Experts query ‘mix-up of priorities’ as president plays golf, posts old pictures and repeats details of Bill Maher feud

More than two weeks into the US-Israel war on Iran, and the conflict appears at risk of spiraling out of control.

Back home, Donald Trump’s behavior also appears chaotic. A foreign conflict typically brings somber reflection from leaders: in Trump’s case, it has brought a stream of behavior that has defied norms and raised eyebrows over his state of mind.

Take last Sunday, for example: the Pentagon solemnly announced that a seventh US service member had been killed in the Iran conflict. Trump spent the day playing golf in Florida, where he appeared to be wearing the same baseball cap he wore during a dignified transfer ritual of dead military members on Saturday.

That same day, Trump spoke at a “Shield of the Americas” summit, alongside a group of Latin American leaders. He told heads of countries, including El Salvador and Honduras, that Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, has “a language advantage over me”, because Rubio speaks Spanish.

  • Gork@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    241·
    5 days ago

    Riley said: “This is a representational dilemma of: how do we expect a person who is a billionaire to actually be concerned about the wellbeing of people who are not of wealth, who are not of that particular economic class? And I think Trump’s behavior shows either he’s a narcissist, or he just simply doesn’t care.”

    I’m waiting for more MAGA folk for leopards to eat their faces over this.

    • givesomefucksEnglish
      91·
      4 days ago

      It’s not just wealth.

      Any isolated social circle will start to exclude everyone else as “them”.

      It’s our brains working as designed.

      Even the founders understood this. It’s why Representatives were originally so powerful and meant to spend most of their time back in their home districts.

      Sending the same people to DC for decades just guarantees the people they represent start to become “them” and other politicians regardless of party become “us”.

      With insider trading and donor/lobbying system, the politicians are getting rolled up with wealthy as “us”.

      I’ve been saying for a while now that we have the tech, reps should be required to spend like 90% of their time in their districts. Have an office, occasionally state level meetups in the capitals, and super rare DC events.

      But the bulk of the work can be done via telework.

      It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but it would limit grifter candidates, make reps face their constituents daily, actually understand their issues, and go a long way to making politicians feel like their actually accountable.

      There’d be no hiding in a crowd of politicians.

      • BilboBargainsEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        It’s not just our political representation, everything is being comodified into some app or other. I can sit at home and do all my shopping without ever talking to anyone. This is bad for mental health.

        The fact that all of the lawmakers are crammed into one place makes it easy for lobbyists to set up shop. If we live next door to our representative we can at least attend afternoon tea with them and on the way out throw a brick throw the window of our local PAC.

        The whole idea of a representative for millions of people is an anachronism from feudal days. How can they possibly serve all their constituent’s interests from atop a giant hierarchical pyramid? On the other hand, we desperately need unified action to tackle the looming climate crisis or we’re all fucked.

        • givesomefucksEnglish
          3·
          4 days ago

          In 1793 each Rep represented 35k people…

          In 2023 it was 761k per each House Rep…

          Representative democracy is fine, the problem is we need like 20x more representatives at least.

          That makes lobbying/bribing that much harder and dilutes political power. As well as giving us a much wider pool for higher office.

          The excuse for freezing the number is number of chairs that will fit in a room, literally, that’s why we lost representation. Telework solves that.

  • cygnus@lemmy.caEnglish
    171·
    5 days ago

    This sounds eerily familiar. I’m picturing him in a bunker, yelling at his generals.

  • givesomefucksEnglish
    81·
    4 days ago

    He’s too used to countries not falling for sunk cost and being willing to walk away to mitigate further damage…

    He killed a literal “supreme leader” and caused a power vacuum where everyone is desperate to establish dominance by showing their feverance to fight what is quite literally a holy war admitted by the three main participants.

    Iran isn’t going to let this go anytime soon. And US and Israel can’t win a war of attrition when we spend 100x the money shooting down what Iran launches. They can keep launch shaed drones from fortified positions in their own territory. They don’t even need forward deployment to hit what they’ve been hitting.

    Any attempt to invade will be a modern d-day. Anything crossing the border will see a constant stream of drones, and everyone that gets thru makes it easier for the next.

    And the only way to get enough bodies for that futile attempt is a US draft. With Trump’s obsession with state voter records, I really wouldn’t be surprised to see them try to institute a draft and almost exclusively take Dem voters or any other demographic they don’t want.

    These days, they’ll likely blame AI if anyone questions it.