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For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope t
by jebronie 6y ago
For me the bottomline of the Trump administration is that he has started zero new wars, sparing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. As an outsider I hope that the US will not go back to its foreign military interventions.
- tsimionescu 6y agoThat is good, but counts for very little when he has helped sow the seeds of numerous other wars, especially by rolling back most climate change fights.
- Helloworldboy 6y agoThis is pure aimless, embarrasing reaching
- newherefordc 6y agoHe got lucky with foreign policy, and he did start a war against immigrants and people whose skin color is not white in the USA itself, led by Stephen Miller.
- jebronie 6y agoHow high is the death toll, how many cities where obliterated?
- Grakel 6y agoEntering the country illegally makes you a criminal. Trump got 40 percent of the Hispanic vote.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoLatino vote is currently responsible for almost all of the house seat flips for republicans, especially in CA.
- ookdatnog 6y ago> Entering the country illegally makes you a criminal. If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes. By that definition, everyone who has ever received a parking ticket is a criminal too, though. Seems more sensible to reserve this loaded term (in US context) for the violent crimes and property crimes the FBI releases statistics on.
- slumdev 6y ago> If you define "criminal" as "any person who has committed a crime", and "crime" as "any illegal act that can be punished by law", then yes. A criminal is a person who commits a crime. It is possible, by ceasing to commit crimes and making restitution to society, to return to a state of non-criminality. But while one is still committing a crime, no amount of hand-waving or pearl clutching can make a non-criminal out of someone who is actively committing a crime. For an illegal immigrant, this would mean either lawful settlement or deportation. Until an illegal immigrant either earns the right to settle or leaves the country, that person is still a criminal.
- vharuck 6y agoTo carry with the driving violation analogy, if you've ever gone above the speed limit but not been ticketed, then you are still a criminal. You have not ceased committing that crime.
- slumdev 6y agoAssuming you've stopped speeding, you have ceased committing the crime, but you have not made restitution. There's a difference.
- ookdatnog 6y agoI know people who systematically drive over the speed limit. I disapprove of it, but I wouldn't call them criminals. You can justify doing that by being sufficiently pedantic about definitions, but I don't think you gain anything in the public debate by lumping "people who speed" in the same category as burglars, murderers, etc. In most discussions, it's not productive to view these people as belonging to the same group.
- mseidl 6y agoCrossing the country "border" is simply a misdemeanor(like driving without insurance). But if you're a refugee there is no "illegal" way to cross. You can cross where ever then once you make it over you can apply for refugee status.
- googthrowaway42 6y agoHe said criminal, not felon. A misdemeanor is a class of crimes.
- matsemann 6y agoAre the lives saved before or after including the hundreds of thousands of covid related deaths?
- justinzollars 6y agoThe Syrian proxy war killed 500,000 Syrians. The war in Iraq killed 1 million.
- jebronie 6y agoTrump has not created the virus and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci. The UK, Spain and Belgium (all with the advantage of socialized healthcare) did even worse judging by per capita deaths. So he can't be that bad. I also think its quite disingenuous to compare his handling of the virus to the suffering and deaths caused by wars that only serve to establish economic and power advantages.
- jackson1442 6y ago> and followed the independent advice of Dr. Fauci Care to point out to me where he did this? As far as I can tell, he wants to fire Fauci, has continuously disregarded his advice, and loves undermining him: * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-fire-fauci-chants-after-election/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-rally-fire-fauci-chants-a... * similar, via AP https://apnews.com/article/trump-threatens-fire-fauci-rift-disease-57c804db048aa7f1c99f227b495f52e6 https://apnews.com/article/trump-threatens-fire-fauci-rift-d... * https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trumps-dumbfounding-refusal-encourage-wearing-masks/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/25/trumps-du... * https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-wears-face-mask-in-public-first-time-coronavirus https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-wears-face-mask-in-pu... (note the date on this one-- 11 july) * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/trump-fauci-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/us/politics/trump-fauci-c... * https://apnews.com/article/00a1dc6f5932c9fe778ee5e9cabacc71 https://apnews.com/article/00a1dc6f5932c9fe778ee5e9cabacc71
- jebronie 6y agoWhat moral calculus allows deaths from a pandemic, even if the by-product of negligence and mismanagement, to be placed on the same moral plane as deaths from bombs, drones, tanks and bullets, or the displacement of tens of millions of people from the War on Terror, or the slave markets and anarchy that still persist after the NATO bombing of Libya championed by Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, or the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from the U.S.-supported bombing campaign of Yemen that began under Obama? - Glenn Greenwald
- justinzollars 6y agoI'm 38 and Trump is the first president in my lifetime to not start another war. It is a big achievement.
- titzer 6y agoWhich war did Bill Clinton start again?
- gscott 6y agoHe tossed a few rockets around https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/bill-clinton-al-shifa-sudan-bombing-khartoum https://jacobinmag.com/2016/10/bill-clinton-al-shifa-sudan-b...
- dragonwriter 6y agoSo did Trump, so if you are just looking at that and not, say, the Balkans, I'm not sure why Trump gets any extra credit here. Of course, there's probably some dispute over whether intervening to prevent genocide, either in general or in the specific manner it actually occurred under Clinton in the Balkans, is really a negative.
- bjoli 6y agoHe definitely didn't start it, but there were US missiles landing on at least 3 continents. I was a child at the time, but it was such big news that I still remember two of those occasions.
- ivalm 6y agoKosovo war was US led (not opposing it, but definitely under Clinton)
- AntiImperialist 6y agoHere he boasts that he did want to start many but the Republicans kept blocking him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbUAzGzTh_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbUAzGzTh_g
- 6y ago
- noobermin 6y agoHe did however increase the number of drone strikes and other skirmishes in the middle east and Africa.
- anonu 6y agoI can also tell you that many people in the middle east are sad to see Trump leave. His strong stance on Iran and some of the new alliances and shakeups in the region regarding Israel, though possibly done through some brute force, have certainly changed the status quo, possibly for the better. Just yesterday Trump administration sanctioned Gibran Bassil, a corrupt Lebanese politician who is very close with Hezbollah. I hope Biden has the same sense to chase these guys down...
- archagon 6y agoCertainly not the Kurds.
- Helloworldboy 6y agoIn your opinion, is it the responsibility of the US to intervene and spend american lives in every regional conflict in the middle east? Democrats hate war until it’s a republican president avoiding it, then they become hawks.
- benignslime 6y ago"don't start wars" "chase them down and assassinate them" See where your hypocrisy lies?
- bosswipe 6y ago> His strong stance on Iran In other words, you just like the side of the war that he picked.
- rideontime 6y agoWould it reassure you to know that the foreign military interventions never actually stopped? https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/trump-yemen-war-civilian-deaths/ https://theintercept.com/2020/10/29/trump-yemen-war-civilian...
- amykyta 6y agoBottom line or at least some silver lining?
- lsiebert 6y agoOne doesn't have to declare war to wage it. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more-than-bush-and-obama-combined-2020-10?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-have-bombed-yemen-more... Also he also didn't take Covid seriously, thus helping contribute to hundreds of thousands of people dying? It didn't have to be a political issue.
- dannyw 6y agoPolitical administrations are big: failures in some areas don’t nullify successes in other areas.
- randomsearch 6y agoIt's not so simple, I think, to say that by avoiding war he saved lives. The US withdrew from Syria, and it does appear to me that for a moment that were a sense of morality from Trump there, he genuinely did not like the idea that lives would be lost as a consequence of his actions. That is commendable, though perhaps something that should have been considered in advance of such a situation rather than reactively. But what was the consequence of not intervening? It created a vacuum, into which stepped many military powers, and many people have died or been displaced. We also have to consider the long-term consequences of an isolationist foreign policy. There is a balance to be found between war-mongering and exerting influence to shape the world positively. Particularly, you have to avoid leaving a vacuum that can be exploited. At the least we can say he didn't start an arbitrary new war, and that is a small but significant positive.