First I've heard of substantial American interference in that election.
You'd be (un)surprised by the amount of election interference the United States has engaged in.
My argument is not that he is uniquely evil, it is that he is uniquely dangerous. No one disputes we've had horrible presidents who did horrible things.
Fair enough.
Is he uniquely dangerous in a way other post-1945 presidents haven't been? If so, to who? Because as evil (and dangerous) Trump is, he has to commit to policies such as arm death squads in Central America or has had his own Highway of Death or pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war over an island in the Caribbean. The most dangerous aspects of Donald Trump are with regards to climate change, in which he's just loudly carrying out a policy the United States has been quietly carrying out since Kyoto, and the DPRK, which today seems to have largely cooled.
The other aspects of him that are dangerous aren't unique to him, but unique to the entirety of the American government, such as his xenophobia and commitment to an economic system that will lead to all our grandchildren dying of exciting new cancers, heatstroke, and drowning in a few decades
None of them flippantly threatened nuclear war while crap-posting at 3am.
Because they didn't have Twitter.
Do you really think Nixon or Reagan would not have used Twitter to flippantly threaten nuclear escalation if they had access to Twitter? We will never know, but we do know that Nixon was purposely erratic about nuclear weapons and that his strategy of being erratic is something Trump at various points of his presidency has used.
Ronald Reagan joked about nuking the Soviet Union. Does it not seem dangerous that an American president would be so flippant that he doesn't just threaten, but jokes, about using nuclear weapons? It wasn't that long ago that we watched on nationally televised debates as two dozen other Republican nominees also voiced their desire to bomb various countries in the Middle East such as Iran. If Trump is "uniquely dangerous", it is because the United States is uniquely dangerous.
Trump's unhinged, horribly corrupt, petulant and stupid. Past presidents might have had some of those features but not all and they existed within power structures that kept them in check. Most of the horrible things the US has done had popular backing - a lot of people supported Vietnam and all the other wars. Now, however, Trump doesn't need popular support to do what he pleases - his coalition controls the entire federal government until January, at which point they lose one part of one branch.
Every American president is corrupt. Trump is definitely dumber and more petulant than most though, I agree.
Trump seems less a danger in this scenario than the fact that the entire American system of government is intentionally designed to be anti-democratic.
Do you think a banana republic with nuclear weapons ruled by a man child with a temper on the precipice of prison is remotely comparable to the US of the past? Or do you agree this represents a uniquely threatening and unstable combination of features we haven't yet seen in the US?
Yes, because this is really just the second part of the Nixon Saga, isn't it? We, as a species, have been here before and just need to take a deep breathe and ask ourselves why are Americans so uniquely bad at what they do that they continually let this happen.
Again, nothing Trump has done has killed or ruined as many lives as the global drone campaign, the Iraq Wars, and the various interventions it has engaged in since 1945. Trump's most dangerous aspect is that he put brown people into camps, but this is only happening because the American form of government is so structurally evil and the people in that country have enough dangerous, unhinged, people in it that this could happen.
It wasn't the top Democratic priority from 2008 to 2010. We were consumed with the struggle to bring healthcare to our people which is something most developed nations have managed. After that, there was little the Democrats could do. Since then, it has been and is growing still as a major issue and cause celebre within the broader public - not just liberals.
The ACA didn't even manage to do that. The ACA was just this weird neoliberal attempt to thread the needle so that their donors can earn windfall profits (at government expenses). It was/is a terrible policy the Democrats wasted energy on between 2009 and 2010; a policy in which they controlled most of the government they needed to control to do whatever they want and what they want was this pathetic healthcare scheme that only looks good in comparison to the Republican plan, which is to eventually send poor people to poor camps anyway. If Democrats were ever serious about healthcare, they would've started with either nationalizing the healthcare industry or implement single payer or, given how much power they had to shape policy in those years, both. They didn't, because Democrats don't really care.
I just saw an Air Force propaganda piece (it was a longass youtube ad) trying to convince the public to pay for brand new engines for B-52 bombers. One of the selling points of the new engines that the USAF lauded was the dramatically reduced carbon footprint, particulate counts and noise emissions from these new engines.
Jesus Christ.
The Democrats really want to act on climate change and have in states they control. We cannot pass anything through Mitch McConnell and haven't been able to for going on a decade. That doesn't mean they haven't tried and continue to push for these issues.
The difference is those lobbyists now directly tell the government officials what to say. We also haven't gone out of our way to troll serious negotiations, which is effectively what Trump's administration is doing now.
I do not feel that this is true. I say this because the policies the Democrats have gone after have always had a greater priority than climate: the market. In an era where the goal should be to vastly reduce the number of cars on the road, period, the Democrats' market-based solution was to subsidize private automakers (including ones who were bailed out in 2008) to sell even more cars (now hybrid and electrical) to the market. A lot of defenses for Democrats make them sound like helpless children and not as grown adults with the same powers of obstruction available to Republicans, or that there aren't actions
outside the sphere of electoral politics and the courts that the Democrats could take if they really considered climate change the existential crisis it is. I don't think Democrats have the tools for handling climate change because, for the most part, the Democrats are committed capitalists and committed to the markets whereas climate change is the natural long-term outcome of industrial capitalism, a contradiction that can't be bandaged over with tax incentives and subsidies neatly.
As for the lobbyists, well, the lobbyists have always told government officials what to say. They've been doing that since the 1880s. The only difference is that the modern politician, secure in their position, no longer feels the need to reword their homework answers to make them sound like they came up with them.
Sorry; did not mean for it to come off that way.
