Is it really that wrong to want for your country what Trump stands for?

[Anniedash]

I know that there are plenty of threads on Trump at the moment, but most of them are designed to rubbish the guy. That’s been done to death in the last 10 years.

He has still won two presidential elections so perhaps it’s time to move the discussion on a bit.Let’s put aside Trump’s personality, bluster, and whether he will deliver or not, for a second.

Is it really so wrong and bad to want to go for what his core message is? Why is the far right label used so liberally and will we ever see a government in this country which can tackle this madness -

A stop to or huge reduction in illegal immigration

Putting your own country first ahead of internationalism. It’s not a novel idea and certainly not a byword for automatically wanting war. In fact Trump’s argument is that war is bad

Saying no the climate hysteria. Climate change is real but climate emergency seems to be a made up concept to simply tax people to death to re distribute taxes to government lobbyists. Why should people accept being poorer in the name of this dangerous ideology

Putting a stop to woke madness. When did it become ok for state sponsored mutilation of children? Men pretending to be women in prison and hospitals getting access to women’s spaces. People being sanctioned do not using the correct pronouns

Driving the economy forward and putting a stop to endless freebies for those who have no intention of contributing to the system and refuse to work because they are sad.

The fact that someone as eccentric as Trump has to fly the flag for common sense ideas shows you just how batshit the political discourse has become.

It would be easy. The US still has a small military base there. Panama is a tiny country. Military helicopters can leave airforce bases in Texas, fly nonstop round trip to drop bombs.

The US ran Panama for several generations, recently, so it has a lot of knowledge about how things work and who is who.

The real question is, why bother?

Even setting aside his policy decisions, he is just not fit for public office.

• There are multiple complaints in New York State, going back to the 80s, about him failing to pay his contractors for work.
• He is an alleged serial sex offender, going back to the 1970s.
• He obtained loans by fraudulently overstating the value of his assets
• He obtained planning permission to build on protected land in the UK by promising to create significant employment in the area, then built something different that provides very little employment.
• He uses loopholes to avoid paying personal income tax, despite claiming to be a successful businessman with a high income
• His first wife has stated that he coerced her into having an abortion.
• He incited a riot, then claimed it was nothing to do with him.
• He paid hush money during an election cycle (illegal) then booked it as something else in his accounts (illegal)
• He appoints cronies and family members to important government positions for which they are not qualified.

I could go on...

They tried to litigate Trump and he was found to be a 36 times felon.

The ideas that you put forward are appealing to what is known as the lowest common denominator. The uneducated (or at least not to university/degree level). They sound really appealing but the people who vote for them are like turkeys voting for Christmas. They didn't and don't understand that when the tariffs are applied, the country sending the goods into America don't pay them - it's the Americans who pay at the tills. That's all well and good until they try to buy the American version of X (whatever it is they want) which should be cheaper but isn't available as they no longer make X in the US.

I mean even the merchandise that Trump flogs (including his ties) are made in China!!! FFS. Make your own merch at home Donald and then you could at least be seen as leading by example. He doesn't lead. I don't think he knows how to.

Economics… as compared to what we are experiencing in UK…. Because our voters are so well educated and policies are not targeted to lowest common denominators?? You think UK is well educated in terms of the masses?

Get real. Labour did the exact same thing - made promises to the lowest common denominators and uneducated because there are so many of them!! Its numbers of votes.

Labour Fostering hatred of the minority of educated and highest factor who own anything. Whilst Looking the other way at crime, drugs, immigration …

I’ll just leave this here.

yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/49978-how-britain-voted-in-the-2024-general-election

Education remains a strong indicator of how someone voted, with Labour doing a lot better than the Conservatives amongst those who have a university degree (42% to 18%). By contrast, the Tories performed marginally better than Labour amongst those whose highest level of education attained is GCSEs or lower (31% to 28%).

Reform UK also did significantly better amongst those with a lower level of education receiving 23% of the vote amongst this group, compared to just 8% amongst those with a higher level of education.

The opposite was true for the Lib Dems and Greens who did better amongst those with a higher education.

I encourage everyone to watch Musk speak at the inauguration. Its on YouTube. He appears to very enthusiastically do a Nazi salute. Twice.

America has fallen.

Yes!
We are fucked

I am so so happy at the executive orders signed. Finally the conservatives are getting some wins. It feels good tbh to see us righting the ship.

The average American emits 130x as much CO2 as the average person in Niger. But it's Niger that is the problem?

Elon Musk's literal Nazi salute at the inauguration not guving you pause for thought OP?

Immigration is what made America great in the first place.

Cool It by Bjorn Lomborg is a good starting point.

He's a statistician and environmentalist who thinks climate change is man-made, worrying and real (as do I).

But thinks that the response has departed from good scientific and economic sense in a way that harms us, both now and in the future, and especially harms poor people.

His main points are that the economic burden of slower growth/more poverty is massively underweighted or even ignored in the mainstream debate (perhaps because those leading the debate are mainly post-poverty), that climate adaptation offers a much better way to protect against harms than attempts at reversal (for example, the number of people harmed by extreme weather events in the West has decreased, not increased, steadily over time, because the West got richer and spent on adaptation). And that carbon capture and storage technology is massively under-invested in because it's a public good, but also because of an ideological aversion to it (in favour of a de-growth mindset) which means we continue to warm faster than we have to.

I'm not in total agreement with the previous poster (I'm pro-growth, pro-electrification, pro-carbon taxes and carbon markets, and pro climate mitigation, and I think climate change is a serious threat that requires big changes, just not always the ones proposed).

It's really not stupid to look at the course of our environmental debate over the past decades and into the present and think it's been at best a mixed blessing and possibly actively bad for humanity. The anti-nuclear-power, anti-adaptation and degrowth strands of it certainly. I do think it's getting better, thankfully, as it's become a more mainstream concern.

Trump & Co have conveniently forgotten that 🙄

🇮🇷 Iran &
🇱🇾 Libya &
🇾🇪 Yemen &
🇺🇸 USA

These countries are the non-signatories of the Paris Agreement. What a bunch.

I just watched the footage...chilling

Musk isn’t the president, he might chair one department outside of the formal government.

And I am sure he will deny it is a Nazi or fascist salute.

Musk is s very strange guy, almost certainly psychologically unwell, but he is not a threat to democracy unless he is allowed to become so.

America has lurched right in quite a big way, partially for good (I am sure most here will applaud the U.S returning to two ‘genders’) and partially for bad. But it definitely hasn’t ‘fallen’. I’m not saying that it won’t, but it remains a low probability event.

Yes fostering a political climate in which a prominent figure feels emboldened to throw out Nazi salutes at the biggest political event of the half decade is NBD 🙄

I think you'll find that even the 'right wingers' on here are pro-choice, especially for rape.

100% agree with this.
It's all about him and how he can progress his own wealth and agenda, with the possibility of breaking the law on the way/to achieve his ends.

The little man, but even more so, all.women, have had serious setbacks by his election and inauguration. I am completely horrified of the effects his decisions will have on the lives of millions, to the detriment.

The great argument - if you don't like what you're hearing try to distract them by showing them something shiny and sparkly - I call this the "Magpie Defence".

It's really got no substance and it's purely meant as a distraction.

Yes there are uneducated people everywhere. Every country has them. It speaks volumes though about the education system when so many of them think that what Trump was saying was actually for their ears when it's actually for the ears of his billionaire friends.

Trump has taken over at the end of the Biden Administration. Any sort of economics from Trump's time in power will be felt in about 12-18 months (approx) as everything else is down to Biden's teams. It was the same when he took over from Obama. Great economic prosperity and then he ran the country into the ground and added billions to the US national debt.

Oh and last point, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/20/trump-elon-musk-salute

‘The great argument - if you don't like what you're hearing try to distract them by showing them something shiny and sparkly - I call this the "Magpie Defence".

It's really got no substance and it's purely meant as a distraction.

Yes there are uneducated people everywhere. Every country has them. It speaks volumes though about the education system when so many of them think that what Trump was saying was actually for their ears when it's actually for the ears of his billionaire friends.’

I hate this argument, nearly always used by the wealthy liberal elite.

The above poster didn’t quite use the term ‘thick’, but most do. When right wingers get elected, or electorates give a thumbs down to further global integration, they are accused of conning a thick electorate who don’t know what is good for them.

The reality is that politics isn’t maths and no one knows the perfect solution; all policies benefit some and harm others.

Democracy isn’t perfect, but I still think it is better than any alternative. And, if an electorate gets it wrong, they get another vote every half a decade or so. All politicians claim to have found the panacea in opposition, and all lie that their manifesto will be good for everyone. If you have failed to make your case to the electorate, it is your fault, not their fault.

@LookItsMeAgain

"Oh and last point, when someone shows you who they are, believe them."

Oh - should we also be worried about Kamala Harris and Santa too?

@GeneralPeter , that's almost exactly my view on climate change too. The world is a harsh place - I think sometimes there's a rosy view that the world today or 200 years ago was perfectly suited to human habitation and we were all living lives in perfect harmony with nature, but if you look at who is statistically hardest hit by natural disasters it's countries with low levels of infrastructure sophistication who don't have the defences.

And the thing that helps with building that level of infrastructure is energy security.

I don't think the average Brit can even imagine what it's like to not have energy security at a national level. The outrage at the Winter Fuel Payment cuts would pale in comparison. There wouldn't be energy to buy for any amount of money. Infrastructure like levees and storm drains and firetrucks wouldn't be prioritised for maintenance when all energy supply is going towards food and heating and maybe hospitals if there's a bit left.

This is to say nothing about energy usage by defence forces in a more politically unstable world with increased migration.

If you truly believe the climate is becoming more unpredictable, the last thing you should be doing is advocating for us to cut off energy sources before we have replacements - including coal, oil, and nuclear. And you should be training as an engineer and encouraging everyone you know to do the same.

Actually dissident European settlers built America and made it a great country.

Somehow European rejects built a country called Australia that wasn’t too bad either tbh.

A country is an aggregate of its people. If its people are productive and optimistic, that will be reflected in the national character.

I find British people, whilst polished and civilized, to be pessimistic do-nothings who are resentful of success. And that’s certainly reflected in the state of your country right now.

Sorry but I’m tired of the constant sniping from a declining power that hectors from an increasingly bad position.

Leave just there … think through the data source and collection used by Yougov. Sure they will tell you their data collection is accurate and representative …. But they absolutely fail to survey large swaths of the UK population.

They use telephone but literally only 10% will talk to them. And the “internet” …. You have to ask self, who talks to these people or spends time doing an online political survey? Is there a bias ? Do you talk to the people with clipboards doing surveys at train stations or by polling stations?

Look around, do you think the uneducated masses are participating in Yougov surveys?

Yougov is a data source, but you must look at how they gather data and consider the weight you give it. IMO, they miss large segments of voters. They of course, being self interested, running a business will tell you that they are best!