I have heard a lot of rumors about things Trump has done, and seen actual evidence of bad things he did do. But I have never even heard the rumor that Trump has had people “taken out” like a hit man.
After the insurrection, though, I am not sure where Trump’s ceiling is. I don’t know how far he’d go if he feels desperate enough.
After the insurrection, I am not sure where all the other political institutions’ bottom is, as to their level of cowardice.
We need to re-define conservative, and liberal.
I’m generally conservative in my actions. In that I think before I act. I’m liberal in that I don’t feel that I should tell others what to do, or how to live there lives.
I guess this is the key. Established Repubs like McConnell, Graham, and McCarthy initially condemned trump right after the Jan. 6 riots, but soon did a 180 and got right back on the trump train.
trump is on trial for causing those riots. If he somehow wriggles out of a conviction, or the penalty has no teeth and he’s still allowed to run and win the Presidency, that will leave him with free rein.
Hitler showed how relatively easy it can be to rise to power in a democracy and convert it to a dictatorship. I guess we may find out if we’ve learned anything from history.
Yeah, I refuse to accept this. Someone in another thread, when I said that trump is not even a real conservative, said that the meaning of ‘conservative’ has changed due to trumpism. I understand that word meanings are organic, and do shift and change naturally over time, but I don’t think we should allow trump and trumpism to dictate and redefine what the words ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ mean. trump is not conservative. he’s not liberal. He has no belief system other than his belief in his own hold on power, recognition and self-aggrandizement.
Words can have different meanings. My pants have a fly but that doesn’t mean there’s a winged insect on it.
“Conservative” and “liberal” mean something totally different when used as political labels as compared to any other context.
I think the problem is this…
People use the shortcut that liberal equates to whatever the Democrats are championing, and conservative is whatever the Republicans are championing. Even though that doesn’t make sense, because even within each party there are different political beliefs and a whole spectrum of conservative/liberal. That’s why we have those labels separate from the party names.
But because people simplify the terms so much, they just assume that whatever the Republicans stand for is “conservative”. And when Trump comes in and totally flips the table, and pushes for a bigger and more intrusive government, and cozying up to rogue states that hate America, and attacks law enforcement organizations, and pushes other ideas that are the opposite of what conservatives have pushed for over the decades… Even though the Republicans have gotten on board and are echoing those things, that doesn’t automatically make them conservative. It means that the Republicans are moving away from being conservative, and toward… Well, I don’t even know what you’d call it. I guess “MAGA” is its own thing.
Trump is for Trump. Nothing more, nothing less.
I doubt it just because he’d have to pay whoever did it, and that’s very unlikely.
Well, we all know it’s damn likely that Trump decides not to pay someone for services rendered. But this is a particular type of vendor where that’s a very unwise strategy.
That’s because conservatives never really cared about intrusive government per se, but intrusive government that stops them from doing whatever they want (i.e. discriminating, polluting, etc).
They also hate America if America is no longer a white Christian-dominated country.
They only support law enforcement that helps consolidate conservatives’ power and control minorities.
Conservatives have been pretty damn consistent about this for 60+ years now.
Trump hasn’t flipped anything, he’s the fulfillment of decades of conservative thought and actions.
Trump IS conservativism writ large.
But even then, the thing that showed me Trump was very much not a conservative was his support for eminent domain. I mean, someone owns property and it gets taken away from them and repurposed for the “greater good”. I can’t think of anything further from conservatism than that, and Trump is all for it.
That has nothing to do with it. Russia and North Korea in particular, as opponents of the US, are part of the “Axis of Evil”, remember that?
(Originally it was North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, but later Russia and China were added.)
That changed because Trump personally likes and admires Putin and Kim Jong Un. And since he’s their leader, the Republicans followed along. You cannot possibly say it has always been that way. That’s 1984-style revisionism.
The way they are turning against the FBI is opposite of many decades’ worth of policy and public support. And it started in 2016.
Republicans’ war on the FBI goes back to 2016, when then-FBI Director James Comey, a registered Republican for most of his life, decided not to seek charges against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. She had stored emails from her time as secretary of state, including discussions about classified information, on a private, unsecured server that the agency found may have been vulnerable to hackers. But Comey concluded that there was no evidence that Clinton intended to commit a crime, which would have been required to indict her for mishandling classified information. GOP lawmakers nevertheless decried what they believed was political favoritism.
Your claims are provably false.
As long as the property is taken from the right people or to further right people’s purposes then it’s perfectly conservative. Conservativism is a means to an end, that adapts as needed to preserve power in the correct hands.
But you talking about something else. No conservatives haven’t always hated America, but that’s only because America was protecting their ideals still, or at least the thought it was. Once America elected Obama, it was over. Then they turned outward and gravitated to countries that would help them defeat the diseased America. Trump likes Putin because he knows his supporters do, not the other way around.
Right. Exactly what I said. Conservatives only support law enforcement when they believe it’s working for them.
The idea that conservatives are pro law enforcement for law enforcement’s sake is silly. It’s purely transactional.
I can cite repeatedly how the importance of private ownership of property is one of the bedrocks of conservatism. Can you cite the opposite?
I’m not the only one who has noticed the dramatic shift of late.
No I wasn’t. In case you forgot…
That’s what I’m talking about. I suspect you didn’t read what I wrote very carefully. Of course conservatives have always hated portions of the country, that’s what partisanship means. What’s different is that they’ve been consistently hawkish against any nation that is in conflict with the US until recently. Specifically Russia and North Korea.
So then your argument is that the FBI suddenly turned on Republicans? Because I’m pretty sure that’s not the case at all. Again, this is driven solely by Trump, not “conservatives”.
Your argument is very revisionist and pretending that “conservatism has always been that way” is willfully blind. I mean, pretty much everyone else is alarmed by the dramatic shift since 2016. I can’t see how anyone can pretend “oh it has always been that way”.
I really don’t think that’s true, or even a useful exaggeration.
A lot of the “hatred” is really more like “discomfort.” They are uneasy when people who aren’t white, ostensibly Christian, conservatively dressed, middle-aged-or-older men are in positions of power. That discomfort leads them to be silent or supportive when racist etc. things are said or done, but I don’t think they’re feeling the hatred so much as enabling it. Just as bad, but the trouble with labelling them as haters means that you can’t effectively address the correct problem.
They’re never going to hate America. They’re going to lash out and break things in their tantrum over how America isn’t behaving like they think it should, and generally make America a much worse place. But it’s not because of hatred, it’s because of love. The kind of selfish love people sometimes have for their children, that turns toxic when the child turns out to be Trans or atheist or marries a black person or whatever else the parent would just never be or do.
Trump embodies that kind of selfish, toxic, entitled, slow-motion tantrum. It worries, me, though, because it’s pretty easy to turn that kind of lashing-out-and-breaking into a mob out for blood, and to turn it into hate with a very little bit of scapegoating, and Trump has been priming the pump against “immigrants” (read: Latinos) and Trans people (read: all LGBT people), using well-worn rhetorical tricks (read: also Jews and Black people).
The greater good isn’t really defined though. Trump used eminent domain to take property from others to build one of his crummy casinos. The money a casino could bring to the community is the greater good, right?
But wasn’t really a bedrock now was it? Sure they claimed it was, but it wasn’t and when push came to shove they realized what really was important was who eminent domain was applied against, not the principal itself. That’s why they were able to abandon it so quickly.
Private property has always been seen by conservatives as the privilege of the “appropriate” group of people.
But in the end my point is: I really don’t understand all of these conservatives that are shocked, shocked I say, about the rise of MAGA within the Republican party. It’s been growing for decades.
For Trump there is no greater good than himself. 
Not until Trump. That’s why it’s so dramatic.
Acquiring it, absolutely. Laws meant to hinder property ownership for minorities go back to, well, I guess you could say in one way or another the country’s founding. And I’m sure there were underhanded attempts to deprive the “wrong” people of their property that they already had as well.
But this is all out in the open. It’s blatant. They aren’t even pretending anymore. That’s what is so shocking.
If you were to say there were always opportunists who felt this way all along, sure. But this is changing the platform. It would be like the Democrats suddenly opposing legislation to combat climate change.
Growing, yeah, I bet you could show that.
But this is like watching a guy who is working out and slowly gaining muscle over the years, then suddenly after one Summer he looks like Mr. Universe. You’d have to suspect heavy steroid use or something else, but it would still be alarming.
All I can say is hindsight is 20/20. I was shocked when he won the Republican primary and continued in that state throughout his administration. I was hopeful that Republicans finally had enough of him on January 6, 2020, but those hopes were quickly dashed and I decided to abandon the party for good. Looking back, Trump make sense, but at the time I was surprised.
These charts explain things, sort of, understanding presidents take credit and are blamed for things beyond their control.