Trump Kicking and Screaming Transition Thread

I fear very much that the Trump administration marks a serious turn for the worse in the history of the USA, quite possibly the beginning of an irreversible decline which at some point will necessarily involve balkanization. When that happens, the leftover pieces will no longer have the same influence in the world. That will not be all bad, but it will not be all good, either.

I put nothing beyond Trump in the matter of saving his own skin except actual, in-person cold-blooded killing.

Fortunately, he seems to have cops for that sort of thing.

Yeah, if you've got a great case, I don't think that your legal team would be trying to runaway from you.

I suppose it's possible that they figured out he was likely to stiff them on the deal. But still, if you're the legal team on a very high profile case and you win, you're going to gain a lot of clients as a result. So, even if you get stiffed by the original client, you can make the money up on all the increased business you'll be getting. Then again, defending Trump is probably not the kind of publicity that you want right now.

The article itself mentions a possible reason that a firm might hypothetically want to pull out of the case even if it thought it was meritorious: there is pressure being put on at least one firm to get its bigger corporate clients to chastise and/or walk away from the firm. The benefit of repping Trump, win or lose, is probably less than the benefit of established relationships with long-term clients with far greater needs for legal services.

There is also the issue of ethics (insert lawyer jokes here). A lawyer is not supposed to file claims that are frivolous, and it's hard to argue (even for a lawyer) that there is truly a good-faith factual basis for allegations of widespread fraud. The Atlantic I think had an article about how no self-respecting lawyer would rep the Trump campaign, and there's definitely merit to that. If repping the Trump campaign causes you to get repeatedly (to use a technical term) wriggedy-wriggedy wreckt by judges to the point that your reputation suffers and you become less effective for your other clients, all the money in the world is probably not worth it.

Don't forget "selfie-gate"

I miss when this was the most embarrassing thing about our President:

Is it bad that after a Trump presidency, Dubya seems downright charming and wholesome?

Yes, it's bad. It's very, very bad!

Eh, I'll allow it. The guy was a war criminal who needed impeaching but I never believed he hated America or was trying to grift his donor base.

@Lanzman why are you booing me? I'm right

I've struggled back and forth over who's the worst president ever, Reagan or Trump.
I mean, at first glance, you'd think covid would put Trump over the top, but you gotta remember Reagan and AIDS.
*Holds hands up in a pantomime of scales*
AIDS..covid..AIDS..covid.
But now, I think this soft coup of Trump's seals the deal.
Worst. President. Ever.

No, you're not. Bush II is not a war criminal. You're suffering from BDS.

Well, that gets into a philosophical question, doesn't it?
Is Dr. Frankenstein vicariously guilty of The Monster's murders?
If he is, then Bush is a war criminal, because while Cheny was the de-facto commander in chief, Bush through his lazy incompetence let him be that.
Bush loosed the monster.

Mind you, Reagan had the brain issues before he left office and probably just kept forgetting to stage a coup

Yeah, they'll find those WMD's any day now.

You need to get some perspective and get out of you’re bubble. Buchanan pretty much allowed the build up to the civil war happen by pandering and placating the South. Polk got us into a war with Mexico over the thinnest of excuses. Jackson forcibly removed the Cherokee and directly responsible for their genocide.
ETA: You literally sound like the comic book guy from the Simpsons.

I don't think we'll know the answer to that question for another 10 years, at least.

Trump probably had more negative impact during his administration. He wasn't just neglectful of Covid the way Reagan was of AIDS; he actively worked against efforts to mitigate it. He created a destructive personality cult that has become more and more unhinged with each passing month, and by using a bullhorn where Reagan used dog whistles, he has emboldened every racist, misogynist, and all-around scumbag in the country in a way that Reagan never did.

On the other hand, Reagan did lasting harm by rewriting the narrative that underlies our national dialogue. The myths he perpetuated, like the Welfare Queen trope, continue to affect public policy 40 years later. Until Reagan, even conservatives had to pretend to believe in the New Deal ethos of using the government as a tool to lift people up if they wanted to get elected (Nixon, for instance, would probably have signed Obamacare). After Reagan, the Horati0 Alger mythology was revived, and an every-man-for-himself, greed-is-good mentality started to dominate our national culture.

We'll have to wait and see what Trump's impact is. Will he turn out to have done more harm than Reagan by convincing 40% of the electorate that every public institution is out to get them and that objective reality doesn't exist? Or will the full extent of his trashiness start to sink in, so that Republicans 10 years from now are running away from his legacy rather than venerating it like they do Reagan's?

No offense, but as badly as Reagan etc. handled AIDS and as horrible as it is that in part that was due to the political ideology of "who cares about that disease, cause it's only affecting gays and druggies," I'm pretty sure that it's not in the same ballpark as covid on several fronts (in fairness, I have just a general understanding of how AIDS unfolded, so if I'm wrong, people should correct me):
1. AIDS pretty much came out of nowhere, so even the most attentive president would have likely gotten caught flatfooted. By contrast, Trump had ample warnings to take preventative measures before covid got here specifically, and actively dismantled the pandemic defenses his predecessors had worked on.
2. Though more inherently fatal if untreated and even with the best treatments available in the 80s, HIV is far harder to transmit than covid
3. I assume the actual deaths from HIV during all the Reagan years are fewer than the 240k who have died because of coronavirus
4. Reagan's problem was a mixture of ignorance and apathy about HIV/AIDS. Trump knew full well how deadly coronavirus was and downplayed it to try to increase his chances of getting re-elected.
5. Reagan never AFAIK actively sabotaged prevention efforts by others. Imagine if he appeared on the nightly news talking crazy talk about how AIDS was going to just disappear any day now, how you can't get AIDS by having unprotected sex with men or sharing needles, how infecting disinfectant might be a cure. Or if he used the federal employees to block prevention efforts.

I can't imagine that the long-term impact of Trumpism could possibly be worse than that or Reaganism. Maybe I've got a gleam of nostalgia, but for all the deliberate and inadvertent harm Reagan did, he did some good or at least tried to. He will get props for being able to bring the country together after the Challenger explosion and for hastening the end of communism. As much as people might make fun of Just Say No, there's something to be said for pushing drug awareness.And of course, I wish we could get back to the days where people on both sides of the aisle would battle during the day but retain a fundamental respect for the others.

I'm not sure that there is one positive that a person can point to about the Trump administration outside of tax cuts if you're one to benefit from those. The fact that he blatantly disregarded laws and norms and almost entirely got away with it is almost certainly going to inspire someone to follow in his footsteps, only who is a) more focused on actually achieving things beyond seeking attention, playing golf and getting cash quick and b) willing to play their disdain for the system closer to the chest.

Posted this in another thread, but before it was nominated for the International Photography Awards:

Nope. If you read And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts, you'll see that the medical community knew there was something going on for quite a while but couldn't get anyone to listen because the victims were gay/sex workers/IV drug users. It was only after the outbreak hit a critical mass that the medical community was forced to take notice. See, again, And the Band Played On for specifics about that.

And yet, even during the Reagan era there were serious efforts to reduce the transmission of the disease.

That's difficult to say since people were reluctant to provide the necessary funding to do the research needed to ascertain the exact numbers.

You forgot homophobia. Reagan, like many people, felt that gay men were getting "what they deserved."

Whereas Reagan didn't care because it seemed like the only people dying of the disease were gay men, sex workers, and IV drug users.

His staff liked to joke about it publicly.

I'll point out that despite what that article claims, the death toll at this point was higher than 1,000 people.

You forgot homophobia. Reagan, like many people, felt that gay men were getting "what they deserved."

Whereas Reagan didn't care because it seemed like the only people dying of the disease were gay men, sex workers, and IV drug users.

[/quote]

I'm not so sure that Reagan was a hard-core homophobe. He was a contemporary of Rock Hudson's and I suspect (I could be wrong) that he helped persuade the Louis Pasteur Institute in Paris to take Rock Hudson as a patient. Hudson's sexual orientation was hardly a secret in Hollywood. Like Covid AIDs was easy to dismiss out of hand until someone close to you personally or professionally got it. Watching friends and/or respected colleagues die a horrible, lingering death would have an impact on most of us. I guess my point about Reagan is that while I've never been a fan of his politics and feel that he helped steer us onto the path we're on today, I hesitate to think the worst of him in this particular case. He could have done a lot more, but I'm not so sure he would have dismissed the victims as getting what they deserved. If there's more direct evidence of that attitude I'd be interested in hearing it.

honestly, what would anyone benefit from talking to her anyway? Michelle can fill Jill in on anything she doesn't already know.

Nope.
Ronnie and Nancy cut off all contact with Rock, refused to even answer questions about him, and wouldn't even go to his funeral.
Ronnie was a bastard.
Nancy was a smidge better, cuz she cared for her hair and makeup gays, but it was only a smidge, and for selfish reasons.

Trump is clearly worse than Polk or Jackson, and I'm anything but a fan of either. Buchanan could maybe have a case but for me the only real competition is Andrew Johnson who was a profound shitshow. I can't see how we possibly shoehorn Reagan into the top 5 though, however dim one's view of him might or might not be.

ETA: Yes, Reaganism plowed the field for Trumpism to grow but one could argue that without Rush and Newt and Fox (or their equivalents) tending the garden that the right wing public would not have been so primed to lose their fucking mind that a black man got elected and in their insanity elect Trump. So yes, Reagan created an anti-NewDeal narrative in the public mind (without ever actually framing his shit as a repudiation of the New Deal) and that has been a huge barrier to progress. But it wasn't Reaganism alone that created Trump.

As for the AIDS stuff, yes it was criminal but a lot more presidents than you might imagine have some dark-ass shit on their watch, I don't think that specifically makes him "one of the worst" simply because the competition is pretty strong.

Bush was worse than Trump by most metrics, in his first term especially.

Conventional metrics, however, do not include "tore apart the very fabric of society and brought the nation into international disrepute, if not civil war" on a scale of one to ten....

In other matters, anyone else noticed the symbolism of his hair suddenly being grey?