You want entertainment. He wants to take the job seriously. The mayor of New York wants to secure some form of business dealing going forward and do right by his constituency.

When his hands are tied behind public image, he can’t talk openly about a lot of things that would make the general public panic or not understand the meaning and context. We tend to forget or choose to forget that even the best politics is still public perception management.

100%, the American public, for as much as everyone complains about the state of politics, are not much better as a driving force for policy and good outcomes.

Because everyone can’t keep their shit together and the most ill-informed voices now speak loudest, we’re going to see more and more actual politics moving behind closed doors, for better or worse.

That’s how a lot of the deeply “set in” authoritarian empires have started you know.

A lot of people unhappy with the situation but just keeping quiet and pretending to go along with shit. Until years pass and a whole new generation of government workers who grew up with all this as normal come in and sign the oaths with a shrug and a smile.

It was obviously Trump’s idea to begin with, and the GOP haaaates the idea of giving away even twenty cents to a starving orphan so they have been grinding their teeth on this idea for a while now.

Trump is not republican. He’s not anything. He’s a colossal, spiteful, angry, narcissistic old man who just wants people to love him. He’s been very consistent that way. He would break whatever rules and regulations there and do whatever he’s told will help to get that outcome of being loved by people, it just so happens that his hatefulness aligned better with the republicans this round.

In some alternate timeline, Trump is our greatest president ever as he became a useful tool for an upstanding, socialist-majority congress and senate who use his willingness to trample tradition and regulation to pass sweeping reforms of our entire country’s oppressive financial systems. Just doing whatever he’s told so people can cheer his name.

It makes perfect sense if she wants to start focusing on her senate/presidential plans. And she is. And she will run.

He’s been one of the absolute weakest, belly-exposing, fealty-bowing establishment dems in the entire government. He has literally cited Trump’s “mandate” as a reason why they can’t oppose him. Fuck him and his tepid “he better not say bad stuff” response. I hope he gets primaried but we all know how set-in this old-money is.

A lot of political experts are predicting that this latest Epstein drama may actually have consequence.

Not the way we wish, we will never see Trump impeached, much less arrested, but it’s very possible that we don’t see real policy movement from Trump for the rest of his term. He is not going to be able to secure votes as his loyalists start to scatter into their own little power groups, each avoiding the burning, sinking ship that is the fallout of the Epstein falls.

It’s not the justice we fantasize seeing, but it’s a real good thing for the future of our country if it goes down like this.

Vance cannot hold Trump’s political capital.

Trump is “untouchable” because he has a massive share of political capital, the currency of how things move in government. In his case, it’s a huge mob of feverishly loyal, armed patriots with the intellect of fenceposts. These are the kinds of power reserves that have built and destroyed countless nations, and it’s why Trump gets away with everything he does and why the GOP has hoisted him up as the figurehead to implement all their dumb fucking ideas and back-room earmarks to funnel money to the corporate donors.

This power bloc follows Trump because they are charmed by someone who is both authentic and contemptable “just like average folks” in their eyes. He is openly resentful of everyone, he hates what he does, he hates the people around him, he spits on his own base and they love it. To them, it feels refreshing, it feels like a “real person” to their limited scope and perception of the world, and he validates their absolute worst impulses, and you can never underestimate the loyalty and commitment of someone who has their deepest fears or passions granted to them.

Now Vance… the GOP and Peter Thiel have been parading this guy around, desperately hoping that he can pick up and continue the mission as soon as Trump keels over. But it’s not working. The base isn’t openly scornful of him, yet, but they’re truly not captivated by him, he talks like a politician, he talks too much, he smiles and laughs, he says all the right things at the right times. This is exactly the “Washington Deep State” vibe that they despise.

I’m not saying Vance won’t be dangerous or cause a lot of problems, but he will be RADICALLY neutered in what he can get away with. He will be barely above full-on “Lame Duck” status for his entire term. It will be another status-quo, right-wing slop presidency that maybe starts a small war somewhere to drum up attention and funding for some contractors, then gets voted out by some popular liberal Democrat.

History is a flat circle. I’ve seen a lot of this before.

“Divisive.”

I mean, COME ON guys, lets just meet halfway. They wear swastikas and SS uniforms, and you don’t complain anymore, it’s called COMPROMISE.

It’s not just the right, but our modern society broadly cares far FAR more about aesthetics than substance. It’s always been this way, but the information age/short-attention-span era has directed a very bright spotlight on the problem.

This means though, that superficial, “dumb” insults and personal attacks are going to get about a thousand times more media attention and engagement than the most controversial policy debate or legal disputes.

(This comment is aimed directly at any possible DNC aids who might be scrolling Lemmy looking for things they need to tell the shriveled husks they represent.)

I can’t be the only one who has these memories.

In my case, Trump and my own father might as well have been clones. My father was even a wealthy narcissistic authoritarian who was obsessed with his hair and image and was incapable of telling the truth. He was surrounded by sycophants and the vilest people imaginable who were tripping over each other to fellate him until he ran of money, and was abruptly abandoned by everyone but his debt collectors.

He died (alone, of alcohol poisoning) right about the same time Trump became president. For me, my brain has been scrambled since 2016, I feel like he went from terrorizing my family to running the country, and on some subconscious level I keep thinking I have to go to the White House or something on the holidays and listen to him make rambling nonsense speeches about himself.

WRONG.

He is entirely penis.

Smollette was equally condemned and ridiculed by the left as well as the right, but FOX performed a giant song-and-dance number to portray the case as something the left was supporting.

But none of this is surprising. This story about Natalie Greene will never make more than subnote in the FOX chiron that scrolls past, ensuring none of the nearsighted, elderly bags of fear and hate who keep the network blasting night day won’t even notice or hear about it.

Our world has left behind any desire for truth and everyone, everywhere, this site included, just want to live in narratives and stories that make them feel something.

The fact that I can’t load the replies you got tells me that the evil chuds I’ve already blocked previously are out in force on this post. Some people delight in the idea of yanking help from people who aren’t white, male gamers. Whatever they’re saying, block 'em and don’t get discouraged. Lemmy is just as bad as some of the worst reddit communities the way literal children try to get attention with poorly-educated hot takes.

Yah you’re right, USAID’s exertion of soft power is bullying just like drone strikes and ground invasions. Jesus christ you’re one of them. I sometimes wish there was a divine judge out there. Don’t bother replying, I will get too mad at another inhuman, selfish, mindless drone scraping for excuses to not care about others.

Yes and those values are bad.

I have been across the internet yelling at dumb liberal dipshits about this (conservatives too, but their response is about what you would expect, I figured though at least liberals would have an idea how serious this is.) and it still largely goes unappreciated how much harm this has done and will do, and it is not being reported and probably never will be, because it’s perceived as largely impacting people with darker skin living in less developed areas.

The death tolls will radically increase in the coming years. Even if we restored USaid to full funding tomorrow, the interruption will continue to ripple for years and years.

The blood on the hands of the people who cut this program is going to be at biblical levels and they hold a hatred that cannot be overstated. This is a sheer malevolence that should lead to trials at the Hague followed by public crucifiction.

On the larger sites I always get pushback on this, saying that “We have to let countries learn to manage themselves.” And “That money should stay in this country.” and the like. If your feelings resonate with those statements, you aren’t just morally decaying, you don’t understand the strategic power of these kinds of programs and probably learned everything you want to know about geopolitics from Hearts of Iron games, and you certainly need to better understand the numbers involved. But you won’t even look it up will you. Putting “What does USAID do” into your search bar gets a little too close to caring, and maybe feeling some of that blood on your hands as well, doesn’t it?

edit: The few replies or messages I’ve gotten here tell me that indeed, empathy, kindness and any kind of human connection to others have been algorithm’d out of a lot of you fucks.

That’s not something you can just undo or walk away from.

I don’t disagree with any of what you said, I am saying that they will absolutely try to walk away from it, from the ignorant base to the cowardly, evil grifters, pundits and politicians. And largely, it will work. Because American attention spans are shot from being overworked, overstimulated and under-nurished. This country elected Trump twice after some of the highest voter turnouts in history despite his first term being some of the lowest approval ratings of all presidents. That’s not a sign of a healthy population.

There is a systemic problem in American society, and while a lot of it is manufactured and deliberately imposed on us, we can all do a lot more to combat it. It requires a lot more involvement and a lot more effort to remind people of atrocities and problems of the past that we’re risking repeating over and over.

And I don’t mean online either. We have to get a lot more active in the physical world. Talk to people, volunteer, do phone-banking for actual leaders in your community who represent you. We’re all stuck on social media sites like this one, screaming into the void and thinking something will change or someone is coming.

Nobody is coming.

I’ve kind of realized after my diagnosis and journey into understanding and reframing my whole life, that for people who are on the spectrum, in a lot of cases it’s almost entirely a syndrome of “thinking too much.”

This is a curse when you’re in a social situation and need to be spontaneous and witty and relatable, but it can also mean you have a very strong internal language system for working out situations and seeing things from many angles.

This isn’t to say that autistic people can’t get stuck in wrong modes of thought, or that neurotypical people don’t also have the capability to work things out in their mind, but it is going to have an effect on your politics and how you view the larger world.

I’ve read that autistic people generally have a very strong sense of “justice” in this regard, and this is why it can feel far more painful to see injustice happening, because the power of overthinking lets you experience it from all different angles or imagine being the person experiencing injustice. It’s like brute-forcing empathy.

More rats sensing the ship is about to sink and scurrying off as fast as they can.

In a few years time, depending on what happens in the next year, you might think that the entire MAGA movement was a hallucination, as it will be next to impossible to find a single person who ever defended it, you won’t see anyone who admits to ever having a bumper sticker or flag on their lawn, they will have all up and disappeared like a fart in the wind.