Comment by honzaik
5 hours ago
last week's "truth" (https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1164091464198...)
"I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country! Our Military Patriots desperately need FISA 702, and it is one of the reasons we have had such tremendous SUCCESS on the battlefield."
I thought you were quoting a propaganda ad from starship troopers for a second there
Th amount of conservatives/republicans that love Starship Troopers (the film) because they take it at face value is pretty scary. The ones that call it poor satire are especially…interesting.
They continue to prove Verhoeven’s point many times over even decades later.
How many times do we have to tell you this old man?
The book and author of the book was serious/not satire and meant everything earnestly at least the time of writing.
It’s objectively not meant to be looked at as satire. Most of the “citizenship requires service” stuff would be amazing from the perspective of smashing this countries geriocracy.
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The most surprising thing about watching the Trump trainwreck has been in how spineless he is about any personal ideological conviction.
He cares about perceptions of him. He cares about power and money.
But past that it's literally... whoever was last in the room with him. Which in this case was obviously Palantir. And 50 days ago was Hegseth.
Why is that surprising? He’s been that way on the public stage for 40 years. What’s surprising is his base popularity hasn’t moved at all. He’s giving a fair chunk of the population what they want.
>He’s giving a fair chunk of the population what they want.
That would be upsetting if so. I feel the far more frightening thing is he is telling a large swath of people who don't know what they want, what they want. And then delivering that. So it could be literally anything.
Because the only thing they really want is validation of their unserious world view, and their frustration that results from it. Trump's thrashing around without a coherent plan and [inevitably] making our position worse mirrors their own existence.
The only remotely ideological conviction he has is "trade bad, tariffs good".
It was his selling point. The people who voted for him don't care that he has no ideological conviction. They like that he is instinctively against "liberals". It just so happens that those are the people giving him less money and groveling.
The low-brow term for this is "owning the libs", but I believe it's really what's happening. It doesn't matter his personal moral failures or inconsistency, as long as he sets back social progress.
That feels like too reductive of a distillation and conveniently excises the necessity of examining his supporters' grievances for legitimate ones.
He was elected by a broad coalition of conservative-ish stakeholders, many of whom had very coherent and enunciated goals.