Comment on Would America be as divided if Trump lost to Hillary in 2016?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
I read a lot more about US politics in 2016 than I do now (sorry, now that Trump has been president once, I know what it’s like when that happens and don’t worry that much about it anymore). I can tell you that back then it already seemed very divided from my (non-US) point of view.
theparadox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That sounds disturbingly like you aren’t all that concerned about what a second Trump presidency would be like. It sounds like you don’t think the first one wasn’t as bad as people thought it would be and the second one will similarly be better than people think. Am I misreading your words?
STUPIDVIPGUY@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’re not worried because they don’t live in the US.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
This isn’t too far off. In 2016 many people I read thought a Trump presidency would literally be the end of US democracy, possibly the end of the world because he would start a nuclear war. Those are not things that ended up happening, so I do not predict that they will happen if Trump wins this year either.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 2 months ago
And it almost was. Remember, he lost an election and tried to send fake electors in to declare him president. When that didn’t work, he worked up his cultists into attacking the capitol in order to threaten pence into not certifying the election. It was so dangerously close to a constitutional crisis that Republicans and Democrats banded together to say that the VP does not have this power.
Also trump nominated three members of scotus, and it was that majority that just opened the door for the president to commit all kinds of crime with immunity.
The pain of his last presence is still playing out, and it doesn’t look good.
I’m more concerned that if he wins again, he’ll complete gut the government and even if he does step aside when his term is up, the damage will be done and we will have no ability to tackle some of the biggest issues facing us: namely climate change.
theparadox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I see. So what has happened over the last 8 years as a direct result of his election isn’t concerning to you?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
There could have been better worlds, probably would have been if Clinton had won in 2016, but it isn’t anywhere near as catastrophic as some people predicted.
TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 2 months ago
There’s a reason why Trump 2016, though it caused a lot of damage, wasn’t nearly as bad as it was thought to be.
Trump was probably the laziest president in US history. He had no clue what to do at the start of the presidency, and many of his requests were met with resistance by employees in the executive branch because they were stupid or illegal. This is because the executive branch has a small chunk of president-appointed positions relative to the merit-based chunk.
Many of his successes came about later in his term, as he got plenty of help from well-funded right-wing organizations to find people to appoint to various positions, including the 3 Supreme Court justices who helped remove federal abortion protections.
If you look forward to now, the same right-wing organizations have prepared a document (Project 2025) serving as instructions for Trump’s first 180 days. It calls for reclassifying every merit-based position in the executive branch into political ones, replacing the people who serve in those positions with Trump loyalists, then dismantling organizations like the FBI, EPA (environmental regulation), NOAA (meteorological organization; helps detect hurricanes), DOJ (sues entities for reasons like antitrust), and more. The only entities that could intervene in this case are the Supreme Court, which is very comfortably on Trump’s side, and Congress, which is very unlikely to be controlled by Democrats in a way that will matter.
Tl;dr, Trump didn’t know what to do during the first term. For his second term, he was handed a step-by-step tutorial on how to dismantle the FBI and everything else in the executive branch.