Aside from the rampant racism, transphobia, sexism, anti-intellectualism and hatred for anyone poor, liberal media despise Trump because deep down in places they never like to admit at their plush dinner parties, Trump truly represents what America is.
A shallow narcissist culture looking for its next selfish ego stroke paranoidly armed to the teeth with enough corporate weapons to destroy the planet many times over
That’s fine when you are the host of a reality TV show, it’s terrifying when that person leads a nuclear armed country.
Trump is the ultimate resentment politician. He understands how it feels to be looked down upon by his peers who have laughed at his achievements. His overcompensation resonates with every white working poor American who have perceived their culture and their values belittled for cosmopolitan pretensions while economically robbing them of any resilience.
Trump’s revenge fantasies against every imagined slight ignites those voters own resentments while also becoming a flare to attract white supremacists and Nazi sympathisers.
That’s what politics, thanks to social media hate algorithms, has degenerated into, “I’m hurting, but you are hurting more”.
Trump wants the world to cower before him.
He wants the threat of American aggression to gain him power and submission.
Threatening friends and allies is not what friends or allies do.
That is what a vile and selfish narcissist on an ego trip does.
That is what a toxic bully does.
We should not cower to Trump.
We should boycott America, shun America, and work with everyone who isn’t America for the next 4 years to see if American Democracy can rebalance itself.
We should not cower before an Orange fascist.
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Agree
100 percent !
Obviously we wouldn’t kill people by willful abandonment – if it hurts your chances of winning you don’t do it – but there are circumstances where being less concerned about someone’s health and safety could be an advantage.
Suppose you have two factory desigs, one is very safe, no deaths would be expected, the other has an expected 1% death rate for employees per year but is twice as efficient, or twice as quick to build, whatever. The country with modern morality is probably going for the former, which would put it at a disadvantage.
Suicide bombing may be an effective strategy at certain points in the war, threatening people’s families to force them to do it might be effective. Likewise for discouraging defections.
Experimenting on live subjects may be useful for biological warfare.
As far as war crimes are concerned, if one country can bomb the shit out of the village where all the factory workers are sleeping with their families, and the other country doesn’t do that because it’s a war crime, you know which country’s going to do better out of it.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably war crimes, they helped to win the war. If Japan weren’t on the brink of surrender anyway they would have been after those.
Torture may be very useful if you can return to the victim after the information is verified.
There are all kinds of moral lines we wouldn’t be comfortable crossing that would help to win a trade war vs Trumponimics. Acting as though there aren’t is wishful thinking. People don’t typically commit war crimes for the fun of it, they commit them because they help you to win. If they didn’t help you win we wouldn’t need laws against them. If you’re not willing to win at all costs New Zealand will be at a disadvantage in any trade war.
But when that is not the case, as with my war crimes example, the price of doing so means that when those norms are needed to protect us then we have moved passed the reasons to ignore it in favor of severely punishing for breaches of The Rules Based Order.
Being a good person is not mean a weak person. It is having the strength of conviction to stay true to what we believe even in difficult times. And when people can look to you and depend on you to mean what you say, it becomes easier for a peaceful resolution to otherwise difficult matters, and to mitigate the horrors of unrestrained warfare. Should we not strive to move away from such horrors when they can be moved past?
MAGA Republicans are a funny breed. Seriously funny if the whole thing wasn’t so serious.
At one end of the spectrum there are the seriously dumb-as-a-brick hiks. I met one or two about 6 months ago when The Don was doing a stand up at Woodside in Silicon Valley. Like Trump, as thick as a lump of lard.
This cohort make themselves ‘feel’ better by inflicting pain on those less fortunate than they are. Fortunately there were only half a dozen of these specimens on one side of El Camino Real, whilst on the other side of the road, there were anti Trump specimens.
But then there is the other cohort. Average, and above average intelligence who are driven by ego, self preservation, money and greed.
Bpth share US exceptionalism in common. That’s the road to nowhere. The dead end that they’ll have to get learnings going forward by having to go there/ So be it. They’ll all realise their farts are just as pungent as everybody elses. Whoar!
I class Musk in this second cohort if only because I don’t find Him the genius many claim Him to be. A template for the ultimate Master of the Universe.
We’ll see how it all works out before too long
This is an interesting observation of U$A in it’s modern context. A now confused country that seems to have lost its direction because its direction is without steerage and now its just clunking along.
Call me Bubbles! Everybody does.
The Guardian
The America I loved is gone
Stephen Marche
It was a nation of dreams, built for the screen. Then it shattered.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/20/american-dream-trump-canada
Mr Bradbury, I share your disregard for Trump. However it is a mistake to attribute to all of America, or all Americans, support for his pathological disregard for principled standards of behaviour. Some of them, in fact a considerable number of them, yes. But not all of them.
Trump remains 100% made in the USA.
We have no need to bow down to the USA AS THERE IS NOTHING WE NEED THEM FOR .We can sell what little we manufacture easily .There are still billions of people out side of the USA market we just have to cut the umbilical cord and move on .
Project 2025 is real these conservative governments world-wide are implementing policies that mirror each other with slight differences but many similarities like targeting LGBTQ communities, abolishing abortion rights, targeting education specifically CRT initiatives, gender ideology, whilst advocating smaller government, privatizing public utilities, promoting white nationalism to name a few
Free Aotearoa
https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
The irony is that a completely amoral, erratic and unpredictable individual like Donald Trump may do more good for the world than all the pious regiments of the left, who deplore climate change while starting and enthusiastically prosecuting wars, jetting around the world, building fancy holiday homes, wining and dining, and buying every new gadget on offer. If Trump reduces trade, dampens the global economy, and discourages Americans from traveling the world, or the world from traveling to America, then he may help to at least slow down the speed at which the catastrophe is closing in on us. If for his own selfish reasons he helps bring an end to the war in Ukraine, that will be good for the planet and its peoples. If out of his own fears he steps back from war with Iran, that will benefit humanity. We can’t say that these possibilities will become actualities. After all, Trump is amoral, erratic and unpredictable. But he offers us no less reason for hope that Joe Biden, Keir Starmer, Anthony Albanese, or Chris Hipkins.
Interesting points GF. Unfortunately many desperate people are being harmed by him as he turns USA into fascist police state.
We should not cower to Trump !
But as a country we have been groveling and cowering to Washington since 2008 , and allowed an American business like Warner’s to blackmail the country and buy influence to remove our sovereign laws they don’t like.
Cowardice is already underway with the recent behavior of Luxon and his Foreign Minister.
(Probably, at the Pope’s Funeral) “What’s so special about lying in state? … I DO IT ALL THE TIME!”
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