Every American here has allowed the quickest decline of a superpower in history. The damage to our country is irreparable and going to result in a worse life for generations to come
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
Surely, he has made things uniquely worse, and in ways that would not have happened without him.
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
People didn't vote for change, they voted for the same thing they had 4 years ago that changed absolutely nothing.
To quote Vaas from Far Cry 3: Do you know what the definition of insanity is?
And how did the system respond after the first win? It didn’t. It was same ol’ same ol’, and look what the led to.
Blaming Trump for the cluster fuck mess that gave him the opportunity to run and win… Sorry. Absolutely not his fault.
I don’t like the guy. But I’m not going to be foolish and blame him for winning. That’s not his fault.
You don't get the wildfire without all three, and anyone paying attention can observe the looming danger and the inevitability of ignition. Who lights the match matters. But is only a small part of the contributing circumstances.
The wealthy have been manufacturing these issues for decades now by buying up the entire media apparatus and gutting systems to the bone so that they can squeeze out a bit more blood to drink.
This is the stronger part of that statement to me. More than individual responsibility. Collective responsibility of the powerful. It seems to me that there's plenty of blame to spread around, which doesn't negate any of it. I even see ways democrats have contributed by, for example, conspiring to exclude Bernie Sanders who plays to the same feelings of dissatisfaction as Trump, but in a different way. More build it better than burn it down.
Though I think that's what Trump sees himself as doing as well. People don't have to agree - I appreciate some things he's done and recoil in horror at others. But similarly for democrats. I was very displeased with Obama for renewing the Patriot Act while appreciating the difficult compromise of the Affordable Care Act.
Historically, US politics has been quite volatile. The period between WWII and the 90s was unusually stable and prosperous. Which I tend to credit having bombed the rest of the world's manufacturing capacity to smithereens and the recovery period for, mostly. I think we're entering a more volatile period, but who knows?
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
But rather than own their failure, they work - hard - the “OMG it’s all his fault” narrative (read: deflection and distraction) and it works. So well, they keep doing it.
But repetition of a lie doesn’t make it true. Concession to buy into a lie, also doesn’t make it true.
No doubt DJT has his flaws. But he’s still a scapegoat. Why? Because no one is asking “How did we get here?”
Essentially the US cannot improve it's current direction unless it can have an honest discussion about how it got so bad in the first place, with all administrations under the spotlight for failing to address the decline.
Ironically, it's accelerating away from honesty.
In Q4 2016 (upon Trump's first election), the bottom 50% owned just $1 trillion out of $90 trillion.
The system failed them. Trump is a populist.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
What's completely incomprehensible is that the people suffering consequences of the Triffin Dilemma double down on the US dollar as the reserve currency. If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status. It's amazing how easily it is to misdirect blame to immigrants, libs, etc. Absolutely wild.
IIUC that was actually an explicit goal laid out in Ron Vara's book. It's obviously hard to tell where the line is between deliberate policy and mere narrative-chum for useful idiots to latch on to. But the impression I've gotten is that many of Grump's moves are in line with this goal, but fail to achieve it because the Dollar is so damn sticky (at least in the near term).
Also, the truth is that supporting manufacturing jobs to compete with China could always have been straightforwardly done by taking the surplus wealth gained by being the world reserve currency (ie being able to trade paper dollars for real goods), and directly spending it on subsidies for domestic manufacturing. But the policy over the past several decades has been instead to simply give away that wealth to Wall Street in the form of artificially low interest rates that create an asset bubble (ie the fake "fiscal responsibility" that the Republican party had been promoting)