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this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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politics
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For me, Trump is ultimately the last president who could possibly have enacted and globally promoted actual climate science based reforms that at least might have stood a chance at preparing America and the world a way forward through what is going to be an extremely challenging next few decades.
Instead he was an incompetent idiot criminal mobster bully who crystalized nascent fascism, religious extremism and anti intellectualism into an unstoppable political force, and in the process broke basically the brains of all of America in one way or another, utterly destroyed our reputation to the rest of the world, and has left an utterly catastrophic political situation in his aftermath, that basically only FDR could possibly hope to do any better than mitigate.
Say what you will about exact placement of other Presidents but Trump very obviously deserves the bottom spot.
The fact that having this 'opinion' outloud in a bar in basically most of America would get me assaulted is further proof that this collosal evil doofus is essentially the best argument against American Exceptionalism I can think of, but I am again literally likely to be assaulted for having it.
Anyway, tl:dr, we're doomed now, thanks Trump.
Worst is a pretty high bar to clear though. Like, Jackson literally committed the Trail of Tears, genociding all the Indians against the express orders of the SCOTUS, who he told to pound sand because he controlled the army and there wasn't jack or shit they could do to stop him.
Like, Trump was real real bad for sure, but like, Trail of Tears, literal death marches at gunpoint bad? Idk.
Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.
Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson's trail of tears.
I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.
Just to add I think you could make some of the same arguments for the degrading of healthcare/social safety nets and the EPA. If we're purely talking numbers and not specific cruelty.
I imagine you would compare the US numbers with peer nations to get an estimate how much is on him.
One of the many fucked up things Trump did--there are so many that it's easy to forget--was meeting with Navajo tribe veterans under a Jackson portrait. He loves Jackson and would repeat all Jackson did if he could.
I mean, trump would have loved to create his own trail of tears (not that he knows what that was, historically). I guess it's reasonable to deny credit for what he wanted to do versus what someone actually did, though.
The thing is, he had so many opportunities to do a handful of good things and STILL did the other fascism stuff and he probably would have won reelection. I mean, Nixon at least gave us the EPA and cleaned up our waters.
I mean, it was a freebie. Covid? If he went all in on saving lives we could be living in Trumpland right now. Instead he might have killed hundreds of thousands of people with his dumb mouth.
Trump is really testing our democracy right now.
He has already broken it.
I think you're too optimistic unfortunately.
Well that would make you the actual only person I have ever met that has said any opinion I have about politics is too /optimistic/.
I have spent my entire life being called overly pessimistic about the political nature of America, and while I have been wrong about some things and learned /why/ and then learned more, you are again the only person who has ever said I am too optimistic and this is both baffling and in a weird way sort of validating.
For my full actual outlook for the future, I am basically educated guessing that while the financial elites of America have been so far successful in convincing a good number of non poor people that the economy is in a sort of low growth holding pattern, this will fall apart due to the now for several months ongoing military/piracy fun going on near Yemen.
No amount of financial fuckery and op eds will be able to mask the downturn which I estimated several months ago now would cause such significant logistical strain on basically the global capitalist machine in general that it would result in an actual negative GDP print for the US economy in either Q1 2 or 3 of this year. The UK has apparently already had that happen.
What this means is the economy will officially shit itself and basically barring Trump literally being incarcerated, he will win over Biden.
If Trump /is/ literally incarcerated, enough Republicans will lose their minds that they will basically attempt to secceed even harder and basically do something like another insurrection and/or mass wave of basically domestic terrorism to the point that it will be obvious that the US is balkanizing.
While I consider this Trump being incarcerated scenario overall less likely, if Trump wins he will basically end American democracy and his total inability to have any kind of policy that makes any kind of sense will basically lead to horror misery and further impovershment of the masses, while he basically just orders his goons to order their goons to direct the idiot violent followers of his to be brownshirts.
Either way, the climate has now basically indisputably passed the 1.5C threshold, is actually basically trending closer to the worst case scenario envisioned by the last IPCC that actually bothered to model such things, possibly even worse, which means we are guaranteed basically everything most people need to routinely purchase becoming more expensive, more failing infrastructure, more unchecked corporate greed, hundreds of millions of climate refugees in this decade alone, and we in America will basically either be having a civil war or being crushed under an authoritarian boot while this happens.
There.
Am I still too optimistic?
lol, in a sad way. I think you're pretty much spot on except for the climate part. I think the last president who could have done anything meaningful was probably Bush senior and not Trump. I'm still gonna recycle and stuff, but we are way past any hope of anything less than catastrophe imo. I'd put money on it except I'm not holding out much hope of the dollar holding much value.
As bad as Trump is, Democrats are pretty much equally inept when it comes to dealing with climate change. All but the most progressive Dems are just as beholden to fossil fuels interests. We needed Gore to win back in 2000 for any real difference to be made. Now we're doomed regardless.
The Inflation Reduction Act was the most powerful climate law ever passed in the US, and it was significant enough that it forced European countries to pass similar legislation.
It certainly doesn't fix climate change suddenly, but it's incorrect to say Democrats are as bad. They're at least meaningfully trying. Trump and Republicans are actively wanting to make things worse.
>The Inflation Reduction Act was the most powerful climate law ever passed in the US
by what metric
Most spending towards climate change, at $369 billion.
And, from a political perspective, it forced other countries to make similar legislation.
the Organic Act preserved vast swathes of the united states against development. the bureau of land management established under truman has done the same with other federal lands (with varying degrees of success).
how can you quantify the relative value of these against the IRA? i don't think the simple summing of budgetary allowances is a good metric to decide whether it's teh most powerful climate law ever passed.
Let me rephrase -- most powerful climate change law ever passed. Not overall climate and environment. The establishment of the EPA would be a strong contender for the most powerful environmental law ever passed, that's for sure.
if the money is spent correctly, maybe. i haven't read it, but I'm wary it may spend 200billion on clean coal and the rest on hydrogen fuel cells (as examples)
Are Democrats just as bad? No. But they are equally inept. They align themselves with business interests and favor preserving the status-quo over the dramatic systemic change that is required to address climate change. Anything they allow to pass is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Far too little, far too late. Neo-Liberal incrementalism is what doomed the world, reactionary conservatism is mearly a by-product.
The law isn't about preserving the status quo though. It has massive subsidies and provisions to create a brand new status quo. The idea of the law is to build up American green energy companies so that they'll be global leaders in the space.
I agree it isn't the full solution, but it is still significant, and it's trying to make some systemic changes.
I agree, but then you have to have a discussion about what actual voting fraud looks like, and also involve climate change.
I have attempted to do this with a few Republicans these days.
It generally ends with them become irate, loud, angry and throwing out insane nonsense.
This probably won't make you feel any better, but with how long it takes our actions to make a significant impact on the climate, he could've been a climate messiah and the next few decades would probably still be the same.
I'm not sure when the tipping point was, but we've long since passed the point where we could avoid the whole problem by reducing emissions. We've been locked into a dynamic now where we not only need to reduce emissions to fix the climate, we need to take mitigative measures against the effects of climate change. These next couple decades are going to be a combination of promoting green energy and defending ourselves from climate change. We couldn't stop the monster from being born, so now we have to fight the monster while also saving everyone from it.
I have hope we'll manage it though. There was a report in early 2023 which said the efforts we've made so far on the climate have made a difference. We're no longer on the path to an apocalyptic extinction event of +4 degC or higher. It'll be hard work, but we can do it. My biggest regret is that I don't think our generation will ultimately be able to fix it. We're going to have to do what we can, but it'll be our children who are able to finally fix it. There's just not enough time left for us to do so in a human lifespan.
well said. i dont agree about the climate stuff, but the rest is 100% correct.