7 ms·

For any Americans reading this, how does it feel right now to have Trump as your leader give what he's enacted in the last week?

by dcip6s 10y ago

Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Horrible. I'm American, but I don't live there. This stuff makes me worry about family back 'home' - and whether I'll be able to get back out again. Do I risk not seeing my spouse or do I hold out on visiting family? My spouse, who is not American, refuses to go back with me if I do. Edit: Some things I thought of after I hit send: I realize this may be unfounded, but things are so... unsure ... right now that I don't trust the government at all. In addition, I'm relying on news and it looks pretty dire. This looks like the sort of policies that American's used to laugh at.
dukeluke 10y ago
Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again. It is sad that many illegal immigrants will be deported, but if we provide a path to citizenship, it sends a message to others thinking about coming illegally that if you come and wait long enough, you'll gain citizenship. That's a dangerous message in my opinion.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again." Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place. You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them. It's the same thinking that, for example has us building m1 abrams tanks that we toss in the desert, never to be used again, because "these people need jobs", despite the military not actually wanting to build them anymore and desperately trying to get congress to let them cancel it. In the best case, this kind of silliness lasts until things get automated. In most cases, this kind of silliness lasts a lot shorter time period than that because your economy is not competitive with others who aren't pretending (IE China, et al). So unless step 2 of this master plan is "somehow completely isolate ourselves from the rest of the world while making tons of money, ..."
  - dukeluke 10y ago
    You also can't build a sustainable economy by importing everything and expecting everyone to be highly educated. Not everyone is capable of earning a degree, and those in the lower class need to have the potential for a comfortable life. Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain?
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      hence, the only real hope being basic income and friends, not sticking head in the sand and pretending world has not changed. You simply aren't going to be able to provide a lower class a comfortable life by giving them work that doesn't actually need doing. Worse, trying probably ends very badly.
      - dukeluke 10y ago
        Ideally you are right, but instead of arguing about an ideal that will never happen in our two-party political system, I think we should try to think of a solution that will at least somewhat work in this country. At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.
        jacquesm 10y ago
        > At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system. But that's the problem right there: It will not work, and in fact it will make things (possibly much) worse.
        DannyBee 10y ago
        But it won't work, and will make things worse. As for "until the system changes": How do you think the system changes if you try to band aid it? Who is then fighting to change it? Systems change not generally in smooth realization that things are not going to go well 50 years from now, but instead when things hit the breaking point and the lower class revolts. See,e.g., the history of the world elsewhere. Sad, but true.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  > The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. Source?
  - dukeluke 10y ago
    Logic. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in a country of about 300 million. Assuming around 7 million of those work & assuming 6 million of those work at or below minimum wage, that means that 2 percent of the population is probably underpaid. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that almost all of that 2 percent is working in some sort of manual labor, whether it's agriculture, construction or housework.
    - denzil_correa 10y ago
      If the logic is so sound, it should not be difficult to prove. So, I'd wait until you prove it via data and get accepted by an independent fora. Until then, this is one of the many plausible theories.
      - newmanships 10y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_i... Tl;Dr - wages for lower class/lower educated minorities are hurt, but employers gain an advantage (lower labor costs). There's also a paper by professor in econ from Cornell about African Americans suffering the most from it, but my phone won't link to the PDF. Outside of academia you just have to go to your local home depot to see how much cheaper you can get someone to come work for you for the day, or go to any massage shop charging $25 / hour instead of $60+ while employing illegal immigrants.
        denzil_correa 10y ago
        Thanks. > while employing illegal immigrants. It's important to note what the original claim of the parent comment was. It was not "illegal immigrants" but "uncontrolled immigration" which includes both legal AND illegal immigrants.
microcolonel 10y ago
I've lived in Canada my whole life, but I'm also a born U.S. citizen. I feel hopeful about the outcome of the election. I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. The nice side effect of businesses not believing that he could become president, is that they didn't have as much time to buy favours. The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S. and perhaps finally undo some long-standing pay-for-play regulations. As it stood, I would have felt terrified and uncertain if I were to start a business in the U.S. one year ago. I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident. The alternatives seemed like they were trying to trick the U.S. into paying for their expensive lifestyles in spite of the consequences to the public.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. This isn't that, it is rather the opposite.
  - microcolonel 10y ago
    If you're thinking that there are more corporate ties to the Trump administration than there would have been to the Clinton administration, I can only encourage you to reconsider. On top of corporate ties, there are even preferential ties to foreign governments.
    - shard972 10y ago
      I still can't believe they actually closed the clinton foundation already. They didn't even try and keep up the charade that it was a legitimate charity doing important work worldwide and absolutely not about buying favours. I guess it's hard to keep going when all that saudi money dries up.
      - 10y ago
CamperBob2 10y ago
To those who are modding people down for answering the parent's question, cut it out.
timwis 10y ago
I can't believe all the other responses to this question were either positive or from someone abroad! Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Awful. It feels like a bad dream that we're expecting to wake up from. And people are _afraid_ of what's to come from the administration, and of the attitude that the election has seemed to condone. The feeling is so strong here that it reminds me of riding public transit on a snow day -- you can generally make any remark to any random stranger about the snow and instantly relate to one another. That's how it is about Trump. His rhetoric does _not_ reflect the views of the majority of Americans (as the popular vote shows).
- drc0 10y ago
  http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-babB4IwUpD4/UAG8Cf1QXzI/AAAAAAAAArA/NRW9AeZ7tD4/s1600/berlusconicompagnone.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-babB4IwUpD4/UAG8Cf1QXzI/AAAAAAAAAr...
- shard972 10y ago
  > Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Consider that hillary won the suburbs of Philadelphia stronger than Obama in the last two elections, and yet trump still won the state...
- mjmsmith 10y ago
  Yes, it is... mysterious. I'd expect the demographic here to be roughly similar to, say, the Ars Technica forums, and yet HN appears to be have many more Trump apologists. I wonder why that is.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Note that the question was asked around 5-8 AM in the continental US on a Saturday morning, so early responses were likely to come from abroad. Like many others here, I'm an American who lives abroad. There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it was concern about the direction the US has been taking in the last 16 years. I'm horrified and terrified of what this government holds for the future. It seems like the US is quickly abdicating its role as guarantor of peace (flawed as it was in that role's execution) and I worry deeply about the possibility of a divided and poorly-armed Europe being overrun by Russian influence or the Russian military. In addition, there is a terrible human cost to GOP policies with regards to healthcare, the environment, and of course telling Iraqis who put their lives on the line for the US that they can just go home and get murdered. I worry that Trump's bluster about voter fraud has less to do with his injured pride at losing the popular vote and more to do with claiming reason to annul any GOP failures in the 2018 or 2020 elections. I can imagine a GOP supreme court, GOP congress, and military with GOP sympathies might be willing to go along with it. The world's democracies, under both conservative and liberal leadership, have been too willing to infringe on their people's privacy, and I wonder where this goes if you extrapolate the trend over the next decade or two. The closest thing we have to a leader of the free world is Angela Merkel, and she's suffered politically for her policies.
woofyman 10y ago
Disturbing, scary and predictable given his campaign rhetoric.
meanduck 10y ago
Not american but as an anti-statist, Im enjoying this.
mikeash 10y ago
At this point, I just hope he doesn't get us all killed. The guy is obviously deranged, and having him at the helm of the US military is frightening.
kylog 10y ago
For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed. Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.
- krapp 10y ago
  Hacker News represents the American tech community, and the American tech community appears to be moving towards an embrace of right wing and neo-reactionary ideology, which is odd given the anarchist and leftist roots of hacker culture. The mythology of Trump casts him in the mold of the Silicon Valley archetype of self-made Ubermenschen like Thiel, Bezos or Jobs, who render the state and the status quo obsolete through sheer force of personal will and aggression.
kylog 10y ago
For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed. Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.
kylog 10y ago
For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed. Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.
krapp 10y ago
I despise Trump, but in a perverse way, I welcome the damage he will inevitably do. The harder he and his staff of racist oligarchs swing the pendulum of American politics to the right, the more swift and brutal the retribution will be when it swings back, as it must. He's going to discredit the axioms of the alt-right, disgrace the Republican party and, hopefully, ruin the office of President so much that actual core political reforms take place if for no other reason than to prevent anything like that from happening again.
lizavp 10y ago
Why have I waited so long to process my dual citizenship?

For any Americans reading this, how does it feel right now to have Trump as your leader give what he's enacted in the last week?

by dcip6s 10y ago

For any Americans reading this, how does it feel right now to have Trump as your leader give what he's enacted in the last week?

Broken_Hippo 10y ago

Horrible. I'm American, but I don't live there. This stuff makes me worry about family back 'home' - and whether I'll be able to get back out again. Do I risk not seeing my spouse or do I hold out on visiting family? My spouse, who is not American, refuses to go back with me if I do. Edit: Some things I thought of after I hit send: I realize this may be unfounded, but things are so... unsure ... right now that I don't trust the government at all. In addition, I'm relying on news and it looks pretty dire. This looks like the sort of policies that American's used to laugh at.

dukeluke 10y ago

Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again. It is sad that many illegal immigrants will be deported, but if we provide a path to citizenship, it sends a message to others thinking about coming illegally that if you come and wait long enough, you'll gain citizenship. That's a dangerous message in my opinion.

DannyBee 10y ago
"Good. The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. My hope is that these actions will increase the wages of the lower class, which will increase the velocity of the dollar in America and get our economy going again." Or, you know, we'll just import whatever it is for 2 cents more instead of paying people to do it. Unless you start to make it artificially expensive to do that through tariffs. In which case, you are essentially trying to prop up the entire economy on a house of cards. Which is what got us into a mess in the first place. You can't build a sustainable economy on pretending things aren't actually cheap and that people aren't willing to get paid next to nothing to do them. It's the same thinking that, for example has us building m1 abrams tanks that we toss in the desert, never to be used again, because "these people need jobs", despite the military not actually wanting to build them anymore and desperately trying to get congress to let them cancel it. In the best case, this kind of silliness lasts until things get automated. In most cases, this kind of silliness lasts a lot shorter time period than that because your economy is not competitive with others who aren't pretending (IE China, et al). So unless step 2 of this master plan is "somehow completely isolate ourselves from the rest of the world while making tons of money, ..."
- dukeluke 10y ago
  You also can't build a sustainable economy by importing everything and expecting everyone to be highly educated. Not everyone is capable of earning a degree, and those in the lower class need to have the potential for a comfortable life. Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    hence, the only real hope being basic income and friends, not sticking head in the sand and pretending world has not changed. You simply aren't going to be able to provide a lower class a comfortable life by giving them work that doesn't actually need doing. Worse, trying probably ends very badly.
    - dukeluke 10y ago
      Ideally you are right, but instead of arguing about an ideal that will never happen in our two-party political system, I think we should try to think of a solution that will at least somewhat work in this country. At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system.
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        > At very least, it will work as an economic band-aid until we can change our political system. But that's the problem right there: It will not work, and in fact it will make things (possibly much) worse.
      - DannyBee 10y ago
        But it won't work, and will make things worse. As for "until the system changes": How do you think the system changes if you try to band aid it? Who is then fighting to change it? Systems change not generally in smooth realization that things are not going to go well 50 years from now, but instead when things hit the breaking point and the lower class revolts. See,e.g., the history of the world elsewhere. Sad, but true.
denzil_correa 10y ago
> The income of laborers and low-wage workers has been artificially suppressed due to uncontrolled immigration working at rates lower than minimum wage. Source?
- dukeluke 10y ago
  Logic. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in a country of about 300 million. Assuming around 7 million of those work & assuming 6 million of those work at or below minimum wage, that means that 2 percent of the population is probably underpaid. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that almost all of that 2 percent is working in some sort of manual labor, whether it's agriculture, construction or housework.
  - denzil_correa 10y ago
    If the logic is so sound, it should not be difficult to prove. So, I'd wait until you prove it via data and get accepted by an independent fora. Until then, this is one of the many plausible theories.
    - newmanships 10y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_i... Tl;Dr - wages for lower class/lower educated minorities are hurt, but employers gain an advantage (lower labor costs). There's also a paper by professor in econ from Cornell about African Americans suffering the most from it, but my phone won't link to the PDF. Outside of academia you just have to go to your local home depot to see how much cheaper you can get someone to come work for you for the day, or go to any massage shop charging $25 / hour instead of $60+ while employing illegal immigrants.
      - denzil_correa 10y ago
        Thanks. > while employing illegal immigrants. It's important to note what the original claim of the parent comment was. It was not "illegal immigrants" but "uncontrolled immigration" which includes both legal AND illegal immigrants.

microcolonel 10y ago

I've lived in Canada my whole life, but I'm also a born U.S. citizen. I feel hopeful about the outcome of the election. I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. The nice side effect of businesses not believing that he could become president, is that they didn't have as much time to buy favours. The proposed rules for regulatory bodies (one in, two out) could considerably reduce the financial and emotional cost of doing business in the U.S. and perhaps finally undo some long-standing pay-for-play regulations. As it stood, I would have felt terrified and uncertain if I were to start a business in the U.S. one year ago. I don't think Donald Trump is necessarily any better of a person than the other candidates; but I think he has a better chance of doing good by accident. The alternatives seemed like they were trying to trick the U.S. into paying for their expensive lifestyles in spite of the consequences to the public.

jacquesm 10y ago
> I'm interested to see what can happen with an effective reset of corporate sponsorship in the highest seat of government. This isn't that, it is rather the opposite.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  If you're thinking that there are more corporate ties to the Trump administration than there would have been to the Clinton administration, I can only encourage you to reconsider. On top of corporate ties, there are even preferential ties to foreign governments.
  - shard972 10y ago
    I still can't believe they actually closed the clinton foundation already. They didn't even try and keep up the charade that it was a legitimate charity doing important work worldwide and absolutely not about buying favours. I guess it's hard to keep going when all that saudi money dries up.
    - 10y ago

CamperBob2 10y ago

To those who are modding people down for answering the parent's question, cut it out.

timwis 10y ago

I can't believe all the other responses to this question were either positive or from someone abroad! Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Awful. It feels like a bad dream that we're expecting to wake up from. And people are _afraid_ of what's to come from the administration, and of the attitude that the election has seemed to condone. The feeling is so strong here that it reminds me of riding public transit on a snow day -- you can generally make any remark to any random stranger about the snow and instantly relate to one another. That's how it is about Trump. His rhetoric does _not_ reflect the views of the majority of Americans (as the popular vote shows).

drc0 10y ago
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-babB4IwUpD4/UAG8Cf1QXzI/AAAAAAAAArA/NRW9AeZ7tD4/s1600/berlusconicompagnone.jpg http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-babB4IwUpD4/UAG8Cf1QXzI/AAAAAAAAAr...
shard972 10y ago
> Perhaps I live in a bubble (Philadelphia), but there is a pretty unified view of how it "feels" right now: embarrassing. Consider that hillary won the suburbs of Philadelphia stronger than Obama in the last two elections, and yet trump still won the state...
mjmsmith 10y ago
Yes, it is... mysterious. I'd expect the demographic here to be roughly similar to, say, the Ars Technica forums, and yet HN appears to be have many more Trump apologists. I wonder why that is.
CalRobert 10y ago
Note that the question was asked around 5-8 AM in the continental US on a Saturday morning, so early responses were likely to come from abroad. Like many others here, I'm an American who lives abroad. There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it was concern about the direction the US has been taking in the last 16 years. I'm horrified and terrified of what this government holds for the future. It seems like the US is quickly abdicating its role as guarantor of peace (flawed as it was in that role's execution) and I worry deeply about the possibility of a divided and poorly-armed Europe being overrun by Russian influence or the Russian military. In addition, there is a terrible human cost to GOP policies with regards to healthcare, the environment, and of course telling Iraqis who put their lives on the line for the US that they can just go home and get murdered. I worry that Trump's bluster about voter fraud has less to do with his injured pride at losing the popular vote and more to do with claiming reason to annul any GOP failures in the 2018 or 2020 elections. I can imagine a GOP supreme court, GOP congress, and military with GOP sympathies might be willing to go along with it. The world's democracies, under both conservative and liberal leadership, have been too willing to infringe on their people's privacy, and I wonder where this goes if you extrapolate the trend over the next decade or two. The closest thing we have to a leader of the free world is Angela Merkel, and she's suffered politically for her policies.

woofyman 10y ago

Disturbing, scary and predictable given his campaign rhetoric.

meanduck 10y ago

Not american but as an anti-statist, Im enjoying this.

mikeash 10y ago

At this point, I just hope he doesn't get us all killed. The guy is obviously deranged, and having him at the helm of the US military is frightening.

kylog 10y ago

For me and many many others I know, it's terrifying and enraging. Also I'm deeply ashamed. Also wrt HN: like some others I am a bit surprised to see the strong Trump support here, but then, hate is so often over-represented behind the shield of anonymity.

krapp 10y ago
Hacker News represents the American tech community, and the American tech community appears to be moving towards an embrace of right wing and neo-reactionary ideology, which is odd given the anarchist and leftist roots of hacker culture. The mythology of Trump casts him in the mold of the Silicon Valley archetype of self-made Ubermenschen like Thiel, Bezos or Jobs, who render the state and the status quo obsolete through sheer force of personal will and aggression.

kylog 10y ago

krapp 10y ago

I despise Trump, but in a perverse way, I welcome the damage he will inevitably do. The harder he and his staff of racist oligarchs swing the pendulum of American politics to the right, the more swift and brutal the retribution will be when it swings back, as it must. He's going to discredit the axioms of the alt-right, disgrace the Republican party and, hopefully, ruin the office of President so much that actual core political reforms take place if for no other reason than to prevent anything like that from happening again.

lizavp 10y ago

Why have I waited so long to process my dual citizenship?