One of the self-owns of all time. Triggering a global supply chain crisis right before midterms is bottom of the barrel strategy. But then again, who expects competency from any recent American administration, most especially this one?
These people live on manufacturing crisis after crisis in order to exploit the manic status that they generate. Why worry about how the midterms, if you can create a situation where elections cannot be held at all...?
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.
Of course Trump will try something outrageous that would result in prison time for any other person. But I think that the states are also still independent, mostly ruled by law rather than man, and there's limited troop power to interfere.
Trump is not all powerful, unless everybody gives up their power. Not everybody is as weak as the SV elite, and the failures of Big Law and others that bent the knee were very instructive to everybody else. Bowing down to the king makes you his servant, but it does not protect you in any way.
This time he has his own brown shirts, even fast tracking to to service without any training. DoJ had been getting their hands on voter rolls from swing states. Bondi and other trump top advisors and relocated to living on military bases. Idk where it's going but it's really not looking good.
Yes, it's going to look bad, and Jan 6 was just a trial run. Now all those criminals that have been freed are in the ranks of a supposed "police" force that self-equips from US Patriot Tactical.
But there's not enough of them. Even for Minneapolis, a mid-size city. There might be a few targeted attacks, lots of voter intimidation, but the US is a very big place, and the ranks are too small, and their popularity is tiny compared to other authoritarian regimes.
It's going to be ugly, maybe really really ugly with violence and innocent voters hurt, but the forces of democracy will win out. Minneapolis shows that there's a strong backbone to this country still, even if some swing voters were tricked.
Yes, and Georgia refused. American elections are a lot more complicated than you seem to believe. There’s plenty to worry about in specific locations, but the federal government has no direct control over any of the voting processes or policies.
Well he and his people are far too stupid and incompetent to have come close to succeeding. While it's not great that there was no punishment, we should at least be thankful that they act on emotion and can only loosely follow playbooks for corruption from the past rather than write new ones for modern times.
What's the basis for this war in Iran? Did that stop this administration? This is akin to pointing out that it's actually illegal to drive 30 mph over the speed limit.
Certainly it's possible that could happen to us. If it does I fully expect to have elections throughout the process.
We have the highest concentration of weapons per capita in the world and a deeply ingrained expectation of voting. In a very dark humor sort of way it would be absolutely hilarious if someone was stupid enough to attempt to intervene in the process.
We might go down in flames but you can be absolutely certain we'll have collectively agreed to light them ourselves.
Yes, of course they are different. We're not embroiled in an active Civil War with tens of thousands dead and a third of the country having seceded. Most things are different from that.
They may be, but if there are no elections, there is no United States. Constitutionally, its government is predicated on having elected representatives.
I could see Trump trying this, but I also can see dozens of other people or groups, some richer, more powerful, more competent, and more ruthless than Trump, just waiting in the wings for the guardrails to come off to make a play to rule the territory of the former United States. If he tries and succeeds at this it's open-season. It's not a Trump dictatorship, it's a civil war, akin to the Chinese Civil War after the emperor fell or the Syrian civil war after the Arab Spring.
Yeah... because Lincoln wasn't a wanna-be tyrant like Trump. The leaders in charge of the elections are diametrically different people. Lincoln fought to keep the Union together; Trump tried to cause a coup to stay in charge in Jan 2020. My god.
The name of Lincoln and Trump cannot and shouldn't be used within the same sentence. Lincoln's story is inspiring and you can see him worried about his country and he grew up learning law books being poor and rose up to power.
Lincoln says, "With malice toward none, with charity for all"
Trump is the exact opposite of Lincoln being "With malice towards all, with charity for none"
The irony of the situation is that they are from the same party.
He believed that the greatest danger to America came from within, warning that if the nation faltered, it would be due to self-destruction rather than external forces
Lincoln's famous speech: , "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."
Lincoln was ahead of his time and might as well have predicted something like Trump.
In the current laws you mean, dictatorships usually start by throwing current laws out of the window. Not that I believe Trump would do that, but it is not unheard of in other parts of the world
They can and they did. What the tariff decision shows is simply that, on very specific topics (in this case, big business), their base is significantly split: on one side the populist masses, on the other the wealthy elites. When the chips are down, the current USSC is connected the latter more than to the former, and will vote accordingly.
There is no crisis that would create a situation where elections "cannot be held".
That is to say, if the current admin attempts to suspend elections, the legality of that and the magnitude of the reaction will be the same, crisis or no.
Every non-Confederate state held elections. Two recaptured Confederate states (TN and LA) held elections. The only states which did not are the ones that had seceded, and thus were not US states at the time.
That's not precedent for the federal government declining to hold elections in any way.
How are they downplaying it? Trump can try all he wants, but there is no mechanism in the constitution that allows him to do that. He wasn't successful in 2020 and he won't be successful this time.
The GOP won't even kill the fillibuster in the senate because they know change is coming.
They keep making the same mistake: underestimating that your adversary gets a vote, whether it's Iran, trade partners, colleges, Colbert, the Kennedy Center's audience, or Minneapolis.
I think you're failing to recognize that we essentially live in a post-Truth world. Two opposite statements can be uttered by the same person on the same day, and it won't matter.
He has lived through multiple wars where elections were held. I do not think highly of the man, but he would have to be pretty bad off to come to that belief.
I would wager that someone as selfish as narcissistic as he is would have been oblivious and unconcerned with the day to day affairs of the plebeians unless it effected his income.
Depends, I just want to point out that the US is a net exporter of Oil. They also secured oil imports from Venezuela while at the same time in 2 strokes seriously hurt Chinese oil imports.
If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
It's always hard to predict how the USA will vote when "war" is happening.
> If the goal was to hurt China / BRICS and kneecap Iran it seems on point.
While also hurting Europe, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and many more. Very on point...
It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
So now all of us around the globe have to pay the price for American Imperialism, compounded by the complete shattering of the USA's soft power as an ally, this will only create more animosity against the USA from all sides. Very on point.
But the USA oil industry can make a buck until everything buckles, or perhaps the USA admin will introduce price controls like in the 1970s, that worked very well too.
> It will hurt everyone, Americans included, oil is a global market, fertilisers are a global market, those are basic inputs for probably every single thing produced in the world.
Only because those countries choose for that to be the case. For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that. Local prices and export prices are different.
But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices. They choose to take every excuse to raise prices (in fact the Netherlands goes further: if sales tax on gas raises because prices raise, the amount of tax paid is kept constant if prices drop. So they artificially raise local gas prices. So if gas prices are low, tax on gas has at one point reached 72%), but it is fundamentally a government choice.
>But the US, Canada, the Netherlands, and long list of other countries could make this crisis have zero effect on local prices.
The US Government cannot force US companies to sell at a lower domestic price if they can get a higher price exporting. I know that God-Emperor Trump pretends that he can command the oil sector to make less money, but he can't.
>For example, Saudi Arabia and Russia don't do that
2 countries famous for being beacons of free-market capitalism.
And it will go higher now. And given the President's hatered for high interest rates and the next fed chairman being a garden-variety lick-spittle, things are not looking up.
They aren't pumping that much oil since Chavez, the expertise for extracting oil was lost during nationalisation. It needs a lot of work to restart extraction, it will take years.
The 'issue' here is that China has good relations with Iran and in talks to guarantee safe passage for their ships, like they had previously with respect to attacks off Yemen by the Iran-backed Houthis.
Just because the US won’t literally run out of oil doesn’t mean the economy (or populace) will be unaffected by a supply crunch. As everyone in the country can already see when they go to fill up their tank.
You are mistaken to assume there was a goal. Trump has admitted he did this because he was told that Iran were about to attack the U.S. not because of any strategic goal.
Whatever your political affiliation and thoughts on the war, I hope we can all agree that it would an awful thing to base our foreign policy on the US election cycle.
Not so awful as it may seem. It would be even more awful if election cycle had no influence over decision to wage one more war. "Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".
The Biden administration was actually extremely competent, handled global inflation after the pandemic and Russia's war fairly well relative to peer nations, and set US manufacturing on course to provide us with all the batteries, solar panels, and EVs to prevent oil crunches like this from causing future inflation.
I expect more competency from US Presidential administrations, and also expect more competency and indpendence from the various parts of the executive branch, which should execute their missions without micro-management from the President, and I further expect far more competence from Congress and the US Supreme Court in setting law and enforcing law. It's bad enough that we have an incompetent Presidential administration, but that damage should be limited by the independence of the other parts of the government. The blast radius should be far smaller, we shouldn't have a King.
Biden held back arms support for Ukraine on dubious "we don't wanna test Russia's red line" grounds, gave unlimited support a wannabe despot's (Netanyahu's) wars of aggression even as he tried to backstab democracy in the US, arguably also enabling him to start the current situation in Iran, failed to prosecute an attempt to overturn the US election, and stayed in the presidential race for too long when his body and mind was in visible decline.
We wouldn't be having a discussion about the US having a king if Biden's administration was actually competent at doing its job.
I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Nonetheless, I wouldn't call Biden incompetent on any of that.
Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost. Biden was not incompetent, but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
> I disagree heartily with Biden and the deeper US intelligence communities assessments, like you do.
Maybe if they were actually competent they wouldn't have made the mistake then?
> Biden did not lose, Kamala Harris lost.
Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back. Furthermore if Biden knew he would be unelectable in 2024 earlier he could have dropped out earlier and allow Harris (or other Democrats) more time to campaign. But he chose to stay until a disastrous televised debate forced him out, out of… what, exactly?
> but he was successfully portrayed as incompetent by applying a very different standard to Biden than to Trump 45.
Biden defenders always bring up how we shouldn't criticize him because Trump is worse. Ok. But you realize that's an absurdly low bar to clear, no? We are not upset that Biden is worse than Trump, we are upset that Biden is worse than what we expect from a someone with a letter D next to his name.
> Harris had no choice but to carry the Biden administration's poor approval on her back.
Is that so?
"Vice President Kamala Harris was asked by the co-hosts of The View on Tuesday whether she would have done anything differently than President Biden, responding 'not a thing comes to mind,' before coming back to the question and adding that she plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet if she is elected in November."
Bothsides-ism is such a plague. While I don't agree with everything you said, I feel like the pandemic response doesn't get enough credit. Everyone hated how the Biden admin responded in the moment, but looking back the US really came out ahead compared to almost everyone else
The nation is one terrorist attack away from rallying behind the president. And sadly the chances of that happening have gone up significantly in recent days.
What’s baffling to me is how they’re going to attempt to spin the colossal fuck up this is from a “Best Military in the World” perspective, particularly after their unapproved relabeling of the DoD to the DoW.
It doesn't matter how good the military is if the political leadership is incompetent and the strategic objectives are incoherent. You'd think that after Vietnam, Iraq 2, and Afghanistan this lesson would have been learned, but apparently not.
Lockheed Martin already paid for Trump's ballroom (not a joke) and so needed the guy to start a War as their investment must be repaid a hundred fold. Who cares about American voters ?
I have no idea how American will extricate itself. We are nowhere near a Nixonian "Peace with Honor" exit. The Trumpian manuver of declaring victory and walking away seems increasingly infeasible. I think the best case senario is a Pyrrhic victory. The worst case is probably more like Russia's exit from the Soviet-Afghan war.
I would bet Trump just shot himself in the foot with this war, after midterms he will be a "lame duck" pres the remainder of his administration, relying on executive orders, which his opponents will merely take to liberal judges to have them stricken down. The final straw near the end of his term may be selling pardons to any takers.
Yes, it sounds crazy right now, but a lot of things sounded similarly crazy 10 years ago, and here we are.