MeanwhileOnGrad
"Oh, this is calamity! Calamity! Oh no, he's on the floor!"
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Meanwhile On Grad
Documenting hate-speech, conspiracy theories, apologia/revisionism, and general tankie behaviour across the fediverse
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Trump is a lot like Reagan in that a lot of his policy choices are time bombs. In forty years, someone's going to be wondering "Jesus, why is this shit so dysfunctional? Oh, it's ~~Reagan~~ Trump. Of course it's ~~Reagan~~ Trump, it's always ~~Reagan~~ Trump."
Some of it will not even take that long. Like the tax breaks trump gave out that expired during Biden’s term. I see that cited a lot about why Biden bad.
Only tax breaks for regular people expired, the corporate handouts were good indefinitely.
It would take decades to undo all the damage from Trump’s tenure, some of it may even be irreversible. It’s mind-boggling that anybody who lived through four years of that could want to vote for four more years.
Nothing particularly bad happened, to them
It's telling that the big thing the guy cared about in terms of each candidate's impact was the NordStream pipeline sabotage.
(Not that I think Biden was behind the pipeline exploding necessarily, just that it's an odd thing to pick out as a big impact of Biden's term in office.)
What, you don't remember Marx dropping that line in one of his letters to Engels?
I think he titled it, "Fuck You, Got Mine."
Damage isn't obvious. A lot of it is:
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Declining/damaged trust from allies and such.
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Financial decisions that don't cause massive disruption but start to move things in the opposite direction from progress and toward greater wealth inequality.
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General degradation of norms and values that our countries and allies rely on
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Don't get me started on national security issues with how easy it was to get in Trumps ear by sitting at mar a Lago, spending a bunch of $ at his properties, meetings where translator notes were destroyed, stolen documents...
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all the intelligence assets/ways&means burned because of the document handling and other stuff
All of this together makes it a lot easier for enemies to manipulate the populace and eventually cause some large scale disruption which would be probably under the opposing party (democrats) to continue to encourage trumpism and the politics that got us there.
Lastly, if you didn't suffer from anything negative from Trumps presidency, you're lucky or ignorant. Chances are it's affecting you in ways you either don't know/understand or don't care about. Essentially all trump did for the white working man is give them a warm fuzzy feeling inside
I was once of those federal employees impacted by the government shutdown that lasted almost two months. I illegally collected unemployment just to make sure I had for to eat. All because of a stupid fucking border wall that never even got built. I paid the unemployment back and faced no repercussions but the fact that I had to break the law because of his stupid ego is insane. I have a kid now I don't know what I'll do.
Sometimes I think my memory is bad and getting worse, but hey at least I can remember an attempted coup 3.5 years ago
Yeah, I can’t remember anything bad that happened in 2020.
Ok but... Let's be real trump didn't cause it, he just made it worse.
Infinitely worse. It’s hard to calculate, but there were countries where they literally had single digit covid numbers during the pre vaccine days, just because they gave the situation the gravity and strictness it deserved
I have a family member who’s in the hospital right now, in a part of the country where practically no one including the hospital staff is wearing a mask. It’s hard to even find them in the hospital to put one on. There are rooms clearly marked with mask and droplet precautions on the outside of the door, and the staff will take a mask from a box next to the door, go inside to deal with that person, and then when they’re done they take their mask back off and go back to walking around treating patients with no mask. What do the people in those rooms have? I don’t know but I can confidently say the hospital is fucking up in a fashion that is actively killing some number of patients and that politics are involved in that.
I am constantly worrying whether Trump’s bullshit will wind up adding my family member, individually and personally, to that 1.5 million surplus deaths
There are rooms clearly marked with mask and droplet precautions on the outside of the door, and the staff will take a mask from a box next to the door, go inside to deal with that person, and then when they’re done they take their mask back off and go back to walking around treating patients with no mask. What do the people in those rooms have?
This is pretty standard, and maybe I can shed some light on it. You don the mask as you enter the room and take it off as you leave to avoid spreading the contaminate out of the room. The mask adds a barrier and reduces your risk of contracting whichever disease (and subsequently spreading it to other patients), and all the stuff it's blocked stays in or at the room when you shed it. So the people seen doing that are actually playing their part in keeping whatever that person has limited to the room they're staying in.
As for what people in those rooms have, it can be a lot of things, but it really is what it says on the tin. They have something that can spread by droplet, which ranges from the flu to stuff like whooping cough or, yes, COVID. The system to keep these things contained is pretty consistently updated and has worked well when implemented. We were all wearing masks everywhere for a time because COVID was spreading like wildfire, and concerns of people becoming contagious before showing symptoms with no way to reliably innoculate/vaccinate medical workers
So they are putting on a mask for the rooms that require it and then discarding once no longer necessary?
In what world is wearing a mask while walking around in a setting where there are guaranteed to be undetected COVID cases, and guaranteed to be people who will be vulnerable to exceptionally bad impacts if they catch COVID, during a COVID spike, no longer necessary?
I’m aware they are following the hospital’s guidelines. I am saying that those guidelines are killing people.
No, he caused it. He may not have directly created the virus, but he is personally responsible for the disaster that tore apart the US.
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He explicitly disbanded the organization directly responsible for warning about and planning for possible pandemics.
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He dismissed the danger and refused to do anything at all until the pandemic was in full swing.
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He politicized standard and critical pandemic procedure, crippling any effort to manage the spread and deathtoll.
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He caused havoc in ppe distribution as feds competed with states and hospitals to fill a "stockpile" that strangely never seemed to distribute said stockpile.
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He actively spread misinformation on treatment and preventative care, downplaying necessary medical treatment and promoting crackpot "cures".
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Even at it's height in 2020, he was attempting to sweep it away out of sight instead of doing what needed to be done: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/politics/donald-trump-testing-slow-down-response/index.html
Suffice to say, he did plenty to make the pandemic what it is. Honestly, the only thing I can give him any credit for is focusing on fast tracking the vaccine. But considering his part in fostering the pandemic we are still dealing with, he isn't absolved of much, imo.
I swear it's like people memory holed just how fucked Trump and the right wing's response to covid was, and it's a symptom of even deeper issues.
I lost quite literally 50% of my immediate family members to covid. They were conservative, and bought into all the anti mask and anti vax conspiracies, hook, line and sinker. Literally as my unvaccinated father was dying in the hospital, he would text me messages about how the vaccine was going to fry my brain or kill me, and I needed to do my own research and stop listening to the lying liberal media.
Don't get me wrong, I had no love for conservative ideology before Trump, but I could at least have well reasoned debates and find common ground on some policies with my conservative family members. Most importantly though, we didn't even really talk about politics that much. Now, I can't even make a chicken salad sandwich in their presence without somehow triggering an insane rant about the woke liberal agenda.
My other side of the family isn't even very liberal but they aren't trump supporters, and they're way better to interact with. The extent of our political discussions usually chalks up to "everything's pretty fucked, wanna smoke a bowl instead of harping about it?"
"No we are definitely real communists not right wing trolls"
They aren't even trying to hide it anymore.
But don't you see, you literally cannot tell the difference. Muh both sides. The Repubs do a bunch of horrible shit, yes. But if you look at the Dems, well, the Repubs are also doing a lot of horrible shit while the Dems have control of no branches other than the executive. That's the Dem's fault. Therefore we must conclude that muh both sides.
I wouldn't call Project 2025 "more standard American bullshit". It's a plan for how to turn America into a fully fascist country within one presidential term.
The US is already a fully fascist country.
Ahh, leftism-doomerism. No one quite so right wing.
“Oh, cool! I’m gonna vote for Kamala Harris then; if we’re already fascist then she can’t do any harm, and I might get some of my student loans forgiven that way.”
NO NO NO NOT LIKE THAT
"Don't you understand? You'd be voting for a fascist! And that makes YOU a fascist! You gotta vote third party bro, trust me bro, protest votes totally work bro, and Harris is gonna win anyway I guarantee it, just ignore the victory margins in 2016 and 2020"
Or better yet: "We should let Trump win to stick it to the DNC for not picking someone far enough left. Just ignore the fact that if Trump wins they'll probably pick someone further right next election season anyway. Also I'm sure all those trans people whose lives are now in danger from Project 2025 sleep safer knowing that the blood of those Palestinians that Israel is still killing because Trump is still funneling them weapons isn't on my hands, because I didn't vote for genocide. I'm a great ally."
How is this not downvoted into oblivion - I know it's a link to that instance, but still.