OFFICIAL LRC President Donald Trump SECOND TERM Thread

TKTKTK wrote:

Ghost of Igloi wrote:

So, you’re still a punk, and predictably not clever.

Back to the topic.

Trump is playing on one of the basic misconceptions of the American people: the weird belief that money to programs, like water to a house or current to a fixture, must be turned off for the distribution mechanism to be studied and understood. But money, per se, is not harmful; it doesn't have to be stopped for a project to be studied. Indeed, the only reason to cut it off is to harm those people and projects receiving it--even though those people and projects took jobs or applied for/received grants and funding in good faith. That is, the people receiving the grants didn't do anything wrong: they applied, through legal avenues, for money that was made available through legal mechanisms, and they could keep doing the work they believed they were funded to do while Trump's team pretended to investigate inefficiencies. But Trump doesn't want that; he wants them to hurt.

Why?

In part, because he's a sadist. I don't mean anything dramatic by this. I only mean what we can all see with our naked eye. Trump's greatest pleasure is in making people twist uncertainly in the wind. Whether he's twirling his finger before selecting the next reporter to call on at a press conference or posting a tweet "The calm before the storm" with a picture of a gathering of high-level military leaders (as he did in 2017), Trump delights in the power of ambiguity. He knows, in his reptile brain, that that's actually more powerful than conclusiveness. He's loving the panic, the scramble, that his little fit has caused.

Also, he knows that many federal workers and many recipients of federal grants (though far from all) are minorities. Of course, White people and agencies also receive federal money. But in Trump's brain, the federal government is full of Black women, and the agencies receiving federal money are funneling it to Black neighborhoods and needs. Again, it's a reptile understanding of things, but I'm certain it's basically true.

Finally, he's not sophisticated enough--or fundamentally smart enough--to stay on top of an organization as large and complex as the federal government. The Trump Org was essentially a family operation, miniscule in scope and not beholden to shareholders. He wants to shrink the federal government down to a size small enough for his--all together now--reptile brain to be able to more or less grasp it. It's not really systematic or principled: it's that Trump really is so broken-brained that this is how he operates. It's funny: while he himself loves operating in gray zones, he can't handle the world's nuance and complexity himself; it baffles him, like a question about the nature of existence might baffle a replicant. Hence his blanket pardons of the Jan 6 insurrectionists--again, not principled, just pathetic--and his blanket impoundment of our tax money.

Anyway, this is all so infuriating. That's my tax money that he's not distributing to after-school programs, medicaid recipients, Meals on Wheels, etc. He's sitting on it, like Smaug on a pile of gold, because he's too stupid and corrupt to have any other idea of what to do with it. And for some reason, the anti-tax crowd would rather see their tax money hoarded by a billionaire moron than recycled through the communities that paid those taxes in the first place. We are truly in the Upside-Down.