The Orange Man and the State of his Union - Trump thread #139

[Spandauer]

Thanks to @JoshLymanSwagger for the thread title.

Trump, Vance and Musk are building a bigly bridge across the Bering Strait...
...and creating a gaping chasm in the Atlantic.

Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Previous thread:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/chat/5275361-an-unholy-trinity-or-just-a-seedy-threesome-trump-musk-and-putin-trump-thread-138

That’s terrible. I dread to think where this is going to end.

Thousands of scientists have been demonstrating. What kind of an idiot pulls the plug on so much science?

I think the answer to that is contained in the question 😅

The Fulbright thing is just so cruel. They're awful people (as well as being idiots).

I'm fuming about him bringing the child with cancer to the joint session while simultaneously cutting off the funding into childhood cancer research and trials.

It’s honestly frightening. What’s the betting they find some funding for neuralink though.

USAID were also funding female Afghan scholarships in Oman. These have been withdrawn and the women told to go home within two weeks. Quite a few of them are at risk for activism towards the regime.

Unbelievable.

It's particularly galling as my relative who works for USAID says it's completely chaotic. They're all on administrative leave, sitting in a foreign country, unable to go to work, access the computer system or distribute the medication they have that's already bought and paid for, so people are getting ill and dying needlessly. But they're still being paid, which is good for them in an otherwise hopelessly miserable situation, but hardly adding up to efficient cost-saving.

And then there's how much the eventual lawsuits and defending against them is going to cost the government. Particularly at the rate they're losing DOJ staff.

That’s absolutely tragic @user9876543211. The madness of King Trump.

.

How tragic, so sad. One man and his unmerry men have caused all of this.

I'd hesitate to call him a man..

So much unnecessary harm and possibly more death to come because of the ego and general incompetence of the big orange baby.

Whilst I am glad Europe is finally waking up to the need for a funded defence, it will come at the cost of America's soft power. The EU and UK are not rearming purely because of the Russia but also due to the US's unstable behaviour. They are no longer an ally and there's grounds to consider them an active threat, given the present administration's stance towards Canada and Greenland. Trump is taking a direct leaf out of Putin's playbook with economic warfare on a flimsy pretext.

Does the US (and China) really want a militant EU with a fully integrated army and the spending power of 550 million people behind it? One of the tacit agreements coming out of the Second World War was a benign and quiet Europe given the horrors the continent imposed on the rest of the world when it was belligerent.

I guess we are at the FAFO period of history. Again.

I do genuinely think that the US and Trump’s motivation might have been to try and get the Europeans to step up, and that it might have worked but I’m not sure they quite realise(d) that in doing it in the way they have that what’s happened is a move towards Europe actively seeing them as a threat and an adversary. The trust is gone and what will result is a rearmed Europe that won’t be willing necessarily to step into the breach when the US requests it.

Admittedly, I've become incredibly cynical over the past several years, but I'd see it more as aimed at realigning the axis of alliances as per Putin's hopes. If America's no longer on side, Europe and NATO are arguably a weaker barriers to whatever Putin and friends' long term goals are. I think it's just another playing card in the game of destroying western democracy.

US foreign policy since WW2 (they didn't really have one prior) has been to ensure that whatever theater they are in, they are top dog. Hence their investment in ensuring that South America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe don't do anything stupid like band together.

That doctrine now appears to be in the wind. And since it doesn't benefit the US (who will be last to realise, given their current situation) and massively benefits Russia, you do find yourself asking whose tune they are playing.

It would be ironic if the country built on a rejection of the internecine wars of Europe ends up subservient to a more united Europe than America.

I had actually meant to put that on the Ukraine threads but equally applies here!

Well it's the Trump as solipsist again isn't it? He doesn't think of other countries as existing, as being real.

I mean it really informs everything he does. Just reading the above posts about Afghan women, Fulbright scholars and the rest.

Reading some US posters on here recently (the goady type) you feel like solipsism is an American philosophy.

So the USA’s payroll is not yet reduced. China and Canada said they would take the USA to court and I believe there are penalty fines that will need to be paid. Financially the Us has tipped to the point of no return.
i really enjoyed this podcast.

Reading some US posters on here recently (the goady type) you feel like solipsism is an American philosophy.

I'm not entirely convinced they're all American. I've been making a practice of posting this in response to quite a few of them

Germany has issued a travel warning for the US, specifically for restrictions on trans people.

I think that there is always a risk in online media of people being deliberately goaded into being against each other. Of course some people (not just Americans) are thick and nasty. Some people are trolls. And some people actually want to stir up division. It only takes a few people posting "Europeans will learn the lesson for being weak and pathetic" or "Americans are all fat lazy cowards. We are planning to spit on their flag next weekend" for other people to react and throw insults back, and it all then escalates (especially when people are genuinely upset). And then someone has screenshots of the unpleasant things said to share elsewhere. And the original two posts could have been written by the same person. Actually I think deliberate trolling to get a reaction that paints the trollee in a bad light is a technique of Vance etc but that's another story.

I would almost always chose to respond to someone in good faith (assuming that they are who they say they are). But I don't think its worth letting it emotionally affect you, or making assumptions about Americans/men/women/Muslims/Christians etc based on posts by anonymous individuals.

I meant to add, I do think its not just always about bringing people onside/round to the opinion they claim to have. Sometimes I think its the opposite. Like a straw man but made of manure instead.

"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets."

WH Auden.

I don't disagree, but what I'm seeing a lot of (not this thread, but the site) are provocative threads started by one-time posters, with no history, who either don't come back or only come back to express faux naivete or be goady, where a lot of phrases seem repeated word for word from right wing talking points and disinformation. There seems to be an influx lately.

Randy Rainbow back again. (He now has a sponsor's ad to sit through but still en pointe.)

Yaeh sorry - I realised that my comment about "I would always try to take it in good faith" sounds like I was chastising you in a PA way for commenting - I wasn't at all. I do think that drawing attention to the issue in the way you described is probably useful for other readers. I just don't know where the lines are with MN rules around troll hunting and also, am lazy.