Red Mosquito

Looks like White House looking for replacement for Pete Hegseth...

but everything is going so smoothly and swimmingly..maybe give the job to Bartiromo

Peeps wrote:

What do you think of Dana White, Peeps?

Dev wrote:

Peeps wrote:

What do you think of Dana White, Peeps?

http://forums.theskyiscrape.com/viewtop ... =4&t=20323

Dev wrote:

Peeps wrote:

What do you think of Dana White, Peeps?

loud, brash and opinionated. which is what he has to be to run his company.

from his political standpoint and thoughts i totally disagree with him

An oldie but a goodie: Try and think of one thing that this administration has done or Trump has said that wouldn't have caused a complete and utter GOP/Fox meltdown if Biden or Obama had done or said that very same thing.

zeb wrote:An oldie but a goodie: Try and think of one thing that this administration has done or Trump has said that wouldn't have caused a complete and utter GOP/Fox meltdown if Biden or Obama had done or said that very same thing.

It's not the same thing. Trumpf is victim and just fighting back because they said mean things about him. And they hate Jesus and love illeguls. Give him a chance to get the job done. Again.

Happy Trees wrote:

zeb wrote:An oldie but a goodie: Try and think of one thing that this administration has done or Trump has said that wouldn't have caused a complete and utter GOP/Fox meltdown if Biden or Obama had done or said that very same thing.

It's not the same thing. Trumpf is victim and just fighting back because they said mean things about him. And they hate Jesus and love illeguls. Give him a chance to get the job done. Again.

I like you more every day, Trees.

zeb wrote:

Happy Trees wrote:

zeb wrote:An oldie but a goodie: Try and think of one thing that this administration has done or Trump has said that wouldn't have caused a complete and utter GOP/Fox meltdown if Biden or Obama had done or said that very same thing.

It's not the same thing. Trumpf is victim and just fighting back because they said mean things about him. And they hate Jesus and love illeguls. Give him a chance to get the job done. Again.

I like you more every day, Trees.

And I love you right back.

zeb wrote:An oldie but a goodie: Try and think of one thing that this administration has done or Trump has said that wouldn't have caused a complete and utter GOP/Fox meltdown if Biden or Obama had done or said that very same thing.

Helping Israel

Bye bye "disparate impact":

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential ... ritocracy/



If Trump had just not done this insane tariff stunt and said "All executive branch orgs must return to pre-pandemic staffing levels" vs DOGE's antics, we would be living under the red team for a decade.

Bi_3 wrote:If Trump had just not done this insane tariff stunt and said "All executive branch orgs must return to pre-pandemic staffing levels" vs DOGE's antics, we would be living under the red team for a decade.

Anti-DEI initiatives never maintained much better than a 50-50 split, polling-wise.

Pete Hegseth was never gonna be anything but a disaster, and that’s a fact.

RFK Jr was a necessity, because Trump needed his voters in order to win, but bringing him on board was a guaranteed cabinet self-sabotage. Almost everything he says is unpopular, especially with parents of young children, and he’s 20 points underwater with unaffiliated voters.

Deportations have been popular as an idea, but inhumane approaches are not (which is why it went from being Trump’s strongest polling topic in March to being fully underwater a month later)…and there were no circumstances under which this administration was ever going to be humane about how they executed deportations. So the polling collapse on that topic was always baked in, and if anyone here didn’t see it coming, I don’t know.

Actions targeting social supports will always be deeply, deeply unpopular when you actually take them.

Conservative voters like seeing him pick fights with higher education, law firms, and the media, but no one else does.

I could go on, but the point is: he doesn’t have any agenda items that elevate him.

I agree that tariffs and their impact are the primary weight dragging him down right now, but he entered office barely net positive…and none of his policies or approaches are designed to improve on that. So it seems like the more accurate statement is “if Donald Trump hadn’t enacted exactly the agenda that he campaigned on, The red team could rule forever.”

The other side is, he didn’t really have other components to his economic agenda. “Other countries treat us unfairly, the Democrats signed terrible deals, only I can fix it.”

To a median voter who only sort of pays attention to politics and is tired of slowly strangling under the weight of American capitalism, that sounds pretty good. The system is broken. The system isn’t helping me. Fuck these people who tell me I need to save the system.

But Donald Trump‘s impulse and Republican (not conservative) ideology both lean towards enacting policies that are beneficial to wealthy people. And even if you think those policies are generally right, this is simply not a moment in history when they were gonna be popular with anybody.

People wanted to feel like the American dream wasn’t being stripped away from them. They were tired of seeing the rich get richer while the price of a new suburban home shot up into the stratosphere. They were tired of being told that the economy was rebounding when their wages were not.

I stand by my assessment from February 1st:

I think you’re gonna find soon enough that this election came down to “the economy isn’t working for me, and I’m mad at the government about it.” And having a president who is dismantling the government’s ability to provide any check on capitalism, while simultaneously pursuing actions that will increase the economic pressures on the working and middle class, is going to have very potent ramifications.

McP, I respect that perspective and the depth of your understanding here as no one on RM can match it, but I don't think any of that matters anymore. It's completely tribalism now and so the only thing that will break folks from that, and what I think is the root cause of his polling issues, is his absurd economic policies aimed at lowering borrowing costs for consumers and the feds. If somehow he gets mortgage rates to dip back under 4%, no one will care how many court orders about he ignores.

every issue is polarized, and one has to join a team. even (er, especially) the ones that otherwise would be noncontroversial. it's how things like Covid became politicized. hell, if Obama touted a shot that was proven to cure all cancers, Fox/Trump acolytes would take the other side.

tragabigzanda wrote:Agree with every word of that, but would like to add some additional color:

Here in the blue-bubble Bozeman in recently red MT, people are generally fine with things as they are. Which is not to say they’re happy, or even supportive; but absent any compelling Democratic candidates running a regulatory and trade campaign that they perceive as helping their household income, people generally seem inclined to let Trump break everything so the next President can rebuild it in a way more fitting of their needs/goals.

That is, I have seen zero indication that this disaster presidency has any meaningful impact on D-aligned voter sentiment…

So I’m not sure if that’s what you’re referring to by “potent ramifications”; if you’re talking about increased foreclosures, deaths due to lack of medical coverage, etc etc — yes of course. But if you’re implying that Trump’s actions are definitely going to come back to bite the GOP big time at midterms, I’ve seen almost zero evidence that’s going to happen.

The popularity of tariffs was something I tried to avoid discussing during the rollout, because I felt it wasn’t something you could reasonably measure the political weight of before the impacts took hold. People get polled on cause, not effect, because effect is too predictive. And economic effect takes months to unfurl.

For the exact same reason, I don’t take any meaningful information from people‘s immediate response to the federal teardown.

People can think the federal teardown is great, and then suddenly one day they skip a Social Security check because the system isn’t working right. People can support the idea of the federal teardown, but then find out that their school system is cutting special education services in half because federal funding dried up. People can support the federal teardown, but then get mad because of a disease outbreak associated with tainted lettuce that is untraceable. People can support the federal teardown, and then get upset because a program that helps disabled, elderly Americans like their mom evaporate into thin air. People can support the federal teardown, and then get upset because their employer is skirting OSHA standards, or because of their wait time at the VA, or because it got harder to file their taxes. Hell, people can support the federal teardown and then get upset at it because of a misperception about the number of airplane near-collisions happening.

It takes months for the real economic impact of tariffs to be felt. It takes even longer for Federal program closures and office closures to reveal their impact. So that topic is very much still in “watch this space” territory for me.

Second of all, that’s not my point. lol. My point is that there’s a reason the two most popular political figures of our time are Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Millions and millions of Americans are tired of watching things get worse for them and their family. They’re tired of billionaires, and they’re tired of struggle. It’s really that simple.

Donald Trump is good at speaking to that feeling, just as Bernie is. Different ways, different ideals, but the same effect.

But too many of the things Donald Trump wants, and too many of the people he surrounds himself with, run counter to any effort at resolving that situation.

He cannot… Fundamentally cannot… Do anything but exacerbate it.

Even if he does start to lean towards a positive response, all it takes is a Laura Loomer sucking him off…or an Elon Musk flattering his wealth…or a foreign government distracting him….or just an opportunity to goose the stock market so his friends can get richer, and presto….he has once again performed the magic trick of turning a house of cards into a pile of them.

Now I’ll go off topic a little bit, and tell you the other piece of the equation I think matters here: Americans are cowards for shame.

We hate shame. We hate feeling it. We feel victimized by the experience. And we are very, very, very receptive to any political messaging that says “anything that makes you feel shame is unfair. You have a right to be free from it…and I promise that I will put a stop to it.“

The problem with this, of course, is that shame is a natural emotion. It is a learning emotion. Shame is to our ability to form community what physical pain is to our ability to work with fire.

Fear of shame, in an internet age, inevitably drives us towards pocket communities that are full of people who are, and think, like us. It has done as much to make us tribal, I think, as anything else.

And maybe that’s the South Dakota in me, because political messaging towards my part of the country was always heavily rooted in a sense of shame. Ego stroking. Erasing the feeling of being small and insignificant.

You are the Heartland. You are the Real America. You are the reason this whole thing works.

Pandering, that is (by the way) genuinely destructive to the audience receiving it.

One constant, I think, through the last few decades of post-Internet America is this: hatred of shame is very good at selling a narrative. But consistently, when it comes time to enact the policies inherent to that narrative…it doesn’t work out.

Weaponized shame is a powerful tool when you are not in power, and is your enemy once you get there.

Some of the most famous politicians of your lifetime, especially the ones who were deeply unpopular yet somehow remained in office for decades, were successful largely because they were good at speaking to people’s cowardice towards shame…and then obfuscating about it once they were the majority.

Donald Trump can’t do that. He couldn’t do it last time, and he can’t do it this time. Have you ever heard about groceries? It’s an old-fashioned term. He loves to say it. Groceries. Nobody used to say anymore. Now they love it.

When he’s on the outs, he’s a rebel leader. When he’s in power, he’s a joke. He brings down everybody around him. He puts a guy in charge of the department of defense because he looks good on TV. And that’s a bad place to be when, you were elected because people are sick of shit not working.

They had Tim Pool in the press briefing room the other day, and he really showed the lame-stream media what for!

I guess it's ok to wear a beanie at the White House. Zelenskyy take note!

great posts, McParadigm