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Comment by wraaath | Hacker News Reader

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The sense I got is that it could be overlooked as an anomaly. The second time he was elected, and the actions he has taken since, have absolutely ended all that. The Allies are truly incensed, the US's reputation won't recover for decades.

Exactly that. Not only he got re-elected, during his first term he did bad things but what he did now while not even 2 months in office seems way worse. Also it's clearly visible that the checks and balances are now severely broken, you have an administration not even abiding its own countries laws in very fundamental areas, that does not spark trust. Heck he even discredits and breaks trade deals signed by himself, who can trust such a country?

It was easy to justify sitting out Trump I as a (former) US allied, Trump II demands immediate action.

It’s a loss of trust. We were in the process of getting better relations with Russia, but then when Putin goes and invades Ukraine you can sort of rationalize it. Communist gonna communist right?

All the actions potato head has taken are a deliberate slap in the face of all their allies. Maybe something we’d expect from potato head, but not from the United States. Even given he was elected we’d expect the rest if your political system to stop a single man from burning down all bridges. Clearly that was an incorrect assumption.

Putin isn’t in any way a communist.

As a former KGB officer wouldn't he be the most likely to want a return to the old ways?

What does the KGB have to do with communism? A lot of countries have had draconian secret police and spy agencies, regardless of whether those countries were communist or not.

For example, the Gestapo in Nazi-era Germany.

It has nothing to do with communism and I didn't say that it does.

I was referring to the single party authoritarian government of the USSR

Sure, but the person I responded to asserted it had to do with communism, so that’s the context I was replying to.

Then I apologize for jumping in the conversation. Either way Putin is evil and Republicans are all traitors for supporting him

This is such an absurd stretch that I don’t think anyone can actually believe it, even if they wanted to.

Can you elaborate?

Congratulations, now can you respond to the contents of the message, instead of jumping on technicalities?

How is whether he is actually a communist relevant to the substance of what I wrote?

The point is that he wasn’t exactly trustworthy to begin with, and an erstwhile enemy. You don’t feel betrayed when your enemy does what you expected him to.

He's an autocrat acting on delusions of empire building. That is the root of Russia invading Ukraine. All the other excuses are ancillary or nonsense (Nazis etc)

True, but unrelated to whether he's a communist. There are authoritarian and libertarian communists but Putin is neither.

Actually, re-electing GWB was the early confirmation to the world that something was very wrong here.

Nah its much much worse now. Personal, humiliating, watching literal elephant in porcelain shop fucking up everything and everybody in all directions (apart from russians and israelis, I guess like-minded leaders).

He got way more senile, but in his case its not movement to incoherent bumbling but more hatred, pettiness, little napoleon complex etc.

Biden was elected in 2020.

Highly likely that Trump's bumbling of COVID resulted in Biden's election. In NYC there were refrigerated tractor trailers parked outside of hospitals for the overflow dead. I'm sure it was just as bad in other parts of the country during those months. Curious how quickly people forget, and I'm sure we'll have to relearn these lessons yet again.

> Curious how quickly people forget, and I'm sure we'll have to relearn these lessons yet again.

I think some of this forgetting was attributable to the Biden administration's decision to suddenly start acting like COVID didn't exist. It's pretty hard to remind people of metrics from the past when you're also simultaneously trying to avoid talking about those same metrics in the present.

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