Genuinely ignorant here, but historically speaking, is it normal for the president to bad-mouth the previous administration so openly and often? Especially in writing like this.
The characters in the whack pack seem the use Andrew Jackson as a model. He was similarly tasteful and also a disaster.
There is no advantage to doing this unless you are a vindictive, angry, petty PoS.
The important thing to keep in mind is that it is all fiction and it is ONLY Trump saying these things. It is important to let authoritarian ideas die on the vine rather than endlessly debate the strawmen and keep them alive, IMO.
As I recall, other Presidents might decry Congress etc. but would almost never out-and-out criticize the direct previous official actions taken by the office of the Presidency.
Huh? Can you offer a single example of this pre-Trump?
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/orders/
Also unprecedented is the use of Executive Orders to govern, as opposed to legislating through Congress, but that is not an entirely Trumpist thing, as Congress has been (take your pick) failing to govern/applying checks and balances for 20+ years now and across multiple administrations.
I think that if the candidates can’t get a majority of the population to vote for them (not just a majority of the voters), the office should remain vacant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_United_States..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Calling it a “gift” somehow manages to add an extra level of ick in my mind.
Yeah, it's a gross lie. The "gift" is clearly a fee.
So transactions are the opposite of a zero-sum game, they are a win-win game, where both parties end up winning. Because value is subjective.
1 million dollars seems exceptionally cheap for a US resident visa with no strings attached.
In Canada some provinces have a similar process where you can run a business for a year and apply for permanent residency. In my city there were a bunch of weird little, clearly unprofitable franchises - bubble tea was one for a long time - where the owner was basically running it at a loss to buy citizenship.
It seemed to require a little more commitment to the community and effort than just handing over a big bag of cash. They've discontinued it in Ontario now, which has probably contributed to the glut of unoccupied commercial real estate.
Also, anecdotally, a friend just immigrated from Scandinavia to the US 3 months ago. He's loving it and has no plans to go back despite the political situation.
Most people are fairly isolated from the day-to-day political show. Life keeps going more or less the same across different presidents.
The related “Platinum Card” on the other hand makes me absolutely livid. It means that for $5 million, there’s a status available that is arguably better than US citizenship, granting 270 days of presence in the U.S., and exemption from US taxation. I am a U.S. citizen who spends <30 days per year in the U.S., and I can’t even open an ISA in the UK where I live due to the US’s global tax rules, let alone anything more complex. To have citizenship based taxation and then grant a special status to foreign wealthy individuals is a slap in the face of decency.
270 days in the U.S. is also long enough to become tax non-resident in whatever country you’re spending the other 90 days in, making it likely that you’d be tax resident nowhere.
Just this week we found a homeless and black guy swinging from trees.
On the front a picture of Trump.
On the back pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln weeping in despair at the sight of Neu Amerika.
A million bucks? Should have made it a billion.
