Yes, it does.
No. No, it most surely does not.
I read his Truth Social account. Yes, they are.
Point me to the prominent Democratic politicians and influencers who are advising people to flee the country, then, because I can only cite their words and actions and I don’t see any of them speaking or acting like that.
Now, you’re arguing against what you wish I had said, as opposed to anything I actually did say.
I leave you to it, then.
Have a good night!
Look, it’s simple; if Joe Biden thought there was a need for enemies of Trump to flee the country, he would tell us so. He hasn’t, therefore he doesn’t.
Beyond that, I can’t prove a negative or read his thoughts, so if you were expecting me to do that then you were setting yourself up for disappointment.
Look, it’s simple; if Joe Biden thought there was a need for enemies of Trump to flee the country, he would tell us them.
Even assuming that was true, the Democrat leadership is committed to pretending that the Republicans are “well meaning but misguided” people who can be worked with like reasonable people. Not fanatics. They’ll walk into their own death chamber saying that if everyone sucked up to the Republicans just a little harder everything will be fine.
OFFS, peeps, it’s getting snippy in here! And, to point out, I really like the posts by Dopers in this and other related threads.
For ME, I fear the religious aspect of p 2025. I think it would be easy to have our government officially claim the US as a Christian country (but others are allowed, yadda, yadda…)
This would be a gateway to lessening crime on anti-senitism, crime against LBGTQ+, and ending abortion nationally.
It would probably be a financial boom for Trump and his lawyers. Large, rich churches paying for a speech, donating to GOP PACs.
Another is the transphobia. It will be very easy with these assholes for uninformed people to think trans people are actors. They may not even be recognized as people anymore.
I really don’t think any death squads, concentration camps or military will or can be used in immigration. I really don’t think Melon and Elmo will be taken seriously with tariffs or budgets.
Though I may worry about our favorite bear assassin to take some control (like spewing bullshit on vaccines) in healthcare.
These are the people who put children in cages the last time, and made sure to lose documentation in order to permanent make it impossible to reunite them with their families. And now they’ll have even more unrestrained power to indulge in their race war. So yes, you’ll see killing, brutality, rape, and probably military attacks on Mexico.
Meanwhile, in the real world, Mitch McConnell has effectively sabotaged Trump’s agenda by ensuring that one of his lieutenants will be the next Majority Leader, which means the filibuster isn’t going anywhere.
This is a ridiculous article. It’s been known for months that a leadership election was coming after the election and the three candidates (Cornyn, Thune and Scott) announced their bids months ago. Any other Republican Senator could have (and still could) run for Republican leader. While Cornyn and Thune have worked with McConnell, neither is a McConnell protege or owes him any particular allegiance. Neither one has an incentive to try to sabotage Trump’s agenda and may in fact feel more pressure to tow his line to establish credibility with his MAGA-aligned members.
As for the filibuster, it really depends. If Democrats take the House (still a possibility), there’s no point in killing it. But if the filibuster is the only thing that stands athwart passage of some key plank of Trump’s agenda, it’s going to die.
Both have been clear about what their agenda as Majority Leader would be and it doesn’t include nuking the filibuster.
Moreover, a point you failed to notice is that the leadership election is being held by secret ballot, meaning there can be no public pressure on senators to support Trump’s choice in Scott, and that the election is being held on Wednesday, before any of the newly elected GOP senators will be seated.
This is far from a harmoniously aligned caucus that will do whatever Trump says without question and that’s going to make most of his agenda unachievable.
Trump enjoys his ability to fire anyone in the executive branch, and “primary” (apply demagoguery to influence voters) in the legislative branch. 20 of the GOP senators are in peril of that in 2026, out of the 2025 majority of 52.
I did not fail to notice that it’s a secret ballot – the caucus vote is always by secret ballot. And the newly elected GOP Senators WILL be voting, while Republican Senators who are not returning next session do not get a vote. The caucus is not bound by who’s currently a Senator.
But, you know, I feel like the only thing I can say is, “we’ll see!” This board has come unmoored in the wake of Trump’s victory. There’s no point in trying to have a conversation about what may happen and why, because each of us is experiencing this through our own reality. I’ve never seen anything like it on the Dope. I find it incredibly disconcerting.
That’s only natural, given the perception that Trump himself is unmoored by legalities, conventions and shame itself.
And that as well occurring in the globalization/digitization era of “disprupters;” the billionaire cronies who align themselves with Trump and Putin. Ironic that the original Conservative, Edmund Burke, warned about men such as this based on their very basis of makeup. They’re just not quality people.
However, no matter how disruptive, and for better or worse, the fact remains that human nature hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years, while the systems under which humans conduct themselves have always been in some state or change. Donald Trump can’t live outside a system just by force of will.
What we’ll probably see is a period of stagnation (exacerbated by the conflict over resources due to climate change, but that was in the cards regardless) characterized by the inversion of two operating systems:
At the top: Gemeinschaft in all its worst aspects: cronyism, nepotism, favoritism.
At the middle and towards the bottom: Gesellschaft. If those without connections hope to receive a few crumbs off the banquet table, they must make themselves useful little cogs in the machinery of society.
In enlightened, progressive times this is reversed. At the top, things are transactional and meritocratic, while the plain folks below with no great ambitions live by their community and familial connections. But that will have to wait for now, hopefully subject to change not too brutal.
Yeah - one reason I’m ratcheting down my participation in these threads (present post notwithstanding.) I saw the result of my trying to figure out what was going to happen in the election - ZERO benefit for the election OR my inner peace. I feel the same about what Trump’s policies WILL be. I’ll respond when. and iff they come, and then, through a filter of “how will they adversely affect ME?”
We must not allow a Gemeinschaft gap!
When you’re evaluating the actions of very rich and powerful people, “canny move” has a different meaning. They have resources to “fail upward”, change the narrative, and force their poor decisions to work out to their benefit.
Remember that Musk almost certainly didn’t want to buy Twitter. He (apparently) was trying to bluff Twitter’s board into make changes favorable to him. They called his bluff. He claimed he was “super worried about the economy”, which turned out to be objectively the best economy in history. He was forced by a court order to buy a 5 billion company for 44 billion while his detractors pointed and laughed. He claimed he would make it a “neutral platform”, because at the time it seemed to suit his interests.
What you’re now seeing is Musk licking Trump’s boots to salvage the useful bits of a bad decision. He’s running to the autocrat and offering his humble propaganda network in exchange for (probably) redirecting the Department of Education budget to NASA, which will then outsource all its rocketry business to Musk at a ridiculous markup, which he will claim is a “cost savings” because it’s “privatized”.
Don’t ever think these chumps are canny players of 11-D chess. They just have access to power that you and I don’t, all they do is shit lemons and make lemonade with other people’s sugar.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at with that. There’s a lot of disagreement, sure, but there are a lot of unknowns. There are things you can point to that suggest that democracy will now unwind and there are things you can point to that suggest it may only be a little worse than Trump’s first term.
Personally, I lean towards the former. There aren’t adults in the room any more, and I see no reason to ignore the things Trump has said he will do.
Hoping that the new senate leader will have a spine and stand up to both Trump and the maga mob seems hopelessly wishful given what’s actually happened to the GOP in the last few years. It’s just not realistic at all IMO.
My best case scenario is Trump is too lazy to get much done and spends most of his time golfing, plus there’s infighting between the extremist and more extremist wings of the party. And therefore, not much changes, and we quickly get to 2026 and flip both houses.
But by “not much changes” I mean in a relative sense. Even in the best case scenario this is going to be worse in terms of human rights, civil unrest etc than last time, and the economy might well crater too.