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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   32849 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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I do think the flip flopping will be one of the best lines of attack against her.

In her case, she’s very lucky to be running against Trump who changes his positions with the wind.

Is that true? With Trump, he seems relatively consistent. He is anti immigration, favors protectionist trade policies, skeptical (but not exactly hostile) towards foreign alliances and foreign wars, likes lower taxes, doesn’t care as much about spending, and supports reduced regulations.

That has been pretty consistent since he has been on the scene. Where was the flip flopping?

Too many to list, but for just one example he's gone a complete 180 on the Jan 6 rioters - on Jan 7th he said "The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay." By contrast these days he opens his rallies by saluting them, calls them political prisoners and promises to pardon them.

And he could point to a bunch of new evidence that seemingly does suggest that a decent number are being wrongfully charged, especially relative to the norm.

Okay, but that's shifting the goalposts. You were saying "Trump doesn't flip flop", now you're saying "Trump was correct to change his position". Those are different arguments.

You could, if you were so inclined, come up with a sympathetic argument for why Trump changed opinions on any given issue. Sometimes those arguments might even be somewhat true. But I think the underlying reality is that Trump just honestly doesn't have strong beliefs on many issues and changes position pretty easily.

The most recent was on the Tik Tok ban which he rallied for then turned against.

Yeah agreed. That is a flip flop. But that also seems like a rather tertiary issue (can’t imagine it is a top ten issue for voters per polling). On the big issues he has been very consistent (and that isn’t always great because on some of those positions he is wrong).

On the big issues, Harris vacillates.

The Tik Tok thing is a core representation of how Trump thinks and makes decisions though. He supported banning it on what seemed like a whim, a rich investor who seems to have some financial connections to China made a big donation, and then Trump came out against the ban. He repeats this pattern over and over. He seems uniquely and obviously prone to self-enrichment and therefore a completely untrustworthy on major issues like China, both to domestic people but also importantly to international partners.

Some other obvious flip flops/inconsistencies that come to mind with 10 seconds of thinking:

  1. Immigration, he recently went on the VC grifter podcast and said he's all for skilled immigration. He said the same thing before he was president but one of his first acts was to totally fuck up the visa/green card process for all my high skilled immigrant friends and leave them randomly stranded far from home.
  2. Stances on crypto
  3. Stances on taxes

Here are some more details: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/06/22/trump-policy-flip-flop-00164538

  1. So he said he was for skilled immigration before and after. Then he implemented something not directly targeting skilled immigration but having that as a second order effect and you claim he flip flopped? That isn’t really a flip flop.

2 crypto sure. Doubt he spent much time thinking about crypto.

  1. Taxes I don’t think so. Where is the flip flop?

Also all pols are influenced by rich donors; especially on issues they don’t particular care about.

TikTok ban, for example. At least Trump’s flip flopping is easy to predict (preferences of the last rich donor he interacted with)

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