Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

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> It's kinda amazing that a president we considered pretty bad is now a role model.

Why do you consider him a role model? Based on how he spoke instead of the actions he took? Most politicians, put on a facade. They play the crowd, kiss the babies, etc. They change their positions with whatever way the polls go. What good is a smile and manners if someone is robbing you when you're not looking?

Bush started an entire war on a completely fabricated lie. And Obama carried the torch, despite running originally against the Iraq war! Maybe you don't feel the consequences of this because you don't have to pay the bill and your family members were never deployed to a war zone.

Trump, for all his flaws, his instincts are for negotiation and peace. He just negotiated a peace deal between Rwanda and Congo:

https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-democratic-repub...

And again between Azerbaijan and Armenia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39dzl1lzrgo

He also seemed to handle the Iran-Israel conflict in a way that for befuddling reasons to me, actually deescalated the situation, despite the controversy at the time.

I'll take mean tweets and strong negotiation over smiling faces and reckless invasions any day of the week.

> is instincts are for negotiation and peace

That's a pretty wild statement given that he just invaded Iran. He's also made direct military threats towards allied Denmark, even in press conferences. There's also the less overt threats about making Cananda a US state and giving Ukranian land to Putin.

Pretty militant for the first six months, even from an objective historical context. Should he keep up that tempo for a full term of office, that would measure up with the more intervention oriented presidents including Nixon himself.

I'm not aware of any ground forces holding onto positions in Iran or controlling any ongoing surface movement at all, in any way.

I meant a role model relatively speaking to trump. He was at least presidential.

I totally agree he did a lot of actions that were very questionable like the iraq war and also the extreme surveillance. I just meant Trump makes him look good :)

I disagree about Trump but I don't want to get into that.

And I think what he is saying is that a person should be judged by their actions, and consequences, rather than their rhetoric. This is even more true in modern times when people generally have no clue what people who they don't like are actually saying. Because they are listening to media that also generally don't like the same people and who will regularly take things out of context, disingenuously interpret them, or even just plain lie. And since we're talking about people that are disliked by somebody, they'll never know any better - because it's not like they're ever going to actually go seek out what the person said; they want their biases confirmed.

This issue is most embodied by the various little social experiments on YouTube where people will ask college students what think about action [x], [y], and [z] that they invariably agree with, then they're told it was done by a politician they don't like, and you can see, in real time, the cognitive dissonance kick in where they suddenly try to figure out why they don't "actually" like these actions. Or vice versa for disliked actions by a politician they do like. This, more than anything, sums up the divides in America today.

Trump literally just invaded Washington DC, which he has the right to do because the constitution says so, but that's what it is.

Well, he only had that right for 48 hours if I understand correctly.

30 days, but it's likely that it can/will be extended.

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