Schmoozing the super-rich to fund a $300m ballroom while cutting food aid for those on low incomes threw the president’s architectural folly into sharp relief
It was a feast fit for a king – and any billionaire willing to be his subject. From gold-rimmed plates on gold-patterned tablecloths decorated with gold candlestick holders, they gorged on heirloom tomato panzanella salad, beef wellington and a dessert of roasted Anjou pears, cinnamon crumble and butterscotch ice-cream.
On 15 October, Donald Trump welcomed nearly 130 deep-pocketed donors, allies and representatives of major companies for a dinner at the White House to reward them for their pledged contributions to a vast new ballroom now expected to cost $300m. That the federal government had shut down two weeks earlier scarcely seemed to matter.
But two weeks later, the shutdown is starting to bite – and throw Trump’s architectural folly into sharp relief. On Saturday, with Congress still locked in a legislative stalemate, a potential benefit freeze could leave tens of millions of low-income Americans without food aid. Democrats accuse Trump’s Republican party of “weaponising hunger” to pursue an extreme rightwing agenda.
I know a lot of people in the military. If you were on the inside, you’d see a lot of sudden, mostly innocuous incompetence, because the last thing most people in the military want to hear is someone telling them how to do their job. Couple that with most people in the military being relatively sane, and I’d bet you’ll start to see operations get canceled or failed or reschedule due to all sorts of “oopsies”.
The modern military has never had to deal with an insurrectionist in the oval office though, so who knows, but I don’t think you’d see open rebellion from the armed forces, just epic sandbagging.
Caveat: This doesn’t count any private armies the assholes in charge raise up, like how they’re trying to turn ICE into their own Einsatzgruppen. those won’t be staffed with military or ex military, they’ll primarily be disaffected, uneducated young men they can control almost exclusively via propaganda.
If ICE ever started a shooting skirmish with a deployment of the National Guard, they’d have difficulty identifying the ICE member’s bodies afterwards. Military units have discipline, but if they get fired on, all bets are off.
That’s an interesting idea. 54-58% of military voted for Trump. So you think that half of the army would just sit there while the other half blocked their deployment or do you think that by the time people rise against Trump most of the military will stop supporting him?
They won’t stop supporting him, but most of those trumpers are enlisted. The officers overwhelmingly don’t support him, and we don’t generally tell the enlisted why we are telling them to do something.
Edit: also those same officers have been sandbagging him all year. The fact that no one is noticing just tells me how few of y’all have military experience.
Great, so they will keep sandbagging him while ICE and police massacre protesters.
BTW, I did noticed that when Trump ordered the navy to bomb fishing boats one officer resigned and the bombings continued.
I left the officers cadre over a decade ago, so I don’t know what the current discussions are. The military doesn’t like to move without the people as a general rule, we know that y’all outnumber us by more than enough to make us stop.
I suspect that many of the officers are just waiting for Trump to invite the people, at which point things star moving fast. We don’t like fast. Marines tend to break shit when they’re going fast.
I’m sure if you break that down by branch you’ll see it line up mostly by education. The Air Force has a lot less maga in it than the Marines, for example.
Same goes for the Officers vs Enlisted in every branch