… but Trump’s narcissism is so toxic that it doesn’t matter. It’s a lay-up but he’s hard wired to throw the ball out of bounds and not drop it in the net. He is who he is.
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I mean, I get where you’re going with this, you’re going to “no TRUE containment” the shit out of anything and try to argue each post individually devoid of context.
He couldn’t even get Mitch on board with passing Nancy’s stimulus right before the election, which may have been all he had to do to get re-elected. Not even w/ Mitch’s precious Amy Barrett gifted him as a Trump card in negotiations.
Unbelievably bad negotiator and WEAK leader.
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this is essentially the deplorable “if you’re mean to deplorables we’re just gonna be even more racist just to show you!” argument
Other than Republican donors rebelling and Rs in Congress fighting him every step of the way. Trump was way too lazy to fight through that.
It always amazed me how negotiations just vaporized when Trump entered their vicinity. He was just such a totally unreliable counter party that people would throw up their hands and walk away.
I’m very familiar with the vendor-customer relationship because that’s a huge % of my job, and I can tell you that there is 0% chance I would ever have anything to do with a customer that acted out 5% as badly as Trump does… unless I was making so much money it literally shocked the senses. And I don’t mean money owed by this nutcase I mean I already have the cash.
Turns out political negotiations are more delicate than buying linens in NJ from an Italian guy with 95% profit margins. Like the level of ineptitude Trump has as an operator was on full display for four years and I can say that every time someone describes him as a ‘businessman’ I genuinely want to fight them on behalf of my occupation. He represents the absolute worst things about the worst 5% of business people wrt ethics plus he has absolutely none of the skillset and is a massively -EV black hole.
I’m not saying business guys are in any way a clean or competent group of people, but Trump is still a negative outlier in almost any metric you could think of. The only reason he wasn’t in prison from then on by the time he was 25 is that his dad had a billion dollars back when that was rare… which is the same reason he got to be the most powerful person on earth for four years and terrorize the whole planet.
Honestly if there’s anything we for sure can’t have in the next version of how we organize our society it’s toxic levels of inherited wealth. If there’s one through line to the Trump story it’s that at every stage he was a complete and utter failure at everything while running hotter than the sun at the exact same time.
I’m serious we need to ask ourselves ‘how would a dumb kid from a family at the top of society with NPD and a fuckload of resources do in this system we’re building’? We need to make sure that the dark triad shit is -EV and escalates exponentially as you offend instead of being a flat amount you could just… pay.
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there’s a sentiment in america that we should occupy a lot of countries around the world
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It’s not only that now.
It’s also about a dictator entering his twilight years and beginning to consider what his legacy will be, the obvious candidate being annexation of Ukraine.
You feel the same way on Taiwan? Should the US recognize and sign a bilateral defense treaty with ROC?
Eventually, yes, probably.
The status quo there is comparatively more stable and that shouldn’t be the priority right now and we shouldn’t try to fix both problems at the same time.
Keeed pretty much 100% correct ITT as far as I can tell. Preach.
One false dichotomy presented ITT is that expanding NATO is the only way to stop Russia doing anything. The world has other means. In practice what NATO is for small countries is an imperialist mandate: you have to do what the US says, or maybe we’ll withdraw protection.
The anachronistic nature of NATO is thrown into sharp relief by Turkey right now, being as how they are practically an open ally of Russia.
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Yeah, look at Taiwan. The US makes noises that it might intervene if China invades, sells arms to Taiwan, and can escalate those arms sales to respond to Chinese aggression towards Taiwan. All of which serves to deter China while stopping well short of a binding, irrevocable alliance.
that’s not at all how NATO protection works. US doesn’t just unilaterally withdraw protection for say Montenegro or Latvia if they don’t feel like it, regardless of what trmp was saying. there are 30 member states.
Wow, what a surprise this story was a russiagate bullshit story
https://twitter.com/noahshachtman/status/1382713472056709123?s=21
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Lol Bob Mueller
But that’s not Trump. Trump’s racism was a means to his helping rich people and himself get richer. Not Vice Versa.
in no way is this shocking or even mildly surprising
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the best people
Was sure the 2nd part of this sentence was gonna be “it’s the motion in the ocean.”
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