Call me crazy but I think he might be telling the truth. His main priority is self-aggrandizement and he has no respect for any institution that stands in the way of that, but his political positions were actually fairly mainstream for a Republican. I don’t see Romney, McCain, or GWB giving the speeches (or provoking the mobs) that Trump did because they acted with respect for America’s democratic institutions, but I can see them supporting similar laws and policies. My guess is that Trump doesn’t actually care much about the practical reality of governing a country and in 2016-2020 the existing Republican establishment did most of the policy work. Now extremists are putting a lot of effort into becoming the ones who influence him, and maybe they will (which certainly frightens me) but that doesn’t mean that he currently cares much about their policies.
Trump cares about one thing, Trump. If these policies will hurt people he sees as an enemy, he’ll be all for it. He doesn’t want to run a country, or do any work, he wants to be the “strong man” at the top everyone “respects/fears”. He gives zero shits about anyone or anything besides himself. This election is 100% about getting elected to keep himself out of jail, and of course his revenge on everyone trying to hold him accountable for his ever growing crime list.
I’m not sure that you and I actually disagree. I’m just saying that maybe he really doesn’t know (or care much) about the ideology of Project 2025. If you asked him to explain what their policy goals are, I don’t think he would be able to. If so, he’s actually telling the truth here.
He absolute knows about it. He has spoken at the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025 is founded by people that were in his prior administration. It’s been all tailored to his presidency. He also knows, as does his campaign, how toxic the whole thing is - and it’s the only reason he is trying to distance himself (poorly) from it.
To your point, you’re right he probably doesn’t care about it; it’s a sure thing he hasn’t read it, whichever poor bastards have tried to explain it to him have undoubtedly been thwarted by his legendary incuriousness.
But by that same token, it doesn’t even matter. All he wants is to golf and yell at people. He’ll totally leave the keys with whoever to implement fascism while he babbles on about his greatness to room-fulls of Ivanka clones shipped to him by maneuvering billionaires. Nothing will stop them and no one will try.
I don’t think that Trump is easy to control. The Republican party in 2016 totally failed to do so, and so did members of his administration (both the extremists and the ones trying to be a voice of reason). He’s not interested in the day-to-day business of governing but he is interested in power and I think he has good intuition about people who would try to limit his power or have power over him. He uses people; people don’t use him.
Trump seems to admire Putin and there is reason to think that Putin wants Trump to be elected, but despite all the accusations there is no evidence that Putin has any sort of control over Trump. And I haven’t even heard anyone else claim that Salman or Kim control him.
Besides all the obvious things, you’re right. There is no hard evidence that putin controls trump.
Trump announced, on stage with putin, that he rejects the entirety of the United States Intelligence Apparatus’ conclusions that russia interfered in the election, and instead believes putin.
Trump also rejects the conclusion that he lost the 2020 election. I think he would reject any conclusion that implied he wasn’t actually as popular and admired as he claims to be. The conclusion about Russian interference isn’t unusual in that context.
I mean, one of many examples. The collusion is old. There’s a mountain of circumstantial evidence. If one wants to hew close to “no amount of coincidences will constitute proof”, well then, there’s still direct connections. The meeting at trump tower, the mayflower hotel meeting jeff sessions perjured himself over. Mike flynn admitted to twice and was convicted of lying to the FBI about putin’s influence. Influence is control.
Jared’s $2B sweetheart deal is payment for services rendered by MBS. You think trump isn’t going to get a huge chunk of that? That’s controlling interest.
The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
I can only speak to Portland, but entirely too many people here refuse shelter for a variety of reasons, #1 being they can’t bring their drugs and alcohol with them.
Then deal with the drug problem. But I’ll tell you right now that most homeless people do not have the money or time to do drugs unless they’re homeless because of drugs. The majority of homeless people work as many hours as they can and are constantly trying to become not homeless.
Yeah they did that policy completely backwards. The Portugal experiment works, but you have to actually do what they did and Oregon did none of the follow up work the Portuguese did.
But you shouldn’t be punishing homeless people for that, at best it’s some sort of venn diagram and critics want to make it look like a circle.
Why is that a bad thing? Why is having the resources to help them available a bad thing, and clean needles to prevent things like AIDs from spreading a bad thing? Not having that isn’t going to stop them. Having that means the ones who do want help can get it.
Having the resources to help them is a good thing, it’s bad that they don’t want the help.
We set up a plan where getting caught with drugs got you a $100 ticket. The ticket was waived if you called a 1-800 helpline and asked about getting help.
Note - You didn’t ACTUALLY have to enter treatment, just calling the number was enough.
Of the 16,000 or so people ticketed, about 2/3rds of 1% called the number. They wiped their asses with the tickets.
We’re replacing that with a new plan that says “Get help or go to jail, pick one.” Kicks in I think in September?
To be honest going to jail isn’t a great thing though. That’s just creating more trauma that’s going to block any recovery. I agree it needs to be there at some point but this feels like we’ve just gone back to the war on drugs that didn’t work.
That’s the problem. They’re used to the stick. They’ll just bear it until they can escape reality again. It doesn’t help anyone, it just makes anti drug crusaders feel better.
“…entirely too many people here refuse shelter for a variety of reasons…”
Have you ever spent time in a shelter? Like tried to sleep there? Undoubtedly no. Because if you had you’d know that the only way they are tolerable and the only way you can block out that they are obviously unsafe, noisy, and completely not conducive to good sleep is to dull your pain with drugs or alcohol.
The street, which is obviously unsafe, noisy, completely not conducive to good sleep, and open to the elements
It seems to me that this is not something with which you’ve had personal experience. Yours is a reasonable speculation but it’s at odds with the reality for most people who have been homeless. I grant my own experience is limited to two shelters, but both were horrendous and I’ve never once heard a good word about any of them.
For the same reason he called members of the KKK “very fine people”. He’s completely amoral and doesn’t want to alienate people who are obviously fans.
That saying about 10 people sitting at a table and a Nazi sits with them. Now there’s a table full of Nazis. Trump is the new or should we say neo Nazi
oh, i agree. but the blind eye we turn towards the availability of alcohol which kills untold thousands per year is a little insane. it kills far more than fireworks, and a lot of innocent bystanders at that.
marijuana is a registered drug because of its 'danger', but alcohol is not. it would be comical if it wasnt so sad
Honestly, the only thing I can think of that could work would be what happened with cigarettes- a combination of significantly rising prices and an alternative to the original addiction (vaping, which is, at least in theory, safer). Some people claim that legal cannabis fills the second goal, but it’s a hell of a lot more expensive than cheap beer, at least in Illinois. And good luck convincing beverage outlets into pricing people out of cheap beer.
Again, cannabis and tobacco taxes don’t end up being spent on what they claim they will be spent on. They go into slush funds and get parceled out on bullshit.
If they did things like help with education and such, I’d agree. But they don’t.
Tax money is generally not “wasted”. It goes towards services for the state. So, yeah - I would not mind if there were additional taxes placed on fireworks to go into the state’s coffers, to come back to me as road work or universities.
Alcohol is very heavily regulated, starting from creation, through transport and conditions of sale, to how, where, and when it is consumed, and what can legally be done after consuming it.
There is a lot of licensing and legal regulation surrounding bars and alcohol-sales businesses. I think you’re confusing regulation and prohibition.
Maybe if there wasn’t a whole month known as Pride where American Conservatives spend the entire time doing everything they can to demean and denounce an entire large segment of the population, I’d have more pride in America.
There’s so much bullshit going on in courts lately. It’s hard to keep up enough to know if something is good or bad. It’s starting to get fucking exhausting.
“court ruling blocks decision to block court decision to block court decision to ban plumbuses from not not being not sold in stores” - that’s every other court releated headline.
To sum up: we recently got the awesome FTC instruction that noncompete agreements are disallowed in almost all cases.
Noncompete agreements keep workers from being able to work in their trained field just because they previously worked somewhere else in that field and had to sign a paper to do so. They’re a tool used to harm worker power; traditionally for knowledge workers, but now it’s being used all over the place.
The judge SC said, you can’t ban those. Noncompetes are cool and good. Fuck workers.
EDIT: This was a 5th circuit judge, so not the USSC. A little below that level.
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