r/pics:

u/xander707

This isnt even surprising. This is totally on-brand and 100% expected for anyone who has been paying a modicum of attention during the last decade. I have lost what little faith I had in the American public for allowing this. Given all that transpired during and after Trumps first term, those who voted for this or didnt vote at all, knew exactly what they were standing for, or werent standing against.
u/xander707

Theres multiple issues with the inflation narrative. For one, Trump contributed to it more than Biden did. Trump pressured the fed to keep interest rates low during a hot economy which leads to inflation. Trump grossly mishandled the pandemic which lead to inflation. Trump issued stimulus checks, just as Biden did, which lead to inflation. Now the common counter-arguments are that this is complex and also that because the inflation occurred under Biden, he naturally gets the blame for it. But yet the same people who make that argument wont acknowledge the 3 million net job losses, more than any other presidential term in American history, that happened directly under Trump. The roaring economy that Obama gave Trump was worse than dead by the end of Trumps term, but Trump gets a bizarre pass on that when Biden doesnt on inflation. Furthermore, Trumps planned policies for his second administration will lead to increased inflation and economists were sounding the alarm on that during the election cycle. Mass deportations = inflation. Mass tariffs = inflation. Installing a lapdog fed chair that does only what Trump commands and drops rates on his whim = inflation. But the worst part of all, is that when inflation explodes under Trump, and it will, all of his voters who were crowing about inflation wont care. They will not blame him. Which is why the narrative is horseshit.
u/xander707

They didnt care about that. They pretended to care to get actual fence-sitters or apathetic voters to stay home. And it worked.
u/xander707

You can pretend to be a high road critical thinker who doesnt let themselves be manipulated by others but I just want to circle back to how earlier you justified the Blackwater mercenary pardons because youve been to war and innocent people die everyday. You are defending war criminals and the murdering of innocent civilians. I dont know what war crimes you committed when deployed, but these mercenaries were convicted, in some instances convicted several times on their appealed retrials, of killing 17 innocent people including children. I really want to stress that this was an unprovoked attack, and not a situation of collateral damage, hence why they were tried and convicted. So just for clarification, you are saying that if a mercenary group opens fire, unprovoked, into a crowd of innocent people containing no enemy combatants whatsoever, killing 17 people including children, that has no relevancy to someone like you and you feel completely indifferent about Trump pardoning these war criminal murderers? This holds no relevancy to you, but Hunter Biden does? Just trying to get all the facts here.
u/xander707

Thats just lazy thinking my dude. Having a cold sucks, so does having cancer. That does not make them equal. I promise you that for every instance of something bad you could point to about Biden, or Obama, or democrats in general, I can match you to ten worse instances by Trump and GOP. To claim that both sides are the same when they clearly are not, just exposes you as either a bad faith agitator, or genuinely incapable of critical thinking.
u/xander707

Imagine going back in time 10-20+ years and showing conservatives a glimpse of this future they will eventually be gleefully supporting. Surreal. If you went back to the early 2000s and told them Trump would be the Republican president paid for by Elon Musk who gives a blatant sieg heil at the inauguration, to applause, theyd laugh you out of the room. The America most of us grew up in has gone up in flames and no longer exists. Im not saying conservatives werent bad/racist people back then, but they still wouldnt recognize what the party has become today. This is outrageous.
u/xander707

The side which pardons violent cop beaters. You couldnt make this stuff up, wouldnt pass as believable for fiction.
u/xander707

I agree. Unfortunately its going to take some time for others to accept the reality of the situation.
u/xander707

I didn’t realize that Trump was going to able to do things like pass a budget via EO. For one, its not going to do the dems any favors to shut down the government over the budget. The public will have a negative reaction to that and blame the dems, further eroding what chance of power they have left. But more importantly, it appears that Trump and Elon are quite literally taking the power of the purse away from congress anyways. They literally control the treasury. Whatever budget congress passes or doesnt pass wont mean as much when DOGE now controls the distribution of government funds as they see fit. Whos going to stop them? Not the GOP controlled congress, not the GOP Supreme Court, and certainly not the powerless dems. Or actually abolish the Department of Education. He cannot do that strictly via EO no matter what he thinks. Its going to happen. But just because Trump is rattling off all these EOs doesn’t mean they actually they’re going to be in effect. It does though. Thats how EOs work. And it takes either an act of congress or the courts to stop them. And the fact of the matter is that Trump has the advantage in congress and SCOTUS. So even in the rare instance that a court does shut down one of his EOs, either the SCOTUS will reverse the court decision, or Trump will simply do a new EO with modified language to get around the court ruling. We really need to be cognizant of the extreme peril we are in, and fully understand that neither dems nor institutions can save us now. Trump has as near to absolute power as one could reasonably describe it. There isnt much he cant do, and theres no group or authority with the power to stop him that is willing to do so.
u/xander707

Its because democrats respect the processes and decorum of how the government is supposed to run. Its never occurred to dems to go full fascist and just purge the government and do a coup of the treasury through unelected, Un-appointed billionaires. Exactly how are dems, with no power whatsoever in congress, supposed to stop Trumps executive orders?