Principled people aren’t Republicans in the first place. They’ve been blatantly monstrous for decades now. Anyone still in the party is either outright evil or so detached from reality their actual opinions and goals are irrelevant.
There were principled Republicans earlier in my lifetime. I didn’t necessarily agree with their principles, but they definitely had principles upon which their campaigns and political careers were founded. But these principled ones, the ones who didn’t abruptly transform themselves from being kinder, gentler Kennebunkport/Nantucket slightly racist elitist, Reagan/Bush free-trade pro-multinational neoliberals…into currying favor with pro-wrestling watching, pick-up truck-driving, foul-mouthed, wife-beating, cross-burning MAGA radicals…they left the party. What’s left is the hollowed out party that has become infested with self-serving opportunistic flea-carrying rats.
What do you have against pro-wrestling?
Not if Trump’s approval-ratings drop low enough. At that point the ‘no head over the parapet’ instincts will be deployed to prevent voter anger rather than to prevent the Wrath of Donald.
Yep, good point.
It does mean of course though that things need to get a lot worse before we get a Jamie Lannister to turn on the king.
I reckon the approval ratings need to get hella low because of how intimidating the maga mob can be. So even with, say, 2/3rds of the county vociferously against Trump the spineless people in this admin may still worry about the people draped in Trump flags.
Yes, “42%” likely wouldn’t be low enough to counter the MAGA-violence factor.
But at some point we may see the actually-effective number, whatever it may be, come into view—speed the day.
(Sigh)
Once again a thread in P&E, to wit “Trump Won’t Rule Out 3rd Term”, is being taken over by people who would rather belabor their paranoid fantasies about Trump being a god-emperor who can cancel elections and nullify the Constitution by fiat than acknowledge that he’s a confused old man who doesn’t understand the limits of his power.
With the way some of y’all are deliberately misreading the 22nd amendment I would swear you WANT Trump to be absolute ruler for life because it would absolve you of any responsibility for the state of things.
And you keep ignoring that it’s not about Trump being powerful, it’s about a near total lack of resistance. He’s sleepwalking into being a dictator because our political system is just that dysfunctional, it has no defense against someone who “doesn’t understand the limits of his power”. Because it turns out that if those “limits” are ignored…they don’t actually exist.
Well played, how did you know that it’s April 1st in my time zone?
Because, handwaving the president explicitly considering staying on for a third term, and talking about “methods” for doing so, would indeed be foolish. Previous Trump “jokes” were things like Project 2025, which is now being implemented to the letter including attacks on freedom of speech and the judiciary that are supposed to be unconstitutional.
He’s expliclty said that one of the “methods” would be pulling the same stunt as Putin; making Vance the president then swapping back in, or dictating decisions from behind the scenes. Even former republicans have been alarmed by this.
But no, This is Fine meme.
I don’t understand how you folks can question that Smapti’s understanding of the 22nd Amendment is the only one that’s possibly correct.
Which, as I’ve laid out in that thread, he cannot do.
I never said things were “fine”, but we’re not going to be able to address the REAL things Trump is doing if we waste our time on fantasies. Trump’s goons are having people arbitrarily thrown in a Salvadorean gulag without due process and you’re worried about something that isn’t even possible.
Mine and that of the people who wrote it and every single legitimate constitutional scholar.
So are you gonna do anything to help bring about that resistance or are you just going to keep daydreaming about nuking brown people?
And every single legitimate constitutional scholar . . . I wonder if you realize what you did there…
I’ll put it this way: if your argument were that trump’s third term is a problem necessarily down the road, and we should focus on more proximate problems, then fine. That makes sense. Lord knows, we have our hands full.
But if the argument is “This can’t happen, because constitution” then I just don’t see how you can say that. Trump and musk are engaging in countless unconstitutional or illegal actions, many of which were at some time dismissed as fearmongering, or even TDS. It’s happening, with many more in progress.
At the least he will try to stay in, and what the president and his acolytes are trying to do is very important. It’s not just us, or a left leaning pundit inventing a possible threat, it’s the president’s own words.
For the most part, the courts have blocked or delayed many of his excesses, and despite maga rhetoric about ignoring the courts, the admin has complied with those orders (though often in a malicious or bad faith way). The issue isn’t so much “nobody is stopping him” so much as it is that the judicial system is slow to act and that many of the laws he’s bending are written in a way that relies on the parties involved acting in good faith.
Could he make an attempt to run for a third term? Perhaps. The odds of it getting anywhere are extremely low.
Trump says he wants to do blatantly unconstitutional things all the time. That’s not new. His track record on actually accomplishing those things isn’t exactly stellar. Tell me - has Hillary been locked up? Has NBC’s “broadcast license” been revoked? Has he reformed libel law so he can sue the “fake news”? Is Canada our great 51st state? Do we own Greenland? Was the 2020 election postponed? Did he stay in office after the end of his first term? Are teleprompters illegal? Is the military policing the streets of Chicago and Seattle? Are public school principals elected by the parents of students?
Assuming that just because Trump says he wants to do something means that there’s actually a way for him to do it or that he actually intends to do it is putting more stock in his mental faculties and his governmental acumen than there is any evidence for.
Like what? There’s nothing I can do.
I think Trump’s leverage here is spending the government’s money.
A court may say “no” to something but Trump can make sure a check for whatever program is not written.
Technically congress should have that power but this congress has ceded that power to Trump.
So sure, Trump cannot end your program via Executive Order but he can strangle it to death.
Then kindly fuck off and get out of the way.
You know when there’s nothing you can do? When you’re dead. As long as there’s breath in your lungs you have the power to fight for this country and the only person taking that away from you is yourseld.
I love that you in no way addressed the “Like what?” part of Der’s post!
That is because, if you do not accept “Trump can’t do that!” on faith, the only other thing he can come up with is “Then you must think that Trump is God and can do anything in the universe!!!”…although not one fucking person here has actually said anything close to that.
Meanwhile
Trump says he will do whatever he wants and no one court can stop him.