X/itter Truth Bomb Of The Day
This one should come with a warning label (especially as it cuts both ways)
Hard truths come in many forms, including sometimes in under 144 characters. Former regular commenter and editor-in-chief of the must-read site Ordinary Times, Will Truman, just dropped this banger:
And considering that he has been talking about this issue for decades, launched a trade war in his first term, AND continually campaigned on tariffs (see for example, articles 1, 2, and 3 just from OTB), pretending that one didn’t think he’d do what he was promising is really weak tea.
FWIW, in a representative democracy this is true of all elections. I can name a TON of things about Biden and his policies I deeply disagreed with, and at the same time, I am prepared to own that is ultimately what I voted for based on the choices I had.
Oh, and for the “WHAT ABOUT CHINA” tariff-apologist crowd, Ordinary Times already has a great rebuttal on purely economic grounds (which doesn’t even touch on how the DOGE cuts created a soft power vacuum that China is already filling).
I’m afraid I’m not super engaged with OT these days, though I was in the past.
One reason is that they no longer provide an RSS feed, and that’s still how I do things. It’s still my method for not missing anything.
AND, they published a post bemoaning Trump getting away with it after he got elected. The post claimed it was all Bill Clinton’s fault and the fault of voters who didn’t demand his removal from office for getting a BJ and then lying about it. I lost my temper a little bit. I did not think these things were morally equivalent.
More recently there was a post about autopens and how the situation with Biden was so much worse than we thought. Right at the same time that ICE was grabbing people off the street and packing them into Salvadoran prisons with no due process. And then it comes out that Trump uses autopens, maybe even more than Biden did.
Still I know that Will doesn’t like Trump and hasn’t for a long time. His voice is welcome to the chorus.
Will be my response to the laments of MAGA friends and associates.
And: Talk to the hand.
Yeah. Trump’s pivot to China seems to largely come down to clearing the field for China.
Given their propensity to be single-issue voters on things like abortion or unrestricted gun rights, I’m always shocked when Republicans can’t fathom the idea that there might be other deal-breakers as well.
The existence of deal-breakers is both the biggest argument for and against single-issue voting.
@Tony W:..single-issue voting.
I cast my first ballot for President USA for George McGovern in 1972. I could not vote in the 1968 election as I was 2 months shy of my 21st birthday, the legal voting age at the time. Roe v Wade was decided in January of 1973. I have known that the President appoints Supreme Court Justices since grade school. Knowing that a Republican President would likely appoint Justices who would rule against Roe I have always voted for a Democratic President. That has been my single issue when I cast a ballot. Look what happened.
I can’t think of any Republican that I have voted for in the past. Federal, state or local and as long as Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party I will NEVER vote for a Republican candidate for any office.
Not even for dogcatcher.
(Truth be told the Animal Control Officer of Jackson County, Illinois where I live is an employee of the Jackson County Board. I always vote for Democrats to occupy seats in my district.)
@Jay L Gischer: I’m curious about the RSS issues. Our RSS feed is current.
https://ordinary-times.com/feed/
Are you by chance using Feedly? We’ve had some people report issues with it. It can sometimes be fixed by disconnecting and reconnecting to it.
Republicans did not think this through. Trump is going to kill their brand. Hard.
Wrecking people’s retirement accounts on purpose is pretty stupid. You guys need the Olds to vote for you or you are fucked.
Even if you are going for a “short, sharp shock” you need to communicate that at up front.
What are they thinking? “I just lost ~10% of my nest egg in two days by a self-inflicted move by Trump.”
They are overestimating the resilience and forbearance of retirees living on investments.
@Matt,
For one thing, in a binary scenario, we’re most often voting AGAINST something rather than FOR anything. For another, successful candidates usually hammer a small number of issues in the campaign, so voters have no reasonable way to know how they’re going to govern on a wide swath of other policy areas.
Biden, in particular, campaigned as the sanity candidate and most of the Dem field quickly rallied to support him as the best way to beat Trump. But he took a hard left in office, governing closer to Bernie Sanders (on domestic policy, at least) than the guy from the primaries.
Even with regard to Trump, I had never heard of DOGE until after the election and had no idea he planned to put massive tariffs on American allies. Even on issues where he’s keeping campaign promises, like mass deportation of immigrants, I didn’t think he’d be exporting them to El Salvadorian prison camps.
@James Joyner:
Lots of good stuff to think with James. I am on the road today but I plan on responding tomorrow.
@James Joyner: I don’t think this dynamic applies to all issues, but I do think it applies to *this* one because it was something that he really did signal he was going to do. That’s far less true of DOGE. (El Salvador is in between. Know we didn’t know that but he was clear that he was going to great illegal immigrants very roughly.)
The other main defense “I voted for Trump for other reasons and this was bundled in there” is actually a reasonable claim – I voted for Harris despite preferring Trump’s positions on some issues of importance to me – but I voted how I voted knowing the tradeoffs that would be made if she had won. My defenses would be “art of compromise” on good ways and “lesser of evils” on bad ones.
The central promise made by Trump every single day since he rode down the escalator has been that he will punish someone.
Every single speech, every single tweet, every single policy, every single personnel appointment has been loudly and clearly aimed at inflicting pain and suffering on some group of persons, both foreign and domestic.
It doesn’t matter what anyone at a diner says, they know this. THEY THEMSELVES SAY THIS, in all those quotes about how he is hurting “the wrong people”.
And it isn’t just Trump. Every Republican Senator and Congressperson, every Republican governor, state legislator, county commissioner and school board member has repeated the same claims and demands that America is under attack from within and those who are guilty must be punished. That there is a large swath of people who are not Real Americans and are therefore not legitimate holders of power.
So yeah, they voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.
@James Joyner:
This is what I mean.
For decades, Republicans have been making increasingly loud and wild claims about cutting the size of government- What did you think they meant when they said they wanted government to be small enough to drown in a bathtub?
During every single budget fight during the Obama years, “Shut It Down!” was their slogan.
When they made preposterous claims about balancing a budget where revenue makes up barely 2/3 of spending, how could those claims be reconciled without doing what we are doing now?
It has been clear for decades- not just the past few years, but full decades stretching back to Reagan- That the Republican Party has been indulging in fantastical thinking on par with the worst Soviet planners.
And since November 2008 they have been increasingly bold about racism, flirting with all manner of white supremacists and blood and soil nationalists. What did you think “Real Americans” meant? It means that some people are legitimate, and some people are not.
It means that some people are entitled to due process and some people aren’t.
Once that claim has been accepted as a legitimate policy within the Overton window, everything that follows- Lawless rendition, suspension of habeas, lawless executions and even ethnic cleansing- Becomes as predictable as the sunrise.
There has been a consistent pattern of Inside The Beltway Pundits refusing to listen to what republicans have been clearly and loudly saying, sanewashing and minimizing what everyone could clearly see coming.
@James Joyner:
This is a stunning revelation James but I applaud your candor.
What it confirms for me is that the [still] “conservative” electorate are in the grips of a mass hypnotic phenomena. Again, I watched otherwise sane, upstanding members of society shut down their normal middle class lives and buy one-way tickets to Turkey in order to sneak in Syria to join the Islamic State. Many of these people were shocked that the Islamic State was impoverished group of cultists and mercenaries believing they were suffering as the down payment on an islamic revolution. what they saw on the internet and what they experienced when they arrived shocked their conscious. Many more watching from around the globe were stunned when ISIS collapsed. Everything they saw was that victory was inevitable. Of couse, no one outside their echo chamber was stunned.
AK47s and Pickup trucks against a professional military AND US AirPower? Defeats was all but assured. This despite massive amounts of information on the internet that ISIS was run by paranoid psychopaths. How could they not know? IT WAS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACE.
The human psychology is such that it will dismiss any adverse information connected to its tribal identity. This is true of Democrats, Blacks, Whites….name the group identity. Democrats are stunned by the lack of response from the current group. But it’s been right there in front of their face for years–that Dem leadership would avoid confrontation at all costs.
So James, nothing that is happening is a surprise. I’ve said before that the GOP is run by some very bad actors. I believe in the system of ‘win some, lose some’ and tossing the opposition a bone in the spirit of sharing American values and citizenship.
This is not these people. They are winner take all, fuck your feelings people. The only thing these type of people understand is the surety of direct confrontation. I ask myself a simple question when forecasting how Trump might behave. “Whats the worst he can do and screw over someone he needs to use for something in the short term?” That’s what Trump will do. He has Alligator reasoning, which is simply 3 things Alligators evaluate that guide most of their behavior: “Can it eat me? Can I eat it? Is it a potential mate or rival?.
I say that to underscore the fact that very few people that consider themselves conservatives, even small c conservatives, what to believe what I previously wrote about their tribe. But it’s right in front of their face. They want to believe there is a compromise or bipartisan solution that can keep the previous norms in place. There is no evidence of that. In fact, the anecdotes reveal intentional efforts to spark confrontation. Knowing Dems will cave and winner take all.
It’s not going to get better for awhile, how do I know? Who does Trump need? Right now he needs his Billionaires and the Supreme Court. Those are the only things that represent threats today.
It’s apparent that Democrats and a few principled Republicans are also stunned that these events–meaning they spent zero analysis on Trump’s businesses and donors to find chinks in the armor that could be exploited. Those take time to develop.