Trump Kicking and Screaming Transition Thread

Trump really is struggling for quality legal representation - that or quite a few law firms are grifting HIM for a change. This one is laughable:



Upshot for Steve - lawyer alleges 3000+ ballots cast by folk who are shown on change of address database as no longer resident.

Lots of the addresses moved to are military installations. The military make extensive, totally legal use of mail-in ballots so personnel can keep residency.

HuffPo has this as well and gloriously one of those people included in the filing is the wife of an Air Force Major - and a former ACLU legal director. She has already been contacted by many other military personnel and spouses whose ballots are being contested and they are NOT happy.

shit. wrong rep. but this is old news (nov6). you gots to be on your game to tweet with the best.

I wondered why you took such offence, lol

Blame HuffPo, they linked to the damn tweet in their article today.

Not that I am disagreeing with you, but those last two were during his second term which is out of scope of comparing first terms.

I am not going to deny that these things are bad and that there is a tendency to give W and Reagan and others a pass on such things.

But by metrics, I thought you meant actual statistics of some sort as opposed to just things done.

I think for just about everything that you have listed, there's something the Trump administration did that would at least be a call, and probably a raise. The one exception is that Trump did not initiate any new foreign conflicts akin to the Gulf War II.

• Using the courts to decide the outcome of the 2000 election, in questionable circumstances at best and in opposition to the popular vote.
• Trump: he is attempting to use the courts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, under unquestionably flimsy circumstances in opposition to both the popular vote and the projected electoral college vote. He is also sowing doubt about the validity of the process and has managed to convince some 70 percent of Republicans that the election was unfair. He refuses to concede that he has lost. He is denying the President-elect Biden access to intelligence and resources to make the transition easy, which means, particularly in the area of coronavirus response, the Biden campaign will be in a worse position to save lives. As bad as W's use of the courts re: 2000, at least he brought his case in good faith.
• Justifying the decision to attack Iraq on an obvious tissue of lies, and staging a venomous propaganda campaign around it.
• Trump: As I said, fair enough that Trump did not invade another country. But W was only about as dishonest as the average politician. Trump lies about everything and anything.
• Waging the Iraq War and causing untold damage to the middle-east and the international order generally, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths and the rise of ISIS.
• Trump: Again, I will concede that he is less of a warmonger than Bush in actuality. But that is more a coincidence that the circumstances he faced himself in didn't lend themselves to waging a war. Trump would be fully capable and eager to do so if he thought it would benefit him and his cronies. ETA: we don't know how much Trump might have been play-acting, but his statements, for instance, about unleashing fire and fury on North Korea and how he has a big button were terrifying. We still have a couple months to go, and there's definitely time for a wag-the-dog scenario.
• The setting up of an extra-legal network of torture camps throughout the world.
• Trump: I have no doubt that Trump still uses this network. I will add that he also has set up internment camps for people attempting to immigrate illegally to the U.S., including putting children in cages and he has sought to use federal resources up to and including the military to quash protests (and set up a photo op with tear gas) in the wake of George Floyd.
• Exploding the US deficit with tax cuts for the wealthy.
• Trump: Definitely did the same. Don't know how one can yet say that what W did was much worse.
• Passing the PATRIOT Act, among other efforts to create an enormous domestic and foreign surveillance apparatus.
• Trump: Presumably benefits from being able to abuse the PATRIOT Act. Politicized the Dept. of Justice to go after his political enemies and to protect him and his political friends. Abused foreign policy by demanding a quid pro quo from the Ukraine government: you announce an investigation into my potential political rival and then you'll get the military aid that you want.
• Creating the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE.
• Trump: Again, he took the department and made it even worse. The whole hullabaloo about The Wall, children in cages, Muslim ban is worse than anything that happened while W was in office on this front.
• Entirely botching the response to Hurrican Katrina.
• Trump: In addition to entirely botching the response to Hurricane Maria affecting Puerto Rico, Trump's response to the coronavirus contributed to/caused a fairly high number of the 240k American deaths and counting. Unlike a hurricane, there was relatively ample warning about the coronairus that Trump actively ignored and downplayed. The botches of FEMA during Katrina were way more forgivable than the botching of the pandemic response.ETA: it was remiss of me to not point out that Trump has flirted with slow-walking disaster relief to California for its wildfires because California is a blue state.
• Overseeing the meltdown of the world financial system, and beginning efforts to bail out those who had caused it.
• Trump: It is probably hard to say specifically where the world financial system is going to be in the wake of the coronavirus and how much Trump's response is to blame. But his myopic trade wars, his kissing up to dictators and alienating long-time allies of the U.S. for no particular reason, his pulling out of the Paris Accords and creating uncertainty about whether the U.S. can be taken at its word is IMO easily something that matches any irresponsibility W showed about the world financial system.

We haven't even gone into such levels of Trump damage as filling various positions in the civil service and the courts with under- or unqualified lackeys, systematically firing whistleblowers, denial of reality, increased polarization and attacks on various people and institutions as "the enemy," a complete lack of displayed empathy, the fact that he makes even W look like a genius who has earned grandmaster status at 3-D chess (such things as windmills causing cancer, dropping nukes on hurricanes to dissipate them, injecting disinfectant to cure the coronavirus), etc. etc.

Ehhh, I don't think it's wrong to look at someone's whole time in power when making these comparisons (unless you're doing stuff like looking for trends and trying to predict how they might go).

I'm now picturing someone responding to a Godwin evocation by saying "Well although he was in power until 1945, it's only fair to look at his performance from 1933 to 1937..."

GOP senators shrug off Trump's conspiracies over election results: 'He can say whatever he wants'

Excellent post, @Raoul the Red Shirt! Eye-opening to place those points side by side.

In addition, I don't know that a President who made the US military directly complicit in Turkish genocide can be given a pass on war mongering just because he technically never declared war on America's Kurdish allies before slaughtering them.

Remember the days when @Paladin @oldfella1962 and @Zombie RIP used to laugh off suggestions that Trump was a despot who would do anything to cling to power and said these were the rantings of hysterical leftists......

Good times!

@Raoul the Red Shirt - Those are all good points. I'd add Trump's apparent determination to accelerate climate change as a major mark against him, and I'm very sure that in after any second term we'd have much more to talk about - assuming we were still around. So, this is not to minimise Trump's misdeeds at all. But the Iraq War is a very big one, and I'd say that his merely inheriting torture chambers and mass surveillance (it's unclear to what extent these are still in use given the lack of transparency) is not as bad as being the one who sets up those things.

Of course, this kind of comparison can never be resolved either way. But it is a mistake for people to lose perspective or absolve people like Bush of their sins just because the focus is on Trump right now. It gives Trump way too much credit and lets the Republican Party off the hook.

I'm confused by the implication of a past tense here

You have to understand that modern conservatives like @Paladin @oldfella1962 @Volpone and @Zombie all hate America.

HATE it. Its very existence is a constant hot poker in their mind.

Now they will never admit it and most likely don't realize it but they all hate it. They hate that it is multi-ethnic (and trending majority minority), they hate that it is urban (and trending more urban), they hate that it is liberal (and trending more liberal); They hate America Actual.

Instead they have some idealized past America that they worship. When everyone was white, rich and had their own 40 acres. The fact that this America never actually existed, but to the extent it did was on the back of women, minorities, immigrants and the poor, they can’t grasp/ignore/don't care.

All they grasp is that America Actual is the opposite of their Ideal America making America Actual evil and in need of destruction. It is sullying the ‘memory’ of Ideal America.

So they are all overjoyed that Trump is actively trying to destroy America.

I take one of the most vocal defenders of ‘We have to have the Electoral College else all the darkies in the cities will be able to outvote ‘Real Americans*’ giving the above a dumb rep a sign I hit the nail on the head.

*rural whites

Well, season 2 Homelander is so wrapped up in himself and his own advancement, he cozies up to an actual Nazi, and doesn't give a shit about the morals.
So....yeah, right on the nose there.
I don't think the person in the costume meant it ironically though.

I hated GWB as president and my posting history here and at TBBS (if it still exists) will confirm that.

But there is one significant difference between GWB and Trump that cannot be denied:

However much I disagreed with GWB or believed he was totally misguided, I never once doubted that he at least thought he was doing the right thing for America.

Trump doesn't give a shit about anyone or anything but himself. The aftermath of the 2020 election is proof positive. He's quite happy to watch the country burn if it advances his own agenda.

I've had people try to argue that Trump is altruistic and I ask them, "Have you ever paid attention to the guy like...at all?"

A couple other significant differences:

Although W, like essentially all politicians, had his phoniness and his arrogance, he also seemed to sincerely know he was flawed and limited both from the perspective of having been an alcoholic and from the perspective of a born again Christian. Trump has been unwilling to admit he has ever made a mistake, which means instead of changing course when he makes them, he just doubles down.

W. was also willing to listen to and defer to others. Now sometimes that was to the country's detriment, because it led to Cheney and Rumsfeld having an outsized influence. But overall, it meant that he would take information from differing sources into account and make decisions.

Trump seems to believe he is an expert on everything, and ignores any information that doesn't fit into preconceived notions that he has or that isn't about him, and hyper-focuses on how things affect him. He also basically has encouraged those around him to be yes-people, and his decisionmaking has suffered as a result.

Do they actually give you examples? Straight out of FOX, I'm sure.

"But what if he ran for president because he felt like he could serve his country or, at worst, that the country's needs aligned with his own? " <---actual quote.

He's triggered some sort of mass psychosis among a huge percentage of the population. It's been there for a long time, but his ascent really set it off.

Just telling them the lies they want to hear. Most of it he doesn't believe in.

Starting to think we're going to need actual deprogramming interventions on a national scale. This cult is scary.

Maybe you should think about why you believe national policy should be decided by two or three large urban centers and fuck everybody else. Or is that too complicated for you?

Yeah, I know. You guys dream of a world where national candidates only have to campaign in New York and LA, maybe Chicago for texture, and the rest of the country can go hang. People living in high density urban hellscapes should get to decide for everyone how they should live.

Really? The combined population of NYC, LA, and Chicago, including their suburbs, is 40 million.

That's 1/8th of the population of the country.

You can math, can't you?

I prefer 1 person, 1 vote...
Biden still would have won by 5 or 6 million votes...

Given average voter turnout in this country, that's more than enough to swing an election. We all know that about 80% of the vote is going to be for the D or the R that they always vote for and the remaining 20% or so of "undecideds" make the difference. To say it again, the EC exists to balance dense urban areas against spread-out rural areas. Right now your complaint is that the country as a whole doesn't do what a handful of cities says it should. That's a feature, not a bug.

This time. Beware the pure democracy, as it requires only one successful ideologue to destroy the country.