The tide is turning on Trump

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1. CNN now, poll shows majority of Americans disapprove of Trump.

1. Commentator stated that Trump spoke about his several conversations with Putin and alarm bells ring, because Trump is parroting what Putin says. No independent thoughts?

1. He comes over as having memory problems. He forgets what he said earlier.

1. He needs help running press conferences and appears unable to manage without support.

Is he ill?

It's very odd.

Yey! The world will sleep well tonight now.

Lolol

Absolutely agree with this. China are the biggest owner of US Treasury Bonds - they effectively own a significant portion of the US debt- they don't need to do anything other than start calling those debts in to utterly destroy the US - they wouldn't need to go to war!

Great. Now what about women who are forced to risk their lives giving birth or women who are forced to give birth to their rapist's child? What about maternity rights? What about women's workplace rights as Trump decides to scrap salary data on sex and ethnicity? What about the fact that the White House through Congress is trying to undermine public health insurance like Medicaid, which tens of millions of women with low incomes rely on to pay for health care?
What about the fact that black women living in poverty are disproportionately dying from cervical cancer because they find it difficult to access the HPV vaccine. Now the man who should be helping them gain access to this vaccine is spreading antivaccine misinformation? What about the fact that anti-female rhetoric has become widespread "Your body, my choice" said by men. Abusers are becoming emboldened. Trump is a sexual abuser, who spent much time with Epstein. He's previously backed the Tate brothers, men who traffic and rape women.
Forgive me if as a woman, I'm not jubilant that a trans woman can't play football. I'm not undermining the issue at all but there are far bigger threats to women under Trump's administration.

I cannot believe that anybody - Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, left or right, Christian or Jew or Muslim, male or female, trans or not - believes that that is the most important issue right now, or that it is so overwhelmingly important that the ‘correct’ viewpoint on it should drive anyone’s vote.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.

It's not towards Africans, it's towards you. Advertising is space you pay for. Go and pay for some and stop spamming this discussion.

Could you please signpost me to which US women’s prisons have trans inmates?

Precisely - I'm firmly in the GC camp but when it comes to a choice between a party that has gone a bit cuckoo in terms of the trans issues but are great in terms of women's rights in almost every other way (maternity rights, employment rights, focusing on reducing VAWG, good social policies which would otherwise disproportionaly affect women and children) like Labour or the Democrats

Versus

A party that is happy to define sex only because it wants to be able to discriminate against anyone who is not a straight white male, including subjugating women, and knows that it is an issue that will score votes, that has a record of curtailing women's rights and is open about its plans to do so further, that wants to destroy the social safety net like the Republicans, Conservatives and Reform.

I'll take the first choice every single time. I really don't understand anyone who is feminist or left leaning centrist who would either vote for the second choice or abstain altogether. I'd rather take my chances and continue to fight around single sex spaces knowing that the other things are relatively safe!

This article https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/05/incarcerated-trans-women says that there are 16 trans women currently housed in women’s prisons in the US, out of 1.8-1.9 million prisoners in total.

It doesn’t say whether those 16 are housed together with female prisoners or whether they are in fact housed in separate accommodation within the women’s estate.

16 out of 1.8 million is less than one thousandth of one percent, and I argue again that this is not the most pressing issue affecting the US right now, nor should it be the yardstick by which a president is voted for.

The blame is squarely on Americans who voted Republican.

You know when we read histories of Germany prior to and during WWll and we read ‘Many Germans supported Hitler because….’?

Do you really want to be someone of whom the history of this period says ‘Some people supported Trump because of his rhetoric about trans women in sport’?

Indeed and let's not forget that most trans women are not sexual offenders.
Trumps policies, on the other hand, will disadvantage millions of women.

@Workaholic22 I think it's also on the Republican party for selecting him to stand knowing his policies

Yes. The one reason fir voting Trump that I can understand- if not fully excuse - is ‘I am a lifelong Republican, and so I always vote for my party’s candidate’.

The Republican party has to take the blame that is due to them for presenting their supporters with a candidate whose policies were always going to threaten global security.

My Ukrainian friend’s mum lives in St Petersburg.
She phoned her mum from Kyiv during the bombing at the start of the war and said ‘Mum, I’m scared.’
Her mum told her not to be silly, she must be imagining it, Putin wouldn’t attack civilians.

That’s not someone being scared of reprisals, that’s someone who really believes.

(They are no contact now.)

@BloominNora Yes, I don't think that most Americans recognize what an economic mess the country is in. We haven't had a budget surplus since 2001, we're 34 trillion in debt, and pay billions in annual interest.

The debt ceiling keeps being raised and no administration seems willing to tackle it. If we now go into a downward economic spiral, it won't be pretty.

Economically it's very scary. I've been keeping a eye on the stock prices. FTSE100 and the European markets are all doing really well.

The Dow is tanking off the back of tariffs and the uncertainty.

Add into the mix large scale unemployment, reductions in social security and medicaid and increased tax burdens on lower and middle classes (if Project 2025 is fully implemented), plus the tax breaks for the super rich - it's got all the makings of another 1920's Depression.

OK, so people won't occasionally hire trans women now. They will also hire fewer women day in day out, now women have been tacitly or fairly outwardly declared to be inherently worse candidates than men and this has been poltically declared to be a totally ok viewpoint because it is 'anti woke' and 'just common sense'.

There are around 550,000 trans women in the whole of America. Marginalising them in employment has come at the cost of nearly 170 million women facing even more widespread work and hiring discrimination. Great result for women, eh?

@BloominNora As someone upthread said, the midterms will reflect the public's mood towards the Republicans so let's see what happens. Scary times, as you say. 😞

Trump’s barometer for success is whether the stock market is up or down—he’s always banging on about it. I wonder what his next move will be if the DOW continues to dip.

Do you not give the republicans who voted for him any of the "credit"?

@YankTank I’m sure he’ll have a “well-considered” response, not. 😂

And what if America just refuses to pay? I could quite see Trump declaring those debts illegitimate and writing them off. What happens then? Anyone know?

If they simply said "we will not pay out on t-bills owned by nationals and institutions from countries X, Y, Z" then it would certainly affect the US's credit rating and obviously make it harder for the government to borrow money on the international markets. However, the majority of US debt is owned by US institutions, so I imagine the effect would be limited. It would however greatly undermine the status of USD as the world's reserve currency.