> Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.

This is true but not a novelty. The US has been doing all kinds of things to harm its markets for decades, e.g. artificially constraining the housing supply, using tax incentives and manipulating interest rates to goose consumer spending and in the process drive up consumer debt, and let's not even get into all the ways it molests the healthcare market.

That isn't to say that they're good -- those markets are very messed up -- but things like this are bad, not new.

> Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other.

The H1B program has been widely abused for a while now and in general the US is in need of significant immigration reform. Many of the things Trump does are stupid, because of course they are, but the general premise of "hey wasn't this supposed to be for researchers and scientists rather than mechanic-level IT work" seems to have something to it here.

You can't say we're importing the best and brightest while also doing everything possible to make it so that someone who is a doctor in another country with a world-class medical system has to basically start over from scratch in order to be a doctor in the US.

And then people will have much to criticize about what Trump is doing. But okay then, so do something better instead of all the doing nothing that was happening before.

> It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.

It clearly wasn't. The problem is we need some kind of structural reform -- a system that doesn't allow wasteful programs to accumulate and increase in number over time -- but that would require a functioning Congress, which has instead been doing everything it can for decades to abdicate their role to the executive branch. Which has term limits and therefore the attention span of a goldfish for those kinds of structural problems, and then we end up back in the situation where either no attempt is made to fix it or the attempt is amateur hour because it's attempting a contextual fix to a structural problem.

2024 Democratic platform [1] word counts:

  men:         4
  woman/women: 86
  gay:         3
  transgender: 8

[1] https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTE...

It's true, the Democratic party found themselves in a bit of a pickle during the 2024 election. But it's because the party has been obsessed with the trans culture war for over a decade, culminating in the Biden admin's demands that all womens' spaces be opened up to men who self-identify as women. Prisons, college dorms, sports teams, school locker and shower rooms... there is no place or program that a male wouldn't be able to access the instant he said he was a woman. These principles of self-identification and gender identity as a protected characteristic were being enshrined in government rules and regs at all levels, from Title IX, HUD, Department of Corrections, to countless state and local rules.

Remember Kamala telling the ACLU in that she would provide taxpayer-funded gender affirming surgeries to illegal immigrants if elected president?

If Democrats really didn't want to have that debate you mention, why do they lean so heavily into the trans stuff to begin with?

They talked about it because they knew the median voter disagreed with the Democrats.

Biden was by far the most effective and most progressive Democratic president of the post-WWII era.

What "hammered home" the disillusionment was not Biden's actions*, but rather the media narrative built around him, particularly by the newspaper most identified with the Democratic Party: the New York Times. They were angry that he didn't give them deference early on, and that, combined with the desire of their wealthy Republican owner to push his politics, led to the constant drumbeat of stories about Biden's supposed "cognitive decline", when he's still much sharper than Trump.

ETA: ...not to mention totally ignoring all his very real accomplishments, like forgiving the student debt of millions of people (yes, despite not getting as many as he wanted, he really did achieve that) and the infrastructure bill.

* His inaction, particularly on prosecuting Trump, was a separate matter.

Lots of people know trans people (by which I mean people that have decided to take some visible action to transition) by now - the people in the boonies and flyover states have access to the same internet as everyone else, so a lot of people outside the most progressive cities have transitioned. You have to remember that trans had been at the front of the culture for 10 years (since Caitlyn Jenner) by the time of the 2024 election.

The stocks didn't really go down yet and their media sources are distraction agents.

Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to jump up and say there’s a deep cultural rot in America that, if it weren’t for the fortune of incredible financial success, would have us be seen as a hellhole of antisocial maniacs.

That being said, I just don’t buy into the notion that the strategy of the party from 2016-2024 (maybe 100 Trump rallies per year?) can carry over into the late 2020s / early 2030s.

If anything, this is me saying everyone is aware that the current window for reactionary politics in America is closing as Trump loses his vigor and gets closer to being too old to do what he did between 2014 and 2024. The reactionaries in the government and behind the scenes may make one last desperate grab at maintaining power.

There's no law of nature that proves democracy can't be overthrown, but ICE is currently struggling against popular resistance to merely enforce immigration law in a single medium-sized city. Right now there's not much indication they have either the desire or operational capacity to pull off nationwide voter suppression. (And a number of special elections over the past year have defeated regime-backed candidates without ICE involvement.)

Wait. Do you really think that or are you being sarcastic?

Definitely an odd duck out in the context of Trump, Obama, Bush II, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.

Also remember it’s not just being charismatic, but charismatic enough to keep people distracted from increasingly unpopular reactionary politics that defy even conservative beliefs (e.g. gun control, speech policing, deficit spending, plenary executive).