Languish.org

At the end of 2019, I asked the board how they thogutht he Trump presidency was going. The results were not good, for Trump.

http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,15942.0.html

Only 2 more weeks to go (we hope), and much has happened since October 2019, so I thought it interesting to do a final check in.

Clearly much worse than I expected.  I think most people were kind of hoping that Trump's crazy bark was worse than his crazy bite, or that the great responsibility of the office would sober him up.  I don't think that even his greatest critics could foresee just how much of an irredeemable human garbage he really was.

When Obama took office, I thought it was impossible for the US to ever get a president who was worse than George W Bush. 

I was wrong.

So now I predict, it is impossible for the US to get a president who is worse than Trump.  This time, I will be right. 

Didn't expect this level of disregard for the law.

The big disappointment for me is how many Republicans still back him. The lack of respect for law and order by the Republican base is also worse than expected.

The sad thing is even with the evidence slapping people in the face of how bad this has been, many still support him.

About as bad as expected. My fears with Trump were always about him as a person and that it was always ridiculous to expect either a 70-something man to change that, or be managed given that he's someone who's literally never been employed or had to do things he didn't want to do. I don't think anything that's happened has been a surprise even if it is still shocking and extraordinary.

There's been less violence overseas than I expected. I thought he'd be more reckless in using the military.

worse than expected.

About as bad as expected for me. As in, more long term damage to the institutions than actual havoc during his presidency because of his own lack of ability/focus. Although during his last year he's been really close to deliver in the "internal strife" category.

Last time I voted slightly worse than expected. Now much worse. I thought a coup was unlikely.

Much worse.

We all knew he'd be incompetent. However, I mistakenly thought he'd be a do-nothing president. I did not know he would actively attack democratic institutions.

Like in 2019, it is slightly better than I expected. I expected something just short of the Apocalypse.

Quote from: Richard Hakluyt on January 10, 2021, 03:18:22 AM
The big disappointment for me is how many Republicans still back him. The lack of respect for law and order by the Republican base is also worse than expected.

I agree.  Trump has been exactly as bad as I expected.  He pushes and pushes and tries to get away with as much as he can.  Without the Republicans lining up behind him he wouldn't be nearly as dangerous (and in fact would already be out of office).

Bad as expected, if not worse, with the Mons Capitolinus sine anseribus happening as the icing on the cake.

Much worse than expected.  I had believed that the Republican party leadership would rein him in, not urge him on.  His antidemocratic instincts were as expected, but those of Mitch McConnell were not.

Quote from: grumbler on January 10, 2021, 10:53:54 AM
Much worse than expected.  I had believed that the Republican party leadership would rein him in, not urge him on.  His antidemocratic instincts were as expected, but those of Mitch McConnell were not.

Come on that's not fair, Mitch recanted at 5 minutes to midnight.

It's about as bad as I expected.  I thought he might trigger a war, which happily didn't happen.  On the other hand, I didn't think we would be hit by the fucking plague.  I didn't think that whole Republican party would become so sycophantic   I thought that if lost he would refuse to leave and would try to call his supporters into the streets to defend him.  Fortunately that gambit failed and everyone in Washington wants his blood.  I thought he would announce a criminal investigation into the Bidens before the election but the investigation was announced after it.  He also ordered Biden and Obama and Clinton arrested but that didn't happen either.

Nobody knows what the medium or long term results of this bullshit will be  Maybe everyone will step back from the brink, maybe we'll see bombings and militias shooting at each other.

I clearly had a much higher opinion of him than he deserved. I just thought he was a self deluded narcissistic incomptent clown who would talk a great deal but was too lazy to be dangerous. He failed, in these last few weeks, to live up to those high standards. It is kind of hard to imagine things having gone worse.

But I guess it can always get worse.

As bad as expected when it comes to foreign policy, although it could have been worse. At least he did not start a war.
Much worse than expected domestically. I did not expect a coup attempt or the GOP being so authoritarian. 

He was big on isolationism and anti-interventionism in his rhetoric.

Of course even here he let me down, reversing attempts to dial down conflict with Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran but he probably was less bad than your run-of-the-mill Republican there.

Donald Trump's two signature domestic policies were:

1. The Paul Ryan Tax Cut

2. Dramatically slashing environmental protections.

Let me know if there was a third. Pretty weak sauce.

Quote from: Valmy on January 10, 2021, 01:06:38 PM
Donald Trump's two signature domestic policies were:

1. The Paul Ryan Tax Cut

2. Dramatically slashing environmental protections.

Let me know if there was a third. Pretty weak sauce.

3. Undermine American democracy.

Well I was talking about actual laws but fair enough  :ph34r:

Quote from: Valmy on January 10, 2021, 01:32:41 PM
Well I was talking about actual laws but fair enough  :ph34r:

The least important thing in a President's record :P

Quote from: grumbler on January 10, 2021, 10:53:54 AM
Much worse than expected.  I had believed that the Republican party leadership would rein him in, not urge him on.  His antidemocratic instincts were as expected, but those of Mitch McConnell were not.

This, exactly this.

The current situation matches my initial fears during the election and immediately afterwards.

Then there was a long stretch in the middle where each incident made me think "this is really bad for the specific people affected and consistent with what I expected from Trump, but his incompetence, the fight back, and institutional checks are keeping it from getting as bad as it could be."

Then there's this recent election and the aftermath which takes it back to "yeah, that's what I was afraid of."

Quote from: Jacob on January 10, 2021, 03:25:32 PM
The current situation matches my initial fears during the election and immediately afterwards.

Then there was a long stretch in the middle where each incident made me think "this is really bad for the specific people affected and consistent with what I expected from Trump, but his incompetence, the fight back, and institutional checks are keeping it from getting as bad as it could be."

Then there's this recent election and the aftermath which takes it back to "yeah, that's what I was afraid of."

The turning point for me wasn't the election or the aftermath.  That was predictable once Mitch McConnell's Senate made it absolutely clear that they were unwilling to carry out their constitutional duties when they refused to try the impeachment referral.  They gave Trump a blank check to ignore the US Constitution, and the results from that were predictable.

Donald Trump isn't the least constitutionally-inclined person in the US.  He doesn't understand enough of the Constitution to ignore it (he just assumes that it says whatever he wants it to say).  The least constitutionally-inclined person in the US is Mitch McConnell, who not only understands the constitution but understands his role in making it work.  Tied for second are the other 50 Senators (all Republican) who voted to skip a trial.  Had there been a trial, even one that failed to convict, enough evidence would have come out that Republicans could no longer hide behind the "see no evil" excuse and some would have been forced by their own conscience to vote to convict, firing a shot across Trump's bow.  Luckily for them, McConnell allowed them to both refuse to see evidence and then vote to acquit based on a lack of evidence.

That was the day, January 31, 2020, that democracy in the US was fucked.  Party patriotism "trumped" national patriotism, and things will never be the same.

My personal political views might have gotten a little more radical, but the biggest change for me was in believing that the US has a long-term future. Between the complete collapse of so many layers of checks and balances to the fact that the GOP just re-subscribed to Trumpism unanimously to seeing what that side believes almost every day via interacting with my mom, I really don't think this noble experiment is viable as it is any longer. Changes need to be made immediately and irrevocably. Which really cannot happen due to how things are set up. The guiderails have held (so far), but a lot of them were destroyed in the process and the runaway train is still moving for another week and a half. All of this is just the broader political aspect of things without even touching on the impacts COVID and even more rapidly increasing wealth disparity between the rich and everyone else are impacting things and what they have revealed about our country. Or about the global standing of the United States and what all of that means for peace and prosperity and organizations like the UN and other global efforts and initiatives. Every day things seem darker and the walls and ceiling are just a little bit closer.  :(

Quote from: Oexmelin on January 10, 2021, 01:23:55 PM

Quote from: Valmy on January 10, 2021, 01:06:38 PM
Donald Trump's two signature domestic policies were:

1. The Paul Ryan Tax Cut

2. Dramatically slashing environmental protections.

Let me know if there was a third. Pretty weak sauce.

3. Undermine American democracy.

That was actually foreign policy, not domestic.

Quote from: PDH on January 10, 2021, 04:28:40 PM

Quote from: Oexmelin on January 10, 2021, 01:23:55 PM

Quote from: Valmy on January 10, 2021, 01:06:38 PM
Donald Trump's two signature domestic policies were:

1. The Paul Ryan Tax Cut

2. Dramatically slashing environmental protections.

Let me know if there was a third. Pretty weak sauce.

3. Undermine American democracy.

That was actually foreign policy, not domestic.

We're talking about the Trump presidency, not the Putin one...

Voted only a little worse, just because he didn't start a war that got out of control and consumed us all. :whistle: :pope:

Quote from: saskganesh on January 10, 2021, 09:31:40 PM
Voted only a little worse, just because he didn't start a war that got out of control and consumed us all. :whistle: :pope:

Still got a week for that civil war to start.

Wednesday was Fort Sumter

Will you guys relax. The Capitol hasn't fallen to Nazis in almost a week.

I thought he might get into a reckless war overseas, didn't expect 400k dead from a plague and an attempted coup

Quote from: The Brain on January 11, 2021, 06:46:21 AM
Will you guys relax. The Capitol hasn't fallen to Nazis in almost a week.

:lol:

What percentage of the dead from Covid in the US can we realistically attribute to Trump?  Without a doubt, his contribution to the government response was disgraceful, but on the other hand, how many countries in our category have done that much better by numbers?  It seems like by the time of the second wave, not a whole lot of Western countries managed to put together a respectable response.

Quote from: DGuller on January 11, 2021, 12:26:43 PM
What percentage of the dead from Covid in the US can we realistically attribute to Trump?  Without a doubt, his contribution to the government response was disgraceful, but on the other hand, how many countries in our category have done that much better by numbers?  It seems like by the time of the second wave, not a whole lot of Western countries managed to put together a respectable response.

I find the fact that Andrew Cuomo is publishing a book on his leadership in this crisis astonishing and I sort of feel that wouldn't be happening if there wasn't someone like Trump to take a lot of the criticism.

Edit: And I suppose it depends on what other countries are meaningful comparisons? The most striking thing about the US, is the first wave never really stopped - so if you have a look with the US-EU comparison:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&country=USA~EuropeanUnion&region=World&deathsMetric=true&interval=total&perCapita=true&smoothing=0&pickerMetric=total_cases&pickerSort=desc

Both have a first wave - then the EU has a plateau for most of the summer until the second wave; the US doesn't. The death toll keeps rising, less steeply, all through the summer and then there's a second wave (which is, so far, less severe). That model seems to apply with most European countries whether they did well or not in the first wave. The US is an outlier.

Quote from: DGuller on January 11, 2021, 12:26:43 PM
What percentage of the dead from Covid in the US can we realistically attribute to Trump?  Without a doubt, his contribution to the government response was disgraceful, but on the other hand, how many countries in our category have done that much better by numbers?  It seems like by the time of the second wave, not a whole lot of Western countries managed to put together a respectable response.

Agreed.

Quote from: DGuller on January 11, 2021, 12:26:43 PM
What percentage of the dead from Covid in the US can we realistically attribute to Trump?  Without a doubt, his contribution to the government response was disgraceful, but on the other hand, how many countries in our category have done that much better by numbers?  It seems like by the time of the second wave, not a whole lot of Western countries managed to put together a respectable response.

Yeah. I don't think the impact of his abysmal handling of Covid was nearly as much worse than "average" (what it would have been with a normal president) than the impact of his handling of rule of law, democracy, foreign policy, etc.

In 2016 I wrote the following:

Quote from: Savonarola on December 16, 2016, 05:06:58 PM
Personally I think Trump will be an awful president; but I'll admit I was wrong and that he was at least a mediocre president if:

1.)  He isn't impeached.
2.)  No member of his cabinet is charged with a crime.
3.)  The deficit remains under $500,000,000,000 (it's projected level for FY 2017.)
4.)  There isn't a new humanitarian crisis on the scale of Syria anywhere in the world.
5.)  The US doesn't engage in a military intervention that results in a worse crisis than our intervention in Libya did.
6.)  A tariff war does not emerge.

And, while he didn't in fact make all those criteria, today that looks comically naïve.  My mistake was thinking that Trump would try to govern rather than perpetually campaign. 

(Prior to mob attack on the Capitol this week) the thing that really drove home how bizarre Trump's America has become was discovering that Trump is still carrying on a (one-sided) Twitter feud with the late Senator John McCain, and that no major news outlet covered it.  That is now considered unremarkable behavior for the President of the United States.

At a glance only one stands out as a passing. :lol:

I went back to that thread for a bit. Is derspiess still around?

I voted "As bad as expected" then and that's still my answer.

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2021, 05:00:56 PM
I went back to that thread for a bit. Is derspiess still around?

Do remember the guy with horns?

Quote from: crazy canuck on January 11, 2021, 05:06:01 PM

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2021, 05:00:56 PM
I went back to that thread for a bit. Is derspiess still around?

Do remember the guy with horns?

:lol:

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2021, 05:00:56 PM
I went back to that thread for a bit. Is derspiess still around?

He shows up every once in a while. I can understand why he is laying low right now.

Quote from: Jacob on January 11, 2021, 05:00:56 PM
I went back to that thread for a bit. Is derspiess still around?

He hasn't posted in a couple months.

spiess is fine, but yeah, may be laying low ATM for understandable reasons.

Quote from: Caliga on January 11, 2021, 06:31:12 PM
spiess is fine, but yeah, may be laying low ATM for understandable reasons.

The FBI is looking for him after he lifted that podium from the capitol?

Lay off Speesh.  He did the exact same thing Moldy did in 2016.

 :sleep:

He's conservative, but he's not a Trumpist.

Quote from: Tyr on January 11, 2021, 04:58:14 PM
At a glance only one stands out as a passing. :lol:

Or that's Seedys vote, since the world didn't end by September 2017.

Quote from: Admiral Yi on January 11, 2021, 06:36:56 PM
Lay off Speesh.  He did the exact same thing Moldy did in 2016.

Yeah, he said he voted for Johnson, not Trump. I was just wondering where he's at.

He's busy with football work.

Quote from: Syt on January 10, 2021, 02:54:51 AM
At the end of 2019, I asked the board how they thogutht he Trump presidency was going. The results were not good, for Trump.

http://languish.org/forums/index.php/topic,15942.0.html

Only 2 more weeks to go (we hope), and much has happened since October 2019, so I thought it interesting to do a final check in.

Up to inciting the Capitol riots, about as bad as I thought:
- ICE declaring open season on migrants
- Sabotaging international relations
- Disruptive of US&international trade
- Bad for climate change issues
- Bad for science

The nomination of so many SC judges was not foreseen, but was a very real possibility.

Worse.
I really thought that once Trump got his sea legs in office he would be more canny and live up to his populist image by triangulating a bit more - e.g. pushing through a real infrastructure plan, ending carried interest exemption, etc. If for no other reason than to build his re-election case. There was an opportunistic flash of this at the end with the $2000 check proposal, but that just proved the rule - Trump was just too lazy and incompetent to govern to his rhetoric and instead was content to sit back and rubber stamp a far right agenda he doesn't really even believe in, in return for unwavering backing for his relentless pursuit of payback against perceived enemies, abuse of power for political ends, and endless self-glorifying events.