Trump’s Most Unhinged Plans for His Second Term
nymag.com
Many of Trump’s proposals for his second term are surprisingly extreme, draconian, and weird, even for him. Here’s a running list of his most unhinged plans.
Many of Trump’s proposals for his second term are surprisingly extreme, draconian, and weird, even for him. Here’s a running list of his most unhinged plans.
Ok that escalated. Starts with usual giving himself powers stuff but ends up with Federal "freedom cities" and flying cars.
Freedom to do what, murder LGBTQ+, lefties, people of color, and so forth? Because that's what I have to assume he means by "Freedom."
Given the libertarian influences, I'd assume they're supposed to be hyper-privatized free trade zones or special economic zones. That means low or no taxes, hardly any regulations, unhinged capitalism for everything.
It's the same bullshit libertarians have been praising for decades now and that's been tried and failed again and again. Remember that crypto cruise ship?
Freedom to have every facet of your existence regulated to a homogenized set of conservative social values while also being totally free of any corporate oversight at all.
Not sure who wants to actually live there. Conservatives like two places: cities that exist because educated, largely liberal, people create jobs she money, or the country where they can leach off the cities to fund their infrastructure without any of the social costs that come with it.
Probably freedom to just sit there empty. He wants to build them from scratch.
This sounds oddly familiar to other stories we've heard before.
Freedom cities sound like freedom fries.
I remember back after 9/11 and France called us on the bullshit… the state legislature voted to call them freedom fries in the capital cafeteria. (I was in highschool and lobbying for some environmental stuff. My former math teacher was our rep, so, we went to lunch and talked about things.)
In any case, those fries were not free, and they weren’t fried. (Orida frozen… stuffed in a microwave…)
Also? As a side note, the reason flying cars are not a thing is because nobody has found a way to make free energy yet- anything that flies has to expend energy to counter gravity- on airplanes, the wings push air down and it moves forward. In things that hover it’s either the rotors/fans/jet engines pushing air.
That expenditure just doesn’t exist on normal ground vehicles.
@FuglyDuck that's so funny, I was literally telling people the freedom fries thing was real earlier today! Someone younger than us had thought it was just a myth or satire.
(Over here - sorry not sure how to link it via your instance but you get the picture).
just checked with one of my teenagers, confirmed they didn't know freedom fries. which makes sense of course, but i took it for granted they must have heard - it was such a bizarre thing to me at the time!
In NZ we have these things called Afghans (an iced biscuit/cookie with cocoa and coconut) and we would joke that if the US had them they'd have to rename them.
Yeah. I remember being incredulous when I saw the menu, me and the other highschool kid. The Rep explained that they actually passed a bill for that to be renamed; in this tone of voice dripping with sarcasm. I'm not sure if it happened federally or in other states, but it happened here- it only applied to the state capital cafeterias, though.
Wikipedia seems to think it happened in many places. I don't think people realize how bizarre some of that stuff was.
Yeah.
It was bizarre. The US lost it’s damn mind and went full on crazy. I remember asking what Iraq did and getting called a traitor. (They were mostly Saudis? And Saudis funded?)
I also remember bejng asked why I wasn’t joining up… like, dude, let me graduate highschool first…
Knowing now that Bin-Laden had been in Pakistan and we kinda knew almost where for a long time really makes the Iraq invasion so much worse.
I went and protested it in Copley Square the night before we invaded Iraq. I’m glad I did it, but it seemed to do fuck all. Possibly lead to Barack Obama’s presidency, which I’m happy about, but that in turn may have lead Trump’s as well.
I can’t help wonder how different the world would have been with Gore as president. Even social media may have been regulated differently with a moderately (or even slightly) tech savvy administration, though that’s probably a stretch.
Edit: Wft autocorrect; Batak Obamass? Really?
@nilloc I went and protested too, there was a big march in New Zealand and we stayed out of the "coalition of the willing" who invaded. We were lucky we had a very strong centre-left leader at the time.
The Gore alternate timeline is interesting. Would we have had less pollution by now?
I can't even imagine. I think 9/11 would have still happened... I don't think they'd have caught it; and I don't think we'd have just... not responded.
That’s probably the case, though I think smarter people who didn’t already want to invade the Middle East to avenge their daddy’s name (before 9/11 strangely) might have heeded the multiple intelligence warnings better.
I hate Nader for his spoiling that election in particular, but he wanted locked cockpit doors way before 9/11. Gore may have listened to his advise but probably not in time.
I think we also would have sanctioned Saudi Arabia and worked with Pakistan instead of the bullshit that happened instead.
The thing was… that at the time, locking the door wasn’t really the issue.
The policy at the time was to allow the hijacker’s to take over because there were hundreds of hostages on board. Before 9/11, nobody thought they’d take the plane and crash it into stuff.
Similar to how cashiers/bank tellers are taught to comply with robbers. The expectation is that doing what they want is safer for everyone - and the assumption was they’d want cash.
Post 9/11, those assumptions changed, and now pilots are instructed to let the hostages die instead of opening up, because its likely that, failing getting down to where a response team could get on board, everyone is going to die anyhow and letting the bad guys control the plane means substantially more deaths.
It's not a stretch. The antitrust lawsuits brought by nine states and the Justice Department against Microsoft was made to simply go away under the Bush administration. Our technology would probably look very different today without Microsoft's monopoly, and without that who knows what the rest of the map would look like?
Yikes. The pressure must have been really intense. I'm in NZ and I lost a bunch of US internet friends (some I'd met irl) for not being enthusiastic about attacking Afghanistan.
In the immediate family, it wasn’t too terrible. It was a certain uncle, that I never speak to any more thinking I should be signing up. (he’s as deep into MAGA world as anyone, the only reason he wasn’t at Jan 6 was he’s too broke to go.)
Most everyone else kind of would just… not talk about it? By the time i did graduate, all the fervor wore off into a kind of … refusal to accept we’d been lied to? I dunno weird times.
I will say this. It definitely colors my understanding of what’s going on with Palestine. Seems to be that history is rhyming again.
I agree.
Wikipedia is correct. I was 34 on 9/11. There was so much of this crazy bs. The freedom fries thing was rampant. I lived a few blocks from a mosque, and sadly there were several threats, picketers and vandalism for several years.
Trump is already disqualified from holding any office, let alone that of the President, under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4591133
Page 17:
V. The persons who framed Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment regarded the President of the United States as an officer of the United States
The President of the United States was among the officials who took the oath to the Constitution that under Section Three triggered disqualification for participating in an insurrection. As noted in the previous section, the persons responsible for the Fourteenth Amendment sought to bar from present and future office all persons who betrayed their constitutional oath. “All of us understanding the meaning of the third section,” Senator John Sherman of Ohio stated, “those men who have once taken an oath of office to support the Constitution of the United States and have Fourteenth Amendment distinguished between the presidential oath mandated by Article II and violated that oath in spirit by taking up arms against the Government of the United States are to be deprived for a time at least of holding office.” No member of the Congress that drafted the the oath of office for other federal and state officers mandated by Article VI. Both were oaths to support the Constitution. Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky saw no legal difference between the constitutional requirement that “all officers, both Federal and State, should take an oath to support” the Constitution and the constitutional requirement that the president “take an oath, to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin declared that Congress need not pass laws requiring presidents to swear to support the Constitution because that “oath is specified in the constitution.”
In fact, the exact question of whether the disqualification from public office covered the Presidency came up at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was being drafted: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/lsb/lsb10569
Specifically:
I’ll highlight that last bit again:
That is from this paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3748639
Some people seem to have a lot of trouble with figuring out what "or" means, in a list of things.
That doesn't EXPLICITLY say they can't be President. - a Judge in Colorado who probably would also rule the framers PROBABLY meant AR15s in the Second Amendment despite it not being explicitly said.
Yes, actually, that's exactly what it means. He broke his oath of office. He is not fit to hold any public office including that of the President, and he is barred from holding office by the Constitution of the United States. Period dot, and of story.
The courts, so far, don't agree. Unfortunately.
Incorrect. The judge in Colorado ruled he broke his oath of office and engaged in an insurrection, which is what makes the ruling so coo-coo bananapants.
There are people in powerful positions who may try to interpret this as favorably to Trump as possible to let him off the hook for it, holding as much integrity for themselves as they can while still achieving the goal. Are you sure it will hold up? I'm not, unfortunately.
Not with the conservative shills on this Supreme Court, no. Not when it really counts. This is the product of several generations of conservative activism to stack the courts with partisan judges for conservative causes.
I can't really find fault with the ruling. The amendment specifically calls out very important positions like senators and representatives, and even electors for POTUS...but they just plumb forgot the even more important position of POTUS? It's really hard to believe.
I don't know why they would exclude the POTUS, and few want trump off the ballot more than me, but the argument that the POTUS is not included is very reasonable.
The text literally says "any office". Not sure what you're talking about here.
So why do you think they left POTUS out of the list when they listed out other important positions? Why not just say "any office" is that's all inclusive?
Read the excerpt, then go read the rest of the paper at the link. The context of why is in the other sections, before and after 5 which I quoted above.
I read the excerpt, and it makes no mention of why they explicitly call out senators but not the post, and vaguely referencing a 55 page paper just leads me to believe you have no explanation.
If this is not the case, could you put the argument in your own words?
Oh, by all means. You see the President has to take an oath of office to defend the Constitution, and the Framers thought that nobody in their right minds could be stupid enough to think that the Fourteenth Amendment didn't apply to the Office of the President, or the person holding that Office, because the Fourteenth Amendment applies to whether people who break their Oaths of Public Office get to hold Public Office. To wit, they do not. Not unless a quorum of the sitting government says they can with a vote to that effect, anyway.
As such, it was obvious to the Framers that this would also bar someone from the Presidency. As it says in the context I asked you to read.
You're not arguing why one and not the other, but why it should apply to the POTUS even though it doesn't say POTUS.
I'm not saying I disagree, but the same argument could be made for senator or representative as well. So why call out these specifically and not the other?
If you're resting your hat on "well it obviously applies to senator but not POTUS" when I would think, without specific clarification, that it would obviously apply to both ... Well then I think they justified her ruling as reasonable.
Everyone who takes an oath of office is covered by the Fourteenth Amendment. Why?
THEY ALL TAKE OATHS OF OFFICE
That's it. That's the answer to your question. If you want to know why the Fourteenth Amendment was written, that's also in the paper I linked. Your weaponised ignorance disguised as well-meaning debate only works as long as you aren't being obviously disingenuous.
No, it isn't. This is even a shift from your previous argument. But, again, it's just why you think the POTUS is included, but not why they explicitly call out senators but not the POTUS.
It's fair to say you don't know, which is basically what I'm saying here, but claiming that I'm weaponizing my ignorance when I'm asking you to explain, while you're claiming a conclusion is clear despite yours... Well that seems incredibly backwards.
What I am stating hasn't shifted at all. Your "argument" is that because the President isn't explicitly listed in the text, then "we can't know if they're covered". Do you think every list everywhere has to be exhaustive, even when criteria and examples are listed? You know what the text does state?
Section Three states:
I'll bold and italicise the really important bits, and delete the bits that aren't relevant, because you seem to have trouble with the word "or" in lists:
The ONLY argument that "this doesn't cover the Presidency" is that "The Presidency is not an Office of the United States, and the person who holds the Presidency is not an Officer of the United States". This is obviously wrong as the actual, explicit text is "any office, civil or military", and the actual requirement is "having previously taken an oath of office, then engaging in insurrection against that office".
YOU are obviously wrong, because "any office" is pretty fucking explicit - the Presidency is an Office of the US, as laid out in that 55 page paper you refuse to fucking read. "Civil or military" - the President is both. "Previously having taken an oath as an officer of the United States" - check, taking the Presidency does indeed require an oath beforehand. "Having engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same" - yep, he did that too. That's all the requirements, so are you still going to come back with "but president not listed 🤔" as though it's at all valid?
Edit: Fuck this, I've made my point very clearly, and there is no point in engaging further with you because either you get it or you're a concern troll - maybe both. Good day.
Sadly, the Democrats have proven themselves to be just as fascistic when it comes to immigration. I got talked into voting Biden, but I'd be lying if I said that I don't question that decision every day.
One of the first things Biden did was to build more concentration camps, and one of the first things his supporters did was make excuses for that.
Edit: Oh yikes, the fascism defenders and concentration camp explainers have appeared in droves in my inbox 😬
Scroll down for exhibit A...
It's fair to criticize Biden for not being better than he is but it's fucking braindead, bordering on parody to suggest that Biden isn't better than Trump. Only complete morons or people that aren't paying attention would suggest such a thing, so I'll just give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you aren't aware of what Biden has gotten done in his first two years.
I can't stand that he's old, he fucked over rail workers, he's still supporting Israel in their genocidal quest, and he has increased funding for police, but it's hyperbolic af to say he's just as fascist as trump, the poster child of American fascism. Dude literally attempted to overthrow democracy to stay in power. "The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power."
The Biden administration ended up getting the rail workers the sick days they were fighting for. Maybe it would have happened sooner had a strike taken place, but to say so would be pure speculation. While seemingly heavy handed, his actions prevented a huge logistical nightmare and I'm the end got three results being asked for. I agree with pretty the rest of what you said, but saying he fucked over rail workers is a bit disingenuous.
That's a lie. They only got a small fraction of the sick time they demanded, and that's only for some workers not all. Now you use those exploited workers as a political tool.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/american-democracy-was-never-designed-to-be-democratic-eric-holder-our-unfinished-march-nick-seabrook-one-person-one-vote-jacob-grumbach-laboratories-against-democracy
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/14/liberalism-and-fascism-partners-in-crime/
https://truthout.org/articles/fascism-is-possible-not-in-spite-of-liberal-capitalism-but-because-of-it/
https://nyanarchist.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/scratch-a-liberal-a-fascist-bleeds-how-the-so-called-middle-class-has-enabled-oppression-for-centuries/
I'm referring solely to immigration, which is the topic at hand. No one has claimed he is as bad as Trump overall, and I'm not sure how these links are supposed to make me feel better about how he's actively persecuted immigrants and refugees. I mean, let's be honest...
Edit: "he's old" is literally age discrimination. Of all the criticisms of Biden, "he's old" is not relevant in the least.
I mean, it literally isn't. Voters can choose any criteria to choose their political candidate.
How is age not relevant? The risk of dementia quintuples from 70s to 80s. The elderly are more susceptible to almost every disease. Not to mention that the presidency is one of the most stressful jobs, just look at the before and after photographs of presidents.
I don't want to pass any sort of judgement on whether it is or isn't age discrimination, but your way of arriving at this conclusion is flawed. It's like saying voters can choose all sorts of criteria to select their favourite, so going by the criterion of race can't be racism. Those possible criteria can have different names and descriptors, independent of whether they are possible or not.
His age does indeed put him into a risk group for possible dementia, true, but the criterion disqualifying him would be if he specifically does have dementia or not - not his age. Young people can develop dementia with a certain probability too, that does not exclude young people, it only excludes young people who actually do develop dementia.
Possibly one of the most needlessly pedantic comments I've ever received.
Age discrimination is typically, almost entirely, discussed as a legal issue, most often within the arena of employment. The reason being that most people realize and accept that age affects abilities. So taking into account the age of a candidate wouldn't be age discrimination in the typical sense.
And he's going to take a cognitive test at my request and share the results? And those results will guarantee that he won't develop dementia for the next five years? If the answer to either is no, then I need to make a decision based on probability. He's far more likely to develop dementia than someone in their 70s, and I would guess hundreds to thousands of times more likely than someone in their 40s.
Not to mention that life expectancy would hold that he'd be dead by now. He's fairly likely to die in office, especially when considering the stress of the job.
Why, thank you, but be aware that flattery will get you nowhere.
Alrighty, then let's look at your comment from the perspective of legality. Age discrimination involves treating an applicant or employee less favorably because of his or her age. That's the definition. Now if we were to continue here and expand our scope, we could state that this is illegal in working environments because - short version - there are laws making it so in the workplace, but that does not touch what is or isn't age discrimination. Since there are no laws declaring it illegal in an electoral context, age discrimination happening while voting is not illegal there, but it still very much is age discrimination. Just like in our previous example, not voting for a candidate because one doesn't like their race is still racism, but like above, it is not illegal because no law says it is.
True enough, not much difference in your conclusion because it is not a case of illegal age discrimination, but
it literally is.
By that definition, every choice is discrimination because any criteria you set necessarily excludes so other group.
You keep pivoting to race as your analogy, but it doesn't fit. Look at the scrutiny courts give to race versus sex or age. Laws based on race receive strict scrutiny, gender gets intermediate scrutiny, and age is judged with a rational basis scrutiny.
So, yes, while discrimination can mean that, it certainly has a connotation that makes it a poor word choice. It is misleading as to what's happening. Using age as a selection criteria is based on rational facts, selection based on race is based on hate. Poor analogy.
Not quite. We got two factors here, one, the different treatment from other groups, yes. but the second factor - different treatment because of someone's age - limits it to cases of different treatment due to age. It's not age discrimination because someone else gets different treatment, it is age discrimination because age is the reason for that.
And that's why racism is an apt analogy, because that is one possible motivation for different treatment in someone's mind, just like age can be another reason. The different levels of scrutiny do not touch that. These come into play because proving such motivations in court is difficult and needs quasi-tangible standards, but what's being proved is that a factor (such as age, race, gender, etc) IS the main motivation in a case.
There are two definitions for discriminate:
Either considering Biden's age isn't discrimination because it isn't unjust, because those factors are an important consideration; or every choice is discrimination because we're using the differentiate definition. Personally, I believe the second definition is useless and doesn't convey the obvious connotation of discriminate.
Race is a terrible analogy for the same reason it receives strict scrutiny, there are no readily apparent reasons to use race as a determining factor. Age is not remotely in the same ball park, because there are numerous reasons to consider age. The piece you're missing is that age can be used as the reason for disparate treatment and be within the bounds of the law. Race can...almost...never be. (Can't think of anything, or any case law that upheld a race criterion, but maybe it's possible).
We were in the legal definition of the term age discrimination, and what i said above is what's relevant there.
But both can be reasons for different treatment and in that one particular feature, they are the same, thus the sound analogy.
Age discrimination (in a legal sense) is different treatment because one particular feature (age); racist discrimination is a different treatment because of a particular feature (race) as well.
In that they are the same, the different degrees of legality of both were not in question here.
No, sorry, it remains terrible. In the same way stealing a candy bar and murder aren't analogous simply because they're both illegal. Although, at least in that analogy both would always be illegal. In your analogy, disparate treatment based on age can often be valid and permissible, well disparate treatment on race can never be.
Yikes
I know... Science!!! Absolutely terrifying!
Lmao no. Did Obama or Biden put immigrants in cages, separating children from parents? Did the dems implement literal death traps in an attempt to kill more would be immigrants? I could go on and on.
They are nowhere near the same level. Take your reductive bullshit somewhere else
To your first question, yes. Obama did and there were protests and court rulings against it. A court order in 2015 limited child detention to 20 days and lead the Obama administration to change its ways. The Trump administration worked to undo that court order.
And, yes, cages and camps still operate today, within that 20 day limitation.
The Obama administration deported more people in its first term than the Trump administration did.
When it comes to deportations the Trump administration, as with so many things, talked big, but was unable to effectively enact its stated goals.
Yea buddy...That vote for Trump will certainly make things better compared to Biden.
What vote for Trump??
right wing democrats have to resort to lies, like that not voting for trump is voting for trump (?) and then blame us when they lose
Yeah, I get that a lot. And here's the most hilarious part: Even if you admit that you voted for Biden, they will still somehow make that a "vote for Trump" if you're not sucking sufficient cock. It's weird as hell.
also they act like it's your fault that people who are way less into politics than you or me might not feel like going all the way to the polls and wait 4 hours for a shitty cannidate they don't even like. those are the voters hillary clinton lost that lost her the election, and what biden's really risking losing next year
Yea buddy.. That vote for one of two clowns who both support (and have been allowed to rise to the top by) the system that oppresses the rest of society will certainly make things better compared to realising the system is and always has been rigged and that your choice within it is nothing more than an illusion keeping you distracted while they continue to exploit you.. 🙄🙄
So you don't vote?
Pretty sure most people do know they're getting fucked by both sides, but voting is literally the only feasible way to make shit better instead of worse.
So wOkE!
I’m in no way here to defend Biden, but I literally have heard nothing about concentration camps related to Biden. To what are you referring?
What’s your definition of fascism?
So you just use it as a generic pejorative. Understood.
ROFL!
You've made some libs big mad lol
I half expected them to arrive, but part of me was hoping there wouldn't be so many here on Lemmy. At least they're showing their ass, and anyone should be able to see right through their excuses and lies.
Well, it's simple. The majority of the US is liberal too.