no need to write an essay or anything

some libs and baby leftists are kinda baffled by the trump banter here and don’t know what’s serious and what’s irony

  • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    No, absolutely not.

    Occasionally I’ve seen someone (there might even be some in this thread) get some stupid 5th dimensional chess idea about how Trump is going to accidentally create the conditions for communism somehow (I saw this for Biden too once). It’s the sort of weird nonsense Americans come up with after realizing that our political situation is FUBAR, but they don’t want to give in to doomerism and they can’t concieve of anything beyond voting every 4 years. It’s incredibly stupid and tbh deserves to be bullied more.

    Broadly speaking, the main difference between Trump and other presidents is that he says the quiet parts out loud. He is very openly and explicitly bad, compared to the others that put on nice pretenses while enacting essentially the same policies. We often focus more on exposing these “fake friends” because sometimes well-meaning people get fooled by their lies, whereas nobody well-meaning likes Trump. It’s just less interesting to talk about stuff where we’re all pretty much on the same page.

  • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I hate Trump but, in the grand scheme of things, his foreign policy was dogshit for advancing the interests of US power projection and I am of the opinion that he was a real spanner in the works for the imperialist agenda compared to his predecessors.

    You might say Trump is strays alarmingly close to fascism and I’d be inclined to agree but I’d also note that what US imperialism inflicts upon the world is much closer to fascism in practice than what Trump is like domestically and that needs to be weighed accordingly, especially given that the US is only one country.

    I am not hoping for another Trump presidency. I anticipate that a second term in office for him would allow him to shift further to the right as well, which is a grim prospect.

    But at the same time, I’m fairly convinced that America won’t advance towards socialism much in the coming few years due to a range of internal and external factors, so I am more concerned with how US foreign policy interferes with other countries and their potential advances towards socialism.

    This means that, overall, I would see a Trump win as something that bodes slightly better for the rest of the world than a Hillary or Biden win, for example. (Although admittedly it would suck somewhat more for the people living in America.)

    Would I prefer Bernie or West instead? Of course.

    So, do I support Trump? No, unequivocally not.

    Do I think that another Trump presidency would give some respite to the rest of the world and to allow some breathing room for other countries to move towards socialism compared to someone like Biden? Likely, given his previous presidency.

    In an overall sense, from the perspective of “pragmatism” and “harm reduction” (ironically two things that get used as a bludgeon to coerce the radical left into voiting blue, no matter who) I think that Trump would be slightly better from a global perspective in comparison to Biden. But I certainly wouldn’t cheer for a Trump victory.

    I figure this take is going to ruffle some feathers but a slightly shittier situation for the US under Trump doesn’t even come close to comparing to the atrocities that US inflicted on Libya, for example, and Libyans are just as important in my consideration as Americans are. That’s going to be a bitter pill for some people to swallow.

    Ideally Trump would be locked up, and so would Obama and Biden and Kissenger and Bush and Jimmy Carter… but that’s not on the cards, aside from Trump (lol.) I would consider a Trump win over Biden/Harris to be slightly less awful overall.

    But this is like asking me if I’d rather eat a piece of shit or the equivalent volume of diarrhoea; both are absolutely awful and I’d prefer neither but one is slightly but notably less awful than the other. That doesn’t mean it’s not a shit option though.

      • ReadFanon [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Bernie’s foreign policy is absolute trash and Parenti was right to break with him over Bernie’s support for the destruction of Yugoslavia.

        If Bernie managed to get elected and not get couped in the process, then by some miracle he managed to implement the domestic reforms that he envisioned, it would be social democracy at home and some variation of business as usual on the international level.

        Still, I think that Bernie would rely upon popular support and that means that imo he’d be more responsive to his voterbase than “Let’s vote him in now and push him left after” Biden would be. But who knows?

      • ElGosso [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Protectionism is different from hawkishness. If he were hawkish he’d be calling for heightened US carrier presence in the South China Sea and calling Taiwan independent. He just wants to keep manufacturing jobs in the US - I doubt he’d sound any different if those jobs were going to Kenya or Turkey or Ireland or any other country. And it’s not like it isn’t a policy without it’s own problems - ask any third world Maoist about labor aristocracy and they’ll tell you - but just because it sometimes lines up with hawkishness doesn’t make it the same thing.

        • GaveUp [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          "He has also stated that countries that export armaments to China should be sanctioned and violators should be punished

          Bernie supports an arms embargo against China that includes:

          Denying participation in cooperative research and development

          Prohibiting ownership and control of any business registered as a manufacturer or exporter of defense articles or services

          Revoking all licenses relative to dual-use goods or technology

          Prohibiting participation in any foreign military sales"

          https://feelthebern.org/bernie-sanders-on-china/

          He’s said nothing on the American presence surrounding China

  • iie [they/them, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    lol the guy is an Epstein-associated, fascist dogwhistling sex offender, it goes without saying we should flush his ashes down a toilet. Feels weird to even spell it out.

    But look. Trump supporters are a large group, like 150 million people presumably. Some of them are frothing bigots, some of them are Go Red Ream politics-as-a-sport people, but some of them, I can guarantee you, just want someone, anyone, who MIGHT do something tangible for them, and after spending their lives watching polite, civilized politicians do nothing while people’s livelihoods crumble around them, they’re willing to take a chance on someone like Trump. And then libs are fucking baffled by this, baffled that some crass pseudo-populist jackass who bills himself as an outsider might pull more support than their bloodless, sneering, polished ghouls.

    Some of them are people like this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B1g7mjT1PA

    He’s got things a little scrambled, but on some level he knows he’s getting fucking screwed.

  • SorosFootSoldier [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    some libs and baby leftists are kinda baffled by the trump banter here and don’t know what’s serious and what’s irony

    As opposed to what, acting hysterical anytime he’s mentioned and feigning enough outrage to some moral degree? Calling him a wet boy and laughing at him takes actual agency away from some of the ghoulish shit he does. When you act like he’s Voldemort (is that the bad from Harry Potter) and not being able to name him is shit he revels in. Literally everything libs have done to try and combat Trump has fallen on it’s face and only made him more emboldened. Not to mention it’s simply unfunny and often punches down in the process, like showing him sucking Putin’s dick. Nice one, way to throw gay men under the bus too.

  • Flinch [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    trump-drenched he is swamp-ass incarnate, our big wet sloppy pissboy, may he one day have a heart attack on live TV. he’s not the guy we need, he’s the presinald the US deserves.

    for context I am a taxpaying US citizen (Death to America).

  • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    People just like making fun of the way he exposes the hollowness of liberal institutions.

    But in reality I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.

    • Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      But in reality I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.

      This triggered some neurons. Remember that allegation that Trump once stayed at the same hotel and room in Moscow that Obama once stayed in and he paid two sex workers to urinate on the bed?

      Seems like a lifetime ago.

  • WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Not from hexbear, but no, of course they don’t. I would wager that you would have a very hard time finding anyone on hexbear or lemmygrad that has anything but contempt for all US presidents. A bunch of monsters, the lot of them.

  • vertexarray [any]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Definitely not. He’s an odious fascist, or he would be a fascist if he had any sort of ideological commitment to anything other than drawing attention to himself. The fact that he was elected at all is a monumental condemnation of the USA. He just has the soul of a problematic Florida drag queen in there, which makes him a tremendous poster.

  • Trump is a grotesque monster, but he’s hated by libs not for vile actions, but because he was rude. We don’t value civility here, so we can laugh at him when he’s funny, but he and every living American president deserves to be tried in The Hague

    • Millie@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      See, this is why I don’t trust y’all. How can you pretend to be leftist when to you the fundamental difference between Trump and any other political administration is literally just that he’s rude.

      How is it that nothing else, from the rights of workers and of oppressed minorities to the protection of the environment to access to health care and education, means anything?

      If none of that means anything more than being rude or not, you’re not a leftist. You’re a cosplayer.

      • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        they’re saying the only difference between him and any other liberal. you forget that imperialism and white supremacy are the defacto policy of the US government, regardless of the views of any president.

      • Here’s one more difference between trump and other presidents: he was less harmful than bush and probably Clinton and Obama. Clinton was responsible for turning the Democratic Party into the neoliberal garbage it is now, bush killed hundreds of thousands of people and devastated multiple countries, and Obama oversaw one of the greatest transfers of wealth from the poorest to the richest the world has ever seen

          • Absolutely. All of them have so much blood on their hands and I will celebrate their deaths with glee. It will be a small pleasure compared to the countless lives they extinguished and cast into poverty but it’s all I can expect when it comes these monster