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Cheez Whiz's avatar

I saw that clickbait headline and thought, naw. Then Edroso restacked it. Ok, I'll read it. As you sort-of said, its Explanation #2 of What They're Really Doing. It doesn't conflict with my theory, which is that Trump's been fed a story that the height of American wealth and power was the end of the 19th century, and abandoning that system was the cause of all our troubles. No doubt dear old Dad taught Trump his history, but there are people around him telling this story. But why feed him that story?

My own Grand Unified Theory that I've pitched a few times here and elsewhere is apparantly too dumb to even mock, but here it is. The one thing uniting the theocrats, tech bro futurists, libertarians, whatever Miller is and devoted Trump voters is a burning desire to destroy the modern administrative state to return to a 19th century federal government focused on the military and collecting tariffs and other fees and little else. Grabbing assets for pennies is a nice lagnappe but that destruction is the goal. A federal government that can't afford to do stuff is much easier to drown in a bathtub. This has been an explicit Republican goal for a long, long time. Trump is the battering ram, a weapon. He's the only possible President deluded enough to believe the story he tells, that tariff $ will flood in and simultaniously industrialists will invest in American factories that will sell those same goods to Americans.

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Bern's avatar

Alla these theories just read more or less like bog standard Republican dreams of the last hundred or more years. Linking them to the vision of god-willed dominion, plus the unattended firehose of modern media just gets them further along their path.

Even the deranged incompetents have a place – every Republican probly has, or at least knows of, a mouth-breathing cousin who couldn't piss in a bucket if it was strapped to the front of his tighty whities. Those people could easily get ambassadorships.

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