You are just getting suspicious? I am really curious what your news consumption over the past 10 years has looked like. That’s not meant to be an insult or anything, I know not everyone follows this stuff like your average poster in political topics, but there was the entire Mueller investigation that tried to answer this back in 2016, and lots of things that have happened since then that just never made it onto your radar.
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Actual, truthful news doesn’t get distributed as well as you might think.
There is the alleged “hookers peeing on him” video.
Yeah, I am naive about politics. I run into conversations and am besides myself when I hear stuff. But I am trying to pay attention.
Guessing his followers would not be upset by that.
If that were the case, he’d be selling it for $50 a pop, autographed for an extra $100.
You are welcome to join us on the informed side. Fair warning though - it’s pretty bleak right now. The more you pay attention, the angrier you will get.
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I don’t want angry…
Civil discussion and not being called a racist, nazi, nor predator though…
Not exactly bail out, but the Taj Mahal was a money laundering operation for the Russian mob
No guarantees, but it does depend on your views and whether they are racist or nazi-adjacent, or if you’re a fan of the Nashville hockey team.
I meant that you will be angry about the current state of our government and how we arrived at this point. As long as you are willing to discuss things in good faith I don’t think anyone here will be angry with you personally.
If the goal is genuine sharing of information, name-calling and broad labels aren’t conducive. I’ve been trying to discuss by actions instead of labels. For example, instead of the nazi label, I’ll describe erosion of first amendment rights by canceling student visas due to writing an op-ed for the school newspaper or liking social media posts expressing an opinion not favored by the current administration.
When Trump entered Presidential politics, I had a hard time understanding how anyone could not be a racist and supported him. It took a while to understand the issues and people in general to gain an appreciation how they can look past things he says and not translate a vote for him into an endorsement of what he posted on social media.
We live in echo chambers. It isn’t just social media and fox news, it is how people express concerns about current events in apolitical conversations. A lot of it may bubble up from those sources, but most people get there just through the balance of those things they come across in their daily lives. My dad is a good example - he spends little time on social media and does not watch fox news, but he makes some pretty bad assessments of how Trump is going to be great for the economy that I think he mostly gets from his golf buddies (the senior crowd from a small town). They aren’t talking about the crap Trump posts on X, but they are generally all speaking favorably of certain things. We can see how that is going.
It’s good to be aware of what is going on, but you do need to take it a level further of understanding the issues beyond that surface level where people take a side and create labels. Empathy is important to avoid getting sucked in to it all.
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The way that Trump managed to not only avoid his own personal debts and instead bilk shareholders out of bajillions in his casinos is actually really impressive. I can’t immediately find a good article on it, the one linked below has some of the details amidst the bloviating, but basically the TL;DR is that he owed a debt personally on his casinos, and declaring bankruptcy would have ruined him. So instead he took 2 of the casinos public, issued a crap ton of junk bonds that only made 1 payment, and used that money to buy out his remaining casino and transfer the debt from him to his company. He then paid himself tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, running through the rest of the money from the IPO and junk bond sale, then declared bankruptcy to walk away from the whole mess. Anyone who bought the stock got trashed.
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Moderately successful old guys in small towns are some of the most arrogant people around. My dad is one of them. They spent much of their lives being a big fish in a small pond and think that their success is an indication of their genius. Every problem is simple to solve when you live in a small, homogenous community.
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That’s doesn’t really describe my parents well as they mostly accumulated wealth through my dad picking up a lot of overtime shifts on a union job and them being frugal with money for 50 years. They are more of the millionaire next door types. But absolutely, there exist plenty of people in their town with that mentality - the “big shot lawyer” types that mostly make money in traffic courts or whatever is fairly mediocre but it puts in them in the top 1% of the town.
I really don’t know any of his golfing buddies but he has described them as pretty average financially. I think they are just old white retired men that aggregated together outside of the nearest big city.
Excellent article by Joyn Murdoch over at the FT
