Trump 2nd term prediction thread
So, looks like Trump not only smashed the electoral college, but is looking on track to win the popular vote, which seems to be an unexpected turn of events, but a clear sign of the current temperature in the country and perhaps the wider world.
Would be interested to hear views on how his 2nd term will pan out from both sides of the aisle - major happenings, what he's going to get done, what he's not going to get done, the impact of his election on the current conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, whether his popularity will remain the same, wane, or increase, etc.
A bit of an anemic OP, I know, just interested to hear people's thoughts now that the election uncertainty is over.
You keep thinking that everyone is in politics to steal stuff from other people then calling it democracy because the 51% decided the 49% had "too much".
Well some people have dignity, which means they don't like to receive charity if they don't feel they are truly desperate.
If you can see a rich person being in favor of increasing taxes on the rich as possible and not dumb, why can't you see a relatively poor person being in favor of cutting welfare as possible and not dumb?
Describing subsidized health care as charity and beneath human dignity is about as depraved a view someone can have.
If people felt as you believed they do about ACA and its subsidies then they simply would't be using them - health insurance outside of the ACA marketplace and its subsidies is still widely available in the USA. The more obvious and logical conclusion is that they're unaware Trump and Republicans will be taking away a program they actually like and depend upon.
I’ve still got faith that Trump will have difficulty implementing his crazier ideas once they require people outside his circle to participate and because his sycophants are chosen for loyalty more than competence.
Some of the crazy/weird/fully impractical stuff he said, he said to "boast" to low info people, i don't think for example there has ever been any intention to substitute the income tax in full with tariffs (or with anything else).
But the low info/low propensity guy making 70k per year and sending say approx 10k to the federal government , who feels he gets nothing in return and "the swamp" is stealing his money , feels good even at the idea that someone is trying to think how to stop stealing his 10k.
It doesn't matter that it isn't feasible, that he actually gets stuff back from those 10k (or his relatives and friends do), that the tariffs would increase the costs of what he buys and so on.
He feels good because someone is at least thinking like him about those 10k he feels he gets scammed for every year (this is what the gorgonians of this world don't get: he isn't an idiot. He just want to vote for someone that at least pretends not to be disgusted by his existence).
Gotta go through the claims by Trump and associates and remove those who are clearly pure signaling with no intention to be put in practice.
To be clear the left does this as well, like when they propose to tax unrealized capital gains and the like.
As for the actual policy claims that have a veneer of practical feasibility (roughyl the "agenda 47"), what do you think is crazy?
The stuff in this list
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurke...
I suppose that you like others believe a deportation of all illegals to be practically impossible (not in the legal sense but in the actual enforcement sense).
That might very well be true , but even if he "only" deports 1 or 2 million of them and militarily secures the border (with far more violence and strictness than he did in his first term), and pushes many more to self deport by making life for illegals a lot worse in the USA, would that be "trump giving up" on the topic, or simply the normal political processo of shooting "for the moon" and then achieving what is possible?
Describing subsidized health care as charity and beneath human dignity is about as depraved a view someone can have.
If people felt as you believed they do about ACA and its subsidies then they simply would't be using them - health insurance outside of the ACA marketplace and its subsidies is still widely available in the USA. The more obvious and logical conclusion is that they're unaware Trump and Republicans will be taking away a program they actually like and depend upon.
Subsidized health care for people making a normal salary is charity toward people who can think they don't want to be recipients of charity.
Subsidized health care for actually poor people is charity, it is uncontroversial to claim it is, and it can very well be seen as a good example of reasonable charity if you agree with that. Still charity.
It is not "depraved" to call government welfare charity (not mandated insurance like social security or medicare), it is objectively true and uncontroversial and it is the first time i have ever seen someone triggered by the use of charity to describe stuff the government gives for free to people in need.
As i tried to explain to you already, normal non leftist people do take advantage without any ethical consideration of whatever they legally can, even if they disagree with the subsidy. They buy subsidized solar panels even if they would have preferred those subsidies not to exist and there is nothing strange in doing so for all normal (ie non leftist) people.
Moreover, i can't find data about how the approx 20M americans who buy their insurance on ACA marketplaces with at least some subsidy vote. Not sure why you believe many/most of them are trump voter.
Surely some will be, but as high as it was, turnout was approx 65%. And unless i am mistaken, poor and middle income people vote less often than over-average income people, and younger people vote less often than older people.
So say 10M at most of those 20M recipients voted, let's say 5M voted for Trump.
Uuuuh, 5-6% of actual Trump voters might lose a subsidy!! and many of them might even prefer to keep that subsidy but still think that deporting illegals or stopping government sponsored censorship in social media or stopping sending aid to ukraine or x y z is more important.
The fact that you think all/most of those 5M people have no idea that they might lose a subsidy is patronizing, the kind of approach to politics that (thanks god) allows the right to win elections in europe as well at least sometimes.
When we say you guys are detached from real people this is what we mean. You truly think you can choose for others better than they can for themselves in all aspect of life, you treat voters like children.
Oh and btw maybe that's true. Maybe a significant portion of those estimated 5M trump voters who have access to ACA subsidized plans didn't know Trump intended to remove that subsidy. In which case it's Harris campaing fault. Biden run basic ads about medicare/obamacare/social security nonstop in all swing states for months.
Harris run promoting Liz Cheney book, calling Trump Hitler, putting tampons in boys restroom, and forfeiting student loans for people who wasted years of their lives pursuing useless majors.
Subsidized health care for people making a normal salary is charity toward people who can think they don't want to be recipients of charity.
Subsidized health care for actually poor people is charity, it is uncontroversial to claim it is, and it can very well be seen as a good example of reasonable charity if you agree with that. Still charity.
It is not "depraved" to call government welfare charity (not mandated insurance like social security or medicare), it is objectively true and uncontroversi
It's not really charity, it's just normal social insurance. No normal person can save up enough for a hospitalization at 20. They've only been in the labor force for 2 years. Which is why people pool their money together and have those who, say, inherited a bunch of their money from their parents, pay for someone who didn't, though taxes. I'm sure in some abstract way no one wishes that were the case, that God would see their worth and shower them with resources in their moment of need so that they don't need society, but that's not how life works.
Subsidized health care for people making a normal salary is charity toward people who can think they don't want to be recipients of charity.
Subsidized health care for actually poor people is charity, it is uncontroversial to claim it is, and it can very well be seen as a good example of reasonable charity if you agree with that. Still charity.
It is not "depraved" to call government welfare charity (not mandated insurance like social security or medicare), it is objectively true and uncontroversi
You're uninformed, speaking entirely from your own beliefs rather than anything resembling reality about the American public.
The poll findings also showed 78% of voters support making permanent the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced tax credits and 56% were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports it. The policy proposal had the support of majorities of Republican, Independent and Democrat respondents.
Source:
You're uninformed, speaking entirely from your own beliefs rather than anything resembling reality about the American public.
The poll findings also showed 78% of voters support making permanent the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced tax credits and 56% were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports it. The policy proposal had the support of majorities of Republican, Independent and Democrat respondents.
Source:
The genius of Trump was that he was able to make it seem like he wouldn't take it away so that people who wanted to do something else could have the luxury of voting that way. Of course it's a failure of Harris to get that point across, but it's also a win for those who see social insurance as a charity and that the rich should have more because they deserve it. We'll see if it was truly a win for them, that Republicans move to remove the ACA or if there has been a paradigm change. I suspect that Republicans will try and remove the ACA, and maybe succeed. It'll turn opinion on Trump somewhat if it happens, but it'd be a win for the oligarchs, which is the point of winning an election.
It's not really charity, it's just normal social insurance. No normal person can save up enough for a hospitalization at 20. They've only been in the labor force for 2 years. Which is why people pool their money together and have those who, say, inherited a bunch of their money from their parents, pay for someone who didn't, though taxes. I'm sure in some abstract way no one wishes that were the case, that God would see their worth and shower them with resources in their moment of need so that t
Man it's charity to pay for someone else insurance (!!!!). It's normal insurance if you pay the whole premium yourself, or if you are taxed during working life to get access to insurance later on (medicare).
We are talking ACA subsidies. We are talking the fact that premium would be X, yet you pay a lower amount Y, and the difference is paid by taxpayers, if your income is below threshold K.
That difference is charity. And some people receiving that charity aren't destitute people, many are normal people who could pay the premium if they tightened elsewhere in their budget, and some of them don't like to be recipients of charity or that others in their same positions are recipients of charity.
You're uninformed, speaking entirely from your own beliefs rather than anything resembling reality about the American public.
The poll findings also showed 78% of voters support making permanent the Affordable Care Act (ACA) enhanced tax credits and 56% were more likely to vote for a candidate who supports it. The policy proposal had the support of majorities of Republican, Independent and Democrat respondents.
Source:
The fact that those subsidies are popular with 56% of the people doesn't negate anything of what i wrote.
Notice how "more likely to vote" means they can care about it but it's not single-issue. As i wrote, many of those recipients perhaps would like to keep those subsidies yet consider other parts of the Trump policy platform more desirable.
Yet you want "choose for them" because "you know better".
The genius of Trump was that he was able to make it seem like he wouldn't take it away so that people who wanted to do something else could have the luxury of voting that way. Of course it's a failure of Harris to get that point across, but it's also a win for those who see social insurance as a charity and that the rich should have more because they deserve it. We'll see if it was truly a win for them, that Republicans move to remove the ACA or if there has been a paradigm change. I suspect tha
They will certainly try to reform it in some ways, decreasing the burden to taxpayers. How exactly, it's complicated.
They might end up gutting medicaid (medicaid recipients don't vote much, and when they vote i think vote democrats more than republican anyway, although this cycle has been weird so things might have changed in that regard).
Not sure why you think that republicans will lose politically if they gut medicaid.
Trump plan to attack the Biden era government sponsored online censorship
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1855119856...
6 min long but the tl;dr is to throw the book with the full force of the state agains every single individual in the federal government which contacted social media to talk about censorship of legal content.
And sec 230 will be limited only to companies that meet "high standards of neutrality". Basically if you want to curate content then you have to be fully legally liable for all the resulting content. You are either a platform where content is free to exist without your curation, then you dodge legal liability, or if you curate then it's on you.
Very very very very very very very good. Spectacularly good. Awesome. Far better than i expected.
So mods are a thing of the past?
I’m trying to keep an open mind on trump, but that’s entirely because it’s not like I have a ****ing choice. With that said I’ll make my optimistic predictions now:
1. Russia/Ukraine ends but with Ukraine being smaller than it was 8 years ago (possibly smaller than it is right this second)
2. RFK doesn’t find a way to kill us all
3. Dems finally abandon this gen z obsession that anything that offends the slightest person for the slightest reason needs to be expelled and stop mandating DEI for the sake of appeasement and the idiot gen z’ers and their Instagram accounts who helped put in this hell grow the **** up
4. Trump abandons the mass deportation plan fast enough that deficit spending doesn’t make **** that much worse
5. Federal abortion ban never actually gets voted on much less waiting to see if trump actually won’t veto it
I can’t think of much else
I’m trying to keep an open mind on trump, but that’s entirely because it’s not like I have a ****ing choice. With that said I’ll make my optimistic predictions now:
1. Russia/Ukraine ends but with Ukraine being smaller than it was 8 years ago (possibly smaller than it is right this second)
2. RFK doesn’t find a way to kill us all
3. Dems finally abandon this gen z obsession that anything that offends the slightest person for the slightest reason needs to be expelled and stop mandating DEI for the s
6. There's no more elections and Trump is President until 2040.
It won't happen until much further into his reign. Some of them may change their mind after he wins his third election... I'm joking, but those who do change their mind will be the minority, and chances are that won't happen until long after his presidency.
Yep. It won't be many who regret their choice. Most will say "he just needs more time" or "he just needs more help/enablers."
what makes you think I need to explain my life to you?
My thoughts and my feelings are my own and not subject to your inspection or your analysis.
this isn't a debate, nor is this debatable as being of a questionable ideology.
so it is written, so shall it be done.
