This wouldn’t happen today. Today there is talk about Canada becoming 51st state; there is relatively little opposition to that - on the contrary, the perception of Canada as a US ally drops in the US[1]. Four more years of this and I could see people similarly accepting tanks. And if you want to prevent this, the time to act is now.
Surely no one currently in power wants Canadians to vote in U.S. Federal elections? So it has to be a setup like Puerto Rico (U.S. citizenship without representation in Washington) or even American Samoa (no U.S. citizenship). The 51st state thing does not make sense at all.
Yes. For 10 years now, we’ve been hearing how hysterical the predictions about Trump’s actions are. And then he does them. And goal posts are moved, frogs are boiled, whatever analogy you prefer. Dude’s, right now, disappearing people against court orders to forced labor camps in other countries with no due process. He’s talking about taking over Canada and Greenland. What makes you think this is unrealistic? Why do you believe what you believe?
At best -- at best -- the rhetoric about Canada and Greenland is just yet another distraction from all the other domestic crap he and Musk are pulling. At slightly less than best, he wants to scare other countries into making concessions favorable to the US (or at even less than best, favorable to Trump and his cronies).
But yes, I would not be terribly surprised if Trump were to use boots on the ground -- or at least the threat of such -- to expand the US's territory in some way.
Underestimating your enemy, or buying into all these media talking points about his will-they-won't-they energy and "epic trolling", will have disastrous effects. The most culpable person down the list after the apathetic are those who refuse to take tragedy and security threats seriously.
Did you forget we recently spent over 30 years of military operations in Iraq? Or our current military support of an ongoing genocidal religious massacre? What exactly is your threshold for fucked up shit?
All of this is a strawman. I said nothing about the other side of the aisle, and they get no excuses either. But whataboutism is not a valid argument nor an excuse for this current administration's behavior.
> significant drawdown under Trump
Dude is literally going full empire mode right now with our neighboring allies. And he also got very close to starting a war with Iran on his way out of his last term. And now he is continuing to support the same genocide as his predecessors, and siding with Russia over the Ukraine conflict. He is an absolute clown and an illegitimate tyrant.
> Has the US government been out of control for decades? Sure. Is Trump doing something uniquely bad? I've yet to see it.
Status quo has never been a legitimate excuse for tyranny.
> All of this is a strawman. I said nothing about the other side of the aisle, and they get no excuses either. But whataboutism is not a valid argument nor an excuse for this current administration's behavior.
If your position is that Trump is doing something crazy then you absolutely need to show how what he's doing is different from baseline. And if you're suggesting people should have voted against him, which tends to be implicit in conversations about the president, then the alternative they would be voting for is absolutely relevant.
I don't need to bother when the man himself will be the first to proclaim to you that he's done more in his first 100 days of this term than any prior president. He can't shut up about it.
> And if you're suggesting people should have voted against him, which tends to be implicit in conversations about the president
I'm not suggesting anything other than what I explicitly stated, and this kind of predisposition, bias, whatever you'd like to call it, is the entire issue of this conversation with you. At each turn, you pile on another straw man, telling me how I must be thinking instead of earnestly finding out exactly what I have to say. There is no value in such an exchange.
> At each turn, you pile on another straw man, telling me how I must be thinking instead of earnestly finding out exactly what I have to say.
You stepped into my conversation with someone else. The statement I called out was:
"For 10 years now, we’ve been hearing how hysterical the predictions about Trump’s actions are. And then he does them. And goal posts are moved, frogs are boiled, whatever analogy you prefer."
If that's not a statement you want to defend then there is indeed no value in your participation.
> You stepped into my conversation with someone else
This is hacker news, that's the point of threaded conversation. I presented fine counterpoints to your arguments, and you failed to effectively engage them, instead moving to straw man arguments. There is a reason your post was flagged to death. This is the end of our conversation.
> > For 10 years now, we’ve been hearing how hysterical the predictions about Trump’s actions are. And then he does them.
> We've been hearing hysterical things about every Republican candidate for at least 30 years. Nothing ever happens.
I think you replied to something you made up to avoid replying to the actual thing. It was that in case of Trump apparently there is a history of ppl saying "surely it is joke and president would never do that" but then the president does exactly that. Not about hysterical things talked about US presidents.
After many cases where he said "I'll do that" then people like you said "no that's insane he's not going to do that don't worry" and then he does it, a sane person should assume that maybe he talks without thinking but then he sticks to what he blurted. And those things include attacking allies bordering with USA
So it can be up to USA military to uphold constitution or do what president says.
It looks like Trump's second presidency is very different from the first and a bunch of things actually happened like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43511213, renaming of international water bodies, rugpull meme cryptocoins, DOGE and stuff it does, appointing convicted criminals to the gov, tax cuts on the rich, tariffs on allies (UK/Taiwan), pardoning darknet druglord, disappeared a Muslim student and terminated her visa apparently for coauthoring a pro-Palestinian op-ed in university newspaper (https://apnews.com/article/tufts-student-detained-massachuse...) etc.
> It looks like Trump's second presidency is very different from the first
That's a pretty big backpedal from "For 10 years now, we’ve been hearing how hysterical the predictions about Trump’s actions are. And then he does them."
I didn't give those examples but stuff was happening during first presidency too (the wall, abortion, Jan 6). And now it keeps happening except more often & worse. Both can be true.
A curse of the old is that they are doomed to see the world only as they have always known it, to always be "right," leaving them at best to die bitter; at worst, confused.
