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You don't say. That kind of seemed obvious from the very fucking start. Trump is absurdly incompetent or he is actively working to destroy the country. I honestly can't tell which it is.
Why not both?
I contend that actively trying to destroy the country without a good reason or an exit plan counts as incompetent.
Especially when he's tearing down the very systems that allowed his loser ass to fail upwards to begin with.
His memecoin alone will make him billions off of the presidency.
Regardless of whether anyone thinks he's intelligent or competent, I think most would agree that he is a conman. I've honestly never seen 70+ million people fall for a con so easily. It speaks volumes to America's education and media landscape.
Seriously, out of all the corrupt things he’s done, publicly setting up a way to launder bribes …
As soon as you think you're too smart to get conned, you're gonna get conned. I'm positive that nearly all of hist voters think they are too smart to get conned.
But yeah, his are so simplistic and easily spotted, I can't believe people fall for them either. A non-zero amount of people bought and presumably ate Trump Steaks. It's like the steaks from a freezer in a pickup truck; I haven't even seen any of those guys for years now.
I feel like at least some of them would have or should have had a better memory than a goldfish and recall when he fleeced them all for money to "finish the wall" near the end of his first disaster term (don't you love how he no longer mentions the wall anymore?) and realize they got scammed because there's still no border wall but Trump took in like 100M+ and blew it all on legal counsel.
He's old and has become rich from all this. You think he doesn't have an exit (planned or not)? He either dies soon and he won't have lost much or he lives a while linger as a rich man (assuming he doesn't end up in prison, which I doubt at this point).
Ladder pulling is a feature to those people.
Trump may be incompetent but the architects of project 2025 are, unfortunately, not. Trump is merely their most useful idiot.
Oh, they’re incompetent, too. They are just very effective at installing their incompetence into the government.
The Heritage Foundation is not new; their last big project was Ronald Reagan, and they were very successful in destroying the economy in the long run. That also started us down this path that got us to Trump to begin with.
Trump would never have happened if there wasn't mass amounts of economic hardship.
I think "evil" is a better word to describe them.
Trump may have never happened if the fucking dnc supported bernie in 2016..
Or if Florida didn't rig the 2000 election for Bush, or if the Supreme Court never ruled that money = speech and corporations = people, or if Nixon didn't snuff out the hippie movement with the War on Drugs, or if the FBI never killed MLK Jr. for him being a socialist, or if Ronald Reagan and Joe McCarthy were unsuccessful in their Red Scare movement in the 1950s, or if FDR didn't compromise with capitalists and went full socialist instead.
There are lots of things to point to.
I really think it’s just not a plan, but a bunch of individual wishlists. It’s not that evil is incompetent but it’s a bunch of people each pursuing their own agenda, each using the orange fool to get what they want. The part where we may get lucky is each is too egotistical to work together, and Trump is to weak a leader to make them all head in the same directions.
It’s not a bunch of incompetent fools, is a herd of evil cats
Sorry, I had to.
He's working very hard to meet his campaign promises. They were too grandeur. The government needs a massive increase in revenue to be able to meet the promises he's made. If you sit down and think about it, this is the easiest way for the federal government to increase revenue without directly increasing taxes. Then he does wild deportations to distract everyone from what he's doing.
All to keep the top 1%'s share of total adjusted gross income to share of total income paid at 26.3% and 45.8%. Crazy to me that the top 1% of earners cry so hard about contributing a proportional amount in taxes.
Except that when tariffs are this high, they discourage imports and purchasing. It's self-defeating.
Still a revenue higher than zero. It's absurd and idiotic, I know. But it still is.
I honestly can't think of promises that would require more money.
And the simplest way to do it is to just spend the money. The government isn't required to have money in order to spend it.
The richest make more money when they sell more and the stock market does better. The tariffs hurt them more than a tax increase would because they can't dodge revenue loss and market devaluation.
He's not running a grand plan. He's not a mastermind. He's doing exactly what he said he would. He had to get back into power to avoid consequences. He did so by putting all the awful people with irrational agendas into positions of power so they would support him. He doesn't give a shit about the 1% unless they're helping him, and he doesn't give a shit about the 99% unless they're voting for people who can help him.
All the "distractions" are him letting the people who got him into power do what they want, because it doesn't hurt him and he doesn't care.
The deportations aren't a distraction, they're the point for the racists who directly helped him.
It's not about who in society it helps, rich or not. It's about who in his cabinet it helps. Everyone else can go fuck themselves.
There are quite literally dozens. Bringing manufacturing back to the US, eliminating income tax, eliminating tax on overtime/per diem, cut "energy prices" in half in 12 months (max of 18 months), end the Russia/Ukraine war, make in vitro fert free, end birthright citizenship, cut corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, eliminate tax on social security, car loan interest tax deductible... The list goes on. All of this will cost quite literally trillions of dollars and none of that has anything even tangentially related to his trillion dollar plan for mass deportations.
We're looking at the largest increase in federal spending in the history of the United States here. More than any war ever. You have to pay for it somehow.
Only one of those is actually something that would cost money. The rest either don't cost money (how does ending birthright citizenship require revenue increases?), or they're plans to reduce revenue.
One doesn't typically count a plan for reducing revenue as the reason for increasing revenue.
Again, the government doesn't need to match spending with revenue. When you control the money supply you can just spend what you need. There's an impact to doing so to much, but that probably won't come to a head for a few years.
It's not a grand scheme. It's surface level opportunism.
Governments can spend at a deficit, but there’s a limit to how much debt they can accumulate. Other countries have found that out. US was in a special position in the economy as the largest economy, a strong position in international trade and a lot of dollar investment or dollar based trading. We could get away it’s more, but at some point it still hits a limit and falls apart.
We’re already at a point where debt payments are one of the biggest pieces of the federal budget, blocking out better uses for that money. We keep stealing from the future and eventually we’ll get there to find everything gone.
And that’s before you have an incompetent leader destroying all that dollar influence, everything that made that special economic situation possible. We’re fucking around with that special economic position and will come out of this subject to the same deficit limits as any other country. Well find out our accumulated debt is beyond prudence for a “normal” economy and we’re no longer special enough to ignore that
We were in a counterintuitive position where spending more money for things like infrastructure and chips act was ok because of our special economic situation plus it’s an investment in the future that should have paid off. Whereas the orange fools approach to spending less money just risks our special economic situation that lets us get away with fucking around, plus points to a future of despair: it turns into losing more money in the future
Yup, that was the "can't do it too much" part. :)
Any of it would be relevant if I thought trump or the Republican party cared about those consequences.
The worse part of it is
That’s the potential economic catastrophe. So far we haven’t had to face many consequences of excessive debt accumulation, but if those idiots succeed in destroying the special circumstances that let us get away with more fiscal recklessness than other countries, that reckoning could happen very suddenly.
It’s a similar feel to climate tipping points. It’s unique enough situation that we really don’t have a good way to predict the likelihood, the timing, the severity, but we’re not just playing with fire, we’re running around holding a tank of burning napalm over our heads claiming: no big deal, no one’s been burnt yet