Summary

Trump just presided over one of the greatest diplomatic disasters in modern history, with flared tempers, raised voices, and shredded protocol.

Never before has a U.S. president bullied and berated an adversary, never mind an ally, in such a public way.

During a tense Oval Office meeting, Trump and JD Vance attacked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, demanding he accept a peace deal with Russia or lose U.S. support.

The conversation devolved into shouting, with Trump accusing Zelenskyy of being ungrateful and “gambling with World War III.”

The meeting ended in chaos, with no agreement reached.

  • @[email protected]
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    171 day ago

    They really have you all wrapped around their fingers, don’t they? Your democracy is literally on fire around you and the best both ”sides” can do is bicker whose fault it is.

    • @[email protected]
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      111 day ago

      There was never any democracy to begin with if you can’t vote for whoever the fuck you want, without resorting to “lesser evil” strategies.

      • @[email protected]
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        221 hours ago

        So long as we have strict elections of a singular position like president, you are pretty much going to have to vote for lesser evil. It doesn’t matter how many parties are running, the president is a singular office.

        Other nations with more robust parties sidestep this by having an elected body figure out the executive, rather than direct elections of that office.

        if you want those third parties get them into the house and maybe the Senate, where the task is feasible. For the singular president of the nation, whoever is doing the voting will have to be strategic. I’m disenchanted when I see those parties just make a presidential run without really investing much in the down ballot races.

        The fixes are either removing direct presidential election, or severely curtailing the practical powers of the office. We shouldn’t be so subject to the whims of a singular position.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 hours ago

            Sure, that lets people vote for who they want and still vote for someone that will actually win in a larger election, maybe pick up some more local offices.

            Frankly Democrats should be big on RCV. The hard right and moderate right vote together, but the progressive is more split and a larger chunk refuses to vote strategically, at least if that is their only vote. RCV gives then the ability to vote the way they want to and still vote for a candidate with more broad acceptance.

            Not sure it would have done anything in this presidential race, since there’s no sign of third party vote being enough to change things in any remotely close state. It might have at least relieved the vitriol between would be allies over Democrat voters refusing to vote with the harder left versus the further left refusing to vote strategically with the Democrats.

            There would remain the hopefully miniscule but very loud progressives that think either the electorate goes perfectly for their perfect candidate, or else someone like Trump should win to teach those voters a lesson, and maybe break things so hard that a path forward for their favored leaders to get in power.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 day ago

      Funny how you instantly presumed my opinion was from “They” (whomever “they” are).

      Way to project how you see politics - in a Tribalist and Unthinking “Follow the Leader” way - onto others.

      It’s exactly through reasoning logically up from actual Principles that one concludes that the Democrat Party leadership are nothing more than unprincipled slick grifters representing whomever pays them better (which invariably are some very, very rich people), even when many of the common members of Democrat Party aren’t at all like that but have either been swindled into going along with it (easy to do when people are tribalists and hence whatever their “leaders” tells them needs not be questioned with a keen skeptical eye) or just disempowered via anti-democratic mechanisms such as “super delegates”.

      America is as America is now thanks to all the useful idiots, and that’s both the ones on the Republican and on the Democrat side.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 day ago

      Well, the people aren’t really capable of anything on our own, so what else are we going to do on discussion forums?

      The people who can actually do something continue to pretend they have 0 idea how to do their fucking Jobs, they’re not playing the blame game rn because they’re too incompetent (willing or otherwise) to get that far