I'm going to be blunt here and say that there is an epistemic disease among much of the American establishment that absolutely refuses to believe that Trump is capable of truly bad things. It's part of what's enfeebling the elite opposition to him right now. - ThreadSky

quinnae.com • 25 days ago

I'm going to be blunt here and say that there is an epistemic disease among much of the American establishment that absolutely refuses to believe that Trump is capable of truly bad things. It's part of what's enfeebling the elite opposition to him right now.

Reposted from Paul Krugman

Goldman Sachs, Jan 21: "Despite Trump’s comments that the 25% tariff will be implemented in 10 days, we continue to believe the odds of a 25% tariff on Canada and Mexico are low (20%)." Why have analysts been caught so flat-footed by Trump doing *exactly what he said he would*?

Comments

gretagroots.bsky.social•25 days ago

They also cannot see and accept that he is trying to destroy our economy, security, all of it, on purpose. Bc he has a slogan, no one believes what is right on front of their nose

gia9c.bsky.social•24 days ago

Because about 1/2 of us are idiots

rtmit.bsky.social•24 days ago

in fairness, this disease is just a mutation of the innate belief that a living organism would not, knowingly, cause themselves harm. Issue lies with them assuming Trump thinks this will cause specifically him harm, while Trump assumes all harm happens to someone else forever.

ellievision.bsky.social•25 days ago

Part of it is the rich white guy bubble they all operate in. No one can pierce the bubble.

thufir.bsky.social•24 days ago

Yep

benjaminlanders.bsky.social•25 days ago

Bingo
✨

jooseylove.bsky.social•25 days ago

Perhaps they are just hoping for the endgame: a technocratic, North American Empire, but playing the short game with nonchalance to cover it up. Seriously though, do they know what the end game is here & why crashing the economy is a feature, not a bug?

basterdius.bsky.social•25 days ago

The Senate Democrats agreed to take the weekend off!!!! What in the actual fuck?

design3.bsky.social•24 days ago

Chase em down on social media

They are disgusting in their retreat from their duties

astefansky.bsky.social•25 days ago

They still somehow think this is business as usual.

Dem leadership has spent the last 25 years capitulating. It’s reflexive now.

To quote someone Schumer might remember, “Just say No”.

Please, we’re asking you to just fucking stand up and say No.

hrnpilates.bsky.social•25 days ago

I think they assume he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his ability to cash in on something. They don’t really comprehend his rapid need to punish his critics.

hrnpilates.bsky.social•25 days ago

^Rabid

sablue52.bsky.social•25 days ago

There's no bottom. Every time people say he can't go lower, he goes lower. It's a perverse challenge.

jeffreyschmeffrey.bsky.social•25 days ago

I would ask the question now: does anyone still thing Musk and Trump wouldn't steal the election if they could from a tech standpoint?

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

It's also a disease of people believing that, no matter what goes wrong, if it doesn't personally affect them, they don't need to care. These people run the press, are on corporate boards, and believe that wealth = protection.
Therefore they perceive threats to wealth as threats to themselves...

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

They saw the expiration of tax cuts and the push for a more generous and regulared state as a threat to their wealth. So they went with what they perceived as the lesser threat, a madman and his mad party who do not believe in any of that bunkum...

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

But now that they have enabled a madman, the greatest threat to their protective fortune is opposition to the madman and his mad party.
They don't want to be accused of being "not very nice" and risking the might of a petty state coming after them. They want the peaceful life.

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

A life of inflated profit margins, inflated assets, inflated rents, and if the interest rates go up and cause the population to seek a strongman as @isabellamweber.bsky.social warned:
https://www.exploring-economics.org/en/discover/anti-fascist-economics/
That's okay. He's got an inflated ego.

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

He can be complemented. He can be bribed. He can be controlled.
That's what they believe.
And they're morons.

thimbles.bsky.social•25 days ago

Just a reminder, there was another way this could have all gone down.
If we had a sense of urgency, you know, three years ago when it mattered:
https://bsky.app/profile/isabellamweber.bsky.social/post/3lfrtcbwlbc23
But politics, journalism, economics, corporate board rooms, the justice system, all of them are infested with morons...

forevernever.bsky.social•24 days ago

"there's no way we could have elected, again, a malicious sociopathic idiot to the presidency"

lgaud.bsky.social•25 days ago

Welcome to Dumbfuckistan people.

bluedotinmi.bsky.social•24 days ago

Failure of imagination is a huge issue. But also can you call it imagination when they are spelling it out!?!?!?

sevenbrg.bsky.social•25 days ago

I don't think it's just the elite.

As a Canadian on this site, I got lots of Americans telling me not to worry and ignore the bluster last month since it was just "distraction" from the other bad things he was doing.

Canadians have been taking this very seriously for awhile.

sevenbrg.bsky.social•25 days ago

To be fair, Trump did ALL the bad things.

tepidlatte.bsky.social•25 days ago

In his first term, Trump was a one-man-band clownshow. His "plans" failed, often comically, because he had no idea how to implement them.

This time, he actually hired people who can execute, so real evil will get done, while he continues to cavort and jape around like a prize twat.

rcownie.bsky.social•25 days ago

No, he didn't. He hired a bunch of nutjobs so high on their own supply that they think they can jump off a skyscraper and fly. Gravity is the same as ever.

tepidlatte.bsky.social•25 days ago

I hope you're right but, apart from the comically bad cabinet appointments, there seems to be an army of apparachiks who know enough about how things work to snarl everything up in court indefinitely, while the looting continues unabated.

mzrad.bsky.social•25 days ago

Respectfully, these members of the American establishment want fascism and presenting them as tricked, naive, or duped is giving them a pass. They are slavering for oligarchy while pretending to be surprised.

j-c11.bsky.social•25 days ago

The Dems keep whining about him breaking norms, but aren’t doing anything about it. I wonder if Dems in Congress have grounds to sue the Trump administration for illegally letting Musk take control of the Treasury?

mrliam.bsky.social•25 days ago

This is brill, ma’am.

design3.bsky.social•24 days ago

Trump was 50 years in the making
The perfect stooge and front -man for the truly awful groups who are pulling the strings

Heritage foundation

Federalist Society

Claremont Society

the Evangelical groups

uggggh25.bsky.social•25 days ago

And what next?

peppermintjack.bsky.social•25 days ago

these rich bastards are all so furious about seeing people trying to exercise a modicum more power in the workplace & that now they might get in trouble for sexually assaulting their interns that they blinded themselves to trump's incompetence and only saw he shared their desire to inflict cruelty

controlgroup.bsky.social•24 days ago

It’s like they forgot all the crime in plain sight and “I just need 11,000 votes”

kallaipdx.com•25 days ago

Human beings are incredibly bad at intuitively understanding risk, probabilities, exponential growth, etc. We are living through events that require more than just a linear extrapolation from our first go-round with Trump to grasp and too many people’s mental models can’t handle that.

bitshammer.bsky.social•24 days ago

They keep acting like he isn't doing bad things AS HE'S ACTIVELY DOING THEM bo less

zzzzarf.bsky.social•25 days ago

People are so saturated in the capitalist “rational actor” bullshit that they can’t conceive an alternative. Trump is obviously a deranged idiot that clearly wants to do the insane things he says, but they can’t stop excusing it as a “distraction” and positing there’s some secret supervillain scheme

coasterspaul.bsky.social•25 days ago

If there's one thing everyone needs to remind themselves through this term, it's "No! It's just dumb!"

missionmansd.bsky.social•24 days ago

the “elites” already. time to stop trying to co-opt the opposition’s rhetoric.

haleynms.bsky.social•25 days ago

He gets endless benefit of the doubt, it's so frustrating

dean-d-margo.bsky.social•25 days ago

He’s bluster. But bluster that doesn’t back down without a serious slap. So to keep his bluster going, some truly bad things are likely to result. It’s truly sad to see.

rabbitsblinkity.inklily.com•24 days ago

100% correct, IMO in particular finance has "nothing ever happens" as a fundamental belief and there's no way they'll think otherwise right up until the secret police show up on wall street. They think everything can be solved with money and the markets will be open on Monday no matter what.

kedwards.bsky.social•24 days ago

We’re used to republicans breaking things by increment, not taking a sledgehammer to entire institutions. No one wants to believe the president is deliberately FUBARing our government.

neon8ive.bsky.social•25 days ago

💯 and, not to be condescending, kudos for the word 'enfeebling'. 👌

jonoco.bsky.social•25 days ago

Belief in American Exceptionalism is a hell of a drug.

airbasealmighty.bsky.social•21 days ago

the disease has run rampant among many Americans right now too. I don’t know he did it, but he did

super-mighty.bsky.social•25 days ago

Did Goldman Sachs trade on what they said they believed or on what they secretly actually believed?

cwlj.bsky.social•25 days ago

Critics say Musk is part of a coup. It's not so simple.

swmark78.bsky.social•23 days ago

I think part of it is the myth of "Enlightened Self-Interest" they live by.

cnjulia.bsky.social•25 days ago

He tells everyone what he is going to do. His folks only believe what he will do to the people they hate.

jillc.bsky.social•24 days ago

There’s also a disease among part of the electorate that everything he says and does is fantastic and spot on.

thecraftybear.bsky.social•24 days ago

Prognostics are based off a reasonable approach to economics. The current American administration lacks any common sense whatsoever, so it's impossible to prognosticate anything based on reason.

tricksterink.bsky.social•24 days ago

Sorta like the establishment's insistence that climate change isn't *really* real, or not so real that we have to change very much about how we do things on this planet?

s3rp86.bsky.social•24 days ago

They only remember that in Trump 1 it was good for them but don't remember that he had people around him that stopped him from doing the dumbest shit possible. Those have been gone for years now . The fact people didn't pick up on that is a huge flashing red warning sign.

erin-p.bsky.social•25 days ago

Normalcy bias is a helluva drug.

bdowney.bsky.social•24 days ago

It's more than the establishment -- which stands out because, well 'a wizard should know better'.

But we regularly see normie Americans who insist that Trump won't do bad things. Both to the country or _to them_. Like that guy protesting in a border town today.

Trying to wrap my head around it.

bdowney.bsky.social•24 days ago

I apologize in advance for asserting Chuck Schumer is a wizard.

vincentphotographs.bsky.social•24 days ago

#Trump #Wharton #Whartonproud release the #transcripts on this genius take your credit or call him out. He was a #birther turnabout is fair.

johnbgilman.bsky.social•21 days ago

Or perhaps there is simply no "elite opposition" to fascism in the US?

krisellyn.bsky.social•24 days ago

“movements in their prepower...stage can attract so many ordinary philistines is that their members live in a fool’s paradise of normalcy; the party members are surrounded by the normal world of sympathizers and the elite formations by the normal world of ordinary members” (Arendt Origins 368).

jmdaggett.bsky.social•25 days ago

Of the major ways of gaining knowledge, the reliance on Tradition (on its own not a bad thing) as a means of knowing and understanding, is absolutely blindfolding. Many - on some days myself included - find it hard to shift to the empiricism and trust of our own eyes needed for these times.

mnemonicer.bsky.social•25 days ago

I fully expect Pete Hegseth to loose the military on Americans. He will cross the Rubicon. I'm sure Susan Collins will be very concerned then.

zparks.bsky.social•24 days ago

Well, the “elite” recognize themselves with their masks off.

killerkitty.bsky.social•24 days ago

Trump is pure, unmitigated, self-centered evil.

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