“I love the poorly educated!” The only true and absolutely honest thing Trump has ever said.
“I can’t get my car registered because Obama closed all the agencies” on a national holiday.
This is who votes for him.
Only if they’re Real Americans™, meaning white racists who support him.
For instance, he doesn’t like immigrants illegally coming across the border, even though they tend to be poorly educated, because, as he told the National Association of Black Journalists, “they’re taking Black jobs”.
The journalists questioned what he meant by “Black jobs”, something that his acolytes would have immediately understood. Black jobs are obviously the sorts of unskilled menial jobs which are suitable for Blacks, and these journalists should have understood that these are exactly the sorts of unskilled menial jobs that undocumented immigrants tend to take, since they can do no others. It was Very Unfair™ for the journalists to make him say the dog whistle part out loud.
Trump also helpfully informed the National Association of Black Journalists that “many of you are Black”.
Your post was great, thanks. I think you nailed a big chunk of it.
“Moral hazard” does need to be taken into consideration when formulating any policy, but right wingers seem to have a particular aversion to it (your point above). To the extent that, even if you can demonstrate that a given policy will, in the aggregate, save society money, they still won’t support it, since some people will get a freebie.
One thing that comes to mind is ending homelessness. During the pandemic, various places put homeless people in hotels, and it ended up working really well. OK, let’s do that across the country (to be fair, some red states are doing this too). This strategy dovetails with Harris’s promise to build a couple million new housing units. Entirely doable, and it will save the government massive loads of dough.
As a general update to the OP, this week the Dems are absolutely killing it at the DNC, while Trump and Vance are holding ultra-low-energy events to sparse crowds. Trump continues to piss and moan like a petulant child at the barbs flung at him at the convention while saying nothing of substance. Any polling I’ve seen has been positive for our side. Various hosts and guests on Fox continue to critique Trump’s anemic campaigning and self-defeating messaging.
In short, things continue to look dismal for Trump and the GOP. The stick shaker is still shaking away. STALL WARNING.
My wife and I have been doing a lot of traveling recently, and one of the common elements we see everywhere we go has been a glut of available office space. The massive and relatively rapid realignment in white-collar working expectations has left a lot of landlords scrambling for tenants. We frequently wonder how difficult it would be to convert these empty workspaces into at least temporary accommodations to deal with the parallel housing crisis.
Further exploration of the practical logistics would require another thread, but a politician with vision could offer some form of this as a way of addressing two seemingly unrelated problems with one solution.
Which is not to say that Trump is a politician with vision. Ahem.
Yeah, sometimes you see these old malls turned into schools, medical facilities, government buildings, storage places, etc. I think I’ve read of some turned into (for-profit) housing as well, but your idea is a good one. Hey, at least those old 1970s malls tend to feature sturdy construction–and skylights!
People are hypocrites, for one thing. For another, they want restrictions on abortion even if that comes short of a total ban.
If you want to go on thinking they’re just deliberately voting for evil you can, but you’re wrong, sorry. They have very different beliefs. They really, truly think the Democrats are the evil ones. Look, I’m with you on the facts and think Trump is just about the worst Presidential candidate in the history of Western republican democracy, but the facts are the facts:
- Republican voters genuinely think they’re the good guys. They really, truly believe that they are voting for what is right and good and best for the USA.
- Trump is not going to dump Vance (I don’t think he even can, anyway) and Vance will not hurt Trump’s chance to any significant degree.
- The race is close and Trump has a very good chance of winning.
Malls can be repurposed, but it’s often not worth it. They’re designed to be malls. Their suitability as a storage facility is pretty limited because a true warehouse or distribution center is specifically designed for that purpose and malls are a bit subdivided and don’t have enough docks to serve their internal size.
Obviously they can make decent temporary schools or clinics or what have you but, again, it’s a huge waste of space on the whole unless you substantially reconstruct their interiors, and that c an often cost damn near as much as just knocking them down and building a purpose-built structure. Around here we need housing, anyway.
Trump cannot drop out of the race without risking having to pay the piper for his various misdeeds over the years. The only surefire path to avoid prison and other penalties is to win the election. Trump is in ride or die mode and he’s either going to be elected or he’s going to crash spectacularly and take a lot of people with him.
You have some valid points, but I disagree with this one. Historically, Republicans have represented at least a nominally defensible conservative ideology, while Democrats have represented a defensible liberal ideology. The former is no longer true, but even when it was true, Republicanism was characterized by a strong element of selfishness, with the idea that “I’ve got mine, and if you’re less fortunate, it’s your own damn fault”. Today it’s characterized by a complete abandonment of basic human rights.
With the advent of Trumpism, and particularly now with Trumpism V2.0 and the Project 2025 blueprint, Republicanism has become dangerously extreme. Those who still support Trumpism V2.0 are either dangerously misinformed or irredeemably selfish plutocrats voting for their own financial interests and absolutely nothing else. Both groups – but particularly the clueless group – are likely to be shocked by what they have wrought if Trump wins. The plutocrat group is going to be a lot more insulated from the evil and are consequently less concerned about it. But this is basically why Republicans and former Trump insiders are peeling away from the cult and supporting Harris.
Yeah, often it’s not ideal. But remember that the movie Logan’s Run was filmed in a mall, indicating their extraordinary potential for, um, something!
Seattle saw a lot of people working from home during the pandemic, leaving lots of empty office spaces. Many of them are still empty. So this idea is at least being considered.
An alternative, which Mayor Bruce Harrell has championed as part of his downtown activation plan, is to turn underused offices into apartments. The idea is that new residents would refill empty streets and help them feel safer.
His sentencing in the NY case is set for September 18, and he knows that this could further erode his chances.
Anthony Scaramucci has speculated that Trump may drop out if he can get a plea deal in all of his cases to avoid prison. If Trump thinks he is going to lose anyway, such a thing may be plausible. Would he sell out the GOP in order to save his own ass? Of course! (I’m not predicting this will happen, btw. If anything, Trump seems too low-energy now to make any major moves. That’s the biggest reason why I’m pretty sure he won’t dump Vance, either.).
When has the Mooch been right about anything regarding trump?
One things humans are able to do is subordinate absolute morality/ethics to a particular cause. In Hitler’s conception, Germany became the highest good. To a mafioso, the crime family is the highest good. And so on. I think there is a lot of this at work in right wing thinking.
Did Hitler know he was the “bad guy”? In some sense, I absolutely think he did, since he knew that putting Germany above everything else would not be appreciated by the rest of the world. Similarly, the wingnuts that chuckle at “pwning the libs” and fucking around with others’ private lives know that they are not being altruistic, empathetic people.
A lot of them are too dumb or incurious to understand their own thinking, however. Example: MTG.
I’m not sure that question really makes sense. He was an insider. I’m not sure if he has made any predictions at all before now.
So what?
So did the fucking nazi’s in charge of Auschwitz.
You can absolutely be objectively be evil and still believe you are on the side of angels. Your own beliefs about yourself do not matter at all.
Anyone voting for Trump after 2016 is evil. End of story.
Bingo. All the talk about MAGAs believing they are the good guys is pointless. Sure, they think they’re the good guys. So did the Nazis. And the slave owners. They’re wrong.
And I sincerely hope this doesn’t devolve into a “but who decides what is evil?” debate. Some things are so beyond the pale that they are as objectively bad as any moral conclusion can be.
All comes down to Pennsylvania by the looks of it. Whoever wins PA wins the race.
Maybe. The ElectoralVote site has Wisconsin as the tipping-point state. But the ordering of the states near the tipping point greatly affected by statistical noise.