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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • “What the hell do you have to lose” is one of those great little artifact statements from 2016. The kind that kinda could plausibly work for him back when he was a “political outsider” but I don’t think it really works on anyone these days.

    Even among his cult, there’s an understanding and an acceptance of the fact that Trump essentially runs the republican party now. Everyone’s bowed down, everyone’s paid homage. Almost definitionally now, being in the republican party means you are pro-Trump. That may very well be the only metric upon which GOP politicians are judged in the modern day.

    “What the hell do you have to loose” is one of those kinds of statements that worked in the context of “the establishment running the party aren’t racist enough don’t have your best interests at heart so why not give me a shot?” that comes with a kinda tacit admission that “I’m probably not going to be much better”. But in 2024 Trump’s just not the outsider anymore. He is the republican establishment.

    Among the many other delusions he is clearly trapped in, I think he’s also trapped in the delusion that he’s some kinda evergreen outsider, despite the fact that he served four years as president and another four basically running the GOP opposition. I think that delusion is not helped by the fact that the republican base is so rabidly anti-intellectual that you kinda have to present yourself as “an outsider” in order to get anywhere, but if it’s an outsider your looking for Trump just aint it.










  • It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this but not only is such an arrangement impossible without federal input (as the comment from tal states) but I seem to recall seeing that a lot of the counties looking to join the greater Idaho thing are some of the ones most dependent on the Oregon state government for funding. If they did manage to leave then it’d actually probably be a net boon for Oregon in terms of state resources going to places where people actually live.

    The resultant Greater Idaho though? Suddenly saddled with a bunch of counties that need a lot of help to maintain services and seemingly a general political attitude of the government shouldn’t help people. In my personal opinion it’d turn pretty fucking distopian pretty quick, that is of course assuming that they could somehow get Oregon, Idaho and the federal government to agree to their scheme. I don’t think it’s going to happen, even if they can get some counties to sign off on it. But if they did the people of those same counties would likely come to regret it not long afterwards.

    Also just as a brief note I think my information on this is like more than a year old and I don’t think I could find it again to to quote it. So if someone has better/more up to date info that negates anything I’ve said feel free to post it.