I hope at this point people agree this has gone well beyond partisanship. Having a private citizen unilaterally gutting government agencies is an affront to the checks and balances of a functioning democracy.
You have consistently and reliably posted your political views here. Please don't try to pretend that you hate the political discourse now that people are critical of your guy.
What can this sentence possibly even mean. Trump is left to you?
I would also appreciate using tools like this AI system[1] to identify and limit hate-filled posts. It's only accurate about 90% of the time, but that's an acceptable loss for me, even if my speech gets filtered.
I think this rule is generally followed by HN's users, but for whatever reason, anything that touches "Elon" or "DOGE" always gets insta-buried, whether or not it's tech-related, whether or not it's interesting, whether or not it's worth discussing.
I don't think it's automated bots, but there is most certainly an online Elon Defense Brigade of real users out there trying to bury anything negative about the guy. I don't know what would make someone devote so much time to defending the honor of a billionaire. It's almost religious.
1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
People refresh all day here and often on the new post and new and comment feeds specifically, and many earnest users who take pride in maintaining a certain character to the site are quick to flag anything that's likely to devolve into noise and vitriol, like most political topics.
It can be frustrating to have them do that when you really wish you could to commiserate, explore, or debate the community on these topics, but bots aren't at play. Many people just don't see this as the right place to have these discussions and work to keep it that way.
While almost all of are political in some way, and most of us are tracking all these same events, we don't all want talk about it here.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
The guidelines also say the following, so I’ll just stop here:
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Given your comment history, trying to call out others on this rule is interesting. But we all can improve, I guess!
Prior Presidents more or less respected the need for independent agencies within the Executive, and the courts upheld the right of Congress to direct how money is spent meaning the President couldn't arbitrarily shutter an agency created by law written by Congress.
So on one side, I agree with you, who would think that they actually follow through with what they were saying over and over on the campaign trail.... And now they have.
Last term it was, "He is your president you have to support him". Now it is, "The American people voted for this"
All the same meaningless phrases that do nothing to discuss issues, just an appeal to the masses.
Political sentiment has never been static. We'll see what people think when inflation sky rockets, they max out their credit, etc, and they have fewer social programs to reach out to for help.
You can follow along here:
People frequently point out that Trump is doing more or less exactly what he said he would do, either explicitly or by way of Project 2025[1]—a detailed several hundred page diatribe and action plan for a second Trump term that he disingenuously claims to know nothing about, despite having employed nearly every one of its authors to work on his campaign and/or administration. That includes Project 2025’s principal coordinator Russell Vought[2], who Trump named to head the Office of Management & Budget, and who was policy director of the Republican National Committee platform committee from May 2024. So it is fair to say that we were warned.
But it is worth noting that an April 2024 NBC News poll[3] showed Trump leading voters who say they do not follow political news by 26-points. Meanwhile voters who said they read a newspaper every day supported Joe Biden 70% to Trump’s 21%. They very shrewdly targeted fire hoses of wedge issues, disinformation, and fear-mongering to millions of voters who reportedly do not follow politics, and who likely just felt like shit was better for them before 2020. It worked. But I am not so sure that these voters were equipped to know about, or fully understand the implications of, something like Project 2025. There is certainly room to speculate how many of Trump’s 2024 voters were voting for this kind of radical reshaping of American governance, rather than simply desiring a return to the pre-2020 status quo, before COVID-19 and its socioeconomic consequences violently rattled society’s cage.
It is true that Trump won his reelection with 49.8% of the vote, but that isn’t the same thing as 49.8% of voters. With only 63.7% of eligible voters casting ballots last November, Trump’s share of the vote narrows to just under a third of the electorate, significantly less than half. As I mentioned before, a large bloc of those voters do not engage with traditional news media. Along with the NBC poll I cited above, a survey conducted in November 2024 by Northeastern University[4] found that just 24% of Republican voters relied on news media, while the rest said they got their news from family and friends, as well as social media.
This means that while less than 1/3rd of eligible voters cast their ballots for Trump, only ~8.3% of the electorate entered the voting booth reliably informed, and still chose to support him.
---
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/06/heres-h...
2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2025/02/06/project...
3. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/poll-biden-tr...
4. https://www.chip50.org/reports/2024-us-elections-sources-of-...
If you ask them why, many seem to cite American support for Israel in its war against Gaza. Others cite inflation.
It's hard to restrict democracy to those who are "reliably informed". I wish we could. The whole idea of democracy is that you shouldn't have to, because informed people will be able to have influence enough to win most of the time. That fundamental proposition seems to be in doubt.
Congress is mostly voted officials, the judiciary is the group that are carefully vetted for cultural fit and the executive is where the messy parts happen with oversight from the other two government branches. It is where people like Musk are supposed to be working - the president thinks he a good person to be wielding power.
Which check + balance is being adhered to?
Which actions aren't in violation of the constitution, are operating fully with stipulated oversight and clearly operate within established best practices?
This should be trivial to provide from the Most Transparent Administration Ever.