Tom Clancy’s US Politics Thread

Well that's awkward.

You know what I'm enjoying the most? The fact that Trump announced a 2024 run a couple of weeks ago, and basically nobody fucking cares.

Obviously some people do, like a lot of Republicans who (correctly) think that he is absolute electoral poison and don't want him to run again. But at this point in the cycle in 2015 (or whenever it was) every single day there was some new bullshit thing he said, some new outrage. And at some point recently, people stopped giving a shit, and now I can go entire weeks without hearing about him.

Obviously that could change when the presidential race actually starts, but it's pretty blissful for now.

Just on that, and your “nobody cares” re Trump, worth noting that the vote totals were something like 1.8 million to Warnock and 1.7 million to Walker. There’s no way in hell an election between a reverend and a mouth-breathing idiot psychopath should be that close. How the fuck is it possible. So yeah, I don’t think Trump should ever be underestimated- or, rather, that the US voter should never be over-estimated. It’s pretty clear that nearly 50% of Americans are out of their fucking minds.

Trump announced his candidacy so he’d have a whole new reason to tell people to give him money. That’s why he did it two years before the election and on the first day after the midterms, too - to maximise the amount of time spent taking donations.

Plus his NY fine was $1.8m. Big woop.

Le Tissier for PM!

Oof, this is pretty rough. I hope they're ok

The size of the fine doesn't really matter it's that Trump has been shown to have given the nod to to tax evasion it's just the start not the end.

I completely disagree, I’m afraid. Fines can incentivise two behaviours - either they will dissuade breaking the law or they will create a situation where it makes more financial sense to break the law and then pay the fine. This is the latter.

The real problem is that all parties are incentivised towards the latter. Businesses like the fines to be smaller for obvious reasons, but lawmakers and government like the fines smaller as well, so they become less a disincentive to break the law and more a revenue stream for local government.

The fine isn’t the punishment with the tax thing, the real punishment is that they could be barred from taking out loans or even doing business at all in the state of NY. It’s also a trickle down effect wherein it opens itself up for more criminal indictments moving forwards. This is the broader part of an investigation that originally had a much narrower focus, so now has even more incentive and ammunition to go back to a laser like focus on one person - Trump.

Can you go to prison in the States for non payment of fines? Because let's face it, he's never going to pay.

Meanwhile, in further news that won't actually do anything, apparently they've found more restricted documents in a storage unit belonging to one Donald Trump!

Must snap one of these up quickly before they're all gone. Holy shit, visit the website and watch the video. collecttrumpcards.com/

Someone speculated it was an NFT earlier. It was funny to see the gqp folks convinced that he was going to announce he was running for speaker of the house.

Vortex Can you blame me?!? Look at them, just look!!!