The grown-ups have left the building - Trump thread #136

[Spandauer]

As we descend into 4 years of madness...

(thanks @Jaichangecentfoisdenom and* *@AcrossthePond55 for the suggestions)

Previous thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5200273-hands-across-the-water-trump-thread-135

If he wants to be PM, Farage needs the votes of people who were and are passionately anti Brexit. This is why at every turn people need to be reminded he is "Mr Brexit".

Not sure someone as principled as Farage could do that.

Mind you, though it's (briefly) fun to watch while these people aren't yet in office, this much disruption at the heart of US government is manna to Vlad.

I'm not so sure. I don't think he factored in the opposition from the ground. Astonishingly he may have over estimated how dumb the MAGA crowd are.

Who remembers the end of "The Man Who Would Be King" ?

I saw some of the MAGA quake on twitter last night
but could not face clicking onto various accounts to find out.

Heather Cox Richardson's summary this morning was gleeful.
THe inauguration is going to be a bin fire

re Reform in the UK - Farage is the figurehead. The rest are nutters. He cannot become PM without winning >330 MPs
and Badenoch is not exactly rolling out the red carpet.

My first reaction to Farage as PM was "Oh no, that will never happen. People are too smart to fall for his crap". Then I remembered who our POTUS-elect is for the fucking 2nd time and that I had thought "Oh no, it won't happen a 2nd time". Luckily at least you don't have an Electoral College to deal with, although it wouldn't have made a difference in 2024.

As far as "If we have no Speaker, the election can't be certified so Trump can't be inaugurated", that's just clutching at straws. They can vote Johnson back in on the first day of session (3 Jan) then vote to fire him on 7 Jan after the election is certified on (the infamous) 6 Jan.

Remember they changed the rule to 'only one Rep has to call for a vote to fire the Speaker'. And it only takes a simple majority to vote him in and to vote him back out. And the GOP has the majority.

@AcrossthePond55 POTUS is a separate election from Senate and Congress.
In the UK the Prime minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons.
The UK cannot have a split house like the US gets
and the electoral boundaries and rules work in an utterly different way (all MPs have a similar size electorate)

@Talkinpeace

No, I get the difference, I think I just worded it in 'US terms'. I just can't believe Reform UK would get enough votes in an election to end up with Farage being PM. Is that really a serious concern? But then again, who would have thought 20 years ago that MAGA would ever be so powerful in US politics.

I always thought that in the Commons there was a majority party 'in power' and an opposition party. I always rather equated your opposition party to be similar to our minority party, in that they can still propose laws and can still vote in opposition to things favoured by the majority party. Is that not correct?

Elon Musk and Steve Bannon having a civilised discussion. Worthy successors to Washington and Jefferson.

If Farage could mobilise the “never” voters here via social media (and the mainstream media, which appears to be in thrall to him), I suppose he could pull it off. Lots of people don’t trust politicians and actually know very little about politics, Parliament, government and legislation, so they might vote for anything that seemed to offer something different. Reform came second to Labour in how many constituencies? Brexit is over and done with now, few people understood what it was all about in the first place (apart from “sovereignty” and “passports”).

@borntobequiet
Reform came second to Labour in how many constituencies?
Utterly irrelevant due to that magnificently British thing - the Protest Vote

Reducing the margin in a safe seat is a solid protest vote
all smoke no flames

UKIP, Brexit Party, and multiple other random on the day groupings.
NOTHING will put Farage (the Dulwich public school boy merchant banker with a German passport) become UK PM

I don’t think “nothing” and “never” are words that should be advisedly used in politics at the moment.
Protest voting is the voting des nos jours, it appears.

@borntobequiet

"If Farage could mobilise the “never” voters here via social media (and the mainstream media, which appears to be in thrall to him), I suppose he could pull it of"

In other words, pulling a Trump.

@Talkinpeace

"NOTHING will put Farage (the Dulwich public school boy merchant banker with a German passport) become UK PM"

I hate to say it, but this is what all of us said about Trump; "No way. It'll never happen". And yet here we are. Not once but TWICE.

The American electoral system is utterly different to the UK.

Every MP (and the prime minister has to be an MP) has roughly the same electorate.
The US electoral college gives massively distorted weight to small rural areas
AND
The US allows filibustering and voter suppression
and inconsistent voter rules around voter registration and polling districts.

Trump in 2016 was an independent outside of the Senate and Congress machine.
That is not how the UK system works.

Jimmy Carter RIP.

(Trump will no doubt have something unpleasant to say and/or manage to shoehorn a reference to himself into the narrative)

RIP Jimmy Carter. This is an article about his links with Habitat for Humanity since the 80s. Even in his nineties he helped build houses and was involved in the building of nearly 4,500 homes for the homeless. The article talks about how it all came about.
How I wish we had a man of his moral fibre due to be President now instead of plumbing the depths with Trump.

www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/jimmy-carter-habitat-for-humanity/

Was it Carter that sold his family peanut farm when he was elected? I seem
to recall he was cited as the principled example when 2016 Trump refused to divest himself of his business interests.

Yes I believe so

How many of us wouldn't have 'cashed in' in some way? Remarkable.

Carter did not want to make money from his time in the Oval Office.
"I don't see anything wrong with it; I don't blame other people for doing it," he told the Washington Post. "It just never had been my ambition to be rich."

After leaving the White House, the couple returned full time to the house they lived in before he entered politics, a two-bedroom rancher that is valued at less than the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

11 facts about Jimmy Carter that may surprise you.
The peanut farmer-turned-president, who died Sunday at 100, put solar panels on the White House and once spent 89 seconds inside a melting nuclear reactor.
gift token:
https://wapo.st/3BPh9Z9

The peanut farmer-turned-president, who died Sunday at 100, put solar panels on the White House
And Reagan took them off right away even though as solar thermal they provided free hot water

When we moved to the UK in 2004, UKIP was a joke party. No one foresaw the referendum results. America voted in Obama. No one foresaw Trump. I fear you vastly underestimate the power of Musk's purse and a voting base of young men radical for radicalisation via social media, plus ordinary voters who are going to feel hard done by over the next several years by Labour's almost inevitable inability to ameliorate the pain inflicted by austerity, Brexit and 14 years of Tory leadership.

I very much hope you're right, but fear you're not.

RIP Jimmy Carter. A truly fine and honourable person.

Jimmy Carter truly lived his Faith. A man of service to humanity.

"Well done, good and faithful servant" Matthew 25:21

One thing that separates the US and UK is not only size, but coherence. Something which youth culture can teach us.

It's entirely possible - nay normal for a fad to start in the UK in (say) Cornwall, and be in John O'Groats a week later. And then just as quickly burn itself out. This is why when MTV started up, it was playing UK artists that were already well past their UK sell by date. Although it did help them break the states.

I wonder if the same applies to culture more generally ?

Even within Europe, dealing with time zones isn't really a thing. Whereas if you live in NY and need to deal face to face with someone in CA, you really need to time it carefully. That physical (and temporal) separation is alien to a UK where we all sit down at 3pm on Christmas Day in hushed reverence to hear the wisdom of our anointed sovereign with the only distraction coming from trying to hold a fart of nuclear proportions in until the room is clear.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/30/donald-trump-loses-appeal-e-jean-carroll

@SerendipityJane
I was staying with my Dad (whose birthday it would have been today)
in Manhattan
during the first summer of MTV

The distance between New York and California
is the same as that between London and New York.

Europeans are used to multiple languages and nearby borders
Americans are not