MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
you may as well give up the entire American project right now
The framers were very clear that the system they were setting up relied on the electors exercising a certain discernment in the choice of President. If mixpap is right about Trump's character, and he is susceptible to low-effort social media campaigns in a way which the vast majority of people who are paying attention and have 90+ IQs are not, then the willingness of the electors to elect a man like that to the highly responsible and sensitive office of President of the United States is a "you may as well give up the entire American project right now" level failure of the system.
there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon.
No - the weapon doesn't work close to universally. We know that because Tim Pool and Lauren Southern had to be paid to spout Russian propaganda on Twitter. If Russian social media trolling worked on all MAGA midwits they would have done it for free.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict
I was alive and awake in 2014 and 2022. The troop movements were detectable by satellite - the invasion was definitely coming from Russian-controlled territory and not, say, the United States. The people saying now that the US started it were mostly spending January 2022 insisting that Russia wasn't going to start it, so I don't see why you find them so correct that you would believe them over your lying eyes.
he doesn't actually want the war to continue,
Nobody wants the war to continue. That Trump wants the war to end with a Russian victory is not in doubt - Trump has said it, Lavrov has said it, Trump's opponents have said it. That other people (including sufficiently many Ukrainians to sustain the level of war effort we are seeing) want it to end with a Ukrainian victory is also not in doubt. Russia is not currently open to peace without victory, and Ukraine probably isn't either. The rest of us can either shut up or pick a side. Trump has picked the Russian side, and the rest of us can judge him accordingly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Part of what happened is that Ukraine did not, in fact, start it. This is not a disputed fact. Trump is just lying.
"Donald Trump today announced that Incanto was a notorious paedophile and had been taken into custody" and "Donald Trump today falsely accused Incanto of being a notorious paedophile and took him into custody" are very different stories. You should respond to them differently. If a newspaper is able to distinguish between them in its reporting, it should.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
I agree with your points on the merits of "Fort Liberty". "Fort Sherman" or "Fort Burnside" would have been better given both generals won important victories for the USA in the area. But ostentatiously refusing to use the official name of the base is clearly an attempt to dogwhistle something, and the rules of this board require me to charitably assume that what they are dogwhistling is support for the MAGA campaign to retain military bases named after white supremacist traitors, rather than actual support for white supremacism or treason.
In any case, "Troops from nearby Fort Liberty have not been deployed to the relief effort. Does anyone know why not?" is an attempt to "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion." "Fort Bragg or whatever it's been renamed to" (when the correct name is well-known and can be found with thirty seconds' Googling) is what you say if the only audience you care about is the kind of person who cares strongly about naming military bases after white supremacist traitors.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
If my experience of Brexit is any guide,
If my experience of Brexit is any guide, the people who told the necessary lies to get the median voter to believe that the government was their enemy and the system that had delivered decades of peace and prosperity should die in a fire are high on their own supply and it is going to end in avoidable harm to the country, landslide election defeat, and wailing and gnashing of teeth in opposition.
To take an obvious example, if DOGE and its supporters believe what they are saying on social media about how closing down USAID is successfully defunding a vast left-wing conspiracy then their OODA loop doesn't have ground truth in it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
I mean, on other policies, we've already had pro DEI bureaucrats in the military claiming the executive order banning DEI prevents them from teaching about the Tuskegee Airmen. Pete Hegseth then told them to knock it off and keep teaching it. But it created another news cycle of "Oh my god, the Trump administration is trying to erase the Tuskegee Airmen from history!"
Setting up a snitch hotline for employees to inform on each other and warning that non-snitchers will be punished for failing to snitch on their colleagues who are still doing DEI sub rosa is something you only do if you want this kind of panicked overcompliance. Given the racial politics of parts of the US conservative movement, I have no doubt that the kind of person who signs up to be an anti-DEI purge enforcer wants the Tuskegee Airmen removed from the curriculum, and Trump only walked this back when it became clear it was upsetting the normies. There is a reason why a powerful constituency on the right supports having a Fort Bragg but no Fort Arnold despite Benedict Arnold being a better general than Braxton Bragg.
The most likely candidate I can think of is an amendment regularising the administrative state if it appears to be under serious threat from the conservative majority on SCOTUS. Nobody wants to live in a world where the clownshow that is Congress has to deal with the technical detail of bank capital adequacy or aviation safety, and very few people want to live in a world where those things are not regulated at all.
Before the McCarthy speakership fiasco, it looked like an Administrative Procedure Amendment would pass easily if needed with votes from Democrats, moderate pro-business Republicans, and conservative Republicans bought by the incumbent banks, airlines etc. I suspect in today's climate a lot of Republicans would be afraid of being primaried if they supported it (a majority of the voters in low-turnout non-Presidential Republican primaries appear to be the kind of anti-establishment conservative who would be happy to watch the world burn if libs were sufficiently owned as a result), so it would be difficult to get the required supermajority.
* IANAL, but my reading of the Constitution is that the administrative state is unconstitutional for the same reasons as the Air Force under any sensible interpretation scheme other than "living constitutionalism". But both the administrative state and the Air Force are good ideas, and should have been regularised by constitutional amendments which would have passed easily at the time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.
Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
Trump is after all a bog-standard democrat from the 90's,
I don't know why people keep saying this. Even if Trump was a bog-standard Democrat in the 90's, which he wasn't (per Wikipedia he first registered as a Democrat in 2001 after losing the 2000 Reform primary to Pat Buchannan), people can change.
In so far as we can see which substantial policy issues Trump actually cares about beyond "Donald Trump should be President", they appear to be:
- Broad-based tariffs, with other foreign policy goals subordinated to a tariff policy based on perceived US economic interests (rather than using tariffs to reward geopolitical allies and punish enemies, or to contain China specifically).
- Zero illegal immigration, a large cut in legal immigration, and removal of existing illegal immigrants.
- Reducing the US resource commitment to maintaining an international system where the US's allies are free-riding.
Any one of these could have got you anathematized by the 1990's Democratic party, which, if you check the date, was controlled by the Clinton machine. They would also have got you funny looks from Reagan Republicans.
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
And the idiotarian left would be marginally more intellectual coherent in doing so than the right are in our timeline given the two sides respective views on lethal self-defence, but still wrong.
Ashli Babbit fucked around and found out. De mortuis nil nisi bonum so I won't say anything else.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
That's because the Texas authorities specifically intended (based on both the text of the law and Paxton's jawboning in the Cox case) to make women carry non-viable fetuses until medical confirmation of fetal death - or to term, for non-viable fetuses which don't die until cut off from the placenta.
The issue in the Cox case is that Texas Republicans want Cox to go through several months of pregnancy, an unnecessary C-section, and six figures of medical bills (which Texas Republicans think she should not get help with, because the government fucking you in the ass is just life, but the government taxing me to pay for the lube when it fucks you in the ass is socialism) in order to achieve the spiritual benefits of watching a baby die in an incubator instead of aborting it. SCOTUS in Dobbs correctly ruled that this is within the powers of the State of Texas, but it didn't rule that it was a good idea.
This isn't even a case where rare corner case is acceptable collateral damage in order to prevent the large number of elective abortions. Paxton's intervention was widely praised by the pro-life movement because this is a type of case they care about. (Obviously not enough to support parents of severely disabled children who would be eugenically aborted if that was legal, because socialism again, but enough to ruin lives because it's for the children works on both sides of the aisle).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
This seems so blatantly inbounds ethically that it amazes me that this is what they're going after him for.
As with the lawsuits, the Trump-Raffensberger phone call is improper (both as a matter of ethics and as a matter of criminal law) if and only if the factual claims Trump made were knowingly false. The Georgia indictment indicts the call as "False Statements and Writings" and "Solicitation of Felony Violation of Oath of Office" (in that Raffensberger knew there was no fraud, and would therefore have violated his oath of office by launching the investigation Trump requested). The Federal indictment doesn't charge individual bad acts, but it describes the phonecall as "the defendant lied to the Georgia Secretary of State".
Filing a false police report is not protected speech.
As a separate matter, Trump threatened Raffensberger with criminal liability for aiding and abetting the (non-existent) fraud. That probably should be a crime, but it doesn't appear to be given that it isn't charged in either the Federal or the Georgia indictment.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
There is a big difference between using recount laws for the purpose for which they were intended (even if those recount laws later turn out to be unconstitutional) and filing lies with the court. Neither Bush nor Gore was ever accused of filing briefs containing false factual claims - the key facts of Bush v Gore (that recounting punch card ballots accurately was sufficiently difficult that there wasn't time for an accurate statewide recount before the electoral College deadline, and that the margin of error of the original count exceeded Bush's margin of victory) were never disputed.
Trump's State court challenges to the 2020 election are criminal if and only if they were based on knowingly false factual claims. Both the Federal and Georgia indictments promise to bring evidence that they were.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The white South didn't accept their defeat and try to live an honourable peace. They launched an insurgency (the 1st Klan), and when that failed they waited out the presence of federal troops in the South and then staged a series of coups against the Reconstruction-era State governments (elected by multi-racial electorates) in order to introduce Jim Crow. The North, to their shame, tolerated this due to exhaustion during the Gilded Age, and enthusiastically embraced it due to political corruption in the New Deal era.
Jim Crow was a dishonourable peace, and the Civil Rights movement was right to seek to overturn it.
Indeed, it's a humiliation ritual. Again, I cannot even name one statue of Stalin or Lenin that suffered the same fate.
Neither Stalin nor Lenin betrayed their country. This kind of ritual humiliation was SOP for traitors, which Lee was - or at least an unsuccessful rebel, which counts as a traitor under the traditional rules. You can argue that Lenin was a traitor to the Kerensky government, but he was a successful rebel so it doesn't count.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
Many norms are being broken, but almost never by Trump
Come off it. You can argue that invoking war powers in peacetime is technically legal, but it is definitely unprecedented.
Impounding spending, while not unprecedented, is a clear breach of norms about separation of powers (and the law, assuming that the Impoundment Control Act is constitutional).
Obfuscating the org chart of a powerful office within the EOP, for example by issuing a press release saying that Elon Musk is head of DOGE and then saying in a court filing that it is actually Amy Gleason, is a breach of norms about basic honesty (and possibly also perjury).
On the other hand, district court judges issuing nationwide injunctions against executive policies that appear to be facially illegal is now, unfortunately, entirely normal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.
In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].
In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.
Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.
He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).
I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."
That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
"All good Samaritans must be licensed and up to date with their paperwork"
It wasn't a paperwork violation - it was a competence violation.
"All good Samaritans must know the difference between lethal and less-lethal violence and make an honest attempt to act on that knowledge" is sufficient to condemn Penny (unless you are the kind of right-winger who favours summary execution of street crazies)
The sleazy behaviour of the President's son and brother been a top-3 Republican talking point for some years now. The possibility of John Podesta's brother being a paedophile was also a major right-wing talking point. There is as much evidence that Joe Biden delivered any of the bribe-service implicitly promised by Hunter and James' schemes as there is that Clarence Thomas participated in his wife's insurrectionary plotting or that Samuel Alito participated in the petty harassment of a left-wing neighbour - i.e. none whatsoever in the legal sense, and not much in the Bayesian sense beyond the normal assumption that families stick together.
Anything that is Bayesian evidence that a prominent government official is disloyal is legitimately newsworthy. And a close family member engaging in obviously disloyal behaviour is weak Bayesian evidence that the principle is disloyal because families do, in fact, stick together and more powerful family members do, in fact, have a degree of control over less powerful family members' behaviour. This isn't a legal point, but the court of public opinion isn't subject to legal rules of evidence. Nor is employer discipline - I work for a bank, and if my wife were to get caught trading stocks on my employer's watchlist I would lose my job. If I told my wife "Please don't trade this stock - you could get me fired." and she did it anyway, I would be in a shockingly dysfunctional marriage. So my employer's compliance department assumes that she is doing it with at least my tacit approval.
The Alito incident should be less newsworthy because flying a controversial flag to troll a neighbour (and we now have tapes which, if genuine, prove that this is what is going on) is not disloyal behaviour. I am not obliged to believe a conservative Christian who insists that he has no control over his wife's behaviour. I can (and do) conclude that Alito doesn't take the kind of behaviour his wife is engaging in seriously enough to ask her to knock it off. But that just means he is a cockwomble - it doesn't mean that he is disloyal or corrupt. Given that six/seven of the nine Supreme Court justices (I am excluding Thomas, Roberts and possibly Gorsuch here) are partisan hacks appointed to rule the way their party wants, arguing about whether they are cockwombles or not is unproductive. But critically, the fact that Martha Ann Alito was trolling a neighbour rather than expressing support for an insurrection wasn't known at the time.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman
And Rommel was regarded as a true German gentleman. But if a statue of Rommel stood in a place of honour in central Stuttgart as part of the pantheon of military heroes of Baden-Wurttemberg, and it was melted down at the request of the local synagogue, we wouldn't be complaining about "teabagging the outgroup". In fact, part of the "Reconstruction" process in post-WW2 Germany was the removal of Nazi monuments.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
No. I am applying the morals of his own time. Lee knew that slavery was evil, and fought to defend it anyway out of a misguided sense of patriotism. Given the many positive aspects of his character, I hope he gets to spend eternity slightly further away from the Fire than, say, Jeffrey Epstein.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Didn't a bunch of states create mail-in-ballot rules that undermine ballot secrecy just for that election in particular before some of them got taken out by courts due to their irregularity?
Before 2020, nobody thought that mail-in ballots were per se fraudulent. In 2016, three states including one swing state had all-postal elections (Washington, Oregon and Colorado), and most other states had no-excuse postal voting for anyone who applied. 23.7% of all votes were cast by post (see pp 9/10 here). And nobody on either side of the aisle thought that this was a problem that would justify overturning a close election.
Trump made specific allegations of fraud which were not true. He could have made the purely legal argument that slightly easier postal voting introduced in an irregular way was grounds for tossing the election on a technicality (as of 2016, it was a colourable legal argument based on the independent state legislature theory, which wouldn't be rejected by SCOTUS until Moore vs Harper in 2022) and allowing Republican State legislatures to choose electors, but that wasn't the argument he made. He said that he won by a landslide, that there was "massive fraud", that Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines meant that the in person votes were invalid, and that rogue election officials had added large numbers of fake ballots to Biden's tally.
Wasn't the whole Covid psy-ops leading to these rule changes in the first place?
You mean the pandemic with an impact visible at the macro-demographic level? Or are you telling me that governments outside the US faked 6 million deaths (by official count) or 25 million deaths (based on demographic statistics) in order to allow slightly easier postal voting in a US election?
If there was evidence of a massive conspiracy showing all level of governments and media building up the Covid scare with the ultimate goal to undermine the integrity of the elections, wouldn't that be some kind of coup, or at least conspiracy to commit a coup?
Yes, which is why it is good that there is no such evidence. The pre-2020 conventional wisdom was that easier postal voting helps Republicans (because of the military vote), so if there had been a large-scale conspiracy to steal the election for Democrats, the main goal of the conspiracy would not have been slightly easier postal voting.
Well yes, of course the average rich and powerful American is a honest guy.
I didn't say that. I said that by the (low) standards of rich and powerful Americans, Trump is unusually dishonest. Heck, even by the (even lower) standards of greater-NYC real estate operators, Trump was unusually dishonest, this was common knowledge on Wall Street, and was in fact sufficiently common knowledge that a joke about it got into Sex and the City.
and not Epstein's buddies
Epstein's buddies like one Donald Trump, who allowed Ghislaine Maxwell to recruit girls at Mar-a-Lago, who was a frequent flyer on the Lolita Express, and who promoted the corrupt prosecutor who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal the first time he got caught? Even by the (very, very low) ethical standards of Epstein's social circle, Donald Trump went above and beyond.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
At some point more and more individuals will be caught up in interstate lawfare wars. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg.
Trump isn't a victim of this kind of interstate lawfare. All his legal problems relate to behaviour which (if he did it) is illegal everywhere, and the claims of jurisdiction are pretty clear-cut.
Trump's current legal troubles are:
- Federal cases with a clear federal cause of action (the Mar-a-Lago documents, the federal Jan 6 case)
- New York cases where jurisdiction is proper because NY is the Trump Org's principal place of business (the Stormy Daniels payoff, the bank fraud case) or the behaviour alleged took place in New York (the E Jean Carroll rape and defamation lawsuits)
- A Georgia case relating to interference with a Georgia election.
"This kind of lawfare" strictu sensu - i.e. seeking to regulate the worldwide behaviour of businesses outside your jurisdiction on the basis that they did some business inside the jurisdiction - has been SOP in the US for a very long time. From my perspective as someone who has spent most of my career working in non-US multinationals, the biggest issue is random insane civil verdicts in US state courts, but there are a number of federal policies which are also objectionable - especially sanctions on Cuba and the law attempting to punish companies for participating in the Arab boycott of Israel. Countries other than the US do not do this - for example the UK only attempts to regulate British companies and British-based activity of foreign companies. In general, countries other than the US take the view that, as applied to international trade in goods, this kind of behaviour violates the WTO treaty, which says that countries can only discriminate between identical goods based on whether or not they have a trade deal with the country they were made in, not on who made them.
What Texas is doing is something slightly different in that it ties the requirement to doing business with the Texas government, not to operating in Texas. This is less objectionable from a jurisdictional comity perspective, because the Texan government is acting as a market participant, not a sovereign, and has the right to choose who it does business with in the same way as any other entity (FWIW, I have no idea if the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment does or should regulate States as market participants). This kind of behaviour used to be rare except for mission-driven organisations like charities and political parties - normal people care about what they are buying, may care about how it was made, but do not care about the general ethical record of the people making it. The idea that public sector customers should take an interest as customers in the out-of-jurisdiction activities of the companies they do business with is new - AFAIK it dates back to left-wing campaigns about corporate tax compliance in the noughties.
It will be interesting to see how Texas's attempts to enforce this against Wells Fargo pan out. If this was a term in a contract "Wells Fargo will not discriminate against a firearms entity" then at common law it would probably be unenforceable as a restraint of trade and/or a contract to break the law in a (legally) friendly jurisdiction. But making it a pre-contract enquiry means that Wells Fargo are pretty clearly guilty of a fraudulent misrepresentation.
I feel like this kind of interstate lawfare is exactly what the interstate commerce provisions in the US constitution were meant to prevent.
This is the important point - a world in which every jurisdiction tries to regulate activity outside its territory - particularly if that regulation is driven by idiosyncratic local politics rather than being an attempt to enforce widely-shared norms - is very bad from the point of view of making it legal for normal people to do business normally.
Trump derangement syndrome is an escalation, but the blue tribe thought the Obama-Kenya conspiracy theories were a huge escalation and didn’t really distinguish between the randos who said it and the GOP higher ups who explicitly disavowed it. If Rubio had won the 2016 election we may well have been seeing the same level of derangement, admittedly with less ammo.
The "randos who said it" included Donald Trump - who became a GOP higher up when he was nominated for President. Both Trump's popularity with the anti-establishment right and his extreme unpopularity with the pro-establishment left (and large parts of the pro-establishment right) start here. When Obama published his birth certificate, Trump claimed the credit for making him do it. Per Wikipedia, Trump didn't publicly acknowledge that was a US citizen until September 2016 - i.e. after fighting the Republican primary as an ambiguously-repentant birther.
Falsely claiming that a major party candidate is ineligible is an attack on American democracy. The GOP primary electorate nominated Trump despite (definitely) or because of (probably) his willingness to do it anyway. Trump's base within the GOP is people who think that Democrats always cheat, that they get away with it because the GOP establishment are cucks, and that Republicans should cheat back harder. This is more obvious post-Jan 6 than it was then, but Trump's opponents brought receipts in 2016.
Fundamentally, the scary thing about Trump is that he behaves as if American elections are kayfabe on top of an underlying system of raw power politics, and his supporters love him for it. If American elections really are kayfabe, this makes him someone who breaks kayfabe and gets away with it, which any wrestling promoter knows can destroy the franchise. If you think that American elections are not in fact kayfabe, then he is the worst threat to American democracy since elections really were rigged in 1960's Illinois. In either case, he needs to be stopped.
Or, to cut the crap, the US goal is a quick Ukrainian surrender and Russian victory. This will get the dead bodies off Trump's TV set. (There will still be dead bodies as Russia genocides the Ukrainian population of the territory they occupy, but the Russians won't allow the media to report on them).
If that is a US goal (or even if it isn't), they won't get it. A core Russian war aim is to turn Ukraine into a client state. Belarus doesn't work as a buffer between Russia and Poland, and a Putin-controlled Ukraine won't work either for the same reason. A neutral buffer state (pre-WW1 Belgium is the classic example) works because both sides understand that violating it's neutrality is kicking off the big one. Trump is committed to the idea that Russian violations of future-Ukraine's neutrality should not be a casus belli for the US.
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