The only real reasons liberals single out Trump with such vitriol is because he was a crude, boorish asshole who said everything out loud, thus shattering the notion that all presidents were ‘good’ because they were elected, and because Trump got lots of Americans killed.
Every president during my life has been a nasty bastard that would slip a knife into your spine if it meant moving up, and they have all killed people by the truckload; but Trump was the first to result in so many dead Americans. He wasn’t even particularly racist for a president, unless you can find me audio of him talking about black people being synonymous with “monkeys wearing shoes”, as good old saint Regan did.
Reminds me of Marx on the Third French Empire.
No Circe using black magic has distorted that work of art, the bourgeois republic, into a monstrous shape. That republic has lost nothing but the semblance of respectability. Present-day France was already contained in the parliamentary republic. It required only a bayonet thrust for the bubble to burst and the monster to leap forth before our eyes.
I don’t think Trump actually is racist as I don’t think he thinks about other people enough to care about things like that
He’s definitely a racist. The whole Central Park Five thing for instance.
In my experience, literally every single person who says some shit like “Shaun’s videos are great but his Twitter sucks” is just a Democrat who’s mad that he doesn’t think the Democrats are the good guys.
It’s like a bizarro version of c/the_dunk_tank where they only get mad at correct takes
I’ve been saying for a while it’s very revealing how Trump got actual fascists into the government like Gorka and Miller and not a lot changed.
“Not a lot changed” is a pretty bad take. Civilian drone strike deaths increased at least 330% under Trump (and that figure might be even higher), we went from détente with Iran to committing acts of war against them, the federal judiciary is now stacked with Federalist Society psychopaths to a degree that requires historic changes to even balance out, open fascism is more normalized than it’s been since the 30s, and that’s just what immediately comes to mind. Then there’s the idea that Trump pushed a lot of limits that hadn’t been tested in decades, if ever, which would give a slightly more competent or slightly more popular fascist a hell of a lot of data on how to do a lot more damage.
The fact that having Gorka, Miller, etc. in high places didn’t turn out even worse is more a factor of their lack of familiarity with the bureaucracy, how difficult it is to make any major change happen in a continent-spanning country, and how easy it is to slow things down in the U.S. government in particular.
Breaking deals, enforcing sanctions, assassinating world leaders, and hiding civilian casualties are all standard fare for American presidents.
How much of this would have happened with or without Trump? idk.
Hillary largely ran on the promise of continuing the Obama years, and as a former cabinet member under Obama, that was plausible. She probably would have followed through on the Iran deal, at least kept in place the Obama thaw on Cuba, continued the bad-but-not-as-bad-as-Trump drone program, and done the coup attempts in Bolivia and Venezuela. Maybe some bad things she would have done a bit more competently (e.g., the Venezuela coup), but that gets back to your point about edging into “great man” territory. Presidents almost certainly don’t plan the fine details of stuff like that, and the idea that Trump’s incompetence hindered the national security state is overblown anyway – they just started lying to him when he had a broken clock good instinct.
The US judiciary has always been stacked with RW freaks and every Republican president has furthered that mission.
American presidents constantly renege on deals, especially ones created by earlier presidents.
I find the hypothesis that Trump’s Fascists didn’t understand the bureaucracy to be a much less convincing explanation than the alternative: the United States of America has never not been Fascist. Fascists aren’t popping up because Trump became President; both issues are the result of the United States being a Fascist nation with Fascist culture. The US already invades and plunders whoever it pleases. It has 1/4 of the world’s prison population, and effectively enslaves minorities via racist criminal justice. It kills millions around the globe and occupies several countries. The country is largely run by unaccountable, bloodless lawyer psychopaths. The United States is already at just about Maximum Fascism.
Trump was not uniquely bad, but he definitely changed things for the worse compared to Obama (who was also bad, of course).
As for the idea that everyone in mainstream American politics is just a different shade of fascist, that’s an ideological dead end, not to mention an enormous oversimplification. We will get nothing done if we call the vast majority of politically active Americans fascists, so believing that would be tantamount to giving up. Luckily, it’s only believable if one uses an incredibly loose definition of “fascist” that renders the word almost meaningless.
I hate when assholes try to act like Shaun being Br*tish is reason enough to disregard his (correct) takes, as if he isn’t obviously very well read and knowledgeable. Lindsay Ellis did this same shit, yelling at Shaun when, close to the election, he was saying something bad about Biden, and Ellis acted like he was doing some evil thing and shouldn’t be commenting since he wasn’t American. As if the US and its policies don’t hold hegemonic control over the entire world.
B-b-b-but my 23 and me results say I’m from Germany! :theiss-explanation:
