Donald Trump the Megathread part II - Mod Warning updated in OP 12/2/26

Wonder how many are GOP/Trump donors………

Because Trump makes a complex world easy to understand and he confounds and frustrates the perceived educated elites who are seen to have dominated the world for decades (the irony of course being that much of what he does seems designed to build his own wealth and the wealth of others profiting from his erratic policies).

For those who feel left behind by the so-called cosmopolitan liberal elite and who feel looked down upon as people whose opinions shouldn't be taken seriously because they are seen as dumb ignorant bigots, Trump is pure catharsis. He takes the educated, nuanced arguments of the liberals and he more or less urinates on them. He takes their facts and statistics and just makes up his own. He takes their complicated world views and counters them with simplistic post-truth gibberish — but he gets away with it and in doing so he becomes admired as this colossus who empowers those who are seen as dumb and who finally makes the smart people feel helpless and confused. And he's good at it, with an entire world full of smart reasonable people left feeling completely at a loss at how this buffoon has cast a decade long shadow over global politics.

Professor Donbert Trumpstein.

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I really don't think that has the effect you think it has. This has galvanised Europe. His actions have led to a huge increase in defense budgets. Factories have been spun up to support the war in Ukraine and to support the EU armies. A new EU defense purchasing bill has been authorised. Countries like Canada and the UK are scrambling to be part of it. Nato is nothing if it went to support Trumps war in Iran, it became more legitimate staying out. The US are losing their power with their allies as the Allies go looking for new relationships. Wait until you see the EU develop closer ties with Asia. This has been a huge disaster for the US.

You're dead right when you say it's generational psychological imprinting. It's actually a pretty fascinating insight into how attitudes reverberate across generations and eras. You can see where it comes from really, America was built by immigrants who came to a still untamed land — both in terms of its geography but also in terms of its status as a functioning state that did not have the centuries of developing laws, norms and forms of State regulation behind it which the European nations did. They also never underwent the major sociopolitical upheavals Europe went through — the great class revolutions and uprisings that set Europe on the path towards its modern social democratic form.

So in America, you stepped off the boat and from that point on you had to elbow and jostle your way to survival or perhaps even big success. Before you know it you have an entire society of people who have all gone through the same basic process of having to elbow their way to some form of success (great or small) with no safety net beneath — everyone from the labourer earning enough to pay rent to the salesman who went from selling trinkets from a stall to building that into a corporation.

And understandably those attitudes would then have been instilled in their children and the entire building blocks of how the State and the economy functions would have been constructed by people who were brought up with that mindset, and it lives on to this day.

The other aspect to that is that the Americans were not going to barren land. There were plenty of native Americans present already in the Americas. That at its inception creates a siege mentality, which promotes a them versus us. It also probably led to a degree of tension between the different factions

I don’t think that it was one single cause that let to America’s demise. The elite was definitely a huge part. Techno-feudalism ended up bleeding into so many aspects of the culture and rotting it.

There is a fab passage from the book, “Slouching Towards Utopia”: “Easterlin, bemused, puzzled over how “material concerns in the wealthiest nations today are as pressing as ever, and the pursuit of material needs as intense.” He saw humanity on a hedonistic treadmill: “Generation after generation thinks it needs only another ten or twenty percent more income to be perfectly happy…. In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather it is the triumph of material wants over humanity.”

The disparity is real and should always be challenged. Gross disparity destabilises society. But we also need to be realistic and people, rather than reaching for the Barnum type solutions, need to ask is the need a realistic expectation. “The history of the ends that humans pursue, he <Richard Easterlin> suggests, demonstrate that we are ill-suited for utopia. With our increasing wealth, what used to be necessities become matters of little concern- perhaps even beyond our notice. But conveniences turn into necessities. Luxuries turn into conveniences. And we humans envision and then create new luxuries.”

To add to that, if for a second they stopped with all their shite all over the world and had to stop for a second, they might start to see the problems they have at home.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/04/20/image-soldier-striking-jesus-christ-statue-israel/

it has been verified as legitimate

that is really worrying. I am sure that it will be disseminated widely on the Socials. That way MAGA can state the it was the Muslims all along or use it as proof that we cannot be sure either way….. Flood the deck and that way nobody will know what to believe… And they are unlikely to read the Guardian which reports that the IDF acknowledges authenticity