This is why I keep telling people that Trump is not an anomaly and is not new. I think a lot of people on here must be too young to remember the Bush era.

The line from the Star Wars prequels of, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause" captures how it felt and was clearly about Bush’s policies. If Trump is worse than Bush, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of fascist giants. And tbh I still regard Bush as the more dangerous of the two because he was able to command such overwhelming support, there was zero opposition in government anywhere, at all. He could ride his bike with no handlebars.

The war powers act gives the president the authority to invade any country on earth, he only needs congressional approval for operations lasting longer than 30 days. Congress also gave the president blanket authorization to invade any country he thinks might be harboring terrorists, following 9/11, with this absurd, fascist decision to grant the executive dictatatorial powers passing the Senate 98-0 and the House 420-1 (and with nearly 90% of Americans supporting Bush at this time). Trump’s actions in Venezuela therefore, while a brazen violation of international law, are fully within US law. It’s virtually impossible for a president to actually violate US law through military actions abroad.

Any attempts to rein in these ridiculous laws should be fully supported and are badly needed. Even if Trump ignores them, it can then be used to discredit him and prove that he is acting against the will of the people.

Having more guns.

Might want to ask the indigenous people how effective pieces of paper are at holding back the US military.

In the US you get two options and both are completely uninterested in “firming up the laws” and reining in the power of the executive. Trump can do basically whatever he wants, because after 9/11, Democrats fully supported measures like the Patriot Act that vastly expanded executive power, and when Obama came in after Bush he did nothing to hold him accountable for war crimes and torture, while continuing to use the same tools for largely the same purposes. No president wants to prosecute a former president for illegal activity because that would open the door for being prosecuted for their own illegal activities, which they all perform.

It doesn’t really matter if the average American cares about guns or about something else. We’ve never been given an opportunity to vote on the power of the executive just like we’ve never been given an opportunity to vote on Venezuela or Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen. The powers that be decide these things, all the voters do is choose which face they want doing it, which aesthetics and justifications will be used for decisions that have already been made.

Colbert at Bush’s correspondence dinner:

The greatest thing about about this man is that he’s steady, you know where he stands. He believes the same thing on Wednesday that he did on Monday… no matter what happened on Tuesday.

Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that “near right” and failed. Social pressure isn’t going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I’m saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it’s the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.

I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President.

This is such a big factor, imo.

The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of “benevolent interventionism.” and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because “the government doing stuff is bad,” and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They’re stuck in the early 2000’s where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for “bringing democracy” to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the “moderate Republican” neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they’re sure to win.

The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.

I’m genuinely speechless.

Please open a fucking history book.

The War Powers Act of 1973 only requires the president to notify congress within 48 hours. The president only needs authorization it troops are deployed for longer than 60 days.

The US drone strikes wherever it feels like, whenever it feels like. In fact, this was reaffirmed in one of the wiki pages you link in another comment:

The authorization granted the president the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11 attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups.

Note that no specific country is mentioned in that, meaning that it gave the president complete, unilateral authority to determine which countries fell into that category and how to respond.

Business Insider has reported that the AUMF has been used to allow military deployment in Afghanistan, the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, and Somalia. The 2001 AUMF has enabled the US president to unilaterally launch military operations across the world without any congressional oversight or transparency for more than two decades. Between 2018 and 2020 alone, US forces initiated what it labelled “counter-terror” activities in 85 countries. Of these, the 2001 AUMF has been used to launch classified military campaigns in at least 22 countries.

Even now, all Trump would have to do is say he determined that Venezuela at one point “harbored” someone connected to 9/11, there could even be truth to it! If someone tangentially connected at some point might possibly have passed through Venezuela without the government’s knowledge, that’s enough (not that we would even be told the reason). This insanity became the law of the land over 20 years ago, with near-unanimous bipartisan support, and it has survived multiple democratic presidents. Biden invoked it regarding Somalia as recently as 2021.

Welcome to the paying attention club, glad you could join us, but this is absolutely not new.

What exactly do you think occurred in Russia in 1991?

Yikes guys, Operation Valkyrie seems kinda problematic, that exploding briefcase killed several Nazi officers who just happened to be in the same room as Hitler.

There’s a slight issue with this way of thinking.

Problem: The two party system is preventing us from enacting reforms

Solution: Use the two party system to enact reforms getting rid of the two party system, so we can start enact reforms.

Problem: My car won’t start.

Solution: Drive down to the mechanic and he’ll fix it so you can start driving places

Problem: Asking the king nicely hasn’t been an effective method of stopping him from taking all our grain.

Solution: Ask the king nicely to institute democracy so that you won’t have to rely on asking the king nicely to make things happen.

Y’all always remind me of the fable about the mice who all decide that it’d be much better if the cat had a bell around its neck so they could hear it coming, but then one mouse asks, “How are we gonna get the bell there? Who’s gonna tie it?” and nobody has an answer.

So, at least as reputable as anything you say then.

I don’t think you can compare trump to either Bush or any president in recent history.

Hard disagree. Bush was absolutely terrible, and the only reason he gets whitewashed like this is because he’s no longer the current thing. If anything, Bush was much more capable of enacting his fascist agenda because he was able to get bipartisan support for it. It Trump is worse, it’s only because he’s standing on the shoulders of demons. Bush introduced the surveillance state, extrajudicial detention, and started multiple wars of aggression.

you might not get free elections that far into the future by allowing trump back in.

We don’t have free elections now. We will always have some form of elections though, virtually every country does. Elections are very useful to any aspiring dictator. Give the people a way to feel like they can work within the system and they’ll be much less troublesome, and less prone to engaging in other mechanisms of influencing things that could actually be disruptive.

On top of that, American elections are extraordinary for controlling the people, you get two groups of people who are both adamantly defending different ruling class candidates, hating each other’s guts, and trying to push anyone with a different perspective into that paradigm. It’s one of the most ingenious mechanisms of population control ever designed. Imagine, if we didn’t have elections, you’d not longer have any sort of beef with me at all, and we could be discussing the most effective ways of disrupting the state.

Also, Trump’s nearly 80. Octogenarians are not known for overthrowing governments and establishing dictatorships, on account of how they’ll die soon anyway, even if they had the energy and mental acuity for it. It’s much more likely that someone after Trump will.

Just as the far-right did not originate with Trump, it won’t end with him either. As soon as he’s out of the picture, then you’ll be talking about how uniquely terrifying the next person is, and how you can’t compare him to Trump who wasn’t really that bad and just had a different vision for how to improve the country, or whatever bullshit you say about Bush. Or if you personally don’t, then people will, perhaps young people who weren’t really aware of how awful Trump/Bush was. And you will be right, about the threat being awful and terrifying. But as long as you insist on just treading water, the threat is only going to get worse and worse forever. That path is 100% certain to lead to fascism.

Good luck on rooting out the secret Reds lurking behind every corner, trying to corrupt an impurify your precious bodily fluids.

On what ethical basis?