A War on Blue America. In a second term, Trump would punish the cities and states that don’t support him

MicroWave@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 244 points – A War on Blue America
theatlantic.com

During his term in the White House, Donald Trump governed as a wartime president—with blue America, rather than any foreign country, as the adversary. He sought to use national authority to achieve factional ends—to impose the priorities of red America onto Democratic-leaning states and cities. The agenda Trump has laid out for a second term makes clear that those bruising and divisive efforts were only preliminary skirmishes.

Presidents always pursue policies that reflect the priorities of the voters and regions that supported them. But Trump moved in especially aggressive ways to exert control over, or punish, the jurisdictions that resisted him. His 2017 tax bill, otherwise a windfall for taxpayers in the upper brackets, capped the federal deductibility of state and local taxes, a costly shift for wealthy residents of liberal states such as New York and California. He moved, with mixed success, to deny federal law-enforcement grants to so-called sanctuary cities that didn’t fully cooperate with federal immigration agents. He attempted to strip California of the authority it has wielded since the early 1970s to set its own, more stringent pollution standards.

In Trump’s final year in office, he opened a new, more ominous front in his campaign to assert control over blue jurisdictions. As the nation faced the twin shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd, Trump repeatedly dispatched federal law-enforcement agents to blue cities, usually over the opposition of Democratic mayors, governors, or both. Trump sent an array of federal personnel to Portland, Oregon, ostensibly to protect a federal courthouse amid the city’s chaotic protests; reports soon emerged of camouflage-clad federal agents without any identifying insignia forcing protesters into unmarked vans. Trump responded to the huge racial-justice protests in Washington, D.C., by dispatching National Guard troops drawn from 11 states, almost all of them led by Republican governors. Later he sent other federal law-enforcement officers to combat rising crime in Kansas City and Chicago, a city Trump described as “worse than Afghanistan.”

Trump has signaled that in a second presidential term, he would further escalate his war on blue America. He’s again promising federal legislation that would impose policies popular in red states onto the blue states that have rejected them. He has pledged to withhold federal funding from schools teaching critical race theory and “gender ideology.” He says he will initiate federal civil-rights investigations into liberal big-city prosecutors (whom he calls “Marxist local District Attorneys”) and require cities to adopt policing policies favored by conservatives, such as stop-and-frisk, as a condition for receiving federal grants.

Non-paywall link

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"Second Term"

As if, if trump gets reelected, there will ever be another real election.

He punished blue cities and states in his first term too.

they literally delayed, and sabotaged, covid responses because at the time it was "only hurting blue states" \

There was over 100 million covid cases in America, leading to over a million deaths.

And thats all on trump, his crew, not caring to act until red states started getting hit, and even then it was half hearted and laden with disinformation (anyone remember injecting bleach?)

If he had just responded immediately and urgently he would have been a shoe-in for a second term, and would have gotten all the praise he would have ever wanted.

but he had to take the evil option instead, because Trump and his cohorts in the republican party will always take the low road and crawl through the shit.

At first they thought it was going to kill more Blah people. These ghouls were positively ecstatic over the idea.

Turns out, it was more a self-own, as more teabaggers ended up dying as a percentage...also, if the Orange Dotard actually did the right thing on covid, he might have actually won the election. So he's a dumbass 2x over, at least.

Any other president would've leapt at the chance to unify the country behind their response to a crisis like COVID, more or less guaranteeing a second term and a legacy as the president that "beat" COVID. But trump only knows how to sow discord, so of course all he did was politicize it and further divide the country*. They turned masks of all things into a political issue.

I'll always remember his response at a press conference to a question that was essentially "What comfort can you give to scared and suffering Americans?" and instead of, you know, assuring them that "we'll get through this together" like any rational politician would do with a softball question like that, trump of course lashed out and accused the reporter of being against him or something for daring to suggest everything wasn't absolutely perfect I guess. It was fucking bizarre.

*I will give him the barest hint of credit with how he didn't outright sabotage the vaccine development or distribution, but that was frankly because he saw personal glory in it for himself. Once that was politicized too, he fed the anti-vaccine crazies everything they wanted to hear (while quietly getting the vaccine himself, of course).

Yep.

Trump's ego is his own worst enemy.

Course we knew that when he purposefully bankrupted a casino cause he couldnt handle his wife doing a better job running it.

The bleach/UV thing wasn't purposeful misinformation. It was so much dumber.

You probably can't find the full video, but as Trump is walking to the podium, he stops to examine a poster-sized infographic from the CDC. An infographic about sterilizing surfaces. He then takes the stage and starts spewing bullshit.

Do you want a civil war? Cause that's how you get a civil war.

The use of confederate flags was foreshadowing.

Yes. They routinely taunt the left about not having guns. They think if they start a civil war the left will be defenseless. That would also give them cover to enact a Constitutional Convention, something they've been wargaming for decades.

Aren’t most blue states net contributors to the federal government?

Yes, generally blue states contribute more in taxes than they receive in federal spending and generally red states receive more in federal spending than they pay in taxes. Although there are exceptions, such as Texas (net contibutor) and New Mexico (net recipient).

Let's be honest here. Trump would hurt the red states too. But largely in lip service of hurting the blue states. Which his mouth breathers would be okay with.

If the electoral college chooses that asshole again, he needs to be assassinated before he can take office.

This is one of the key deficits in modern liberal politics that will cause democracy to fall. I can totally understand the arguments for why political assassinations are regarded as more or less ‘not worth it’ but there reaches a point where a nation-state as pseudo-person in and of itself must practice self-defense up to and including arguable murder.

Napoleon being the classic example. Hitler after the Putsch another. Letters from a Birmingham Jail in a more positive light. There are figures in politics from whom flows such charisma and control that a polity, a democracy, a nation-state must choose to integrate or extirpate the figurehead of a threat.

What happens with Trump in jail? Civil war. What happens with trump as President? Civil war. What happens with trump assassinated? Still civil war but against disparate movements with no leading figure.

Fuck all you Americans for letting it get this far. Someone should’ve stomped on New Gingrich’s face back in 94. Y’all let Mitch McConnell Weimar your republic. Your liberals and neutered leftists have failed the world. Fuck you all.

Fight.

Does assassination not just lead to someone else taking over but with the casus belli to implement more extreme measures, faster?

Typically yes and again I understand the argument but what else?

Should Napoleon been given the opportunity to return from Elba? Should Hitler have had the chance to assume the Chancellorship after the Reichstag fire?

There’s a risk and balance to all action especially in geopolitics. I doubt someone like Kissinger would give a different assessment if our morals aligned.

This kind of thing would be non-stop Viagra for the magabrained teabaggers. They love the idea of hurting people that are not themselves.

A fucking psychopath with millions of brainwashed following his cult. I hope he rots in jail.

Oh come on, it's not like he tried to engage in mass murder by neglect during COVID or sent DOJ strike teams into blue cities to illegally fight protestors.

Oh wait, he did both of those things.

Entertaining an egg dictator for all these years is exhausting. If they want a civil war so bad they can have it. My entire lifetime corporations and politicians have only frown in extreme wealth and power and the people have only lost. Take your cities back from the invisible masters of corporate America. Free the world.

I still remember that happening when the pandemic first was ramping up. Blue states purchased masks for essential personnel, while Trump sent people to confiscate the supplies to give to Red states donors for resale. Shipments had to be masked for supplies to get to hospitals in the wrong states. Republicans are doubling down on the war on blue.

Then the DNC better get a better candidate in there

Why is this being downvoted?

Our only option is a guy who was, and continues to, be deeply unpopular? Who only won last time because (4?) establishment candidates rallied around him in the primary. Oh and who could very well die of old age before finishing his term...

Trump is a threat to anyone who is not a fascist. So why is the establishment(the DNC) continuing to prop up a candidate who is as unpopular Hilary Clinton: a candidate who already lost to Trump?

It does not matter if the economy is doing 'better', inflation is down, crime-rates are down, unemployment is down, etc etc etc. You're average idiot does not pay attention to any of this - its all team-sports to them. They will sooner not vote at all - voter turn out was only 66% in the last election - the highest rate for any national election since 1900.

And all this before we even get to his foreign policy... what the fuck

I do not accept this is the only option. Find another candidate DNC.

The hive mind wont allow them to accept any other outcome. Many others fear being ostracized by their peers if they don't help reverberate the echo chamber. Instead of demanding we support the guy that's polling worse than any prior incumbent, they need to be pushing their party for another option. But democrats always punch left because we remind them they are not good people by supporting other people that are not good.

It is way too late in the American election cycle for that.