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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Halls of Shrewd'm / US Policy
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Author: Dope1   😊 😞
Number: of 84361 
Subject: Re: States Finding Backbones
Date: 08/25/25 7:30 PM
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The picture that Trump and right wing media paints of big cities is a false one.

Some things are exaggerated. Others are very much true.

Trump’s plan for blue cities will make things immeasurably worse.

Oh, they've largely been on a glide path of "Worse" for many years now. Deciding that "We're gonna eradicate homeless!" and setting up incentives to create an entire Homeless Industrial Complex, for example. Or the de-policing, let's find alternative ways to "rehabilitate" criminals absent any real consequences for some very serious offenses as another.

All these policies had very predictable bad outcomes but given that most blue cities are REALLY blue - there is no semblance of an opposition party - these things were implemented.

I'm not going to respond to the "police state" stuff any longer. You're free to dream up whatever scenario you like. It's clear what Trump is doing: He's highlighting high crime rates in blue cities in an attempt to energize the Republicans that live there *and* pick off more blue coalition voters at the same time. He's forcing the democrats to defend bad results.

In other words, he's using the Clinton and Obama governance playbooks against YOU: the Permanent Campaign.

aei.org - Wp content

Blumenthal described the permanent campaign as a combination of image making and strategic calculation that turns governing into a perpetual campaign and “remakes government into an instrument designed to sustain an elected official’s popularity.”

...and he's doing it by constantly forcing democrats to defend poor results.

He's also very good at making the democrats play perpetual defense, something he learned was vital in his first term. That's a lesson from Sun Tzu:
Whoever is first in the field and awaits the coming of the enemy, will be fresh for the fight; whoever is second in the field and has to hasten to battle will arrive exhausted.

https://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html

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This community has written 84,309 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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