AIBU to think Trump appears increasingly unhinged?

[anotherside]

Are you concerned that Trump has totally lost his marbles?

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP

I thought they had started to claim the latest post was not him. But good to have this quote to throw back at them!

It was even suggested many big decisions towards the end of his term in office were being made by others in his office because he was incapable of making them.

It’s pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that’s exactly what’s happening now.

I hope that in a few months time when Trump is using the Iran war as a rallying cry for the Mid Terms, claiming success and putting himself forward as the hero of the hour and the strategic leader of the US armed forces ( which he will do whatever the outcome!) that the American people, especially those who lost a sibling, a cousin or a friend not forgetting the few remaining parents who lost a child, in the Vietnam war, that Robert Mueller was a decorated war hero in that unwinnable conflict , whereas Trump who sneered at Muellers death in the cruellest and most spiteful way, was a several times draft dodger.

It is, as Trump has discovered, a lot easier to risk other peoples lives in armed combat than to risk your own.

Conservatives / right-wingers / Trumpists reject any and all accountability for their own choices.

So their choice to vote Trump is “The Democrats” fault as is they were forced to vote / forced to vote for Trump.

It’s so childish.

And they gave up a lot of their hard won rights with it, for example abortion rights.

Ofcourse many women agree with that too.

Selective memory for some! Trump’s deranged behaviour was clear as far back as 2020 when he lost to Biden and refused to accept it.

His supporters knew who he was and still backed him.

Just take responsibility for your candidate.

(By this logic everything Biden the Republicans are responsible for and everything Starmer does is the Tories fault ad infinitum.)

It is always possible he uses it as an excuse not to have the Mid Terms.

LOL

To be fair I don't think he should be entirely personal about it - Harry was just an example of the people who were being insulted, but I don't really think that he should only take it badly on behalf of his own actual family. But I think that Trump, with his obsession about his children getting WH jobs etc would understand that more even if he has no concept of Charles' role of representing the whole nation.

But how can insulting British soldiers in Afghanistan just be overlooked?

Indeed. And that's where you have to ask how is that possible? Because he wasn't elected just by the diehard Jan 6th people 4 years later - he did BETTER than in 2016.

So while I don't accept that everything he has done since his election is somehow "on the Democrats", I do think that that regain of support for a man who had been thoroughly disavowed in November 2019 can't be explained why much that Trump did, but can be explained by disaffection with the Democrats in 2019.

There's really no plausible explanation that doesn't include a large measure of blame for the Democrats.

At this stage I'm loath to say he can't do something, because there've been so many things he shouldn't have been able to do, and did - but I would still draw the line at that:

Just as I also don't believe he'll get to stand for a third term, despite his own suggestions that he might.

I could be wrong, but I'm putting that out there as a line in the sand all the same.

I was hoping it was a very weak attempt at satire.

But they didn't. Poor women already couldn't access abortions, and wealthy women still can.

This is the sort of oversimplification that so many people make about America.

It is simplified as it goes a lot further than abortion rights.

Project 25, it was all there during the election.

Don't get me wrong, I think Trump is a disaster, for the rest of the world and to a lesser extent, for America.
But when people make massive oversimplifications like "Trump removed abortion rights" as though poor women and teenagers etc had access to abortion before the SC overturned Roe v Wade, it grinds my gears a bit.

It enables the Democrats to pretend they care about women's rights, when in fact if they'd cared, they'd have put Roe v Wade into law long ago. Obama said it was his number one priority, until it wasn't. And he had a supermajority at that time, so he could have done it. Removed it as a live issue because it would have been in the law, not just dependent on a SC reading of the constitution. My feeling is they didn't want to solve the issue because it allowed them to weaponise it to ensure women's support just by pointing to Republican opposition to abortion.

That’s only if you assume all the disaffected Democrat supporters went to Trump.

Whereas neither Trump nor Harris got more that 50% of the vote.

Many went third candidate or chose not to vote. Those options were open to Trump voters so them choosing to vote for him cannot be laid at the Democrats door.

LBC are talking about him now. Sheilagh basically just explained that she would welcome more shit piss and fuck if it meant world peace.

Why do you think poor women could not access abortions in states that enacted abortion bans? Planned parenthood centres exist?

If there has been change to the status quo what was the point of the bans and why have maternal mortality rates increased in states with them?

No it doesn't - why were all those Democrat supporters disaffected in the first place? That's certainly not the Republicans' doing

And even assuming Trump's new supporters were people who wouldn't have voted at all previously, that still leave the question of why they turned up for Trump. And that's where my point earlier about the government losing an election rather than the opposition winning it comes into play: it might be because the Republicans ran a great election campaign, but it's more likely that they strongly disliked something about the administration in power, ie, that they really didn't want the Dems to win.

And since they were people who tended not to vote, anyone in the Democratic party who really wants to change the party so as to win next time (rather than just call voters rude names) really needs to think about how they put middle of the road/uninvolved voters' backs up to that extent.

Have you forgotten already? For years before the overturning of Roe v Wade, many states had only one Planned Parenthood centre in the whole state - that's like driving from Italy to the Netherlands for an abortion: fine for a woman with means and no need to keep it all secret, but very different for a teenager or a woman with small children who doesn't want her partner to know she's pregnant again.

They also weren't often actually free. Readily available for those with the means to pay for one and access it - ie those who had the least need of them.

Here for instance is a NYT report from 2017 about Louisiana: https://archive.ph/h1flM (Roe v Wade was only overturned in 2022)

To get an abortion in the state of Louisiana, patients must fulfill a long list of requirements: There is a state-mandated ultrasound during which the technician is required to ask if they want to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus, there is an informational pamphlet designed to discourage them from ending their pregnancy, and there is a 24-hour waiting period before they can return to the clinic for the procedure. Lawmakers say this time empowers women to “reflect” upon their choice.
In reality, these demands are extremely costly. Many women have to pay for travel and lodging, and take time off work. They then have to pay upward of $500 (the typical price of an abortion at 10 weeks) out of pocket for a procedure that is often not covered by insurance or Medicaid. This is compounded by the fact that most women in this position are low income and already supporting a child at home.
In the past year and a half, little has changed. One exception is that when I conducted these interviews just over a year ago, the Women’s Health Center in New Orleans was one of only five clinics that provided abortions in Louisiana. Now it is one of three.

But the situation has worsened with the bans has it not?

Also not sure what your point is in posting this? Yes anti abortion stats placed hoops in place to make access to abortion harder. Overturning Roe vs. Wade made it easier to out right ban abortions which has directly impacted maternal mortality rates.

Isn't overall us wide maternal mortality falling?

Nobody has argued that Democrats being unhappy with their party is Trump’s fault.

That’s the point. Democrats are accountable for their loss.

Trump voters are accountable for who they chose to vote. It really is weak that every discussion on Trump being unhinged is pivoted back to “but the Democrats”. There Democrats have nothing to do with Trumps actions nor who Trump supporters chose to elect.

This is just whataboutery.

I'm not defending the war in Iran.

I'm saying that I would rather have a leader say exactly what's on his mind, and does it, rather than a creep who uses carefully measured language, then takes action that is equally horrific.

At least with Trump, you know exactly what you're getting. Whereas with Tony Blair, you had a creep who pretended to be level-headed, but then started the Iraq war which is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

... and then the issue of course is that all of us know multiple Tony Blairs in our personal lives...

In some places - because it depends on what the state concerned chose to do.

But that's not the same thing as pretending that the evil Republicans changed the situation from "everyone can get an abortion" to "nobody can".

The reality is that they won a "moral" or psychological victory rather than actually reducing abortion rates. And the Democrats could have pre-empted that but chose not to for their own electoral reasons - which is my real point here.

I'm not saying there's been no change - I'm saying the Deocrats wanted to keep the abortion issue on the stove for their own reasons, but played the game badly and lost.

(As for why maternal death rates have gone up, I'd need to see the detail, but one likely aspect is that when abortion is illegal, women who didn't want an abortion but who develop problems in their pregnancy are likely to find themselves dealing with healthcare professionals paralysed by the fear of being denounced for carrying out an abortion on a pregnancy that could (potentially) have been left to miscarry normally or even been saved. And some of those women will end up dying because of the delay. That's what happened to Savita Halappanavar in Ireland.)