2025 Political Thread

[Mike S]

Any predictions on how large the swing to blue in Congress will be in ~1.5 years?

I ripped this from Wiki. It is a map for the Senate seats up for election in 2026. The darker reds and blues are Senators retiring, the lighter shades means the incumbent's term is up for reelection. Republicans hold a 53-45 advantage, with 2 independents. If the Democrats can pick up 4 seats, which isn't unlikely, they can control the Senate. I think the House will be a bloodbath for the Republicans.

 

[Mike S]

Trump certainly is not a Reagan conservative.

Trump Is a Socialist

The president thinks the U.S. is one big Macy’s—with him in charge.

thedispatch.com

Donald Trump is a socialist.
When I write “socialist,” I do not use the word the way most right-leaning commentators use it, meaning: “bad.” If you want to get a feel for exactly how insipid and repetitious the contemporary online right is, do a search for “cackling socialist”—you don’t even need to include “Kamala Harris.” You’ll be hip-deep in stupid in two clicks.

Donald Trump’s vision of the economy is classic socialism. And if you want to say that what it really is is classic nationalism, fair enough: As Jonah Goldberg observes, at the level of practical economics nationalism and socialism are the same thing: nationalized industries are socialized industries, socialized industries are nationalized industries, nationalized medicine is socialized medicine, etc. Bernie Sanders thinks and speaks as a nationalist, as do left-wing writers at places such as Dissent magazine—see J.W. Mason’s “A Cautious Case for Economic Nationalism.” Barack Obama’s economic views were explicitly nationalist. Trump’s view of a man at a desk moving pieces of the economy around like rooks and pawns on a chessboard is what socialism is all about—though the old tyrants in Moscow at least had the humility to assume that a committee of experts would be necessary to manage the economy according to “scientific” principles or at least the guile to pretend that they believed it, whereas Trump apparently has swallowed his own silly god-man horsepucky, being, as he is, an money maker of exceptional asininity.

Trump, to my knowledge, doesn’t cackle. But he is economically more in Lenin’s camp than in Adam Smith’s and Milton Friedman’s and Ronald Reagan’s. He already imagines himself as a kind of royal figure—any guess who the serfs are going to be when we get to the end of this road?

 

[UpperLevelLOL]

Trump certainly is not a Reagan conservative.

Trump Is a Socialist

The president thinks the U.S. is one big Macy’s—with him in charge.

thedispatch.com

That is a painfully bad understanding of socialism, woof. Classic socialism is state intervention through control of corporations and heavy state investment/subsidies, not slashing budgets and shrinking the government. The author of that article needs to re-read Lenin, Marx, and other socialists if he's going to make that comparison. Trump's slashing of government expenditure and targeting the social safety net is in alignment with Reagan's whole domestic spending platform. This is just a hamhanded attempt to try to absolve modern conservatism for electing Trump.

 

[bjdeming]

Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who accompanied socialist Bernie Sanders on what was probably his farewell tour recently, talked the usual stuff about "taking the message to the people" -- even in these times, when ordinary folks are frustrated and want to be heard.

A blast from the past (so long ago that it sounds new today):

...While Chesterton demonstrates how Socialism utterly fails to fulfill any of its promises because it does not trust the common man to make his own decisions, he also points out that capitalism’s primary failure is that it has accomplished everything that socialism threatened to do...

...This system rests on two ideas: that the rich will always be rich enough to hire the poor; and the poor will always be poor enough to want to be hired by the rich...

-- Source

-- and one of the online versions of the book they 're talking about.

"Poor" these days seems different from a hundred years ago but could be defined in the Trump 2.0 era (and perhaps ever since Yuppies became a thing in Reagan times) as "anyone who isn't rich enough to be matter to us cool people."

 

[ghost]

The Magas are giddy over the biggest nothingburger of policy with the GOM --> GOA. The rest of the world will still call it the GOM and in 5 yrs when Maga is hopefully in our country's rear view mirror, we'll be calling it the GOM too... heck I still am

 

[Evan]

This is an unprecedented level of corruption:

 

[notsoencrypted]

This is an unprecedented level of corruption:

And an excellent example of foreign emoluments, one of the very specific things called out in the constitution.

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

 

[ghost]

This is an unprecedented level of corruption:

Trump company strikes Qatari golf resort deal in a sign it's not holding back from foreign business

The Trump family company has struck a deal for a luxury golf resort in Qatar. It's a sign that the company has no plans to hold back from foreign dealmaking during a second Trump administration.

apnews.com

Scratch my back then I’ll scratch yours

$5.5 Billion . .

 

[bjdeming]

I still think it's going to be the cryptocurrency that eventually gets him impeached (barring other new revelations, say, as just one possibility, collusion with Bukele over the deportation flight, or an unspinnable/undeniable stupid move as he ages over the next 1,000+ days), but this is a biggy.

 

[bjdeming]

Something weird happened at the Copyright Office today.

 

[bjdeming]

...Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have also previously announced they will scale back efforts to prosecute certain kinds of white-collar offenses, including public corruption, foreign bribery, kleptocracy and foreign influence...

-- Source

Is America great yet? Because it doesn't feel great right now, except maybe it might to any members of the Grant (not the man himself), Harding, and a few other dirty administrations who might have had a time-travel accident and suddenly found themselves in 2025.

They, in fact, would be green with envy and would never ever want to go back home -- provided they could come up with the initial scratch to get close to the trough.

But then, would they be able to get through the crowd that's probably been delighted to discover the US has finally decided to come down to their "business as usual" level instead of delivering one of those old-fashioned anti-corruption lectures and trying to bring them up to our level of fairness, transparency, and the rule of law?




If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.



What else of America is for sale, and where does all that money go?

 

[bjdeming]

Just to be fair, the Democrats -- with whom Donald Trump schmoozed for quite a while and probably would again if not for the whole divide-and-conquer thing aimed at keeping them from being held to account -- have done this sort of thing, too, recently.

Yes, it's ugly all around. Yes, there's our hesitance to deal with such sludge. And definitely there is a lot of hay that various political enemies make of it from time to time until they get into power and do similar things.

But the important thing is that it is wrong.

It is a betrayal of public trust.

And such is life that we get more and more of whatever we put up with.

Such is human nature that the ugly bits of human nature get stronger and stronger when they are not called by their true names, which are not "Democrat," "Republican," "conservative," "liberal," "MAGA," "right wing nut," "left wing nut," etc.

My own favorite hate-handle is "Yuppie" because I've watched that segment of the Boomers come out of their draft-dodge havens as soon as the Viet Nam War ended, just dropping poor people and whoever else was dependent on the aid of those havens and going for money, power, and conspicuous consumption to the point where Midas might suggest a dial-back (though everyone would laugh at him because of his jackass ears).

Both the Clinton tag-team and Trump are Yuppies.

But it's best to call things by their true names, when they need fixing: these include (and are not limited to the Yuppies) greed, selfishness, pride, ill will in its many forms, self-righteousness at hating (___), and so forth.

BTW, I just looked into myself for that list, not outward at all.

We all are infected with these old diseases of human nature, and that's going to affect politics at every level.

Fortunately, so will their antidote, when it comes: morality, wholesomeness, courage, hope, and so forth -- there is a very good reason why the roughly four-decade-old Decadence crowd laughs at such things and mocks them, pronouncing them long dead.

It's a very human reaction to something they fear and hate so much.

But why fear good things? Why not call problems by their old tried-and-true names, be done with them, and move on towards good things?

To quote King Donald, it would be stupid not to.

Personally, I look forward very much to the next national Revival, which was already underway on campuses at last report.

 

[bjdeming]

Senator Schumer reportedly asks some very good questions about the Qatar jet business and is going to play hardball until they're answered.

He won't back down on this, after the criticism he got for going ahead with the government refunding bill.

 

[bjdeming]

In his eagerness to accept a plane from Qatar, Donald Trump has achieved a remarkable feat, uniting many partisans across America's bitter political divide.

The problem for the White House is that unity is happening in opposition to it.

Predictably, Trump's opponents in the Democratic Party slammed the president after he indicated he would accept a luxury jet from the Qatari royal family.

More noteworthy – and potentially more troubling for the president – is that some of his strongest supporters also have serious reservations about the deal, even as it's not yet finalised.

Maga influencers have described the move as a "bribe", grift, or an example of the high-level corruption that Trump himself has consistently promised root out...

-- Source

 

[ghost]

Former President Joe Biden had advanced stage 4 prostate cancer. Praying that he will get better… but how could they have missed this with his yearly physical? Or did they?

 

[Mike S]

Former President Joe Biden had advanced stage 4 prostate cancer. Praying that he will get better… but how could they have missed this with his yearly physical? Or did they?

I highly doubt they just discovered this.

Just because Trump is a moron and scum doesn't mean we should forget how evil and conniving the modern Democratic Party is.

 

[UpperLevelLOL]

Whataboutism and false equivalencies are really poor arguments.

Also, this piece from someone who actually know what they're talking about puts to rest any sort of conspiracy theory here about the timing: https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/19...hysician-reporter-presidential-health-expert/

 

[bjdeming]

A Reuters columnist weighs in:

In all these cases, Trump seems to have overestimated his hand and underestimated the cards held by his opponents. Others may draw the lesson that he does not have the stomach for long fights. The president is also facing more resistance at home...Meanwhile, Musk’s chainsaw approach to government and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s handling of a measles outbreak are unpopular. Although Trump’s overall popularity ratings have recently risen after an initial drop, Republicans will need public support to keep control of Congress after next year’s midterm elections. Without that, the president’s power will further erode.

I still say this is not the same Donald Trump that has been in the news most of my life, or even from 2016 through at least 2019.

Anyway, that op-ed is from the outside looking in, and from the UK, which doesn't have a written constitution and so can't get context for the basis of power in US self-government, and just how repulsive the executive-branch power grab since January really is.

To this US citizen, given recent trends ("Eat the tariffs, Wal-Mart!", MAGA criticism of the Qatar jet deal, loss of pristine national credit rating, investor concerns, etc.), it looks as though a lot of TOP faithful who are up for reelection could lose big-time as a result of their wagons being attached to this 78-year-old star.

Can Vance save them?

 

[Evan]

Whataboutism and false equivalencies are really poor arguments.

Also, this piece from someone who actually know what they're talking about puts to rest any sort of conspiracy theory here about the timing: https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/19...hysician-reporter-presidential-health-expert/

There are extremely good reasons to doubt the transparency involved with this diagnosis. All we have to do is look at what transpired in the last 18 months of Biden's presidency. Multiple WH staff and Democratic officials LIED about Biden's faculties. This is not is dispute. It happened.

That being said, there's no clear cut evidence that the diagnosis was delayed or hidden. I am dealing with a situation with a family member right now that is somewhat similar. Showed a lot of physical decline before, suddenly, being diagnosed with a pretty obvious cancer. It happens.

I understand why very few people want to give Biden and his handlers the benefit of the doubt. They certainly haven't earned that level of trust. If anything, they actively misled the public previously about his health.

Nonetheless, I'm a "show me the proof" kind of person. Thus far, there's not any demonstrable evidence that the cancer diagnosis was hidden.

 

[Evan]

Speaking of scumbags, Marco Rubio remains the greatest political disappointment of my life. What a sniveling spineless coward.

Fairly ironic that at this point in my life two of the only Presidential votes I don't regret are George W. in 2004 (an incredibly underrated President and a wholly decent man) and Mitt Romney in 2012 (this country would've been so lucky to have such a kind, intelligent, and decent man ascend to the Presidency).