The long, strange desclension of Republican presidents

[Politruk]

about engineering a demographic shift, one aimed at displacing the traditional American electorate with a more pliable voting bloc to secure long-term partisan dominance.

Will you please drop those damned lies once and for all? Nobody has any good reason to expect Latinos to vote Dem. And certainly not to be "more pliable" than anyone here already.

 

[ll74]

BS, The President is acting within the Constitution.

Emergency actions that are temporary are within the Constitution , though I argue that they are made up emergencies.

(When you say there's a security issue because of economic issues but then remove tariffs temporarily, that indicates the pretext is horseshit - for example)

Biden didn’t inherit a border crisis, he engineered one. Far from working with anyone to fix the problem, he violated his oath of office by willfully refusing to enforce existing immigration law.

He enforced the immigration law within his Constitutional powers as much as the current President is doing so. He just didn't shut the border down by lying about an invasion

The very statutes President Trump used to bring the border under control, laws Biden claimed either didn't exist or somehow tied his hands. The irony? The same people who screamed that Trump lacks the authority to act were watching Biden dismantle enforcement mechanisms with purposeful indifference. This wasn't neglect; it’s deliberate sabotage of national sovereignty that perpetrated crimes against the American people and humanity in general.

Emergency powers aren't meant for permanent fixes to issues within the law. Trump should not be allowed to take authoritarian power based on bullshit emergencies and when he does, Congress and the Judicial branch should step in to block it

Reform is needed.

The truth is, the next President can immediately reverse everything this President has done.....and that is the fucking problem you are avoiding addressing. Executive action on immigration is short term...temporary...... transactional.

And i haven't even discussed his unlawful use of the AEA (but we've discussed that previously, so no biggie)

 

[Rightguide]

I tip my hat off to you, your tenacity to continue to argue with these uninformed trolls is quite remarkable. They always argue the exception and not the rule. Trump is embarrassing the shit out of the democrat party. They'd rather protect criminals over American citizens. SAD!! I remember Quoting immigration law to 74, statutes that proved Biden was ignoring his duties to protect our borders. 74 saying if your not satisfied with how Biden is handling immigration lobby your congressional representative to change the law and yet Trump closed the borders acting within the framework of the law.

Thanks, I appreciate that. Speaking truth in the face of rampant propaganda is a civic necessity more than just a moral obligation. When left unchallenged, propaganda warps public perception, erodes trust in institutions, and replaces reasoned debate with manufactured narratives. Left unchecked, it creates a political and social reality where facts are optional and lies become policy. Truth-telling is the only antidote to this corrosion. It preserves the integrity of democratic discourse, holds power to account, and it reminds both 74 and the powerful that reality cannot be replaced with repeated nonsense. Here in Lit, which is saturated with distortion, truth becomes an act of resistance, a patriotic duty.

 

[Politruk]

Truth-telling is

Not a thing of which you are psychologically capable.

 

[Rightguide]

Will you please drop those damned lies once and for all? Nobody has any good reason to expect Latinos to vote Dem. And certainly not to be "more pliable" than anyone here already.

The Democrats made that mistake, which is exactly why they were blindsided when Trump drew in such a massive share of those voters. Millions are now walking away from the party's increasingly unhinged embrace of cultural radicalism and ideological feminization. The modern Democrat platform no longer speaks to working families or traditional values, it panders to far-left activist elites, and the backlash is growing.

 

[Politruk]

The modern Democrat platform no longer speaks to working families or traditional values, it panders to far-left activist elites

You are an idiot. There is nothing far-left in the Dem platform, nothing for the plutocracy to fear, nothing to open bladders on boardroom carpets.

 

[Rightguide]

Not a thing of which you are psychologically capable.

I bring it every day I'm here. You, on the other hand, have been thought-policed into a state of useful idiocy, so sealed off from reality that truth doesn’t just elude you; it threatens the fiction you’ve mistaken for fact. You’re not just blind to reality, you’re actively allergic to it.

 

[Politruk]

I bring it every day I'm here. You, on the other hand, have been thought-policed into a state of useful idiocy, so sealed off from reality that truth doesn’t just elude you; it threatens the fiction you’ve mistaken for fact. You’re not just blind to reality, you’re actively allergic to it.

You have everything exactly backwards.

 

[Rightguide]

You have everything exactly backwards.

No, you’ve got it exactly backwards, you've got to get out from in front of that funhouse mirror and stop thinking it's reality.

 

[Politruk]

No, you’ve got it exactly backwards, you've got to get out from in front of that funhouse mirror and stop thinking it's reality.

You can't point out any mistake of fact or reasoning I've made -- you never can. You're the one who is always wrong on this board.

 

[JohnEngelman]

That's fine, but the 30 million Dollars they paid him bought something.

An assertion like that requires documentation.

 

[YDB95]

Then if that is true how do you explain this:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1921693516754833453

I explain it thusly: he's simply doing the same thing Biden already did, and which Trump undid as soon as he got the chance to. He just wanted the credit, and of course the likes of you were bound to fall for it.

 

[Politruk]

An assertion like that requires documentation.

Rightguide is the one who thinks the U.S. only gave aid to Ukraine because of Biden family business interests. His grip on reality is very tenuous.

 

[YDB95]

Rightguide is the one who thinks the U.S. only gave aid to Ukraine because of Biden family business interests. His grip on reality is very tenuous.

It's beyond well-documented that nothing of the sort happened. What's worse, the people who created that rumor in the first place know it's horseshit. But the Rightguides of the world don't know they had the wool pulled over their eyes. Again.

 

[Politruk]

There has never been a Pub POTUS since Eisenhower who was worth anything. Every one since was worse than the one before.

"Have you heard about the Eisenhower doll? You wind it up, and it does nothing for eight years!" But, in fact, Eisenhower was very busy behind the scenes. He cultivated a public image of idleness -- that was just his way of shoring up morale and calming Cold War anxieties. "You see? Everything's great! The President doesn't need to do anything but golf!" It is notable that Eisenhower had no ideological politics to speak of and could as easily have been a Democrat -- both parties approached him to be their candidate. He accepted the New Deal as a fait accompli, and sensibly dismissed as stupid and irrelevant the reactionaries who would roll it back. The worst you can say against him is that he planted the seeds of the Vietnam War.

Then there was Nixon -- a man it was really easy for Boomer hippies and activists to see as the motherfucking Antichrist, and it's hard now to say they were wrong. Now, to be fair, Nixon was very highly intelligent, and sincerely committed to public service as he understood it. But his conception of civic virtue never included honesty, not even in principle -- his attitude was, those in the know will make the decisions, and the public will be told what it needs to be told. Privately he was the most vulgar sort of racist, as transcripts of Oval Office recordings make clear, but he was not really emotionally invested in either side of the civil rights movement -- politically, racism was only something to exploit for advantage, hence the Southern Strategy. Nixon was personally responsible for prolonging the Vietnam War, which would have ended in 1968, but Nixon used his connections to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks -- just so the war would still be there as an issue for him to run against in November, claiming he had a "secret plan" to end it. (This is very well documented.) OTOH, we can thank Nixon for the EPA, and normalizing relations with "Red China," among other things. He was a flaming Commie by the standards of today's GOP.

So was Reagan, even though he fulfilled the dreams of the Movement Conservatism that began in 1964. Reagan did not repair the economy or win the Cold War, those were just things that happened on his watch. He left an entirely pernicious legacy in American politics -- see Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. The worst thing about Reagan was that he was stupid even before he went senile -- but, unlike Trump, he did have a knack for surrounding himself with people who knew what they were doing. He was as hands-off as Eisenhower pretended to be, let his subordinates do the governing, which was probably the best choice in his case. But on the whole, the Reagan years were an embarrassment -- remember James Watt, the pro-corporate Interior Secretary who thought the Beach Boys would drive people to destructive craziness?

Bush I was only Reagan Lite. He was a man of his old-money class -- he never changed the evil and destructive supply-side approach that he himself mocked as "voodoo economics" during the 1980 primaries. And that led him to wreck the economy. Otherwise, forgettable apart from the Gulf War.

Bush II was far and away the worst president since Buchanan, until Trump edged him out of that ranking. He was as stupid as Reagan and not one whit more honest. He led us into a pointless and expensive quagmire of a war based on lies -- it was as if FDR had responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor by invading Brazil. He wrecked the economy utterly. No good at all ever came of his "compassionate conservatism" and "faith-based initiatives."

And now there's Trump. A president with the intellect and ethics of a real-estate developer, and not a successful one. A man who both embodies and and encourages/validates all that is evil and contemptible in the American national character -- willful ignorance, anti-intellectualism, greed, dishonesty, arrogance, racism, sexism, misogyny, xenophobia, American exceptionalism, religious bigotry, producerism, etc., etc. A kakistocrat who surrounds himself with the most incompetent, dishonest and malignant officials to be found. How did the Party of Lincoln sink this low?!

Nobody has even tried to defend any of the presidents named and condemned in the OP -- not even Reagan.

That is significant.

 

[Politruk]

Another disturbingly regular pattern is that every Pub president leaves an economic mess that a Dem has to clean up -- that's been going on ever since Bush I.

 

[Politruk]

At this point, not even the RWs on this board can honestly doubt that Hillary would have made an immeasurably better president than Trump.

Or that Harris would have.

Or that even Biden would, in his present age and condition.