Bewildered wrote: ↑Sun Apr 12, 2020 9:42 am
As far as I can tell he has done less harm the GWB so far. However I do think he is different to regular republicans in ways that are troubling, e.g.
- the things he gets away with (corruption, lying, mis-treatment of the press, etc) but are setting dangerous precedents,
- the level of support he had from neo nazis and they way he emboldens then
- the somewhat personality cult and fanaticism amongst some of his following
- he did get his Muslim ban through in some for, and it did do significant harm
- he is influencing more nasty abuses and harsh behaviour by immigration authorities
Regarding the benefit, I think it should be less in the US than other countries because they do have primaries where you can vote alternative candidates to get the nomination. At the same it’s unclear to me that your intended message of not voting in the presidential election would send the message you want it to. It could also go in the direction of the part of the electorate that doesn’t vote getting cut off and marginalised. Isn’t that what happened with evangelicals until Karl Rove got them engaged and used them to win the election for GWB?
The GWB administration is the low watermark. The more you dig into it the worse they appear. Even little known stuff like the deterioration of relations with North Korea. I quote from William J. Perry's autobiography (sorry for the formatting, I'm copy-pasting from a pdf):
"Colin Powell, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when I joined
the Clinton administration, was now the designated secretary of state in the
George W. Bush administration. I brought him up to date on our negotiations,
and he told me that he planned to follow up on our negotiations with North
Korea and try to bring them to a successful conclusion. Just six weeks after
President Bush’s inauguration, South Korean president Kim Dae Jung visited
Washington for reassurance that the new administration would follow through
on the North Korea negotiations that I had started. Secretary Powell appar-
ently gave him that assurance, which led to the next morning’s Washington
Post headlines reading: “Bush to Pick up Clinton Talks.” That same afternoon,
when President Kim met with President Bush, the latter told Kim flatly that
he was breaking off all dialogue with North Korea, and for two years there
were no discussions with the North. I was confused and angry as I saw our
long and carefully conducted diplomacy being summarily rejected, and I was
despondent at what the future would bring in Korea as this opportunity for
diplomacy slipped away. I appealed to my long-time friends in the State De-
partment, Colin Powell and Rich Armitage, but they had no real option but to
comply with the president’s decision."
Trump's rhetoric does seem to be associated with louder voices on the far-right. Which is obviously bad. It's hard to say whether he's a symptom or a cause. This has obviously been bubbling away for a while. It's probably a bit of both. It's hard to say to what extent that genie can be put back in the bottle in the near future though. Immigration officials have always been awful in the US. Again, Trump may or may not be making things a bit worse, but then also he may or may not be drawing attention to some stuff that was going on before.