Why Trump can’t do the things that scare many people - answers to common questions - and relating to kindness and the positives in the world - you are NOT going to end up in a dictatorship
I wrote this originally in response to a tweet on Twitter and thought it would be a good basis for a blog post.
For those of you who think Trump is great and love his picks for cabinet etc, this is not for you.
I am writing this to help anyone who is scared, maybe they voted for Harris or maybe they voted for Trump but never expected Elon Musk to have what seems to be such a big role or worry about the cabinet picks or in other ways are getting “buyer’s remorse”. For whatever reason some people are getting scared and need our help fact-checking.
Trump is the duly elected president, he is the people’s choice in a free and fair election according to the rules of the US democracy and there is no question about that.
But he can seem scary to many people so this is to help with those fears. So I am writing this to help the scared people, most of whom are Harris supporters. My fact checks are NEVER political in intent, it is just to help anyone scared whatever it is about, and it is not about changing the vote which has already happened.
This is the tweet I am responding to:
i've shared your resources about Trump, but some common replies i get are
"he doesn't care about the law/constitution."
"he'll do what it takes to bend the rules"
"his cabinet is all on his side."
"we didn't think he'd overturn RVW, either."
how do i respond?
https://x.com/ChelleDoggo/status/1857874282031825324
Yes he doesn't seem to care much about the law / Constitution. But the law / Constitution cares about him.
Every officer in the army AND in the civil service swears an oath to uphold the US Constitution also every Judge and Justice.
He will soon find that he can't do these things.
This may help
Trump can’t start a world war
is not a hawk
and can’t order a general to go against the US Constitution
TEXT ON GRAPHIC
All soldiers and officers will protect the US Constitution with their life and will NOT obey illegal orders.
All ranks are thoroughly versed in the Law of War.
To follow an illegal order is a war crime.
No matter who gives the order
A four star general will have NO HESITATION telling a general he can't obey.
President's choice must be at least 1 star alredy.
Generals are assisted by military lawyers.
A four star general has a team of lawyers on tap.
A president can ONLY appoint 1-star generals and above to command and ONLY withapproval of Senate.
The Supreme Court is NOT on his side. The Jan 06 trial would still be going ahead if he hadn't got elected.
Trump has the worst record of any president at least sine 1937 with the Supreme Court. The only president to lose more than half his cases.
This may help:
On Roe v. Wade the Justices didn't lie. They said they would take reliance into account. I go into that in my Roe debunk. This is important because though the reasoning seems very strange to non lawyers it is NOT political.
The reason they decided in this eccentric way on Roe is because Republican presidents for many years chose justices specifically for past records on topics related to Roe.
It is NOT because of MAGA loyalty and their rulings on other things will NOT be aligned with MAGA 6/n.
It's not at all clear that his eccentric choice of cabinet will get through. If they do - they will be loyal but ineffective. A bit like putting a tattoo artist in charge of Microsoft. They will be out of their depth and not achieve much. Likely resign or be fired soon.
Unsuitable Trump candidates will be stopped by the Senate
- Trump will be UNABLE to skip Senate confirmation
with “recess appointments”
- Democrats can stop full recess with a filibuster
Pete Hegesth, Fox News Host
- Trump's pick for Defence Secretary
- Nothing like enough experience to run the Ministry of Defence
Has out of date eccentric views
- wants to forbid women like these from serving alongside men in the armed forces
Also my
TEXT ON GRAPHIC:
Why medical experts don't want JFK jr near public health.
No problems with healthy food.
But his vaccine misinformation could lead to the return of diseases vanquished from the Americas decades ago.
4 Republican senators are enough to block his confirmation.
Polio has almost been eradicated from the world - but it can return if vaccination rates drop below 90% as is happening in Gaza Strip.
Easily stopped with vaccination.
1 in 100 are paralysed for life in legs, arms or breathing muscles.
1 in 100 to 200 eventually die.
Last case:
Oceania: 1990
Europe: 1996
North America: 1990
South America: 1991.
Cases in 2023:
Africa: 509
Asia: 27
Graphic shows polio cases from:
- and Musk's unofficial advisory post has no power - likely clashes with Trump soo
TEXT ON GRAPHIC:
Elon Musk won’t be Trump’s poodle. Trump with Patton, a Goldendoodle cross between poodle and golden retriever.
only president never to have a pet.
Photo of Patton from: Trump's First Dog $PATTON (@patton_on_sol) on X
at one point there seemed to be some potential for him to choose Patton as a pet but he never did.
in
Yes Trump breaks accepted ways of doing things - but now has 20+ wannabe Trumps in the House doing the same all with different ideas
On rule breaking - yes he breaks the accepted way of doing things.
He now has 20+ Freedom Caucus MAGA extremist rebels in Congress.
Like 20+ wannabe Trumps all with different ideas that will make it hard to impossible to pass legislation without help from democrats.
See:
The president as a servant of the people - and some of his picks for cabinet are a bit like putting a trapeze artist in charge of Microsoft
The president is a servant of the people, he just carries out the laws enacted by Congress, and all subject to the US Constitution, interpreted by the Judiciary. Congress has authority over what a president can do. He is very limited without it.
We are 2 months away from Trump's inauguration and from the way it's shaping up it seems likely to be an ineffectual presidency with Trump sure to fall out with Elon Musk probably early on, and likely with some of his other picks, with some at least of them rejected, with him surrounded by advisors who don't know what they are doing with no previous experience of jobs anything like what they are supposed to do - a bit like gardeners who don't even know you are supposed to water plants. Or someone who got a job teaching Japanese who doesn't speak a word of the language.
It's like putting a trapeze artist in charge of Microsoft.
They are just going to run into one problem after another and he likely fires many of them or they retire just as in his first administration though for different reasons.
Well that's my prediction 🙂. I am NOT ABLE TO SEE THE FUTURE and am just an ordinary flawed human.
But from his picks it doesn't seem like it's shaping up to be a very competent government. And the tiny House margin will make it hard to pass any laws and Rick Scott losing in the leadership contest is an early indication that the Senate won't do as they are told.
Elon Musk as a likely early split with Trump when he fails to save him $2 trillion
The Department of Government Efficiency will be only advisory and can't have any powers at all. That’s because it would have to be set up by Congress to have any powers and also because Elon Musk couldn't head a body that has any real powers as he'd have to put SpaceX into a blind trust to do that because of government ethics rules and the huge contracts SpaceX gets from the government.
See again: SECTION: Trump will also have the same problem of the first term of a revolving door presidency - Elon Musk won’t be Trump’s poodle for instance
in
I know that Elon Musk says he is going to trim $2 trillion from the budget but actually the executive doesn't have that level of control. There is a small amount of funding they can save on but nothing like that much and they can't defund departments.
Only Congress can do that. The Republican party in Congress is extremely diverse, it would be a coalition of about 5 different parties in a country with a system or tradition of coalitions nstead of two party system.
It took nearly 20 years to close down the by then completely useless Board of Tea Examiners who tasted imported tea. If it still existed today, Elon Musk wouldn't be able to close it down, only Congress.
Trump is expecting Elon Musk to find him $2 trillion of savings but he won't be able to do that and when that happens we all know what Trump does, he fires him and finds someone else.
Incidentally for any who worry about Musk maybe some day becoming president, he can’t. He wasn’t born in the USA.
When talking to people who don’t listen - then try not to in the argument but just leave the door open
And then not try to win the argument but just leave the door open :).
I focus on helping people who are scared and want help.
SECTION: How to talk to people who don’t listen, contradict, and argue ... - Mike Ryan of the WHO
Trump’s habit of accidentally doing good things
Writing from the UK I find it puzzling to understand why anyone voted for Trump. It just doesn’t translate into anything that would make sense in UK politics.
So what is Trump’s appeal in the USA?
I do not find it credible that many in the USA voted to
end democracy,
install Trump as a dictator
or take away their own rights
I think most voters who voted for him understand at some level that he can't really do that.
I speculate it is to do with
free speech laws,
a strong constitution,
Trump's charisma
his way of accidentally doing things that work out well even against his own intentions.
The best explanation I saw from one Republican on TV was that they see him as someone who will disrupt the way government is done and they want it shaken up because they don't like the way it is working now.
So perhaps they see the confusion and disruption he creates as itself a good thing shaking up the government to lead to unexpected solutions?
It reminds me a bit of the computational technique of “simulated annealing”. This is a classic problem of the traveling salesman who has to visit a number of destinations spread over a large area and can visit them in any order. Which order is best? In this case they are airports in Europe and joined by flights along straight lines. It is a remarkably hard problem to find the best solution - though you can find reasonably good solutions quite easily.
For a simple version of the problem, you suppose there is a direct route between each one and all he has to do is to minimize the total flight distance. This is far too complicated to find the solution by trying out all possible routes once the number of cities gets very large though for small paths it is solvable by checking everything.
Well it turns out one of the best ways to solve it quickly is to start with a random path through them all. Then you jiggle the paths around in a way that resembles raising the temperature - and then gradually cool it down, do less jiggles, with restraints on the path that guide it towards shorter total paths.
Perhaps Trump does something like this? Jiggles things up forcing others around him to rejoin the dots sometimes into an accidentally better solution?
However he does it, the one thing I can understand is that he often has accidentally done good things.
his summits with Kim Jong Un where I think he accidentally hit on the right tone for the leader, combination of threats and flattery, talking up the economic potential for his country of the deal, and talking about building luxury hotels in North Korea which has some beauty spots that would be attractive to tourists if it was opened up - and going right to the top which you need to do negotiating with a Confucian leader.
his operation warp speed for vaccines where it is kind of accidental because he did little to help people get vaccinated when he lost the presidency, but he still got vaccinated himself.
withdrawing from the Paris Agreement I think actually led to the rest of the world taking more not less action on climate change, it may be a factor in how much action we've done since then.
the first president to give Ukraine any military support and if he hadn't given them the javelin anti-tank missiles, Biden might not have either and Latvia and Lithuania would have found it harder to give them the Stingers politically and they would have found it significantly more difficult in the battle for Kyiv in spring 2022.
Domestically in the US he was responsible for the big per person payouts in 2020 that helped support many people during the recession and set up the conditions for the recovery with Biden continuing the same, so he took on trillions of dollars of debt to protect the economy in COVID which a more traditional Republican might not have done.
he also did some revisions of tax that the Democrats also thought helped the economy as they kept them.
And it is true he didn't start any wars.
It’s important to realize though, nor did Biden.
Trump set up the conditions for withdrawing from Afghanistan, which he thinks led to the Ukraine war - if so surely the Ukraine war would have happened as much under him as Biden
I also don't think he'd have stopped the Hamas attack, if anything he made the conditions for it stronger by his support of Netanyahu. So I don't buy those arguments at all.
But he did, mostly accidentally, do things that were good for the world.
by misleadingly claiming that NATO countries owe money - they don't actually the 2% is about boosting their own military not about paying anything to the US or anyone else - but with all that goading he probably boosted the amount they spent on funding their miltiaries which led to their militaries being more prepared for assisting Ukraine and to present a stronger front to Russia after the incursion.
You can't run history again but without Trump if it was Clinton instead in 2016 it might not necessarily have been a better world by now, different but not necessarily better.
Of course, Democrats would have many reasons to prefer that history with Clinton winning, but after it has happened there were pluses from a Trump term that might not have happened under Clinton.
It is of course permitted in the US constitution to elect a convicted felon.
He is not immune from prosecution as a president. That much is clear from the evidence Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed before the Jan 06 case was closed down (it is now in the process of being closed down).
See:
. Judge in Trump 2020 election case unseals more evidence from special counsel
What is the use in much worry, and finding kindness everywhere
Also even if there were lots of problems to come what is the use in much worry?
TRANSCRIPT "When we face some problem, if there is a way to work on it, then make effort. If the situation is such that there is no way to overcome it, then there is no use in much worry." [Dalai Lama's comment on the quote] A very realistic and very scientific way of thinking.
1:17:40 into this video (181K views · 4.4K comments | Compassion and Love | His Holiness the Dalai Lama will give a talk on Compassion and Love followed by a question and answer session online from his residence in Dharamsala,... | By Dalai Lama | Facebook):
He goes on to talk about how he applied this advice to his exile from Tibet and his interactions with China and the Chinese people.
Those were awful times for the Tibetans, their way of life destroyed by invading Chinese. But "There is no use in much worry"
When you can do something then make effort
If the situation is such that there is no way to overcome it, there is no use in much worry
It is a very practical way of dealing with things.
You can simplify your life a lot by focusing on things you can do something about.
Also looking for kindness in the world.
As the Dalai Lama put it:
Dalai Lama : "love and compassion predominate in the world. And this is why unpleasant events are news, compassionate activities are so much part of daily life that they are taken for granted and, therefore, largely ignored.."
Compassion and the Individual | The 14th Dalai Lama (The Office of His Holiness The Dalai Lama | The 14th Dalai Lama)
Every time you hear of something horrible in the news your mind focuses on it. But when you hear of someone being kind - you probably wouldn't bother to share it, don't mention it to anyone, such stories sink down in the news and are hardly noticed.
Not necessarily to go around telling others to do that but it can be a useful way to lead your life if you find it useful :).
Need to respect Trump voters to protect democracy
As a Trump voter put it in our group:
"We are not racist, we are not supporting the fall of democracy, we are not looking to have him as a dictatorial leader or oppress minorities, we simply made a choice we thought was right. "
If you are a Harris voter, we all need to respect those who voted for Trump. They didn't see what you saw in him.
Scared people worry about what Trump can do and we are helping fact check those fears.
But it only adds to your anxiety and worry to see everyone who voted for Trump as anti-democracy, or racist etc when they are NOT.
They are ordinary kind people like you. Likely about half our group members from the US voted for Trump. Other people in your community and often in your own family may have voted for him. There are many families where some voted for Harris and some for Trump.
As Kamala Harris put it:
QUOTE STARTS
"Now, I know folks are feeling and experiencing a range of emotions right now. I get it. But we must accept the results of this election.
"Earlier today, I spoke with president-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory. I also told him that we will help him and his team with their transition, and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.
"A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results. That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny. And anyone who seeks the public trust must honour it.
"But hear me when I say: the light of America's promise will always burn bright. As long as we never give up. And as long as we keep fighting.
And we will also wage it in quieter ways in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbour. By always using our strength to lift people up, to fight for the dignity that all people deserve.
This is how to PROTECT DEMOCRACY - to support the principle of peaceful transition of power and that Trump is the people's choice and has won.
And part of that is respecting the right of other people to vote differently from you in a free and fair election.
Everyone is equal. It doesn't matter if they are
the CEO of Microsft or Facebook
the wealthiest person in the world
a winner of the Oscars
have Olympic gold medals
are a Nobel Laureate
the current US president or a former president
Everyone has the same one vote as you do. And your vote is just as valid as anyone else's and is counted equally with them.
This respect for the people's choice is the VERY FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY.
This is how to PROTECT DEMOCRACY - to support the principle of peaceful transition of power and that Trump is the people's choice and has won.
This respect for the people's choice is the VERY FOUNDATION OF DEMOCRACY.
And part of that is respecting the freedom of choice of those who voted for Trump.
At the same time you continue to stand up for everything you see as right. And Trump’s decisions are his alone, “the buck stops here”. He is the representative of the people the servant of the people.
But it does NOT mean that those who voted for Trump are responsible for ANYTHING he does. It doesn’t work like that either. For instance Trump alone is responsible for his cabinet picks, not the people who voted for him.
Trump is accountable to the voters. In the worst case he can be impeached, or more usually if voters don’t like what he does they will vote against his party in the mid-terms. But voters who voted for Trump are not responsible for what he does.
Here is more of what Kamala Harris said in her concession speech in context:
We can all be the brilliant brilliant billion stars of the future
We can be the brilliant brilliant billion stars of the future. And Trump is not going to be able to do much. I know he keeps hitting the news every day. That is what he is good at, being in the news, saying dramatic things.
But for most, it is in the world of ideas rather than anything real happening.
If you ground yourself in what is happening in the real world rather than in the imagined / conceptual world of ideas then it's not that much and after 4 years of this then it's on to the next president.
And I expect pushback from some of this right away for instance in Senate nominations. Trump is testing the limits of what a president can do and he'll find there are limits.
And those limits will keep you safe from the worst excesses of what he might try to do.
Then there's Kamala Harris's brilliant brilliant billion stars. By always using our strength to lift people up and fight for the dignity all people deserve.
"And we will continue to wage this fight in the voting booth, in the courts and in the public square. And we will also wage it in quieter ways in how we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking in the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbour. By always using our strength to lift people up, to fight for the dignity that all people deserve.
...
"Don't ever stop trying to make the world a better place. You have power... and don't you ever listen when anyone tells you something is impossible because it has never been done before.
"You have the capacity to do extraordinary good in the world.
...
"And I'll close with this. There's an adage an historian once called a law of history, true of every society across the ages. The adage is: only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.
"I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time, but for the benefit of us all I hope that is not the case. But here's the thing America, if it is, let us fill the sky with the light of a brilliant, brilliant billion of stars.
"The light, the light of optimism, of faith, of truth and service... and may that work guide us, even in the face of setbacks, toward the extraordinary promise of the United States of America.
SEE ALSO
BLOG: Senate moderates will discard Trump’s more unsuitable government appointments - Trump will be UNABLE to skip Senate with “recess appointments” - Democrats can stop full recess with a filibuster
BLOG: Trump can’t start a world war - is not a hawk - and can’t order a general to go against the US Constitution
BLOG: Trump won’t be able to pass anything except blandest partisan laws or bipartisan with Democrats - with only single digit majority in House and 47 Democrats can filibuster to stop most laws in Senate
BLOG: Seeing through clickbait news - BBC example - ambiguity in title can give a false impression to naive readers that UK could be attacked by Iran - and tips to see less clickbait and sensationalism
BLOG: Effect of Trump's tariffs if implemented fully: inflation doesn't fall so much (+0.8%) - global GDP is reduced slightly (-0.5%) - but Congress has to pass these NTR tariffs with a tiny House majority
SEE: For anyone trans who is suicidal or scared - or trans kid or relative - many in US care about trans kids - many states are pro trans - science is solidly behind you - and Supreme Court also
SEE: It only takes 4 senators to stop RFK from becoming head of HHS - risk is misinformation leading to return of diseases eliminated from the Americas long ago - but vaccines still help protect you
BLOG: Trump’s presidency will have only the minutest effects on global warming - indeed he is betting on the wrong horse on fracking with the world AND the USA moving increasingly towards renewables - DRAFT
BLOG: How Europe is Trump-proofing NATO - it can defend itself from Russia and ALSO support Ukraine without the USA - Biden is helping Europe transition to a Trump term where the US no longer leads NATO
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NEW SHORT DEBUNKS
I do many more fact checks and debunks on our facebook group than I could ever write up as blog posts. They are shorter and less polished but there is a good chance you may find a short debunk for some recent concern.
See Latest short debunks for new short debunks
I also do tweets about them. I also tweet the debunks and short debunks to my Blue Sky page here:
Then on the Doomsday Debunked wiki, see my Short Debunks page which is a single page of all the earlier short debunks in one page.
I do the short debunks more often but they are less polished - they are copies of my longer replies to scared people in the Facebook group.rough Ukraine and will do so no matter what its allies do to support Ukraine.