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Notes -
There's a transcript here. Trump came out against nuclear power, but other than that it's about what you'd expect.
He didn’t come out against nuclear power. When he said he was worried about nuclear power, he meant it in the military sense. Musk then brought up how nuclear can be great for electricity and Trump agreed and joked it needed to be rebranded.
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Damn it, can we have a single American leader with the courage to say “split baby split?”
Although my guess is his opposition to nuclear comes more from his connections to big oil and coal than to any environmental or “nuclear waste is scary” principle.
I think the above post is mistaken. Trump supported nuclear power for electricity. Was against nuclear proliferation
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I'm very hesitant to accuse Trump of having any principles.
The one nice thing I have to say about Walz is that he was supposedly pro-nuclear. I'm not hugely optimistic about it a) lasting the rest of the election season or b) actually doing anything -- Walz signed a pretty big energy bill, but never actually did get rid of that nuclear moratorium -- but triumph of hope over experience yada yada.
I think there are certain things Trump believes in, particularly his general views on immigration and crime (which were mainstream to moderate for most of his adult life), his belief in infrastructure development (he was a real estate developer, after all) and his belief in American greatness/speaking loudly and carrying a machete. All of these views were once very moderate right, but the mainstream left has moved so far to the left that they appear extreme -- particularly in how they'd involve reversing progressive, uh, progress.
But I agree, when it comes to things like guns, taxes, abortion, and the culture war, Trump's stated positions are just pandering to his base. One of my major problems with Trump is that for all the ways in which he's accelerated the culture war, he isn't actually a culture warrior. He doesn't really care about the culture war, he just gestures towards it because the Republicans who do care about it are friendlier towards him than the people who don't. But his own views are extremely moderate on culture war issues, with the exception of immigration (which isn't about culture to him, it's about basic respect for the law and drug trafficking). This includes abortion. If I were a betting man, I'd say at least some of his many sexual partners have gotten abortions after being impregnated by him.
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