Lol what a strange stretch. I’m not Christian, I’m an atheist socialist annoyed at how the US government has historically worked to overthrow socialism everywhere in the world.

NYPD has offices all around the globe. Because… 9/11 or something.

Socialism has failed every time it’s been attempted, for one very good reason.

I fully expect the CIA to get involved. Probably before the general election even happens.

I don’t want to accuse Trump or his administration of having rational or intelligent decision-making processes, but it’s hard to really have any productive thought or conversation about theit decisions if I just assume they are irrational or stupid. So bear with me as I try to make sense of something that might be senseless.

There have been a handful of odd discrepancies from the Trump administration piling up. Mueller, for all his flaws, did prove that a good chunk of Trump’s campaign in 2016 had illegal ties to Russia and Putin. Even though Trump avoided direct consequences and pardoned some of them, they were still convicted and the ties to Putin are solid. Heck, there were ties between Trump and Russia going back to the 80’s.

Musk also has ties to Russia and Putin. So it was not all that surprising to see Musk throw his full support behind Trump last summer and then do the whole DOGE thing. It was a bit odd to see someone so thoroughly tied to electric cars support someone so pro-fossil fuels, but I could see Musk deciding that defense contracts for SpaceX, Starlink, and other businesses might outweigh reduced EV subsidies for him.

Allegedly, Trump and Musk had a falling out. The back-and-forth on social media, Musk stepping back from DOGE, and later walking back some of his statements. Speculation as to whether that was real or not. Was it really over the spending bill? Was Musk really leaving DOGE? Was this all a ploy to manipulate the stock market and do some insider trading? Was this just Musk on drug-induced psychosis?

Then the tensions between Israel and Iran flare up again. Trump sides with Israel as the US traditionally has, Putin sides with Iran as Russia traditionally has. There was the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Ted Cruz, and we’ve seen some discord among the far-right over whether to support a US war against Iran or not. The US struck Iran and didn’t appear to do a whole lot of damage, and Iran struck back in the most polite way possible and did pretty much no damage.

Other wonderful folks have dug up old Trump tweets from the Obama years, speculating that Obama was appearing weak and would strike Iran as a show of strength.

So was this all just political theater? Trump doesn’t actually care whether Iran has nukes or not. He wants Trump to appear strong and willing to go to war. He wants to show his support for Israel and reaffirm America as the World Police.

So my guess is that Netanyahu keeps pushing what he can get away with. Allegedly, there was tension between Netenyahu and Biden over the line between counter-terrorist operations and genocide. Biden, the consummate centrist neoliberal, allowed the genocide as long as it didn’t hurt businesses, but seemed to have been pressuring Netenyahu to keep restrictions on it. Trump abandoned those and Palestine seems to be suffering far more since he took office. Then you add the Israeli strikes on Iran on top of that- I don’t think they had anything to do with new intelligence Israel received, just that Netenyahu felt he could get away with it while still maintaining US support from Trump, which he could not have done under Biden.

Where I start to really speculate- I don’t think Trump cares about Iran. He doesn’t care about of they have nukes or not, he doesn’t care about Islam vs Judaism vs Christianity. He care about the media narratives, especially in the US. Same thing with the tarrifs- it was more about appearing powerful to his base than actually being powerful.

I never said EVERYTHING is real. In fact, I would agree that the vast majority of the internet is not. I just think TV news sources don’t have any reality left at all.

With how bad TV news has gotten this might be a good thing.

Social media allows for all sorts of disinformation and misinformation, yes. But there’s also real people talking about real experiences. Primary sources spreading their eyes and ears across the world.

TV news is owned by billionaires like Murdoch and Bezos and are basically just propaganda outlets for them. And while I’m sure Zuckerberg and Elon are influencing their social media platforms just as much, at least on the internet there are places like Lemmy where the truth at least has a chance to exist.

Kinda sad how fascists seem to be so much better at taking down fascists than anti-fascists are.

I would normally agree with the general sentiment that the POTUS gets both too much value and too much credit for the economy, and that particularly early in a term we are usually still seeing the results of older policy.

Except that in Trump’s case he has spent the first 100 days in office implementing policies with nearly universal agreement that there will be an immediate negative impact. Drastic, nonsensical EO’s like mandating commerical truck drivers speak English. The tarrif nonsense. Threatening global war with the talk of annexing Greenland, Canada, and Mexico. Etc.

You should looked up how Congress works. They need a Supermajority to pass most legislation, and the Dems only had that for about 4 months from 2009-2010. The last time they had that control was under Kennedy/Johnson in the 60’s.

Even without those DINOs they still didn’t have a Supermajority. Honestly I think most people just don’t understand the difference between a majority and Supermajority and mistakenly believe 50 is enough in the Senate.

Then why didn’t Republicans vote for it?

And not just votes. Republican Attorneys General across the country tried to get it overturned in the courts. The House and Senate Minority Leaders have quotes strongly against it. Romney himself did not hold any office at the time the ACA was passed, but was preparing for his next presidential campaign. He described it as “an unconscionable abuse of power…the act should be repealed”.

If you look more closely at the Massachusetts state government in 2006 when Romney was governor and passed “Romneycare”, you’ll find that the state Senate was dominated by Democrats 34-6, while the state House was dominated by Democrats 139-20-1. There’s a much, much stronger case that Romneycare in Massachusetts was a Democratic piece of legislation than there is that the ACA was Republican.

The Republicans had plenty of control of the federal government before Obama, and their plan of "leaving Americans with nothing* was already in place. That’s what the Republicans voted for in 2010 by voting against the ACA.

Who said anything about dual majorities?

What times are these?

As I said, they have only had control for 4 months in my lifetime. Before that you need to go back to 1961-1969 with Kennedy and Johnson. I would actually need to do more research to find out whether they had a Supermajority or not, but it’s not even worth looking up because going that far back in time shifts the politics of the parties significantly and is not very relevant to today. The Democratic Party still has plenty of Southern Conservatives all the way into the Carter years.

So I would love to know what pattern you are seeing.

Romney was indeed a Republican, but a moderate one. The Church of Latter Day Saints has always been a weird outlier in American politics, and as a Mormon Romney largely follows that tradition. Utah itself is a great reminder that the trends Americans see with the two-party system, where every issue is a binary choice with the GOP or DNC each picking an option, the reality on the ground is more complicated.

It’s also worth looking to how Romney was the first senator in US history to vote to impeach his own party’s president. He did it again the 2nd time Trump was impeached too, along with a handful of others.

That’s not to say that I like Romney at all, or even that I like the ACA or even that I like the Democrats.But Romney is perhaps the furthest left Republican and created that initial bill with the intention of being a bipartisan compromise. He’s far closer to Neoliberal than Nazi. And while it was the foundation, his bill was NOT the final bill that passed into law. The bill that did pass saw 100% of Republican senators vote against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with 1 meaningless Republican vote. To say it was a Republican bill is simply historically inaccurate.

My apologies if a crosses a line with the comment, but calling the ACA Republican is demonstrably and factually false and, in my opinion, actively spreading disinformation.

The bill passed the Senate 60-39, with 1 abstaining. All 39 Republicans Senators voted against it. It passed 220-215 in the House with only 1 Republican vote.

If you want to say it wasn’t enough, that’s completely fair and I would agree. If you want to say the Democratic Party, both back then and today, is dominated by Neoliberal interests and suppresses Progressives or Socialists or whoever else then I would also agree. But none of that was the conversation- the bill that passed was demonstrably not Republican.

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They had control of the Presidency and the House of Representatives. I never said they didn’t have that- I said they didn’t have control of the Federal Government.

The Senate was tenuous. Just having 50 Dem Senators (well, that’s not true either because you need to include Independents to get to 50) isn’t good enough- you need 60 votes to have a filibuster-ptoof majority. The Dems just barely scraped that together in 2009, complicated in part by Ted Kennedy’s seizure and eventual death and Al Franken delayed in getting seated due to recounts. They only had 60 votes (still including Independents) from September 24th 2009 - February 4th, 2010. 4 months of controlling the federal government.

That is why when the 2008 financial crisis happened and the Dems wanted to pas a stimulus package in 2009, they had to get Snowe, Collins, and Spectre (who would leater switch parties to get them to 60) from the Republican side in order to get that passed.

They absolutely did not have control of the Supreme Court at any point in the Biden administration and the Republican SCOTUS shut down a lot of what the Biden administration tried to do. I remember checking every day for months to see how they would rule on Student Loan forgiveness, for example.

This is why they have the perception of being powerless- because they’ve pretty much never had the power. The Republicans love people who say the Democrats are useless. They love saying Biden didn’t do what he promised when he DID and the GOP-dominated Supreme Court reversed it. They love being able to stall Democrat legislation and blaming a Democrat president. Everything the Dems have done outside of those 4 months have required careful compromises and negotiation with the GOP to pass.

I agree about “fuck em”, let’s get out with the old and in with the new.

But what majorities are you talking about? I keep seeing this repeated all over the internet- the sentiment that Democrats get nothing done when they have control. The problem is that I’m 33 years old and the Dems have only had control of the federal government for a few months of my life, and that’s when they passed the ACA. I can’t really make a judgement on what the Dems do when they’re in power because they largely have not been.

And it seems to have worked out for him pretty well. He lives an incredibly lavish lifestyle, won the presidency twice, has a huge collection of devoted followers, and generally seems to have avoided any negative consequences.

Between Trump and the people around him, SOMEONE know what they are doing.

The regular people seem to be using the word “oligarch” pretty often nowadays. Maybe he needs to actually talk to some regular people?