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We've definitely seen feudal infighting and unpredictable positioning based on who could control the administration best in the financial sector. The SEC's behavior in particular has been completely incoherent. And that's not just according to crypto people who rag against it all the time (who ironically parlayed the chaos into lobbying gains), but literally everybody that interacts with the financial aspects of the Biden administration is unhappy. Even bond traders are fed up at this point.
Biden even seems to have lost a powerful stronghold of Democrats in the Silicon Valley VC universe. Techies with money are following Thiel's lead, holding their nose and going with Trump, which is a small revolution in such a solidly blue demographic.
I mostly blame Elizabeth Warren for this. It's an open secret that she loomed large over the economic policy and I wouldn't be surprised if she personally was behind most of this electoral poison (such as unrealized income taxes).
This is all to say that it speaks to a regency situation: Biden is a weak king and all his dukes are too busy fighting for control to maintain a united front against external enemies.
Let’s be real though, it also speaks to the widespread belief among liberal centrists (and even Thiel is ultimately a gay libertarian) that Trump isn’t actually going to do anything socially conservative. On immigration he might tighten the border a little beyond what Biden just did, but he’s not going to deport 15 million illegal immigrants. On abortion the Roe reversal is as far as he will go given his personal ambivalence on the issue. On guns he’ll leave it to SCOTUS which seems much less aggressive than many pro gun copium addicts were predicting 5 years ago. On China the candidates are largely indistinguishable. On Ukraine even the Europeans are pushing for some kind of ceasefire now, if quietly. Trump isn’t going to pull back the military from overseas while the evangelicals are champing at the bit to unleash the USAF on Hezbollah and China rhetoric heats up. He’s smart enough to know that cutting back medicare doesn’t play well with the millions of geriatric whites who comprise many of his most dedicated supporters. What is left that is radical?
The weird period of explosive promise in 2016 and early 2017 is over. Trump is going to govern as a center-right president except when it comes to hunting down his personal political opponents, who will face the full weight of a new Paxton-led justice but who will probably just leave the US and chill for a few years while the vast, vast majority of the establishment remains in place.
Trivially, trans stuff is going to come to a critical head soon one way or the other: social conservatives has been focusing most heavily on minor transition, but Kincaid v. Williams is the other shoe dropping for Bostock, can't be put off another four years, and it's... hard to overstate how broad of an impact it would have. In addition to the direct regulatory impact, it would likely (given the recent EMTALA example) result in the feds overriding every remotely anti-trans state law under a Dem admin. And the next President has non-trivial chances of replacing the two names on the dissent from denial of cert in Kincaid. I don't think Trump particularly cares about trans stuff, but I don't think you can staff a Trump admin without anti-trans activists precipitating out of the woodwork even if he did care.
There's a lot of active encouragement of at-least-gray immigration under Biden. It's possible that most of that escapes scrutiny in a Trump administration, but at least some of it won't survive, for better or worse, and I'd expect it to be a serious target as this decade's version of 'self-deport'.
There's an increasing set of broad policies that the Democratic party is looking to get through over a wide variety of infrastructure goals for their political movement: regulation on charter or private schools, post-Janus encouragement for unions like banning right-to-work states, reparations-likes for (certain) minority groups. Trump obviously would be strike against any of those going anywhere, but progressive seem him as likely to do reversed version. Again, I'm not sure Trump cares, but a Trump administration will near-certainly bring people who do.
((Conversely, I think Paxton talks a much stronger talk than he actually walks.))
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The one exception is probably the ME where I imagine a Trump administration will act very differently from Biden's.
What of the Ukraine? Trump's constant boasting that he'd put an end to it may not ultimately change much as the country seems spent, but I would expect a democrat to keep antagonizing Russia to a higher degree.
In fact this alone may be why Trump's no longer that repellent to the establishment. He can be the cleanup crew for their long telegraphed pivot to China.
I'm not sure I understand your question? I didn't mention Ukraine.
I'm just asking in general, but I guess I missed that you're upthread neighbor already mentionned it.
Ah I see. Unfortunately I don't have much to add to what you already said (which I largely agree with) as I just don't have a great sense of the dynamics at play, beyond the most basic ones that most people are aware of.
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I suppose, but how much different. He can’t accuse Biden of being weak on Iran and then pull out US forces, but at the same time I think Trump’s political instincts prevent any messy entanglement in Yemen or Lebanon which he would see as costly. That boxes him into much the same space as Biden.
Surely there's a lot of scope for policy differences besides actually deploying troops? A big factor of course is whether or not the Hamas/Hezbollah conflicts have died down, but even if they have then there are things his administration would probably do differently, such as not pressuring Israel into accepting the outlines of a two-state solution in return for a normalization agreement with SA as well as providing more diplomatic shielding for Israel and deterrence towards aggressors generally. And if the war is still on, or new wars break out, he'd likely be vastly more supportive of Israel than Biden.
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