...and just like that Obama became the GREATEST President again!!!!
UPDATE: Donald Trump Takes Office as the 47th US President
- Thread starter DC_Dude
- Start date
I know but at least Blunt was consistent.
This one is all over the place so sometimes I have to respond at least once.
You know I REALLY tried to be empathetic, but the minute they bring up Trump and his promises. It is SO FCUKING HARD NOT TO LAUGH!!!!
"That's like making 5.00/hr and expecting to pay your bills." ...You mean like the national minimum wage?!?!
I know this ends up hurting me as well, but with the recension of farming bills/relief and tariffs farmers are FCUKED, no WE ARE ALL FCUKED!!!! But Kamala's Laugh!!! "I wouldn't change any of Bidens stances" Welp, WE changed 'em!!
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Everybody else in the WHOLE FUCKING GODDAMNED WORLD is concerned about the victims.
Read the room.
I have relatives in that slave state.
Most don't seem to know or acknowledge slavery ever ended.
Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em in the ass.
I DO feel for the handful of decent folk who just want to live and let live though... They seem to be the ones that always suffer because of what somebody else did...
They take about $3 fucking dollars from the federal government for every $1 they pay in taxes. Let them and Texas fucking fund their own damn rescue.
Fuckin' capital of Dumbfuckistan...
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I don't think that's enough for them to ignore a nazi salute on national tv.
Yep
They only crying because they are directly affected.
Naw, people just love drama and celebrity gossip, no one gives a shit about the victims.
Victim is a strong word some were willing participants because they liked the money.
They were kids you stupid dumb fuck troll
I didn't say it was right and that doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing, especially the ones who kept going back.
They don’t know that Queen Elizabeth detested slavery until she saw the returns on investment. They don’t know the ambivalence of white people. The same people that are saying they need to know the truth about the abuse hate Critical Race Theory. They don’t know about whom that protest.
I know you’re trolling as usual doing your fake Blunt impression but what you’re saying is like blaming kids for being raped because the rapist gave them a PS5 and they knew what they were getting and kept going back to get more games. Some of these girls were 14 you sick fuck.
Majority of them were in foster care/orphanages or runaways living on their own.
It made them easy targets for Ghslaine to prey on.
Brian Tyler Cohen
1h ·OMG: Trump just posted this.
Yes, this is real.
Diane Ayala
He should be giving serious thought to the EPSTEIN files!!
CBS News
1h ·The Trump administration on Wednesday moved to terminate the legal status and work permits of nearly 270,000 Venezuelan migrants enrolled in the Temporary Protected Status program, urging them to self-deport from the U.S.
Trump administration to end temporary status of another 268,000 Venezuelan migrants, urging them to self-deport
The Trump administration is seeking to end temporary protections and work permits for nearly 270,000 Venezuelan migrants.
www.cbsnews.com
You think a 12 or 14 year old has the capacity to understand the future consequences of their actions? Stop judging them as grown women. The majority of the women came from poor families being enticed by money and started out as giving massages before being pressed into sex work. Some were threatened or their families threatened. There one girl was told she was TOO OLD once she hit age 16.
Just because a girls body can be used like a grown woman, it doesn't mean she is ready to do what a woman does. She's not mentally or physically ready. There is an age of consent in this country for a reason and only one political party keeps trying to lower the age and protect pedophiles.
Get ready for Polio II: the Rebirth of Sick
From March
www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au
Trump is not an aberration
It would be comforting to think Donald Trump is an outlier, that this, too, will pass. Alas, while Trump is abhorrent, he is not an aberration. His administration is the fulfilment of conservative America’s drift further and further right into populist nationalism and isolationism. It is not...
It would be comforting to think Donald Trump is an outlier, that this, too, will pass. Alas, while Trump is abhorrent, he is not an aberration. His administration is the fulfilment of conservative America’s drift further and further right into populist nationalism and isolationism. It is not coming back.
Conservative America, the one controlling the United States, is a different country. The clichés that have embroidered the chaining of our wagon to the US – “shared values”, “cultural affinities”, “the international rules-based order” – no longer apply. They are lies.
When it comes to liberal/democratic values and attitudes towards international cooperation, multidecade World Values Survey research shows this America is more closely aligned with Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Türkiye than with “the West”. The values held by various European conservative parties – in Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – are closer to the Australian left than they are to the American right. The Chinese have more liberal values than America’s ruling Republicans.
The instinct of our political duopoly is to not want to believe it, to look the other way and hope to be spared the massive inherent challenge. The election campaign is to be fought within a mutually agreed illusion that, while Trump’s tariffs are a problem, our world has not been turned upside down, that we just have to “manage” the US president, stay calm and carry on.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned of “a new world of uncertainty”, saying “the pace of change … when it comes to rewriting the rules of global economic engagement has quickened”.
The rules aren’t being rewritten. They’ve been scrapped – and not only for “economic engagement”.
Peter Dutton baldly claimed he could “get a deal done”, declaring he would “work with the Trump administration Mark II to get better outcomes for Australia”.
The opposition leader remains all headlines and no substance. Was the end of the American century, the US government going rogue, aligning with Russia and launching trade wars against allies primarily an opportunity to yet again call Albanese “weak”? Yes, it was. End of contribution.
In the lead-up to this Australian election, concentrating on the tariffs issue is easier for everyone than grappling with the world’s biggest power declaring itself supra-legal. The nation, like the president, being above the law ends the “rule of law”, leaving only entitled, amoral self-interest.
In fairness, the US has never cared for any rules that didn’t suit it. All pretence has been shed.
The flip side of Trump’s international grievance – “everyone has been ripping America off” – is an overweening arrogance. Exceptional America is the richest and best at everything. To the extent that the rest of the world matters, it is only to the benefit and glorification of the USA, to be used or discarded at whim.
Thus America doesn’t want friends – friends are needy. The best lesser nations can hope for is to have their abeyance accepted. The emperor might pat them on the head.
This America has elevated exceptionalism to something more like the divine right of kings. This America can do whatever it likes without restraint. Encouraging 57,000 Greenlanders to seek independence from Denmark and then offering each of them millions for the frozen island is bribery. Squeezing the Canadian economy, threatening Canadians’ welfare if the country doesn’t toe the line, is extortion. But this America believes unfettered exercise of power – bribery, extortion, coercion, invasion – was integral to making America great before the liberalism thing came along.
The latest OECD forecast of global and Australian growth being downgraded by America’s tariffs is the immediate consensus economic concern. It doesn’t help, and the extent of the damage will depend on the forbearance of other nations in their desire to retaliate. It is a mistake, though, to extrapolate that initial shock and underestimate the flexibility of the rest of the world.
Protectionism eventually renders a mature economy uncompetitive. American goods made with expensive or substandard steel and aluminium end up needing further protection. The American car industry, for example, is facing an isolated future behind tariff walls that encourage inferior products at higher prices. Check the Australian car industry of the 1960s and ’70s.
The delusion that America is so great that it is sufficient unto itself ends up making it matter less to the rest of the world.
China is seizing the opportunity to claim peace-promoting neutrality on Gaza and Ukraine, to preach stability, free trade and climate action as the US vacates the field. China is by far our biggest trading partner, the economy that matters most to us, and it continues to grow faster than America’s.
The Australian policy establishment has viewed the world through a distorted American lens for so long it has become myopic. We’re apparently unable to see that most of the world and nearly all of our neighbours have preferred to be independent of the US and China – they have not signed up, as we have, to be strategic vassals.
Our embracing of deputy status is even more embarrassing now the sheriff is a mobster. Our immediate reaction has been to cave in to his tactics, to offer protection money in the form of preferential access to strategic minerals when our best interests would be served by being an honest and open trader, selling at the market price.
Australia remaining in the service of this America is unconscionable and harmful to our interests. Yet AUKUS and the aspiration for capo status it entails is not an election issue. Besides seeking to shaft independent candidates, it is about the only area of bipartisanship.
This month, advocacy group Australians for War Powers Reform summarised its concerns in a report titled “AUKUS and the Surrender of Transparency, Accountability, Sovereignty”.
It points out that neither major party saw a need to debate the $368 billion plan in parliament.
“Almost all MPs and Senators had no say, no input and certainly no vote. The Australian public and their representatives in Parliament have been shown no respect in the drive to push ahead with this contentious defence agreement.”
All the report’s concerns – about the doubtful delivery of nuclear-powered submarines, their purpose and our sovereignty et cetera – are based on an outdated version of the US. This America is a foreign entity, not the one Morrison and Albanese jumped into bed with four years ago.
John Burn-Murdoch identified the challenge for world leaders in the Financial Times this month: “Acknowledging the new reality can be clarifying,” he wrote. “A government seemingly driven by zero-sum ideology and a commitment to reducing international co-operation is one whose threats of a trade war you should probably take seriously despite possible economic self-harm. Likewise, a leadership team that believes geopolitics is a game of cards played by strong men and great powers is one whose support and co-operation other countries should quickly build independence from.”
Having based Australia’s future on being an American military base, however, a quest for independence is something the Coalition does not want and Labor dare not mention.
We weren’t always so subservient. Writing in another place, I have tried to resurrect relatively recent but largely forgotten history.
When the US invaded Grenada in 1983 to change a Marxist government, Australia voted with the majority in the United Nations to condemn the move.
In 1985, when the US wanted to use Australia as a base for planes monitoring MX missile testing in the Tasman Sea, Labor members revolted, forcing then prime minister Bob Hawke and his pro-American defence minister, Kim Beazley, to retract their permission. The Reagan administration diplomatically withdrew its request.
That Australian Spring didn’t last long. In 1989, when the US invaded Panama – leading to the deaths of more than a thousand Panamanians – we went along with it, one of 19 nations to support the US in the UN against the majority.
Then there was Iraq. And there is always Pine Gap and Exmouth.
It is a matter of self-respect not to join the conga line of ring-kissers at the White House begging for a tariff favour. To reject conservative America’s global view is to preserve some form of soul.
Of course, it is not all Americans. Some of my best friends really are Americans, good people distraught by their nation. The values of the American left still sit squarely with the liberal democratic mob, representing the America that Labor and the Coalition want to believe in.
The American left is irrelevant for the foreseeable future, however. Wishing for an internationally engaged, liberal democratic US government is not a rational basis for Australia’s foreign and defence policies. Yet hiding from unpleasant realities is what we prefer.
We’re the country too scared to make public the Office of National Intelligence’s climate risk assessment. What passes for our political leadership feels safer if the public is shielded from anything greater than the policy incrementalism and domestic wedging that will dominate the election. If the public knew, it might demand hard decisions be made.
When government does not trust the people, the people will lose trust in government.
Tariffs are not the least of our worries, but they are by no means our biggest. Don’t expect our government, whoever is elected in May, to publicly face up to that.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 29, 2025 as "Trump is not an aberration".
Conservative America, the one controlling the United States, is a different country. The clichés that have embroidered the chaining of our wagon to the US – “shared values”, “cultural affinities”, “the international rules-based order” – no longer apply. They are lies.
When it comes to liberal/democratic values and attitudes towards international cooperation, multidecade World Values Survey research shows this America is more closely aligned with Putin’s Russia and Erdoğan’s Türkiye than with “the West”. The values held by various European conservative parties – in Germany, France, Italy and the United Kingdom – are closer to the Australian left than they are to the American right. The Chinese have more liberal values than America’s ruling Republicans.
The instinct of our political duopoly is to not want to believe it, to look the other way and hope to be spared the massive inherent challenge. The election campaign is to be fought within a mutually agreed illusion that, while Trump’s tariffs are a problem, our world has not been turned upside down, that we just have to “manage” the US president, stay calm and carry on.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers warned of “a new world of uncertainty”, saying “the pace of change … when it comes to rewriting the rules of global economic engagement has quickened”.
The rules aren’t being rewritten. They’ve been scrapped – and not only for “economic engagement”.
Peter Dutton baldly claimed he could “get a deal done”, declaring he would “work with the Trump administration Mark II to get better outcomes for Australia”.
The opposition leader remains all headlines and no substance. Was the end of the American century, the US government going rogue, aligning with Russia and launching trade wars against allies primarily an opportunity to yet again call Albanese “weak”? Yes, it was. End of contribution.
In the lead-up to this Australian election, concentrating on the tariffs issue is easier for everyone than grappling with the world’s biggest power declaring itself supra-legal. The nation, like the president, being above the law ends the “rule of law”, leaving only entitled, amoral self-interest.
In fairness, the US has never cared for any rules that didn’t suit it. All pretence has been shed.
The flip side of Trump’s international grievance – “everyone has been ripping America off” – is an overweening arrogance. Exceptional America is the richest and best at everything. To the extent that the rest of the world matters, it is only to the benefit and glorification of the USA, to be used or discarded at whim.
Thus America doesn’t want friends – friends are needy. The best lesser nations can hope for is to have their abeyance accepted. The emperor might pat them on the head.
This America has elevated exceptionalism to something more like the divine right of kings. This America can do whatever it likes without restraint. Encouraging 57,000 Greenlanders to seek independence from Denmark and then offering each of them millions for the frozen island is bribery. Squeezing the Canadian economy, threatening Canadians’ welfare if the country doesn’t toe the line, is extortion. But this America believes unfettered exercise of power – bribery, extortion, coercion, invasion – was integral to making America great before the liberalism thing came along.
The latest OECD forecast of global and Australian growth being downgraded by America’s tariffs is the immediate consensus economic concern. It doesn’t help, and the extent of the damage will depend on the forbearance of other nations in their desire to retaliate. It is a mistake, though, to extrapolate that initial shock and underestimate the flexibility of the rest of the world.
Protectionism eventually renders a mature economy uncompetitive. American goods made with expensive or substandard steel and aluminium end up needing further protection. The American car industry, for example, is facing an isolated future behind tariff walls that encourage inferior products at higher prices. Check the Australian car industry of the 1960s and ’70s.
The delusion that America is so great that it is sufficient unto itself ends up making it matter less to the rest of the world.
China is seizing the opportunity to claim peace-promoting neutrality on Gaza and Ukraine, to preach stability, free trade and climate action as the US vacates the field. China is by far our biggest trading partner, the economy that matters most to us, and it continues to grow faster than America’s.
The Australian policy establishment has viewed the world through a distorted American lens for so long it has become myopic. We’re apparently unable to see that most of the world and nearly all of our neighbours have preferred to be independent of the US and China – they have not signed up, as we have, to be strategic vassals.
Our embracing of deputy status is even more embarrassing now the sheriff is a mobster. Our immediate reaction has been to cave in to his tactics, to offer protection money in the form of preferential access to strategic minerals when our best interests would be served by being an honest and open trader, selling at the market price.
Australia remaining in the service of this America is unconscionable and harmful to our interests. Yet AUKUS and the aspiration for capo status it entails is not an election issue. Besides seeking to shaft independent candidates, it is about the only area of bipartisanship.
This month, advocacy group Australians for War Powers Reform summarised its concerns in a report titled “AUKUS and the Surrender of Transparency, Accountability, Sovereignty”.
It points out that neither major party saw a need to debate the $368 billion plan in parliament.
“Almost all MPs and Senators had no say, no input and certainly no vote. The Australian public and their representatives in Parliament have been shown no respect in the drive to push ahead with this contentious defence agreement.”
All the report’s concerns – about the doubtful delivery of nuclear-powered submarines, their purpose and our sovereignty et cetera – are based on an outdated version of the US. This America is a foreign entity, not the one Morrison and Albanese jumped into bed with four years ago.
John Burn-Murdoch identified the challenge for world leaders in the Financial Times this month: “Acknowledging the new reality can be clarifying,” he wrote. “A government seemingly driven by zero-sum ideology and a commitment to reducing international co-operation is one whose threats of a trade war you should probably take seriously despite possible economic self-harm. Likewise, a leadership team that believes geopolitics is a game of cards played by strong men and great powers is one whose support and co-operation other countries should quickly build independence from.”
Having based Australia’s future on being an American military base, however, a quest for independence is something the Coalition does not want and Labor dare not mention.
We weren’t always so subservient. Writing in another place, I have tried to resurrect relatively recent but largely forgotten history.
When the US invaded Grenada in 1983 to change a Marxist government, Australia voted with the majority in the United Nations to condemn the move.
In 1985, when the US wanted to use Australia as a base for planes monitoring MX missile testing in the Tasman Sea, Labor members revolted, forcing then prime minister Bob Hawke and his pro-American defence minister, Kim Beazley, to retract their permission. The Reagan administration diplomatically withdrew its request.
That Australian Spring didn’t last long. In 1989, when the US invaded Panama – leading to the deaths of more than a thousand Panamanians – we went along with it, one of 19 nations to support the US in the UN against the majority.
Then there was Iraq. And there is always Pine Gap and Exmouth.
It is a matter of self-respect not to join the conga line of ring-kissers at the White House begging for a tariff favour. To reject conservative America’s global view is to preserve some form of soul.
Of course, it is not all Americans. Some of my best friends really are Americans, good people distraught by their nation. The values of the American left still sit squarely with the liberal democratic mob, representing the America that Labor and the Coalition want to believe in.
The American left is irrelevant for the foreseeable future, however. Wishing for an internationally engaged, liberal democratic US government is not a rational basis for Australia’s foreign and defence policies. Yet hiding from unpleasant realities is what we prefer.
We’re the country too scared to make public the Office of National Intelligence’s climate risk assessment. What passes for our political leadership feels safer if the public is shielded from anything greater than the policy incrementalism and domestic wedging that will dominate the election. If the public knew, it might demand hard decisions be made.
When government does not trust the people, the people will lose trust in government.
Tariffs are not the least of our worries, but they are by no means our biggest. Don’t expect our government, whoever is elected in May, to publicly face up to that.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 29, 2025 as "Trump is not an aberration".
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