323 Comments

And a day later, Facebook removed all restrictions on Trump. That's how the mafia works.

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Trump has his panties in a twist. Or maybe he just knows that one of the few people in the world more widely despised than him is Mark Zuckerberg?

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Zuck can afford a 100 cartels to sort that wonkers shit out.

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A hole-in-one

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Zuckerberg has been getting away with too much. Congress calls him in, he plays dumb then they give him a slap on the wrist & a modest fine. That's the kind of crap I have no time for. This isn't a movie. This is real life with consequences. Those consequences led to Katie Porter losing a Senate seat to Adam Schiff, because people don't like performative politics...they prefer actual action & Schiff delivers, while she yells at Zuckerberg & he gets a fine.

Trump is a truly sick psychopath. All he does is sit around ruminating in jealousy & hate with vengeful thoughts of retribution & making others pay for being smarter, richer, better looking, better with the ladies, more charismatic, & more talented than he could ever dream of being. Before Trump the Republican party was a problem, & they're still the problem with him. The GOP should be shut down for their anti-democratic rhetoric, attacks, fascist behavior & platforming murderous dictators throughout the globe.

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There is that. They are are all cunts!

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Ta, Marcie. TFG is jealous of Zuckerberg's wealth.

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Donnie is actually poor ... so much in debt. Homeless people have a trolly - he has nothing - even his wife hates him!

And that youngling dork who has made it clear he is now fair game?

LOSERS!

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Insofar as it is far less fictional than TFG's.

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If 43% of people get their news from FB then 43% of people are A Idiot.

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I'm perfectly fine with locking Zuckerburg up and throwing away the key.

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Lock him up with trump.

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Let them fight.

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OK, so while I certainly understand what Trump would LIKE to do, there’s no “he’s gonna take COMPLETE CONTROL” clause in any of the laws establishing these agencies. So, it’s not as if we hit 1/7/2025 and - POOF! - it’s just done and Zuck is in prison, Facebook is banned, etc. That’s not how any law works in the US, regardless of what their platform or Project 2025 says. If it were, GWB would have done all of what he wanted post-9/11. So, that shit is a wish list, not a path forward. All of these decrees will be immediately challenged in court, Congress, etc.

No, I don’t care about or give much credence to Trump being lawless, blah blah blah. That makes it MORE likely he’ll fail - he won’t be following the law. It’s clumsy.

All the things that make it hard to move things forward in the USA also make it hard to make sweeping changes like this. What’s most likely is that our government moves slightly right over a few years.

We should all be vigilant but chill some.

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there is literally no evidence in the past 8 years to support your final sentence.

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GWB didn't have the cult following necessary to get away with what the PNAC gang wanted. He (and then Palin) were placed in order to soften the ground and get the American public used to having imbeciles in positions of power. Without the normalization of "moron" they brought, Trump would have never been accepted as a viable candidate.

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I disagree. GWB had plenty of lackeys…and they voted en masse. They had way more power, knew how to execute a legislative strategy, had a bigger base, and even had a mandate after 9/11. I recall this quite well - I worked to turn out voters for Kerry in 2004 and also was employed in the aviation industry. I paid really close attention to the crap they tried to do, and they succeeded with a lot of it - USA PATRIOT Act; bringing the FCC under their thumb and going after Howard Stern, Eminem, Janet Jackson/JT, and others for “indecency” (even driving Stern off the airwaves and to Sirius); strengthening FISA and “warrantless wiretapping”; voter ID, etc. They brought a whole lot of power to bear on specific topics and ruined a number of lives over it.

Hell, even the jingoistic flag-jumping crap we see today is a legacy of that era, not to mention the “othering” of Muslims and specific minorities.

In fact, a whole bunch of what’s soulless and wrong on the right today has roots in the GWB admin…and they exercised power in ways that Trump couldn’t dream of. I was in my 20s at the time and that crap actually caused me to leave the GOP - which I did in 2002 - and become an ardent Dem.

Oh, and they basically killed the prospects of the American Christian church by fusing their version of Christianity with the power of the federal government. Church attendance has fallen steadily since about 2003 or so in the USA and I’m not surprised. Their use of religion as a weapon was fatal to its cause.

Sorry, they were way more effective at this than Trump could ever be.

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I didn't mean to suggest they were ineffective. On the contrary, they were extremely effective in creating the foundations needed for the fascist coup we're living through. Along with the "Pearl Harbor type event" the Project for a New American Century called for in order to push through their Shock Doctrine policy shifts, they got such tasty morsels as warrentless surveillance, The Patriot Act, the militarization of our civilian police forces, and running all internet traffic through NSA servers for example, all starting with the Brooks Brothers Riot (thank you, Roger Stone) and the literal theft of the 2000 election (enjoy your nap, Justice Scalia).

My point was merely that GWB was never anything but a placeholder and a tool to get the American public used to having an idiot "decider" in-chief while they built their cult of stupid, propping up Sarah Palin as someone worthy of public office, eventually morphing the Koch Brothers Tea Party morons into QAnon and merging it with the Mega-Churches and MAGA, softening the ground for the complete decoupling from reality we are in now. These are just steps on a predetermined path, and the intelligence community players behind the scenes are the actual Deep State Edward Snowden warned us about (btw, the former head of NSA just joined the board of OpenAI and Apple and Microsoft just left).

Make no mistake, Trump was always the long-game, and the people around him are every bit as effective in turning the ship-of-state to the right, because ultimately, it's all the same people making the actual decisions, and Trump is just the figurehead for the Frankenstein Monster they've built out of leftover parts of the stupid and disenfranchised, animated by the oligarchs money, and set loose on the villagers of democracy.

To quote Karl Rove, way back in 2004, just after the bullshit invasion of Iraq, deepening the destabilization we have wrought on the Middle East, talking to a reporter, "The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'."

All that MK Ultra/Cult research is about to pay off.

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"We should all be vigilant but chill some." Famous last words. I'll bet you were among the "don't be so hysterical, Roe will never be overturned" crowd.

Sweeping changes get made every time there's a Republican administration, wiping out progress that took decades to achieve in mere months or weeks, but because Democrats tend to follow the rules and traditions, the obstacles to sweeping changes prevent recovery being as rapid as the dismantling. The government has been moving "slightly right" over a lot of "few years" with little balancing movement "slightly left." See "Overton Window."

You seem to think the canaries are just resting or pining for the fjords, when in fact they're already dead and it's long past time to sound the alarm. Chill can lead to freezing to death.

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Roe had a path forward to being overturned (and I was NOT one saying it couldn’t). There was nothing stopping the USSC from overturning Roe - it was a previous decision with no direct basis in a law.

I need someone to lay out the path to this “declare ownership, ban stuff, throw people in jail for…reasons” being done legally. Unless people are just saying they’re gonna send in the troops (fine…but then why bother with Project 2025?), the plan is to use the law to do stuff they want. That law is not aligned with the stuff they want, so something would need to change. This js what I mean - it's path-dependent. The path is very much not clear or easy.

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Last time, they had no idea what to do about winning and running the nation. Within two weeks the Trump WH was a stalemate between Bannon 'Burn It All To The Ground' and Javanka 'Let's Make Some Real Money From This'. That paralysis was persistent for the entire administration as they never had the support inside the WH to carry out the plans that they claimed to have ready to action when in charge.

This time, however, the folks in the background have had 8 years to plan their comeback and they aren't relying on Trump assets to get that done. And they had just enough successes - rolling back abortion, leaving Afghanistan, trade wars with China - to feel that they will need to hold back. They want a stupid man to sign any piece of paper in front of him, then go off and play golf for the rest of the day. If they get it, you will wish you were in Hungary.

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Sorry, I’m still not seeing it. “They” haven’t had 8 years. It’s been barely 3 since Trump left the WH and he went through staffers like I go through sunglasses. I don’t recall them getting better in their 4 years in the WH, either. If anything, they got more dysfunctional.

Hell, I remember their transition team giving all these interviews and press conferences with these dire warnings about firing people, dismantling the administrative state, etc. They sounded real damn sure of themselves and then couldn’t plan their way out of a wet paper bag. And they had people like Heritage banging down their door the whole time.

Look, I’m not arguing that things will be just fine. I’m arguing that the same people here saying how transformative this second term will be are the same people that were *certain* Trump would be made the legal President come 1/6/2021. It’s path-dependent, and dependent on things occurring that have a very low likelihood of doing so.

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'Eight years' means that the people who saw Trump as a buffoon with no chance of winning discovered that they had made a massive miscalculation. They would have been concentrating on the 'regular' candidates, finetuning their campaigns and messaging. Not picking the outsider and disruptor to ride him into the WH. At that point it was too late, if they'd spent a year working with Trump's campaign and replacing the crazies with their people it would have been different.

And they do. The Heritage Foundation regularly embeds their people inside Republican campaigns, lending assets and paying for staffers. When the Trump campaign won in 2016, the first thing that happened was that Heritage Foundation staffers were recruited to administer the handover. They worked on most of the policy decisions for Trump, particularly the filling of the Supreme Court positions*. And this is when they didn't expect him to win.

*https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/heritage-foundation/

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Heritage has been embedding their people in campaigns for years. This isn’t new. Hell, GWB was basically run by Heritage and CFG people.

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Yes. As Dubya was a completely mainstream traditional Repub candidate. Trump wasn't in 2016. There was no way that those groups in the background would have looked at him and picked him as the winner of the election. At the point he'd picked up the momentum to roll the other candidates and make his run they would have been scrambling to even identify anyone inside the campaign to talk to. It was chaotic. Trump was picking people who weren't involved in those bodies. He was too busy doing massive rallies to sit down and discuss policies with wonks. He despised all that stuff. And after the election, it was too damn late. At best, they had Pence - a career politician - as the only person inside the WH who would listen.

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This was the refrain the first time around. Look how close he came to pulling off the coup. Next time he won't be surrounded by buffoons and morons.

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PAB will ALWAYS be surrounded by buffoons and morons. But he'll have some people who can actually realize his worst impulses.

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I'm sure Hungarian voters felt the same regarding Orban.

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Hungary’s population equals 10 million. That’s equal to the population of Los Angeles county.

For some perspective.

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Just pointing out another country where things went very wrong doesn’t disprove my point.

Hungary’s political system is completely different from the USA - it’s a parliamentary republic, which means the legislature is basically THE lawmaking body. Many fewer veto points.

Hungary is also basically a monocultural country where ~90% of people share a common ethnicity. So, not nearly as many competing interests.

Regardless, my guess is that Orban didn’t have to break Hungarian law to do what he did. Their laws give the parliamentary majority a lot of power. The USA’s system does not, so Trump would have to break the law. Big difference.

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My point is that Orban broke the country by slowly dismantling the checks on his power. As the recent Extreme Court rulings indicate a similar situation has been underway in this country for quite some time as well, by filling the courts with ideologues that are attempting to shift the power balance to something that wasn't what the Constitution envisioned and apparently succeeding.

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You’re making my point. Orban and his party had to actually work to overturn and replace laws to get him and Fidesz the power they needed to get them to where they are now. They didn’t just publish a manifesto, decree that they had certain powers, and then magically were given them. The argument this post and you are making is:

1. Trump is elected

2. He declares that he has full control of agencies based on…reasons

3. ???

4. Trump is Orban

What is 3? That’s my point.

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#3. Profit.

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It took only 2 years for Orban to change their Constitution. Needless to say, he's been in power since 2010. I guess you're telling anyone in your vicinity to "...move along, move along, nothing to see here...".

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Now you’re seeing my point. Orban had to change the Hungarian *constitution*, and that alone took him 2 years in a much more pliable system, and one without checks & balances (or term limits for PMs, I’d imagine). How will Trump change the Constitution, exactly, and what changes will he be willing and able to make? Any amendment requires something just shy of an act of God. The two systems are completely different to the point where comparing one context to the other and saying, “see how that works?” is just not applicable.

So, what’s likely is a rerun of 2016-20 with maybe a bit more competence up front. They keep trying to bash through walls and get stopped. They make some incremental progress (not great) and push executive authority in some areas to their limits (also not great), but this is NOT a fundamental change in anything. While this is all happening, Trump does his usual thing where people try to show him up, he has someone else fire them, and leaves everyone in an “acting” status, the agencies run dry of expertise, and the whole thing kinda grinds to a halt. That’s basically 2020, except now Trump is much older and declining mentally (which is why all this attention on Biden is stupid, even if it’s applicable). He doesn’t exactly attract the brightest to his administration, so this is our likely near future if he’s elected. Note that on January 6, 2021, we survived 4 years of Trumpian chaos and I’d argue its direct impacts were:

- a resurgent anti-vax movement (but now on the right), meaning more people died (and die) than are necessary

- some really stupid American GOP voters that turn out LESS often than they used to

- a significant change in the USSC

I honestly think the greatest harm - outside of the USSC - was actually to American society, not to our government (especially our Executive Branch). TFG just gives every idiot license to be an asshole despite their laughable position in life to be one, and his inability to plan or manage anything - or hire anyone that can - leaves everything in a chaotic state. So, this is what I fear, not some radical reformation of laws.

I understand that everyone’s a bit freaked out but I have a hard time drawing any good parallels to Orban here.

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If you’re arguing that it’s just gonna be a coup, then fine, but there’s not a legal basis for what this post points out.

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SCOTUS. You start with judge kasmaryk in the fifth district then appeal to Thomas, Roberts, and Alito.

I don’t think the Constitution means didly to them.

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Trump's gratitude for anyone is short-lived.

Usually measured in nano-seconds.

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TCFFG/PAB again displays his unsuitability for any elected office at any level.

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Sugarmountain! In danger?!?!?

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Okay, kids it's been fun but it is past time to get another water bottle out of the freezer and rehydrate, maybe recharge my batteries a bit by watching another episode or two of Attorney Woo. Right from the start, that vibes and strings theme makes me laugh happily and it raises my spirits. The sight of that sweet, innocent little pixie face of hers is almost too much.

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This is a mob boss threat. That's all it is. I'm sure Zuck will crumble like cooked bacon.

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He just did crumble, took less than 24 hours.

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it ought to be actionable Like, disqualifying for office actionable.

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Paging Martin Niemöller. Martin Niemöller to the white courtesy phone.

(Of course the phone is white.)

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Of Truth Social's 76,463 users, I'd be willing to bet that at least half are journalists, agents provocatuers, spam bots, and libs just there to gawk at the trainwreck.

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You're probably right. Unfortunately, that's the why and how of TS working as a miniature bluetooth speaker in the middle of a vast echo chamber, since everything DT posts gets reported on endlessly. As always, Trump doesn't measure success and failure in the usual, seemingly obvious ways. As a business venture, by the normal metrics of profits and losses, it can crash and burn, but as long as it fulfills the function of conduit for Trump to get all the free media coverage he's accustomed to he's getting his RoI. The only success that matters to him is winning the election and (Sad!) he's gotta be liking his chances rn.

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I'll put my dollar in the pool on "90 percent or more."

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