Votanic wrote:
And we know a Trump presidency will be just fine because the last one was.
The Trump presidency certainly wasn't "fine."
And no, I don't care about the pandemic bullshit. The whole world seemed to lose its marbles and act badly during that one -- Conservatives in Britain, Liberals in Canada, Communists in China, whatever the idiot in India calls his philosophy, etc., they all handled it badly. So I thought Trump behaved like an idiot during the pandemic, but no more an idiot than most of the world's leaders.
Among serious criticisms of the Trump presidency was giving a big tax break to the rich and continuing to f*ck the working man. But any other Republican would have done the same, so that isn't a uniquely Trumpian issue.
Fucking over the refugees was a big moral crime, in my mind. But again, probably any other Republican would have done the same. Cruz would have been far worse. So while it does piss me off, I am realistic enough to know that a lot of other presidents would have pissed me off equally, and some even more so. So it's not a particularly bad strike against Trump specifically.
The single biggest crime of the Trump presidency was tearing up the Iran peace deal and putting the radicals back in power in Iran. Memories are short, and people now have mostly already forgotten that before Trump, the secular opposition in Iran was growing fast. If the peace deal had held, by now it's entirely possible that a rational secular government would be in power in Teheran, and the ayatollahs would be just a bad memory. By tearing up the peace deal, Trump almost single-handedly put the ayatollahs back in the driver's seat and doomed the nascent secular government in Teheran to extinction. Everything that's happening this year, in Gaza, in Jordan, in Yemen, etc., can be traced to Iranian extremists, and their rebirth and re-ascendancy can be directly traced to Trump ripping up the peace deal.
But all that being said, Trump's presidency was not the worst thing imaginable. Trump's greatest crimes came long before he started running for office.
Don't forget this is the thief who backdoored two and a half million dollars from his phony casino. And got away with it! Have you ever seen a casino go bankrupt before? Unheard of. It takes a really amazing thief to steal so much that a casino goes bankrupt! And gets away with it, shite! I know a guy who went to jail for backdooring a second-hand hoist from his bankrupt muffler shop, probably worth 1500, and this cocksucker steals 2.5 million and doesn't even get a slap on the wrist!
The casino was a clear RICO violation. Trump's presidency is basically irrelevant. He shouldn't have been running for president at all in 2016, he should have been doing 15-to-20 in San Quentin. Except at the time he still had Chris Christie on the payroll and it could all be swept under the carpet.
And Trump University! How many hundreds of thousands did he steal there? I don't care that much about his various real estate scams and stuff. As I've said in this forum before, most of his real estate scams involve ripping off other real estate scammers, who ought to have known better and done their due diligence. And ripping off Deutches Bank, hell, I can almost congratulate him on that one. DB certainly doesn't come to the table with clean hands! But Trump University was something new and evil. Ripping off working-class people who really thought they were going to learn something. Many of them emptied out their life savings, some took second mortgages, just to find out they weren't going to learn anything, and every "class" was just an excuse to upsell to some other "class" in which they would again learn nothing. Poor people just trying to improve their lives and instead being bankrupted by a con-man. That's evil.
Oh, and one more thing, I guess, from the presidency. Remember the Puerto Rico hurricane, how towns where the mayor kissed ass got federal relief funds, and towns where the mayor didn't, got nothing? That's pure fucking graft. You're a citizen, you pay your taxes, you're entitled to equal treatment under the law. You shouldn't have to get on your knees and swallow the president's jizz just to get what you're legally entitled to.