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Notes -
Alright folks, election is over, now it's predictions time! I want your predictions for what actually gets done in terms of the Republican party platform for 2024, from this site:https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform
I'm just going to go with the top 10. Now of course these are not precisely defined predictions, but in general I'm going to be predicting something like "is this problem solved, to where the majority of Republican voters would feel it's either no longer an issue, or at least will be happy with what got changed?"
Let me know if you have thoughts on a better way to do this. Now, onto the predictions!
1 SEAL THE BORDER AND STOP THE MIGRANT INVASION
I give this a 70% chance, high conf. that major action is taking to secure the border, make illegal immigrants' lives worse in the U.S.
2 CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I'd give this a 15% chance, med. confidence. This one is a doozy.
3 END INFLATION, AND MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AGAIN
30% chance, low confidence. Too many factors in the economy and I don't trust Trump's plan.
4 MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!
60% chance, med. confidence. There is a lot of low hanging fruit. If Trump and co. can wrangle the bureaucracy, this could happen!
5 STOP OUTSOURCING, AND TURN THE UNITED STATES INTO A MANUFACTURING SUPERPOWER
30% chance, low confidence. It's definitely possible, but rising prices of goods makes this real unpopular.
6 LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS!
40% chance, medium confidence. Gosh I hope so!
7 DEFEND OUR CONSTITUTION, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS, AND OUR FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS, INCLUDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF RELIGION, AND THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
95% chance, high confidence. I don't see freedoms/rights getting worse under Trump, personally.
8 PREVENT WORLD WAR THREE, RESTORE PEACE IN EUROPE AND IN THE MIDDLE EAST, AND BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY -- ALL MADE IN AMERICA
95% chance, low conf. we avoid WW3 under a Trump term. 80% chance we end the war in Europe, med. confidence. Idk about the dome
9 END THE WEAPONIZATION OF GOVERNMENT AGAINST THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
40% chance, medium confidence anything significant gets done. The Deep State goes Deep.
10 STOP THE MIGRANT CRIME EPIDEMIC, DEMOLISH THE FOREIGN DRUG CARTELS, CRUSH GANG VIOLENCE, AND LOCK UP VIOLENT OFFENDERS
55% chance, medium competence. I think cracking down on crime is doable but, again, quite unpopular for optics. we'll see.
Alright, I'll bite.
Hah, quite a line right here! but fair. Thanks for biting friend.
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I got curious in just asking, "What was the largest deportation operation in American history to date," i.e., what's the line he has to beat? Operation Wetback? Wiki says something about a little over a million "returns", but I'm fresh to the immigration lingo and had to look into "returns" vs. "removals". I guess that "returns" can include anyone who is caught, but basically doesn't fight it in court; just says, "Ya got me; take me hoooommmeeeee." Whereas "removals" have formal deportation orders. I believe that a "return" could also include silly examples, like an example of someone I heard about who screwed up and applied for their visa too early (for another country) such that it expired before they got there, but nobody caught it before they flew there, so they were turned back at the airport.
So, I wonder which curve is he getting graded on? Then I found that removals were still stupid low in the years of Operation Wetback compared to more recent times. Returns at that time look to be about 2/3rds of the peak. Eyeballing totals would put the peak in 2000, something like 1.85M (driven by the peak in returns, around 1.7M). Removals peaked in 2013 at about 400k. There's a few more years in the less-immediately-readable more recent yearbook.
Concretely, on what metric would this prediction market resolve?
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Let’s have some ‘black-pilling’ on the mass deportation front.
Mandatory nationwide e-verify and fines for employers (which will probably be blocked by liberal GOP senators + the filibuster anyway) aren’t going to lead to millions of illegal Central Americans self-deporting. By the way, many European countries already have their equivalents of this and still huge huge numbers of illegal migrants. American hospitals will still (under their own duties of care) treat these people for free when they walk in with an ailment, charities will still feed them, plenty of people will still hire them cash-in-hand or in less than scrupulous businesses.
Even the shittiest, worst life possible in America is still an order of magnitude better than life in Guatemala or Honduras for anyone but the tiny local elite. No threats are capable of leading to self-deportation for the bulk of illegal immigrants. They will always take their chances in the US. The worst life possible in the US is better than the average life in Haiti. Heavy enforcement may affect things at the margins, but not the majority.
The pull factor will remain as long as birthright citizenship does. For the last 25 years, the number 1 test for any GOP nominated SCOTUS judge should have been “Will you rule birthright citizenship unconstitutional”, because this is the ONLY thing that matters when it comes to immigration. Instead they decided that maximizing the production of underclass babies was the central duty of American conservatism, and here we are with ACB and so on. Parents sacrifice themselves for their children every day, it is a fundamental behavior. As long as an illegal immigrant evades ICE long enough to have a child (and America is a big, big place), their descendants are as American as you or I. As long as this is the case, illegal immigration will always be huge.
I think appointing judges who would rule the constitution unconstitutional is bad actually.
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What about the Tony Abbot method, as described by the Dreaded Jim here:
…
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I wouldn't be that black-pilled.
Looking at the illegal immigrant numbers under Trump and then again under Biden you see a huge spike. We will now revert to the 2016-2020 Trump numbers or maybe even less because he's got more buy in this time.
Not everyone will self-deport, but some will. It's probably already happening. Somewhere there is a migrant who is 50/50 on whether to stay or go. Trump's election alone will push him to 51/49 and he'll leave.
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#2 is true for Haiti, but not as much for other parts of Latin America. Honduras, Guatemala, etc are crappy places to live, but they’re ‘normal lower middle income country’ crappy, not ‘Haiti Afghanistan and the worst parts of sub Saharan Africa’ crappy. There are plenty of underclass Americans who split a rented bedroom in a bad neighborhood, ride bikes, and eat shitty food while working two crappy jobs. You are drastically overestimating the standard of living of Americans who, for whatever reason, cannot function normally.
On the other hand, economic growth in Mexico and declining TFR in Latin America reduces immigration pressure to begin with.
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Pretty much nothing, because the Constitution hasn't described the actual structure and functioning of our government for at least 80 years, and so, no matter what powers the president and congress are s'pose'da have according to musty old texts nobody in DC cares about, in reality they have basically no power over the Permanent Bureaucracy.
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Re: #2 a reporter asked J.D. Vance something like "how are you going to round up and deport 10 million people".
He said this, which I think is a great answer:
Secure the border and stop new people from coming in
Arrest and deport the 500,000-1 million known criminals who have sneaked into the country
Prosecute people who hire illegal immigrants so that they self-deport
There's also things that could be emulated from the example of Tony Abbot in Australia — were Trump and Congress able to get such things enforced. But it doesn't matter how much they want to do the things you list, when all the permanent bureaucrats actively work against them.
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Yeah I think Trump can easily win #2 if you include self-deportations, even if his program isn't particularly effective in terms of per capita removals, there's just a lot of people here who will probably leave.
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It baffles me that no previous Republican government has done this. It's such an obvious low-hanging fruit. The fact that JD is suggesting it makes me think that this may be the first US government who actually want to reduce illegal immigration.
It’s almost as if the Mitt Romney types liked having all those illegal immigrants driving down wages.
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The people who employ illegal immigrants tend to ones that republicans want to keep happy.
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And it always baffles me how people don't conclude that maybe Republicans haven't done this because they can't.
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Reason: "Neither Harris nor Trump Is a Friend of Free Speech"
Can't speak to the flag burning, but the airwaves are publicly owned and granted by the government. If they are being flagrantly misused to spread proven lies and undermine the public which owns them, why shouldn't the license get pulled?
Likewise, libel and slander laws exist. Why shouldn't Trump avail himself of them same as people have against him?
Because "public" does not exist - it's just an imaginary entity to make our conversations easier, but there's no actual thing as "public" that owns anything. What actually happens is that the government functionaries are controlling the speech over the airwaves, and as we have found out multiple times, they can not be trusted not to abuse this function, even if they have best intentions at the start. And being human, they rarely even have the best intentions. That's why the best method to prevent the abuse is to deny them the power of control.
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Completely agree. Anyone broadcasting vaccine misinformation or transphobia contradicting consensus public health science on public airwaves should be shut down.
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He doesn't just want to use existing laws, he said he wants to 'open up' libel laws. It's also just pretty pathetic - did Obama ever threaten to sue Birtherists for libel, much less threaten to 'open up' the laws to get at them?
Obama had a media environment an order of magnitude more friendly to him and his goals, there is simply no comparison between the simpering star struck media under Obama and the vast open collusion between the great majority of the media & academic landscape to take every opportunity to blatantly attack, lie and mislead about Trump.
This is a pretty revealing answer, since it indicates that the real grievance isn't actual libel, it's the overall hostile media landscape, and it's pretty chilling for a President to suggest that laws be changed in order that he can lash out against media outlets that don't like him. If he's that sensitive to partisan or negative coverage, he shouldn't be in politics.
Not quite as revealing as you might think; laws are made for man, not men for the law.
If a law or set of laws are not working as intended or being enforced unevenly, you change the law. The point of a law is what it does. The point of Libel / slander / defamation laws is to prevent large public actors from egregiously publicly lying on purpose in order to damage or destroy someone.
There’s nothing inconsistent in thinking that those laws exist for a reason, and seeing the Trump case as a good example of why those laws exist, noting that they clearly aren’t having the desired deterrent effect, and then saying we need to do something about that.
We’ve completely sacralized massive media companies, to their benefit. But they can be shamelessly bad actors too in the same way that companies that make chemicals, arms, cars, etc are.
I’m not necessarily agreeing that “opening up” libel laws in the right move, but there’s nothing inherently incoherent or pernicious about it.
This problem still existed under Obama it was just camouflaged by a sycophantic relationship between big media and power.
Fine, that's a legitimate point (which I completely disagree with but let's leave that for one second), but it's still probably a bad idea to have a sitting President be the one to make that case. If there is one person with reference to whom we probably ought to err on the side of freedom of speech as regards libel, it is the President. If libel laws really should be broader, it should be very easy to make that case without having to centre it around a politician who dislikes what his media opponents say.
What accusations/lies against Trump from mainstream media figures do you think Trump is currently prevented from taking libel actions against that he ought to be able to if and when an 'opened' libel regime took effect (and that represents some higher/more sinister plane of lying that any previous President did not have to deal with)?
So here’s the departure for me; while I don’t find the idea around reforming libel laws necessarily objectionable, I don’t actually agree that this is the best strategy.
Trump tends to take the most extreme opening love as a bargaining chip, which is a common business tactic and something he outlined as part of his preferred strategy in “The Art of the Deal”.
I think legacy media alternatives like long form podcasts, Twitter/X and Substack are completely eating the legacy media’s lunch, and the worst actors are suffering the necessary consequences of tanking their reputation after so many years of blatant lies and manipulation.
I’m personally quite optimistic that the necessary change is already well on its way through pure consumer choice and the breaking of the hard wall of censorship & collusion. The preference cascade is already here, political capital is better spent elsewhere.
I don’t know enough specifics about current libel law to spell out which particular things are actionable, but I do hope that the trump organization litigates to the maximum extent possible through current law without trying to force a square peg through a round hole.
As for the uniquely dishonest treatment of Trump by the media, that’s eight plus years in the making with too many example to name.
The Russia Hoax is the obvious big one, but I distinctly remember the first small example I saw myself that made my radar go off just a tad; it was his during his first trip to Japan, the whole fish food row with Shinzo Abe. This footage starts exactly a few seconds after Abe overturns his box of fish food over, but is cut where it was to make Trump maximally look like an oaf when he was just following Abe’s lead.
That stupid footage was like a whole news cycle, super early in his presidency. And it just got progressively worse after that. After the tenth incident like that I simply started to assume I was being lied to when someone said something negative about him, and I tended to be right much more often than not.
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Because of the 1A. Fox News and OAN should be allowed to broadcast their opinions. The regime shouldn't be in the business of telling them what they can and cannot say. Trump is arguably a public figure, although some people are saying he is a Marxist born in Kenya. Big if true.
I don’t think the first amendment requires giving person A, B, and C a subsidy that isn’t given to anyone else. In fact, one could flip this on its head and say providing the subsidy is harming the freedom of speech rights of others (since relatively speaking their speech is more expensive)
My response is silent on the subsidy. I'm asking who decides what is "fake news", or whether speech "undermines the public?". Trump says his regime should determine that, in accordance wit his whims. The Reason article points out why this might be a bad idea as far as the 1A is concerned.
But this is my problem with Reason types—they never account for context. Yes, it would be bad if government routinely goes around punishing people for speech the government doesn’t like. But it would also be bad if the government routinely went around rewarding folks for speech the government likes.
So NBC, ABC, and CBS get billions of dollars free subsidies from the government. They were rewarded with this because it was thought broadcasting things like the news was in the public interest. But it has become obviously clear that those three organizations aren’t broadcasting the news but acting as an appendage of the DNC. Why should the government subsidize the speech of the DNC?
Take away the subsidy and let ABC, NBC, or CBS bid on the broadband. Use the money to pay down debt.
Thats an entirely different argument. If thats where the goalposts are, then Reason types would be on board, as it isn't about one man labeling something "fake news". The context is very different from what is being proposed team Trump which sneaks in viewpoint discrimination under the guise of free speech.
If he is actually consistent of free speech, then there wont be objections by reason types.
Ehh we shall see. And those are proposals being put out by people close to Trump (eg Sacks).
These are the same reason types who got upset about mask bans when ignoring the giant thumb government had put on masking.
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Fox News is cable though.
I think a lot of people have forgotten what Broadcast means and why there's a legal distinction.
In short, there is a limited spectrum of channels we can have on broadcast TV and radio. There are strict rules that the government has implemented to ensure that this limited resource is allocated "fairly." It's not like the Internet where everyone can talk at once.
I don’t see any good reason the current broadcast arrangement can’t be torn up, it no longer serves the same public purpose it had back before cable news and the internet.
It’s basically just a structural subsidy to a cartel at this point.
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I’m sure if Trump actually had a legally compelling case he would have already filed, but he hasn’t. That implies to me that he wants to reduce libel protections. (I don’t think he wants that for idealogical reasons, or even has strong convictions about it. I think he’s just personally upset.)
Plus, ‘undermining the public’ goes both ways. Should news organizations reporting on ‘Haitians are eating the cats’ be shut down?
He actually did file two lawsuits recently.
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Listen, he lost a libel case for denying he raped a woman. Because now if you deny you committed a crime, that's calling the person accusing you a liar, and that's libel.
A lot of people have lied about him. "Compelling case"? I hardly see how that matters.
Only in the most tortured interpretation of events. He actually lost the case for calling Carroll a liar, saying she was only accusing him to get publicity for herself and sell books, implying that she was working for the Democrats and/or that she was paid and suggesting she should 'pay dearly' for her accusations. It wasn't some legal trickery by which his denial was construed as implying she was a liar, he literally said she had made it up to sell books.
Didn't she?
Let's say I accuse you of raping me. You know that you have never raped me. You can honestly say you're innocent! You can also say, with 100% certainty that I am making it up. It shouldn't be libel for you to say that I'm making it up, because you are in a position where you can say that with certainty. Maybe I made it up because I am mentally unstable. But if I was also publicizing a book at the time, then you could reasonably infer that I made up to sell the book.
And this seems like the inference that everyone makes. Most liberals take this libel suit as evidence that Trump has been proven of rape in court.
I suppose this depends on the semantics of 'proven'. But the jury did in fact find that Trump had sexually abused Carroll (though not raped her), so in that sense he has been proven of sexual abuse (and of actual malice in his statements) in (a) court.
https://www.scribd.com/document/644110955/gov-uscourts-nysd-590045-174-0-1
If you want to make the case that Trump was reasonable to accuse her of lying, fine, but that's not the argument @WhiningCoil was making, who said that Trump had merely denied the accusations and that counter-accusation of lying was merely something people had read into his initial denial, not something he had explicitly done himself. However that would be merely a critique of the factual findings of the jury, not of their logic or of that of the trial/libel laws/judicial system themselves.
The jury's findings are about as ridiculous to me as Cardinal Pell's conviction in Australia. The story as portrayed has no basis in reality. It is really telling that Carroll's story was that Trump raped her and the jury didn't agree. Carroll's story is that Trump met the legal definition of rape - penetration with a penis - but the jury disagreed. The jury collectively said, "No, your story breaks the laws of physics and anatomy, but we will just change your testimony to 'fingers' instead of 'penis' and then pretend that doesn't have implications on the reliability on the rest of what you said."
It's not semantic to say that there is a crucial standard of evidence lacking that would have been required in a criminal conviction.
It is natural, when denying an allegation, to provide an alternative explanation for the facts. It is part and parcel of denying an allegation. If you ask a kid if she ate a cookie, she will deny it by saying, "No, the dog ate it." The explanation is part of the denial. It shouldn't be libel to provide an alternative explanation when someone is accusing you of something.
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