A thread for Democrats Only
POSTED BY: THGRRI
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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Just How Far Will Trump Go?
The president has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize the federal government to his advantage.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200814223426/https://www.theatlantic.com
/politics/archive/2020/08/trumps-weaponization-usps-and-census/615235/
Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted, a wide range of public-administration experts have told me.
“There’s always been temptation … but no president in modern times has taken action so explicitly and obviously—or transparently—to influence and actually direct these agencies to favor the party in power,” Paul Light, a public-service professor at New York University, told me. “None. None.”
The result of Trump’s moves: an executive branch whose full reach and power is being conscripted to serve the president’s immediate interests. “All of it comes from a place that whatever is in his personal interest—whether it’s financial, reputational, or political—if it benefits him, the government is merely a tool for serving himself,” Walter Shaub, the director of the Office of Government Ethics under former President Barack Obama, told me. “He has simply crossed lines that no one would even conceive of crossing in the past.”
Experts I spoke with said that Trump has dramatically accelerated the pace of his efforts to weaponize federal actions since his Senate acquittal, when every Republican, except Utah’s Mitt Romney, voted to dismiss the charges against him with no sanction and not even a full-scale trial to explore the evidence.
In the past, the census has occasionally faced questions about its accuracy. But never before Trump has there been evidence of a president deliberately trying to skew the results in a manner that helps one party. “I don’t think there’s ever been a charge that the census was systematically unfair,” says Donald Kettl, a longtime scholar of federal administration, now at the University of Texas at Austin.
Until now, the reason for avoiding census tampering has seemed obvious: It was thought that everyone benefits from an accurate count (just as everyone was thought to benefit from an apolitical military, among other institutions Trump has tried to manipulate). Billions of dollars in federal aid are tied to population, so presumably every state would want as many of its people counted as possible. “A complete count is important no matter what state you are in, because so many federal and state programs are tied to the numbers of people,” Steve Murdock, who served as the Census Bureau’s director under President George W. Bush, told me. “You don’t gain much by not counting the people you have to provide services for.”
But in a political environment defined by widening polarization along racial and geographic lines, that traditional restraint has apparently broken down. Hardly any congressional Republicans have raised concerns about Trump’s determination to curtail the census count. That includes Republicans from highly diverse states across the Sun Belt, which are likely to be among the biggest losers if minority populations are systematically undercounted, both in terms of federal aid and the apportionment of congressional seats and Electoral College votes. This week, I asked the offices of GOP senators from Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Georgia if they had any objection to Trump short-circuiting the census count. All refused to respond, except Florida’s Marco Rubio, whose staff referred me only to a comment he’d made on a related issue, Trump’s effort to exclude the undocumented from apportionment. (And even on that question, Rubio avoided taking a definitiv
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:In Texas, we've got lots of men exactly like Trump: fat dumb motherfuckers. You know what stops them? Their eating habits kill them. If I put these guys under significant legal or financial pressure and they just have strokes or heart attacks and die. It is a very satisfying way to suddenly win in a business struggle. Makes winning look easy. Same could happen to Trump. He is one fat dumb bastard of a businessman who breaks his contracts. He is going to blow himself up one day and die from a cerebral hemorrhage. It happened to FDR and Woodrow Wilson while they were President. It can happen to Trump.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
We're back to Second hoping that Trump dies soon.
Reality must be hitting him too hard today.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/woodrow-wilson-suffers-a-stroke
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
Get a load of the hate everyone.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/317474/say-neither-candidate-good-preside
nt.aspx
52% of Democrats/leaners wish someone else were their nominee
36% say Biden would be a good president; 33% say Trump would
42% of Americans view Trump favorably; 47% view Biden favorably
Kiki’s hoping nobody notices that her numbers only reflect what ifs. Like, would you like to have a different choice? Not how these same people are actually going to vote. There are polls for that as well. None show Trump has a chance in hell of winning.
T
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
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Quote:Any links for your claims?
Originally posted by THG:
Kiki’s hoping nobody notices that her numbers only reflect what ifs. Like, would you like to have a different choice? Not how these same people are actually going to vote. There are polls for that as well. None show Trump has a chance in hell of winning.
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Quote:Any links for your claims?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Kiki’s hoping nobody notices that her numbers only reflect what ifs. Like, would you like to have a different choice? Not how these same people are actually going to vote. There are polls for that as well. None show Trump has a chance in hell of winning.
Absolutely, Jacks thread.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63767
T
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
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Donald Trump didn't invent vote suppression — he's just taking it to the next level
Undermining voting rights and squelching democracy isn't just a Trump thing. It's been a GOP thing for decades
https://www.salon.com/2020/08/17/donald-trump-didnt-invent-vote-suppre
ssion--hes-just-taking-it-to-the-next-level/
Trump is taking it to a new level, however, by attempting to suppress Republican votes right along with Democrats. For years the GOP has been pushing voting by mail to help their senior and rural constituencies who have tended to prefer it. R Roughly one-fourth of Trump's votes in 2016 were delivered by mail.
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Quote:
Originally posted by THUGGER:
Kiki’s hoping nobody notices that her numbers only reflect what ifs. Like, would you like to have a different choice? Not how these same people are actually going to vote. There are polls for that as well. None show Trump has a chance in hell of winning.
Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Any links for your claims?
Quote:Well, if you live by the polls then you die by them.
Originally posted by THUGGER:
Absolutely, Jacks thread.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63767
T
CNN Poll of Polls: Biden's lead is narrowing
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/17/politics/biden-trump-poll-of-polls-
august-election/index.html
That's backed up by my scan of nearly a dozen betting sites and other polls.
Biden was a poor choice. Adding Harris on top was an extra helping of a poor choice.
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Quote:Trump winning won't make the GOP competent to govern. After 4 years of him, voters should ask themselves "Why Are Republicans Failing to Govern?"
Originally posted by 1KIKI:
That's backed up by my scan of nearly a dozen betting sites and other polls.
Biden was a poor choice. Adding Harris on top was an extra helping of a poor choice.
Managing a pandemic is difficult in the best of circumstances, but it’s almost impossible for the party built around mistrust of the government and opposition to social services.
The coronavirus death toll shows that what America is doing now is not working. The experiences of Europe and Asia show that the virus can be controlled. So what do congressional Republicans think should happen next?
On this question, every answer was a verbal shrug. Collectively, congressional Republicans have no theory for containing the virus. And they don’t really see it as their job to come up with one. It may have been the Trump administration’s job, but the White House decided to leave it to state and local governments.
That’s left congressional Republicans in a bind. To admit a new strategy is needed is to say that Trump is failing, and few are willing to risk the predictable reprisals. Moreover, congressional Republicans are uncomfortable proposing the kinds of strategies that have worked elsewhere. For instance: Pushing America back into lockdown while spending tens of billions to set up a true test-trace-isolate strategy would also require a multitrillion-dollar support package so families and businesses could survive the return to economic deep-freeze. Few Republicans want to do that.
“There’s a certain amount of motivated reasoning here,” says the top GOP staffer. “If you’re not going to have government intervention, you can’t have the lockdowns.”
That brings me to the explanation for GOP behavior that is almost unanimous among Senate Democrats I’ve spoken to. They believe Republicans are readying themselves to run the strategy against former Vice President Joe Biden they ran against President Obama: Weaponize the debt — which Republicans ran up by trillions during the Trump administration — as a cudgel against anything and everything the Democrats want to do. Force Democrats to take sole ownership of an economic response that’s too small to truly counteract the pain.
If Republicans are behaving like an opposition party that primarily wants to stop Democrats from doing anything, that’s because it’s the role they’re most comfortable playing.
More at https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/8/17/21368234/trump-repub
licans-covid-19-2020-democrats-senate-relief-stimulus-polls
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by THG:Quote:Any links for your claims?
Originally posted by 1KIKI:Quote:
Originally posted by THG:
Kiki’s hoping nobody notices that her numbers only reflect what ifs. Like, would you like to have a different choice? Not how these same people are actually going to vote. There are polls for that as well. None show Trump has a chance in hell of winning.
Absolutely, Jacks thread.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=63767
T
Stupid people don't know they're stupid, and they certainly don't realize how obvious it is to others.
Idiot Ted still doesn't get that my thread was how to read aggregates (which he still doesn't understand) and how to watch trends (which he still doesn't know how to do).
The polls themselves are bullshit, just like they were 4 years ago.
But following trending information from the polls is important.
Do Right, Be Right. :)
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