Who fucking cares what Mike Pence thinks? Republicans hate his guts since Trump turned on him and everyone else has always hated him, and he doesn’t have any political power, so his opinion has like negative news value these days. I guess mainstream media companies just can’t resist his dynamic intellect and incredible charisma /s (that “/s” doesn’t really feel sufficient, he makes Jeff Sessions look smart and Jared Kushner seem human)

Also Pence you forgot you aren’t VP anymore

ABC also forgot, how the hell this moron’s opinion is worth a whole ass news article is completely beyond me

They pretty clearly do matter since we’re all getting what they’re getting

Either way, this would explain the discrepancy between the average policy preferences of the generation as a whole and what the ones who voted in 2024 voted for, we’re basically talking about different groups

Did Trump actually win more young voters overall or just a larger percentage of the voters who bothered to show up?

This only matters if people in the federal government are willing to say “You don’t have any legal authority to tell me to do anything and I don’t want to help you, so go away” which I wouldn’t count on always being the case

A redundant efficiency department with no direct way to make changes, it’s like nominating a sex trafficker to be the attorney general or something

In related news

While Trump has functionally escaped legal jeopardy by winning the election, the other criminal defendant breathing a sigh of relief after Trump’s election is Mayor Eric Adams, who is currently scheduled to go on trial in April on corruption charges. Thanks to Trump, the mayor’s day in court may never come.

Damien Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District whose office indicted Adams, is a presidential appointee who will almost certainly be replaced by Trump. Recall that back in 2017, less than two months into the first Trump term, his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, abruptly and publicly fired 46 U.S. Attorneys who had been appointed by President Obama. That list included Preet Bharara, a mentor and predecessor of Williams.

After getting rid of Bharara, Trump named — and later fired — Geoffrey Berman as his successor. Berman’s days were numbered when he began investigating and prosecuting members of Trump’s inner circle; Berman was replaced by Jay Clayton, a Wall Street securities attorney and golf buddy of the president.

It’s hard to imagine that Williams will not be replaced by Trump and gone long before Adams’s trial date. And that’s where things get interesting.

It’s not at all clear that a new Trump-picked prosecutor will continue the corruption case against Adams, especially in light of the subtle political quasi-alliance between Trump and the mayor. “I know what it’s like to be persecuted by the DOJ for speaking out against open borders,” Trump semi-joked at the nationally televised Al Smith charity dinner. “We were persecuted, Eric. I was persecuted, and so are you, Eric.”

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20241113121556/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-big-win-was-also-a-win-for-eric-adams.html

There’s the Trumpist Republicans, who are unified and devoted, but then there’s everyone else.

Ftfy, there is no such thing as a good Republican, there was decades of bullshit from them that led us to this point and they’ll be fascist scum after Trump is gone. Anybody who can’t admit that simple truth is either too dumb or too cowardly to be given political power.

Me: oh boy i cant wait to unify against all the republican jerks that have been messing stuff up for literally my whole life

Harris: i promise to put a republican on my cabinet have you met my friend liz

Me: oh boy i can’t wait to die

That’s a really complicated question that’s going to depend on what he’s trying to do, but it’s never going to be any one thing, it’s going to be a combination of using legislative procedure and longshot lawsuits to slow things down where we can, having conversations with our families and neighbors about how Trump is fucking up and driving Trump’s popularity down, and some amount of finding workarounds for social problems that don’t require government involvement (e.g. private abortion funds, mutual aid networks, etc).

We didn’t let the USSR decide our troop deployments for us, and we didn’t tell everybody what a great guy Stalin was to sell war bonds. When it comes to potential voters, I agree with you we can’t be picky (like, if they’ve got a problematic stance on trans people or women or people receiving welfare or whatever I’ll try to politely and succinctly tell them why what they’re saying hurts to hear and then steer the conversation back to the many many things we do agree on), but when it comes to the people we put on stages, the people we elect, and the people who advise elected officials on policy and campaigns the Manchins and Kinzingers and Cheneys of the world are poison who will only lose us votes.

Beyond the brain drain, the school to prison pipeline is going to get opened wide, they’re going to jam as many cops into public schools as they can and have them going law and order on kids over stupid shit

I wonder if Biden is happy for his “friend”

It’s a big tent, the people in charge of the party right now suck but there are lots of good lawmakers and staffers in there

with the Tulsi Gabbards switching to red and the Adam Kinzingers switching to blue

Ugh, a future of having to choose between Russian agents and fucking tea partiers sounds bleak as hell, we’ve gotta be able to do better than that

Fair points, maybe I could have put this better. I’m not saying he won’t try, I’m saying we shouldn’t make it easy for him by conceding that he’ll actually be able to succeed.

I mean, tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of people are deported from the country every year already, whether Democrat or Republican presidents are in office,

Sure, I agree that the Democratic party’s collaboration with fascism has been awful. No time like the present to fight for a change in what we’ve been doing.

it’s hard to say what would happen under Trump.

We can make some pretty good guesses about what Republicans will attempt to do. Nothing’s guaranteed but it virtually inevitable they will try to make the situation worse.

From 2016 to 2020 they actually fell to a low of 27k for at least a little bit.

Feels like you’re cherry picking a bit here, but yeah - general Republican antipathy towards bureaucracies and bureaucratic administration sometimes makes them bad at being able to follow through on their plans to hurt people and that’s probably something we can try to take advantage of.

Trump is wrong a lot and lies a lot, I don’t believe anything he says and you shouldn’t either

Besides, acting like there is going to be another election (e.g. talking to likeminded people and trying to organize political coalitions) will prepare us better to deal with the alternative scenarios

Thanks, good luck to you and your family too. Wherever you go, talk to your neighbors and lawmakers, that’s the only way we can make and maintain societies worth living in.

There will be some token deportations of undocumented immigrants that were going to be deported anyways,

Fuck that bullshit, this makes as much sense as saying “well, there probably will be some summary executions of people charged with crimes, but they were gonna be found guilty anyway”.

The only thing working in our favor is Trump’s general incompetence and chaotic headspace, he’s his own biggest enemy sometimes.

He’s got fascist toadies who are very intent on this in his administration who will keep him organized and focused. What we have in our favor is hundreds of millions of Americans who think xenophobia is idiotic hateful bullshit.