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[Grim Portent]

Trump may not be particularly bothered about Project 2025, but Republicans control the Senate and are probably on the way to getting the lower chamber too. Harris showed how easily manipulated Trump is during the debate, so it probably isn’t going to take much to get him to sign off on it.

I consider it unlikely that much of Project 2025 will come to pass, enough of the Republican Senate and Congress will not be in favour of various chunks of it to make it impractical. No party on earch passes all their policies without some internal dissent.

Bigger concerns are going to be if Trump gets his way on things like tariffs and tax alterations, four more years without a federally protected right to abortion* resulting in more women dying of complications the treatment for which is classified as abortion, and some new supreme court justices.

*Not that the Democrats would likely be able to pass one without a pretty big electoral sweep anyway.

Most of the more immediately problematic stuff has and will continue to come from the State level governments, outside of Trump's direct influence. Stuff like Florida's bills about censoring the existence of LGBTQ+ people and so on weren't going to be affected by a Trump or Harris presidency.

[hector13]

I know why Kamala Harris lost.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

She lacked convictions.

sorry

[Il Palazzo]

Gotta subscribe to The Onion for the sanest coverage of the upcoming four years.

[Egan_BW]

Just dropping in to say the democratic party worked very hard to earn this humiliating defeat in the electoral, popular, senate, and house votes all at once. I can't believe theres still people in this thread saying all their rights are going to get taken away, theyre gonna put the gays in camps, and you need to leave the US. Seriously? Where were you during the last trump presidency? It's exactly that attitude, constantly, on MSNBC and NPR and Twitter and Reddit and every niche forum and discord server they can get their claws in, that has people sick of the dems.

Calm down, take a deep breath, go outside, and if it still really matters to you, start hoping the democrats can change the image of their party and develop a campaign where they talk about their own policy more than lying about what the other guy's policy is.

https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-definition-of-fascism/

[Andux]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Sensei]

No I'm really not kidding: all of this talk lost the vote. People are sick of it. The election result hung on people who did vote for Obama but wouldn't vote for Hillary, who did vote for Joe but wouldn't vote for Kamala.

 I'm sure these people didn't just wake up one day and decide to hate immigrants for no reason. They didn't suddenly get converted to white supremacist patriarchy. They didn't just sit in an echo chamber hearing only one side. They watched Kamala and decided they didn't like her, or her talking about trump endlessly. They watched trump and decided they liked him more. Maybe they kept track of the real world violence happening and decided it wasnt Trump's rhetoric that was causing most of it.

And yeah, Kamala's policy was between nonexistent and garbage. Remember when she briefly brought up price fixing, got hate for it, and never got specific again?

I'll say it again: The democrats worked hard to earn this complete loss. They made it for themselves. If you keep on this track, you will only serve to drive more people away.

[Folly]

Bigger concerns are going to be if Trump gets his way on things like tariffs and tax alterations, four more years without a federally protected right to abortion* resulting in more women dying of complications the treatment for which is classified as abortion, and some new supreme court justices.

While any needless death is a tragedy, the number of women dying or being seriously injured by lack of abortion access pales in comparison to other causes of needless death which we have already accepted.

The Supreme Court is honestly already fucked for the remainder of most of our lifetimes; further shifting the ratio won't do much more harm.

But the tariffs are what really concern me. Trump going crazy with tariffs while Musk simultaneously guts the departments responsible for mitigating the fallout from such follies has the potential to to completely destabilize the economy and leave us with no path to recovery. RFK banning all modern medicine with no pushback is also a pretty serious concern.

I really don't think we can afford to underestimate the danger of a multi-pronged attack on our government. We have checks and balances in place, and contingencies for many different scenarios, and Trump's incumbent administration is poised to systematically dismantle all of those safeguards simultaneously.

[Grim Portent]

Bigger concerns are going to be if Trump gets his way on things like tariffs and tax alterations, four more years without a federally protected right to abortion* resulting in more women dying of complications the treatment for which is classified as abortion, and some new supreme court justices.

While any needless death is a tragedy, the number of women dying or being seriously injured by lack of abortion access pales in comparison to other causes of needless death which we have already accepted.

I consider them quite different from most other dangers accepted by Americans,* in that most of the other equivalents have some societal value.

Cars and guns have legitimate uses, abortion bans don't. They're just an abrogation of human rights to bodily autonomy (and privacy for that matter.) Abortion bans causing death are quite particular in how and who they kill, in that those deaths can be prevented with literally no tradeoffs.

*A few of which I consider unnaceptable as a Brit and wouldn't accept in my crountry, but none so egregiously so.

[MonkeyHead]

Look, dont act surprised. Plato observed this millenia ago. The US is going to get the government it deserves, nay, WANTS, as the purpose of a system is what it does. You cant engineer a two party system without expecting populist divisions entrenching or being exploited in the way that they have - it is a known feature of democratic systems. Y'all just better hope a philoshiper king emerges for the next election cycle. The silver lining is that the more awfult the incoming administration is, the more appealing a return to rationality will seem next time around.

[McTraveller]

Broad tariffs are objectively and absolutely garbage, but these are the most likely to occur, sadly.

Tearing down "all the agencies" may sound scary but I don't know that all the GOP senators are going to throw out their pork programs, same with gutting domestic military spending. Gutting foreign military aid, and letting foreign oppressive regimes run unchecked, that's a real possibility. Gutting consumer protection agencies, that's a possibility (depending on how many people those agencies employ, of course.)

Enforcing immigration is also likely to occur, and this will also be a net negative for society. This costs a lot, yes, but the benefits are greater.

Less corporate tax and likely much less antitrust enforcement... this is going to drive the wealth divide. We'll also have record deficits, because although the GOP likes to cut taxes, they don't cut spending enough either.

Climate stuff - the effects are so far off, that we're probably going to see this going in the wrong direction, because "who cares about future generations, when I have to sacrifice some small luxuries today?"

Health Care: repealing ACA will not do anything good, but so many people are still upset that ACA didn't actually bring healthcare costs down, that they want ACA gone just out of spite I think.

My forecast: we're going to get a recession, and there's going to be even worse military action in one or all of Europe, the Mideast, or Taiwan.  Foreign relations will deteriorate further because we basically can't be taken seriously any more. We'll deport a bunch of people, but everyone will still scream that all the Bad Things like the recession are due to DEI and "foreigners" and if we just had stronger borders and were allowed to publicly mistreat people we think are weak/different, we'd be fine.  We'll keep falling behind in technology and manufacturing because we've now shifted from a "let's do it!" culture to a "who can we blame?" culture.  This is the worst part of the Trump cult: only He can save us, everyone else is at fault, and if you don't think He can fix it, you're "the evil within."

[JoshuaFH]

I remember how horrible the last Trump Administration was, exactly as if it was yesterday. The cringe and gall I felt at the daily incompetence was enough to leave permanent scars on my soul. The fact that I'll have to endure that in a manner that is ten times worse as he incompetently destroys the country in what will be the world's dumbest fucking coup in the history of the world, and then leaves America and probably the world in rubble in his wake... It really does feel that the only way I'm going survive the coming years is to give up on real life, retreat into my mind, and dissociate from reality entirely.

[hector13]

Look, dont act surprised. Plato observed this millenia ago. The US is going to get the government it deserves, nay, WANTS, as the purpose of a system is what it does. You cant engineer a two party system without expecting populist divisions entrenching or being exploited in the way that they have - it is a known feature of democratic systems. Y'all just better hope a philoshiper king emerges for the next election cycle. The silver lining is that the more awfult the incoming administration is, the more appealing a return to rationality will seem next time around.

The thing Egan_BW posted (thanks btw, very interesting read!) addresses the “silver lining” as being part of the problem: once a dictator gets into power, they fix the system so that they’re the only ones who can have it.

It may be too early to call it now, but the Republicans have the presidency, senate, probably the HoR, and you can argue they also have the SC, so they are certainly in a position to seize the power if they want.

[Lord Shonus]

Trump may not be particularly bothered about Project 2025, but Republicans control the Senate and are probably on the way to getting the lower chamber too. Harris showed how easily manipulated Trump is during the debate, so it probably isn’t going to take much to get him to sign off on it.

I consider it unlikely that much of Project 2025 will come to pass, enough of the Republican Senate and Congress will not be in favour of various chunks of it to make it impractical. No party on earch passes all their policies without some internal dissent.

There's also considerable ability for a minority party to gum things up (especially in the Senate), and even if the GOP retains the House the margins will remain razor thin. Fighting the legislative parts of whatever agenda gets proposed (which won't necessarily be what's been pushed so far) enough to delay the worst until the midterms is entirely possible.

The bigger problem is that we won't have much ability to actually do anything beneficial on a Federal level unless the Dems make deals or manage to make gains in said midterms. Two or more years where legislative stasis is a best case scenario is not a good thing.

[Grim Portent]

The bigger problem is that we won't have much ability to actually do anything beneficial on a Federal level unless the Dems make deals or manage to make gains in said midterms. Two or more years where legislative stasis is a best case scenario is not a good thing.

Hmm, I sometimes feel the US system is particularly vulnerable to that sort of thing. Feels like you guys get gridlocked nearly as much as Belgium or Stormont* sometimes. Partly by design I know, but there are certainly a lot of things I would change about the system were I designing a democracy from the ground up.

In practice properly transformative legislation doesn't happen very often anyway so that's not much different, a lot of little things that would benefit people are unlikely to happen, but to be blunt they don't seem to get done often either. Disaster relief funds are often a partisan issue aren't they? Dems usually vote for emergency funds to stuff like FEMA, Republicans more likely to oppose IIRC, so I guess any California wildfires or Florida hurricanes might be more problematic.

*Northern Irish regional government. Locks up a lot because the largest Unionist party and largest Republican party need to agree on compromise positions, and usually one or the other isn't willing to due to fundamental disagreements.

[Lord Shonus]

The vulnerability is a major thing in the last few years because partisan control has been so narrow. We haven't had a sustained period were one party had solid majorities both houses of Congress and the Presidency for a long time - every Congress since the 109th (2005-2007, the First part of Bush II's second term) either had narrow majorities, at least one house in control of the other party, or both.