I really think the desire to normalize Trump and characterize him as the next logical step in presidential history is counterproductive. He is dangerous specifically because he’s a freakish aberration, a break from normality. Even if you liked Bush or Reagan or whatever, you should hate him - ThreadSky

whstancil.bsky.social • 5 days ago

I really think the desire to normalize Trump and characterize him as the next logical step in presidential history is counterproductive. He is dangerous specifically because he’s a freakish aberration, a break from normality. Even if you liked Bush or Reagan or whatever, you should hate him

Reposted from Pedro Yokes

Yeah the idea we can’t criticize Trump because the real problem is “the system” is shit-tier thinking. Trump sucks. And yes, he does suck in a way that’s different in type and magnitude from other American Presidents.

Comments

bobisjim.bsky.social•5 days ago

TBF a lot of people on the far-left look at trumps use of executive power and see an avenue to bypass congress in the same way

ttbdns.bsky.social•4 days ago

The real issue is the focus on Trump, like when Trump dies, everything will just go back to normal. It’s the entire GOP. There aren’t Trump Tariffs or Trump’s deportations or Trump’s decimation of federal program’s. It’s the entire GOP.

wonkie.bsky.social•5 days ago

The changes in the Republican party toward fascism made him or someone like him inevitable. There is nothing freakish about him. He's a genuine representation of the party of Greene, Rand, Abbot, Cruz, Faux and Newsmax, the list is endless. The Rs have a deep bench of fascist wackos.

wonkie.bsky.social•5 days ago

We need to recognize that our problem is Republicans. Trump will age out or whatever and the next R candidate will be just as fascist and the next Republican Congress will be just as full of nutcases and sleazy cowards and Faux and Newsmax will continue to be Goebbels.

pedroyokes.bsky.social•4 days ago

Sorry but there’s absolutely a huge difference between him and all of those people— he actually made all of those people significantly worse. He’s made every Republican even worse than they were. NewsMax barely existed on tv before Trump.

wonkie.bsky.social•4 days ago

The Republican party leadership decided forty years ago to end representative democracy in the US. Tom DeLay said so openly: the goal was a one party state, pro-oligarchy. Voter suppression, the substitution of hate and fearmongering for policy discussion, the lies, Citizens United, Faux,

wonkie.bsky.social•4 days ago

court packing gerrymandering--it was all intentional designed to create a base of voters who hated the rest of America, lived in an alternative reality, and could be counted on to vote R no matter how bad the candidate was. The Republican party created a radicalized base and undermined

wonkie.bsky.social•4 days ago

fair elections. They went fascist before Trump which made Trump possible

pedroyokes.bsky.social•4 days ago

One of the things Trump brings to the table that these people do not is a sense of charismatic shamelessness that none of them can get away with— and that has made them all worse.

profsteed.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think he’s the obvious “next step”/product of American right-wing evolution, theoretically speaking, but in practice the better way to stop him is to rhetorically cast him as a radical aberration.

marginalsc.bsky.social•5 days ago

Reagan was a freakish aberration himself.

nonathan.bsky.social•5 days ago

Running into this w/ family and am trying to point out the amount of power in the executive IS a problem to be fixed, but this shouldn't distract from the fact that the options Trump's exploiting have been available to presidents since Bush and were not leveraged at this scale and this vindictively

mechatherium.bsky.social•4 days ago

Perhaps we need stron stronger limits on Executive orders.

haroldfjord.bsky.social•4 days ago

Okay but also you're retweeting someone noting how this is built on the past???

somuchderp.bsky.social•5 days ago

The normalization of GWBush as a legitimate political force has been infinitely more damaging to American democracy and institutions than the refusal to portray Trump as somehow being sui generis. Trump, Bush and Reagan were a multigenerational war on American freedoms and should all be opposed.

oldandcranky.bsky.social•4 days ago

absolutely. Trump is the direct result of Reagan.

judith-ip.bsky.social•4 days ago

He is a freakish aberration from what was before, but I’m afraid that those after him will all follow his approach.

nihildev.bsky.social•4 days ago

It can always be both, with one being more severe than the other. It’s not a binary thing.

anantesq.bsky.social•5 days ago

I generally agree with you, Will, & have mostly ignored your back-n-forth w/ppl, primarily bc their replies were making me roll my eyes, so maybe I’m missing some context here…but why can’t it be both that this is where we were headed & that where we were headed was a break from normality?

mikepjones1.bsky.social•5 days ago

Trump is both a departure from all previous Republican Presidents and entirely normal for the post-2009 GOP, a fascist party hiding in plain sight.

The embrace of the Tea Party & Birtherism marked a rejection of any constraint on raw power or any attachment to democratic standards.

saywhat95.bsky.social•4 days ago

If you liked America as a functioning country at any point, you should hate him

averybullard.bsky.social•5 days ago

After MAGA dies, how does our country rebound. Here's my biggest fear.

sjlessman.bsky.social•4 days ago

Do you really think JD would be better? Well, he wouldn't put a 100% tariff on barbie dolls, but let's not miss the fact he worked hand in hand in the creation of Project 2025. Also the support of the Republicans in Congress, the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society.

twitteraddict.bsky.social•4 days ago

JD would be better in one way: he'd have fewer supporters. There are a lot of people, some of whom aren't even Republicans, who put a cult-like faith in Donald Trump personally. Vance wouldn't keep all of that support, and it would hurt the project.

frankhumungus.bsky.social•5 days ago

Not the next logical step in presidential history, but the realization of every imperialist/isolationist/racist/austerity thing Republicans have been using to rile up the base for decades, but pretending they couldn’t do because Dems wouldn’t let them. Dems will, in fact, let them.

paul-lukasiak.bsky.social•5 days ago

That's like saying a gangrenous foot is an aberration, and ignoring the diabetes.

the only people who "normalized" Trump were Dems like Biden, who insisted that once Trump was beaten at in 2020, he could safely be ignored as a "freakish aberration", rather than a symptom of a larger problem.

whstancil.bsky.social•5 days ago

No American has ever experienced a presidency like this one - a president who doesn’t know, care about, or follow our laws and founding documents. A president fully for sale, with no policy interests whatsoever, who appoints the worst people in the country to every single position.

dwn-081.bsky.social•5 days ago

I do believe he has genuine policy interests in (evilly) white supremacy and (bizarrely, stupidly) tariffs. All else — and to be sure, even parts of those — is grift.

kle138.bsky.social•5 days ago

This to me is the key point. There is zero chance Trump could be president on his own. He literally is not capable. He is only in power because others think they will benefit from having him in power. Multiple factions, perhaps, I’m not saying it’s a marvel of coordination. Trump is a freak & a tool

ackbar7.bsky.social•5 days ago

This was the perception of W Bush as well

lord-of-crime.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes. It's the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect.

somuchderp.bsky.social•4 days ago

This exactly describes Bush. This amnesia is really something to behold.

kimphilbywasbad.bsky.social•5 days ago

I would disagree with “no policy interests whatsoever”. He really thinks that tariffs are the secret to wealth.

smegmaticsmotrich.bsky.social•4 days ago

Why are Alito and Thomas—appointees of the Bushes— objectively worse than Trump’s picks?

averybullard.bsky.social•5 days ago

No American has ever experienced a Republican Congress that fully enables a presidency like this one - a president who doesn’t know, care about, or follow our laws and founding documents. A president fully for sale, with no policy interests whatsoever, who appoints the worst people in the country..

rolandwall.bsky.social•5 days ago

Trump inhabits that reality that the Constitutional system relies on leaders all following at least the framework of mutually agreed upon norms. The expectation was that checks and balances would prevent outright authoritarianism. Trump is what happens when neither of those work.

rolandwall.bsky.social•5 days ago

That said, past GOP leaders, notably Bush 2, set the table for this and shaved off the expectations of legal bulkheading. The willingness of corporate leaders, media, and other institutions to fall in line has normalized thoroughly corrupt and dictatorial actions.

ichoosefeminism.bsky.social•4 days ago

And Americans voted for him twice!! Twice!!! He didn’t get there alone

paul-lukasiak.bsky.social•5 days ago

1/ that doesn't make Trump an aberration, because the empowerment of Trump was produced by the system TWICE.

And, in fact, if Trump was an aberration, rather than a predictable result of the system, the progressive web would not have spent the last nine years warning (each other) about the danger

paul-lukasiak.bsky.social•5 days ago

2/ Trump and Trumpism represented. "The left" understood, better than anyone, what Trump was about, and has consistently tried to raise that awareness in the rest of the country -- while "mainsream" Dems like Pelosi ("impeach himself") and Biden ("focus on the future") downplayed it.

whstancil.bsky.social•5 days ago

He can’t even speak in sentences or write a letter on his own! He’s bizarre and dangerous, unfit from top to bottom, a husk of a human, an endless black hole of resentment and ego you wouldn’t trust to run a Burger King.

rupertstubbs.bsky.social•5 days ago

I’d check out Ian Leslie’s article on the upcoming post-literate society - https://open.substack.com/pub/ianleslie/p/seven-features-of-post-literate-politics?r=43jrc&utm_medium=ios - as he points out the communication style that will fit best in a short-video age (reverting back to pre-literate simplistic messages repeated often), which Trump exemplifies.

ridgecook.bsky.social•5 days ago

Trump is not an aberration.
He is the culmination of a 40+ yr effort (beginning with Reagan) to build a political party completely subservient to Wealth. With a chief executive supported and encouraged by that party. SCOTUS was captured for that effort. Corporate Media built to support it.

goodparliament.bsky.social•5 days ago

1000%

theemightyquinn.bsky.social•4 days ago

I’m confused as to why so many people are hating on this guy.

whstancil.bsky.social•5 days ago

Say what you will about Republicans past but their leaders were basically competent humans. The kind of person who could successfully fill out a college application or manage a regional branch. Trump isn’t that. He’s fully deranged, a true psycho, whose only talent is shakedown and self-promotion.

mattferrel.bsky.social•4 days ago

GWB compared to Trump is like Hilary Clinton compared to Trump

somuchderp.bsky.social•5 days ago

I can't get over how we've somehow managed to memory-hole the entire fucking 8-year Bush presidency.

jfloyd314.bsky.social•5 days ago

I mean, no. Bush was a bad president, but he was bad completely within the normal parameters of expected presidential behavior. Trump nuked those parameters from orbit.

It is possible to be a bad president and still be light years better than Trump, and that describes every president besides Trump.

oldandcranky.bsky.social•4 days ago

He was a mass murderer and should be in jail for war crimes. Trump sucks. So does Bush.

somuchderp.bsky.social•5 days ago

No, Bush was absolutely NOT within the "normal parameters of presidential behaviour." The amount of shock and dismay expressed at the time over Bush' combination of doltishness and dangerous attacks on fundamental freedoms was no worse than what we see for Trump now.

smegmaticsmotrich.bsky.social•4 days ago

How many hundred thousand Iraqis has Trump murdered?

angrynerdbird.bsky.social•3 days ago

Nah. George Bush Jr. was so disliked at the end of his administration that he made it hard for a white man to run for president.

pinko-slime.bsky.social•4 days ago

Trump is the end point of the Republican project that Bush very much so helped along. The current Trump administration would be inherently less powerful without ICE, no child left behind, the surveillance state, ect

ealluia.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think Bush was one of the worst Presidents we ever had, and some of the horrors we are seeing now were prefigured in Bush and warned about the Bush admin at the time. But Bush is so much more competent and within bounds compared to Trump that it's not even a little bit close.

hearsay.bsky.social•4 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/hearsay.bsky.social/post/3lotgh3unzk2e

spm1961.bsky.social•4 days ago

+ the remarkably sleazy method in which he and his gang took the white house ie: florida (ballots designed to confuse ppl, a roll purge of felons that "accidentally" threw 30-40 thousand NON felons off the voter rolls) was a subversion of democracy unseen since the height of the jim crow era. (1)

spm1961.bsky.social•4 days ago

i read the village voice and the nation back then and had a good idea of what had happened. to see the democrats response after SCOTUS settled it ("we need to put all this behind us and work with president bush bla bla bla") just astonished me. they seemed so inhumanly stupid and cowardly. (end)

somuchderp.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also they did a Jan 6 before the Jan 6, that everyone just forgot. Republicans led a violent insurrection (Google "Brooks Brothers Riots") to prevent a ballot count and used their allies in SCOTUS to legitimate it, thereby overturning the results of the election. No one was jailed over it.

ok-now-what.bsky.social•5 days ago

Bush was widely considered the worst president in American history by the end of his term, but he was MILES more competent than Trump. His nominees were conservative but mostly normal.

I'd be surprised if Trump could even say "misunderestimate". He's a senile, demented, hateful, cruel, imbecile.

somuchderp.bsky.social•5 days ago

Again, what you're saying is completely nuts. You're talking like the Iraq War, the Afghanistan War, the Global Financial Crisis, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, WMDs and so much else never happened. The guy lied about everything! Boasting about Iraq going great even while 000s were dying was Trumpian!

ok-now-what.bsky.social•5 days ago

Like Bush was considered dumb because he couldn't remember Pervez Musharraf's name; Trump just said India and Pakistan have been fighting for thousands of years! He's just on a different planet.

gregmilner.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think about this a lot.

brienmcmullen.bsky.social•4 days ago

I clearly remember when Bush was done thinking we better win 4 straight terms because the next GOP president was going to try to be a be a dictator.
It was clear back then that the GOP was headed this direction.
Sorry, but it's true.

twitteraddict.bsky.social•4 days ago

It wasn't inevitable. Romney wasn't a wannabe dictator. It was clear that part of the Republican party wanted a dictator, but it wasn't clear that they would win.

brienmcmullen.bsky.social•4 days ago

But look at the extremist anti-democratic behavior of the Senate during those years, or in States like North Carolina and Wisconsin. They had already gone off the deep end by 2012.

grumpyoldprop.bsky.social•5 days ago

When exactly was that? Republicans have been deranged psychopaths for longer than our lifetimes.

markr51.bsky.social•4 days ago

Eisenhower was normal.

grumpyoldprop.bsky.social•4 days ago

How old are you?

moralsbeforemoney.bsky.social•4 days ago

I've been looking into the h/o other current dictators.. Putin... Erdogan... Orban... all of them laid out the path for this fascist. Trump wants to be kind like those of Saudi Arabia and UAE... he wants that power without any accountability. It's his jam.

paul-lukasiak.bsky.social•5 days ago

no one who experienced the progressive we b through eight years of George W Bush would ever accuse him of being "basically competent".

you've memory-holed the fact that GWB was regarded as someone who diverged significantly from what was considered "normal" at the time.

mateocaballero.bsky.social•5 days ago

It’s important to acknowledge both. How past presidents laid down the path for someone like Trump to take power (EOs, imperial presidency, eroding civil liberties and separation of power, election interference, bad judicial appointments, etc.) and how he is a break in all the ways you describe.

vonryansexpress.bsky.social•4 days ago

What sort of Nancy Pelosi bullshit is this?

meadowbrook7953.bsky.social•5 days ago

He is criminally insane, the worst of all humankind.
The essence of greed, hatred & violence.
There is no normalizing him.
He needs to be institutionalized.

jsteele1020.bsky.social•4 days ago

I don't even consider him the president. he deserves zero respect. he's a con man and a criminal, nothing more. he's lucky he has SS protection.

mrsfezziwig.bsky.social•5 days ago

A ton of nits
being picked here.
I’ll add mine:
I think we don’t get Trump if Occupy Wall St, Me Too, and BLM never happened. Trump/authoritarianism is
a last-ditch effort to
preserve privilege. Oligarchy along for the
ride because profits were stagnating under
status quo. IMO.

admiral-monke.bsky.social•4 days ago

As long as you recognize that these movements coming about is a direct result of conditions that could be remedied, you are on the right track.

It is not the fault of the demonstrators that there is a reason to demonstrate

mrsfezziwig.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think you misread if you think I was assigning blame or
fault.

maximumeffort433.bsky.social•4 days ago

People desperately want to displace blame; if Trump was "always in the cards" then there's nothing we could have done (short of tearing down our whole system) to prevent him.

If Trump is the result of an election then people have to take responsibility and vote; "It's the system!" absolves them.

ideologyeater.bsky.social•4 days ago

I'd argue people don't want it to be systemic because they want to be absolved of the responsibility to tear down the institutions and systems that brought in here.

thegreatphilouza.bsky.social•5 days ago

And yet they don’t

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