President Donald Trump

You must be so disappointed in him.

This is a a juvenile way of thinking about politics and the media imo. You aren't "getting to" Fox just because Fox is reporting negatively on what you are doing. That's just what the outrage vendors on the left side of the spectrum want you to believe.

Trump isn't backing off on the National Guard stuff because he has misgiving about authoritarian action. He is backing off because he can't really do what he was teasing without a tremendous amount of blowback and civil unrest. It was mostly performative, like I said several days ago.

If he’s going to ape the way Trump posts on SM he should do more centrefold spreads flaunting his wealth, and claim it’s irony.

He began the race with a thirty yard head start. He should be leading at this point.

I queried my brother on the Newsom stuff because I was surprised by the reaction in this thread. He voted for Obama twice, Hillary, and Biden. He didn't vote for Kamala or Trump in the last election. He hates Trump. Although he obviously has voted mostly for Democrats over the last two decades, I nevertheless would describe him as a swing voter. He pays relatively close attention to politics. He lives in what has historically been a swing state, and I have found him to have a relatively good sense of how those states will go in presidential elections.

He had a much more negative reaction than I did to Newsom's recent forays into trolling. He said that he wouldn't vote for Newsom in a general election under any circumstances, but he said that he probably would vote for Moore, Shapiro, or Whitmer, especially against a MAGA candidate. He said that if it was Newsom against someone like Vance, he would just rickroll the election like he did in 2024.

People like my brother exist. It's just a question of how many of them there are and how many people have the opposite reaction.

This is all useless LOL anecdote of course, so take it with a boulder sized grain of salt.

The serious politicians are too polite, the impolite politicians only appeal to the simple-minded, the complex politicians are bad communicators, the good communicators are liars, the trustworthy can't win, and the ones in it to win aren't serious enough.

For the good of the American Republic, I can only suggest you guys crown a king.

Trolling aside, I don't like Newsom's odds in a general election. This doesn't feel like a climate in which the country is prepared to elect a California (or New York) Democrat as president. The national bias against California and coastal "elites" seems too profound, which is dismaying because that bias is mostly based on deliberate lies that the GOP has promoted.

But reality doesn't matter any more. Newsom is trying to overcome that bias by tacking to the center, but I don't expect that tactic (or any other tactic) to be effective enough to give him a good chance in a national election.

Luciom and Nut Nut agree. They just can't find common ground on what the king's priorities should.

I actually have a similar brother, although he's not in a swing state. He's neutral on Newsom.

In my massively large sample sizing of about 7-8 conversations on Newsom, I've found that people who aren't a fan of his trolling, already didn't like him previously. And mostly on issues they had false media understandings of. I've actually probed down on this a bit in face to face convos.

Newsom is the ultimate politician, who will do (nearly) anything to gain power. He's smart, and fortunately to this point, he mostly uses his power and lands on the correct side of issues. I see him somewhat like Clinton in that respect, except even slightly more liberal. I've been at fundraisers where he's spoke, but I never took the time to meet him, but he does well in rooms.

The issue w/ people who land heavily on the narcissistic scale is they are completely unaware of how they function. Someone like Trump who is at the very end of that spectrum and w/ NPD, he creates a wake of pain behind him everywhere he goes, and he never sees it as his fault. You can never get them to see or understand this, and often the only way is to function like them (briefly), to get them to acknowledge what they are doing. In this case, it's about getting the media to acknowledge how it functions, and getting perhaps some followers to see how absurd it all really is. It's easier to do this when it's something they disagree with. Additionally, Newsome actually is a lot of the things that Trump is trying to project. He's way more alpha than a beta Trump.

I don't think Newsom will fall prey to acting like this after he's done. He's too smart. It was intentional to raise his profile, as he realized that democratic voters really wanted someone to at least show they can fight. And he's done that... for better or worse. Personally, I think it was a smart strategy, and that it will (and already has) begun to work.

Newsom is maybe the first Dem politician to actually push back on this narrative in a way that gets noticed. Getting Fox News to put up a chyron telling people that LA has a 4x murder rate than CA feels vastly more effective than whatever countermessaging (if any?) the Dems have tried.

I agree, the whole thing may be a moot point and any Dem winning is a long shot. You generally don't just vote out fascists once they control the levers of executive power.

Maybe... but Newsom, again intentionally, did podcasts w/ right-wingers to demonstrate he understands their positions. This was the whole point of him doing this, which went right over all the angry liberals heads. I live in CA... trust me, tons of of liberals hate Newsom and call him anti-trans, etc... he pissed off his base here.

He also took more balanced positions about trans athletes, homelessness, and moderate positions on education and other positions moderate voters care about.

I dunno... it will be interesting how polling shakes out when we get further down the road.

I truly don't? i never even said anything that remotely would allow for that? i actually insist on removing power from executive-controlled agencies which would mean having a far less powerful president?

In my model as you very well know the executive can't ever establish any rule. No regulation can be passed without explicit congressional vote.

How would a "king" work if he can't regulate anything? if he has 0 power to decide which goods can be produced, sold and consumed nationwide without exception, 0 power to mandate or forbid any healthcare procedure, 0 power to regulate pollution, 0 power to decide which sexual acts are legal or not, 0 power to regulate marriage, or abortion or drugs or firearms or telecommunications or or [insert everything that isn't explicitly a power of the president in the constitution), 0 power OF TAXATION?? and it would be fully illegal for congress to delegate any of that, no exception including in emergencies?

AS you very well know, in my model even if EPA , FDA, CDC , DoE and so on are allowed to exist they are purely advisory boards and not a single letter, number, phrase in any statute or application thereof can ever change just through one of their deliberation, it rather has to pass congress.

How, exactly, would a president in that model be a "king"? because he could use unlimited lethal violence to deal with aliens (which don't have any constitutional right in my model)?

I would even be ok with congress having to vote explicitly to allow emergencies (rather than today where congress can only vote to declare an emergency doesn't exist after the fact).

A president would be allowed to NOT SPEND money congress appropriated in my model, which isn't power rather a form of veto, and the more veto powers exist the less things gvmnt can do and that's the model i like. A model where gvmnt acts sparingly, only when it's obviously necessary (as defined as broadly, supermajoritarianly agreed), and only to the minimum extent possible.

That's why i also favor the senate filibuster to become part of the constitution (and restored for all nominations and so on), reconciliation to disappear, and mandatory sunset clauses to exist for every law that isn't passed with absurd margins.

Oh and all senate confirmed nominees just be kickable out of their role with the same senate removing it's confidence (ofc not the judiciaries or the president). The same threshold to get the role should be used to get kicked out of it.

It's kinda insulting and outrageous for you to claim i like monarchy as a model. I want a very decentralized gvmnt with 6-7-8 power sources that are unaligned between each other and constantly vetoing each other so that the very minimum is done by gvmnt, because invariably , in almost all cases unless it's quite obvious the best thing gvmnt can do is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AT ALL.

So definitionally Trump isn't a fascist because it was very easy for Biden to win in 2020

This doesn't describe me. I've had concerns for a long while about how a Democrat from California would fare in a national election, but those concerns were not specific to Newsom. I don't know him as well as California residents do, but I would say my overall views on Newsom are neutral. I view him as a competent, albeit unextraordinary, politician. He obviously is dying to be the president, but I don't hold that against him. That's true of almost everyone who runs for president, whether they wear it on their sleeves or not.

Newsom trolling doesn’t make me want to vote for him but it is nice to have a democrat in the news for doing something that isn’t concentrated cringe or out-of-touchness

I have zero problem with Newsom going hard against Republicans for their bullshit crime narratives. It's a good idea. I've never claimed that he needed to be nice, and I've never claimed that everything that he has done was a misstep.

Calm down. I mostly was making a joke. The actual government you seem to prefer is robber baron America, where government is limited, power is centralized in the hands of very few, and the masses can just **** off. Better?

Got it. You don't live in CA, and in general, don't want someone from "elite" states to run, to turn off middle America and swing voters. I understand where you're coming from.

At some point, someone in the democratic party needs to punch back against these false media narratives that have been building up for decades now.

Something like "elite" is a perfect example.

If Republican / conservative ideas are so great for the economy and their communities, why do these "elite" states outperform red states in nearly every metric?

Someone like Newsom is punching back on those false labels. You can call them elite... but what they really need to be re-branded as is better ideas. They work better in America, and all over the world, but Republicans have been successful at labeling them silly things to diminish their actual value, and creating stereotypes so people can easily not think about them or try to understand them.

IMHO, Newsom may be that guy to finally break through the BS.

I mean, look at the 4x LA clip as an example... and this is happening on the daily.

He must necessarily be ultra-competent at in-party infighting (which can be very useful for a national campaign), being at the top of the democratic party in california requires exceptional intrigue skills necessarily.

He isn't particularly competent on bread and butter issues tbh, and i am not talking partisan stuff, he didn't manage to fix the extreme housing problems, nor homelessness, nor the absurdity that has become building infrastructure in california, nor runaway budget problems.

Running a deficit after markets did what they did in the last years in a state that has a disproportionate amount of revenue linked to market performance (through income and capital gain taxes on high income earners) is quite a disaster tbh.

Yes those are all shared responsibilities he has with the legislature but he didn't do very good at all. Maybe there is no solution in a mono-party state like california and no one could avoid overpaying for too many state employees (from prisons to schools so again, not a partisan issue at the end), insane state public pensions and so on.

But it doesn't spell well at the federal level given that there are similar issues to fix there as well (+ entitlements of course).

I do understand democrats can't run on increasing taxes (except for the very rich) or cutting entitlements (that's losing automatically at the national level)

How is power centralized if localities , states, federal gvmnt, federal congress and the federal judiciaries share it?

You can't be this dense. Nobody is.

Yeah, he's pretty good at this but the stupid fake trump troll posts are bad.

I don't really care for him but it's a no brainer for me against any current republican candidate.

I'm still on the buttigieg wagon, though. He's smart and articulate and honest.

FWIW, I am not one of those people who is personally is turned off politicians from states with a lot of "elites." I live in NYC.