I hope that you and Velocity are correct. 
The danger with Trump isn’t deliberately getting into a conflict; it’s getting into a conflict with a major power unexpectedly, such as with North Korea and Iran. I don’t think Trump wants to get into a conflict with either, but there are some unique and real dangers with Trump at the helm:
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Trump has effectively neutered the diplomatic corps.
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Trump has hired and relies on ‘Yes men’ for input.
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Trump believes that being unpredictable is an advantage (in reality, it’s dangerous as hell)
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With North Korea, he has built up expectations of possible successes, but since he has fundamentally failed to understand what Kim wants, there is a real risk that he gets embarrassed in a big way, which will put pressure on him to do something ‘impressive’ in response. I only see escalation from there.
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With Iran, he has forced Iran to commit to a path toward nuclearization, which is probably the opposite of what he thought his intense sanctions would achieve. What happens when, despite his pressure, Iran achieves a fully operational nuclear bomb or missile? Moreover, what if Israel preempts us and just attacks Iran because they’re not waiting around for us to stop them?
I thought his goal was to get cheers at his rallies by shitting on an accomplishment of Obama and to that end, it was a success. I doubt Trump cares at all how *Iran *responds. What have they done for him lately?
Keeping in mind that since his name first popped up as a possible candidate people have been underestimating what the Asshole-In-Chief is willing to do and say to stay in the headlines, the same way they have underestimated what the Russians have been willing to do to stir the shit, I can see where the Russians set up a third party as an aggressor using just enough evidence to give Trump the excuse to play PATRIOTIC HERO!, but just iffy enough to not quite convince others. Trump gets his PR, and the Russians have stirred the political shit once again.
He may not care, but his party has staked out the claim that Iran must not have nukes, and so has Israel. It doesn’t matter if he cares about Iran or not - others care.
Great, so we can count on Republicans to abandon Trump in large numbers, then, considering how important this issue is to them. Why, he might even be challenged in the primaries.
Trump can send cruise missiles to Iran without any US casualties. I suppose dropping bombs would be more risky but he could do that too.
He didn’t just “bungle” PR. He maliciously abandoned it, blamed its people for the disaster, criticized its elected officials who WERE trying to help people, and wound up causing the deaths of thousands of American citizens. He demonstrated that he can’t or won’t handle a disaster even with the full resources of the United States of America at his fingertips. He spent weeks disparaging PR, its citizens, and its efforts to save itself.
He demonstrated that he is beyond useless, he is actively destructive and vicious, and a natural disaster is not nearly as bad as a war. It’s terrifying to imagine how he would freak out at a war, but I bet he thinks a war would save him.
I don’t mean his party’s voters, but the party itself has staked out that claim, and he’s going to look weak if it NK and Iran end up becoming fully nuclear powers.
Could he and the GOP find a way to spin out of it? Sure, I mean, the GOP used to be the party of free trade and Trump forced them into becoming the party of trade barriers. Go figure.
I don’t think there’s necessarily a single issue that can hurt Trump – except for Jesus and the economy, that is. I don’t think a nuke-tipped NK or Iran would do him in, but I think it would make him look weak, which is not a position an American position wants to be in, especially considering how they banged on the “Obama’s a pussy” drum for all these years.
There’s an article in the NYT, I think, where Trump is booed at Trump Tower in the presence of several people, and he just brushes it off by saying he heard cheers, not boos. I think that was pure bravado. He’s an odd combination of raging insecurity and jaw-dropping arrogance, but he has a whole bunch of obvious tells when he’s lying. The big question is, Is he lying to himself and does he believe those lies? or is he just a common con man, lying to his marks? His fans don’t care about the lies because they want them to be true, and they feel it’s an injustice that they’re not true. But what does Trump believe? If he thinks he’s telling what he feels should be true were it not for whatever imaginary conspiracy Fox has dreamed up that day, then it’s entirely possible that makes him feel he’s. All that self-pitying claptrap about “witch hunts” certainly suggests it.
(And how did “witch hunt” switch from “innocent women being falsely accused by evil men and then being executed” into “Probably guilty men being accurately accused by (at least some) women they’ve hurt but whining to the high heavens about getting hoist by their own petard”? Plus, Trump whines about “lynching” but the closest he’ll get to that is if that long, long tie of his gets slammed in the door of Air Force One.)
*Well, THAT was a new record. Log in, get logged out, log in AGAIN, get logged out, and so on. *
You don’t think the military industrial complex finds any Republican President “useful”? They’re not beholden to Trump over other Repubs, just over Dems and they won’t mind a Biden all that much, though Sanders & Warren probably worry them.
Everything that I recall reading about his childhood suggests that Trump is someone who grew up palpably terrified of disappointing his father (i.e. failing, losing). I think Donald Trump learned not to love people, and instead came to view people as transactions or means of transactions. He was conditioned to be a raging sociopath. Under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, he developed a predator or prey, live or die, kill or be killed psyche. His pathological lying - to the point of lying to himself and living in an alternative reality - is symptomatic of this conditioning. It’s a reflex: “Wait, they just booed – no, fuck, they didn’t, they praised me, and fuck them if they did boo me because my people will cheer louder than they boo, so there!”
It doesn’t have to work per se, it just has to work with a relative handful of voters because, these days that’s enough to tip an election. I would expect anything to be done is the final days of October so people won’t have the time to process it intellectually, just viscerally.
Well seeing how Putin’s last 9/11 went…
I wonder though. If this exact attack was carried out today, with the same bumbling done by people related to trump rather than the FSB, would it be swept under the rug just as easily? I’d like to think that the presence of the internet would make such a thing impossible.
We might be at the point that the GOP is so far in lalaland that such an attack could simply be blamed on the Democrats.
I think Conservatives were intrigued by having a non-politician running for office. Then, when the primaries were over they turned out in droves to vote for not-Hillary. Hatred of Hillary was the primary factor, not Trump-magic.
Real life has kept me away from posting for a while. I did not intend to post and run.
I am relieved to see that many people think that my Reichstag Fire scenario is unlikely.
But what about how a unified USA would not be in Putin’s interests? If the USA were unified in a way that they (we) implemented policies favorable to Putin, would that not be the best possible outcome (from his perspective)? Sherrerd pointed out that a war in Venezuela could cause the USA to pull assets from Europe. Putin would undoubtedly like that. If the USA’s attention is suitably diverted, then Putin and his Russia could get away with all sorts of things. Ukraine would likely be invaded. Who is going to stop him?
Is there any doubt that GWBush benefited from the actual 9/11 attacks? He was able to use that event as the justification to go to Iraq. Trump is even more willing to lie about all manner of things and he has an audience already primed to believe whatever BS he shovels at them.
I think Putin is unlikely to try anything “kinetic” - an actual shooting war or anything. What I think Russia might do is continue trolling and fake-newsing like it did in 2016, but this time on a much more sophisticated, convincing scale.
Up to this point, a lot of right-wing fake news has been the absolutely laughable, nonsensical kind - like the Pizza Parlor child trafficking ring, etc. I think we could see some much subtler, much more convincing and believable stuff instead. Moscow’s had 3 years to practice and hone things.
I don’t think Trump is useful enough to the Russians to risk a major geopolitical conflagration. They’ll milk him as long as they reasonably can and discard him.
Do not make the mistake of thinking Trump is especially powerful or especially compromised or especially important to the Russians. There are dozens if not a hundred where he came from, not diabolical sleeper agents but ordinary douchebags corrupted by the NRA or some other PAC, just ordinary Republicans willing to advance Russian interests. Or hey, no need to pick on the Republicans, there’s Tulsi too.
If you think it will take a 9/11 to subvert democracy, you haven’t really been paying attention these past couple of years. All it takes is a weasel like Mitch McConnell working every loophole while the media machine moves us along saying “nothing to see, keep moving on” every time a new bombshell hits.
It’s all happening now, in slow motion and in plain sight, and they’ve nearly pulled it off. There’s no need for a foreign agent to create a big distraction; we do just fine keeping ourselves distracted.
Fake news doesn’t have to be believable to be effective. Millions of Americans have now “learned” that fake news is the norm, so they go by their gut. This is why 50 million Americans think Trump is innocent of the impeachment charges: evidence is irrelevant; it’s presumed to be fake.
The purpose of fake news isn’t to get people to believe the fake news, it’s to get them to doubt the real news.