What’s the point in him taking an oath he’ll break with impunity?
I think that would require more organizational skill the Trump or his followers have shown so far.
My prediction is that it is going to just be a haphazard chaotic mess. Various ICE troops packed into vans making random raids with no clear idea of what to do with the people once they pick them up.
I also think that a lot of this will be outsourced to the states, with the Feds giveing Carte Blanche to anything they wanted to do. So Abbot can call up the Texas national guard, or deputize a bunch of good ol’ boys to round people up and kick them over the border, and know that the justice department is going to turn a blind eye to any abuse.
Bannon calls it “flood the zone”. It will be like a Gish Gallop of evil deeds instead of spurious arguments and is completely in character for the whole lot. I wonder how they will manage a crescendo of that for four years considering how limited their imagination is, but I fear they will be able to surprise me.
As for my personal fears: the first really bad news will be the details about how they will stab Ukraine in the back.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the president has had a stroke while tweeting on the toilet. President Vance will address the nation shortly.”
As for the tariffs against Canada, I wonder why the government hasn’t done the obvious thing. Or maybe they have. Offer him a billion dollar bribe, half payable immediately and half at the end of his term. Of course they should stiff him on the second payment. He could not resist such an offer.
I can live with news that bad. Vance wouldn’t inherit trump’s cult of “personality”. He would be enabled to a much less degree than trump, and hopefully there would be a MAGAt civil war.
He doesn’t care about money. At least not in the way that some people think. It’s all about ego. Money is how you keep score. Canada caving in and giving him concessions (real or imagined) feeds his ego. A secret payoff does not.
He may try to do tariffs on day one. I’m not sure. He may attempt to get concessions from the other countries and then declare victory. What will be first is the pardons for J6. The best we can hope for is he is convinced to only pardon those who weren’t convicted of violent acts.
Vance would whole-heartedly embrace the Heritage Foundation turds and their Project 2025 nightmare as well be Peter Thiel’s political fuckboy. For sure, the hardcore MAGA faithful like Marjorie Taylor Greene would peel off like a bad sunburn once their demigod Trump is exanimalis but the GOP is so ideologically hollowed out that Republicans have to glom onto someone to have an identity, so the first strong personality that stands up and backs Vance (or whomever succeeds him) will hold the reigns over the GOP and anyone who they appeal to, especially (as I expect to be the case) the nation is in a unending successive series of crises and emergencies.
Everybody wants to focus on Trump as the problem (or savior, depending on outlook and Fox News brainwashing), but the fact that Trump has been able to get this far on so little substance is an indication of a much broader problem that no one really seems to be addressing.
Stranger
What bothers me about Vance is twofold;
First, that unlike Trump, he’s young, mentally sound, and not a fucking idiot, so he’d actually be competent at implementing an agenda.
Second, his MO for his entire life has been “find the biggest bully around and kiss his ass”, from his mom’s alcoholic boyfriend all the way to Trump. He’d be a total stooge for Elon/Thiel and their technofeudalist agenda.
Vance is already a “total stooge” for Peter Thiel. Who do you think has been backing Vance through his meteoric rise in politics after we was quickly made partner in the Mithril Capital, the venture capital fund that Thiel co-founded?
Stranger
I have to admit I’d be so relieved that trump was finally in our rear view mirror that I might not scrutinize JD’s bullshit quite like I should.
Anybody live next to Thomas Homan?
Trump apparently has announced mass deportations will begin Tuesday in Chicago. I imagine he wants a violent spectacle to scare opponents and continue the tarring of Chicago as a hellhole.
Well, that’s going to be a clusterfuck.
I hope a resistance is forming. If extraction squads get tracked and their whereabouts get put up online, what could be the repercussions?
Axios Explains: “Roadblocks to Trump’s mass deportations”
Why it matters: A backlog of nearly 4 million immigration cases and a shortage of immigration judges and detention centers can hinder quick deportation.
The mass deportations outlined by Trump could cost $150 billion to $350 billion, immigration experts say.
State of play: An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live across the country, working in the agriculture, oil and gas, construction, health care and service industries.
What a mess this is going to be.
You mean on Facebook, Instagram, or ‘X’? The supplicating toerags running those platforms will take those posts down and block the accounts from where they were posted.
Stranger
Why would anyone expect Trump and his minions to follow legal procedures for deportation? They’ll grab anyone who looks “illegal”, toss them in buses or railcars (hired from Trump-supporting businesses), transport them to the border, unload them and herd them at gunpoint across. Food, water, restroom facilities along the way? Hey, they’re illegal invaders, why should anyone who isn’t a bleeding-heart liberal [spit] care about their welfare?
I really hope I’m exaggerating.
I’m sure that’s how Trump thinks it’s going to work.
It’s not going to.
I expect that’s how they’ll start. When the logistics for moving so many people gets in the way I expect they’ll transition to “shoot brown people on sight” instead.
I think you are, although you may be excused for based upon the rhetoric you hear from Stephen Miller et al. The reality is that these organizations (and the military) have established procedures for how they have to handle detainees, and regardless if Trump comes in and says, “Rough them up, I don’t care, I’ll protect you,” I don’t think you are going to find that most of the people in these jobs are going to suddenly behave in ways so contrary to what they’ve been trained to do. These agencies may expedite removal and minimize the ‘due process’ that immigrants are afforded (which is pretty arbitrary and essentially within the purview of the executive as to what kind of hearing or review they even get) but there are just fundamental limits on how much can be done in a day. Unless someone is actually going to create an entirely new process, they’re going to be stuck with what is mostly the existing process which proved to fail completely under Trump’s last attempt at mass deportations to the extent that Trump actually got in the way of attempts to expedite the process, and caused a massive ruckus about family separations which resulted in months of legal wrangling. Even a compliant Supreme Court can’t make the slow machinations of the federal courts system work much faster than it currently does, as Trump will doubtless be surprised to discover even though he went through this nonsense less than eight years ago.
And even agencies and federal employees were willing to overlook their processes and take on the liability of forcible removal and deportation outside the law, there is just physically a limit to how many people they can collect, even minimally process, and deport, and the question remains of where they are going to deport them to; just pushing deportees across the Mexican border is not going to be a solution acceptable to Mexico, which is actually our second largest trading partner (surpassing Canada, and currently behind China but we’ll see how that shakes out) and thus has a lot of influence, and not just in the areas of avocados and limes. We just do not have facilities to hold hundreds of thousands of people even temporarily, much less indefinitely (and no, abandoned malls, former military bases, and warehouses will not work even on an interim basis).
This is not to say that under Trump (or a subsequent authoritarian regime) that concentration camps, a corps of paramilitary agents empowered and willing to violently collect and deport suspected immigrants, and other gross derelictions of basic decency and humanity aren’t possible; this is a society that has been primed for fascism, jingoism, and performative nationalism since the ‘Eighties, and history has shown how quickly open and democratic societies can turn rotten and self-destructive. But it doesn’t happen overnight, nor are their the people, equipment, and processes in place to effect the kind of mass emigration that Trump, Miller, Bannon, et al imagine, nor are Americans—especially those in communities served by and dependent upon immigrant labor—going to be as passive and accepting as they imagine. This is the difference between the current reality and what these creeps think it should be like…but we’re also not as far away from that as many pretend with their “Oh, it can’t happen here…the Constitution, the courts, et cetera…”
*sigh* Who is it that you imagine is going to be gunning down “brown people on sight”? The military, which is substantially composed of “brown people”? Federal agents, most of whom are decent people doing a job, and don’t want to be sent to prison for committing what would clearly be murder?
It took seven years under Nazi Germany to go from just arresting political opponents and communists to bulk rounding up of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, et cetera and sending them to death camps, and that was starting from a place of often violent prejudice against those groups and extreme and vocal resentment for having lost the First World War because of supposed domestic sabotage. We’re not there by a long shot, and I hope to hell that there are enough people who recognize that path and resist going down it. Trump may be the chief executive come 20 January, but he is not an absolute ruler even if he and his devotees think he should be, and federal employees—many of whom dislike politics and the interference with doing their duties—aren’t going to fall over themselves to follow illegal orders even if they come from the top.
Stranger