16 ms·

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements. Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
It is very strange how he, a master manipulator, missed the obvious danger Covid could cause to his presidency. I mean, really?
- peteretep 6y ago
  You can’t bully a virus or subject it to social pressure
  - afiori 6y ago
    but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.
  - chillwaves 6y ago
    Dude's a carnival barker. He's great at working up the crowds, but that seems to be his only talent. Combined with his obvious deficiencies in other aspects of leadership.
- crowbahr 6y ago
  That's because he's not a master manipulator: he is aggressive and lucky. His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself. This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well. I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?
    - jonsno56 6y ago
      Do you have a source for your uncertainty?
      - lostlogin 6y ago
        The number of politicians handling the pandemic badly.
    - pricecomstock 6y ago
      I would say Andrew Cuomo has handled it decently as a public health crisis, and handled it very well as a means to improve his reputation.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold. Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.
- paulddraper 6y ago
  The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush. I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    You say that like the pandemic and the economic situation this year were entirely unconnected. If the situation would have been handled with more care in the beginning instead of downplaying it, it likely wouldn't have had the economic effect that it did.
    - paulddraper 6y ago
      I passed no judgment about the effectiveness of Trump's actions. Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).
      - hobofan 6y ago
        Rereading your initial comment, I can see what you meant. It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?
        paulddraper 6y ago
        My point is that Trump was indeed aware of the danger to his election odds that a pandemic-related depression would cause, which is why he opposed lockdowns. You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.
- mikestew 6y ago
  He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up. OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.
  - zoomablemind 6y ago
    COVID-19 presented a pat situation, so to speak, for Trump administration. No good moves whichever way to go. Imposing quarantine measures would be going against the very much support base, who not only oppose it, they subverted this into a principle point of distinction synonymous to freedom. Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements". Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate. If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity. It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation. Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- nemothekid 6y ago
  I don't think he missed it. IIRC he was appropriately briefed early enough. I just think he vastly underestimated how bad it would be, and once he realized he was wrong, he brand of machismo prevented him from actual showing a strong virus response. Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.
  - qwerty1234599 6y ago
    Trump literally would've won had he had sent free red MAGA masks to every American in March/April. It was the perfect missed opportunity
    - klyrs 6y ago
      He did one better, by signing the stimulus checks and branding the CDC guideline mailer. If those stimulus checks kept coming, I think he'd have won handily.
      - jimmygrapes 6y ago
        I tend to agree, and I think that is also why no such further checks were issued. Pelosi would not let Trump have that win, at the expense of the people's wellbeing, and the play worked. Not sure how supporters justify that with all the talk of empathy... maybe "it was worth it in the long run"?
        baumandm 6y ago
        This is not accurate. The HEROES Act was passed by Pelosi and the House of Representatives in May, and it would have included stimulus checks. It was never brought to a vote in the Senate. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get-for-a-stimulus-check-under-3-proposals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get...
  - 6y ago
- ma2rten 6y ago
  I actually think it could have been a great opportunity for him. Generally speaking most leader's approval goes up when they handle a national crisis.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    He could have made a fortune on masks with his name and campaign slogans on them, too. Instead, 237k Americans died and 1,500+ die every from COVID, and many Americans are following his lead by not wearing masks.
- marktangotango 6y ago
  There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    That might be the case actually. I do not buy simplistic explanations about being a simpleton bully and such.
- GuB-42 6y ago
  He didn't miss Covid, he had a plan, but it wasn't the right plan. To be honest, no one could make plans, only bets. He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China. Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.
cloudkj 6y ago
+1 my thoughts as well. He's been a stellar QA, stress testing various facets of government, politics, and media.
JohnBooty 6y ago
Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not. We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be) We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective. His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster. The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!
- csnover 6y ago
  > His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster. Senate Republicans were the ones who lowered the requirement for Supreme Court confirmations to a simple majority, not the Democrats[0]. Senate Democrats had reduced the threshold for presidential appointments excluding the Supreme Court as a result of chronic filibustering by the Republican congress during Obama’s term[1]. I agree with you that something needs to be done about SCOTUS nominations. It’s clear to me that the stakes are currently way too high. Turning the court into a political football has created an incredibly dangerous situation that risks undermining its authority and the rule of law. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-senate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fact-check-gop-ended-senate-filibuster-supreme-court-nominees/3573369001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fac...
- clairity 6y ago
  make no mistake, trump did nothing intentionally for the nation's best interests, because he was unable to see beyond himself. he's the quintessential selfish actor, and that behavior has been repudiated by the electorate at large.
redisman 6y ago
He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor. Good new ideas: Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony. Just freaking get out of the Middle East already. Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
- 01100011 6y ago
  I'm looking forward to Trump's caustic personality leaving the equation so we can finally talk about these things in a more neutral way. A lot of people, myself included, cannot look past Trump's obvious flaws despite some of his ideas(at least the overall direction, maybe not the execution) being worth considering.
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    You think this will happen? The political right have openly embraced demagoguery, authoritarianism, disinformation, and a scorched-earth, because-we-can style of politics. The media have embraced the outrage-factory model for improving as revenues. The electorate have committed to becoming single issue voters. And finally, who benefits the most from this quagmire? The corporate elite who fear the threat of government intervention in free markets.
- dantheman 6y ago
  Depends on where you draw the line on the working class; if anything the working class worldwide has exploded as more people have left poverty in the past 20 years than in the past 100.
  - api 6y ago
    Globalization has been awful for the working class in the developed world.
    - bumby 6y ago
gabrielrdz 6y ago
That is a great analogy. I hope lawmakers patch all those holes, because you are right.
vagrantJin 6y ago
Good man must stress test the system. Thats goodwill.
jedberg 6y ago
I worry that the people in charge of fixing the systems are also the ones that benefit most from it being broken. At least with the Chaos Monkey, no one is on the monkey's side.
kqvamxurcagg 6y ago
I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
- bawolff 6y ago
  As a non american, the way people describe american judges by their partisan leanings seems really messsed up to me. I would describe that as not how a judicary should work.
  - marktangotango 6y ago
    Read up on Italian courts and prosecutors for some perspective.
    - bawolff 6y ago
      I'm not particularly familar with italy's judiciary and nothing popped out in a quick skim of the wikipedia article, but if you're saying that there are countries that are worse, i don't doubt it. Being not the worst is not the same as being good or being ok.
    - romanoderoma 6y ago
      Italian here. Could you explain what you actually mean? Our justice system is a sovereign power and doesn't depend on executive power, but is completely independent from it.
  - akvadrako 6y ago
    Only the partisans describe judges likes that. Judges do have leanings, but it's mostly about jurisprudence, like more originalism, or believing the interpretation should consider the intent of the legislator, or lean towards where society in general is leaning. These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.
adrianmonk 6y ago
For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president. I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that. Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.
- nostromo 6y ago
  All historic impeachment votes were (edit: almost entirely) along partisan lines: Clinton, Trump, and Johnson. Nixon was potentially going to be bipartisan, which is why he resigned first — so we’ll never know for sure.
  - akhilcacharya 6y ago
    Trump's wasn't by partisan lines, Romney voted for it.
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      You are correct, but at 48/52 with his vote joining the democrats it’s as close to partisan as one can get without it being complete.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - blululu 6y ago
    Not exactly true. In every trial in the senate, the guilty votes come exclusively from one side, but the not guilty votes are historically slightly more bipartisan. For both Clinton and Johnson, all the guilty votes came from republicans, while all senate democrats and a handful of republicans voted not guilty. Trump's impeachment trial was unique in that it was a straight party line vote. Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached (the Democrats had a large majority in the house), and a large number of republican senators were expected to vote guilty (which would have been unique). He may have been able to escape a conviction in the senate, but the evidence was pretty damning and the American public would have been furious. In some sense his resignation was the only way to salvage the Republican Party.
api 6y ago
I thought the same thing. Expose our system to an inept wannabe despot. Hopefully the system is antifragile and this will make it much harder for a more serious and competent future one.
throwaway894345 6y ago
I've actually had a related but perhaps converse opinion: it's demonstrated the resilience of our government. A lot of people have been noting his authoritarian tendencies and expressing concern that he might refuse to acknowledge election results, and while that appears to be the case, there's no indication that he will have his way (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results). In some countries, a president demanding a stop to vote counting might get their way, but that didn't happen here, and it's good to know that for the endless flack (some fair and some not) America and Americans get, we still have a robust political system.
- joverholt 6y ago
  Just curious, can you Please give some examples of his authoritarian tendencies?
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Demanding a stop to vote counting mid-election. I want to live in a country where we accept the results of a democratic process instead of spreading conspiracy theories, and yes, that goes for the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and the general "we're going to burn this mf-er to the ground if the election doesn't go our way" sentiments as well.
    - brobdingnagians 6y ago
      The reasoning on the demand to stop vote counts was to delay until they could get legal observers in to validate the process, not a bid to stop the entire process altogether.
      - oa335 6y ago
        There were already Republican observers in NV (as per state law) and in PA, including Philadelphia. The argument lawyers are making in Philadelphia is basically incoherent. See the excerpts from the court transcript for PA case.
DennisP 6y ago
That's true. I've been kinda shocked to discover how much our system depends on entirely voluntary norms. It's not nearly as resilient to determined attack as I'd always thought.
dehrmann 6y ago
It also exposed how we've kicked the can down the road with North Korea and China (having to work with local businesses, forced IP transfers, and IP theft). Not that his approaches to either were all that productive; with China in particular, a lot of traditional US allies have similar gripes, so it'd be easy to build a coalition, but not when you're also engaged in a trade war with them.
tshaddox 6y ago
What flaws did the Trump administration demonstrate that weren’t already obviously flaws? Did we actually get new information about previously hidden flaws?
- acdha 6y ago
  That's like saying that a machine gun wasn't more deadly because we already had rifles. Trump made a number of major expansions in claims of executive power: spending money which Congress had allocated for different purposes, claiming immunity to legal investigation, using the DOJ to defend him against civil suits predating his run for office, simply putting people in positions which require Congressional approval, claiming that he could override state health authority decisions related to the pandemic, trying to zero out taxes which he doesn't agree with, etc. He didn't get away with all of it but that Unitary Executive theory is a really big shift away from the American system of government and it happened by fiat rather than some kind of reasoned legislative process. Put more simply, Trump managed to find a position strong enough that he lost the support of even John Yoo, who felt that the President had authority to order torture. https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-executive-power-says-trump-has-gone-too-far https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-...
pmoriarty 6y ago
This reminds me of a story about when Kurt Gödel, who had fled Nazi persecution of Jews in Austria, went to apply for US Citizenship. In the taxi, on the way to the citizenship hearing, Gödel excitedly told his friend Albert Einstein that he intended to talk at the hearing of a flaw he had discovered in the US Constitution that could allow a dictatorship to take over. Einstein managed to convince Gödel not to talk about that at the citizenship hearing, and just answer to questions. But perhaps Gödel wasn't so wrong.
- sova 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on this "flaw?"
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    It's answered in this Quora question. https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-for-the-rise-of-a-dictator https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-f... It hinges on the fact that Electors in the Electoral College don't have to follow the popular vote. " the legislators can change the state law to require Electors to vote for the President regardless of the popular vote."
    - kybernetikos 6y ago
      It was supposedly intended to avoid populism, but given that the electors are likely to be just as influenced by a populist leader as anyone else, it seems like it assumes a level of care picking the electors that isn't really reasonable. Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.
      - pmoriarty 6y ago
        "It was supposedly intended to avoid populism" Populism? You mean democracy?
one2know 6y ago
That's just your viewpoint. Many on the right saw the Obama years as chaotic and flawed, acquiescing to foreign powers, allowing immigration that lead to terror attacks, etc. One thing we can "post mortem" about this election is that people on the left such as yourself are not able to conceptualize other viewpoints. Other political viewpoints you describe as chaos and flawed and you want to "engineer" the goverment to prevent other viewpoints, and thus other political parties. Another thing on the left is that censorship has been fully embraced by the left in a dishonest way. While its true people are banned for violating communtiy guidelines, there is also weasel censorship such as hiding comments under the guise they might offend so that if users want to see alternative viewpoints they have to click 'show more comments'. Deplatforming and shadow banning non-leftist ideas has also taken root. Both of these things eagerly adopted and used in this campaign cycle are Unamerican and dangerous. Your road to good intentions clearly leads to hell, and you are unable to recognize it.
- dlp211 6y ago
  > acquiescing to foreign powers, allowing immigration that lead to terror attacks Things not based in reality. And there in lies the difference. > Another thing on the left is that censorship has been fully embraced by the left If the government isn't doing it, it isn't censorship
  - one2know 6y ago
    Your reality. How many have been beheaded in France in recent weeks by immigrants? Do you even read about those kinds of things or stay in your bubble.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      How does allowing immigration in America lead to people being beheaded in France.
    - phs318u 6y ago
      About 4 orders of magnitude fewer than have died from COVID this year.
pjc50 6y ago
For me, the icing on the cake was the press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping. Someone made a silly mistake in the booking, but either nobody noticed, or couldn't be bothered to correct it, or dared not be the one to tell Trump the mistake had been made. So the President (staff? apparently not him) gives a final press conference in the parking lot of a suburban store. It would be like watching the Emperor of Japan surrender in a dinghy because somebody brought the wrong Missouri. Unforced error. Abandonment of dignity. Refusal to acknowledge the situation. Hallmarks of the administration. (News accuracy notice: while it appears to have been an official press conference only Guiliani was actually there and not Trump himself)
- augustt 6y ago
  I didn't know about this - thank you. I am overdosing on schadenfreude.
  - nallo 6y ago
    One thing I would like to tell democrats now that you are WINNERS. And I mean it with all well being. Is that I think you should really not focus on your opponent but on your own candidate and party. We are all just humans in the end.
- BlackjackCF 6y ago
  I love to think that it's because 1) nobody else would take them 2) the campaign is out of money so this is the only Four Seasons they could afford.
- barrenko 6y ago
  Really so what? This obsession with dignity in politics is peasant, like most of them are half ass decent.
  - jstarfish 6y ago
    It's kind of a hallmark of diplomacy. Leadership should not be as uncouth as the peasantry.
moonbug 6y ago
Peak Orange Hell Site, my dude.
throw0101a 6y ago
> the weak points in the infrastructure of our government You're not wrong, but: > But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. * James Madison, 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  Or as his contemporary French lawyer / philosopher Joseph de Maistre said: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite (Every nation gets the government it deserves)
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democracy_(1926) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democra...
paganel 6y ago
> The postmortem of the last 4 years I don't think the US will have the time for a "post-mortem", this is not a bug that just disappeared/was solved because Trump is no longer president. More people voted for him in 2020 than they did in 2016, the racist things that he has said and done have not come out of no-where, he had (and still has) a strong support behind him, and that support won't disappear over night.
- abc-xyz 6y ago
  He probably received a lot of votes from liberals like myself who see China as the greatest threat the world is facing today, and were thus forced to vote against our interests (since Biden has a history of being pro-China and even said he would end Trump’s China tariffs during the campaign).
  - whateveracct 6y ago
    I mean Trump's China tariffs have been paid for by Americans. Because that's how tariffs work. Have they deterred business with China in favor of moving that business back to America? Or have they just passed the price along to the American consumer?
  - not2know 6y ago
    I agree that China is a big threat, but trade wars is a bad way to address it. History has shown that the US pretty much always ends up losing in a trade war. Mind you, I don't know what the right solution is, but I do know that trade war is not it.
    - abc-xyz 6y ago
      Sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices to try to stop an evil regime. This is one of those times, and besides war then there’s no other solution besides trying to isolate China from the rest of the world and hurt their economy. Trump went a long way towards achieving that goal. It would of course be ideal if EU and all democratic countries got together, but they (just like Biden) unfortunately have no interest in doing so. Biden believe that it’s USA’s self-interest to see China prosper.
krapp 6y ago
>Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. Chief among which was allowing the election of someone like Trump to begin with.
- garmaine 6y ago
  The DNC is as much or more at fault here than anyone else.
  - krapp 6y ago
    They have some fault, yes, but not more fault than the Republicans for selecting him, or the American people, or the electoral college or first past the post voting. At the end of the day, all the DNC did was bet on the wrong horse. Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      I don’t think that’s at all obvious. An ineffectual chaos monkey for 4 more years is arguably better than an effective leader implementing Very Bad policies that we will be stuck with for generations. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I can sympathize with that position.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - krapp 6y ago
        I accept that people will disagree, especially on Hacker News, but I don't consider the willful sabotage of government "just in case" to be a valid form of political exercise. I'm not aware of anything in Hillary Clinton's platform that in hindsight would have made Trump look like the better alternative, or that would have potentially spelled multi-generational disaster.
on_and_off 6y ago
I distinctly remember a tweet from 4 years ago, "this presidency will be a test of our institutions and counter powers". Well, this did not go _well_. I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Biden says the right things, as experienced politicians do. Let's withold judgment until we see what he does.
  - dang 6y ago
    Your comments seem fine, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
clairity 6y ago
what's more interesting in the discussion is how much attention trump is still getting, rather than the winner, biden. we're more relieved by trump leaving than biden entering. trump being such a poor leader still overshadows how mediocre biden is. it's still uncertain what biden will be doing, other than occupying the white house, of any substance for the next 4 years. he talks a lot about unity, but isn't reputed to be a unifying force, so that seems an unlikely pillar of his presidency. he recites a litany of standard democratic policy positions, but without any real conviction (even "bidencare" is clichéd already). does he do anything to moderate political and economic consolidations that have been so detrimental to prosperity and unity over (at least) the last 40 years? doubtful, unfortunately.
lap43 6y ago
It seems you're the actual monkey.
seppin 6y ago
Except for the things he broke that cannot be repaired. The people dead from COVID. The children separated from their parents. What a cold and callus interpretation of a man that did real damage to thousands of people.
hilbert42 6y ago
"Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey" I'm still in shock over how Trump actually managed to get into power. To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him (it woke me up as to how a large percentage of the American electorate actually thinks, and for me that's a worry). You're right, the chaos Trump's created has seen a paradigm shift in the way politics is carried out everywhere, and that's likely not a bad thing. Often things need to get worse before a wake-up call turns them around for the better. We'll wait and see. Trump's initial success, the lemming-like addiction to smartphones/Facebook mania, and the swathes and swathes of crazy, mad and irresponsible behaviour I've seen over the last seven or eight months in response to COVID-19 has truly shaken my view of humanity. I used to think we humans were smarter than we actually are.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him Voting in the US, especially in general elections, is mostly about tribal identity, which explains a lot of that part of Trump's election, and he was largely a political unknown who's campaign was ambiguous enough that people could read what they want into it (By 2020, that last part was no longer true, obviously.) In the 2016 primary, he had the ambiguity factor, celebrity, the Republican establishment having trouble figuring out what he was doing, and a Republican Primary system designed to turn early pluralities into commanding delegate leads to avoid long primary fights which backfired spectacularly for the establishment.
  - hilbert42 6y ago
    In 2016 I put the result down to the general disenchantment in many democratic countries with democracy generally - similar to the 'logic' behind brexit. That I can understand but it's the relative closeness of the vote in this election that surprised me. Earlier I was looking at a live online polling update with maps of both state and popular vote figures. The popular vote map was detailed enough for me to drill down to county level and finer. In states like Ohio, N Dakota and Nebraska with sparce populations and high overall Republican vote one would occasionally (but not infrequently) come across small settlements of 500/1000 or so only 20/50 miles apart where the vote in one was say D-70%, R-28%, Lib-2% and the other almost exactly the opposite with Lib remaining the same at about 2%. This seems to backup your tribal identity point very well. Given that these settlements likely have only trees or farmland between them the figures are actually quite startling. I took into account that some may have been Native American reservations (which I've not yet ruled out), so I resampled in other states with low populations such as Vermont and New Hampshire and found similar instances (of course, with these latter instances the overall state figures had the Democrats in the majority). These demographics are fascinating to say the least and I'm going to revisit them again shortly.
Ygg2 6y ago
Chaos Engineering only works if the next administration is willing to work on the underlying problems, rather than just preventing next Chaos Monkey event. E.g. imagine after using Chaos Monkey to demonstrate the flaws in structure, instead you just fire the people that made it in the first place. I'm not holding my breath for that one. Lot of Dems campaign sponsors don't want to fix those issues.
akudha 6y ago
Indeed. He was completely incompetent in everything he tried to do. Imagine how bad it would be, if he was actually competent. There is a good chance someone exactly like him can come along in the future, except more competent - that is scary to think about
- trustfundbaby 6y ago
  This x10000%. I've been telling my friends this for years that I'm angry at trump but I'm genuinely afraid for the next more refined iteration of him. Hopefully this four years will encourage us not to put our guards down again.
  - akudha 6y ago
    We can celebrate now, but we need to remember that almost 70 million people voted for him, this time. After seeing him on the job for nearly four years :( There is a lot of work left to do
weaksauce 6y ago
unfortunately unless we fix the ills that he exposed those that want to exploit it will be far more competent at enabling fascism.
JulianMorrison 6y ago
Okay, but... next time, please do not give Chaos Monkey the nuclear launch codes? I believe it genuinely was touch and go a few times there.
justin66 6y ago
> Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. > The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements. In many cases a thoughtful analysis will reveal that the "flaw" that was exposed was that a particular function of government required good people being elected and good people being appointed. In those cases it might be a mistake to attempt to update the design or structure of government, when the solution is a lot simpler.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ska 6y ago
I think see what you are saying, but your framing to me supports a dangerously wrong idea that seems to have a lot of currency . Trump is not some sort of wild outside anomaly, his gaining power is more of an emergent property. Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

It is very strange how he, a master manipulator, missed the obvious danger Covid could cause to his presidency. I mean, really?

peteretep 6y ago
You can’t bully a virus or subject it to social pressure
- afiori 6y ago
  but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.
mhh__ 6y ago
Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.
- chillwaves 6y ago
  Dude's a carnival barker. He's great at working up the crowds, but that seems to be his only talent. Combined with his obvious deficiencies in other aspects of leadership.
crowbahr 6y ago
That's because he's not a master manipulator: he is aggressive and lucky. His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself. This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well. I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?
  - jonsno56 6y ago
    Do you have a source for your uncertainty?
    - lostlogin 6y ago
      The number of politicians handling the pandemic badly.
  - pricecomstock 6y ago
    I would say Andrew Cuomo has handled it decently as a public health crisis, and handled it very well as a means to improve his reputation.
whatshisface 6y ago
A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.
lordnacho 6y ago
Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold. Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.
paulddraper 6y ago
The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush. I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.
- hobofan 6y ago
  You say that like the pandemic and the economic situation this year were entirely unconnected. If the situation would have been handled with more care in the beginning instead of downplaying it, it likely wouldn't have had the economic effect that it did.
  - paulddraper 6y ago
    I passed no judgment about the effectiveness of Trump's actions. Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).
    - hobofan 6y ago
      Rereading your initial comment, I can see what you meant. It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?
      - paulddraper 6y ago
        My point is that Trump was indeed aware of the danger to his election odds that a pandemic-related depression would cause, which is why he opposed lockdowns. You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.
mikestew 6y ago
He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up. OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.
- zoomablemind 6y ago
  COVID-19 presented a pat situation, so to speak, for Trump administration. No good moves whichever way to go. Imposing quarantine measures would be going against the very much support base, who not only oppose it, they subverted this into a principle point of distinction synonymous to freedom. Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements". Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate. If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity. It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation. Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nemothekid 6y ago
I don't think he missed it. IIRC he was appropriately briefed early enough. I just think he vastly underestimated how bad it would be, and once he realized he was wrong, he brand of machismo prevented him from actual showing a strong virus response. Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.
- qwerty1234599 6y ago
  Trump literally would've won had he had sent free red MAGA masks to every American in March/April. It was the perfect missed opportunity
  - klyrs 6y ago
    He did one better, by signing the stimulus checks and branding the CDC guideline mailer. If those stimulus checks kept coming, I think he'd have won handily.
    - jimmygrapes 6y ago
      I tend to agree, and I think that is also why no such further checks were issued. Pelosi would not let Trump have that win, at the expense of the people's wellbeing, and the play worked. Not sure how supporters justify that with all the talk of empathy... maybe "it was worth it in the long run"?
      - baumandm 6y ago
        This is not accurate. The HEROES Act was passed by Pelosi and the House of Representatives in May, and it would have included stimulus checks. It was never brought to a vote in the Senate. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get-for-a-stimulus-check-under-3-proposals.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get...
- 6y ago
ma2rten 6y ago
I actually think it could have been a great opportunity for him. Generally speaking most leader's approval goes up when they handle a national crisis.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  He could have made a fortune on masks with his name and campaign slogans on them, too. Instead, 237k Americans died and 1,500+ die every from COVID, and many Americans are following his lead by not wearing masks.
marktangotango 6y ago
There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  That might be the case actually. I do not buy simplistic explanations about being a simpleton bully and such.
GuB-42 6y ago
He didn't miss Covid, he had a plan, but it wasn't the right plan. To be honest, no one could make plans, only bets. He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China. Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.

cloudkj 6y ago

+1 my thoughts as well. He's been a stellar QA, stress testing various facets of government, politics, and media.

JohnBooty 6y ago

Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not. We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be) We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective. His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster. The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!

csnover 6y ago
> His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster. Senate Republicans were the ones who lowered the requirement for Supreme Court confirmations to a simple majority, not the Democrats[0]. Senate Democrats had reduced the threshold for presidential appointments excluding the Supreme Court as a result of chronic filibustering by the Republican congress during Obama’s term[1]. I agree with you that something needs to be done about SCOTUS nominations. It’s clear to me that the stakes are currently way too high. Turning the court into a political football has created an incredibly dangerous situation that risks undermining its authority and the rule of law. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-supreme-court-senate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fact-check-gop-ended-senate-filibuster-supreme-court-nominees/3573369001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fac...
clairity 6y ago
make no mistake, trump did nothing intentionally for the nation's best interests, because he was unable to see beyond himself. he's the quintessential selfish actor, and that behavior has been repudiated by the electorate at large.

redisman 6y ago

He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor. Good new ideas: Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony. Just freaking get out of the Middle East already. Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.

01100011 6y ago
I'm looking forward to Trump's caustic personality leaving the equation so we can finally talk about these things in a more neutral way. A lot of people, myself included, cannot look past Trump's obvious flaws despite some of his ideas(at least the overall direction, maybe not the execution) being worth considering.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  You think this will happen? The political right have openly embraced demagoguery, authoritarianism, disinformation, and a scorched-earth, because-we-can style of politics. The media have embraced the outrage-factory model for improving as revenues. The electorate have committed to becoming single issue voters. And finally, who benefits the most from this quagmire? The corporate elite who fear the threat of government intervention in free markets.
dantheman 6y ago
Depends on where you draw the line on the working class; if anything the working class worldwide has exploded as more people have left poverty in the past 20 years than in the past 100.
- api 6y ago
  Globalization has been awful for the working class in the developed world.
  - bumby 6y ago

gabrielrdz 6y ago

That is a great analogy. I hope lawmakers patch all those holes, because you are right.

vagrantJin 6y ago

Good man must stress test the system. Thats goodwill.

jedberg 6y ago

I worry that the people in charge of fixing the systems are also the ones that benefit most from it being broken. At least with the Chaos Monkey, no one is on the monkey's side.

kqvamxurcagg 6y ago

I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.

bawolff 6y ago
As a non american, the way people describe american judges by their partisan leanings seems really messsed up to me. I would describe that as not how a judicary should work.
- marktangotango 6y ago
  Read up on Italian courts and prosecutors for some perspective.
  - bawolff 6y ago
    I'm not particularly familar with italy's judiciary and nothing popped out in a quick skim of the wikipedia article, but if you're saying that there are countries that are worse, i don't doubt it. Being not the worst is not the same as being good or being ok.
  - romanoderoma 6y ago
    Italian here. Could you explain what you actually mean? Our justice system is a sovereign power and doesn't depend on executive power, but is completely independent from it.
- akvadrako 6y ago
  Only the partisans describe judges likes that. Judges do have leanings, but it's mostly about jurisprudence, like more originalism, or believing the interpretation should consider the intent of the legislator, or lean towards where society in general is leaning. These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.

adrianmonk 6y ago

For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president. I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that. Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.

nostromo 6y ago
All historic impeachment votes were (edit: almost entirely) along partisan lines: Clinton, Trump, and Johnson. Nixon was potentially going to be bipartisan, which is why he resigned first — so we’ll never know for sure.
- akhilcacharya 6y ago
  Trump's wasn't by partisan lines, Romney voted for it.
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    You are correct, but at 48/52 with his vote joining the democrats it’s as close to partisan as one can get without it being complete.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- blululu 6y ago
  Not exactly true. In every trial in the senate, the guilty votes come exclusively from one side, but the not guilty votes are historically slightly more bipartisan. For both Clinton and Johnson, all the guilty votes came from republicans, while all senate democrats and a handful of republicans voted not guilty. Trump's impeachment trial was unique in that it was a straight party line vote. Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached (the Democrats had a large majority in the house), and a large number of republican senators were expected to vote guilty (which would have been unique). He may have been able to escape a conviction in the senate, but the evidence was pretty damning and the American public would have been furious. In some sense his resignation was the only way to salvage the Republican Party.

api 6y ago

I thought the same thing. Expose our system to an inept wannabe despot. Hopefully the system is antifragile and this will make it much harder for a more serious and competent future one.

throwaway894345 6y ago

I've actually had a related but perhaps converse opinion: it's demonstrated the resilience of our government. A lot of people have been noting his authoritarian tendencies and expressing concern that he might refuse to acknowledge election results, and while that appears to be the case, there's no indication that he will have his way (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results). In some countries, a president demanding a stop to vote counting might get their way, but that didn't happen here, and it's good to know that for the endless flack (some fair and some not) America and Americans get, we still have a robust political system.

joverholt 6y ago
Just curious, can you Please give some examples of his authoritarian tendencies?
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Demanding a stop to vote counting mid-election. I want to live in a country where we accept the results of a democratic process instead of spreading conspiracy theories, and yes, that goes for the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and the general "we're going to burn this mf-er to the ground if the election doesn't go our way" sentiments as well.
  - brobdingnagians 6y ago
    The reasoning on the demand to stop vote counts was to delay until they could get legal observers in to validate the process, not a bid to stop the entire process altogether.
    - oa335 6y ago
      There were already Republican observers in NV (as per state law) and in PA, including Philadelphia. The argument lawyers are making in Philadelphia is basically incoherent. See the excerpts from the court transcript for PA case.

DennisP 6y ago

That's true. I've been kinda shocked to discover how much our system depends on entirely voluntary norms. It's not nearly as resilient to determined attack as I'd always thought.

dehrmann 6y ago

It also exposed how we've kicked the can down the road with North Korea and China (having to work with local businesses, forced IP transfers, and IP theft). Not that his approaches to either were all that productive; with China in particular, a lot of traditional US allies have similar gripes, so it'd be easy to build a coalition, but not when you're also engaged in a trade war with them.

tshaddox 6y ago

What flaws did the Trump administration demonstrate that weren’t already obviously flaws? Did we actually get new information about previously hidden flaws?

acdha 6y ago
That's like saying that a machine gun wasn't more deadly because we already had rifles. Trump made a number of major expansions in claims of executive power: spending money which Congress had allocated for different purposes, claiming immunity to legal investigation, using the DOJ to defend him against civil suits predating his run for office, simply putting people in positions which require Congressional approval, claiming that he could override state health authority decisions related to the pandemic, trying to zero out taxes which he doesn't agree with, etc. He didn't get away with all of it but that Unitary Executive theory is a really big shift away from the American system of government and it happened by fiat rather than some kind of reasoned legislative process. Put more simply, Trump managed to find a position strong enough that he lost the support of even John Yoo, who felt that the President had authority to order torture. https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-executive-power-says-trump-has-gone-too-far https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-...

pmoriarty 6y ago

This reminds me of a story about when Kurt Gödel, who had fled Nazi persecution of Jews in Austria, went to apply for US Citizenship. In the taxi, on the way to the citizenship hearing, Gödel excitedly told his friend Albert Einstein that he intended to talk at the hearing of a flaw he had discovered in the US Constitution that could allow a dictatorship to take over. Einstein managed to convince Gödel not to talk about that at the citizenship hearing, and just answer to questions. But perhaps Gödel wasn't so wrong.

sova 6y ago
Could you elaborate on this "flaw?"
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  It's answered in this Quora question. https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-for-the-rise-of-a-dictator https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-f... It hinges on the fact that Electors in the Electoral College don't have to follow the popular vote. " the legislators can change the state law to require Electors to vote for the President regardless of the popular vote."
  - kybernetikos 6y ago
    It was supposedly intended to avoid populism, but given that the electors are likely to be just as influenced by a populist leader as anyone else, it seems like it assumes a level of care picking the electors that isn't really reasonable. Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.
    - pmoriarty 6y ago
      "It was supposedly intended to avoid populism" Populism? You mean democracy?

one2know 6y ago

That's just your viewpoint. Many on the right saw the Obama years as chaotic and flawed, acquiescing to foreign powers, allowing immigration that lead to terror attacks, etc. One thing we can "post mortem" about this election is that people on the left such as yourself are not able to conceptualize other viewpoints. Other political viewpoints you describe as chaos and flawed and you want to "engineer" the goverment to prevent other viewpoints, and thus other political parties. Another thing on the left is that censorship has been fully embraced by the left in a dishonest way. While its true people are banned for violating communtiy guidelines, there is also weasel censorship such as hiding comments under the guise they might offend so that if users want to see alternative viewpoints they have to click 'show more comments'. Deplatforming and shadow banning non-leftist ideas has also taken root. Both of these things eagerly adopted and used in this campaign cycle are Unamerican and dangerous. Your road to good intentions clearly leads to hell, and you are unable to recognize it.

dlp211 6y ago
> acquiescing to foreign powers, allowing immigration that lead to terror attacks Things not based in reality. And there in lies the difference. > Another thing on the left is that censorship has been fully embraced by the left If the government isn't doing it, it isn't censorship
- one2know 6y ago
  Your reality. How many have been beheaded in France in recent weeks by immigrants? Do you even read about those kinds of things or stay in your bubble.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    How does allowing immigration in America lead to people being beheaded in France.
  - phs318u 6y ago
    About 4 orders of magnitude fewer than have died from COVID this year.

pjc50 6y ago

For me, the icing on the cake was the press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping. Someone made a silly mistake in the booking, but either nobody noticed, or couldn't be bothered to correct it, or dared not be the one to tell Trump the mistake had been made. So the President (staff? apparently not him) gives a final press conference in the parking lot of a suburban store. It would be like watching the Emperor of Japan surrender in a dinghy because somebody brought the wrong Missouri. Unforced error. Abandonment of dignity. Refusal to acknowledge the situation. Hallmarks of the administration. (News accuracy notice: while it appears to have been an official press conference only Guiliani was actually there and not Trump himself)

augustt 6y ago
I didn't know about this - thank you. I am overdosing on schadenfreude.
- nallo 6y ago
  One thing I would like to tell democrats now that you are WINNERS. And I mean it with all well being. Is that I think you should really not focus on your opponent but on your own candidate and party. We are all just humans in the end.
BlackjackCF 6y ago
I love to think that it's because 1) nobody else would take them 2) the campaign is out of money so this is the only Four Seasons they could afford.
barrenko 6y ago
Really so what? This obsession with dignity in politics is peasant, like most of them are half ass decent.
- jstarfish 6y ago
  It's kind of a hallmark of diplomacy. Leadership should not be as uncouth as the peasantry.

moonbug 6y ago

Peak Orange Hell Site, my dude.

throw0101a 6y ago

> the weak points in the infrastructure of our government You're not wrong, but: > But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them. * James Madison, 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163

ArnoVW 6y ago
Or as his contemporary French lawyer / philosopher Joseph de Maistre said: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite (Every nation gets the government it deserves)
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. * https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democracy_(1926) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democra...

paganel 6y ago

> The postmortem of the last 4 years I don't think the US will have the time for a "post-mortem", this is not a bug that just disappeared/was solved because Trump is no longer president. More people voted for him in 2020 than they did in 2016, the racist things that he has said and done have not come out of no-where, he had (and still has) a strong support behind him, and that support won't disappear over night.

abc-xyz 6y ago
He probably received a lot of votes from liberals like myself who see China as the greatest threat the world is facing today, and were thus forced to vote against our interests (since Biden has a history of being pro-China and even said he would end Trump’s China tariffs during the campaign).
- whateveracct 6y ago
  I mean Trump's China tariffs have been paid for by Americans. Because that's how tariffs work. Have they deterred business with China in favor of moving that business back to America? Or have they just passed the price along to the American consumer?
- not2know 6y ago
  I agree that China is a big threat, but trade wars is a bad way to address it. History has shown that the US pretty much always ends up losing in a trade war. Mind you, I don't know what the right solution is, but I do know that trade war is not it.
  - abc-xyz 6y ago
    Sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices to try to stop an evil regime. This is one of those times, and besides war then there’s no other solution besides trying to isolate China from the rest of the world and hurt their economy. Trump went a long way towards achieving that goal. It would of course be ideal if EU and all democratic countries got together, but they (just like Biden) unfortunately have no interest in doing so. Biden believe that it’s USA’s self-interest to see China prosper.

krapp 6y ago

>Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. Chief among which was allowing the election of someone like Trump to begin with.

garmaine 6y ago
The DNC is as much or more at fault here than anyone else.
- krapp 6y ago
  They have some fault, yes, but not more fault than the Republicans for selecting him, or the American people, or the electoral college or first past the post voting. At the end of the day, all the DNC did was bet on the wrong horse. Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.
  - garmaine 6y ago
    I don’t think that’s at all obvious. An ineffectual chaos monkey for 4 more years is arguably better than an effective leader implementing Very Bad policies that we will be stuck with for generations. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I can sympathize with that position.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - krapp 6y ago
      I accept that people will disagree, especially on Hacker News, but I don't consider the willful sabotage of government "just in case" to be a valid form of political exercise. I'm not aware of anything in Hillary Clinton's platform that in hindsight would have made Trump look like the better alternative, or that would have potentially spelled multi-generational disaster.

on_and_off 6y ago

I distinctly remember a tweet from 4 years ago, "this presidency will be a test of our institutions and counter powers". Well, this did not go _well_. I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc

throwaway201103 6y ago
Biden says the right things, as experienced politicians do. Let's withold judgment until we see what he does.
- dang 6y ago
  Your comments seem fine, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0&query=community%20identity%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

clairity 6y ago

what's more interesting in the discussion is how much attention trump is still getting, rather than the winner, biden. we're more relieved by trump leaving than biden entering. trump being such a poor leader still overshadows how mediocre biden is. it's still uncertain what biden will be doing, other than occupying the white house, of any substance for the next 4 years. he talks a lot about unity, but isn't reputed to be a unifying force, so that seems an unlikely pillar of his presidency. he recites a litany of standard democratic policy positions, but without any real conviction (even "bidencare" is clichéd already). does he do anything to moderate political and economic consolidations that have been so detrimental to prosperity and unity over (at least) the last 40 years? doubtful, unfortunately.

lap43 6y ago

It seems you're the actual monkey.

seppin 6y ago

Except for the things he broke that cannot be repaired. The people dead from COVID. The children separated from their parents. What a cold and callus interpretation of a man that did real damage to thousands of people.

hilbert42 6y ago

"Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey" I'm still in shock over how Trump actually managed to get into power. To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him (it woke me up as to how a large percentage of the American electorate actually thinks, and for me that's a worry). You're right, the chaos Trump's created has seen a paradigm shift in the way politics is carried out everywhere, and that's likely not a bad thing. Often things need to get worse before a wake-up call turns them around for the better. We'll wait and see. Trump's initial success, the lemming-like addiction to smartphones/Facebook mania, and the swathes and swathes of crazy, mad and irresponsible behaviour I've seen over the last seven or eight months in response to COVID-19 has truly shaken my view of humanity. I used to think we humans were smarter than we actually are.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him Voting in the US, especially in general elections, is mostly about tribal identity, which explains a lot of that part of Trump's election, and he was largely a political unknown who's campaign was ambiguous enough that people could read what they want into it (By 2020, that last part was no longer true, obviously.) In the 2016 primary, he had the ambiguity factor, celebrity, the Republican establishment having trouble figuring out what he was doing, and a Republican Primary system designed to turn early pluralities into commanding delegate leads to avoid long primary fights which backfired spectacularly for the establishment.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  In 2016 I put the result down to the general disenchantment in many democratic countries with democracy generally - similar to the 'logic' behind brexit. That I can understand but it's the relative closeness of the vote in this election that surprised me. Earlier I was looking at a live online polling update with maps of both state and popular vote figures. The popular vote map was detailed enough for me to drill down to county level and finer. In states like Ohio, N Dakota and Nebraska with sparce populations and high overall Republican vote one would occasionally (but not infrequently) come across small settlements of 500/1000 or so only 20/50 miles apart where the vote in one was say D-70%, R-28%, Lib-2% and the other almost exactly the opposite with Lib remaining the same at about 2%. This seems to backup your tribal identity point very well. Given that these settlements likely have only trees or farmland between them the figures are actually quite startling. I took into account that some may have been Native American reservations (which I've not yet ruled out), so I resampled in other states with low populations such as Vermont and New Hampshire and found similar instances (of course, with these latter instances the overall state figures had the Democrats in the majority). These demographics are fascinating to say the least and I'm going to revisit them again shortly.

Ygg2 6y ago

Chaos Engineering only works if the next administration is willing to work on the underlying problems, rather than just preventing next Chaos Monkey event. E.g. imagine after using Chaos Monkey to demonstrate the flaws in structure, instead you just fire the people that made it in the first place. I'm not holding my breath for that one. Lot of Dems campaign sponsors don't want to fix those issues.

akudha 6y ago

Indeed. He was completely incompetent in everything he tried to do. Imagine how bad it would be, if he was actually competent. There is a good chance someone exactly like him can come along in the future, except more competent - that is scary to think about

trustfundbaby 6y ago
This x10000%. I've been telling my friends this for years that I'm angry at trump but I'm genuinely afraid for the next more refined iteration of him. Hopefully this four years will encourage us not to put our guards down again.
- akudha 6y ago
  We can celebrate now, but we need to remember that almost 70 million people voted for him, this time. After seeing him on the job for nearly four years :( There is a lot of work left to do

weaksauce 6y ago

unfortunately unless we fix the ills that he exposed those that want to exploit it will be far more competent at enabling fascism.

JulianMorrison 6y ago

Okay, but... next time, please do not give Chaos Monkey the nuclear launch codes? I believe it genuinely was touch and go a few times there.

justin66 6y ago

> Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered. > The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements. In many cases a thoughtful analysis will reveal that the "flaw" that was exposed was that a particular function of government required good people being elected and good people being appointed. In those cases it might be a mistake to attempt to update the design or structure of government, when the solution is a lot simpler.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ska 6y ago

I think see what you are saying, but your framing to me supports a dangerously wrong idea that seems to have a lot of currency . Trump is not some sort of wild outside anomaly, his gaining power is more of an emergent property. Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]