US US Politics General 2 - Discussion of President Trump and other politicians

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Should be a wild four years.

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Current members of the House of Representatives
https://www.house.gov/representatives

Current members of the Senate
https://www.senate.gov/senators/

Current members of the US Supreme Court
https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/biographies.aspx

Members of the Trump Administration
https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/
 
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I think if all we get out of the Trump team is impotent whining about "corrupt judges" after 4 years of planning for these then unfortunately it will be a sign that they were never that serious. We all knew this was coming. If they had no plan in place except appeal to Roberts and hope he doesn't fuck him in the ass then what was the point of any of this? You can't feign total war and then back down like a bitch and grab ankle to the first two bit party boss DNC judge they scrape up. If you are not prepared to just ignore them and dare them to do something about it then, again, what was the point in any of this? These judges will happily order him around and dictate literally every aspect of his administration for the next 4 years unless he simply tells them no.

The only sympathy I'm holding onto is that he is playing along until RFK/Kash/Tulsi get confirmed to not create a "crisis" that gives weak kneed gopescum a reason to go squishy on them. We'll know in about a week. If they all get in and he is still complying with these turds and promising "appeals" (which still even as a concept recognizes the courts as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionally delegated executive powers) then sorry to say it really is over. These people will not even allow him to fire executive employees, let alone implement any changes in policy.

They tried to kill him. If he was not ready to go all in after that then he never will be, and this is all for show. Same deal with Jr and all of them. Vance is the only one that even hinted that any judicial review of these decisions was inherently anti-constitutional. And even he stopped well short of the obvious conclusion that they were as a result null and void.

I guess we'll see.

Relax, it's only been a few days since the first fag Judge intervened. We're not even a month into Trumps Presidency, I don't expect him to go full Emperor until they can at least challenge this shit in the Supreme Court. I do hope they're going to try and fast track these cases to the Supreme Court though.
 
I think if all we get out of the Trump team is impotent whining about "corrupt judges" after 4 years of planning for these then unfortunately it will be a sign that they were never that serious. We all knew this was coming. If they had no plan in place except appeal to Roberts and hope he doesn't fuck him in the ass then what was the point of any of this? You can't feign total war and then back down like a bitch and grab ankle to the first two bit party boss DNC judge they scrape up. If you are not prepared to just ignore them and dare them to do something about it then, again, what was the point in any of this? These judges will happily order him around and dictate literally every aspect of his administration for the next 4 years unless he simply tells them no.

The only sympathy I'm holding onto is that he is playing along until RFK/Kash/Tulsi get confirmed to not create a "crisis" that gives weak kneed gopescum a reason to go squishy on them. We'll know in about a week. If they all get in and he is still complying with these turds and promising "appeals" (which still even as a concept recognizes the courts as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionally delegated executive powers) then sorry to say it really is over. These people will not even allow him to fire executive employees, let alone implement any changes in policy.

They tried to kill him. If he was not ready to go all in after that then he never will be, and this is all for show. Same deal with Jr and all of them. Vance is the only one that even hinted that any judicial review of these decisions was inherently anti-constitutional. And even he stopped well short of the obvious conclusion that they were as a result null and void.

I guess we'll see.
They haven't followed anything from the judges and have flat out said that the rulings don't apply to what they are doing in most cases and have continued doing what they are doing.

If I had to guess Roberts is talking to these judges or others behind the scenes because he does not want to take these cases (I mean they don't have anything besides "because I said so" in most of rulings its laughable) because if he has to take them he knows Trump will just get free wins.

All of these are very far out of bounds for what the judicial branch can do power wise and no one besides TDS sufferers think they have power.
 
You know this came up in various planning conversations and meetings as the administration was getting put together before Trump took office. They're not stampeding into this fray with no idea what to expect, and especially given the activist judges who shit all over Trump in his first term, there is zero chance they haven't planned contingencies as to how to deal with this.

I'm in agreement with the suggestion (earlier in the thread) that Trump machine-gunned all these executive orders and firings as fast as possible to drum up public support and provoke the traitors into extremist actions that justify a vicious response from the White House that the public will overwhelmingly support.

Trump's approval rating is, what, 70% right now? Dude's on a mandate and a bunch of whining federal judges aren't going to impress the American people when they're upset they can't stop Trump from executing his mandate.

His approval aggregate on RCP is ~53-55% which is great for him, but not overwhelming. As for the rest, it sounds like the same old "trust the plan" we heard after 2020. I'll trust the results at this point over promises for the future. As I said we'll find out shortly which direction it is going to take. Judges have now ordered him to stop any funding freezes, and to rehire functionaries that he has fired. Undoing everything he has done over the past 3 weeks. And they are growing bolder. For now they are ordering a few people back hired here and there, but if they get away with it these same DNC judges will issue a sweeping order restoring every fired employee and forbidding any future changes to their status. Do we still trust the plan then when Trump complies and appeals to SCOTUS and can wait around for 6 months or longer hoping Roberts/Barret are not activated by their handlers?

Like I said we'll know very shorty which way this is all going to head, as they have overplayed their hand so much that a handful of democrat judges have essentially seized complete control of the executive branch. They control all spending, and all personnel decisions. Unless Trump has SCOTUS in his back pocket and knows emergency reversals are coming down imminently, then his only options are to surrender or defy and ignore them. There is no other choice. SCOTUS will either accept or reject his emergency appeals in the coming days. If they reject him and he still complies, "trust the plan" is not going to cut it when he's been effectively removed from office 3 weeks into his term. Either he fight fight fights or it's over.
 
No. His approval rating is around 55%. 70% of people think he's doing what he said he was going to do.
And the other 30% have not been paying attention. Trumps greatest quality is he is not duplicitous. The man reflexively does not lie. The extent of his conniving is salesmanship where he tries to put a bow tie on a turd. If in doing that he gets ahead over his skis with his bluster (like the Gaza thing) he never takes it back. He just keeps on going and tries to make his bluster reality. The man is a literal force of nature, and its why he is literal kryptonite to the snakes in Washington DC.
 
Presidents do not "name successors", only Emperors do that. If they had asked Trump if he would support JD Vance if he runs for President in 2028, Trump probably would have given a different answer. Trump dodged a poisoned question by saying "no". Only the People can choose his successor.
You just know for certain if Elon decided he didn’t need the drama from DOGE the left would be running the narrative that Trump is not the real President and Vance is calling the shots. They’ve wished Trump said Vance is going to take over like Joe Biden constantly flubbed always referring to Harris as the successor. Sometimes Biden called Harris the President.

They’ve run completely out of material and are just plagiarizing the right wing talking points on Biden which they firmly believe ruined the “wildly successful” presidency. They want to be pretend Trump is no different than Biden in terms of senility (clearly false he acting better than he did in the first term) and they have the nerve to pretend Trump is fully responsible for Eggs being expensive. He’s only been the President for THREE WEEKS!

It’s pathetic. I know I’m better than DNC shills I just ignored politics for at least 6 months when Joe became President. I’d feel like a clown to pretend a President is responsible for everything bad when he just got in. Trump 47 is the exception because he’s on a revenge arc.
 
You see, Israel developed weapons and sold them back to us after we gave them the money and technical expertise to do so. Truly a great ally. I sure hope they treat Christians nicely since it was Christians that invented their entire nation.

I don't even dislike Israel from an ideological point of view, they are a nationalistic, militarized ethnostate. I am 110% ok with that. I have zero issue with them doing what they want vis a vis Palestine. I just don't want to fucking pay for it. But again this somehow makes me a Nazi simp.
Look Israel wants to form an ethnostate I as a conscious objector don't want my nations tax dollars or foreign policy being dictated by them but I can't change geopolitics.
Here’s your problem. If water costs less, it hurts the mega rich California water baron families. Can’t have that.

As a side note, the whole common law for water appropriation in the American West has never made sense to me and is super fucked up. In the east, like rational people, we say that whoever lives next to the water can use the water. But in the west it’s some Byzantine system of who appropriated a beneficial use first historically gets perennial rights to the water source. Makes zero sense and is obviously going to create a problem like California.
California should be building more reservoirs like the state of Texas is doing to increase the water supply. Instead you have large amounts of boutique environmental concerns that would try to Kickstart Indigenous fisheries in nor cal or saving the delta smelt.
Naturally you can't tell the people in charge of these big projects they're wrong because they're experts and that's that.
 
Trump MIGHT cave to the judiciary. Musk MIGHT do something with your SSN. Trump MIGHT declare himself president forever.
Except the first thing on that list is significantly more likely than the latter two. The courts are the best defense that the left has so I don't think its wrong to be worried about them effectively using them to fight the Executive's plan. I'm hopeful that Trump's team will just ignore them or successfully defeat them legally.
 
Presidents do not "name successors", only Emperors do that. If they had asked Trump if he would support JD Vance if he runs for President in 2028, Trump probably would have given a different answer. Trump dodged a poisoned question by saying "no". Only the People can choose his successor.
Everyone is thinking it though. Its hard to not avoid the comparison. For all intents and purposes Trump IS an Emperor. He has grabbed in his hand all the executive power that has over the decades since Woodrow Wilson been concentrated in the executive agencies. The desperate efforts in friendly courts to try and pry this power away is proof enough of how absolutely pants shittingly terrified his political opposition is.

Caesar never declared himself King or Emperor either when he took Rome. He simply assumed dictatorial power, which in Roman terms was actually a legal authority the Senate itself had created in order to deal with crises. In many respects, what Trump has done in these last few weeks is the same. He's not acting outside the law or the Constitution. He is exercising his legitimate power that Congress, past Judicial precedents, and their interpretation of the Constitution have allowed for.

And the absolute screech that is heard, as he commands the beaurocracy, which are all executive agencies created by Congress and given to the President is a thing to behold. I especially love the Inspectors General appointed by Biden suing because Trump fired them. Why? Well, their authority under statute is supposed to be "non partisan" (LOL), and Trump can't just fire them because he's the President and he says so. Well...about that...the President is the chief officer of the USA under Article II. Your office is an article II office. Congress may has "said" that you can't be fired at the Presidents pleasure...but...the Constitution kinda says you can! And Congress and the Judiciary really don't have a leg to stand on here even under Constitutional law. The Chief Officer of the United States has plenary power over his subordinates. ALL OF THEM.

Maybe Congress should have thought of that before creating so many different officers and offices of the United States under the Executive.
 
Some interesting things happening near Harvard University.

Steps from Harvard’s Gates, Conservative Conference Speakers Embrace Funding Cuts and ‘European Majority’ in America​

Breitbart co-founder Steve Bannon called on President Donald Trump to “cut out all the money” flowing to elite universities at the Harvard Conservative and Republican Student Conference on Saturday.

The all-day conference — hosted by conservative and Republican student clubs at four of Harvard’s schools, as well as conservative campus publication The Harvard Salient — featured panels of right-wing think tank fellows and legal scholars, including embattled University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School professor Amy L. Wax.

Just steps from Harvard’s campus, Bannon took credit for Trump’s fusillade of orders restricting federal funding to universities. He said he had told Trump “we have to go into these elite institutions” and return them to “meritocracy.”

“Once you cut the money off, for them, that’s a bitch slap, right?” he said. “They’ll start paying attention. You have to root it out.”

Saturday’s event was sponsored by hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin ’89, a Harvard megadonor whose name adorns the College’s financial aid office and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Other sponsors included the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that developed Project 2025, and the Job Creators Network, a conservative business group that backed hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19 cure.

Sharply dressed conference guests sat around banquet tables in a ballroom on the third floor of the Charles Hotel. Some were graduate students. At least two attendees from Quincy, Mass., showed up after hearing the event advertised on Bannon’s War Room podcast.

At a panel on immigration policy, Wax, who has long flirted with white nationalist rhetoric, said “it’s important to have a European majority.”

Two moderators — Harvard Law School student Dean Sherman and Harvard Republican Club president Leo A. Koerner ’26 — posed questions submitted by audience members. Reading one audience question, Koerner asked Wax, “How important is maintaining America’s white majority for our cultural cohesion and further success?”

A gust of laughter swept the room.

“I think our nation needs a demographically dominant group that represents its culture,” Wax said. “That group should be numerically and otherwise dominant — not exclusive, but dominant.”

The European cultural origin of many Americans, Wax said, is “the secret sauce of our success.”

Wax, who remains a tenured professor at Penn, is currently on suspension with half pay for making offensive remarks and inviting a white supremacist to speak in her class. She has sued the university for racial discrimination, breach of contract, and violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

George Mason University economics professor Garett Jones, who sat on the panel with Wax, proposed a “points-based” immigration system that would prioritize migrants from countries with higher savings rates, lower corruption metrics, and higher standardized test scores.

“Immigration policy, fortunately, can be used to dilute the influence of Americans who are likely to be in that mediocre-to-negative contribution category,” Jones said. “Bringing in new Americans is a way to make America better by changing the composition of the nation through bringing in folks who have the traits that would make our nation better.”

In his keynote address and a subsequent question-and-answer period, Bannon asserted his populist bona fides and took his weeks-long feud with tech billionaire Elon Musk to the podium. Echoing what has become a favorite refrain, Bannon denounced “the apartheid state of Silicon Valley” — an implicit dig at Musk, who grew up in South Africa.

As the two men compete for ideological influence in Trump’s movement and administration, Bannon has found himself at odds with Musk over tax and immigration proposals. Musk emerged in December as a fervent defender of the H-1B visa program, which allows high-skilled immigrants, including many of his companies’ employees, to work in the U.S.

But Bannon on Saturday also praised Musk’s efforts to tear down what he described as the “administrative state.” Musk — who helms the quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency — has canceled diversity programs, issued mass buyout offers, and tried to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“DOGE is a weapon. It’s an armor-piercing shell,” Bannon said. “Just like Trump, DOGE is a blunt-force instrument, and it gives blunt-force trauma.”

Bannon said Democrats had shown “they don’t care about the people.”

“The Democrats are so messed up with the donor class and the credential class. You see — over here, that’s what they’re training: the credential class,” he said. “We took the working class.”

Corrections: February 10, 2025

A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Harvard Law School student Samuel Delmer moderated a panel on immigration law. In fact, the panel was moderated by Law School student Dean Sherman.

A previous version of this article misspelled the name of George Mason University professor Garett Jones.

Article Link
 
Maybe Congress should have thought of that before creating so many different officers and offices of the United States under the Executive.
Almost like all these career legislators are finally reaping what they've sown for decades with their weak, do-nothing management in Congress. Didn't want a President to have the ability to steamroll the entire DC bureaucratic landscape? Maybe you should have considered doing your jobs at any point in the last 60 years.
 
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