Is “Probably” necessary here? Hasn’t he explicitly said this was his motivation?
And for all that he cops a lot of heat like this:
it does seem to me that the harsh reality was that someone like Kelly could (while Trump was in office) prevent more harm by staying on the inside and doing his best to apply the brakes than by the empty gesture of resigning and denouncing Trump. Plenty of people denounced Trump while he was in office and it did nothing at all to stop him because once he was in office he was immune from effective attack.
All of Trump’s shortcomings were amply displayed when he campaigned for president in 2016. That would have been the proper time for people like Kelly to denounce him.
Lots of people did denounce him then, and the voters still voted for him. Remember the line, “Elections have consequences”? At some point, you have to accept that he really did win, and really was going to be president, for better or worse (spoiler: it was ‘worse’).
At that point, do you take a job with the administration, and try to mitigate the damage, or do you retire to your villa and watch Rome burn?
Imagine what the US would look like in 2020, if the people who were hired in 2017 were the people Trump tried to install in office in 2020. You know, the ones who were willing to help him steal the election, not the ones who were ‘the adults in the room’.
If Trump wins in 2024, we won’t have to imagine it, though. Trump will only hire sycophants right from Day 1 this time.
But I’m not talking about MAGAts. I’m talking about people like Kelly who shouldn’t have needed to work in his administration to understand what a threat he is to decency and democracy.
Fair point. It just pisses me off when people like Kelly seem surprised to learn what Trump was really like. We all could see what he was really like. What took them so fucking long?
I think what surprised them was that Trump actually wanted to “Do the job”. I know I was expecting him to be the first truly “figurehead” POTUS. He’d show up to ribbon-cuttings and the like, roll out a few classic hits like “Build the Wall!” and “Lock her up!”, and then go golfing while the people who actually do the work did things the way they’ve always done them.
But then he went and actually wanted to affect policy. And that caught them all by surprise, while also highlighting how awful all his policy proposals were.
When some of us on the SDMB (okay two of us, one of whom is no longer here) began denouncing trump during the campaign and immediately after the election, many Dopers shouted us down and said to “give trump a chance.” When I started the Clusterfuck thread, I was told that I was overreacting and to calm down. Hindsight is great, aint it?
Yeah, lots of people at every level of society and government who should have denounced trump from the get-go didn’t. No one could possibly have foreseen (well, almost no one)how bad it would get. And absolutely no one could have foreseen that we’d still be dealing with this deranged, narcissistic maniac all these years later. Not to mention that he could very well be elected again.
I would like to see some of that thread. I wasn’t here then, but I figured he would be a disaster. When they called it for him that night I threw my phone across the the room. Ugh.
Really? I joined the Dope in 2017 and found most Dopers to be intensely anti-Trump. Was the pre-administration vibe truly open to giving him a chance, with you and a few others the only holdouts?
I went to bed that night before they called it. The next morning, my husband woke me up and said, “Trump won.” About halfway through my morning shower, I realized that my husband doesn’t play those kind of jokes and was thus telling the truth. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it ever since.
