Trump v Musk; popcorn moment!

[fixingmylife]

Musk has just tweeted that Trump is on the Espstein list. Shock horror, not! :-) This is going to roll and roll. USA elected children to run the country and to be the leader of the Western World! Popcorn at the ready......

@AliasGrace47 the US is not ready to elect a female president so the Dems would be shooting themselves in the foot by running one.

As much as I hate to say it, the only viable options now are - straight, white, male, under 55 from a “traditional” State (ie not California!) You have to look at what they are likely to be up against - Vance with DJT Jr rumoured as possible VP.

So that rules out AOC, Gavin Newsome and Pete Buttigieg.
You can probably cross Josh Shapiro off the list too, as I doubt the US will accept anyone who isn't Christian.

JD Vance running for president is expected. But Don Jr as his running mate? That would sink his chances. Poor Don does not have the charisma of his father.

My pick for Dem candidate (for what it's worth - I'm a mere Brit!) is probably Sen Mark Kelly. My pick for all of the above reasons of US not ready to elect a woman etc.
White, male, age 61, ex-navy, retired astronaut (suck that up Lone Skum), ran to be chosen as Harris's VP, Arizona Sen, husband of the wonderful wonderful Gabby Giffords who was shot in 2011 and survived. I was disappointed when he missed out to Walz for the VP ticket. Would anything have been different? Probably not.
Mark Kelly - Wikipedia

Gabby Giffords - Wikipedia

I thought the Epstein Files was about trafficking young women, not young children?
Virginia G was about 17/18 years old wasn't she?

I might be below the age of consent in the US but I wouldn't call that paedophilia.

I'm not a fan of Trump and obviously trafficking 16/17/18 year olds for sex is abominable but it's not paedophilia.

Point 3 in the Grand Jury Charges:

“The victims described herein were as young as 14 years old at the time they were abused”

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1180481/dl

I never realised that !! That puts things in a whole new light.

@heldinadream i think a lot of people were surprised when they didn’t choose Mark Kelly for VP last time.

There’s rumours that Rahm Emanuel might throw his hat in the ring, having served as an advisor to Clinton, in the House representing Illinois, as Obama’s CoS, Mayor of Chicago and most recently as Ambassador to Japan under Biden. The fact he is Jewish would likely (sadly) put a lot of people off and he does have something of a, shall we say “reputation” for picking fights, eh @JoshLymanSwagger!

He does also represent the old guard, so that would go against him.

@CaveMum I don't know what you mean <sniff>
😁 I'm sure he'd be up for the fight.

@heldinadream Mark is priced with the bookies in line with Robert F Kennedy Jr (oddschecker).
Make of that what you will.

Edited to add - If the Dems want to win, they're going to have to pick a WASPy straight man.

Yep this. Still too much sexism for a woman to get elected. My feeling is still that (eventually) the first woman president will be a Republican. So for now, WASPy straight man it will have to be (sigh)

Musk's now deleted the tweets saying Trump is in the Epstein files, and the video he'd posted of Trump partying with Epstein. Don't know why he's bothering, it's not like everyone's just going to think they must have imagined them!

I think it's very well known that Trump and Epstein were friends, but it's also known Trump fell out with him and barred him from Mar a Lago. Which he - and Musk - claimed was because he found out about the underage girls. So if Musk is now making a point that he's in the files, he's presumably trying to suggest that Trump was rather less horrified at discovering his mate was a paedo rapist than he's let on.

(In fairness, I don't think there's any suggestion that Epstein went for girls the age of Musk's daughters, though I thought there were accusations of girls around 11/12. May be wrong though. Still don't think I'd have my kids around someone who raped 14 year olds though.)

It did, but what else has he done except row with Musk? He spoke to the German Chancellor in the White House and repeated what he said to every other Head of State, blowing his own trumpet.

All we have heard for days is this daft argument. In UK I have heard nothing about the budget itself, or any comments from the administration.

Did I hear rightly on TV today, that Trump has said Ukraine deserved the latest beating from Putin because they should not have attacked Russian planes?

Russia is the aggressor, who invaded another sovereign country. Putin has been bombing Ukraine since 2014, and worse in the past 3 years.

America has provided ammunition and assets to Ukraine for those 3 years. America has levied sanctions on Russia and seized assets.

That tells me that Russia is an enemy and Ukraine a friend. Now the president of America has declared Ukraine wrong to defend itself against Russia just days after Trump declared Putin should not have attacked Kyiv.

Does that mean Trump is a traitor to America? Does the American Constitution allow for the President to side with an enemy of state, who has sanctions against it?

Such a shame - land of the free or land of the sexist? It's interesting that though racism still exists ofc they were able to elect Obama back in 2008. Elissa Slotkin is someone else who I really like, but I agree that sadly a woman, esp a Dem, probs has no chance for a long time. The Dems' clumsy idpol & Harris' antics have made that worse 🙄

Yes you did hear that. And yes, Trump is a traitor. Putin spent loads putin him in the WH, he didn't do it for the lolz. Trump is destroying the USA at home and abroad.

It was cheaper and easier for him to buy the POTUS than to win his war on Ukraine.🤷‍♀️

It was being abused on other threads.

It really needed to be taken off. Don't know what it can be replaced with though. The ones we have are clear enough.

Who advised him to raise the tariffs to prevent to many imports when American industry still needed raw materials from abroad?

Wouldn't it have been more sensible to increase the factories first? As I see it, by attempting to reproduce items at home rather than import them, was he expecting American workers to work for the same wages as China?

Musk doesn't agree with his budget, which we are told would have lowered taxes. To a certain extent you can understand his wrath when he worked to get rid of excess spending only to see it being used to give tax relief. Even worse if the lowering of taxes is associated with lower wages.

Nobody advised him, he has no grasp of basic economics. He once heard something about tariffs and decided they sounded like a great idea, and so here we are. Same as Liz Truss, she decided at university that certain economic policies sounded great and so implemented them. It's not a great way to run a country.

There's also the fact (which I don't think most of his voters realise) that he does actually want people to be poorer, and for the dollar to collapse. Which in fairness isn't actually stupid - the US massively overconsumes, and they are in insane amounts of debt because of it. Musk wants to tackle this by reducing spending, and I think by increasing taxes - or at least certainly not lowering them. Which is sensible, as when your country is in trillions of dollars of debt, increasing spending and cutting taxes is not a clever thing to do... So Musk is absolutely correct about this bill (and about the tariffs leading to recession). But because he's Elon Musk, rather than offer reasonable, evidence-based arguments, he's made himself look like a completely mentally unstable, aggressive knobhead by hurling insults, allegations of paedophilia, and idiotic empty threats to dismantle his own company. And he's essentially admitted that he has been happy to aid in the destruction of the economy by a paedophile, whilst he was getting something out of it.

There’s a school of thought that everything happening right now (well for the last 10 years) is a “White-lash” - a response to the “terrible” act of a black man being elected President.

Large swathes of American are still incredibly racist.

So do you think that Reeves was right to raise the employer's National Insurance contributions? Is she right to put pressure on businesses, increase their taxes and slap IHT on farmers?

Liz Truss did have some points. She encouraged employers to invest in business and workforces in the hope that businesses would do better and give more employment opportunities. Allowing businesses to keep more of the wealth they created also would have helped lower the amount of cheaper imports.

Now, whatever people manage to have left each week is spent at Temu and others. Employers have increased costs and many are going out of business. Even charities cannot pay the higher wages and national insurance and are laying people off. Hospices are in dire need of cash.

What incentives have this Chancellor given to businesses? What hope to the people? Train drivers have the winter fuel payments taken not only from pensioners, but also from the disabled. Many used that to service their boilers and so avoid carbon monoxide poisoning.

There cannot be judgement for UK now because we are just hanging under the sword of Damocles, waiting to see which way it drops.

Whatever Trump thinks is an unknown, because he is so confused.

Are you saying that Musk knew what the tariffs would do to the rest of the world and did not try to stop him?

I could accept after the event, and I could accept someone wanting to show the world how stupid he was, but not that Musk knew all along, and went along with it even though his own fortune might flounder?

Trump destroyed the trade in the southern hemisphere in an effort to stop the American people buying cheap imports instead of American made goods. That meant the American people cannot spend their money because American industry is not set up to produce cheap goods from abroad.

Look how cheap designer labels are to import, and American retailers are making a fortune out of them. Don't get me wrong, what he did was stupid, and he could have been choosy on what is imported if he didn't want Americans spending money abroad.

There again, he could have sat down and worked out whether the current industries can actually produce the goods Americans want, and at a low price, if the workers don't mind working for Chinese wages.

How can American industries compete anyway if the cost of raw materials is hit by his tariffs?

He wanted America to believe in him. He held up his placards showing the American people they were being diddled and Trump the business tycoon was there to save them all from going bust.

God help them. The only way he can make America great and prosperous again - if it ever really was this century - is to impoverish the rest of the world, and the rest of the world catches on very fast.

Who advised him to do tarrifs?

Probably no one. That was all Trump's own idea.🤦‍♀️ A fucking mental idea, but one that ballsed up the US and global economies real good.

The real question is who profits from them?🤔

Who indeed!

Wonder how much Trump's Tesla will sell for?

The person who buys Trump's Tesla would have to be rich, somewhat stupid, desirous of a second hand Tesla with an unfortunate back story, desirous of the attention and notoriety that will follow, and unaware of how foolish most people will think they are.
I've got to the end of that list and good lord who popped into my head - Donald Jr or Eric. Both of whom have been quite quiet recently and must be champing at the bit to get some of the action.
Hey, son, wanna buy my last car? 🚘

Apropos of which, I travelled in a Tesla for the first and likely last time the other day, an Uber in London driven by an extremely kind and pleasant driver. There was no chance of me making any kind of stand and refusing it (small person in tow, granddaughter who I needed to convey across London with a load of luggage etc etc). So in the Tesla we got, and very grateful we were at our driver's courteousness and kindness with a grumpy and a bit poorly child and a couple of stressed adults. Drive itself was completely unremarkable.

But I digress, simply because it's probably the most interesting thing to have happened to me for weeks! 😂
Which kinda proves my point that humans love to dine out on personal notoriety by association, IYSWIM.

There seems to be a lot of Teslas in the GP car park at our surgery (4) so either there was some sort of offer - like you'd get at Tesco on Jaffa Cakes (4 for 3) or the cost to lease them is lower than the comparable Jag/Lexus (another 4).