Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
Trump has always been a good candidate, but sucked at being the president. Trump I was Trump being restrained by the GOP and pissing the electorate off in four years. Trump II managed to convince everyone the restraints were the problem and speedran the process in two years.
Inb4 people explain to me the attack on Iran was instigated by the neocons, not the magahats. Yes, and Trump still fucked it up worse than Dubya ever could.
There is just very little ability to operate anymore as POTUS and contrarian and flakiness is high.
Trump is the only POTUS I’ve loved and it’s now apparent that America can’t be governed. He’s largely delivered on campaign promises and got crushed.
Yeah, turns out sometimes people like hearing your promises but don't like the reality you deliver. His whole immigration approach was maximum spectacle to rev up his base while not pissing off business. Turned out nobody liked the combination of lots of tear-jerker moments, maximal chaos, and minimal improvement. And the Iran War was just not a campaign promise. He very clearly did not follow through on his proposed foreign policy there. There's no possible way to spin that fiasco as america-first, the electorate isn't interested.
Americans have much too short of attention spans. The idea of re-onshoring ultimately would have paid dividends for America, but changing the business environment such that people would choose to make things in America is probably a decades long process. He couldn’t have possibly done it in 2 years.
Likewise fixing international issues. Asserting and projecting power is not an overnight thing. Again, you need at least a little time to fix the problem.
But also there are visible costs in the short term that the government seems to have had no interest in, and resultant long-term problems that the government doesn't seem to have had any interest in mitigating. For example, hobbyists can no longer legally buy drones from China, or which use Chinese parts.
In theory, this is the first step in creating a big beautiful American drone industry. However, the replacement American manufacturer is shoddy, way more expensive, and focused on military use. It is also part-owned by Trump's son. And it uses American labour, so even in the best case scenario the prices are never going to be as good again. Even in the best case scenario, hobbyists (plus photographers etc.) aren't going to be able to buy DJI-quality drones for years.
Yes, it's not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. But for this group something they liked has got suddenly worse, it's going to be worse for a while, and there is no guarantee it's going to get better. Scale that up 100x and you have a lot of annoyed people.
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