This is my view. I don’t know if I agree with the 8 years part, but I agree about the people. People keep acting like Trump came out of nowhere, but he and his antics represents the hopes, beliefs, goals and values of tens of millions of Americans.
Those people will still be here after Trump leaves office, and they will find someone else to vote for who represents their values and goals.
If you tried to implement Swedish or New Zealand democracy on the people of Iraq or Somalia, it will not work.
Pretty sure Ryan is a Brit. As for me, what should I be hopeful for: the fact that Trump has put white supremacists in his administration? The fact that he has bragged about sexually assaulting women? The fact that he’s promised to deny health care to 20 million Americans? Or maybe that he’s promised to start a ground war against ISIS?
So he wasn’t actually popular, he just benefited from the ardent support of a vocal minority of reactionaries plus unscrupulous gerrymandering and chicanery.
Yes, it does sound familiar. But it also sounds like something we may be able to learn from.
Hey, I’m happy to support the Trump administration in doing anything that’s actually constructive. At present, though, their only discernible plans seem to be a mix of palaeoconservative attacks on civil rights, reproductive rights, etc., unscrupulous electoral manipulation to suppress political opposition, unrealistic rhetoric about things they don’t actually intend to do and don’t have a plan to pay for if they did do them, and the same old supply-side shibboleths that have been enriching the 1% at the expense of stability and prosperity for everybody else under every Republican president since Reagan.
I don’t see any use in being gloomy or fearful about that, but I’m certainly not going to be subservient and unresisting under it. And I don’t think my fellow Democrats should be, either.
Hope is a good idea when there’s good reason to have hope. What possible reason is there to have hope right now? We’ve elected someone as president with no understanding of economics, domestic policy, foreign policy, diplomacy, or anything else, with a temperament well-suited for posting angry things on twitter and not much else. We have been waiting for the promised “pivot” for the entire election, and ever since then. We’re still waiting for him to show any actual competence at his job. What we’ve seen is that he’s nominating people to his cabinet that believe their own department either shouldn’t exist or shouldn’t be able to do their job, holding fake press conferences where he refuses to discuss policy, throwing out in equal measure meaningless platitudes and insults to the news sources covering him (except Breitbart, which at this point is basically Pravda for Trump), and bragging about keeping a thousand jobs here or there in the country while ignoring how utterly insubstantial and meaningless those kinds of numbers are. Why should we have hope? You assholes elected a completely incompetent candidate.
And you can call us grim if you want, but god damn is that rich coming from someone whose party was collectively in fucking conniptions about Obama being a secret fascist gay muslim who was going to take our guns and implement martial law. At least what we’re worried about isn’t based entirely on paranoid delusions.
I guess I’m not really focusing on economic or legislative changes (of course, they will have a massive impact too) but more the internationally-recognised ‘ethos’ of America.
Americans were always the ‘cool kids’ wot with movies and music, and hamburgers and OMG, just everything cool. Americans were innovators and inventors and architects and engineers. America was the friggin MOON LANDING for gawdsakes! I watched those first steps on the moon when I was 9yrs old. In Australia. In a regional town. On a black and white telly.
America was the country that every other country emulated and just wanted to be. In those days you didn’t have a mustard-coloured dick as your soon-to-be POTUS. I wish you well, and hope that your President doesn’t ignite WW3.
And now we are the only country able to reliably send probes and robotic explorers to every sort of object in our solar system, especially Mars.
Our probe, Voyager 1, is the first man made object to travel into interstellar space. Voyager 2 will soon be the second.
Our citizens have pioneered private space travel.
Our satellites are the ones finding a vast majority of the extra solar planets that is shaking up our view of the potential for life other than our own in the Universe.
We are still the only ones to have sent people to the Moon and will likely be the first to send people to Mars - if we feel like it.
We have been so thoroughly dominant for so long that we’ve actually had mind-boggling feats of engineering and science such as the shuttle program that we later decided wasn’t worth it.
You can thank the USA for just about every beautiful, awe-inspiring image you have in your head of our solar system and beyond just as you can thank the USA for just about every awesome thing done by humans in space.
No other nation even scratches the surface of these accomplishments and what relatively little they have accomplished is basically the result of our work.
If you are not in awe of what the USA has done and continues to do in space then you are not paying attention.
People keep ascribing his behavior to being high. No, his behavior is who he is. Trump’s sobriety is extremely well documented.
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In which case, Pence is president, and I’m not sure which is worse.
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Trump is worse. Trump is not a little bit worse; he is not, like, ten percent worse. He is orders of magnitude worse. If you arranged all the Presidents who ever served in a list, with Abraham Lincoln or Washington or whomever at #1, someone like GEorge H.W. Bush around the middle, and Franklin Pierce at #44, Pence would probably end up below #40. Donald Trump’s name, however, will come after ten or fifteen blank pages beyond your list. There’s only 45 Presidents if you could Cleveland twice, and Trump will still be 593rd.
Michael Pence is a cruel, small-minded bigot and would be a bad President. He would, however, be a President; he is sane and level-headed, and would do the best job he knew how to keep his country stable and safe. He would not sell state secrets and American policy to a foreign government, as Trump will or has already. To borrow from P.J. O’Rourke’s comparison of Hillary Clinton to Trump, Pence may be wrong, but he’s wrong within normal parameters.
My late husband and I came extremely close to moving to the top of the South of NZ in 2004. He was a native, also had Aus citizenship but we preferred NZ. I nixed the move at the eleventh hour and we moved to Oregon instead.
I love Oregon, and NZ may well have kicked me out when (if) my husband had died there. All the same, in recent times I often think it was the dumbest thing I ever did.
No, you’re not very good at reading comprehension. I won’t tell you why either.
Not exclusive, especially when you move out of space science/tech, but we are in a category of our own when it comes to accomplishments in space science/tech and we’ve been way ahead since the first moon landing. I’m not looking down on other nation’s achievements. I enjoy them every bit as much as I enjoy our own. But if you looked up to America with the cool stuff in technology and culture in the past, then there is no reason based on the pace of our accomplishments to cease doing so now.
We are being prayed for precisely because our political culture is a fucking mess. We’ve let the southern and midwestern degenerates get too loud.
