https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/08/trump-administration-downgrades-european-union-status
The downgrade from nation state to international organisation status reverses an Obama administration decision in 2016 to grant the EU an enhanced diplomatic role in Washington, and is being seen in Brussels as a snub reflecting a general antipathy to the EU in the Trump administration. The president has supported Brexit and has described the EU as a “foe”.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/766246213079498752
Oh...no?
Please...don't?
The following other conversions have taken place
EU: Nation State -> International Organization
Russia: Enemy -> Best Friend
People's Republic of China: Nation State -> iPhone Factory
Australia: Nation State -> Kangaroo Farm
Puerto Rico: Territory -> Nation State (that way we don't have to fix natural disasters)
Maralago: Resort -> Mecca
Thank you for reminding me about the Mr. Brexit thing. I still can't wrap my mind around what the fuck that even means
it means his election was a horrible decision and the people who voted for him were mostly gullible people falling for lies by cretins and also Russia helped get him elected through illegal campaigns and privacy violation
Why would we call Trump 'Mr. Brexit'? We're not a member of the EU.
Well it makes about as much sense as calling him "Mr. President".
Is Trump gonna invade Europe?
I don't know.
Like, fuck. I don't know. I just don't know how or why he keeps on being the president of the US, when he's fucking up EVERYTHING.
We should consider building a wall to keep him out
The EU should start telling Trump what a great idea the wall is so he forces it to be built and bankrupts the country/ties up the US military for a year or so building the fucking thing.
Trump's primary mission as president is to adopt Russian foreign policy as US de facto state policy. In Putin's mind, the European Union represents the ultimate cultural enemy - decadent and godless, eternally scheming against Russia - rather than a necessary institution for maintaining peace and markets. Every action he takes is geared in some way toward dismantling the European Union from within, and a large part of that is undermining citizens' faith in democracy and integration. Ever since crushing the Euromaidan protests in Ukraine, Russia has been feeding into Europeans' delusions about independence and nation-statehood. Putin understands how Europeans misinterpret the post-WWII global order as a burdensome imposition, rather than the soft landing for former empires and failed states. He understands that in a world of nation-states, Russia gets to be the only empire.
This should be a word porn addition, nicely said dude.
What Orpheus didn't explicitly say but implied is that this can be considered further evidence supporting the idea that Trump is a Russian agent.
Why would Trump be against the EU lol. The EU is to its member states what the US was like to its states in the 1800’s. He should be cheering that other countries are replicating the American Success Story ™
And make the U.S. pay for it?
Have you looked at the news recently?
Trump has proven rather conclusively that he would prefer not a member-state model for the US federal government, he'd rather prefer that the US federal government stop existing entirely.
Republican voters have elected a man to the country's top political position who would much prefer to be the last holder of that political position. But not in the dictatorship sense - Trump has no delusions of wanting to run the country through governance. No, Trump fantasizes of being the last President of the United States in every sense of the word - he leaves office, and there's nobody to replace him. Of course, we'd never dream of that happening, but that's his fantasy.
Lest we forget that Trump has done nothing but appoint leaders of United States agencies and departments who are openly against those very same agencies and departments from even existing.
He appointed Ajit Pai as the Chairman of the FCC - a man who has overwhelmingly shown that he has no interest in the FCC performing its duty of regulating means of communication. The FCC has suffered from a textbook form of regulatory capture, as we are all no doubt aware.
He appointed Scott Pruitt as the Administrator of the EPA - a man who has publicly rejected climate change, repeatedly sued the EPA for doing its job, and has been described by a previous Administrator as "conscientiously tearing the place down." Mr. Pruitt has also been subject to a series of controversies during his tenure, and resigned from his position earlier this year to prevent the EPA Office of Inspector General from continuing their investigation on him.
He appointed Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education - a woman who has torn down protections for students against predatory student loans, dramatically reduced the DOE team tasked with investigating fraudulent for-profit colleges, and lied about schools' responsibility not to report students to ICE. She lost a lawsuit that proved she arbitrarily and capriciously delayed the implementation of an Obama-era rule to protect predatory for-profit college loans. She has publicly stated that she is concerned about DOE employees being merely sympathetic to the Obama administration. She is considered one of the (if not the) biggest proponents of publicly funding private schools - including religious schools - through school vouchers instead of funding public schools. She wants to privatize American education. Finally, she has repeatedly engaged in activism efforts promoting education as a religious indoctrination tool.
Of course, his other Cabinet appointments deserve some honorable mentions, including:
A Secretary of State who was the CEO of ExxonMobil
A Secretary of the Treasury who failed to disclose his real estate holdings and his director position in a tax avoidance scheme to defraud the government of tax dollars
An acting Attorney General who has been outspoken in his opposition to the Justice Department investigating the government
A Secretary of Health and Human Services who blew over $1 million of taxpayer dollars on his own private charter jets
A Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who was outspoken in his belief that HUD should not enforce anti-discrimination housing laws
A Secretary of Energy who openly stated that he will abolish the Department of Energy
A Secretary of Veterans Affairs who was instructed by the Trump administration to shut down the VA and privatize veteran healthcare
And finally, lest we forget that Trump is spearheading the 3rd longest federal government shutdown in US history, and the 2nd longest to furlough employees. By next weekend, it will be the longest government shutdown in US history. For the most part, the federal government is no longer operational. Those offices lucky to have had some spare money to survive are dropping quickly. The IRS was the first to go, so we have no way to generate any income. Critically, the federal court system is in the process of indefinitely delaying civil cases and will be essentially closed entirely by the end of next week.
If you read all of that and sincerely believe that Trump wants any form of federal government, I don't know what to tell you.
Americans who are against the federal government itself like many Republicans are, are almost seditious.
Jesus mate, great post but I had hoped there was a hint of irony in my own post, lmao. My point being that anti-EU sentiments by Americans is, ironically, anti-American in a sense. One may deduce that my post is an acknowledgement of Anti-American tendencies by Trump
Its like the American Civil War didn't lead the nation into conceiving solutions for every ideological problem, they were just brushed aside, covered up. Like the Republicans have been turning into modern day Confederates from problems rooted since the civil war. This is why I'm concerned by a possible second American civil war happening in the future. The US still has conflicting ideologies from more than a century ago.
The Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian divide is the deepest ingrained in the culture and society of the US. Rural/Urban, state/federal, Republican/Democrat, Confederate/Union are all forms of this large divide that
permeates the United States.
There is definitely reason to believe it is encountering significant problems, like all things built on capitalism its rapid expansion may have been built on a bubble that has become more apparent as we leave behind the cold war.
As you suggest with your final sentence, the integration of smaller states and regions has less to do with democracy and more a chess game with growing stakes as a result of modern development. This was the outcome of two world wars, which evidenced history was progressing to a point where a cycle of regional crises was becoming more and more destructive while also snowballing together into one big calamity. This led to existential/transformative threats, first in the form of Bolshevism and next in the form of Nazism who both proposed total solutions to the scale of modern problems.
Those stakes and those challenges led us to evolve a grand order of our own, where the export of liberal-democracy through economic integration and then international institutions on top of those relations was the promise of peace. This rapidly unraveled just 20 years later after Soviet collapse and Fukuyama's writings, the democracy index stalling and then reversing somewhat. Namely, Russia failed to liberalize in the 90s and then slid back into conservatism, China proved it could economically develop and expand in influence without liberalization, and conflict in the Middle East has degenerated back into ethnic and sectarian divisions as cold war-era Arab nationalist regimes faltered. Similar trends took place in the former Soviet Union, where there has been more degeneration into cultural conflict.
While our export has stalled and regional issues have slid back into non-ideological conflict, globalization as a form of rebalancing has a) undermined our dominance b) revealed all the internal divisions in the developed world that were previously subdued by prosperity. Namely, it has revealed that the post-WW2 middle class was built on a bubble. We now have renewed dissent on the right and left that stands in contrast to trends since 1945 and 1991, which was towards one refined center. We buried old ideas of social-democracy, nationalism, and communism and refined our politics to be more between liberals and conservatives.
The end of the 'short 20th century' has effectively put us back to where we were before it began, rather than an end of history. We never really solved anything.
I would suggest you take the time to look at international relations with Stephen Kotkin, an expert on IR and Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnWp_kr4tfc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot4OPfWZubM
https://guides.gamepressure.com/heartsofiron4/gfx/word/422259356.jpg
this is a bad run of hearts of iron
Trump's underlings in office make Warren G Harding and his Ohio Gang look like common street thieves in comparison to just how much they are robbing of the American people. And unlike then, we're not at all talking about it right now. It's absolutely absurd, and I'm glad you put this together, thank you.
You really think military spending would even budge if he left the country bankrupt?
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