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ymeskhout: Bootlicking Millionaires with Severe Tongue Abrasion - Sad!
In the discussion of the Skadden thing, 2rafa wrote "I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list." and I replied, "How could Trump do that? I can't think of a stick to use, and the only carrot I can think of is being hired as outside counsel, but any firm worth hiring as outside counsel presumably already has every former appellate clerk they can get."
I had seen the headlines about Paul Weiss, but I had hoped it was a weird overreaction, on their part, and could be ignored. But should we worry about the possibility that the Trump administration takes it as a sign they could continue to bully - or even outright extort - law firms? Is this a viable strategy, for the Trump administration? To what extent is Executive corruption limited by POTUS's scrupulousness and Congress's willingness to impeach and convict?
I actually clicked the link and read it.
It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.
It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.
In this case, the topic is the retribution Trump is visiting on the lawyers that tried to prosecute him. Or, in the words of our author,
Vengeful, yes. Petulant baby, not exactly. "When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.
Funny we already had a dementia patient as President, and he wasn't as active as this one. Alas, contempt for Trump excuses everything, especially hypocrisy.
No, what makes you a man is violence, and power, and the capability and willingness to use both. What makes us all gelded is the inability and unwillingness to simply do, to impose your will on reality, whether it be nature and wilderness, or other people and institutions, or least of all your own vices and base desires, like fucking your hot wife.
This is what he misses in his paean of wealth after spitting on those richer and more successful than him:
The GM doesn't have the ability to change his reality. He is less free and less manly than the poorest pioneer, the most wretched and miserable explorer dying thousands of miles from his home of strange foreign diseases, the count or duke or king who never dreamed of central heating or refrigeration or indoor plumbing.
It's a bad post, and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it.
*The image is the only part of this that's relevant to my post.
To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".
Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).
I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.
But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.
It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.
But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.
I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.
Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.
This is not even close to the same. First, he was term limited. Second, he was an insider whose father was CIA director, VP, and President. Third, he was never at risk of being prosecuted and he knew it.
He was in the club, and Trump wasn't, and isn't. There are no rules to a crooked gave, or at least none worth respecting.
I said before and will say again, Trump's original sin for which he cannot atone and will never be forgiven is that he's an outsider. He steamrolled through the Republican party and then bowled through the anoited Hillary in the general. He laid waste to the carefully curated options that were supposed to limit American choices in our elections.
His impeachment came well before 2021, and from day zero he was hounded by bogus claims and fabricated narratives. Trying to explain everything that happened before by what happened after is exactly backward. The lawfare was a continuation of everything from the Steele dossier, the Mueller report, and his first impeachment. It was nothing new in response to the 2020 election.
It also had nothing to do with NY passing a law to extend the statute of limitations to drag him into court and call him a rapist.
The insiders literally bragged about fortifying the election in the immediate aftermath, which helps explain the six million missing voters the Democrats lost from 2020 to 2024. The sheer arrogance still boggles the mind.
It's insider vs outsider, and now Trump is withholding benefits from those insiders and their organs, as is his right as executive. This is against the unwritten rules, but it's well within the written ones, and it'sthus far tame and bloodless. Nobody is in jail, nobody is being prosecuted, nobody is dying in the streets or falling off balconies (except Michael Hastings and Trevor Moore).
Finally, it's tyrants that we should be worried about. Dictators have always been necessary on occasion, and America has had its fair share of muscular Presidents.
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Not that everyone here is friends or anything, but this seems a rather hostile post towards ymeskhout. Am I missing lore?
No lore other than that made some good posts, and hosted a podcast, and was a mod on reddit, and an admin here, and then moved on to substack to post things like this.
Many such cases.
At least TW and Kulak seemed to improve when they spread their wings. They each managed to accumulate quite a twitter following, too. I see no such improvement here, and his twitter is kaput, but who am I to talk? I'm destined to be a reply guy, never an Actually Quality Contributor. Here I go replying again.
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Did you read ymeskhout's post? what a pathetic flail! What a flagrant red cape of blatant insecurity, advertised loudly to the entire world. What a fetid reflexively pathetic snarl of a response. What a belly cry of a scorned goat.
For those not getting it, everything after "Did you read ymeshkhout's post?" is a contiguous direct quote from the article.
This is your brain on Substack, kids. Like I said, don't do Substack, or at least stay connected to neiche pseudonymous internet forums where your friends will make fun of you when you get too full of yourself.
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I don't follow, it doesn't seem personally hostile against him, even if it's very critical of the post's contents.
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The whole point of America is that the President is not a King. The whole problem here is that Trump is acting like one.
If FDR, or even Obama, wasn't a problem for America, then neither is Trump.
I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.
I think liberals agreed, and continue to agree, that nobody should have as much power as FDR did. The standard pro-FDR view is that only reason why FDR was not more of a problem for America (the left agrees that he engaged in at least one egregious abuse of power - the internment of Japanese-Americans) was that he was a man of exceptional virtue in a way that you can't afford to rely on. There were two major bipartisan changes to the system post-FDR intended to stop anyone having that much power ever again - the APA and the 22nd amendment.
FDR's contemporaries thought, correctly, that running for a third term was a breach of the mos maiorum. The only reason historians forgive him for it is that he went on to be an effective wartime leader.
FDR died in office at 63. I do not think the alternative history where he lives to 75 works out well for American democracy.
Their concerns were ignored for generations. They tried to soldier on in any case, but ended up entirely discredited as FDR-descended systemic changes continued to snowball. And now they are effectively extinct, politically speaking. If their political perspective was valuable, perhaps those who now consider it valuable should have put more effort into preserving it when such effort might have born fruit.
Alternatively, once Trumpism has entirely run its course, secured all its victories, crushed all opposition, and set the bedrock rules for the coming century, there will probably be many who will agree that "We should never have another Trump."
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This effectively means that liberals don't care for America having a president, not a king. They love having a king as long he's a man of "exceptional virtue" (steamrolls checks and balances to implement liberal policies).
The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.
"Never have another FDR" practically means "nobody can fix what FDR broke."
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His abuses of power didn't start with WW2, so "we should never have another FDR" after he reshaped the entire country, setting the tone for next century, is awfully convenient.
Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.
KMC, while posting in favour of Trump, compared him to a King and applauded him for punishing lese-majeste in the way a King would. I think that is a problem. You brought up the comparison to FDR, not me. Although if we are going to run with it, I note that if FDR had put out an official portrait of him crowned and enthroned (something Trump did - on @WhiteHouse and not @RealDonaldTrump so it was official government communication) then even his supporters would have objected. If FDR had announced sanctions against law firms who represented his political opponents (which he did not), his supporters should have objected.
FDR's supporters did object to Japanese internment as soon as it was safe to do so. FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.
The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR. They support various plans to neuter opposition to the administration through the courts. And when Trump talks about running for a third term, they insist he is joking while selling Trump 2028 T-shirts and putting up Trump 2028 banners at CPAC. Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight, or at least maintaining strategic ambiguity about doing so - the correct response from non-fashy Trump supporters would be "This is stupid and I wish he would stop" not "Yay libs so trolled. Trump 2028 for great lulz!!!"
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On the other hand, the title really is appropriate for it.
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