Give it time.

The Revolution managed to succeed anyway. We’re still not sure our democracy (flawed as it is) can survive Trump.

Benedict Arnold got in a position to be traitor by being a war hero. Even as a traitor , he followed his conscience.

Trump got in his position by being a real estate grifter, playing shell games with New York City real estate, hiding income to take multiple properties through bankruptcy while having a positive income, not paying contractors and employees, etc. Out of vanity he paid to host his own “reality” show then somehow stumbled into connecting with half the population through outrage and misdirection who nevertheless elected him president. Somehow this narcissistic incompetent bombastic sleazy salesman commanded enough popular support for the Republican Party to worship at his feet, be afraid to contradict his words. Somehow this treasonous buffoon spouts sexist garbage worse than what got Clinton impeached but that’s ok, supports our Cold War enemy and current yet people are ok with it, reduces government services while enriching himself and his family, incites an attempt to circumvent the election but people still want to choose him, actually says he will act as a dictator yet there’s still support, damaged the ability of our government to function but that’s cool, started trade wars out of spite or impulse yet no one objects, then there’s the matter of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths by contradicting his own public health advisors on how to handle an epidemic

So eventually I can expect there to be a kickass way to cook eggs named after Trump?

think of it this way. noone outside America knows who that is.

everyone knows who Trump is

Im not sure he’s going to be alone in that category much longer

Wasn’t he actually very patriotic? He just hated the French that bad.

Trump has done worse damage.

So far

Benedict Donald sounds right

Sure, he was a traitor for a period, and did some pretty horrible things during that time (such as the invasion of Quebec) but he did end up restoring his original loyalties eventually.

Go read about Benedict Arnold. He was actually kind of a hero iirc that fucked up.

You’ve put the cart before the horse. It’s trump who controls the republicans. It’s the republicans who need him, not the other way around. It’s he who has co-opted them. And, no, Reagan, evil though he was, did not damage the Republic like Trump has. Bush, the insipid fool that he was, hasn’t attempted to bring down the Republic. Trump very nearly succeeded in doing that. In destroying America. And he very well might still achieve it.

The Republican party is the problem however. They could stop him at a moment’s notice and kick him out.

So, we have a two party system because FPTP voting always collapses into one given enough time. But there’s no requirement that those two parties be “Democrats” and “Republicans”, especially not as you know them now.

The GOP is worried that Trump’s cult is large enough that if they tried to boot him out directly that it would cause a massive party split of the sort that leads to a decade or so having three parties (and Democrats winning a lot because the right wing vote is split) until either the GOP or MAGA comes out on top and absorbs the other - and they aren’t sure MAGA wouldn’t win that in the end.

It’s better for the GOP long term if they let him tucker himself out or ideally get criminally convicted of things that make him ineligible under 14A Sec 3 in the hopes they can fold much of the cult back into their numbers but keep them politically active. If he gets barred under 14A Sec 3 then the GOP can get cultists to vote for them under claims that they’ll fix that, and then just not bother to.

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That is basically the schtick that every tabloid and every partisan site puts out. Visit the Daily Mail (actuall don’t) and every other story is some garbage from social media that they’ve decided to turn into click bait.

Ummm… It’s not new. Noam Chompsky may have gone off the deep end here in the last few years, but he had a point when he wrote that book in 1988, about events that happened between ≈1960 till ≈1980. This is a well known political strategy that has been used by multiple countries since 1898 when William Randolph Hearst declared, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”

The only real “new” part is that we now have the ability to network so inefficiently that we constantly form echo chambers, emboldening the fringe elements, allowing them to connect to each other extremely efficiently, and maybe allowing the people that are supposed to be watching, to actually watch. I suspect the last part is severely corrupted though.

America is a sad place.

Historians create the list, so sometimes it is about the history these Presidents lived through. Reagan is seen as an element in the fall of the Soviet Union, and thus the recreation of many countries and world order.

Puts him at about average. Reagan represents a brand of conservatism that many disagree with but that doesn’t inherently make him a bad president.

I’ve met many people in real life who seem to believe Reagon is great due to his “very successful” Reaganomics. I don’t know if they actually knew what Reaganomics really was or the results of it.

This should really worry Republicans. Apparently this came from surveying people. If Reagan is 16 , and Obama is 7, and Trump is absolutely last, it says a whole fucking lot about the electorate.

Edit: I’m mistaken, it’s political science folks. So probably not as worrying to them.

Yeah. Most of what is wrong now can be traced to Reagan.

He may be the best human being in the office. He micromanaged his staff–he required personal signing off on the White House tennis court usage–and never figured out the sausage making process with Congress. His actual accomplishments were limited.

The whole thing is subjective, they were rankings done by survey. No one is trying to hide that

You mean the guy who got the job cuz someone died, and then started the Vietnam War?

To be fair Obama did end the war his predecessor started.

Obama was the first President from a minority part of a population and signed Obamacare.

Because Grover Cleveland fucked it all up by serving non-consecutive terms.

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.

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.

He has already broken it.

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.

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.

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?

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Don’t know US history- sounds like Buchanan did nothing, didn’t avoid war. Trump actively went out if his way to cause division, push the country to civil war and enticed conflict from other states.

Buchanan made the country worse through inaction, no doubt about it.

But Trump was by far the worst in how he actively tried to make the country worse for his benefit. Every other president has at least something they tried to do to improve the country. Trump only did things that benefited him personally.

I’d give it even odds that Trump ends up the proximal cause of the loss of the Republic. Easily the worst president in our history, and if reelected, the final president in our history.

Honestly Buchanan wasn’t a great president, but I don’t think it really would have mattered what actions Buchanan could have taken.

By the time he got into office civil war had all but been guaranteed as decades of kicking the can on the issue of slavery, combined with increasing resentment in the divide of the north and south culturally. Had created a powder keg that arguably was lit back during the start of bleeding Kansas years before he even became president.

And with how stubborn the south was on not letting go of slavery, well there really was no diplomatic solution by then. Hence kicking of the can all those years prior. Maybe he could have enacted decisions that delayed the war, but it would have only been a delay.

The only way civil war could have ever been prevented is if the founding fathers had told southerns to pound sand and outlaw slavery back during the signing of the constitution. That or maybe if the cotton gin had been invented a decade later

Can you briefly explain why we would have wanted to avoid the civil war? It freed the slaves and killed lots of slavers, didn’t it?

Then Harrison would be in the middle of the list, not the bottom.

Let’s get tee shirts “Harrison was #1”

Confuse the shit out of people

I wish I could like this more than once.

I think genociding natives outweighs keeping the south in line enough to put him at the bottom

Same. I wrote a ton of pages about his work as governor and lost points bc it didn’t cover his achievements as president. I asked the teacher if she could name one, and she told me that was my job. She was forced to retire after that year.