The Donald J. Trump Presidency

I would never pretend to speak for the people.

But this is not a new development in my life by any means.

Is he ready for a Civil War?

undo wrote:Good thing this guy isn't President, right?

I found out about this story from Italian radio this morning. The newscaster literally had to excuse herself because she was clearly having a hard time maintaining her composure when talking about the snakes and alligator plan. So yeah, these ideas might be barbaric and sinister, but at least the rest of the world is really taking our government seriously nowadays.

undo wrote:I had my first real encounter with a real Trump loving fellow citizen this week, wow

Also, how is this possible? I thought you lived in central Illinois?

Yeah so I’ve been gone for a while but let’s just all eat each other’s bones and murder all the everybody with anger and knife weapons.

undo wrote:I live 30 minutes west of Chicago fwiw

Oh.. Am I confusing you with someone else then? Or was it your parents that are from down State (and now live in Florida)? Regardless, it is still weird to me that this is your first encounter with a Trump supporter.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/trump-syria-kurds-turkey.amp

I’m sort freaking out about today’s news re Syria. I’m super over tired but it’s making me sick to my stomach and I can’t sleep. Weirdly enough, I’m on a Spanish ship participating in an exercise that’s supposed to signal the strength and stability of our alliances.

The Kurds have been such good allies and are literally the only “good guys” in that region right now. And we’re setting them up for a genocide.

Honestly, this should be the damn buster, but I’m so fucking sick of these half-hearted cries of “this is sort of troubling or whatever” from his hordes of spineless enablers, all of whom fucking know better and, cynically sure, could even stand to benefit from deciding to fucking stand up for something for once in their fucking lives.

This should be a watershed moment. From here on out, every single American who has served in the military and derives a sense of pride from that fact will be forced to either condemn trump or to admit that those principles that are supposed to define soldiers - fidelity, courage, conviction, reliability - are actually meaningless to them... basically, I believe that to support this man at this point is to invalidate your service.

My biggest hope is that a lot of them actually are, and that this actually helps the impeachment process gather GOP converts... but I’ll believe it when I see it.

And I want Jim Mattis to publish an op-Ed first thing tomorrow morning dammit and if he doesn’t he can get fucked.

Given the amount of global attention that this move places on northern Syria and the Kurdish forces, do you actually think Erdogan would send in the Turkish army to slaughter the Kurdish people? That is an honest question. Obviously the Kurds have experienced brutal forms of violent repression in the past from Sadaam and the Iraqi government (mustard gas was used on them). It is also true that the Turkish government has imprisoned Kurdish leaders, views the Kurdish independence movement as terroristic, has militarized their southeastern border. A lot of what they are doing is illegal and frightening, but how realistic is a genocide?

And I guess, in this particular case I do wish that certain members of the United States Army remained on the ground with the Kurdish Defense Forces, but that is because I share ideological commitments with them. I don't think the precedent that Trump is setting, of pulling troops out of endless foreign conflicts, is necessarily a bad one. I've gotten in trouble for saying this in the past here, but in so far as Trump could be said to have a coherent foreign policy (he obviously doesn't), I don't find it to be much worse than his Democratic predecessor (which obviously is a really really low bar to have set). Pulling out of the Iranian nuclear agreement is probably the only obvious blunder that sticks out in my mind and he was only doing it because basically Trump's political agenda is just to undo everything done by Obama.

Please tell me why I am wrong about all of this. What would be the end goal of our support for the Kurdish people? Something tells me it isn't building an independent Kurdistan based around the anarchist-Marxist tenets of their political leaders. So what would we be doing there instead?

Like, I guess this must play pretty well with Trump's base, which is what people don't seem to realize. I was watching the news last night with my Italian roommate who knows literally nothing about American politics or the military situation in the region. I thought it was really interesting though that when he saw Americans protesting the decision he commented to me, "it is very strange to see people protesting the end of a war."

Obviously the decision to pull out 150 American special forces doesn't mean the end of a conflict. In fact, it could mean the beginning of a much bloodier phase. But I guess it is instructive to think about his impression of the situation and how that plays really well to Trump's nationalist/isolationist base. I think the Democratic Party needs to do a much better job of actually developing a coherent foreign policy that radically challenges the status quo (which means challenging the intrench interests of the nation's military-industrial complex and the wisdom of neo-conservative foreign policy thinkers).

Looks like I was wrong and Erdogan actually has every intention of using the Turkish army to invade and slaughter the Kurdish people...

Yeah, so basically we´ve decided to abandon all pretext and just embrace the role of bad guy country in a movie.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/10/11/608386/Syria-Turkey-Kurds-SDF-YPG-Erdogan-UNSC-Russia-US-veto

I finally know what it feels like to be some dumbass military officer who gets blown up by Patrick Swayze in the third act of the film. Everything is fucked and it´s our fault.

This is great though, and Yovanovitch is a god damned hero. I hope the republican shitbags in the senate will take her testamony into consideration even though she is a female woman whose opinion is basically nothing compared to the opinions of men and especially powerful old white senate men and especially those who are not also traitor democrats.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/11/yovanovitch-deposition-trump-ukraine-000282

https://newleftreview.org/issues/II114/articles/dylan-riley-what-is-trump

If anyone is interested, that is the best analysis of the Trump administration that I've ever encountered. The premise of his argument is that while literally everyone of every political persuasion is making linkages between Trump and fascism, they are historically inaccurate comparisons, and not just because Fascism is a uniquely European inter-war phenomenon but because of the unique social and economic linkages that produced the Italian and German Fascist States (which were born out a linkage between ex-soldiers, nationalists, the emergent middle classes (petit bourgeois)), which unified these diverse social groups around an economic and social project of imperialism that sought to overturn the global order to free market colonial expansion that, predominately, the English empire dominated in the 19th century.

After making that distinction though, he provides a really incredible and brilliant analysis of the Trump administration, using a concept in Weberian sociology. And then has some really important insights into what is actually being revealed through the chaos of the Trump administration's constant conflict with the legal-bureaucratic State, which is especially pronounced in his frontal war with the State department and the various rogue intelligence gathering and war-making Federal agencies (CIA, FBI, DHS, etc.)

It takes time to read. And I am not providing the greatest summary of his argument either. But I really encourage anyone who has the time or interest because it really is brilliant.

undo wrote:

Will more than 10% of Americans (regardless of political affiliation) ever even get more than the vaguest idea in their minds about what's happening here? Will they ever even hear about it at all?

Please correct me if I'm wrong about this but I remember the revolutions the Libya and Egypt and the short-lived uprising in Iran (which went from front page news to totally forgotten in a single day's when Michael Jackson died) and it seems like MOST people I encountered at school and at work and online were really keeping up with it and actually cared... is this an overly generous memory of how deeply Americans were engaged in "world affairs" only a decade ago?

Today, literally nothing happens outside of the USA unless it's Trump on a trip and we spend 5 out of every 23 minutes on the world news talking about shit people said on Twitter.  

So I was really young when the Arab Spring began in 2010, but I do remember it being a constant fixture of nightly Cable news. Obviously the dramatic events in Tahrir Square kind of created the perfect spectacle for American television audiences, which is part of the reason that it was so widely covered. But I also think that you are right, at least from what I remember there was an earnest feeling at the time that what was occurring throughout the Arab world at the time was somehow world-historic and that we all needed to bear witness and be informed about it. There was also this really pervasive idea that social media and global connectivity had created the conditions of possibility for these uprisings. It's important to remember that this was not long after the Obama election, wherein his campaign was the first to successfully instrumentalize the power of social media for political purposes. So I think in liberal circles there was a real feeling of optimism about the trajectory of the world and a willingness and desire to watch it unfold, which just doesn't exist anymore.

But it is also a uniquely American phenomenon. I don't actually blame Americans for being uninformed though. I place 100% of the blame on corporate news media, which is the most toxic force in American politics and public discourse and has been for decades. It's been really striking watching the situation in northwest Syria unfold from Italy because every morning it is one of the first things that I hear about when I turn on the radio and there are frequent demonstrations, speeches, and gatherings all over town (Bologna is unique in this case). I would actually have to go out of my way to remain uninformed...

I don't have an answer to any of this, but I think it's an important observation and it is definitely one of my biggest frustrations about American life. Despite the fact that America remains the only global imperial force, it's citizens are have a totally provincial outlook and have literally nothing of interest to say about the rest of the world, even though our government is deeply embedded and implicated in literally every corner of the globe.

I really don't get that sense at all, to be honest. Granted I've never had a firm grasp on what other people know or pay attention to but Syria and the abandonment of the kurds have been pretty high up there on what we're talking about these days, and Trump has felt the pressure about it enough to alter his "plan" to be a little less terrible. To the extent that it's not THE thing we're talking about is mostly because there are way more outrageous things happening right now than when Obama was president. Hard to focus on the rest of the world when the president is facing impeachment.

I'd like to think that you are right. Obviously it is difficult to talk about something like the American public in monolithic terms anyway. I was pretty shocked when I was talking to my Mom over the weekend and she literally had no idea what "Kurd" meant. I think she thought I was talking about a type of cheese or something.