[techostritch]

Admittedly I think it’s really hard to piece apart all of the different conservative coalitions.

There are vocal Republican influencers who talk about ending no fault divorce, ending the department of education banning abortion, ending social security, Medicare and Medicaid, more conservatives on the Supreme Court so certainly it could be bad if certain coalitions got their way.

And yet, I think power is distributed enough in America I don’t think too much of it can be dismantled. I think too many billionaires benefit from big government for the billionaires who benefit from small government to dismantle.

But I do think Republicans will deregulate the economy in a way that will put us on a crash course to another financial crisis. And the people who will really suffer will be the poor not the rich.

The other point I will make about a Republican presidency is that 1: people deify Trump and 2: Trump has made lots of promises to people who fundamentally disagree with each other. So there’s going to be lots of conflict in a Trump presidency, what will the people whose promises were broke do, especially those people who see Trump as a god? Will Trump turn on his working class MAGA base to make the billionaires who donated to him happy? I think he just might.

[troyvit]

> I think too many billionaires benefit from big government for the billionaires who benefit from small government to dismantle.

America's system of checks and balances in action.

[zogrodea]

Thanks for the reply. I suppose I have a hard time seeing much happening that will be too bad for ordinary citizens either way. I recall people panicking about a Trump presidency in 2016, but I never saw or heard many negative outcomes (for individuals) about his presidency so I don't quite understand it and have a hard time measuring how justified people's panic is.

[techostritch]

It all depends on what they do, Republicans want to make big change, big change in an economy this size will be disruptive, there will be winners and losers across the political spectrum, and losers for some groups will mean financial devastation. Elections have consequences.

I think a lot of it is how granular you look? Will millions of people be in camps and dead and 10’s of million unemployed in 4 years? Maybe not, but what is the statistic? 1 percent increase in unemployment leads to a 1% increase in suicides?

This is of course not to mention if your gay or trans or a woman who values the right to an abortion.

The republicans will try and go too far by some measure, even Joe Rogan who I would describe as a pretty classical liberal if not conservative libertarian said the other day “Republicans are not the answer, remember when George Bush was in office and we almost had Christofacism?”

[bryanlarsen]

Trump 2024 is going to be very different from 2016. Trump's first couple of years were hampered because he appointed a bunch of Bush people who were fine pushing Bush-type policies (like the tax cut) but dragged their feet on Trump's. And then his second couple were hampered by Congress and the Supreme court.

Trump 2024 will be able to do whatever he wants.

[taylodl]

Other than more than a million Americans died due to Trump's gross mishandling of the pandemic? The idiot damn near collapsed our medical system!

He also figured out a way to turn our farmers into Welfare Queens due to his misguided trade war with China. Trump disrupted the supply chains before the pandemic hit.

Finally, Trump managed to take an economy that was running on all cylinders and start curtailing economic growth - and that's before the pandemic hit. Trump drove the deficits up at a faster rate than Reagan - that's quite an accomplishment! That factors into inflation - as Reagan himself pointed out when he was complaining about Carter's deficits.

The United States simply can't afford four more years of Trump.

[zogrodea]

Thanks for enumerating; I never heard of any of that except for the pandemic (and I honestly don't know either way how much better/worse someone else would have done in that position).

I think this is the best comment for helping me understand the aversion to him. Most of it is about the economy which is easy to understand the impact of.

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, he ran insane levels of deficits. (You could blame the Covid disruptions to some degree, but part of it is probably just regular old fiscal irresponsibility.) That makes things look great for a few years, and then causes inflation and hinders economic growth later. So some people felt that the economy was better under Trump than under Biden, but Trump's economy was not sustainable.

If he's elected again, will he try to juice the economy by unsustainable spending again? I suspect so; it will make him popular, and he loves being popular. But it will cause problems for the next administration, just like last time. Probably worse problems than last time, because the debt from the first Trump administration hasn't gone away, so the total debt load would be higher.