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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Say, since some of Trump's supporters are finally starting to realize that Trump and his gang may not be a good idea after all... Hypothetically speaking, if the majority of Trump supporters turn their backs on him before January 20 and demand disqualifying him from the presidency, would it be legally possible?
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.eh.
◊
Yes, but the GOP brass HATE Trump. If he starts looking like a liability, they'll dump him. Which is probably the whole point of his massive tax breaks; that will win him a great deal of favor among economic elites, and make his position less dependent on the goodwill of the GOP's base.
edited 22nd Dec '16 7:25:02 AM by CaptainCapsase
This one is a big problem, democracy doesn't hinge in the parties or the politicians that compose it but in the institutions that maintain a democratic government.
The Economist: Donald Trump’s most damaging legacy may be a lower-trust America
Fomenting cynicism and partisan divisions is his best chance of surviving his term
AT THE height of Silvio Berlusconi’s power, as the billionaire-politician brushed scandals and lawsuits aside with the ease of a crocodile gliding through duckweed, a professor at an Italian university described to Lexington how the terms furbo and fesso helped explain the then-prime minister’s survival. In those bits of Italian society from which Mr Berlusconi drew his strongest support, it is a high compliment to be deemed a furbo, or a sly, worldly wise-guy. The furbo knows how to jump queues, dodge taxes and play systems of nepotism and patronage like a Stradivarius. In contrast the fesso is the chump who waits his turn and fails to grasp how badly the system is rigged, or how much of his taxes will be stolen. The fesso might cheer a new clean-air law in his city, naively taking an announcement by the elites at face value. The furbo wonders who in the environment department may have a brother-in-law with a fat contract to supply chimney scrubbers. Mr Berlusconi’s fans saw him as the furbo to end all furbi. He showed that he heard them, offering them crude appeals to wise-guy cynicism, as when he asserted that any Italians who backed his centre-left opponents were not just mistaken, but were coglioni or, to translate loosely, “dickheads”, who would be voting “against their own interests”.
Living in that sort of society comes with costs. For decades anthropologists and political scientists have weighed the advantages of living in a high-trust, highly transparent country like Sweden, and measured how corruption and squandered human capital harm places like Sicily. “Trust”, a book published by Francis Fukuyama 20 years ago and now sadly topical again, suggested that America and its distinctive model of capitalism flourished because strangers learned to trust one another when signing contracts, allowing them to do deals outside the circles of family, tribal or in-group kinship relied upon in low-trust societies.
As the Trump era dawns in America, the composition of the cabinet and inner circle taking shape around Donald Trump is too ideologically incoherent to define the next president’s policy agenda. There are bomb-throwers and hardliners in Team Trump, including cabinet secretaries who have called for the federal agencies they will run to be hobbled or abolished, and an alarming number of men who see no harm in threatening a trade war or two. But it also has figures from the oak-panelled, marble-pillared heart of the Republican establishment.
When it comes to national security, Mr Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon is a retired general, James Mattis, who has called Russia’s annexation of Crimea a “severe” threat and accused President Vladimir Putin of wanting to “break NATO apart”. His pick to run the State Department, Rex Tillerson, is CEO of an oil firm, Exxon Mobil, that argued against sanctions imposed on Russia after the Crimean invasion. Mr Trump’s Office of Management and Budget is to be run by a shrink-the-government fiscal conservative, Representative Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, while his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has called for a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan that will drive conservatives “crazy”. It is equally easy to imagine headlines, years from now, that call President Trump a revolutionary who took America down the path to hard-edged nationalism, as it is to imagine a hapless incompetent paralysed by factional in-fighting and plunging poll ratings.
If Mr Trump’s policies are a mystery, his approach to politics is not. The Republican won office by systematically undermining trust in any figure or institution that seemed to stand in his way, from Republican rivals to his Democratic opponent, leaders of Congress, business bosses, the news media, fact-checkers or simply those fessi who believe in paying taxes. Accused of avoiding federal income taxes during a debate with Hillary Clinton, he growled: “That makes me smart.”
Mr Trump will not be able to stop that destructive mission to make America less like Sweden and more like Sicily. He has too many promises that he cannot keep. He must betray those supporters whom he wooed with a conspiracy theory dressed up as an economic policy, backed with crude invective worthy of an American Berlusconi. He spotted a market opportunity: millions of Americans with conservative instincts, notably working-class whites in the Midwest, who felt ill-served by both major parties and could conceive of no benign explanation for social and economic changes that angered and dismayed them. Mr Trump ignored transformational forces, such as automation or global competition. He dismissed the notion that foreign policy is filled with complex trade-offs. Instead Mr Trump told voters a story about “stupid” and feckless elites who had given away what was rightfully theirs: from manufacturing jobs to traditional values or a border secure against illegal immigrants and Muslim terrorists. Just give him power, and all would be well.
Get smart
Fomenting cynicism and partisan divisions is not a flaw in Mr Trump’s approach to politics: it is his best chance of surviving the next four or eight years, as reality bites. That is why he has told his supporters not to believe the CIA, when American spy chiefs accuse Russia of working to disrupt the election by hacking e-mails sent by bosses at the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. It is why Mr Trump has recently held rallies in states that he won, telling supporters, “We are really the people that love this country” and breezily saying of crowd chants to lock Mrs Clinton up: “That plays great before the election, now we don’t care.” As a man about to break his word, Mr Trump needs an America in which all morals are relative, facts are written by winners and principles count for less than winking appeals to partisan loyalty. Most of the Trump legacy is still unknowable. Some of what he does will be reversed by the next president when the electoral pendulum swings the other way, as it usually does. A lower-trust America will be harder to fix.
edited 22nd Dec '16 7:51:05 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesHow did Concordia Parish, Louisiana become one of the sickest counties in the US
?
Bobby Jindal, the GOP platform as a whole and good old-fashioned Suthin' Racism.
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotCross posted from the Racism Thread. Trumpkins are now all over Star Wars because it is anti-fascism and anti-racism.
I find amusing how the point of an entire franchise of movies that is dead set against the dangers of fascism, populism and authoritarian empires goes over the head of the alt-right and Trumpkins who bitch and whine about everything that doesn't cater to their feelings.
For a group that bitches and moans about SJ Ws looking for reasons to be offended and trying to force their views on everything, the doublethink is strong with them.
How dare those private companies no putting up with our bullshit!
>#The Empire Did Nothing Wrong
Inter arma enim silent leges@mantis: Jesus Christ. Best case scenario is that he simply lets Obama's planned modernization of the US nuclear arsenal go through and takes credit. Or, as some foreign policy pundits are claiming and/or hoping is the case, he's embraced Nixon's "Madman Theory" and is simply bluffing.
edited 22nd Dec '16 9:29:44 AM by CaptainCapsase
You know the theory that Trump changes his mind based on who he talked to last? Quick, somebody talk in his ear so he'll do a 180 and go, "Eh, we don't really need to expand nukes right now. I never said that."
edited 22nd Dec '16 9:38:27 AM by speedyboris
Derp, forgot a link. BBC News
Just another twitter message so far, said to come on the heels of a statement by Putin advocating Russia expanding theirs.
Another bit of sad/infuriating news to arise today; by allowing them to register as 501 nonprofits the US government has in part allowed four prominent hate groups to raise nearly 8 million dollars in tax deductible donations
. The article postulates that the backlash from reports claiming that they were unfairly targeting conservatives has caused the IRS to turn a blind eye to openly white supremacist groups claiming charity status. If they change their mind the new administration isn't gonna make it any easier for them to weed them out now.
Given the amount of projection going on with these alt-right types I really don't want to find out what the hidden/encrypted folders on their hard drives contain.
edited 22nd Dec '16 10:23:20 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot
Pardon me if I have a rather low opinion of the American intelligence agencies (Or any intelligence agency) as a source of truthful, unbiased information. At least until such a time as the internal documents are declassified decades down the line and we get to see what was actually going on and what they actually knew.
Trump dismissing the CIA as "distrustful" is worked so well because he's not wrong; they aren't trustworthy in the slightest.

I believe Tom Arnold is crazy (or at least has been in recent years).
Assuming such a tape exists though, it wouldn't matter in terms of the election at this point, but anything that gives Trump a low approval rating would be helpful.
Although to be honest, to some extent I'm not sure how much him being racist/using racial slurs on tape would actually hurt him, since that's part of his appeal- like on one hand, I think a lot of supporters draw the line at open racism, especially when specific slurs are used, but on the other hand, there's a probably stronger pull among those supporters to handwave bad behavior by Trump, especially if it's something criticized in the news media.