Leaving The Office

Leave peacefully?

1. Yeah, he'll leave peacefully no matter what. I do not believe fascism can take root to that extent in America.
0
No votes
2. He'll probably leave peacefully as long as a Republican wins 2024, but if a Democrat wins, I'm not sure.
0
No votes
3. He'll probably leave peacefully as long as a Republican wins 2024, but if a Democrat wins, he won't.
1
5%
4. He won't leave peacefully if he wins 2020, even if a Republican wins 2024.
0
No votes
5. He won't leave peacefully if he loses 2020. He'll claim illegal votes or some other thing.
6
29%
6. He'll declare himself President for Life if he wins 2020 and preclude any further elections period.
2
10%
7. I have no clue. Anything could happen.
6
29%
8. I feel uncomfortable clicking 1 because it makes me seem naive but have a hard time imagining Trump actually refusing to leave office, so I guess I pick some weird "1.5" middle ground
6
29%
 
Total votes: 21
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Thad
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby Thad » Sun Jun 30, 2019 12:35 pm

Brentai wrote:I mean, he's more important than me, sure. But not as much as, say, Kim Kardashian. Sorry, Donny.

All joking and cheap shots aside, she's used her celebrity to advocate for criminal justice reform, and I admire the hell out of that. If she wants to start a career in politics once she finishes law school, well, we could do a lot worse, and often do.

(To be clear, I'm not saying "go straight to running for President"; that's vanity shit. But start small and pay her dues like anyone else -- run for mayor, or state legislature or something, if she wanted to.)

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IGNORE ME
Woah Dangsaurus
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby IGNORE ME » Sun Jun 30, 2019 7:12 pm

No no no, no, no. That was entirely serious. You see the problem?

Lady
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby Lady » Sun Jun 30, 2019 7:54 pm

I'm like a 5.5, but the upside is that his party can only prop up his desiccated corpse for so long until it disintegrates.

tbh I think that now he's normalized evangelical insanity in politics, they have no real use for him once his mind truly wanders, so someone will just tell him about how nasty it is in DC and wouldn't you prefer to be in NYC where all the real action happens?

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beatbandito
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby beatbandito » Sun Jun 30, 2019 8:33 pm

There's already things like the Oregon Republican Senators all just not showing up to avoid a vote. Including telling the cops that would have to bring them back “Send bachelors and come heavily armed. I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon. It’s just that simple.” The crazies want a reason to go off, and some already do, and I think we'll see more of that coming up and some of it will likely be tied to Trump but I don't think anything that happens is really going to be a 'Trump Thing'.
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Thad
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby Thad » Sun Jun 30, 2019 9:07 pm

Brentai wrote:No no no, no, no. That was entirely serious. You see the problem?

I'm just saying if you're using Kim Kardashian as shorthand for somebody who's famous but not particularly useful, I don't think she's the best example of that anymore.

(Her husband, maybe.)

Lady wrote:tbh I think that now he's normalized evangelical insanity in politics, they have no real use for him once his mind truly wanders, so someone will just tell him about how nasty it is in DC and wouldn't you prefer to be in NYC where all the real action happens?


Nixon normalized evangelical insanity. Reagan cemented it. W was their guy, moreso than Trump is (if perhaps not quite as much so as Pence is). Even McCain had to backpedal and kiss Pat Robertson's ring in 2008 after dismissing him in 2000.

White evangelical Protestantism* has had a symbiotic relationship with the Republican Party for fifty years. That's not Trump's doing. But what's unique about him, what's different this time, is that he's laid bare the uttery hypocrisy of that ideology in a way that I think -- hope -- will do devastating long-term damage to it.

White evangelical Protestants already had a problem with diminishing appeal to young people before Trump -- it turns out that being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and anti-science is not the sales pitch it once was.

And it certainly seems to me that embracing Trump makes it very, very clear that they don't give a fuck about those morals they're so goddamn sanctimonious about. Any reasonable person, and a significant number of unreasonable people, can look at Trump and see that he is an immoral man. Even by the professed standards of white evangelical Protestantism.

That, I think, is the fundamental difference between Trump and W, Reagan, and Nixon, in terms of evangelical support. You could at least respect evangelic support for W, Reagan, or Nixon as consistent; you might disagree, but supporting those guys was consistent with the morality that evangelicals espouse. Their support for Trump is as clear an indication as I've ever seen that the symbiosis between white evangelical Protestantism and the Republican Party is football at this point, it has fuck-all to do with any of that shit they say about right and wrong.

I like to think that, in the long term, that's going to be fucking devastating to already-troubled recruitment efforts. They were already losing young people; now I think those numbers are going to get a lot worse.

But I've been wrong about a lot of shit. Maybe I'm completely off-base. Lord knows I've been far too optimistic before, and maybe saying that Trump could be the last straw for the next generation of white evangelicals is just wishful thinking.

And of course as TA pointed out, even if he is, gerrymandering and voter suppression could mean it doesn't matter. We've already got a government by the minority. 2018 was a positive sign that maybe it's not permanently entrenched, but the Republicans have seen the writing on the wall and they've made their choice: instead of trying to expand their appeal to more voters, they're trying to restrict voting power to people who already support them.

* Evangelicals in, say, the black Protestant community and Latino Catholic community are doing just fine, but they ain't so Republican.

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Friday
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Re: Leaving The Office

Postby Friday » Mon Jul 01, 2019 12:53 am

I agree entirely with Thad's previous post about liberal young people and minority rule; it creates a situation where the Republican Party is both at its most powerful (well, maybe not most ever, but they're certainly up in power) and most desperate.

This is not a good thing.

In fact, this is a really, really bad thing.

They know they're losing members. They know the future is liberal. So using the power that they have with the desperation of a trapped animal seeing the end coming, they are not holding back.
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