So I guess 2016 claimed its biggest victim yet - America

Surprised The Hill could get away with referring to the President and his cabinet members that way.

Can’t resist the low-hanging fruit (from None’s link):

Some of the requests were more mundane in nature, including a redecoration of national security adviser H.R. McMaster’s office and a new toilet seat for the Oval Office bathroom. That last request was directed to be completed “after hours please.”

The culmination of all the bad news from the various political threads here has me terrified that, one year after his election, we are trending dangerously close to a decent into actual Fascism. I wish I had the energy to elucidate all of the signs but I don’t. The disregard for the public good and the will of the people shown by the tax bill, the Roy Moore fiasco, and the support for an obviously unfit criminal at the highest level is a big part of it, as is the incessant and somewhat successful attacks on the free press, the flagrant disregard for the truth and the effective destruction of key federal agencies through neglect and sabotage from within. The Overton Window has shifted far enough to include literal nazis, the president actively targets minorities on a regular basis and we have all become numb to the daily parade of outrages. Within six months or a year the Republicans can make their move overtly.

The economy overall is booming …

… But not in the states that got Trump elected.

Gee, it’s almost as if a slogan and a hat aren’t enough to overcome a long-term decline in rust belt jobs.

Thanks, Obama!

I hate seeing people on here react as though the world is coming to an end and that their children have no hope of living in a decent world.

Like nobody in any generation has ever felt the same way. I don’t mean it to be snarky but in the last 80 years there have been decades of shit worse than this. The depression, WW2 and the fear of the bomb during the Cold War.

We are still here.

The politics don’t bug me so much, but I have to say that I worry a lot about the climate repercussions. That’s not only from a parent perspective, but from the perspective of somebody with a public health degree who has spent time working with vulnerable populations in places that are going to be hit hard with drought, famine, etc… if their bread baskets decline.

In all of those scenarios the enemy wasn’t the government itself.

They might have fucked up or not done something correctly, but for the most part, they were on the side of the People.
Once you cross that line it’s all over. And we can see that line from here. It hasn’t been crossed yet, but if Trump declared that he was suspending elections I bet you couldn’t get enough votes to impeach him, and that sort of possibility shouldn’t even be a blip on the radar.

We’re approaching Civil War levels of tribalism and it’s sure as hell not going to improve any time soon.

What ShivaX said. As much as the Republicans like to scream about “class warfare,” this bill is precisely and nakedly that, but in favor of the wealthy. So I might get a 500/year income tax cut out of it (for a while, mind). But in exchange I get to see the country as a whole go that much farther down the road to third-world status, because these assholes believe in their trickle down religion so much that they think the second great hollowing out of the federal government’s revenues in as many decades is just fine (in the face of all the crying needs this country has that only the federal government has the resources to tackle).

I truly believe that the Adelsons and Mercers and Kochs of this country want all the socio-economic and political progress that the bulk of the American population enjoyed in the 20th Century reversed to the point where 90% of the population lives in utter week-to-week and month-to-month economic insecurity, as was the case for our urban populations around 1900. Precisely the conditions which led some members of the tiny middle class of the time to realize that if things didn’t change and fast, it was their heads that would be lopped off when things exploded (if I may mix my metaphors), because they were more visible to the urban poor and couldn’t live in gated estates with private security like the Vanderbilts and the DuPonts. This gave birth to the Progressive Movement and more radical movements on the Left (which, thankfully, we avoided).

Whether such a self-correction might happen again, who knows, because it would have to happen on an international scale, and there are way too many ways it could go a Bolshevik/Maoist/Fascist direction.

They had a better analogy in the 1800’s for current GOP economic dogma:

That’s perfect and I’m stealing it.

Hyperbole much. Don’t forget this guy so far hasn’t even been able to get rid of the dreaded and evil Obamacare. I think even the GOP knows that if you impeached Trump you would still end up with total control of the government with Pence as president.

I had never heard that one before and it is worth stealing.

I agree that things have been very bad before. Civil War, WWII, Cold War. Humans got through it.*

*The world ‘got through’ WWII but it caused immense, incalculable suffering. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have avoided that?
*Cold War constituted the first existential threat to human civilization since the Bubonic Plague. It was a bad one. And of course, the threat is still there, albeit simmering a little.

What’s disconcerting about Trumpia is not merely that it is a crisis but that it is a crisis to the essence of our body politic. It’s an internal, not external threat, and arguably the worst such we have seen since the 1860s. I think this adds a certain sense of urgency. And I think we are becoming alive to the fragility of our vaunted system, how much depends on ‘norms’ and on political actors observing some level of good faith. We have seen other democracies and republics fail, from Rome on up. We are not immune.

Personally, it makes me proud that so many millions of Americans get their backs up and shout ‘hell no!’ at the first stirrings of someone who might even be thinking about contemplating becoming an authoritarian. It almost makes me proud enough to overcome my shame and disgust at the abomination the electorate inflicted upon the country last November. Almost, not quite.

You’ll get there, Gordon! We’ll do it together.

This stuff just ticks me off. I guess any of us could be labelled as an “enemy combatant” and detained indefinitely without counsel. And by detained, what they are saying is the guy’s in jail. They might as well stick the Constitution in a paper shredder.

People with a lot of political inside knowledge say that nothing. literally nothing will lead to impeachment.

They cite the 25th Amendment as our only hope, because impeachment, simply, will never happen. Like no matter what it wont happen. The possibility that we wont have a fair election is a very real one because winning matters more than the republic.

Thankfully, so far the system has endured, but what happens when someone dismantles the system and no one stops them? Because no one will stop them and the only way to stop them is via the system they can dismantle.

Is it hyperbole? Yes, but only barely. It’s a very real possibility that hasn’t existed since the Civil War, if ever.

The only thing that will destroy America is America.

Well I guess we’re lucky the police didn’t show up trying to shoot a 6 year old with Down’s Syndrome… but that substitute has lost her mind and should not be around children.

Wow, no kidding.