this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
1115 points (98.9% liked)
Political Humor
831 readers
248 users here now
Welcome to Political Humor!
Rules:
- Be excellent to each other.
- No harassment.
- No sexism, racism or bigotry.
- All arguments should be made in good faith.
- No misinformation. Be prepared to back up your factual claims with evidence.
- All posts should relate to politics and be of a humorous nature.
- No bots, spam or self-promotion.
- If you want to run a bot, ask first.
- Site wide rules apply.
- Have fun.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I know some people are saying it was always this way, but never have I ever seen (since the '60s) or heard of a president propose annexing sovereign nations and buying countries as casually as this one.
I hope it's just some strange psychological ploy, but it's just too weird and informal to have a Presidential precedent.
There have been periods of fascism in the United States that have echoed what we are seeing today, namely the silver legion in the 30s. However, no one who has been so transparently fascist has ever been the head of state.
I don't really think it's a ploy, moreso I think he's just testing the waters and seeing who will stand up to his rhetoric. Anyone in the Republican party who actually tries to resist will be politically attacked or isolated.
Fascist always purify their own hierarchy of organization before making moves on others. Unfortunately, it seems our republica future is in the hands of the Republican Senate. Now we get to see if the founding fathers were correct in their hopes that the Senate would be more resistant to rampant populism.
I wouldn't get my hopes up though, the founding fathers had a lot of idiotic notions reliant on decor and tradition.
At some point every government relies on good will. Hard to blame the founding fathers when that breaks down.
The founding fathers were more than aware they had to put up guard rails to prevent "mob rule", they just didn't believe in the same guiding rules for their own class.
Founding fathers couldn't predict the question of banning TikTok would ever arise.
They didn't think anything could replace Vine.
The biggest change is that in the past, what the president thought and said was private, the messages transmitted to the public were carefully controlled, and there were several filters they had to pass through to get to the ordinary people.
Today, through social media, we have unfiltered access to the president's thoughts. And we're learning why this is a bad idea.
All other presidents of the social media age so far have managed not to make complete fools of themselves, so maybe it has to do with this particular one.
I assure you, Jimmy Carter did not have thoughts of using military intervention to annex Greenland. Twitter in 1978 would have been "OMG, I got attacked by a swimming rabbit!"
Trump really is more dangerous than all past presidents. Not even Andrew Jackson threatened to court martial politicians that didn't support him.
But did Woodrow Wilson?
Nope. Woodrow Wilson only had private hate for blacks. Which Trump also has.
Similar thing happened with CSPAN.
Back in the day, a Congressmember could make a speech on the floor that only their hometown press would cover. Then they could scoot to the cloak room and cut a deal to vote the opposite way. Bipartisanship was the rule.
Once everything got read into the public record, the members were forced to actually vote for stuff they knew was crazy, but that the locals were hot for.