So funny that Musk has specifically chickened out of a fight like that.

Build a wall and make the Goron pay for it!

Ideally, we would have avoided all this risk, but we didn’t, and for the time being, the best self-care for most of us is to keep in mind scenarios that may play out to reduce harm. Infighting has long been a normal to happen when the GOP asserts itself, so it’s not crazy to imagine it being ultimately the block for attempts to dismantle some of the political structure (the powerful players know how to play this game, and are hopefully worried enough about losing that power in any big change that they will work to protect the mechanisms currently in play).

Professors? You must mean those librul elites. I do my own research!

The point is if they do not care, they wouldn’t even bother to pretend. He’d just stay in office or run again.

The dance of running as VP doesn’t make any sense as either they don’t care and it’s not necessary, or they do care and that’s not a loophole that exists.

Besides, IIRC Kanye and Trump had a falling out over a suggestion that Trump would take a backseat to Kanye in a campaign. Trump won’t settle for even the appearance of ‘second place’.

You claimed that you would be the last to defend him, then defended him? Like what?

4D chess move, now no one else can defend him because he already called ‘last’.

Then he just gets to sell a whole new batch of 48 merch and get even more money… That would really show him?

Note I was referring to the author of the article. He like a lot of other conservatives are probably worried that whole they “won”, it’s really all about Trump and they are trying to think on how to protect their agenda in the face of that precarious reality.

Just remember that reversing the procedure is not a guarantee, should you think you will change your mind later. Other options are more flexible and also protect from things other than pregnancy, which are also undesirable outcomes.

They can’t keep up that sort of lie for too long without the mask slipping. So it’s a good idea to require a fair amount of together time before considering being intimate.

Especially the people who would be worth avoiding wouldn’t have the patience and feel very entitled, so they are less likely to stick around for an early dating period.

If what you think is accurate, then I’ll take ridicule for overreacting if it means Trump’s actual administration thinks it’s too terrible to touch as a result.

If everyone says that PJ2025 or anything resembling it is so terrible it can only be considered a troll bogeyman and should never be implemented for real, I’d take that.

Truth is, they didn’t write up over 900 pages of this crap and produce a bunch of training videos just to ‘troll’. They meant it. Now if, hypothetically, they are no longer ‘in’ with Trump and their ambitions are scuttled and they are trying to make lemonade out of it by extracting liberal tears over nothing, then sure, let them have those liberal tears and laugh about it so long as that stays the hell out of reality. I sincerely hope you are right, but even then, keep up the awareness and ‘overreacting’ to keep it as an unacceptable joke instead of what it was meant to be.

I frankly think that while Bernie should be right, he’s not. His strategy would have also failed, though I’d rather that have been the attempt.

Simple fact of the matter is that out of 10 major countries with elections this year, all the incumbents lost. Didn’t matter whether they were left or right or whatever, they lost. Democrats were doomed by being the incumbents at a time when just so many are unhappy with how things currently are, and people are eager to change everything for a shot. Between having the pandemic become endemic everywhere, economies struggling to digest the massive COVID stimulus, supply chains still off due to both recovering from shutdowns and war, and just the overall situation in Ukraine and Gaza, there’s a lot for people to want a change of course, and they don’t know specifically how this all could get fixed.

Even if they went all-in on more leftist policies, most voters won’t see beyond the ‘D’ and know ‘D’ is what we had today, therefore ‘R’ must be attached to the answer. A critical mass of the electorate either can not or will not critically consider the respective platforms and instead just decide based on ‘keep the same’ or ‘change course’.

Meanwhile, in political circles, everyone is talking like the specifics and strategies made this huge difference or that huge difference and what it means, when the fact is likely that this result was pretty much a given no matter what.

Oh he did. My only hope at this point is that he is just so self-centered he meant he didn’t care about their voting anymore because he personally could never run again.

At least from a personal perspective, I wouldn’t be surprised if he would be ok with closing his legacy having “won the game” by serving as president as long as he was allowed to serve with an overwhelming electoral victory.

He may not care about Trump’s specific presidency, as much as he wants some conservative economic policy in general to maybe endure. This means he would want a republican house, senate, and presidency even after Trump’s second term concludes, and really doesn’t like the idea of going too hard core and the fallout causing a loss of that influence as early as 2027 in the mid terms.

Well, if goods become even more expensive, and wages fail to improve or get worse, then people tend to notice that more than the spin.

Sure you have very loud passionate politically active people who are game for “their team” to win no matter what and will listen to anything to rationalize their position and reject anything that disagrees, but a lot of folks are just looking at their personal circumstance and deciding if they think it’s bad or not and voting either to continue or change, without a whole lot of consideration of what either side says will work or why things are the way they are, they just know “keep it going” or “change it out”.

Well, a scenario is that he cuts taxes and applies massive tariffs, resulting in a huge regressive expense paid the most by the poorest. That he lets companies be more sociopathic toward their workers and says “screw you” to anyone that needs welfare.

The end result if 2 years sees even more expensive bills and less safe employment and less recourse when the employment screws them over would be an electorate that demands him out and takes it out on the house and senate races. Perhaps to the point where they could remove him from office, and maybe even Vance too, and have a Democratic president finish out his term.

So his point is simply that while he pursues republican economic policy, which I suspect the author agrees with broadly, to take it easy and make sure he doesn’t piss everyone off in the process.

That summary was a bit misleading compared to the linked summary.

“What Americans really want, sir, is fewer protections on the job and a weaker safety net,”

The conservative economist is not saying that he shouldn’t have tax cuts and maybe some deregulation, is that he shouldn’t screw the pooch for swing voters in the process.

As he looks toward his new term, Mr. Trump could claim a mandate to lead however he wishes,

As an example, I heard a MAGA politician on the radio the other day. Admittedly it didn’t sound like anyone “hooked in” to Trump’s circle, but I suspect his rhetoric was consistent. The interviewer put to him a question like “given how divisive things are, what do you hope Trump will do to be a good leader for all the nation, including those that didn’t vote for him?”. The response was that Trump won, therefore, there’s no mandate to do anything for the losing voters, and the mandate was simple to do whatever Trump wants to do.

Further, Don Jr. said a key facet for anyone in Trump’s administration is that there must be no one who would dare think themselves smarter than the president. Only yes men allowed.

Ultimately, people need to feel like they have viable livelihoods with a return to relatively affordable goods, and they need to see that within 2 years or else the house and senate will be hard blue come 2027. Of course, there’s always the potential for dismantling the democracy, but the economist would probably think that would be disastrous for stability, and a grave threat to everything including economic concerns. So best outcome for him, as a conservative economist, is somehow making the electorate willingly want to keep the republicans, and he knows that Trump listening only to himself and hard core sycophants is not a recipe to make the electorate happy.

If manners towards 1932 Hitler might have distracted him from what was to come and averted what came next, then sure. Even if it is a long shot, it’s the best chance of the realistic options currently available, and other options may remain practically available, should it come to it.

Of course, even better, if people had flattered his art in 1907.

The last time a sitting president embarrassed him, he escalated by running for president.

Mashed potatoes head Trump might just hit the big nuke button.

With Trump, it actually stands a chance.

Putin has Trump in his hands largely due to hollow flattery. There’s some material rewards too, but relatively paltry compared to how much Trump stands with Putin. He also seems pretty fond of Kim Jong Un after actually having met him, and I can promise you all that guy had was flattery, nothing more to offer.

Trump cares about his ego, and that’s pretty much it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that man be anything other than miserable, except when he found out he swept the swing states and win the popular vote. He was elated like never before.

He also knows nothing of loyalty to others. His outright fascist declarations largely stemmed from his loss and sycophants feeding him fascist remedies for the humiliation of admitting he lost. There’s a chance that on the back of a ego boosting win that likely feels much more gratifying, and a whole host of sycophants, he no longer cares to interact with folks like Steve Bannon. He won’t feel like he owes them anytime, because he finds no purpose in reciprocating support after those folks are no longer useful.

Certainly a more precarious situation than if he had lost, but if the narrative that feeds his ego best is that he loves the elections just as they are, then there’s a chance…