2024 US Presidential Election

Hello Percy - Deciding to move on to other Topics I chose the one at the top of the list, seems like lighter fare, and you just happen to be the last comment.How would Trump be bad for the country and the free world?

I can understand the griping about his hair, his blustering, or his irksome name-calling habit, but I don't hear much griping about his policies.He kept China-Russia-North Korea-Iran-Venezuela quiet, he had the economy humming along, he had the Middle East quiet and on its way to relative peace, he held our deadbeat allies accountable, the USA was energy independent and actually exporting energy, he had the southern border under control and orderly (even without the wall!), and he did it all while under shrill, non-stop attack from the media/entertainment class, the other party, and treachery within his own party.Then the next guy came along and undid as much of his predecessor's accomplishments as possible, seemingly out of spite, and now the country is on fire, the world is on fire.But, not to worry, the election is 8 long months away and when it comes it won't be 45 vs. 46. I have faith that our country and our negligent leaders will come to their collective senses (more or less) and arrange an election that will not, regardless of who wins, result in riotous aftermath and 4 long years of strife.

Is “Dear Leader”, like hitler/hater/racist/xenophobe/et al…., just an aspersion to cast, or is there a parallel to draw between DJT and a North Korean dictator?

NEGOTIATIONS 101:If you just want your adversary to behave then you don’t insult/provoke him gratuitously, and you don’t try to grind him into the ground. You take him behind closed doors, administer the firm discussion and threats, get what you want from him, and then emerge smiling, waving, shaking hands, clapping each other on the back, and telling everyone what a great bunch of guys you are. The adversary behaves and is not desperate to save face, mission accomplished. We have leverage over those you mentioned, DJT understands this, and he handles it masterfully.He says a thousand things every day and it’s easy enough to cherry pick something and try to make something of it that it’s not, but you have to look at the tangible, measurable results.

!!??? Au Contraire!Trump is very much a policy guy – Re-invigorate USA business, mfg, and the economy in general; secure the border, re-do our trade “deals”, re-establish the USA as a world power (but not by getting into wars). Here are just a few of his policies carried out:• Dump the TPP because it was good for global investors but bad for USA mfg, and instead…
• …renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement to USA’s benefit
• …negotiated new trade and tariff agreements with Japan, also to USA benefit
• …dump NAFTA (also good for global investors, bad for USA) and negotiate new USMAC, to USA benefit
• ...renegotiated trade/tariff agreements with EU that were bad for the USA
• …quietly hardballed China into trade, beginning with the Phase One treaty that was of great benefit to the USA, but left to the wayside by the succeeding administration.
• …undercut Russia’s energy influence/coercion in Europe through several agreements like Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, also civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and adamant opposition to the Nordstream 2 pipeline.
• …Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 under Obama, was quiet all through Trump’s administration, then started again in 2022. Trump has also pushed for peace in Ukraine, rather than continued carnage.
• …withdrew for the Iran Nuclear Deal which ultimately gave Iran nuclear weapons, then imposed and enforced harsh sanctions on Iran to bankrupt its regime, and we had no trouble from Iran during Trump. The previous administration, in a hilarious attempt at covert operations, delivered billions in unmarked bills and foreign currency to Iran in the middle of the night, and the current administration gave them more billions more which they promptly used to light the Middle East on fire last fall.
• …called out North Korea at the United Nations in front of the entire world, then met behind closed doors with Kim and came out smiling, and we never heard a peep from North Korea during Trump.You might want to re-calibrate your perspective here, its seems to be giving you backwards indications.Obama’s economy was sluggish, mainly due to burdensome regulations, taxes, and threats of taxes. Trump’s economy was stellar by just about all measures, the stock market hit 20,000 in 2017 and 30,000 in 2020, all without the crazy inflation we have now. This was done by encouraging business rather than penalizing it. Humming under Biden!!?? There is crushing inflation and even the Democrats are renouncing the term “Bidenomics”, lest they get blamed for this economic mess.Trump inherited a border mess, fixed it by enforcing the law and by securing agreements with Mexico, Biden stopped enforcing the law and dropped the agreements and now the border is a complete disaster, even Biden’s allies are conceding this. The USA has and will always rely on immigration, but it has to be controlled.And I agree with your point about the politically motivated prosecutors. Mueller investigated him for 2.5 years, but had to come out and report that he found nothing. But then added that they didn’t find him innocent either, which is absolutely absurd for a prosecutor to say. And I think it’s obvious to everyone who’s paying attention that the current prosecutions are purely political, along with all the purely political creative ways to remove him from the ballot, but people are OK with that because, well, anything to stop Trump.Wrong side of Israel!? He moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem following international protocol. Clinton, Bush, and Obama all made noises about this, but Trump actually did it. And he also brokered multiple agreements between Israel and formerly antagonist neighbors, culminating with the Abraham Accords.So anybody can criticize, that’s easy enough, but what were the problems with his policies?

Soooooo......is there a parallel to draw or is this just a matter of supporting aspersions with slightly more clever aspersions?

OK, ok , racist-bigot-xenophobe-hater-dictator, we got it. These limp disparagements are the last bastion of the argument-less.And the “treating human beings in dire straits” worn-out strawman betrays the utterer’s acknowledgement of the real problem. This kind of strawman pablum is usually uttered by well-off residents of leafy green suburbs – academic, lawyers, and such - people who know that the newly arrived won’t be competing for their jobs, hanging around their neighborhoods, or overwhelming their schools.Americans are, by-and-large and from both sides of the aisle, friendly and generous, but they want to know who’s coming into their home and what the plan is for them: Who are they, have they been vetted, where are they going to live, where are they going to work, how will they be assimilated…? There has to be a process that, like everything else around here, is governed by law.If an old-family European lands in a USA airport with no passport, no visa, and no identification, he will be locked up in a backroom (cell) somewhere in the bowels of the airport and held there until the authorities determine who he is and whether he is wanted for anything, and then he will be spun around and sent straight back to where he came from. So spare all the racist-xenophobe stuff.Trump’s trade deals involved agreements for the other countries to start importing our goods commensurate with what we import from them. The problem with free trade is that we are the only ones who practice it, and these other countries eat our lunch. The old hardcore libertarian total free-trade doctrine has been long discredited. All of our trade “partners” have a thousand ways to subtly subsidize their stuff and tax ours. We do things out in the wide open by comparison so we would have a hard time getting away with this. Tariffs increase the price of their products for our consumers, sure, but it reflects reality and levels the playing field for our producers. I hate the idea that the money goes into govt coffers, but that’s just a sour side effect, the main point is to keep things “fair”.Labelling him isolationist or Neville Chamberlain is just lame. He used surgical military strikes many times and to great effect. A good measure of whether or not large-scale military ventures are worth it is to ask yourself if you would be willing to die in that venture or (probably for most of us here) would you be willing to have your kids die in that venture. (Incidentally, another thing that the leafy green suburb-dwellers don’t have to worry about.) Trump understands this and this is one of the things that endears him to the working classes – they have every reason to believe that Trump truly cares about them.And…wow…astonishing words. I hear Hamas is looking for recruits.

OK

You might be the only person in the country who thinks there is no inflation problem. We have crushing inflation, crushing interest rates, and all the kings men don't quite know how to deal with it, other than to tell Biden to stop saying Bidenomics.

Sure.Trump strong-armed a bunch of Middle East belligerents into signing historic, binding peace agreements that showed great promise and were actually working at the end of Trump's term.Then Biden came in and after some spectacular foreign policy failures the signers realized that no one was going to hold them accountable for anything anymore so they went back to their old tricks.

The cherry-picked details and the complete disregard of the big picture are clear manifestations of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a blind hatred of Trump.These nations are not friends among friends, and they have no compelling reason to enter into such a treaty (especially the non-Israel ones), and lots of compelling reasons not to (e.g., Anwar Sadat). Their signing of these treaties was not popular at home nor amongst their next-door neighbors, but by any measure the accords were a huge, historic step in the right direction in bringing peace and constructive communication to that region. Denouncing them is just silly.The Accords were intended as a series of treaties that were set to continue had Biden not won the 2020 election. But the new administration had no intention of continuing any of Trump’s successes, and its foreign policy competence level made it clear to the world that it couldn’t hold the accords together even if it wanted to.You may want to remove yourself to some perspective of objectivity and re-evaluate your information.

Ok, if you want to throw numbers around:Inflation was at 1.4 when Trump left, peaked at 7 in 2021, peaked at 9.1 in 2022 and peaked at 6.4 in 2023, and is “down” to 3.1 today (but rising again). No matter, the damage is done, prices have been driven much higher and they’re not going down, simply going up a little more slowly. These are just numbers, but the real proof is in what Americans from all sides are saying – things are much more expensive than they were and the economy is bad and it’s Biden’s fault.Interest rates? 0.89 when Trump left, 1.45 in 2021, 2.95 in 2022, 3.96 in 2023, 4.13 in 2024 and no signs of coming down. Yes, that’s crushing, especially when combined with sky-high prices.Regarding the housing market, those who follow these things “hope” that the housing market bottomed-out in 2023, and are “confident” that things are on the rise for 2024. Hardly “booming”. The real measure of how bad things are is in Housing Affordability, which is way down because prices and interest rates are way up.And what’s with the right-wing, Reagan, and 1992 diatribe?(Incidentally, I watch Fox, CNN, MSNBC, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, the View, The Five, Breitbart, Scarborough, ReidOut, et al., to maintain my perspective and my sanity because I don’t trust any one of them completely, and if I get the well-rounded picture I can read between the lines for myself. You should try it sometime. And you may want to re-calibrate your BS-o-meter.)

*..sigh..* Still banging on that old worn-out strawman, I see.As I said before, the USA needs immigration and it always has, but it must be orderly and within the law. If the process exists as you say, then Biden is flatly refusing to enforce the law, which is what’s causing this border mess. Trump enforced the law effectively and received scorn and criticism for it. If there’s a problem with the law, or if we want to offer citizenship to the world’s less materially-endowed, then it’s a simple matter of changing the law, that’s how we do things in an orderly, civilized, constitutionally-limited representative republic. The fact that the Chief Executive (and many others) think it’s OK to just stop enforcing the law is beyond belief. The plight of the people is a legitimate observation and concern, but if that’s all you can cite when addressing this mess then you’re really not offering a solution. Virtue-signaling is the term that comes to mind. The truth is, the current mess adds horror and tragedy to dire straits for those relying on "coyotes" to move them through illegally.Ditto the criticism of Trump for his proposals to fix the problem. Yes, the first thing to do is stop the mass influx of illegals, but something has to be done about the millions of unknowns that have flooded in at Biden’s behest, and Trump is the only one proposing anything at all serious to fix this mess and prevent it from re-happening. All the other proposals attempt to placate both sides and wind up being contradictory, non-sensical, and ultimately indefensible, which is why nothing ever gets done, in spite of politicians on both sides bloviating about it incessantly.You can throw around crime rate statistics and I can counter those, but the fact is the illegal-status immigrant crime rate should be zero. If a US citizen commits a crime we can’t deport him, but if we have reason to believe someone applying for entry into our country is a criminal then we very well can and do (in sane times) prohibit entry.We can also throw around instances and figures regarding tariffs and protectionism, but the fact is we have been losing the trade game because of our attempts to balance lofty notions of free-trade purism with the necessity of protecting our industries from foreign trade practices designed to destroy and overtake them. We need to be an example to the world and play the trade game out in the open, unapologetically. Which Trump does.Still confused by the Israel comments. I don’t want to assume the worst, but delving into it here would depart from the discussion at hand. It’s a subject that merits a dedicated forum.

Please see #492.

If you just want to chew me out, then OK. But if you're looking for a response then you'll need to clarity the "accusing", "advocating", and "talking points" bits.