I’m only 20 years old, I’ve never voted or even really bothered paying attention to any other election, and I dunno it kinda feels like I started on one that was really crazy? But I’m not sure maybe every election has been insane and I just didn’t know because I wasn’t paying attention.
It’s easy to forget all the shit Ashcroft said he was going to do, like misinterpret existing laws to go after porn producers, harrass gay folks, all kinds of other Christofascist shit. Then 9/11 happened, and this is a pretty good summary of what happened:
he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of September 11th to do so.
But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we’ve seen in this country since World War II, who sought… who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done.
And I think ultimately he’ll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.
I’m thinking worldwide. George Bush paved the way for a lot of populistic right wing politicians in other countries, showing that reckless incompetence is fine as long as you put on a suit and pretend to know something about economy.
He then dragged the entire ensemble of headnodding clowns into a war in Iraq on a false premise. Yes, Saddam was an asshole and needed to go, but he did not have chemical weapons. The entire war was about taking full control of oil, that Bush’s croonies had planned long beforehand.
Then there was a little financial crisis called “the great recession” in 2007 and onwards, and of course history has a tendency to point backwards, but I think it’s fair to say that the complete lack of oversight of the financial institutions was the main cause. The cause of this crisis was G. Bush Junior and all the other conservative government leaders in suits claiming to be “fiscally responsible”. If only they had been “financially conservative” that would’ve better, but they didn’t even attempt. It was pretty much as irresponsible as it gets.
I don’t think Trump or the USA as a whole can litteraly destroy the environment, because they’re not that many, 300m people of 8 billion worldwide, and I also don’t think Trump will initiate any wars directly, but they’ll do nothing to stop the existing wars, and we will see a worldwide financial crisis as soon as the next budget doesn’t get approved or earlier.