I think you’re a lunatic.
And I think you live in a fantasy world.
Just for fun, can we focus on the incoming administrative clusterfuck and leave the sniping at each other in other theads?
The good news is, in six to nine months we’ll know which one of you is right and which one of you is wrong, and who gets to be smug and who has to issue a mea culpa.
(Personally, I think you’re both right and you’re both wrong, and the future will be a mishmash of both your perceived realities. I think Trump and his minions will attempt to be genocidal monsters along the lines proposed, and there will be some pushback but not rising to the level of outright revolution; the result will be chaos and blurred lines of loyalty and accountability with, yes, a body count, but in the hundreds and perhaps low thousands, not the tens or hundreds of thousands implied.)
Agreed.
More like tens of millions, not thousands. Even a serious effort at purging about 40% of the American population like the white nationalists want implies that level of killing.
Well all right then.
Let’s all mark our calendars to revisit this thread in the future and check the scores.
Thirded.
I think trump is stupid enough to try a lot of shit and there are no adults in the room to stop him.
However, when the level of chaos is so bad, and enough trump supporters are complaining that it makes it on to MAGA media, there’ll be backpedaling.
I don’t mean this to sound reassuring; I’m just saying within the area of deportations specifically, it’s so unworkable it can’t get 10% of the way to what they want. Of course, that’s still a lot of people suffering or worse.
A tax cut of course.
I’m beginning to think you don’t really understand ekernomiks!
Never interrupt your enemy when he’s doing dumb shit.
There aren’t many scenarios I like, but the coup by General Gonzalez to arrest SCOTUS and the vulgarian administration is one of my favorites.
I predict Trump will be assassinated by someone in his inner circle. He is too unstable, and the oligarchs want to milk the system, not destroy it.
Um, yeah.
He won’t be assassinated. He’ll just be sidelined for all practical purposes. He’s too useful a distraction to get rid of, and as long as he gets to rant daily about whatever, occasionally bask in the adulation of his cult followers at the odd rally, and funnel money into his own pockets, he’ll be happy to let others get on with their agendas behind the scenes.
Not a puppet! You’re the puppet!
New Mexico first, then Old, North, South, East, and West Mexico in that order.
Technically, the Space Force is a subdepartment of the Air Force in the same way that the Marine Corp is under the Department of the Navy. I, too, think it is absurd to move the command to Alabama which does not host any of the facilities they use and is remote from many of their most important bases like Vandenberg, Beale, Peterson, Buckley, and of course Los Angeles Air Force Base which is where all their program monies come from.. (Presumably this is to be closer to the Missile Defense Agency? Oh, yes, that will go well.) And I wholeheartedly agree that there was no good sense in making it a separate branch, with separate uniforms, training and operational standards, recruitment, logistics, et cetera; we previous to 2002 USSPACECOM was a Unified Combatant Command which made more sense as every military service utilizes ’the space domain’ in their capabilities and has particular needs and requirements for space resources and access. Now it is bureaucratic scrum.
I think you and other people promoting the notion that this is a practicable idea don’t really understand anything about the US military structure or how things work. The US military is a big quasi-corporate machine built for fighting foreign adversaries. Each branch has a relatively small police force, but the primary structure of the services is to monitor and launch missiles, move large groups of ships and armor around, launch drone attacks from thousands of miles away, conduct ‘special operations’ to snatch or kill designated terrorists and ‘enemy combatants’ in their beds, and most of all, to issue and manage contracts (which it does very inefficiently, IMHO). It is not designed for policing actions, and when called upon to do these things even on foreign soil with somewhat relaxed oversight it does them very poorly because it is not constituted to do this. I know that Trump thinks that if he just fires enough generals and admirals he’ll get to a group that will snap to and agree to make it so, but what he doesn’t understand is those orders then have to percolate down to functional commands where they are going have to produce and review plans (and the inevitable cascades of PowerPoint charts), make up budgets, MIPR money, sent out RFPs for logistical support contracts, evaluate proposals, et cetera because the US military doesn’t have anything like the equipment, workforce, resources, et cetera to do any of this sitting around waiting for the ‘GO’ order. So, even setting aside the ethical, moral, and legal issues and constraints that being directed to round up people (even ‘illegals’) would activate, just the bureaucratic inertia would doom this effort to a slow grinding halt even absent of deliberate foot-dragging and sabotage. It’s a dumb idea by a guy whose notion of military operations probably comes from John Wayne movies.
Also, the notion that Trump will direct courts-martial against any senior officer who refuses to comply with illegal or unexecutable orders? Good fucking luck with that; the US military has their own justice system which is also based on the Constitution but is far more prescriptive (and largely free of partisan nonsense that the civilian criminal and tort systems are infused with). The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) is very specific about following legal orders and refusing to follow illegal ones, is taken very seriously by military legal staff, and is very inflexible on those issues, particularly since the excesses of Vietnam. This just isn’t going to go Trump’s way if he tries to squeeze that system, and the most he can really do is pardon members convicted of war crimes.
Again, no. The US military is strongly inculcated against coups, and its professional officer corps are essentially institutionalized against even considering the possibility of engaging in such an act, nor is there anyone in the military who would receive broad political support even if they were wholly justified in removing the President. If there were a hypothetical coup, it would be a civilian one, and the military would support or not depending on whether civilian authorities with the power to adjudicated it (i.e. the Congress and the Supreme Court) would deem it to be legitimate succession. The only way the military would enjoin in any kind of ‘coup’ would be as a result of complete breakdown of civil authority.
Stranger
He’s not even a puppet, they make the puppet look like it’s doing things.
Trump will just be a facade, a painted face made to hide what’s really going on behind him.
The reason I asked this way back yonder is that I don’t think trump actually HAS to carry out the deportations. All he has to do is keep the threat of doing it alive in the headlines and discussions (like here) and promise that he will do it. And then from time to time he can say he is in the process of rounding up and deporting people and add a few pictures/videos of brown-skinned people in chain-link enclosures guarded by uniforms. Then eventually he will declare the project halfway done (“It will be wrapped up in two weeks!”) and publish made-up statistics to back him up. But the project will never be completely done because it’s the threat that keeps the subject alive and the libs in a sweat.
Handling the “deportations” this way will be a helluva lot cheaper than actually doing it.
It also means that there will still be people available to pick crops and work the Mar A Lago dining room.
He’s incompetent and demanding. He’ll want assurances and photo ops.
Of course, it would be cheaper for his handlers to stage such opportunities but that requires competence. And he’s mostly rid of the folks who would just tell him “whatever you say” and slowroll his decrees until he forgot about them.
This crew will jump at the chance to kowtow and screw things up bigly. They’re not smart or capable enough to realize they don’t need to go to the effort of fooling 330 million Americans; they only need to fool one senile, probably demented asshole. And so they’ll make the big effort that can’t possibly succeed the way they hope, spreading misery and economic ruin in their wake.