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There’s always been debate about whether Donald Trump is anti-establishment or a member of the establishment. Since he is a billionaire, does he relate more to the billionaire class? Because he’s a Republican, will he always conform to Republican pressure? Because there’s photos of him with Epstein and Hillary, is his anti-establishment ethos just a larp?
His prospective appointments suggests that he is anti-establishment now. The appointees include:
Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. His statements include: “the principal objective of the FDA today is to serve the mercantile interests of pharmaceutical” and “get President Trump back in the White House and me to DC so we can ban pharmaceutical advertising”. He has called for the regulation of unhealthy food, the banning of fluoride in tap water and the legalization of psychedelics. In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. Many say his uncle was killed by the deep state.
Tulsi Gabbard, who has disputed the American account of Assad’s chemical weapon use, argued against the American funding of Ukraine, and argued against sanctions on Russia. She was placed on a heightened TSA terrorist watch list.
Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. He has the most controversial foreign policy view of any Republican politician. He wants the legalization of raw milk and more freedom involving small farms selling their produce. His stance is anti-corporate.
A possible link up with Ron Paul, the foremost anti establishment candidate of the late 00s.
If he goes through with these appointments — and to be fair, that’s a weighty if — I think it would make him the most anti-establishment president since Andrew Jackson.
The ratsphere is among the most vocal critics of the FDA. However, I perceive that the consensus is that it is too restrictive, not pushing towards minimizing health_costs - health_benefits, but instead minimizing health_costs - 0.01*health_benefits or something, because their incentives are bad: they will not be celebrated as heroes for certifying a drug which saves millions of lives, but they will be certainly be cast as villains if a drug they certified ends up killing a few 10k. "The FDA serves the commercial interests of the pharmaceuticals" is either orthogonal to that or even in contradiction.
French fries, various prescription medications, raw milk and psychedelics all have some risks. I am all for arguments that current legislation is not consistent with regard to the relative risks posed by them, and some should be regulated more harshly and some less harshly, but I would be surprised to see Trump basing his policies on a sciency risk analysis.
(The other thing to discuss is the debate what should be regulated by the federal government and what should be left to the states. However, I do not expect any consistency from either party here.)
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Tulsi and RFK, like Trump, are completely behind Israel. Ukraine is a sideshow in comparison in establishment interest.
Coincidentally, agricultural secretory has very little to do with foreign policy.
But he’d be ninth in line for the presidency.
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I assume Trump voters want a return to the economy prosperity they recall from 2017-2019, not to the whole having a pandemic thing of 2020. Hopefully we get lucky and H5N1 doesn't jump to humans (and my understanding is it's more likely it won't than it will), but if you wanted to maximize the chance of another pandemic, these are the policies you'd enact. Not that Biden has exactly been pro-active in doing anything about H5N1.
Although if we get a sufficiently anti-vax federal government we can just have some old-fashioned polio and measles epidemics.
If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.
If he slashes regulation on oil rigs, and we have some sort of horrible spill, would you assume Deepwater Horizon was planned?
Deepwater Horizon happened due to onerous regulations that crowded out terrestrial oil drilling in favor of offshore drilling, which is inherently less profitable and far more dangerous. A foreign E&P company (BP) outsourced its well driller to a firm that bungled the job and had lax safety standards. That sounds a lot like the circumstances behind the COVID-19 lab leak. Regulations caused the job to be offshored/outsourced… foreign entity screws the pooch…
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I do not think that you should update very heavily.
In one model, pandemics randomly happen with a certain rate, perhaps once every 50-100 years (though we might debate if the rate should scale linearly with the world population or not).
In another model, the deep state (or whomever) will engineer a pandemic timed to prevent Trump's re-election (not that he would be eligible again).
Both of these models explain the past data reasonably well. The deep state model might predict 50% for another pandemic (after all, they might try something different, nobody would claim that a lack of another Trump pandemic conclusively falsifies 'COVID was a CIA op'), while the natural rate model would give you a 4-10% chance, perhaps.
I have not calculated it, but I think that the update would increase the Bayesian probability of the deep state hypothesis by a factor of five or ten (if your prior was reasonably small).
If this is a 'heavy update' is debatable, the overall effect is largely dependent on your prior. If you have the deep state COVID hypothesis at 20%, then this observation will certainly push you over 50%. Personally, I have the probability that COVID was intentionally released by a state government (or a cabal of similar influence) at perhaps 0.3%. Most of that 0.3% are not linked to US federal politics at all, however. So even if I multiply the probability of the subhypothesis 'it was all done to thwart Trump' by a factor of ten, it will still be very low.
As an analogy, suppose someone claims to be able to predict dice rolls. I throw a 1d20, and it comes up at the predicted value. This will certainly favor the hypothesis 'that guy is a psychic' over the null hypothesis 'he is just guessing' by a factor of twenty. But this will certainly not be enough to convince me, because I started with a very low prior probability.
Bad model I'd argue, ignores agency of public officials.
Consider parallel: "terrorist attacks are random and happen at a certain rate. If a huge terrorist attack happens and the state seizes enormous powers, then starts warning about another looming terrorist attack right as they attempt to justify invading another country/win re-election, the dice roll probably just came up 20 again by coincidence."
Pandemics are now "in the tool kit" the same way the "terrorism alert level" warnings at every bus station were in 2003. And deliberate release/false-flags aside, "are we in a pandemic/at risk of terrorist attack" is itself a political decision: see the difference between choosing "we must fight monkeypox stigma and not let it change our behavior" vs "we must close the bathhouses for two weeks (forever) to slow the spread"
Wouldn’t they also have to consider public compliance? After 2020, I don’t think a lockdown is going to be allowed to happen. You won’t get anyone to abide the lockdowns even if it’s Cordysepts of zombie apocalypse fame and mobilized the entire US military to enforce it. It would be resisted and probably violently so. The government would have to be insane to try it.
Depends if it's a situation as unfamiliar as the first one, where medical establishments and governments were truly panicking. That fear is transmissible and I don't think there'd be that much resistance. If it's what looks like a repeat of Covid though, and there is less of a sense of the unknown, I do think people would likely resist.
Even at an unknown, the known negatives of lockdown are known — and the end dates given by the authorities are known to be suspect. If some government officials told you to lockdown for “two weeks” given what happened in 2020, very few people are going to believe that the lockdown is actually going to end within 6 months. They also know that they won’t get much in the way of support when the lockdown forces people into unemployment and to close businesses, or schools or forbidding social gatherings. And given that, and given the knock on effects of inflation and shortages, it’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to go along. Covid wasn’t exactly a nothing burger but it also wasn’t something that justified the extreme measures taken to slow the spread.
I think that when the situation becomes scary, everything changes. Another covid-style pandemic wouldn't do it, until and unless hospitals became overrun on a whole new level. If it was something much more horrific, I reckon you'd be surprised how quickly people's current bravado would disappear.
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You don't have to convince people to go along. Just send cops to close down the businesses.
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No, people would fall right in line just like during COVID, and any that didn't would be forced in line by government force, just like during COVID. There might be some violent resistance in Red areas until some high-profile loudly-praised shootings of the resisters.
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I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
I can!
Sure!
This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground". But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice. We could have chosen differently. There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.
And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.
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As @SlowBoy said, raw milk is perfectly safe to drink. If you feel squeamish about it then by all means don't drink it (I'm all for requiring proper labeling), but don't deny the rest of us the choice.
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People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.
I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?
Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.
I agree, at the very least direct-to-consumer raw milk should be perfectly legal. I wouldn't trust even something like a co-op creamery not to screw something up.
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People also died of all sorts of shit for thousands of years. Sometimes literally.
I agree there’s little reason to treat raw milk as the fentanyl of animal products, but it’s not because of the Founding Fathers.
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I doubt any of these, with the possible exception of Massie, plays any significant role in a Trump administration, to wit:
RFK isn't going to be the next FDA Commissioner. His opinions might be popular among a certain portion of Trump's base, but they aren't popular among the GOP senators who have to confirm him. His complete lack of qualifications for the position give cover to any Republican looking to vote against his confirmation, and it's hard for me to see a vaccine hawk like Jim Justice voting for him in any event. If he gets anything, it's likely to be some made-up position that doesn't require Senate confirmation where he's given a title but no power, no budget, and no staff. He'll do this for 6 months or a year until he realizes it's pointless and resigns. Then he does the usual song and dance about how Trump doesn't really believe in his cause and cast him aside after making grand promises.
The chances of Tulsi getting a cabinet position like Secretary of State or Defense or National Security Advisor are even lower than those of RFK being FDA Commissioner. The Republican PArty, Trump's base included, is still dominated by people who supported Bush's foreign policy. Trump's stated pacifism is attractive to a growing number of people, but the average Republican is still more Bellicose than the average Democrat. A lot of older Republicans I talk to still criticize Obama's Iraq pullout. I've had countless arguments about why invading Iran isn't a good idea. Tulsi's a known Assad apologist, yet just prior to Trump's ascension Republicans were criticizing Obama for not taking action in Syria. Combine that with Trump's fixation on "looking tough", and someone like Tulsi is a nonstarter. I'd be surprised if she gets any position at all.
Like I said, this one has a decent chance of happening. That being said it only has a chance of happening because Massie is at least a sitting Republican congressman, and it's a position where he can't do much damage. Raw milk availability is largely a state-level issue, it doesn't break along partisan lines, and removing Federal regulations would only have a small effect on a market that's already tiny (most of the raw milk consumers I know buy it specifically because it's local).
I'm going to lump Ron Paul together with Elon Musk, whom you didn't mention, because it's pretty clear that the only role either of these guys would have would be in reducing government waste. It's also clear that neither of them would have a full-time position. Paul is 89 an retired, and Musk has to run something like 50 companies. My guess is they'll co-chair a bipartisan blue-ribbond panel on government waste and inefficiency which produces a pretty report showing that we could reduce the deficit by 0.3% if we cut these 9,000 programs, which report is presented to congress and promptly filed circularly after each legislator finds something in there that benefits his district.
The problem with a lot of this speculation is that it involves fringe figures who are hoping that profile will substitute for actual influence. People like John Barrasso and Thom Tillis don't want to see people who are further to the left than most Democrats placed in positions of power because they flattered Trump's sense of appealing to a broad coalition. In 2016 there was a lot of talk about Trump appointing Giuliani Secretary of State, and giving people like Steve Bannon and Sarah Palin prominent roles. Giuliani, loyal past the point of any logical sense, had to settle for Trump's personal attorney, and that was before he tanked his reputation. Bannon's career in the White House lasted approximately 20 minute, and Palin was never under serious consideration. Trump has a pattern of bringing people into his fold and making promises (or at least suggestions) that he conveniently forgets when it's time to actually pick someone.
There's some speculation that he might act differently this time because in 2016 he was too reliant on establishment advisors whose choices ended up burning him, and that he may choose to chart his own course this time. I don't think this is possible for two reasons. First, everyone listed above has locked horns with Trump in the past, and three of them are former Democrats whose stated views are still more liberal than the median Republican. There's no reason to believe that either Kennedy, Gabbard, or Musk would be any more of a Trump sycophant than Rex Tillerson or Mark Esper. Second, any position that comes with real power needs Senate confirmation, which makes most of these people total nonstarters.
I think you misunderstood the issue. The anti-vaxx portion of the base is very vocal and they won’t hesitate to primary a senator blocking RFK from the FDA. O I’m not sure about Gabbord, simply because I don’t know much about her or the base’s opinion of her. But the thing here is that the people putting Trump in office want to put those types of people in to secure an actual victory, and they’re not shy about insisting on the changes they fought for.
Honestly, I think Trump's election is actually going to pacify that part of the base to the point where they become much less decisive in primaries. The tea party people activated out of dissatisfaction with the ruling party-- at the time, obama. But Trump is going to claim the economy is good, the immigrants are out, and the woke agenda has been destroyed... and they're going to believe him, regardless of any of the facts on the ground. The traditional midterm apathy is going to favor opponents of trump, disgruntled with the status quo.
They’ll be pacified (and this is true of much of trumps base) if the state allows them to actually win. What you saw on Tuesday was a Revolution, and the people who won are going to insist on actually winning and not symbolic victories. They want Trump to clean house, they want the deep state brought to heel, they want their agenda to happen. And unlike the last time, the6 won’t take no for an answer.
The person who won is an elderly, lazy reality TV star with somewhat idiosyncratic political views with a long history across multiple careers of not honouring obligations to people who helped him out. He isn't seeking re-election and doesn't have a plausible dynastic successor (the Kushners don't want it, Don Jr and Eric aren't up to it, and Barron is a long way from 35) so he doesn't need you for anything.
The people who think they won will have exactly as much say as Trump (or whoever controls access to him if he becomes too senile to make decisions) wants them to. They can say they won't take no for an answer, but they say what they want and Trump does what he wants.
FWIW, my best guess is that both the upside and downside potential of the Trump administration will be limited by Trump's laziness and lack of attention to detail. This is what we saw in his first term, and also what we saw with Boris Johnson in the UK, who is a somewhat similar character.
He’s head of a movement though. And the movement is not a bunch of limp wristed hand wringing party loyalists. They support Trump as the guy who’s there to basically clean house of the establishment and in their view restore the republic to its glory days. They aren’t going to sit home and do nothing if that establishment doesn’t allow the changes to happen. They’re at minimum going to attempt (probably successfully) to primary any republicans who don’t give them what they want. And that’s if they’re nice. We also have a fairly good sized militia contingent who might not be so nice about it.
Trump is perhaps irrelevant except as figurehead. JD Vance is probably more aligned with the movement as I see it, and he’s definitely going to work to implement MAGA and Project 2025
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If we're talking the COVID vaccine, that ship has sailed. Bringing up 2021 policy concerns in 2026 isn't going to cost anyone their office. If you're talking vaccines in general, I doubt the antivax Republicans are large enough to primary anyone for any reason, let alone lack of a confirmation vote. And keep in mind that they only need a few Republican votes, and 13 GOP Senators won't be facing reelection until 2030. Ultimately, though, it won't matter, because Trump isn't even going to nominate the guy.
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If we are making a distinction between dissident members of the establishment and actual anti-establishment candidates, any Kennedy clearly falls even more on the "establishment dissident" side than Trump does.
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What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?
I'm more interested in Musk's promised cost-cutting measures. His whole mode of operation is "guardrails and red tape are for stupid people", while federal bureaucracy is 90% guardrails and red tape. How much carte blanche is he going to get to overhaul the departments before the Congress realizes what's going on?
I once posted a hypothetical here about Trump trying to hollow out one of the noncompliant departments. I can now actually imagine this happening: Trump might be all about vibes, but Musk can easily post a department-wide email that goes, "Just to let everyone know, I've just made myself the sole AD domain administrator, everyone's access has been terminated. Attached is the list of people the new Secretary and I will interview today. If they pass, they will start interviewing more people and so on, so your access will be gradually restored in the next few days. However, I'm going to remain the only one who can approve anything in SAP until the new spending policy is in place. Oh, and let the guys who have come to fix the hinges on the server room door in"
The prospect of Elon Musk crippling the entire SAP infrastructure because they don’t want to answer his questions just made me physically cringe.
To quote Jim Hacker, Prime Minister on an overbearing Foreign Office:
"Are they here to follow our instructions, or are we here to follow theirs?"
The FO makes some good points: politicians tend to be geographically ignorant, prone to black-and-white thinking, and have short time horizons. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats are also blinkered, prejudiced, incompetent and leverage their expertise to block off any feedback or reform that might make them otherwise. Ultimately that can't be tolerated.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=fVVX0lHZ8JE
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somali_pirate_meme.jpg
Make it so!
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Yes please, I want to find out if they put her on a watchlist (which almost certainly should be eliminated anyway) for partisan reasons. If the answer is yes, DHS should be dissolved. It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies. Nonsense like that should be punished severely and publicly.
DHS is a department, not an agency. Apart from the TSA, none of its agencies (list) are new, or obviously surplus to requirements.
Abolishing TSA would obviously be a good idea - move the bits of aviation security that can't be privatised into the FAA, move the bits of port security that can't be privatised into the Coast Guard, and let ordinary law enforcement handle land transport security. But having the various border-policing agencies (CIS, CBP, ICE, Coast Guard) sitting in the same department is probably a good thing given how closely you want them working together.
[This may change if Trump is serious about using broad-based tariffs for revenue - in that case you probably have to unmerge immigration and customs and put customs into the Treasury so it focusses on its revenue collection mission.]
I continue to think the Secret Service should sit in the Treasury for coup-proofing reasons.
To troll the Deep State without handing too much power over to someone politically unreliable, Trump should make Tulsi Gabbard DHS inspector general.
I would generally put anything law enforcement on a national level into Coast Guard (maybe rename it to state security or something) just for the ability to unify such things under a single legible chain of command. As it sits, CIS, CBP, CG, ICE, TSA, and CG are all doing similar things and even at times crossing purposes without any cross communication possible. A bunch of Migrants picked up by the CG would be handed over to BP or ICE, but why? What’s the purpose of doing so when you can simply dump them off at a port in Mexico and shorten the process by days or weeks?
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I honestly have no clue. Trump looks to have a dream team IMHO, and a better understanding of who to trust and who not to trust.
And then there is Mike Pompeo. God help us if he ingratiates himself back into the administration again.
It's also... I mean when I think back to his prior administration, all the promising advisors like Steve Bannon got squeezed out of the administration by more establishment GOP apparatchiks who had Trump's ear when the media threw a shit fit over some made up controversy. I'd hope he's smart enough not to repeat that mistake again, and allow RFK Jr, Tulsi or Elon to be pushed out by the Court Eunuch's again. But I'm also fully prepared to hear Trump start a speech about RFK Jr the way he starts a speech about everyone he's about to fire. "He's a great guy, but I don't know him that well, and he didn't really do much...." And I guess at that point all we can expect is 4 years of mean tweets and deep state sabotage.
Still better than the alternative of a Harris admin using Title IX to force schools to sterilize and mutilate children, or some executive order granting amnesty to 30m illegals that might get challenged in court but is the fig leaf D governors need to start letting noncitizens vote in federal elections, or god help us a tax on unrealized gains. But I was hoping to claw back some my nation away from these people.
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I don’t think you can draw a conclusion that Trump is intentionally doing this. Last presidency he was burned by a lot of his establishment picks when they weren’t loyal enough to him. Now he’s selecting for more loyalists, and that tends to include those who want power but have been kicked out or left behind by the establishment.
Maybe you like the end result of this, but I think it’s largely coincidental. It also means he’s less likely to pick competent people, since competent people are smart enough to stay close to existing power.
I don’t see why Trump would believe that these politicians are likely to be loyal. All of them have previously demonstrated an unusual amount of defiance to the party that employed them. You don’t pick dispositionally defiant, independent thinkers as loyalists, especially not when they have their own micro-base to return to. If RFK doesn’t implement the changes Trump wants, RFK will “burn him”, so RFK’s continued support is contingent on policy alignment. And that’s just politics in sum, no loyalty required. If Trump merely wanted a collection of loyalists then he would pick totally unknown conservatives, because they would only have him to thank for their position and their reputation would be contingent on Trump.
But it’s exactly because Tulsi, RFK, and in a way Elon rebelled against the establishment that they need Trump. They have nowhere else to go!
I think Trump picks people for a lot of reasons, not just pure loyalty, I just think loyalty is much higher on his list of requirements than it used to be.
He has very old interviews where he talks about loyalty and punishing disloyalty. It seems very important to him, and it always has been.
He can say whatever he wants, but then he did a bad job last presidency, because they were fighting against him constantly. I’m imaging many more yes men this time around.
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Arguably true for Tulsi (though I'd like to think she feels sufficiently strongly about her broader progressive economic outlook that she would never be compatible in the long run with a Republican administration), but the other two can just go back to whatever they were doing before a/two/three year(s) ago. Neither of them really needs party politics.
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Trump sees himself as a magnanimous sort of big man who gives everyone, even erstwhile enemies, the chance to be loyal. If Hillary swore fealty tomorrow he’d be distrustful, but he’d give her a chance to prove herself. He has no perpetual enemies.
What are you basing this on? My inclinations run the other way. There is no chance in hell Hillary would ever be appointed to anything
His VP pick literally compared him to Hitler less than ten years ago.
He didn't base his whole campaign for months on locking up JD Vance though.
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