th Dec '16 4:50:24 PM by Mio
A Trumpeachment would hurt the Republicans enough that they could loose across the board in 2018, Trump is not a man who'd go quietly can you imagine the dirt that he and his people have on the likes of Pence? And Trump is certainly petty enough that if he got impeached by the Republicans he would force Pence under a bus out to spite.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranTrump will most definitely mess things up again. He has the heart and soul of a gambler on a hot streak. He's addicted (and with that sniffing he keeps doing, probably not addicted metaphorically either). What got him this far was excess and not restraint. He knows no other way of doing things.
The Republican strategy with Trump is simple. Wait for the Electorate to confirm Presidency, wait for the Inaugration where Trump ends all of Obama's Executive Order and appoints the next Scotus. And then...give him two or three months, Pass the Popcorn and strike.
Timed rightly, a Trump Impeachment could do for the GOP what killing Bin Laden did for Obama.
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Lovely post, Aprilla, and more eloquently and movingly put than I can say.![]()
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edited 4th Dec '16 4:58:50 PM by JulianLapostat
I also don't know how likely that is to happen. This might be entirely wrong, but I get the impression that many of them thought Trump would be their end, and now that he wasn't they're going to bend over backwards for him because all of their traditional establishment candidates were rejected. They're riding on Trump's coattails and they know it.

This is a problem, right?
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1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV