The problem is, he thinks that all that’s needed to make that happen is sending out a Tweet saying “Health care costs should be lower”, and then everyone will bow and scrape to make that happen.
Oh, sure. He doesn’t have enough pull anymore to make it happen. But I feel like in 2017 or so he could possibly have scraped up a coalition of MAGA Republicans and Democrats to create a truly universal plan (maybe more like Switzerland or Germany than Canada or Australia).
And I think his instincts about what that should look like are closer to mine than to, say, Mitch McConnell’s.
He’s a big-government populist, and loves giving the government’s money to private companies. A public-private universal plan funded by taxpayer money and with Trump’s name on it? One that would likely never go away, so he would be immortalized (and would even replace Obamacare with Trumpcare)? He would kill for that, if it were possible.
He’s working on something. You could hear him droning on at his rally as everybody was walking out on him. I heard 400%, 600% savings on something. That’s significant savings.
For all that he hates Joe Biden and Barack Obama, they understood what was necessary to pass legislation. Biden in particular had the benefit of decades in the Senate to understand what was necessary. And Trump likes to threaten or insult others, even those he needs to support his programs.
And that’s just it. Trump threatens and insults others even after they’ve capitulated and are doing what he wants. Given Trump’s propensity for throwing his own “friends” under the bus, I don’t understand how anyone can rally behind him.
One of the reasons Canada and other countries have cheaper drugs is because of exactly this. We negotiate prices as an entire country, and use that to get a better deal. You’d think a “master negotiator” like Trump would understand that, but he doesn’t. The GOP has spent years of effort actually making it illegal for Medicare to do the same.
They’ve eased back on that a little bit in the last few years, but they still haven’t quite figured out the connection. Trump still whines about other countries being “unfair”.
I think you misspelled pogroms.
The only hammer Trump had over the rest of the party are the primaries, I believe he had an undefeated record in his endorsements for the ones coming up. This was pretty much the last time he had any power over them, specially if they do as bad as it seems they will.
Perhaps he can use those savings to go back to grade school.
It’s easy to be undefeated when you switch candidates mid-stream.
It depends on what is meant by “great” and why America is perceived as not being great now.
If it just meant “A great place to live for virtually all inhabitants, and an innovative and productive economy” then sure, I’m on board with trying to make america more of both things. These are great goals for any country.
But the way that Trump uses it, and the way most red hat wearers do, it’s based on whitewashing the past (or indeed desiring a sexist, racist theocracy), ignorance about the current world and deepening the notion of “America #1” which, ironically, is the cause of a lot of America’s problems now, and indeed before Trump.
It comes down to the age-old etymology vs actual usage thing. I can’t get on board with MAGA because of what it’s used to mean, regardless of the individual words of the statement.
Given that I think being right for the wrong reasons doesn’t really count, it’s really hard to say what he got “right”. But relaxing that constraint, there are a couple of things.
He was right in 2015-2017 in saying that interest rates and monetary policy was too tight, and that taxes were too high at the time. His motives were impure - he just wanted a booming economy for his own political fortunes. So we cannot credit him with a correct analysis. But the economic recovery from the Great Recession ran too slowly. Had it progressed more quickly, we might have had a faster recovery, maybe defusing some of the discontent that led to Trump, and moreover setting incentives and conditions for builders to build more housing, which also would’ve sucked some of the energy in later electoral races where housing affordability is becoming a factor.
Trump was right about the prescription, but didn’t really engage with the diagnosis at all, so he gets no credit.
He was right about forcing a renegotiation of terms on the International Postal Union. It was wildly unfair to the US to categorize China as a “developing country”, gaining it more favorable conditions to export to the US. I’m actually not sure how much analysis we can credit him for here. He looks at every treaty and agreement as America being screwed, so this was “a stopped clock is right twice a day situation.” He fixed a tariff that was actually broken, but only because he thinks all tariffs are broken, which is wrong.
Again, neither of these implies that we should ever listen to Trump about anything. When your default posture is to assume America is getting screwed on every international agreement, you’ll turn up something now and then. A superpower with large and complex international relations is inevitably getting screwed by one treaty or another, whether it’s because the treaty was in fact purposely unfavorable in service of greater strategic purpose, or whether it had simply been flying under the radar for so long that the conditions underlying the purpose had shfited dramatically without anyone noticing, or simply that somebody fucked up some 11-D chess at some point. It does happen.
Anyway, a stopped clock is right twice a day, but a stopped clock isn’t really a clock, it’s just a reminder that time-telling is important, and that periodically you need to check the time using a clock that actually works (and ideally toss or fix the broken one).
Excellent post.
This is like saying “My neighbor mowed my grass, but then he burnt down my house” There is nothing that I will give Trump credit for except destroying our country.
The past is not relevant whether a nation is great or not- now. All nations have had issues in the past- those that have been around enough to have much of a past anyway.
Make America Great Again
It inherently contains a claim about the past.
I wasnt talking about that slogan.
Like i said-
Which we should be, in the context of this thread.
What you’re doing is equivalent to “One good thing Chairman Mao did was the Great Leap Forward…Isn’t it good for a nation to make forward progress in a great leap?”
The only thing I could agree on is that the USA is screwed. Trump did that. We where doing well but Trump and the GOP took care of that.
Summary
Wondering what US dopers think of Trumps interference in the world cup.
FIFA broke the rules in cancelling Balogun’s suspension (you can argue over whether it should have been a red card but there are plenty of other examples of that), the rules are clear that any red card results in at least a 1 match suspension which FIFA can extend if they think the offence was severe enough but not remove it).
Trump had a word with Infantino and Balogun is allowed to play in the next game, greatly increases their chances to go through.
Infantino is such a lap dog to Trump (Trump getting the first FIFA “peace prize” dispite FIFA supposedly being fiercely a-political is another clear example) I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them collude to give the US the world cup.
Do you agree that Trump doing such things is good for America?