Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.

Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson’s trail of tears.

I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.

The Inflation Reduction Act was the most powerful climate law ever passed in the US, and it was significant enough that it forced European countries to pass similar legislation.

It certainly doesn’t fix climate change suddenly, but it’s incorrect to say Democrats are as bad. They’re at least meaningfully trying. Trump and Republicans are actively wanting to make things worse.

I agree, but then you have to have a discussion about what actual voting fraud looks like, and also involve climate change.

I have attempted to do this with a few Republicans these days.

It generally ends with them become irate, loud, angry and throwing out insane nonsense.

Well that would make you the actual only person I have ever met that has said any opinion I have about politics is too /optimistic/.

I have spent my entire life being called overly pessimistic about the political nature of America, and while I have been wrong about some things and learned /why/ and then learned more, you are again the only person who has ever said I am too optimistic and this is both baffling and in a weird way sort of validating.

For my full actual outlook for the future, I am basically educated guessing that while the financial elites of America have been so far successful in convincing a good number of non poor people that the economy is in a sort of low growth holding pattern, this will fall apart due to the now for several months ongoing military/piracy fun going on near Yemen.

No amount of financial fuckery and op eds will be able to mask the downturn which I estimated several months ago now would cause such significant logistical strain on basically the global capitalist machine in general that it would result in an actual negative GDP print for the US economy in either Q1 2 or 3 of this year. The UK has apparently already had that happen.

What this means is the economy will officially shit itself and basically barring Trump literally being incarcerated, he will win over Biden.

If Trump /is/ literally incarcerated, enough Republicans will lose their minds that they will basically attempt to secceed even harder and basically do something like another insurrection and/or mass wave of basically domestic terrorism to the point that it will be obvious that the US is balkanizing.

While I consider this Trump being incarcerated scenario overall less likely, if Trump wins he will basically end American democracy and his total inability to have any kind of policy that makes any kind of sense will basically lead to horror misery and further impovershment of the masses, while he basically just orders his goons to order their goons to direct the idiot violent followers of his to be brownshirts.

Either way, the climate has now basically indisputably passed the 1.5C threshold, is actually basically trending closer to the worst case scenario envisioned by the last IPCC that actually bothered to model such things, possibly even worse, which means we are guaranteed basically everything most people need to routinely purchase becoming more expensive, more failing infrastructure, more unchecked corporate greed, hundreds of millions of climate refugees in this decade alone, and we in America will basically either be having a civil war or being crushed under an authoritarian boot while this happens.

There.

Am I still too optimistic?