Yep. Probably the closest he comes to thinking like a true businessman. But that's a good reason why such people don't make good politicians.

He's either incredibly evil and selfish, or he's the furthest a complete moron has ever achieved status. Either way, these are not positives. And frankly, the evidence seems to point more to evil, greed, and selfishness than anything else. Otherwise, he's literally destroying the planet because he wants to, not because it's a side effect of his insatiable greed and jerking off of outdated energy corporations. Sure, this also makes a good case for him being a world class moron, but he's just cunning enough to be a conman worth of his title as the new Teflon Don. He sticks his fingers in enough crooked pies as imaginable, but always skirts right by, while people around him are indicted, arrested, and brought down. That is not the behavior of a full-blown moron (though he is very stupid on a number of topics), but it is the behavior of someone who is insatiably evil.


Also, finding people who have lost healthcare is going as far as Google. Here you go, four million are noted to have lost healthcare so far because of Trump's actions. If you have a semantic problem with how I worded it, get over it. His actions are booting people from having healthcare. He is also now refusing to pay for people's insurance, which will have the side effect of forcing everyone else's premiums higher.

You are demonstrably wrong.


Lex Luthor never threw children off a balcony to my knowledge, and that seems rather beneath the character anyway. Trump, on the other hand is clearly worse than Lex Luthor, because--once again for you Trump supporters in the back--he put children in concentration camps separated from their parents. Why do Trump supporters want to save embryos and cell clusters, but have such a callous disregard for living, breathing children?

There you have it. DC Comics wrote more complex villains than the real life POTUS.

While your analogy is likely very close, I think there is evil for the sake of evil there. Trump defrauded banks out of billions of dollars in failed casinos. When banks told him he was worthless, he moved to deliberately defrauding regular people with Trump university. That is the behavior of a conman, that is deliberately taking advantage of people, that is an essence of evil. And while it can be spun to "for the sake of greed," it springs into another conversation of the gray area between "greed" and "true evil."

Yes, Trump doesn't give a shit, and he especially doesn't give a shit about the people who voted for him, or he wouldn't be stomping on them now, crushing jobs, eradicating healthcare, weakening the military, and erasing freedoms. He cares literally only for himself. If he cared about his kids, he'd actually care about the environment and want to leave a better world for them, so no, he clearly does not love them either. But then there is the question of how is this somehow not evil in some capacity?

The concept of evil, of course, being debatable along philosophical lines, but what would we consider, along moral or ethical lines, to be evil? Trump's goals have been self-serving. He cares nothing for the greater good. He is doing what he's doing for attention and--let's be frank here--racism against Obama since a vast majority of his goals have been to simply "undo what Obama did." He deliberately put the worst possible people in charge of a variety of positions. Bible thumper Betsy DeVos in charge of education. Science denier Pruitt in charge of the EPA (who is finally fucking gone at least). Telecommunications businessman Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC. That's asking a child molester to set the rules in a kindergarten.

If these actions aren't being taken with deliberate evil in mind, then surely the greed and narcissism driving them are in their way a form of evil. I have trouble seeing Trump and his cohorts as anything other than aspects of evil.

Jesus fucking christ are you for real?

What will it fucking take? Jeffrey Dahmer murder-cannibalism-spree?

Honestly, I question the very basic morality of anyone who doesn't think Trump has evil intentions. It's absolutely mind-boggling that anyone could say that. Like, being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, sexually assaulting women, mocking handicapped people, vilifying journalists, defrauding workers and contractors, putting children in cages, called white supremacists "very fine people", destroying the environment, treating the US presidency as a circus show, wallowing in narcissism, gutting net neutrality, the list goes on and on and on, and he's doing all of that gleefully, maliciously, and constantly espousing a mean-spirited streak, flinging insults and driving up hate mobs...

...but surely he's not all that bad, guys, and perhaps he even has decent intentions? Like, what. It's such a blatant denial of reality, I'd even call it gaslighting.


Whynotboth.gif


Because they're brown, of course. Had those kids been white "illegals" from pearly-white Europe, you know the reactions would be different. You just know it.

Trump supporters don't care about the cages or the family separation. They love it, in fact. It's what they wanted.


This is, sadly, true.

Either way, there comes a point where stupidity and malice intersect to such a degree that making a distinction between them is functionally useless.

Is Trump evil because he's stupid or is he stupid because he's evil? This is ultimately an irrelevant time waster of a question. The real question is; how do we stop him?

The problem is 40% of United States voters (the ones that turn out the most, which makes things worse) still don't think the bolded parts above, which is steady or even slightly increased from last year. That's truly scary to me.

Incorrect. The issue is that you have a flawed perception of the issue. No one was booted off healthcare, they just aren't forced to buy it. They can still buy it, it still costs the same amount roughly, but it's completely voluntary (very good thing!). This is pointless to argue about though, since you're going to just keep believing your own extremely warped view of the topic.



This shit was happening before Trump ever announced he was running for office. Some Obama era action for you:
https://www.aclu.org/news/aclu-obtains- ... us-custody
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fed ... 8ad84056b1

For the record, I don't give a shit about abortion (so long as it's done within the first trimester).

There is a difference between doing evil things and having evil intentions. Like I said above, I don't think Trump genuinely has evil intentions. You can question my morality there if you wish Morri - trust me I wont be insulted - but it's pretty obvious he doesn't care about any of those things you listed. He's both (a) absolutely ignorant of almost all of those things and (b) genuinely lacks empathy for anyone but himself. He's an egocentric buffoon who surrounds himself with people who have malicious intentions and who are totally willing to tell him how great he is because that's all he cares about, and it's how they get him to do what they want him to do and behave the way they want him to behave.

You can argue that he's something greater than that, but I honestly think that gives him too much credit. He's not a mastermind. He's not a puppet master. He's a narcissistic idiot that's easily manipulated by others; his own intentions are entirely self-absorbed. The more we recognize that, the more it becomes apparent that the truly 'evil people' are the ones who have propped him up. Once Trump is gone, they'll still be around looking for their next target for gaining power, and it's important that people recognize who they are, what they are capable of doing, and how they manipulate people to support them... because, I hate to say it, the same forces are trying to do the same up here in Canada (and Quebec!) too. And they're succeeding while we argue over the morality of this particular idiot.


You don't.

First, there's nothing we as foreigners could ever do with him specifically. We can bitch and moan about him in a thread among other like-minded people, but that does nothing more than maybe make us feel a little better about ourselves afterwards. It's almost a waste of time. What we can do is work within our own countries to fight against the forces that back Trump, particularly the religious right, and try to make sure that others they support don't win power. There's ways to do this, but it requires actual volunteering efforts in the community, or lobbying, or working within political parties. I get the sense that not everyone here wants to do that, or for some unknown reason, choose not to despite being rather vocal about it. Don't just sit at home playing video games; do something!

Second, it's entirely up to the nameless people working the machinery of the Democratic Party to convince Americans in both urban and rural communities that they're the best alternative. Americans can volunteer with them, of course, and maybe even run for them. Ultimately, however, it'll all come down to whether the people within the leadership of the party can run on a narrative that's convincing and successful. I have my doubts about that, sadly, but I remain optimistic. If the Democrats want to be successful, they must actively work to be as inclusive as possible with the electorate. I just hope that the people who lead and run the party understand that now, because I think they got cocky with this last election.

Third, until there's an election there's nothing nobody can practically do to get rid of Trump or to really stop his actions. For now he is the leader of one of the world's most powerful countries, within a system that makes it practically impossible to remove or stop a President without the President choosing to remove or stop themselves. That's entirely possible in Trump's case - he could choose to retire - but I wouldn't hold one's breath about it. Protesting might help shape the narrative against him, but on a practical level it does nothing and can easily be forgotten. The train will continue to plow on, and we're very likely stuck with President Trump until at least 2020.

Lastly, there's a lot we can do as individuals in our community already. You're not gonna be able to fix or convince everyone, but the vast majority of people out there are politically agnostic; they don't really have any strong opinions one way or another. The most basic and best thing you can do in your day-to-day life is show those people that there's nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about, nothing that could possibly harm them about what you believe in. It's why canvassing is such a powerful political tool. All it takes to initiate change, one way or another, is a conversation (not, I should state, an argument that immediately puts them on the defensive). From there it usually snowballs or it fizzles out, but it's something everyone is capable of doing. I do emphasize that it's not just people on the left who do canvassing like this. The religious right is particularly good at it. You have to beat them at this, and outcompete them, if you want to make sure they do not get power.

But surely even Capeda can admit that the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy increased the number of children ripped from their parents and thrown into detention facilities dramatically in comparison to the Obama admin, yes? Seems like a classic case of whataboutism to me.

Anyway, I loved Derigin's post about the prez on the previous page. It reminded me of a solemn version of Chapo's hilarious[ly depressing] segment on "Womp Womp guy" Corey Polishname's book about his beloved god-emperor. What an odd time in American history. Would sell my soul to find out what future generations will look back on this as, provided their eyes haven't all melted out of their skull from a combination of global warming and nuclear fallout.

I have no doubt that someone has bought the rights to that picture of Melania wearing the "I don't care" jacket, and will use that as the cover for their book about this presidency. It'll be a bestseller.

And the poster/title for Oliver Stone's inevitable Trump movie.

Right, every single one of them is voluntarily leaving the pool. 100% of them.

Also, what happens when one of these fortunate people that can decline health insurance gets hurt, gets in an accident, gets cancer? What then for them? Because I don't want to pay their bill as a taxpayer and health insurance carrier. That's not fair...to...ME.

I think Derigin is arguing that Trump is amoral rather than immoral. The things he is doing is still 100% equally immoral, it's just that he's too brain-dead, too narcissistic, too self-absorbed, too sociopathic and too unaware to realize and understand what he is doing is immoral. It's not in his capacity for calculation. Which may be the case, it doesn't change the fact that what he is doing is evil, he's just an empty ego moving through space without any humanity behind the wheel, kind of like a great white shark (which he is apparently terrified of).

This could be the case, but I probably wouldn't venture to guess. I know that it's really really bad either way.

He's definitely anything but braindead. Questioning his intelligence was constantly leading to underestimation of his capabilities, and as a result we never took him seriously during the election. Look how well that worked out for us...

it's a miracle the Queen's guards didn't attack him after he cut her off mid walk.

Is it really "intelligence" though if he's just using the Kanye/Neymar method of "I'll do whatever gets me the most fame/points/album sales/power/whatever regardless of what people think of me"?

You can promote your new rap album through touring, media appearances, etc. or you can push people's buttons and say a bunch of pure nonsense on Twitter and let Buzzfeed and social media do the work for you. While the latter is effective, is it really "smart"?

You're giving Trump way way way too much credit, and puppetmasters like Miller and Bannon way way way too little. What, are you the sort of guy who thinks opportunistic bullies like Al Capone, Pablo Escobar and John Gotti were actually sharp, highly educated, reasoned men? Nah. You also give way way way too much credit to the electorate; sure, I'd say most Americans are reasonable but remember: most Americans didn't vote for Trump.

Really, listen to the Chapo segment I posted or at least read the personal anecdotes of one of the Trump staff's chief sycophants. That should dispel all notion of the man himself being a 'very stable genius.'

The question to always ask people who say "Obama did it too" is "So it's OK because Obama did it?" The underlying premise of "Obama did it too" is that Obama and Trump are morally equivalent, which is something Trump fans usually don't believe or accept. Not that this will convince them to change their views or anything, but it does stop that pointless line of discussion.

It's true that a lot of the bad things the Trump regime is doing were also done in the Obama regime (the chapo lads estimate about 75% which I agree with), but it is stupid to allow people to use that as a means with which to excuse the one or the other. A lot of times the big difference is that Obama would let this stuff happen quietly under the radar, whereas Trump makes a big spectacle out of it: the difference between O's bloodless technocrat style and Trump's racist uncle on thanksgiving style. Doesn't change how one should feel about the actions themselves.

It was a perfectly fine response in context. The original post implied that the policy that was something Trump conceived, when it was merely the continuation of older policies. Another example of the media playing favorites with politicians... older acts were played down so much in the public eye, Americans at large didn't even REALIZE IT WAS HAPPENING. Fucking crazy shit.

The policy of separating kids from their parents itself was the result of a significant amount of people traveling across the border with children that were not their own: literally human traffickers. The families were only separated until it could be proven that the adults were actually parents (or at least legal guardians). This was a result of the Flores settlement, which incentivized the activity of crossing the border with other people's kids... if they were detained together, prior to this policy, the adult would face a max of 20 days in detention along with the child because they were required to be released together. The child effectively served the purpose of a human get-out-of-jail-free card.

Not to justify the practice... but to give a little insight. Policies create exploitable consequences which requires further amplifying policies that can snowball into something even worse.

Yeah, it's a policy that even Canada has been practicing. But in the US it has become particularly bungled, especially with this latest administration.

Almost all government policy evolves from something; it's just a matter of how shitty it can get. This administration has a tendency to make things shittier, not better.

The level of detail in this indictment DOJ rolled out yesterday reaffirms my earlier thinking after the February indictment. Between the two of them, the indictments name names, describe GRU's operational methods, pinpoint exact locations where Russian officers sat down at a computer to work, and (perhaps most amazingly) state which individuals were behind particular computers. National security indictments never go into this much detail because in the process they indirectly reveal our methods if not sources as well, and if it goes to trial they will need to directly reveal them.

IC wouldn't share this information with a prosecutor unless they really want the people involved to go down.

Uh... lacking empathy for anyone but oneself, and doing what you want regardless of who you hurt or how much damage you cause, isn't having evil intentions to you?


Why do those people have malicious intentions to you, but not Trump himself? They are also lacking empathy for anyone but themselves, after all.


Never said he was. You can be evil without being smart. Plenty of incredibly stupid people are evil and malicious.

There are some fine differences there, between doing evil and having evil intentions, as well as the nature of the people who have malicious or evil intent. With the former you have problems of immorality and amorality, as DrummingEdge pointed out above, but also problems with intent, too. For example, while I have no doubt that Trump is a sociopath, as he fits that to a T, there is a difference between a sociopath and a person with evil intentions; the latter is a conscious effort to do evil, while the former does evil as a consequence of a personality disorder. None of this excuses the actions of him or his administration, but it should paint a clearer picture about who is pulling his strings and how they're doing it.

The "evil" that is done by his administration is the "evil" of the people who prop him up. And that's an important point there too; most people who have malicious intentions aren't sociopaths. Many of them do show empathy, to the people they like. Many of them do see themselves as moral and righteous, because they feel that what they're doing is for the best of their in-group, maybe for the best of all people if not the entire world. They're selfish, but not necessarily self-absorbed. The religious right (and others of their ilk) are a perfect example of this. They want everyone to believe what they believe; they want to share with others their way of life, and it doesn't matter how they get there. For them, the ends justify the means. They're also not stupid; they're well aware of what they're doing, and what it takes to get power and hold onto it. A lot of stupid people do, do evil, but it takes a person with a plan to have evil intentions. It's fairly clear with Trump that he's not a person with a plan; he's a showman that takes a script written by others and makes it into a theatrical performance. He doesn't seem to appear to care, one way or another, what the performance is all about so long as he perceives it as making him look good. That's psychopathic.

The irony about a person like Trump is that he is so easily manipulated. There's a reason why he, himself, was politically agnostic for so long; it generally seems like he was looking for the right group to stroke his ego and give him the appreciation and admiration he thinks he deserves. It just so happens that the people that were able to successfully take advantage of him, and use him to their advantage, also happen to be people who we see as having malicious or "evil" intentions. And now those same people have not only been able to stack the order of succession for the presidency with their people and people loyal to them, but they also know that the strategy they used to get Trump elected seems to work and can work elsewhere.

I think the fact that he has the attentiveness of a gnat and the paragrammatism of someone with a language disorder lends more credence to the neurological disease theory of Trump than it otherwise would have.

Feels like we're just splitting hairs here. I would absolutely call the religious right evil and malicious with evil and malicious intentions, too, but they don't think they are evil or malicious. They think they are doing God's work and the Right Thing or whatever the fuck. Almost nobody actually thinks to themselves that they are evil.

In that, I see no difference between them, and someone like Trump. Evangelicals are too stupid to understand that their ideology is harmful and evil, even if they are "smart", or rather, clever/cunning enough to set their plans into motions and get them done. Trump might lack that cunning and is too stupid to enact evil plans, but on the other hand he probably doesn't think he's "doing the right thing" and rather just doing what serves him, because of his greed, selfishness and craving for attention. So what? They're both evil people with evil intentions.

Koch brothers are lobbying hard to influence the midterm elections.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/12/secret- ... l-ads.html

Trump simply says and does what he thinks the people he wants to appease want him to say and do. Exclusively. None of this has been run through a morality sieve or even transmuted into something palatable by anyone not on The Trump Train. It's just transported wholly, left untouched and unaltered. It's so cliche it's barely even worth saying anymore, but the writing was all over the fucking wall with his "kill the terrorists' families" and "punish the woman for having an abortion," when he disastrously tried to extrapolate what his supporters wanted ("well fuck, these guys hate terrorists and abortions so it follows that..."), or even before that with the blatantly racist Birther nonsense. His morality is coded around making the people whom he believes support him, to approve of what he does. It's a pretty standard American capitalist social darwinist survival mechanism for people who aren't smart or sharp enough are expected to succeed since they come from a successful family and have a shitload of money. Y'all do realize the only reason he gets so massively butthurt whenever someone so much as gives him an unfavorable headline is because he's fucking petrified of disappointing 'his' people. That's it. That's really all there is to him. Going any deeper, everything you think you're seeing is self-projected.

And to be honest this actually wouldn't be a problem if goddamn almost everyone who's a Trump supporter (note: not the same as a Trump voter) wasn't a morally reprehensible irredeemable unteachable piece of shit. So that makes Trump about 98% evil in my book. Numbers may vary.

The US has a shitty recent history with treatment of immigrants because of racists, but denying that Trump has actively and deliberately worsened it is asinine. There wasn't widespread reports of 1500 children just being outright and literally lost under a completely broken bureaucracy under Dubya or Obama, for instance. There was no notice of Bush, Obama, or Clinton gleefully having their face painted on the wall of the fucking camp like the modern self-absorbed Il Douche (pun intended) that he is.

The horrors of the past noted by the ACLU should not be ignored, just as it should not be ignored that Trump is actively making this worse. He encourages violence against minorities and women to such a degree that you can't go a day without hearing yet another instance of a racist Trump supporter attacking someone else. One recent one--from last week--had one of his satellite bigots attacking a woman for wearing a shirt with the Puerto Rico flag. That's an American territory. That's like attacking someone for wearing a shirt with the Iowa flag on it. She was only attacked because her skin wasn't milky white. When we have an organization as corrupt and full of mistreatment as ICE and the Border Patrol was years ago, do you really think things are somehow better with Trump?

On top of which, prior to Trump, actively separating children from families was not the norm. Many of the children previously had come here on their own, ended up lost, or what have you. Or as noted elsewhere here, were trafficking victims so some separation was actually intended to help. The current active separation of so many more children from their families--strictly as a form of punishment for people who likely do not know of the policy ahead of time--was pulled right from the asses of Trump and Sessions.

Hell, this quote comes right from the article you linked:



Beyond that, how many times do you people have to be told that JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING MAY HAVE HAPPENED IN THE PAST DOES NOT MAKE IT OKAY NOW.

You could literally cherry-pick almost any point in US (or world) history that has some kind of embarrassing, horrible shit done to other human beings, but that doesn't make it okay now. Even if we had kiddie camps like we do now--and we really didn't--that doesn't magically make it okay for Trump to do it. We had slavery, too. In that regard, if Trump brought back black slaves, what you're saying is that you'd support that because "we did it before, so Trump isn't so bad."

If Trump wanted to displace more Native Americans and drive them on a deadly new Trail of Tears, you'd support it and defend Trump because "we did it before."

I'm curious if you consider yourself a moral person given your ability to bend over backwards to defend anything Trump wants to do to other people. If you're like the standard Trump supporter, you consider yourself moral because you watch Fox News and hold a Bible, so justifying atrocities is just how you start your day.

You clearly did not read the article I linked that noted how many people have lost healthcare and have chosen to believe that they just decided not to have it anymore, instead making semantic arguments over my use of the term "booted." In your head, 4 million people losing health insurance is either "zero people" or "they just didn't want health insurance anymore."

I like how people pull the "Obama did this too" card with the intention of looking all enlightened and above it all when in fact it makes them compliant to the actions of two questionable administrations instead of one. I sure didn't see any of these people calling it out when Obama was apparently doing it.

TraitorTrump literally went on international broadcast and committed treason in front of the viewing audience.

When I make a post for the explicit purpose of showing how something isn’t “muh whataboutism” just to have it brought back up for a third time... I really lose the patience to try and have a rational discussion here. You aren’t reading what I’m typing anyway.

so we just have received proof that the entire GOP and NRA is complicit and should be charged under RICO. shit could get interesting really quick.

reminds me of how FoulFiend infiltrated message boards to promote the rise of Russian NSBM around 2000

So Trump went the extra mile today to show the world that he is, without a doubt, the biggest traitor the United States has seen in decades.

Trump is ignoring his own intelligence agencies--American law enforcement agencies--in favor of saying whatever Putin tells him. Disregarding that last week, 12 Russians were indicted for the Russian infiltration of the US election, and that there is undeniable evidence that Russians interfered, Trump casually hand-waves his own country in favor of what Putin tells him to say.

We have crossed the threshold where backing Trump is hands-down an anti-American sentiment, when he idly stands besides a country and dictator that has made repeated attacks on the United States.



This is disgusting behavior from the biggest traitor and the biggest coward on the planet.

no offense, while I don't disagree, you're like 6 hours behind the news curve. Start reading the affidavits against Maria Butina.

I never would have figured Rand Paul would join Chomsky and Greenwald in cheering on the dismemberment of western liberalism. There are strange bedfellows to be found in treason, it seems.



Oh, and if anyone here lives in a district where it's an option, ask for a paper ballot in November.

There's also a funny-ass puff piece from The Durden site. What, has the Trump administration effectively killed off Libertarianism? Every single friend of mine who used to be a Libertarian is now a Pepe avatar chud who screams FAKE NEWS at anything that doesn't conform exactly to his worldview. Even the more reasonable libs at Reason and Cato seem to be having a minor civil war on their hands. Trump is regularily billed as the bete noir of the left, but idk, I think he's an even bigger threat to the unity of the right.

Yet despite all that, Trump's been hovering around 90% approval by Republicans, the highest since Jr. declared war on Iraq. So I guess it's working.

Man is 2020 going to be bloody.

None taken. I was just getting it collected for the thread. I was also at work, so I actually should have been doing that instead. I just needed a break from what I was doing at the time.

Here are some responses.

Libertarianism as Hayek and Friedman understood it has been dead for decades. Rothbard shot it in the head, wore its language as a thin skin for his anarchism (which the left mistook for the former libertarianism), and right populists ate the leftovers. The Reasons and Catos of the world are essentially ignored, and the term "libertarian" has become essentially meaningless.

lol