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I subscribe to the @wemptronics school. The Goldilocks zone falls between “more present than Biden” and “less bitchy than Trump.” Both should be easy for a normal person. Unfortunately, nobody in this election cycle has been particularly normal, so there are a few routes to mess it up.
I predict Harris will not unveil anything resembling signature legislation. If there was any low-hanging fruit, it would have already been pushed through via Biden, because a good economy is better at winning elections than a good promise.
More likely she remains a policy non-entity. Fox and friends will press on this as a safe, reasonable angle of attack, but they don’t have a good counterplan, since no one wants to admit to running a tight economy. That leaves us with “State” vs. “State” strategy: two smiling faces telling us they’re going to fix inflation and/or original sin.
Also, why would you want Trump to come down for either nuclear or crypto? I guess he can’t make the latter more sleazy, but he could single-handedly boost the green wing for a generation.
Why would you not want the President of the United States to be on your side?
Because the current generation of eco-warriors are focusing more and more on carbon than on nuclear. The last thing they need is an infusion of fresh anti-Trump partisans.
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Possibly because you believe he won't be able to accomplish anything for it anyway, but will tar the idea for the future by his association with it.
Even better: he'll highlight the crazy, the unserious, and the vindictive, letting you know to avoid them.
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The three stools of Trump's original 2016 campaign were: illegal immigration, tariffs, and ending wars.
Tariffs were so successful that Biden continued many of them.
Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.
Illegal immigration: when Trump took this up in 2016 he was the only GOP politician talking about it, now it's mainstream. The wall went from being violently opposed to routine funding in Kamala's budget.
Trump is the most popular politician in America.
I don't think that Trump surrendering the the Taliban was that popular - it is just that the Republicans managed to pin the blame on Biden (who was in office when the final US pullout from Kabul was due under the surrender agreement Trump signed in Doha in Feb 2020.
FWIW, I think that Trump was right to surrender to the Taliban (there was no pro-US government in Afghanistan worth defending) and Biden was right to implement the surrender agreement rather than ratting on it the way the Deep State wanted him to. But I notice that "Biden pulled out of Kabul and bad things happened as a result" is an attack the Trump campaign are running on, notably at the Arlington press stunt, so I assume the people making the decisions think that this is a good line of attack.
When the Biden administration came in they tore up Trump's agreement with the Taliban in their desire to avoid ever giving Trump credit. Then followed the debacle. Trump deserves the "blame" for starting this chain of events, but hes right to note that Biden could have handled events better -- for example, not leaving all our weapons for the Taliban to pick up off the ground.
Criticizing America's poor leadership is one of the great themes of Trump's tenure in politics.
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To be fair to the poor old man, Biden himself was notably part of the "peace wing" in the Obama administration - he opposed getting involved in Libya
Talk is cheap, and he didn’t have a son or an election on the line for the Lybian misadventure.
He did for Ukraine, hence the war.
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Only technically true, in that he didn't start the war in Ukraine. However it has enormously escalated under his administration, and we're basically bankrupting our nation and ignoring every other priority to keep escalating it.
Less than 60 billion in total is hardly a rounding error...
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I'm not sure whether I'm more amused by the conflation of correlation and causation in an inversion, or the unironic use of budgetary PR in a budget year that was nearly half continuing resolution.
Edit for elaboration, since it may come-
I find the claim that the Ukraine War escalated enormously under the Biden Administration laughable in a 'that is actually amusing' way, given the evolution of many dynamics since 2022.
In 2022, the Ukraine War was a war of national elimination by a Russia waged on three different fronts that threatened to collapse the Ukrainian state, multiple major population centers changed hands with a routine use of artillery against population centers, European countries were to supposedly facing mass freezing death in the winter and total economic deindustrialization for lack of gas, and Very Serious People and Motte Posters were warning that the specter of nuclear escalation was right around the corner if Ukraine received military supplies or tried to retake cities that the Russians had not only conquered but formally annexed. 'Plausible' peace terms included a unilateral disarmament to a scale where Ukraine would have fewer tanks to begin the next war with than it has lost since this war began, a great risk factor for a fourth continuation war. Western discussions on Ukraine included whether there would be an armed intervention, ranging from a No Fly zone to special forces advisors or 'volunteer' military formations.
In 2024, the Ukraine War has largely narrowed to one front, the scale of territory changes and civilian deaths has dropped precipitously to a degree that zoomed-in maps are required to assess relative changes that are hard to recognize from a country-wide scale, the Europeans are far from freezing and no longer operating under the previous economic sword of damoclese, and nuclear threats are so passe that the Russians themselves are downplaying the first invasion and occupation of Russian territory since WW2. 'Plausible' peace terms now adays no longer pretend to rest on Ukrainian disarmament, but hinge on how many years it will take the Russians to re-build themselves out of a Soviet-era military and whether they would really try another attempt at Ukraine and thus does Ukraine have a reasonable need for western security alliances. Western discussions on Ukraine now includes routine criticisms that the lack of Western presence on the ground to die is an immoral policy of treating the Ukrainians as canon fodder.
The stakes, the risks, and even the rate of loss of the Ukraine War have decreased considerably since 2022. It is strategic de-escalation in nearly every sense of the word.
As for bankrupting the nation in the support of the Ukraine War, that would be somewhere between factually inaccurate and glossing over many other more relevant contexts that prevent one's preferred policies from being funded.
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