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Trump's Second Term

dudalb said:
I predict the cabinnet turnover ti going to be constant. You know the people Trump is putting in are incompetnet and will mess things up and make Trump look bad, and that is the unforgivale sin.
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I seem to recall that's what happened last time. (I wasn't following US politics as closely back then.)
 
dudalb said:
I predict the cabinnet turnover ti going to be constant. You know the people Trump is putting in are incompetnet and will mess things up and make Trump look bad, and that is the unforgivale sin.
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Unless they don't care whether they're competent or not.

Tens of millions of distracted, disinterested voters who get their current affairs from social media, friends or right wing talk radio certainly don't care and the Republicans aren't really interested in governing.
 
KDLarsen said:
Like most of his opinions, he's basically copying what the base wants to hear. The DoE has been a gqp bugbear for years, they'd much rather get it out to the states where it's much easier for them to control what is taught, even during Democratic administrations.
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Going a little deeper... Public education has been a target for rich libertarians for a long time. Not just them of course. Wealthy people who want a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor, in general, are likely to work to sabotage public education. Mudsill Theory and the like have been around for a long time. Back in the civil rights era, they found allies in the outright racists among white people of the US who didn't like the thought of black people being able to go to school with their kids (many of them Democrats at the time) and both those groups have ended up primarily influencing and in the Republican Party after how the Southern Strategy shook out. Attacking the DoE and all that lying and screaming about schools teaching CRT and performing sex change operations on your kids can be fairly easily linked back to those roots.
The Don said:
Yes, and Trump is on record saying that he loves dumb people because they vote for him.
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IIRC, he didn't actually say that. He's shown it, certainly, though. For a very shallow and self-centered version of love, at least.
 
It will be interesting to see the effect on the UN. During his last term, Trump withheld payment for a number of UN agencies, WHO among them. This time, he’ll probably again try to do what he can to defund it.
 
I think some here are misfiring their ire and missing the point that stupidity is cultural, and not simply intellectual (see Bonhoeffer, Arendt, Drakulic et. al). A clever clown like Trump does not need to worry about the intellect of his base as long as he fosters miseducation, ignorance, and ongoing cultural bias, or just surfs the wave under him; and those who accuse Trump's critics of impugning the innate intelligence of the population miss the point, and play into his hand.

The seeds in the soil of our culture grow slowly into weeds. Respect for tradition is mistaken for unquestioning acceptance. People groomed to accept convenience, comformity and complacency over hard and painful thought are all that's needed for evil to flourish. The "banality of evil" is not about the qualities of evil itself, but those of its agents. Most harm is performed by the thoughtless and the compliant, and the very essence of thoughtlessness is that there is no thought to analyze. If an empty box arrives at your door, you will not find out anything useful by looking inside it.

I have lived nearly all my life in rural New England, where life is smooth, racial strife absent, people good and sturdy and kind. I lived long in the town that gave birth to W.E.B. Dubois, etc. etc., and yet all my life I've heard snide and pointed racial jokes and rumors and stereotypes, expressions of otherness hiding behind the excuse of humor. I truly fear that a demagogue of the right sort could come along and turn those people, who are the "some of my best friends are" kind of ordinary, wouldn't hurt a fly neighbors, into - maybe not a lynch mob, but the ones who shut their doors and pretend it's not marching by. The evil need not be created afresh by a master villain. It needs only to be cultivated. People who pretend it isn't there are whistling Dixie.

These days its more likely the immigrants, the undocumented and those assumed to be, and Trump the demagogue ascendant. So far. So who''s next? Political enemies, scientific enemies, people deemed too "woke," you?

Of course I hope it never happens, and that I'm the one overthinking and all, but I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than to be the dummy standing there and saying "I didn't know it was loaded."
 
Resume said:
Actually, he did say he liked dumb people. At least the dumb people that voted for him.
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Ehh. Poorly educated =/= dumb. Also as noted, there's a rather specific "dumb voters" fake Trump quote and the quote that you linked to would be inherently poor for the purpose that you just used it for even if Trump did say dumb there. There's truth to the sentiment, but not to the specific claim, by the look of it, in short.

Either way, I'm rather in agreement with what bruto just said. The problem at hand is far more rooted in culture than intellect or education. There's reason for why the Republican Party just keeps manufacturing culture wars to fight, rather than fighting by using facts and integrity.
 
yeah, they're single issue voters who's single issue is the culture war. so much so that bad policy comes second to winning the culture war. it's why they don't even talk about policy and every policy discussion pretty quickly turns into the woke and abortion and trans prison surgeries. these guys are like, well the dems should have been nicer about it. it's a joke.
 
People have no idea how badly Trump is going to mess up with his appoiting a lot of incompetents to run the government.
 
dudalb said:
People have no idea how badly Trump is going to mess up with his appoiting a lot of incompetents to run the government.
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Err... I'm not so sure that this is accurate. It might be accurate for Trump voters, but many of us who didn't vote for him still do remember the insanity of his last time - and that a reprisal was nigh certain to be even worse, all around.

What's more in doubt is whether most Trump voters actually have a bottom line.
 
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