Our favorite resident representative of an alternate political view, John Schussler, sent me an email with a link to this blog post: The Age of the Super A*sholes – Robert Reich. His request was:
This is one of those editorials where I’d love to hear how your readers react. To me it makes total sense, but I’m guessing there are plenty for whom it does not. I’d love to hear the arguments why.
Please follow the link for the entire post. Your homework is to provide comments in support or calm, reasoned disagreement with John’s belief that Reich “makes total sense.”
I will get you started with some examples:
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
This presumes facts not in evidence.
The evidence is that in important ways, Donald Trump is the opposite of a dictator. I’ve pointed this out to John multiple times. I’ll make it more direct this time in hopes it will sink in. No dictator has ever encouraged gun ownership for all of the “common people.” Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and dictators are not about sharing political power. Dictators do not eliminate government regulations. They increase them. Those two items alone disqualify Donald Trump for a dictatorship.
Although after adjusting for inflation some other people may have qualified as trillionaires before Elon Musk, let us assume that part of the statement is true. But where is the “economic dominance?” It is not like he is trying to get a monopoly on the banking industry, energy production, transportation, or even communications–all huge economic sections of our country and critical infrastructure.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
If you read the actual Trump quotes it can easily be interpreted that he just wanted the votes to be audited. If that is an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2020 election” it was legal and hundreds of Democrat candidates have successfully overturned elections. So, what is the point of this beyond emotional inflamation?
Criminally liable… Was this for the crime which the New York state legislature passed a new law tailored specifically for Donald Trump and no one else has been prosecuted for before or since? And is currently under appeal? Yeah, I thought so. Let’s see how the appeal goes before you hang your hat on that one.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
“Paid”? He means made political donations totally that amount, right? And your point is?
Illegal? Citation needed. Destructive? A self-defense shooting is destructive too. But it is legal and sometime even praiseworthy.
It goes on and on. It is all emotion hanging together on half-truths. People like this need to get a better grip on reality and become mature enough to get their emotions under control. There are lots of foibles Trump is guilty of without demonstrating the extent of their TDS.
It’s largely circular reasoning. Trump is bad, therefore these things that have been done by other Presidents without complaint (at least from the Left) are bad when he does them, which is then used as evidence that he is bad.
I don’t claim Trump is good, only that is sucks less than many previous Presidents, especially his two immediate predecessors, both of whom received unquestioned support for the same activities (or worse) by the same people complaining about Trump.
They do not argue in good faith. They are fully tribal – what their opponents do is bad, what they and their allies do is good, *even if it is literally the same thing*.
I do not expect you to get through to John. Ever. Facts don’t matter to him – he has all but admitted so, and he *believes the same of us*. If your point here is to get through to John, it is pointless. God himself could descend from heaven and tell John he is wrong, and it wouldn’t make a difference.
But, for the record, I’ll address a few things:
“Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election” – tried to PREVENT the overturn of the 2020 election, but he failed. Georgia, for only the most obvious, was flipped from R to D on CCTV, published to the internet for all to see.
“was impeached twice” – that is an inherently and explicitly political exercise. The Democrats hate him. Duh. He was not found guilty either time, and the charges in both cases were BS. In one of them, the charges were “How dare you notice this bad thing Biden bragged publicly about doing?!?”
“was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books” – literally (meaning “non-figuratively”), the charges he was charged with required time travel to have actually done. There’s nothing to talk about here except New York’s bias and insanity. It’s like charging anyone living today for murdering Lincoln.
“civilly liable for sexual abuse” – he was found liable for “sexual abuse”… which no one in the case accused him of. There were two witnesses. One (him) said nothing happened. The other (her) said he raped her. There was literally no evidence submitted for the charge of “sexual abuse”, but that’s magically what the jury found. That’s without getting into the ridiculous, 40-years-later-OR-SO (since she couldn’t even claim a specific year) ridiculousness of the charges… which were unbelievable on their face for several additional reasons besides that. Again, nothing to see here but the bias and insanity of New York. Oh, and she’s also the woman who said publicly that “rape can be sexy” or somesuch insanity.
Regarding “trillionaire” – that is entirely and inherently nominal. It is more an indictment of our government for devaluing our currency than anything else. Others have existed with similar levels of wealth, arguably more, but it wasn’t *nominally* in the trillions of US dollars. That’s all.
“Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president” – until they also complain about Soros, this is pure tribalism, as I mentioned above.
“Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme” Of course – don’t all Ponzi scheme lower the price of some important service by 95% percent and radically improve all of humanity? That’s normal, right?