That’s basically my take as well.
OK, I’ll concede that he might have been a non-puppeted clueless moron. 
I wonder if some our “allies” are starting to re-think their position on nukes. If I were Canada, I would build at least a few nukes just to deter any American dictator from even talking about invading/annexing. Same with Mexico. I suspect it wouldn’t take very long for Canada to do this.
The thing is, Trump is not going to be around for that long, so I’m not sure they would consider that big a move right now.
If Trump were really to try to invade Canada, I’m not sure what the response in the US would be from various factions, but I am sure that all hell would break loose. It’s hard to imagine the military even going along with such a plan.
I don’t see Trump ever invading Canada. What I worry about is maybe an invasion of Greenland, and maybe a military takeover of the Panama Canal.
At this point, Trump 2.0 is untethered from the constraints of his first administration. He wants to cement his legacy as one of the “great” manifest destiny types probably. So, what better way than to invade Greenland and take back the Panama Canal, and probably send some special ops troops into Mexico to go after cartels. None of that would surprise me.
For Canada, the short-term risk is an economic trade war, set up by Trump’s stupidity.
I do think in the long-term though, if fascism is allowed to fully consolidate its power in the US, then Canada’s risk of an actual military confrontation goes up. This won’t happen under Trump, IMO. I could see it happening in future decades, if the US fully normalizes fascism.
Think about Putin. He didn’t invade Ukraine in 2002. He invaded them 12 years later, after he’d gradually eroded the freedoms within his country, to stamp out all opposition within Russia.
This could happen in the US. And at that point, no country is safe from a military invasion.
Interesting thoughts…
I don’t think he will invade Canada either. Panama is remotely possible. Greenland would be an attack on a fellow NATO country; here again, I don’t see the military going along with it. It would also be literally illegal, since it would be a treaty violation (and about as big a violation as can possibly be imagined).
I do think the US having Greenland is a good idea. If Trump can pull that off without violence and violations, then cool. He would have done something productive and interesting.
I can see some fucking around in Mexico too, but without Mexico’s permission, I’m not sure how that would fly.
Right, and I don’t think it’s going to happen. Big Biz TPTB would scream and holler. Trump is their bitch, so I think not.
The country would break apart before fascism could be normalized. We are barely holding it together now anyway. IMHO.
I think you’re only partially correct. Objectively, what Bush Jr. did was worse than what Trump has done so far*. But Bush Jr. mostly hurt people in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. We didn’t really suffer domestically. Trump’s damage is focused here at home, so even if it’s a smaller amount than what Bush Jr. did, it feels worse because it’s directed at damaging average middle class Americans, not people in foreign lands.
ETA. Of course Trump is really just getting started. By the end of his term I suspect the damage will be far worse. Also, I think this is a global phenomenon, and Trump is a symptom as well as a cause. Something happened around 2014 or 2015 that made people around the world start “going crazy” for want of a better term. What that was, I don’t know, but that’s where I would set the date as to when this all started.
I disagree with those downplaying this era. This is the beginning of a lot of roll back of racial and sexual Civil Rights.
We will soon have the lowest level of representation of women and POC in leadership positions across all government organizations.
I suspect we will see legalized segregation and discrimination again.
I saw a Youtube video of a TED talk a few months age (Real specific, I know - but I can’t find it again) in which the speaker argued that the right wing is actually acting like they understand that climate change is real, that it’s inevitable, and its a real disaster. Their reaction to this knowledge is to panic irrationally, and act out against the hordes of displaced people who are going to invade the US when their own lives in points south become untenable.
His idea is that it’s us on the left who are in denial, with our heads in the sand trying to act like things are normal and will always go on as they have been.
I’m not sure he was completely correct, but it was food for thought.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that Trump is a weak, fragile coward. He’s not going to do something like invade Iraq, he’ll bully smaller countries like Panama. Even though he personally isn’t at physical hazard, he can’t risk the political damage of taking US casualties, nor can he take the political risk of being upstaged by a military general.
Even that silver lining carries its risks, of course. He bows down to dictators, he’ll let our allies get shredded. Alliances mean nothing to him of course, and he’ll enjoy watching snooty Europeans eat shit when Russia rolls over them.
It’s cold comfort, but that’s the only comfort on tap right now.
Why would that be a good idea…? Accelerating climate change by shaling etc?
It’s a big, underutilized, underpopulated territory that I’m sure the US could use more effectively than it is being used currently. And it could be used in an environmentally responsible way (though barely anything is right now).
In addition to the harm that Dubya did overseas, he really did hurt us domestically as well:
- He was a divisive, polarizing figure in his own right. His win in 2004 I would say was as tragic and traumatic to our side as Trump’s recent win was. In some ways worse, since Biden took the blame, fairly or not, for genuine problems and pain, whereas Dubya was not punished for the foreign war shitshow he had created.
- We didn’t win the wars that Dubya started, and those were a grinding trauma to the nation for two decades. Moreover, they directly and indirectly started a bunch of other big problems, such as ISIS, that we’ve had to deal with.
- While Trump’s harms tend to be positive (that is, things that can be seen, e.g., the stress of his constant trolling, the obvious grifting, etc.,), Dubya created massive negative, that is, unseen harm to the country in the form of opportunity cost. Where would we be as a country (and as a planet) without his useless, costly wars?
I think I can tell you what it is: late stage capitalism had by then failed for 15 years without respite and without politicians (or economists or anyone, really) having any vision for a better economic system. It’s failing around the globe and we don’t know what the do about it. I think that this failure has engendered multiple “tipping points.”
I think this sums up pretty well how I feel.
Several people here have made good arguments for why GWB is an objectively worse president than Trump. But Trump has done more long-term damage to the institutions and norms that have governed this country, not to mention people’s faith in those institutions and norms. At the very least, he’s exposed just how weak our political system’s guardrails truly are, how shaky the Constitution is as a governing document in the 21st Century, and how susceptible the electoral process is to being manipulated by bad faith actors.
It’s a tough comparison because it’s quite asymmetrical. Trump is constantly doing dumb and evil shit and is entirely unpresidential. That is damaging. Dubya was an idiot who at least tried in his own idiot way to be a normal president–but he started wars that completely fucked the US and millions in the Middle East.
Nixon was rather the same kind of thing. He was very smart and was rather skilled at being president. He even did some good (opening relations with China) and liberal (EPA) things. But what he did wrong, he did very very wrong.
I do blame Trump, but at the end of the day he is a barely sentient animal. The more culpable people are the GOP sycophants (that is, the entire GOP) who have allowed his behavior to go unpunished.
While we can say that he is an evil person for having shown us those things in the way that he has shown them, we can’t say that having been shown them is a bad thing. Whereas the effects of Dubya’s idiocy were bad in an absolute sense.
But yes: we have obsolete political and economic systems.
Trump is the penultimate destructive right wing President, it’s the outright fascists who come after him that will do the real damage. Because they’ll be true believers and not as lazy as he is.
If you are correct about this, then that is where my failure in understanding the problem comes from. The way I see it (and the way I saw it during the time period in question), things were still getting better from 2000 through, let’s say Brexit, to take one example of a clearly visible tipping point. Yes, we had 9/11 and the bungled response by Bush Jr. Yes, there was the Great Recession in the fall of 2008. But by 2015 we were seemingly back on the right track, even if we were going down it somewhat slowly. Obama was starting to fix some of the damage Bush Jr. had done. We were making progress on many fronts in terms of improved rights for multiple minority groups (racial, religious, gay, and transgender). We had recovered from the Great Recession. There was a plan in place to address the looming threat of global warming. All things considered things were looking promising, and all we had to do was keep on going down the same path Obama had set us on. Sure, it might have taken another decade or two of people like Obama being in charge around the world. But that was all that it would take. Keep those kinds of leaders in elected office and things would have turned out just fine. But the people in developed (first world, western, whatever term is most accurate) countries decided that they didn’t want that kind of future, and they fucked it all up.
I tend to suspect that historians will look back at this era and – along with whatever else – point out that “DEI --” an informal end to the presumption that only straight, white, Christian men were owed the presumption of competence – proved inarguably that – freed from their extrinsic and artificial impediments – others could thrive.
Which gave rise to a demagogue, who – reminiscent of the one in early 20th Century Germany – appealed to the emotions, weaknesses, insecurities, and tribalism of the populace, whipping them up into a frenzy, and unleashing them on the rest of the world.
My disagreement with this is that while those straight, white, Christian men are most definitely the base Trump and his kind depend on, they are nowhere close to having the numbers to be victorious on their own. The reason they are winning is because people of all kinds, not just the cis hetero white Christian men, have decided that fascism is the way to go. What happened in 2014 / 2015 wasn’t that those cis hetero white men became more numerous. What happened is that people from other groups started to join them in believing something like”hey, this fascism thing might not be so bad after all”. And as I mentioned above, I am still mystified why they started believing that way.
My offhand response to that salient point is that he used bigotry and fear-mongering (stereotypical demagoguery) to find the pain points of numerous cohorts – people who he could manipulate and attract without alienating the straight, white, Christian male.
He basically hammered the African-American and Latino communities with mortal terror about the ‘culture war’ issues, and painted Democrats as a true existential threat to them, their way of life, their families, their values, and All That Is Holy.
Which didn’t cost him any typical red hat votes.
Characteristic 3 of fascism:
Identification of Enemies as a Unifying Cause
He’s masterful at this.
GENERAL REMINDER: 14 Characteristics of Fascism
- Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
- Disregard for Human Rights
- Identification of Enemies as a Unifying Cause
- Supremacy of the Military
- Widespread Sexism
- Controlled Mass Media
- Obsession with National Security
- Religion and Government are Intertwined
- Corporate Power is Protected
- Labor Power is Suppressed
- Disrespect for Intellectuals and the Arts
- Obsession with Crime and Punishment
- Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
- Fraudulent Elections
–Lawrence Britt, Author, “Fascism, Anyone?”