President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Reagan has nothing to do with Donald Trump anymore than JFK has anything to do with Bernie Sanders if he could gain more of a foothold with the unhappy and bitter people in this country.

The inevitable endpoint -- ridiculous and nonsensical populism and corruption -- was due to what we allowed our government to become. That isn't Ronald Reagan or George Bush anymore than it is Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. My personal sense was that Reagan was a fundamentally decent person who would have been horrified by Donald Trump.

Reagan contributed to our government mess -- that spawned Trump -- only in as much as he ran huge deficits (for the time, although by the standards of what we did decades later, it was quaint), which allowed our Federal government to become bigger, and the people running it to become more powerful and take more control of people's lives. Our government is an anchor on our economy, and we have hobbled free enterprise in this country and created a corrupt economy in which there is a bitter underclass now that has been left behind.

That was Reagan to some extent, but even moreso the presidents who followed, ending with Obama -- under which we doubled our debt and our corrupt goverment became more intrusive than ever.

Trump is the total sum of all the presidents and Congresses of the last several decades. And until we undo as much of it as possible, there will be corrupt jackals hanging around ready to boost their own fortunes on the back of the permanent disenchanted class our failed system of government has spawned. This notion that that is a Republican thing, and not a Democrat thing, is ridiculous. Biden may be a more decent man than Trump, and less dangerous to democray in the immediate sense, but if the Congress and him manage to run up trillions of dollars of more debt and destroy our economy farther on the back of the power they take with it, there will be Donald Trump types -- of all stripes -- hanging around, trying to capitalize on the discontentment that it creates. That discontentment is what gives footholds to wannabe dictators and con men and corruption.

The one bogey in all of this is that we are living a debt-fueled fantasy being enabled by a reckless central banking scheme. When that ends in a credit crisis it can go any which way -- the economic misery might create negative chaos. Or it has the potential to create reform.

 

When I posted that, I KNEW someone was going to post something like this.

It's a stain on Reagan's legacy, but it still needs to be put into the context of the time. Before it became a full-fledged epidemic, AIDs was a third rail of politics -- those were the times. Most public officials were afraid to discuss AIDs. It wasn't until Elizabeth Taylor spoke out publicly that that started to change. When Reagan did finally acknowledge it -- albeit, it was impossible NOT to acknowledge it by then -- he did push Congress to fund a massive research program, which was largely in place by the time he left office.

I'm not saying any of that to excuse the fact that he pointedly refused to utter the word "AIDs." It was a failure of leadership. But there is still no comparison between his behavior and about 1,000 shitty things we have seen from Donald Trump.

I honestly don't think Reagan would have been indifferent to the people who were dying of AIDs. I can't really qualify that, though. It's just my sense that he wasn't a shitty person -- more a flawed person. Donald Trump is a shitty person. One of the shittiest imaginable, president or otherwise.