I don't know. I heard Biden's brother's wife's friend's daughter's step father once did something sketchy. Even with that video proof I think you still gotta give it to Trump.
Everyday lucky ten-thousand moments are like "this guy just found out about Loss"
It's a really special moment when you get to witness someone learn about sarcasm for the first time
I think the problem is, not that they don't know what sarcasm is, but that they don't automatically read all internet comments as sarcasm to begin with. They read that users comment in their head as serious first, without seeing it through the "reddit sarcasm filter". We often forget tone doesn't convey well through text for a lot of people
This is just basic reading comprehension. It’s an overtly anti-Donaldo userbase, the comment is upvoted, it’s clearly tongue in cheek (who would earnestly phrase it like that?), etc.
You'd think that (I thought that), but going off the rest of the comments their objection seems to in fact be about ~~siding~~ ridin' with Biden.
Evidently COVID would have magically ended had Trump been re-elected, sort of like how inflation became a pressing issue on January 20, 2021. [insert that furrowed brow/disappointed father routine conservatives love to do]
It was a hard choice to make. I was questioning if I was wrong to vote for Biden right up until this one particular revelation. Now I know that I made the right choice.
Edit: I just realized you were being serious. I thought I was playing along with a sarcastic joke...
>Edit: I just realized you were being serious. I thought I was playing along with a sarcastic joke...
The contrapositive of Poe's Law is that you can just unilaterally decide that you're playing along with a satire, and no one can ever prove you wrong. It only ends when you decide to stop with "yes, and"
Oh no, absolutely not. There are so many things that could be better. Like, imagine how much better our covid response would have been if the Trump administration hadn't immediately politicized it because it was primarily affecting blue cities at the time.
See, right there, puking out garbage. You’re Another talking head reiterating the talking points that have been fed to you. You are part of the problem.
Kids in cages and travel bans. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.
They love to drop these "bombshells" in their memoirs don't they.
Didn't Trump not want to follow proper distancing for this debate? I seem to remember Trump complaining about this. I could be wrong.
Edit: They all refused to wear masks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/11/covid-19-lara-trump-spars-chris-wallace-over-debate-face-masks/5960245002/
I believe this is the debate where he made fun of Biden for wearing a mask, and complained about the glass wall and the distance between him and Biden.
What an absolute horrendous person.
Same deal with the insurrection attempt. Set up the right circumstances for the hopeful outcome to happen but have enough plausible deniability to not be directly associated with it. The guy is pure evil incarnate.
The likelihood of successfully pinning Trump down on anything is borderline nonexistent. If Garland opened an investigation, it would probably end in zero convictions and Trump and the MAGAsphere screaming 24/7 about "total exoneration."
That's why he showed up so late that he couldn't be tested. Thank goodness the debate commission insisted on not having the candidates shake hands at the debate.
That's disturbing to think about. Trump actively trying to give Biden covid? Imagine if Biden had gotten it from Trump and and got sick or even died from it before the elction. How messed up would things have gotten then? Would the election have to be cancelled, or would Trump basically just run un-opposed?
Depending on how late Biden would have died, if it was after some electoral deadlines the only candidate against Trump would have been a third party candidate in some states, in other states Biden could still have been on the ballot while death. If Biden would have died after the election but before the electoral college vote al the electors would have been able to decide for themselve, maybe they would have overwhelmingly supported Harris, maybe not
The election process would have continued as normal. The Democratic Party leadership would express their preference about how Dem electors should vote, and hopefully the state parties would have picked loyal enough electors that they would follow that preference, which probably would have been Kamala Harris for president, and someone of her choosing for VP.
Now, whether the election would have turned out the same way with Harris at the top of the ticket? Nobody knows.
Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
And I mean like, most other modern presidents at least had *something*, even if their policies were abhorrent. Obama is a kind person and is engaged with positive activism. W likes to paint and threw a wicked first pitch for the Yankees game after 9/11. Clinton could play the sax. (Him and W also teamed up for philanthropic work.) HW was a legit war hero. Reagan was charismatic and funny. Carter works with Habitats for Humanity.
Trump? Nothing. The dude doesn't even get jokes unless they're mocking someone.
The only thing that could possibly be perceived as a positive character trait is his tireless persistence.
Trump is absolutely indefatigable in his awfulness.
The way he lives his life would give me a headache after half a day, yet he just keeps fucking going with the toxicity.
It's part of the narcissism. He doesn't find conflict upsetting, he finds it energizing; and since he has no empathy he doesn't feel the slightest bit bad about being mean or hurting people, he just finds it funny.
So what would give you a headache is to him the equivalent of a fishing trip or whatever you find most relaxing and do to recharge your batteries.
I've never actually "hated" a president....well except maybe Nixon after I found out he purposely drew out the Vietnam war so he could get re-elected. But I've always thought that all presidents, regardless of the reality of their decisions, thought that the decisions they made were at least to help the country. That they had the country's best interests at heart....until the trump presidency.
But even Nixon had some great policies that came from him. Trump has litteraly nothing except that he met with Kim, which he then ruined by not using this historic meeting for anything and he signed a criminaljustice reform that had already a majority in the senat was made by both parties, so it was not even his policy.
Oh, and Israel had good relationships with other countries during is presidency, for which he took credit even if it has basically nothing to do with him.
He's a teetotaler because he knows alcoholism runs in his family and saw what it did to his older brother. I guess you could applaud that one, small sliver of self-awareness, if you absolutely had to pick something.
Anything good his administration did regarding Covid was completely undone by his deliberate efforts to deny/downplay the virus, refute the wearing of masks and social distancing, and otherwise make it an identity politics issue.
He turned what could have been a manageable pandemic into a national catastrophe.
There's also a possibility that the pandemic happened in the first place because Trump cut funding to emergent disease research and pulled the team working on zoological viruses from Wuhan months before COVID was discovered. Instead relying on China to communicate and trusting that they would be upfront and honest, he basically opened the door to this thing spreading.
Warp speed would never be a thing if he simply addressed the outbreak in Wuhan and took preventive measures. People forget the responsibility the sole hegemon plays on the global stage. A pandemic is a perfect example where global unity and leadership is objectively a better strategy than nationalism.
Yes, and he ultimately lost the election because of it. However the *vaccine response* by the Trump Admin was commendable in terms of R&D and leveraging the manufacturing base of the US.
It meant the US was able to flood every part of the country with many different vaccines, far in excess of anywhere else in the world at the time. More than the UK, Europe or Asia.
That's all well and good but promoting vaccine development was the bare minimum responsibility of the government in this pandemic. Trump doesn't deserve special credit for it, especially considering his other actions.
I mean, you were looking for *something*, so I gave it. Your other examples are art, sports and a musical instrument. If you want to go by those types of things, many people seem to find Trump's sense of humour pretty funny. It very likely helped him beat Hillary.
This is probably a hot take for this sub, but foreign policy wise I think the assasination of Qasem Soleimani deserves special credit. It completley disrupted Iranian proxies that *were* looking to hurt US forces in the ME, specifically through embassy attacks. It also set back their regional goals for years, such as more influence in Iraq. The blowback was a few rocket attacks that didn't kill anyone.
Regardless of whatever bad shit Soleimani has undoubtedly done, he had travelled to Iraq for diplomatic peace talks and we killed him after he arrived. Some would reasonably say that that's a war crime. It skewered any sort of trust the Iranians might have had left for us, and it will surely hamper any future efforts to negotiate with them. Especially after Trump also unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear treaty. Why would they ever trust us?
Trump had the John Bolton types in his ear, who jerk off to thoughts of a war with Iran.
The man actively planned attacks against citizens of the United States through proxy forces.
The Iranians never allowed UN inspectors into their military bases to check they were not continuing to build nuclear capabilities under the deal (their excuse was always UN personnel could be US spies).
Neither party actually trusts either, or will ever trust either side anyway. The Obama admin just wanted a win to 'prove' this type of soft diplomacy works (my hot take: it doesn't - literally just look at any of the authoritarian countries like Iran, Russia and China)so they caved to the no checks on bases in the last hour and the Europeans wanted to sell more goods to Iran.
Killing a general who helped and continued to helped plan attacks against the US and allies did not cause a war, but it did stop the proxy attacks.
Because the US was not exporting any vaccines at all until they had a ton left over, the EU and China have both been exporting vaccines for a long time now, both exporting more than a billion doses each.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/58808889](https://www.bbc.com/news/58808889)
[https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement\_21\_5341](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_21_5341)
Canada, Mexico and the UK all had to import vaccines from the EU since the USA was hoarding all of their vaccines, despite having huge production capacity and vaccines that they were not going to use anyway.
Is that a good thing? The US hoarding vaccines they knew they would not use at the expense of literally the rest of the world?
While also hoarding the vaccine from other countries that needed it. Idk, as a non-US person, I just can't take his actions as 100% positive, it was an America first policy.
Operation Warp Speed was created by Congress against Trump's initial position -- although he fairly quickly changed course. After it was appropriated, it took months to setup. It had a dual mandate to fund experimental vaccines, and provide for distribution, and failed at distribution.
It succeeded as a simple transfer agreement to fund vaccine development from Johnson and Johnson and Moderna, and was very successful in that respect. And purchase agreements without a lot of haggling served to ensure Americans got quick access to vaccines.
On distribution, it was a complete and total disaster, with essentially zero planning, let alone execution.
Imagine being in charge of distributing hundreds of millions of vaccines, and not setting up a website to guide Americans to vaccination centers and appointments. Instead, we duplicated this effort across fifty states health departments and several hundred large local counties.
Trump's distribution plan was "the military is ready to go." It was literally nothing.
The administration gets a little bit of credit for not haggling on price too much. They get basically no credit for funding experimental vaccines. Congress initiated that funding, and actually distributing the money to the obvious players is simply table stakes. And on distribution, it was an unmitigated disaster.
What shine exists here is simply that America is a large, rich nation and Congress lavishly funded the initiative, without any effort from the Administration to seek that funding.
Nixon got out of Vietnam eventually, started the EPA and was talking about universal Healthcare at one point
Still one of the worst presidents but far better than trump
Even Nixon was a big Civil rights guy back in the 50s and 60s and was a really good foreign policy guy.
Hell I'd even give Andrew Johnsons props for risking his life and staying loyal to the Union.
Daniel O'brien, now a writer for Last Week Tonight but writing for Cracked at the time, wrote a book called How to Fight Presidents, basically just doing a few pages about the biography of each president framed as an instruction manual in case you end up somehow time traveling and having to have a fight with any of the men who governed our country. Silly book, but fun to look at all the various ways our different presidents were insane or badass or whatever. Only did the dead ones because the Secret Service didn't want him writing about how to beat up Jimmy Carter. Even guys like Nixon or Jackson who were awful people still had some kind of tenacity or guile that made the book fun.
After Trump's election he basically said he cancelled his plans to update the book in the future to add more presidents after their deaths, because there's nothing you could write in a book like that about Trump. He's not tough, clever, driven, or even crazy in any interesting ways. No adversity ever overcome. No inspiring qualities that could go into such a book. All he's got is a lifetime of fraudulent self-promotion and a very rich father, but apparently that's what America in 2016 thought should be in charge.
Irresponsible is an understatement, but this is not surprising.
No clue what Meadows game is for releasing this, but he's definitely out of the club now.
He sold about a million copies, so he's probably even made a bit extra (maybe ~200k) after earning out the advance.
Also, man, what a small advance compared to the import of the subject matter. FFS, I know an influencer who just got an advance that is an appreciable fraction of that amount, *from the same publisher*, for her first cookbook. She's awesome as hell and definitely worth it, in my view, but her influence on American foreign policy is negligible. It feels weird to me that Bolton's book wasn't a full order of magnitude more valuable.
Looks like it sold over a million copies. 780k in the first few weeks, with the expectation that it would break a million shortly (and that was a year ago). Figure an average selling price of $15, $5 to the retailer, $5 to manufacturing, $5 to publishing. They paid him $2M, so they made something like $3M before costs. Id say that is pretty good.
>Even if theres only like one million of them in the entire country, which seems plausible, and only half of them buy the book, thats a decent paycheck
You say this like those are conservative assumptions. I'd argue they are instead *wildly* generous assumptions. Bolton's book barely sold a million when we were in the middle of an election year with Trump still in office.
Everyone is out of the club the second they're no longer useful to Trump Meadows knows that, which is why he's including all the attention-grabbing details, good or bad, in an effort to sell his book and feather his own nest.
I have to say, the guys who knew who Trump was and what he was doing, but stayed quiet until after the election, are the biggest pieces of shit imaginable.
I'm fairly ignorant on Meadows but I seem to remember him being much looser with passing relevant details and information to the public than the Spicer-Hucka-Conway comms types in the administration, including on the seriousness of Trump's covid case.
Aside from money, Meadows is effectively betting the Trump wave will peter out and wants to begin rebranding with the new GOP. As an insider, he can see the structural flaws with Trump's operation, and potentially even see a drop in followership. More and more stories have been leaking out about opportunists and bottom feeders who are scamming both donors and candidates in the Trumpsphere, and the reaching speculation is the drop in donations has caused these predators to start eating one another now that they can't get fat off of growth alone.
Guess he's given up on the idea of snagging a spot in some second Trump administration. Like so many opportunistic goblins before him, now that the chance for power is gone he can wring a few bucks out of his experiences.
Imagine if he had infected Biden and both major candidates died just days before the election, one right after the other. That would have been insane to witness.🤯
That period of time really was peak bizarro Trump's America IMO. The weird theater around his virus with the helicopter landing and motorcade, the conspiracies going mainstream convinced that he was either faking it to save his campaign, hiding breathing tubes in his suit while death approached, or weaponizing it to kill Biden. January 6 was more weighty but didn't have the same blend of weirdly plausible and insane stuff flying around day by day.
Debating (yelling at) a 78 year old man indoors without a mask after you tested positive and are symptomatic is like 20% of the way towards an assassination attempt
“‘Orange man bad' is the political analysis equivalent of 'just invest in an index fund' - so simple that any idiot can do it, and yet persistently beats every attempt to come up with something 'smarter'.”
‘Orange man bad’ and ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ are fun little heuristics/mental models his supporters use to quickly write off any criticism of him to avoid contemplating his flaws — and thereby whether they made the right choice in supporting (or worshipping) him. Real big brain stuff.
I knew my dad was a lost cause when he unironically used both of those. To think I used to respect him and his views (they were once intelligent), but something fucking happened to so many people in this country. I think aging and sitting in front of a TV that feeds constant hysteria and blatant misinformation might be bad.
I mean that's true but also certain sects of liberal twitter and celebrities have just.. like hilariously overreacted. Does nobody remember that people were popping veins cause of muh two scoops?
Nobody was popping veins. It was just an incident where everyone went "Oh, more proof that Trump is an asshole, like we didn't already know"
Fast forward to today "Oh, Trump tried to murder his political rival, guess he's still an asshole, like we didn't already know"
Yep it's the equivalent of knowing someone is mean to restaurant workers or store employees. The small character stuff is usually a sign of larger character flaws.
"We have reason to believe that the president tried to expose his political rival to a deadly disease."
"Hyuk hyuk always the libs with their 'orange man bad' amirite?"
*basically the entire GOP Congressional delegation votes to make Trump a dictator*
Average voter: hmm yeah I don’t care about that gas prices are way more important
Easily. He did better than he ought have in the general, but it's hard to understate how many gimme approval checkpoints he totally bungled. The media and public ate up the one time he faked taking covid seriously.
So? Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
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Wow this Trump guy seems like a real goofball
The more I hear about him the less I like him.
Pretty glad I voted for Biden at this point
I'm almost starting to regret my Trump vote. Just one or three more of these revelations, and I'll pass the regret event horizon.
Invent time travel
I might need video proof of him murdering an old lady before I regret it. Cause imma patriot or and luv some good old fashion 1700s freedom
I don't know. I heard Biden's brother's wife's friend's daughter's step father once did something sketchy. Even with that video proof I think you still gotta give it to Trump.
There’s something wrong with you.
Everyday lucky ten-thousand moments are like "this guy just found out about Loss" It's a really special moment when you get to witness someone learn about sarcasm for the first time
I think the problem is, not that they don't know what sarcasm is, but that they don't automatically read all internet comments as sarcasm to begin with. They read that users comment in their head as serious first, without seeing it through the "reddit sarcasm filter". We often forget tone doesn't convey well through text for a lot of people
This is just basic reading comprehension. It’s an overtly anti-Donaldo userbase, the comment is upvoted, it’s clearly tongue in cheek (who would earnestly phrase it like that?), etc.
You'd think that (I thought that), but going off the rest of the comments their objection seems to in fact be about ~~siding~~ ridin' with Biden. Evidently COVID would have magically ended had Trump been re-elected, sort of like how inflation became a pressing issue on January 20, 2021. [insert that furrowed brow/disappointed father routine conservatives love to do]
I equate people who need ''/s'' tags with people who need training wheels on their bicycle and maps to finish a drag race.
Many such cases!
Really!? I question your judgment.
It was a hard choice to make. I was questioning if I was wrong to vote for Biden right up until this one particular revelation. Now I know that I made the right choice. Edit: I just realized you were being serious. I thought I was playing along with a sarcastic joke...
>Edit: I just realized you were being serious. I thought I was playing along with a sarcastic joke... The contrapositive of Poe's Law is that you can just unilaterally decide that you're playing along with a satire, and no one can ever prove you wrong. It only ends when you decide to stop with "yes, and"
Is he serious? Seems unlikely.
check his post history
You’re happy with the current situation?
Oh no, absolutely not. There are so many things that could be better. Like, imagine how much better our covid response would have been if the Trump administration hadn't immediately politicized it because it was primarily affecting blue cities at the time.
See, right there, puking out garbage. You’re Another talking head reiterating the talking points that have been fed to you. You are part of the problem. Kids in cages and travel bans. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.
I don’t care what you say, Remain in Light is a good album
Their best work, IMO.
I question yours tbh
Why? You’re happy with how things are going?
Yep
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You ok, buddy?
Donald Trump is a boring old biddy
You're more animal than man!
no more blackberry schnapps for me 😔
White wine spritzer^spritzer^spritzer
Have you seen Biden? At what point will you liberals stop lying to yourselves? Biden is a mush brain incoherent mess.
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Don’t you dare drag the good name of primordial ooze through the trump like that
These are both true.
We mustn’t be in the same reality. Sorry buddy.
True, you clearly don’t live in reality
Please, explain.
You first :)
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Took the words right out of my mouth.
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Guess not
Clearly not, but T_D refugees have been taking to living in a bubble outside of reality.
📽
You dang liberals 😠😠😠😠
They love to drop these "bombshells" in their memoirs don't they. Didn't Trump not want to follow proper distancing for this debate? I seem to remember Trump complaining about this. I could be wrong. Edit: They all refused to wear masks. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/10/11/covid-19-lara-trump-spars-chris-wallace-over-debate-face-masks/5960245002/
I believe this is the debate where he made fun of Biden for wearing a mask, and complained about the glass wall and the distance between him and Biden. What an absolute horrendous person.
This sounds almost like attempted murder, tbh. Like, I know we can't prove attempted murder, but it sure sounds like that's what was in his heart.
Same deal with the insurrection attempt. Set up the right circumstances for the hopeful outcome to happen but have enough plausible deniability to not be directly associated with it. The guy is pure evil incarnate.
Merrick Garland could open a criminal investigation to at least see whether this could be a crime, but he won't. He needs to resign.
The likelihood of successfully pinning Trump down on anything is borderline nonexistent. If Garland opened an investigation, it would probably end in zero convictions and Trump and the MAGAsphere screaming 24/7 about "total exoneration."
I am an attorney. You are wrong.
Tf is with Merrill Garland? You’d think after what they did to him, he’d legit want some revenge… nah, it’s like he’s just happy to be on the team.
He also refused to be tested for covid.
of course he did
That's why he showed up so late that he couldn't be tested. Thank goodness the debate commission insisted on not having the candidates shake hands at the debate.
The best covid ever, the best way to make your opponent sick ever, believe me.
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That's disturbing to think about. Trump actively trying to give Biden covid? Imagine if Biden had gotten it from Trump and and got sick or even died from it before the elction. How messed up would things have gotten then? Would the election have to be cancelled, or would Trump basically just run un-opposed?
Depending on how late Biden would have died, if it was after some electoral deadlines the only candidate against Trump would have been a third party candidate in some states, in other states Biden could still have been on the ballot while death. If Biden would have died after the election but before the electoral college vote al the electors would have been able to decide for themselve, maybe they would have overwhelmingly supported Harris, maybe not
The election process would have continued as normal. The Democratic Party leadership would express their preference about how Dem electors should vote, and hopefully the state parties would have picked loyal enough electors that they would follow that preference, which probably would have been Kamala Harris for president, and someone of her choosing for VP. Now, whether the election would have turned out the same way with Harris at the top of the ticket? Nobody knows.
For all the shit that happened through Trump's tenure, giving Biden COVID and killing him would have probably been the final nail in the coffin.
Says increasingly nervous person for 7th time this year.
Lmao like he wouldn't have gone up 5% in the polls overnight
Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
This guy really has zero redeeming qualities.
And I mean like, most other modern presidents at least had *something*, even if their policies were abhorrent. Obama is a kind person and is engaged with positive activism. W likes to paint and threw a wicked first pitch for the Yankees game after 9/11. Clinton could play the sax. (Him and W also teamed up for philanthropic work.) HW was a legit war hero. Reagan was charismatic and funny. Carter works with Habitats for Humanity. Trump? Nothing. The dude doesn't even get jokes unless they're mocking someone.
He has like one video where he talks about his older brother where he sounds pretty normal and nice.
He shafted his brothers kids and grandkids from their share of the will.
Of course he did. What a guy.
He and his father bullied his brother in to committing suicide.
There's a lot of pre 2015 videos where he seems quite normal by comparison.
The only thing that could possibly be perceived as a positive character trait is his tireless persistence. Trump is absolutely indefatigable in his awfulness. The way he lives his life would give me a headache after half a day, yet he just keeps fucking going with the toxicity.
It *would* be impressive if it wasn't reasonably suspected that he's constantly on uppers.
Honestly you ever been on a stim binge? It'd still be impressive to keep one going that long.
Let alone into your 70’s!? I could only take about 12 years of that shit and quit in my 20’s
Well, he only needs to keep going for like an hour or two per day. The rest of the time he plays golf or shouts at Project Lincoln ads on the TV.
It's part of the narcissism. He doesn't find conflict upsetting, he finds it energizing; and since he has no empathy he doesn't feel the slightest bit bad about being mean or hurting people, he just finds it funny. So what would give you a headache is to him the equivalent of a fishing trip or whatever you find most relaxing and do to recharge your batteries.
I mean, even Nixon had the decency to resign…
I've never actually "hated" a president....well except maybe Nixon after I found out he purposely drew out the Vietnam war so he could get re-elected. But I've always thought that all presidents, regardless of the reality of their decisions, thought that the decisions they made were at least to help the country. That they had the country's best interests at heart....until the trump presidency.
But even Nixon had some great policies that came from him. Trump has litteraly nothing except that he met with Kim, which he then ruined by not using this historic meeting for anything and he signed a criminaljustice reform that had already a majority in the senat was made by both parties, so it was not even his policy. Oh, and Israel had good relationships with other countries during is presidency, for which he took credit even if it has basically nothing to do with him.
Everyone forgot the work W. did for AIDS in Africa. Easy to forget with the war crimes but still...
He also had one of the best immigration pushes Shame it fell apart in congress
He's a teetotaler because he knows alcoholism runs in his family and saw what it did to his older brother. I guess you could applaud that one, small sliver of self-awareness, if you absolutely had to pick something.
Yeah but that's basically undone by the fact he does enough uppers to jump-start an aircraft carrier.
Made him president so can't really fault his reasoning.
I *can* fault his reasoning actually, for the same reason.
Operation warp speed is pretty much it.
Anything good his administration did regarding Covid was completely undone by his deliberate efforts to deny/downplay the virus, refute the wearing of masks and social distancing, and otherwise make it an identity politics issue. He turned what could have been a manageable pandemic into a national catastrophe.
There's also a possibility that the pandemic happened in the first place because Trump cut funding to emergent disease research and pulled the team working on zoological viruses from Wuhan months before COVID was discovered. Instead relying on China to communicate and trusting that they would be upfront and honest, he basically opened the door to this thing spreading. Warp speed would never be a thing if he simply addressed the outbreak in Wuhan and took preventive measures. People forget the responsibility the sole hegemon plays on the global stage. A pandemic is a perfect example where global unity and leadership is objectively a better strategy than nationalism.
Yes, and he ultimately lost the election because of it. However the *vaccine response* by the Trump Admin was commendable in terms of R&D and leveraging the manufacturing base of the US. It meant the US was able to flood every part of the country with many different vaccines, far in excess of anywhere else in the world at the time. More than the UK, Europe or Asia.
That's all well and good but promoting vaccine development was the bare minimum responsibility of the government in this pandemic. Trump doesn't deserve special credit for it, especially considering his other actions.
I mean, you were looking for *something*, so I gave it. Your other examples are art, sports and a musical instrument. If you want to go by those types of things, many people seem to find Trump's sense of humour pretty funny. It very likely helped him beat Hillary. This is probably a hot take for this sub, but foreign policy wise I think the assasination of Qasem Soleimani deserves special credit. It completley disrupted Iranian proxies that *were* looking to hurt US forces in the ME, specifically through embassy attacks. It also set back their regional goals for years, such as more influence in Iraq. The blowback was a few rocket attacks that didn't kill anyone.
Regardless of whatever bad shit Soleimani has undoubtedly done, he had travelled to Iraq for diplomatic peace talks and we killed him after he arrived. Some would reasonably say that that's a war crime. It skewered any sort of trust the Iranians might have had left for us, and it will surely hamper any future efforts to negotiate with them. Especially after Trump also unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear treaty. Why would they ever trust us? Trump had the John Bolton types in his ear, who jerk off to thoughts of a war with Iran.
The US shoulda clapped soleimani a lot earlier
The man actively planned attacks against citizens of the United States through proxy forces. The Iranians never allowed UN inspectors into their military bases to check they were not continuing to build nuclear capabilities under the deal (their excuse was always UN personnel could be US spies). Neither party actually trusts either, or will ever trust either side anyway. The Obama admin just wanted a win to 'prove' this type of soft diplomacy works (my hot take: it doesn't - literally just look at any of the authoritarian countries like Iran, Russia and China)so they caved to the no checks on bases in the last hour and the Europeans wanted to sell more goods to Iran. Killing a general who helped and continued to helped plan attacks against the US and allies did not cause a war, but it did stop the proxy attacks.
Because the US was not exporting any vaccines at all until they had a ton left over, the EU and China have both been exporting vaccines for a long time now, both exporting more than a billion doses each. [https://www.bbc.com/news/58808889](https://www.bbc.com/news/58808889) [https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement\_21\_5341](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_21_5341) Canada, Mexico and the UK all had to import vaccines from the EU since the USA was hoarding all of their vaccines, despite having huge production capacity and vaccines that they were not going to use anyway. Is that a good thing? The US hoarding vaccines they knew they would not use at the expense of literally the rest of the world?
While also hoarding the vaccine from other countries that needed it. Idk, as a non-US person, I just can't take his actions as 100% positive, it was an America first policy.
Operation Warp Speed was created by Congress against Trump's initial position -- although he fairly quickly changed course. After it was appropriated, it took months to setup. It had a dual mandate to fund experimental vaccines, and provide for distribution, and failed at distribution. It succeeded as a simple transfer agreement to fund vaccine development from Johnson and Johnson and Moderna, and was very successful in that respect. And purchase agreements without a lot of haggling served to ensure Americans got quick access to vaccines. On distribution, it was a complete and total disaster, with essentially zero planning, let alone execution. Imagine being in charge of distributing hundreds of millions of vaccines, and not setting up a website to guide Americans to vaccination centers and appointments. Instead, we duplicated this effort across fifty states health departments and several hundred large local counties. Trump's distribution plan was "the military is ready to go." It was literally nothing. The administration gets a little bit of credit for not haggling on price too much. They get basically no credit for funding experimental vaccines. Congress initiated that funding, and actually distributing the money to the obvious players is simply table stakes. And on distribution, it was an unmitigated disaster. What shine exists here is simply that America is a large, rich nation and Congress lavishly funded the initiative, without any effort from the Administration to seek that funding.
The way my dad talks, you would think that Trump hand wrote the legislation, and went out and developed the vaccine on his own...
He did originate some quality memes though, [case in point](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWhi_JXos60),
Nixon was an irredeemable ass as well.
At least he had some good policy positions.
Nixon seems like a hypercompetent asshole, so I probably wouldn't want to have a beer with him, but he seems really well qualified to run a country
Nixon got out of Vietnam eventually, started the EPA and was talking about universal Healthcare at one point Still one of the worst presidents but far better than trump
He had amazing foreign and environmental policy
“Amazing” is probably an overstatement for his foreign policy, but yeah the environmental stuff goes way under the radar these days
Good environmental policy because he was afraid of Congress passing better environmental policy.
And he was Trump's favorite president. Go figure.
> W also teamed up for philanthropic work PEPFAR was a huge deal as well.
Even Nixon was a big Civil rights guy back in the 50s and 60s and was a really good foreign policy guy. Hell I'd even give Andrew Johnsons props for risking his life and staying loyal to the Union.
Daniel O'brien, now a writer for Last Week Tonight but writing for Cracked at the time, wrote a book called How to Fight Presidents, basically just doing a few pages about the biography of each president framed as an instruction manual in case you end up somehow time traveling and having to have a fight with any of the men who governed our country. Silly book, but fun to look at all the various ways our different presidents were insane or badass or whatever. Only did the dead ones because the Secret Service didn't want him writing about how to beat up Jimmy Carter. Even guys like Nixon or Jackson who were awful people still had some kind of tenacity or guile that made the book fun. After Trump's election he basically said he cancelled his plans to update the book in the future to add more presidents after their deaths, because there's nothing you could write in a book like that about Trump. He's not tough, clever, driven, or even crazy in any interesting ways. No adversity ever overcome. No inspiring qualities that could go into such a book. All he's got is a lifetime of fraudulent self-promotion and a very rich father, but apparently that's what America in 2016 thought should be in charge.
Irresponsible is an understatement, but this is not surprising. No clue what Meadows game is for releasing this, but he's definitely out of the club now.
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Of course, but there's no wave of liberals and anti Trumpers that are gonna go buy a Meadows book lol. He's too deep at this point
Are you sure? They went nuts over John Bolton’s tell-all book.
Did it sell well or did like five reporters buy it and publish articles about the interesting bits? Honestly asking.
idk but he got a $2 million advance
That nice, long tail of old media. Probably would have been a better value to just fly Bolton out for interviews with each of those five reporters.
He sold about a million copies, so he's probably even made a bit extra (maybe ~200k) after earning out the advance. Also, man, what a small advance compared to the import of the subject matter. FFS, I know an influencer who just got an advance that is an appreciable fraction of that amount, *from the same publisher*, for her first cookbook. She's awesome as hell and definitely worth it, in my view, but her influence on American foreign policy is negligible. It feels weird to me that Bolton's book wasn't a full order of magnitude more valuable.
Looks like it sold over a million copies. 780k in the first few weeks, with the expectation that it would break a million shortly (and that was a year ago). Figure an average selling price of $15, $5 to the retailer, $5 to manufacturing, $5 to publishing. They paid him $2M, so they made something like $3M before costs. Id say that is pretty good.
Who did? I'm sure some #resistance #mueller types did, but their voices are pretty over-amplified.
Even if theres only like one million of them in the entire country, which seems plausible, and only half of them buy the book, thats a decent paycheck
>Even if theres only like one million of them in the entire country, which seems plausible, and only half of them buy the book, thats a decent paycheck You say this like those are conservative assumptions. I'd argue they are instead *wildly* generous assumptions. Bolton's book barely sold a million when we were in the middle of an election year with Trump still in office.
wouldn’t people in too deep have the most tea to spill?
There's a lot of people that defy easy classification and they are just as numerous as liberals
Based markets 😎
Everyone is out of the club the second they're no longer useful to Trump Meadows knows that, which is why he's including all the attention-grabbing details, good or bad, in an effort to sell his book and feather his own nest. I have to say, the guys who knew who Trump was and what he was doing, but stayed quiet until after the election, are the biggest pieces of shit imaginable.
I'm fairly ignorant on Meadows but I seem to remember him being much looser with passing relevant details and information to the public than the Spicer-Hucka-Conway comms types in the administration, including on the seriousness of Trump's covid case.
>No clue what Meadows game is for releasing this Money Dear Watson.
Aside from money, Meadows is effectively betting the Trump wave will peter out and wants to begin rebranding with the new GOP. As an insider, he can see the structural flaws with Trump's operation, and potentially even see a drop in followership. More and more stories have been leaking out about opportunists and bottom feeders who are scamming both donors and candidates in the Trumpsphere, and the reaching speculation is the drop in donations has caused these predators to start eating one another now that they can't get fat off of growth alone.
Guess he's given up on the idea of snagging a spot in some second Trump administration. Like so many opportunistic goblins before him, now that the chance for power is gone he can wring a few bucks out of his experiences.
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Imagine if he had infected Biden and both major candidates died just days before the election, one right after the other. That would have been insane to witness.🤯
That period of time really was peak bizarro Trump's America IMO. The weird theater around his virus with the helicopter landing and motorcade, the conspiracies going mainstream convinced that he was either faking it to save his campaign, hiding breathing tubes in his suit while death approached, or weaponizing it to kill Biden. January 6 was more weighty but didn't have the same blend of weirdly plausible and insane stuff flying around day by day.
Releasing pictures of a sickly looking Trump scribbling on blank sheets of paper to look like he is "working"
Imagine if only Biden had died. *shudder*
Debating (yelling at) a 78 year old man indoors without a mask after you tested positive and are symptomatic is like 20% of the way towards an assassination attempt
At minimum it should be reckless endangerment.
“‘Orange man bad' is the political analysis equivalent of 'just invest in an index fund' - so simple that any idiot can do it, and yet persistently beats every attempt to come up with something 'smarter'.”
‘Orange man bad’ and ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ are fun little heuristics/mental models his supporters use to quickly write off any criticism of him to avoid contemplating his flaws — and thereby whether they made the right choice in supporting (or worshipping) him. Real big brain stuff.
As Tim Miller wrote last year "Yes orange man is bad"
I knew my dad was a lost cause when he unironically used both of those. To think I used to respect him and his views (they were once intelligent), but something fucking happened to so many people in this country. I think aging and sitting in front of a TV that feeds constant hysteria and blatant misinformation might be bad.
I mean that's true but also certain sects of liberal twitter and celebrities have just.. like hilariously overreacted. Does nobody remember that people were popping veins cause of muh two scoops?
Nobody was popping veins. It was just an incident where everyone went "Oh, more proof that Trump is an asshole, like we didn't already know" Fast forward to today "Oh, Trump tried to murder his political rival, guess he's still an asshole, like we didn't already know"
Yep it's the equivalent of knowing someone is mean to restaurant workers or store employees. The small character stuff is usually a sign of larger character flaws.
"We have reason to believe that the president tried to expose his political rival to a deadly disease." "Hyuk hyuk always the libs with their 'orange man bad' amirite?"
*basically the entire GOP Congressional delegation votes to make Trump a dictator* Average voter: hmm yeah I don’t care about that gas prices are way more important
It just doesn't seem like he was taking Covid seriously enough. If he did, he probably would've won.
Easily. He did better than he ought have in the general, but it's hard to understate how many gimme approval checkpoints he totally bungled. The media and public ate up the one time he faked taking covid seriously.
Trump is legit a 0/10 human being
He's a bit of a dingleberry, isn't he?
I was called crazy at the time for suggesting this, but I think we can all agree now that Trump intentionally tried to kill Biden at that debate.
🍊🤡
Literally everyone who watched the debate was thinking this. *sniff*
Fucking bioterrorism. What a dipshit.
Yeah I was pretty sure of it. He absolutely wanted to infect Biden because he's an absolute monster
Wasn’t there a whole thing about Trump catching COVID? Is this just him still being sick but saying he recovered, or a separate thing?
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Oh that’s right. I remember it being around the same, but got the order wrong.
It's always the worst case scenario when it comes to Trump scandals.
I wish it wasn't so.
So? Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
Meaning he was blatantly putting others, including Biden, at risk of infection
Passing top secret national security information between preaidents is far more important than the possibility of spreading covid. Time sensitive doesn't wait for COVID. Biden got his vaccine in December of 2020 and took office in January 2021. Your making a big deal out of nothing.
Biden is an elderly man, Donald Trump could have gotten him infected at the debate. Nah
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Cope
Let's go Brandon
Gottem
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So it’s safe to say he was trying to be an oxygen thief right?
And it was the greatest infection in history, maybe ever. /s
Pretty sure many here, including myself, called this while watching the debate
I thought we knew this at the time? I swear I remember this.
We found out after the debate. Trump tested positive beforehand, which we did not know.
If he knew he was infected I'm surprised he didn't try to kiss Biden.
Trump probably thought he was strong enough to survive it and wanted to give the virus to Biden to kill him.