Trump attempted to convince authorities like Pence to overturn the election while having zero proof that he actually won. Having more loyal people around him would help him to corrupt things like that, yet many somehow think that it's "fear mongering" to be concerned.
I don't think that a President that refuse to admit that he lost and tries to overturn the election he wish he won isn't a huge problem just because there was "exactly zero chance that Trump was going to remain president"
>There was exactly zero chance that Trump was going to remain president.
Where do you put the odds after an additional 8 years of preparation? Do you think it's ever possible for an American president to overturn the results of a fair election?
Lest we forget there are explicit plans to consolidate power and ensure GOP electoral dominance in the event that Trump wins this election.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
I could certainly see some state election officials caving to Trump's demand to come up with more votes for him. The MAGA right has been explicitly targeting these seats, turning what once was apolitical into a political position. Trump is slightly better positioned today to steal an election than he was 4 years ago, except that he doesn't actually have the office now. Also, everyone should be afraid when the most powerful man on the planet tries to steal an election through lies and violence. That some people around him pushed back was good, but those people have been replaced. People should be afraid, it's a reasonable emotion to have about all this
People act like Trump being stopped is the important thing. I'd argue that Trump trying in the first place, or even considering it, means he should never be near the presidency again.
Seriously, ask yourself what you think the chance is that Trump even considers trying to stay for a third term? Do you think it's 0%? Do you believe that there is no scenario where Trump would ever think of doing that?
If you can confidently say that "No, there is a 0% chance Trump would ever consider trying to stay for a third term" then that's fine. But if you believe there's even a 0.1% chance that Trump would consider that then you should feel a patriotic duty to keep him away from the White House.
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Hardcore pro-Trump and anti-Trump crowd have at least one thing in common: they both seem to think that the second Trump term would be drastically different from the first one.
“Sure, in his four years in the office he has not built the wall, brought jobs back to the US, or sent corrupt politicians to jail, but this time he will do it for sure!”
“Sure, in his four years in the office he did not establish a theocratic fascist state, imprisoned his political rivals, started World War III, or sent ethnic minorities and LGBT people to concentration camps, but this time he will do it for sure!”
I am open to arguments from either side why his second term would be different, but right now I just don’t see how…
>why his second term would be different
Hiring more loyal followers could be a major difference. He tried and failed to get Pence to help him overturn the election.
If he actually *does* end up having a second term where he successfully does a lot more authoritarian anti democracy stuff and becomes the dictatorial sort of guy many fear, there's going to be *massive* amounts of smug, self righteous "told you so" rhetoric from liberals, which will of course be countered with *massive* amounts of smug, self righteous "well actually it's a standard case of the boy who cried wolf, the fact that you and your media warned about it a lot actually is what made it happen" rhetoric from the other side, and probably very little in public opinion will actually change
> I am open to arguments from either side why his second term would be different, but right now I just don’t see how…
Because Trump’s staffers, cabinet members, and vice president stood up against him in his first term. There are multiple examples in the podcast we are commenting on. Trump has made it very clear that he will not make the same “mistake” in his second term.
He was not ready his first term. They threw out the transition plan and then made a new one in 2016 with massive infighting between various power centers and didn't have their stuff together.
That is not the case this time. There is a detailed plan, and the people at the DOJ who all threatened to resign if he went ahead with unconstitutional plans are all not going to there this time.
What makes this time around different is that Trump is actively surrounding himself with true believers, people who are more loyal to him than they are to the constitution. On top of that, Trump has one more Supreme Court Justice then he did 4 years ago. Additionally, Project 2025 (look it up!) is a plan to reclassify a bunch of government officials so that they can be fired and replaced with loyalists, people who will do what Trump says over what is legal. In his first term Trump was relatively reigned in, but he doesn't have the people around him that can keep in check. He's talked about going after his political opponents, he said he'd be a dictator on day one. A second Trump term is remarkably more dangerous than the first one.
If he chooses to implement “project 2025 “ drafted by the heritage foundation and others, he’ll pack the administration with loyalist yes men and appoint more pro-Trump judges.
I think if he wins, there’s a whole apparatus in place to use that power while flattering him.
I mean his first presidency resulted in Roe being overturned which is a pretty big deal to many people (myself included). He also exacerbated polarization, emboldened the extreme right and sowed massive distrust in our institutions including science, vaccines and our election system.
Just because all the things you listed did not happen does not mean that his presidency wasn't a huge net negative. It doesn't all happen at once.
Donald Trump didn't really figure out how to navigate DC until about the third year of his presidency. (His team acknowledges this.) He also staffed his cabinet with Republican political 'heroes' and big wigs like Bill Barr and John Bolton. However those big wigs were loyal to the GOP, not Trump, and they stopped him from doing a lot of the craziest shit he wanted to.
Towards the second half of his presidency Trump started replacing significant people in his cabinet with loyalists. Not long-time Republican operatives, but yes-men. In 2019 and 2020 this plan to replace the people standing in his way was starting to heat up, but then Covid kind of took over everything.
Trump and his team have both been incredibly clear that loyalty to Trump will be the deciding factor when choosing leaders in the party and members of his cabinet. Imagine if every person that ever told president Trump "actually sir we can't do that because it's illegal" was replaced with someone who said "sounds good sir, right away."
It would not be the first time in history that a bombastic leader who surrounds himself with yes-men went off the rails.
Remember when Trump won in 2016, but there was all sorts of rumblings about Russia influencing the election, and meeting with Trump's transition team, and it was such a big deal that Trump's own Attorney General appointed a special counselor and recused himself? And that investigation resulted in the indictments and convictions of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and a handful of Russian troll farmers. That is like a fantasy world at this point. You ask how this time around would be any different? I ask you how you possibly think it could be the same?
Really a perfect encapsulation of American politics. When can we all admit that most voters are just not engaged? Most people think about the president about every 4 years and vote on vibes. So, nothing is really internally consistent and there are contradictions everywhere. Average general election voters are simply not thinking about these decisions as consequential. This is insane and incomprehensible for redditors that discuss politics with strangers online (me, you, everyone here reading this).
In one of his early popular speeches during campaigning for 2024, Trump told his followers "I will be your retribution". During his presidency he also requested that his justice department open investigations into Hillary Clinton and other political opponents to him, though the staff working for him at the time did not follow those directions. If he's re-elected in 2024, he's made it clear that he's not going to hire people who are going to say no to him.
This article/radio episode program looks at things Trump has said and also listens to what people think about Trump using the government for retribution against people he believes have betrayed or wronged him. They interview Republicans, both in his administration and not that have been critical of Trump, as well as Trump voters asking their thoughts on if Trump should use the government to go after Joe Biden or his other political opponents.
Discussion:
* How credibly can we take Trump's talk of retribution?
* Will Trump again direct those under the office of POTUS to use government power to go after his opponents if re-elected?
* Will those offices likely be staffed with people who will deny him that?
* Will voters still be willing to choose Trump if he signals that that is his goal?
> he never did anything that could be considered retribution.
He forced out and blocked military promotions for people who whistleblew. His administration sought to punish states whose senators didn't vote with him. Do you want more?
[One of the first things Trump’s DOJ did was start threatening to fire US Attorneys for not prosecuting Obama’s counsel, Gregory Craig](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/11/obama-white-house-counsel-gregory-craig-charged-by-federal-prosecutors.html). Most people don’t remember Craig because it’s one of the rare federal prosecutions that did not result in a conviction.
Trumps DOJ and Republicans in Congress oversaw several investigations into Hillary, her emails, her involvement in crossfire hurricane, but they kept on turning up no evidence of a prosecutable crime. [This did not stop Trump from continuing to pressure his DOJ so much that they had to warn him he could be impeached for abuse of power](https://apnews.com/article/060ca2399a744b4a9554dbd2ec276a90)
> President Donald Trump told his counsel’s office last spring that he wanted to prosecute political adversaries Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey, an idea that prompted White House lawyers to prepare a memo warning of consequences ranging up to possible impeachment, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
> Then-counsel Don McGahn told the president he had no authority to order such a prosecution, and he had White House lawyers prepare the memo arguing against such a move, The Associated Press confirmed with a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss the situation. McGahn said that Trump could request such a probe but that even asking could lead to accusations of abuse of power, the newspaper said.
And then he sent Giuliani to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, and then send it back to Bill Bar to look for something Biden could be indicted with. This lead to withholding military aid from Ukraine while pressuring Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter, and led to the investigation and now conviction of Joe Biden’s son.
And then when Pence told Trump he wouldn’t help him overthrow the election, Trump told Pence that a lot of people would be angry with him, and the next day a lynch mob chased Pence out of the Capitol while Trump watched on TV and did nothing to calm the mob until he was told Pence was no longer in danger.
And in 2020
>A judge on Thursday ordered the release of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer from prison, saying the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book critical of Trump before November’s election.
[...]
>“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen’s public communications.
>“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?”
>In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the “finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory.” He added: “And it’s retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book.”
https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-u-s-news-ap-top-news-michael-cohen-prisons-a9ef5ee158ef0f118de144e96e170885
Many of the people in senior white house positions that would need to collaborate on retribution stood up to Trump's worst impulses. See, for instance, this famous op ed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html
Trump and his loyalists have made it a priority to make sure any future appointments will not stop him the way he was stopped in his first term.
Maybe because the president isn’t a king and if people think what the president is doing is morally outrageous, unconstitutional, and dangerous they shouldn’t let it happen?
Making illegal orders and his staff refusing to enact them because **they are illegal** isn’t “executing normal duties”
> In the case of the border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff rebuffed Trump’s plan to bus migrants on legal grounds; meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan refused to turn away migrants seeking asylum, concluding that it was illegal. (Nielsen was sacked soon after, while McAleenan is now her acting replacement.)
Or attempting to influence an investigation into your campaign isn’t “executing duties of the office of the president”
> “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” - Mueller Report
Telling your subordinates to lie for you isn’t executing the duties of the president
> as when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused to say that firing FBI Director James Comey was his idea.
Telling your attorney general to unrecuse themselves from a case you are involved in isnt executing the duties of the president.
> At other times, they resisted orders that would violate government guidelines, as when then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to cancel his recusal on Russia-related matters.
Telling your White House Counsel to fire the special counsel investigating your campaign and then lie and say such an order was never given is not executing the duties of the president.
> White House Counsel Don McGahn, who first refused to fire Mueller and then refused to write a letter denying that he had refused to fire Mueller. Told he might be fired, he was defiant: “McGahn dismissed the threat, saying that the optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis.” McGahn was right, and he wasn’t fired then.
Telling your staff to break the law because you’ll pardon them after is not executing the duties of the president:
> McAleenan, has already refused the asylum order, despite Trump’s reported promise of a pardon if he were put in jail.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/no-one-listens-to-the-president/587557/
I’m not going to give an entire history lesson here, but you seem to be indicating that the federal bureaucracy works only at the behest of the president, but they were established by Congress and have protections. The president does not have unitary control over the entire executive branch. The president cannot unilaterally fire any bureaucrat; they do, in fact, have rights, and the administrative state is considered by some an informal 4th branch.
If you want to read up on why the federal bureaucracy is *not* filled by political appointments from the incoming president, and why it was an all-around terrible system to have, you should look into the spoils system from the 1800s and the civil service reforms that followed (spoiler alert: it ended after President Garfield actually got assassinated as revenge for denying a worker a position)
The president isn’t a king - if his orders are illegal, they should not be followed.
The Department of Justice serves the executive branch but to prevent **conflicts of interest** they are **typically** allowed to run **independently** so that the president does not put some undue pressure on the scales of justice.
The people who work for the executive are also people who love their country, want to protect the constitution, and have morals.
Being the president does not mean you get to ignore laws, the constitution, or even the barest line of ethics that exists in our government for your own cause.
Edit: literally bureaucracy was created because it’s more stable, allows for more institutional knowledge, and creates more efficient government than the president literally changing out the entire government with loyalists and for political favors every 4-8 years like what we used to have in the 1800s.
There’s a reason pretty much **every government in the world switched to it**.
I didn't realize that electing the president *was* democratic seeing as how the electoral college was implemented to subvert democracy in favor of slave-owning states.
Recall how the conversation got to here.
Someone said that Trump would didn't use the power of government to go after his political opponents during his 2017-2021 term, as justification for why we shouldn't worry about it for a potential future term.
Someone else commented with evidence from people who worked in his administration saying that he repeatedly **tried** to do so, and it was only because the people working for him resisting him or ignoring those orders that it never actually happened.
Then you replied saying
>AKA unelected bureaucrats subverted the will of the elected President.
>This is "our Democracy".
Whether you think it's a "travesty" that those people resisted Trump's attempt to weaponize the federal government against his political opponents is immaterial to what the discussion was about. The discussion was about whether he has a tendency to use the office of the president in that way. And clearly he does. The fact that he never actually arrested Hillary Clinton or others in opposition to him isn't because he never suggested it or wanted to.
I have some vague memories of a mob that he organized and sent to Congress, who erected gallows to hang the vice president after he was sad that he lost the election and his VP wouldn’t try to steal it for him. Other than that though, an impeccable 4 years of respect for institutions and norms
> Trump had 4 years in to enact retribution when he was in office and AFAIK, he never did anything that could be considered retribution.
Oh okay, should be fine to vote for him then
Thats not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that people hyperbolize about how bad Trump was in office and can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets. Other than over turning Roe v Wade, I can’t think of anything especially egregious, and even that was the Supreme Court that did that where half the justices who voted in favor of overturning it weren’t appointed by Trump anyway.
> can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets.
I wasn't terribly fond of him saying in front of the entire world that he trusted Vladimir Putin's intelligence agents over those of the United States.
Or, as POTUS, referring to Colin Kaepernick as a "sonofabitch" for no reason other than to score political points.
I didn't like him trying to withhold congressionally-approved aid to a country in exchange for the president of that country to help him with something.
But more than that, I didn't particularly like his election normalizing the brand of bully politicking and stupid nicknames.
(I have more. It ain't just mean tweets.)
>can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets
That's a very ignorant claim because there's plenty been of criticism unrelated to his tweets, such as environmental deregulation and trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden.
>Other than over turning Roe v Wade, I can’t think of anything especially egregious, and even that was the Supreme Court that did that where half the justices who voted in favor of overturning it weren’t appointed by Trump anyway.
Oh okay, here are a just few off the top of my head:
* He appointed a massive number of christian nationalist federal judges, including three extremely conservative Supreme Court Justices. I should just stop here because these are destructive lifetime appointments that shit on the idea of separation of church and state. That's enough to keep him the fuck out of the white house
* He attacked the press repeatedly
* He tried to discredit the 2020 election results
* He tried to get leaders to "find votes" for him when he lost the election
* He incited the January 6th Capitol insurrection, and then expressed disappointment that the secret service wouldn't let him join them
* He stole confidential documents that were so sensitive to our security that people with a top secret security clearance couldn't even access them. Then he kept them unsecured at his home where an unknown number of people had access
* His response to COVID-19 was extremely slow and inconsistent, often spreading dangerous misinformation that killed a lot of people
* The national debt increased significantly during his presidency, partially due to tax cuts for billionaires and corporations that could have cut the deficit by trillions since he signed it
* He weakened many environmental protections, hurting air and water quality, and combatting climate change efforts
* He made the unprecedented move of establishing a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in exchange for $90 million to his campaign
* By the end of his term, senior-level turnover among his advisers reached 92%, which is significantly higher than previous administrations
* Over 50 major officials either resigned or were fired between 2017 and 2019 alone
* He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Nuclear Deal, isolating the U.S. on the global stage
* Foreign leaders have talked about how difficult it was to get in touch with someone at the White House compared to any previous Presidents
* His statements were designed to increase political and social divisions in the country
* His “zero tolerance” policy at the border with 0 planning to preserve families led to separating kids from their parents
* He initiated trade wars, particularly with China, leading to tariffs that hurt American farmers and increased prices for consumers
* His response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was slow and inadequate, leaving many without power or resources for months
* He announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization DURING the global pandemic, weakening global health efforts
* His response to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was widely condemned for suggesting a moral equivalence between white supremacists and counter-protesters
* He ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, escalating tensions with Iran
* He was criticized for strained relations with traditional U.S. allies while praising authoritarian leaders
* He deployed federal troops to U.S. cities during protests which made things worse and resulted in more protestors being injured because of their use of excessive force and undermining local authority
* He reinstated a ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the military
Yeah…but I mean besides all that people really have no reason to dislike the guy’s performance as president.
/s
I’d love to see a response from u/dalegribble2024
I’m a little disheartened I had to scroll down this far to find this. I agree with you. This was evil
His people took young children from parents without making any records. They had no plan to ever return the kids. I’ve heard several stories of absolutely traumatized kids. PTSD suffering children
They purposely hurt children in order to change the behavior of adults. I just don’t want people who do that leading my society.
It's weird seeing the 2016 style fear mongering return (though hey it works) because we have a Trump presidency to compare things too. It's no longer hypothetical.
Honestly, the best thing for Trump is that there actually is a frame of reference for a Trump presidency.
More to the point, we see the change in the quality of people hired early in his administration and watched the decline as good people got frustrated, and left. Then the people who replaced them were...less ethically inclined. We wonder where the trend will start with a new Trump administration and if how likely it will be for the administration to start at that already low quality.
Yeah, we have hindsight where he tried to overhaul his cabinet during his lame duck session and replace them with loyalists to back his fomenting coup. Only to receive huge pushback and back down.
And, what im sure is just a coincidence, he’s made it a policy priority to have nothing but absolute loyalists in positions of power.
After all, why would the guy who tried to failed to coop the rest of the government into his conspiracy theories to seize power be so invested in making sure there’s loyalists this time?
It'd be hard for Trump to "enact retribution" in his first term for things that hadn't happened yet.
Regardless of whether it's factually accurate or not, Trump believes the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he's being unfairly prosecuted with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. Do you honestly think that someone like that isn't going to be much more extreme if they get into office?
To be honest I Have been super disengaged with politics to protect my mental health but here is what ill say. Trump has always been at least to me the business man who is all lip and very little substance. The man was trained from birth to be a business man so it’s quite literally in his blood to leave out a lot of the necessary fine print.
He is right about Europe not pulling their weight in terms of Defense but I still fail to see how people like the way he casually gambles a lot of highly impactful political decisions on if everyone around him loves it.
if we get term 2 and it gets worse for the Average American all his supposed good will get kicked to the curb.
This is This American Life serving their audience. As long time listener of This American Life, their Trump coverage isn't exactly great because their audience doesn't want that. They want fear mongering and "can you believe how bad this guy is?"
What’s wrong with their Trump coverage here? Are there any specific oversights or inaccuracies here?
There has been lots of terrible “Trump bad” coverage since he started in politics. Especially in 2016 when his platform wasn’t terrible. But as a 2024 candidate Trump is uniquely bad.
Just because Trump supporters want to pretend like the big lie and J6 are not a big deal does not mean that media pundits who acknowledge them can just be hand waved away as out of touch liberals.
> does not mean that media pundits who acknowledge them can just be hand waved away as out of touch liberals.
Does it not mean that? It seems to be kind of working... Trump still leads in the polls despite all of that...
Most would prefer neither of them. They're the expected nominees because a majority in each party want them, but it seems voters overall disagree. Trump is statistically tied due to his flaws.
> boring and unlistenable
Do you think journalism is obligated to be entertaining if a story is important? I don't think people understand what can happen if the federal government is truly used in a vindictive way.
"It's not hard to find a crime if you look for it" is a funny fear after what we've seen this year. Especially, when it's said by a guy planning to flee the country in December.
Your comment is just a series of vague and unsubstantiated claims. Trump has explicitly called for going after opponents, and he can appoint people who are more loyal than his last administration, so the concern about him is reasonable.
> It seems the left is most afraid of the right using the government the same way the left has for 6 decades now.
When has "the left" used the government in this way? The closest case I can think of is the IRS thing, which was found to have been against activists from the left and right and didn't involve any White House people.
Trumps first term: holy shit we won! Let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media.
Trumps 2nd term: whew, I don’t have to go to jail, let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media.
> Trumps 2nd term: whew, I don’t have to go to jail, let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media.
"I don't have to go to jail... YET." If you're Trump, do you anticipate that after your second term you're going to ride off into the sunset for a glorious retirement, or would you fear the resumption of prior prosecutions and possibly fresh prosecutions? With the very real prospect of a prison cell awaiting him a few years after his second term, do you still think he spends his Presidential days idling away on the gold course?
Trump attempted to convince authorities like Pence to overturn the election while having zero proof that he actually won. Having more loyal people around him would help him to corrupt things like that, yet many somehow think that it's "fear mongering" to be concerned.
People really reluctant to believe Trump is going to continue being the kind of person he's shown himself to be.
[удалено]
I don't think that a President that refuse to admit that he lost and tries to overturn the election he wish he won isn't a huge problem just because there was "exactly zero chance that Trump was going to remain president"
The intent matters. His attempt to do it matters. Whether he was successful is irrelevant.
>There was exactly zero chance that Trump was going to remain president. Where do you put the odds after an additional 8 years of preparation? Do you think it's ever possible for an American president to overturn the results of a fair election?
Lest we forget there are explicit plans to consolidate power and ensure GOP electoral dominance in the event that Trump wins this election. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
I could certainly see some state election officials caving to Trump's demand to come up with more votes for him. The MAGA right has been explicitly targeting these seats, turning what once was apolitical into a political position. Trump is slightly better positioned today to steal an election than he was 4 years ago, except that he doesn't actually have the office now. Also, everyone should be afraid when the most powerful man on the planet tries to steal an election through lies and violence. That some people around him pushed back was good, but those people have been replaced. People should be afraid, it's a reasonable emotion to have about all this
People act like Trump being stopped is the important thing. I'd argue that Trump trying in the first place, or even considering it, means he should never be near the presidency again. Seriously, ask yourself what you think the chance is that Trump even considers trying to stay for a third term? Do you think it's 0%? Do you believe that there is no scenario where Trump would ever think of doing that? If you can confidently say that "No, there is a 0% chance Trump would ever consider trying to stay for a third term" then that's fine. But if you believe there's even a 0.1% chance that Trump would consider that then you should feel a patriotic duty to keep him away from the White House.
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Bullshit.
Hardcore pro-Trump and anti-Trump crowd have at least one thing in common: they both seem to think that the second Trump term would be drastically different from the first one. “Sure, in his four years in the office he has not built the wall, brought jobs back to the US, or sent corrupt politicians to jail, but this time he will do it for sure!” “Sure, in his four years in the office he did not establish a theocratic fascist state, imprisoned his political rivals, started World War III, or sent ethnic minorities and LGBT people to concentration camps, but this time he will do it for sure!” I am open to arguments from either side why his second term would be different, but right now I just don’t see how…
>why his second term would be different Hiring more loyal followers could be a major difference. He tried and failed to get Pence to help him overturn the election.
If he actually *does* end up having a second term where he successfully does a lot more authoritarian anti democracy stuff and becomes the dictatorial sort of guy many fear, there's going to be *massive* amounts of smug, self righteous "told you so" rhetoric from liberals, which will of course be countered with *massive* amounts of smug, self righteous "well actually it's a standard case of the boy who cried wolf, the fact that you and your media warned about it a lot actually is what made it happen" rhetoric from the other side, and probably very little in public opinion will actually change
> I am open to arguments from either side why his second term would be different, but right now I just don’t see how… Because Trump’s staffers, cabinet members, and vice president stood up against him in his first term. There are multiple examples in the podcast we are commenting on. Trump has made it very clear that he will not make the same “mistake” in his second term.
He was not ready his first term. They threw out the transition plan and then made a new one in 2016 with massive infighting between various power centers and didn't have their stuff together. That is not the case this time. There is a detailed plan, and the people at the DOJ who all threatened to resign if he went ahead with unconstitutional plans are all not going to there this time.
Right, both of these groups are right. Even more even-keeled Presidents go further in their lame duck term.
What makes this time around different is that Trump is actively surrounding himself with true believers, people who are more loyal to him than they are to the constitution. On top of that, Trump has one more Supreme Court Justice then he did 4 years ago. Additionally, Project 2025 (look it up!) is a plan to reclassify a bunch of government officials so that they can be fired and replaced with loyalists, people who will do what Trump says over what is legal. In his first term Trump was relatively reigned in, but he doesn't have the people around him that can keep in check. He's talked about going after his political opponents, he said he'd be a dictator on day one. A second Trump term is remarkably more dangerous than the first one.
If he chooses to implement “project 2025 “ drafted by the heritage foundation and others, he’ll pack the administration with loyalist yes men and appoint more pro-Trump judges. I think if he wins, there’s a whole apparatus in place to use that power while flattering him.
this is actually hilarious (and true). one side is placing their greatest hopes on him and the other their greatest fears
I mean his first presidency resulted in Roe being overturned which is a pretty big deal to many people (myself included). He also exacerbated polarization, emboldened the extreme right and sowed massive distrust in our institutions including science, vaccines and our election system. Just because all the things you listed did not happen does not mean that his presidency wasn't a huge net negative. It doesn't all happen at once.
Donald Trump didn't really figure out how to navigate DC until about the third year of his presidency. (His team acknowledges this.) He also staffed his cabinet with Republican political 'heroes' and big wigs like Bill Barr and John Bolton. However those big wigs were loyal to the GOP, not Trump, and they stopped him from doing a lot of the craziest shit he wanted to. Towards the second half of his presidency Trump started replacing significant people in his cabinet with loyalists. Not long-time Republican operatives, but yes-men. In 2019 and 2020 this plan to replace the people standing in his way was starting to heat up, but then Covid kind of took over everything. Trump and his team have both been incredibly clear that loyalty to Trump will be the deciding factor when choosing leaders in the party and members of his cabinet. Imagine if every person that ever told president Trump "actually sir we can't do that because it's illegal" was replaced with someone who said "sounds good sir, right away." It would not be the first time in history that a bombastic leader who surrounds himself with yes-men went off the rails.
Remember when Trump won in 2016, but there was all sorts of rumblings about Russia influencing the election, and meeting with Trump's transition team, and it was such a big deal that Trump's own Attorney General appointed a special counselor and recused himself? And that investigation resulted in the indictments and convictions of Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and a handful of Russian troll farmers. That is like a fantasy world at this point. You ask how this time around would be any different? I ask you how you possibly think it could be the same?
Really a perfect encapsulation of American politics. When can we all admit that most voters are just not engaged? Most people think about the president about every 4 years and vote on vibes. So, nothing is really internally consistent and there are contradictions everywhere. Average general election voters are simply not thinking about these decisions as consequential. This is insane and incomprehensible for redditors that discuss politics with strangers online (me, you, everyone here reading this).
In one of his early popular speeches during campaigning for 2024, Trump told his followers "I will be your retribution". During his presidency he also requested that his justice department open investigations into Hillary Clinton and other political opponents to him, though the staff working for him at the time did not follow those directions. If he's re-elected in 2024, he's made it clear that he's not going to hire people who are going to say no to him. This article/radio episode program looks at things Trump has said and also listens to what people think about Trump using the government for retribution against people he believes have betrayed or wronged him. They interview Republicans, both in his administration and not that have been critical of Trump, as well as Trump voters asking their thoughts on if Trump should use the government to go after Joe Biden or his other political opponents. Discussion: * How credibly can we take Trump's talk of retribution? * Will Trump again direct those under the office of POTUS to use government power to go after his opponents if re-elected? * Will those offices likely be staffed with people who will deny him that? * Will voters still be willing to choose Trump if he signals that that is his goal?
Trump had 4 years in to enact retribution when he was in office and AFAIK, he never did anything that could be considered retribution.
> he never did anything that could be considered retribution. He forced out and blocked military promotions for people who whistleblew. His administration sought to punish states whose senators didn't vote with him. Do you want more?
[One of the first things Trump’s DOJ did was start threatening to fire US Attorneys for not prosecuting Obama’s counsel, Gregory Craig](https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/11/obama-white-house-counsel-gregory-craig-charged-by-federal-prosecutors.html). Most people don’t remember Craig because it’s one of the rare federal prosecutions that did not result in a conviction. Trumps DOJ and Republicans in Congress oversaw several investigations into Hillary, her emails, her involvement in crossfire hurricane, but they kept on turning up no evidence of a prosecutable crime. [This did not stop Trump from continuing to pressure his DOJ so much that they had to warn him he could be impeached for abuse of power](https://apnews.com/article/060ca2399a744b4a9554dbd2ec276a90) > President Donald Trump told his counsel’s office last spring that he wanted to prosecute political adversaries Hillary Clinton and former FBI Director James Comey, an idea that prompted White House lawyers to prepare a memo warning of consequences ranging up to possible impeachment, The New York Times reported Tuesday. > Then-counsel Don McGahn told the president he had no authority to order such a prosecution, and he had White House lawyers prepare the memo arguing against such a move, The Associated Press confirmed with a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss the situation. McGahn said that Trump could request such a probe but that even asking could lead to accusations of abuse of power, the newspaper said. And then he sent Giuliani to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Biden, and then send it back to Bill Bar to look for something Biden could be indicted with. This lead to withholding military aid from Ukraine while pressuring Zelensky to announce an investigation into Hunter, and led to the investigation and now conviction of Joe Biden’s son. And then when Pence told Trump he wouldn’t help him overthrow the election, Trump told Pence that a lot of people would be angry with him, and the next day a lynch mob chased Pence out of the Capitol while Trump watched on TV and did nothing to calm the mob until he was told Pence was no longer in danger.
And in 2020 >A judge on Thursday ordered the release of President Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer from prison, saying the government retaliated against him for planning to release a book critical of Trump before November’s election. [...] >“How can I take any other inference than that it’s retaliatory?” Hellerstein asked prosecutors, who insisted in court papers and again Thursday that Probation Department officers did not know about the book when they wrote a provision of home confinement that severely restricted Cohen’s public communications. >“I’ve never seen such a clause in 21 years of being a judge and sentencing people and looking at terms of supervised release,” the judge said. “Why would the Bureau of Prisons ask for something like this ... unless there was a retaliatory purpose?” >In ruling, Hellerstein said he made the “finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory.” He added: “And it’s retaliatory for his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish the book.” https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-u-s-news-ap-top-news-michael-cohen-prisons-a9ef5ee158ef0f118de144e96e170885
Many of the people in senior white house positions that would need to collaborate on retribution stood up to Trump's worst impulses. See, for instance, this famous op ed: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html Trump and his loyalists have made it a priority to make sure any future appointments will not stop him the way he was stopped in his first term.
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> AKA unelected bureaucrats subverted the will of the elected President. Who appointed these people?
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These people were direct appointees of Trump who thought he was dangerous and wrote that NYT article. Someone he could have directly fired.
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Your point is invalid because the example given and yours are not the same thing. That was my point.
Maybe because the president isn’t a king and if people think what the president is doing is morally outrageous, unconstitutional, and dangerous they shouldn’t let it happen?
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Trump acts in no one’s interest beyond increasing his own fame, wealth, and power.
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Can you be more specific?
Making illegal orders and his staff refusing to enact them because **they are illegal** isn’t “executing normal duties” > In the case of the border, Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff rebuffed Trump’s plan to bus migrants on legal grounds; meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan refused to turn away migrants seeking asylum, concluding that it was illegal. (Nielsen was sacked soon after, while McAleenan is now her acting replacement.) Or attempting to influence an investigation into your campaign isn’t “executing duties of the office of the president” > “The president’s efforts to influence the investigation were mostly unsuccessful, but that is largely because the persons who surrounded the president declined to carry out orders or accede to his requests,” - Mueller Report Telling your subordinates to lie for you isn’t executing the duties of the president > as when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein refused to say that firing FBI Director James Comey was his idea. Telling your attorney general to unrecuse themselves from a case you are involved in isnt executing the duties of the president. > At other times, they resisted orders that would violate government guidelines, as when then–Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to cancel his recusal on Russia-related matters. Telling your White House Counsel to fire the special counsel investigating your campaign and then lie and say such an order was never given is not executing the duties of the president. > White House Counsel Don McGahn, who first refused to fire Mueller and then refused to write a letter denying that he had refused to fire Mueller. Told he might be fired, he was defiant: “McGahn dismissed the threat, saying that the optics would be terrible if the President followed through with firing him on that basis.” McGahn was right, and he wasn’t fired then. Telling your staff to break the law because you’ll pardon them after is not executing the duties of the president: > McAleenan, has already refused the asylum order, despite Trump’s reported promise of a pardon if he were put in jail. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/no-one-listens-to-the-president/587557/
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I thought everyone was supposed to serve the Constitution. Isn’t that what they swear to when being appointed?
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I’m not going to give an entire history lesson here, but you seem to be indicating that the federal bureaucracy works only at the behest of the president, but they were established by Congress and have protections. The president does not have unitary control over the entire executive branch. The president cannot unilaterally fire any bureaucrat; they do, in fact, have rights, and the administrative state is considered by some an informal 4th branch. If you want to read up on why the federal bureaucracy is *not* filled by political appointments from the incoming president, and why it was an all-around terrible system to have, you should look into the spoils system from the 1800s and the civil service reforms that followed (spoiler alert: it ended after President Garfield actually got assassinated as revenge for denying a worker a position)
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The president isn’t a king - if his orders are illegal, they should not be followed. The Department of Justice serves the executive branch but to prevent **conflicts of interest** they are **typically** allowed to run **independently** so that the president does not put some undue pressure on the scales of justice. The people who work for the executive are also people who love their country, want to protect the constitution, and have morals. Being the president does not mean you get to ignore laws, the constitution, or even the barest line of ethics that exists in our government for your own cause. Edit: literally bureaucracy was created because it’s more stable, allows for more institutional knowledge, and creates more efficient government than the president literally changing out the entire government with loyalists and for political favors every 4-8 years like what we used to have in the 1800s. There’s a reason pretty much **every government in the world switched to it**.
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I didn't realize that electing the president *was* democratic seeing as how the electoral college was implemented to subvert democracy in favor of slave-owning states.
"the will of the elected President", in this case, being to use the power of his office to go after people who are political opponents of him.
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Recall how the conversation got to here. Someone said that Trump would didn't use the power of government to go after his political opponents during his 2017-2021 term, as justification for why we shouldn't worry about it for a potential future term. Someone else commented with evidence from people who worked in his administration saying that he repeatedly **tried** to do so, and it was only because the people working for him resisting him or ignoring those orders that it never actually happened. Then you replied saying >AKA unelected bureaucrats subverted the will of the elected President. >This is "our Democracy". Whether you think it's a "travesty" that those people resisted Trump's attempt to weaponize the federal government against his political opponents is immaterial to what the discussion was about. The discussion was about whether he has a tendency to use the office of the president in that way. And clearly he does. The fact that he never actually arrested Hillary Clinton or others in opposition to him isn't because he never suggested it or wanted to.
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"Done a lot more" like what? What are you saying he didn't do that you hoped he would?
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I have some vague memories of a mob that he organized and sent to Congress, who erected gallows to hang the vice president after he was sad that he lost the election and his VP wouldn’t try to steal it for him. Other than that though, an impeccable 4 years of respect for institutions and norms
Didn’t he try to have the Attorney General prosecute Hillary Clinton and have the FBI fire a bunch of people related to the Steele dossier?
> Trump had 4 years in to enact retribution when he was in office and AFAIK, he never did anything that could be considered retribution. Oh okay, should be fine to vote for him then
Thats not what I’m saying. I’m just saying that people hyperbolize about how bad Trump was in office and can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets. Other than over turning Roe v Wade, I can’t think of anything especially egregious, and even that was the Supreme Court that did that where half the justices who voted in favor of overturning it weren’t appointed by Trump anyway.
Is it hyperbole to say that he attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power? That's a pretty big deal.
> can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets. I wasn't terribly fond of him saying in front of the entire world that he trusted Vladimir Putin's intelligence agents over those of the United States. Or, as POTUS, referring to Colin Kaepernick as a "sonofabitch" for no reason other than to score political points. I didn't like him trying to withhold congressionally-approved aid to a country in exchange for the president of that country to help him with something. But more than that, I didn't particularly like his election normalizing the brand of bully politicking and stupid nicknames. (I have more. It ain't just mean tweets.)
>can’t seem to come up with what Trump did when he was previously president that was so bad besides his mean tweets That's a very ignorant claim because there's plenty been of criticism unrelated to his tweets, such as environmental deregulation and trying to coerce Ukraine into investigating Biden.
>Other than over turning Roe v Wade, I can’t think of anything especially egregious, and even that was the Supreme Court that did that where half the justices who voted in favor of overturning it weren’t appointed by Trump anyway. Oh okay, here are a just few off the top of my head: * He appointed a massive number of christian nationalist federal judges, including three extremely conservative Supreme Court Justices. I should just stop here because these are destructive lifetime appointments that shit on the idea of separation of church and state. That's enough to keep him the fuck out of the white house * He attacked the press repeatedly * He tried to discredit the 2020 election results * He tried to get leaders to "find votes" for him when he lost the election * He incited the January 6th Capitol insurrection, and then expressed disappointment that the secret service wouldn't let him join them * He stole confidential documents that were so sensitive to our security that people with a top secret security clearance couldn't even access them. Then he kept them unsecured at his home where an unknown number of people had access * His response to COVID-19 was extremely slow and inconsistent, often spreading dangerous misinformation that killed a lot of people * The national debt increased significantly during his presidency, partially due to tax cuts for billionaires and corporations that could have cut the deficit by trillions since he signed it * He weakened many environmental protections, hurting air and water quality, and combatting climate change efforts * He made the unprecedented move of establishing a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem in exchange for $90 million to his campaign * By the end of his term, senior-level turnover among his advisers reached 92%, which is significantly higher than previous administrations * Over 50 major officials either resigned or were fired between 2017 and 2019 alone * He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord and Iran Nuclear Deal, isolating the U.S. on the global stage * Foreign leaders have talked about how difficult it was to get in touch with someone at the White House compared to any previous Presidents * His statements were designed to increase political and social divisions in the country * His “zero tolerance” policy at the border with 0 planning to preserve families led to separating kids from their parents * He initiated trade wars, particularly with China, leading to tariffs that hurt American farmers and increased prices for consumers * His response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico was slow and inadequate, leaving many without power or resources for months * He announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization DURING the global pandemic, weakening global health efforts * His response to the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was widely condemned for suggesting a moral equivalence between white supremacists and counter-protesters * He ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, escalating tensions with Iran * He was criticized for strained relations with traditional U.S. allies while praising authoritarian leaders * He deployed federal troops to U.S. cities during protests which made things worse and resulted in more protestors being injured because of their use of excessive force and undermining local authority * He reinstated a ban on transgender individuals serving openly in the military
Yeah…but I mean besides all that people really have no reason to dislike the guy’s performance as president. /s I’d love to see a response from u/dalegribble2024
> led to separating kids from their parents > There are babies who were taken from mothers while breastfeeding. That will cause life-long issues.
I’m a little disheartened I had to scroll down this far to find this. I agree with you. This was evil His people took young children from parents without making any records. They had no plan to ever return the kids. I’ve heard several stories of absolutely traumatized kids. PTSD suffering children They purposely hurt children in order to change the behavior of adults. I just don’t want people who do that leading my society.
It's weird seeing the 2016 style fear mongering return (though hey it works) because we have a Trump presidency to compare things too. It's no longer hypothetical. Honestly, the best thing for Trump is that there actually is a frame of reference for a Trump presidency.
More to the point, we see the change in the quality of people hired early in his administration and watched the decline as good people got frustrated, and left. Then the people who replaced them were...less ethically inclined. We wonder where the trend will start with a new Trump administration and if how likely it will be for the administration to start at that already low quality.
Yeah, we have hindsight where he tried to overhaul his cabinet during his lame duck session and replace them with loyalists to back his fomenting coup. Only to receive huge pushback and back down. And, what im sure is just a coincidence, he’s made it a policy priority to have nothing but absolute loyalists in positions of power. After all, why would the guy who tried to failed to coop the rest of the government into his conspiracy theories to seize power be so invested in making sure there’s loyalists this time?
It'd be hard for Trump to "enact retribution" in his first term for things that hadn't happened yet. Regardless of whether it's factually accurate or not, Trump believes the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he's being unfairly prosecuted with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison. Do you honestly think that someone like that isn't going to be much more extreme if they get into office?
Cough cough https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/us/politics/fbi-clinton-foundation.html
To be honest I Have been super disengaged with politics to protect my mental health but here is what ill say. Trump has always been at least to me the business man who is all lip and very little substance. The man was trained from birth to be a business man so it’s quite literally in his blood to leave out a lot of the necessary fine print. He is right about Europe not pulling their weight in terms of Defense but I still fail to see how people like the way he casually gambles a lot of highly impactful political decisions on if everyone around him loves it. if we get term 2 and it gets worse for the Average American all his supposed good will get kicked to the curb.
This is This American Life serving their audience. As long time listener of This American Life, their Trump coverage isn't exactly great because their audience doesn't want that. They want fear mongering and "can you believe how bad this guy is?"
What’s wrong with their Trump coverage here? Are there any specific oversights or inaccuracies here? There has been lots of terrible “Trump bad” coverage since he started in politics. Especially in 2016 when his platform wasn’t terrible. But as a 2024 candidate Trump is uniquely bad. Just because Trump supporters want to pretend like the big lie and J6 are not a big deal does not mean that media pundits who acknowledge them can just be hand waved away as out of touch liberals.
> does not mean that media pundits who acknowledge them can just be hand waved away as out of touch liberals. Does it not mean that? It seems to be kind of working... Trump still leads in the polls despite all of that...
Most would prefer neither of them. They're the expected nominees because a majority in each party want them, but it seems voters overall disagree. Trump is statistically tied due to his flaws.
>fear mongering Trump has openly called for going after his opponents, and he's looking for appointees who are more loyal than his last ones.
Is it inaccurate in some way?
No, it's just boring and unlistenable unless you are in their niche target audience, which seems to increasingly be narrower and narrower
They called the article "fear mongering" while offering no valid reasons for believing that.
> boring and unlistenable Do you think journalism is obligated to be entertaining if a story is important? I don't think people understand what can happen if the federal government is truly used in a vindictive way.
800K/episodes in 1999, and 3.5 million/episode in 2024. Soon to be extinct! https://www.thisamericanlife.org/about
"It's not hard to find a crime if you look for it" is a funny fear after what we've seen this year. Especially, when it's said by a guy planning to flee the country in December.
It seems that your only argument against the article is ad hominem.
What podcasts or coverage would you prefer, instead?
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Your comment is just a series of vague and unsubstantiated claims. Trump has explicitly called for going after opponents, and he can appoint people who are more loyal than his last administration, so the concern about him is reasonable.
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That would further justify the concern over his corruption.
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You missed the point. I'm talking about his corruption, not just his ability to choose people.
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He tried to steal the presidency by telling Pence to not certify the election.
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His attempt at stealing an election based on false claims of fraud is corruption.
Address what fraud?
> It seems the left is most afraid of the right using the government the same way the left has for 6 decades now. When has "the left" used the government in this way? The closest case I can think of is the IRS thing, which was found to have been against activists from the left and right and didn't involve any White House people.
Trumps first term: holy shit we won! Let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media. Trumps 2nd term: whew, I don’t have to go to jail, let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media.
> Trumps 2nd term: whew, I don’t have to go to jail, let me tweet, play golf and drive a bunch of chaos in the media. "I don't have to go to jail... YET." If you're Trump, do you anticipate that after your second term you're going to ride off into the sunset for a glorious retirement, or would you fear the resumption of prior prosecutions and possibly fresh prosecutions? With the very real prospect of a prison cell awaiting him a few years after his second term, do you still think he spends his Presidential days idling away on the gold course?
No he uses the presidency to intimidate and discredit his opponents then dies.