if you retain power, you can fix it. the US government currently has the significant problem that one party campaigns on the government being dysfunctional, so they do their best to make it so.
But what would trump have done if he retained the presidency and lost congress? That's also been pretty common over the last few decades if I'm mistaken, a president with one or both sides of Congress is reelected but Congress flips to the opposition party.
> He would do nothing because his supporters believe misinformation and worship him.
Interesting, that hasn't been my experience.
I live in a very red part of the country and most people I know are Trump supporters, including some family members have been very MAGA since 2016.
I've been hearing more and more complaints over missed promises: no Epstein files, raising budgets, RFK is starting to water down his promises, no end to the Ukraine or Gaza wars, etc.
He missed effectively every promise from 2016. Why did these people vote for him 2 more times, especially after an attempted coup? Maybe these "complaints" are just an attempt to dodge personal responsibility for having supported a catastrophe.
Sure you can guess at a person's intentions or reasoning, but my experience here is that there weren't many complaints in the first term for whatever reason and now there are.
I couldn't get inside their head to say why. My read on them is largely that the complaints are legitimate frustrations though. This isn't exactly a part of the country where voters are somewhat evenly split and Trump supports would need to save face or smooth over interpersonal friction by giving a nod to the idea that he may not deliver.
> I've been hearing more and more complaints over missed promises: no Epstein files, raising budgets, RFK is starting to water down his promises, no end to the Ukraine or Gaza wars, etc.
I based my argument on the poll averages as shown below, most are high 40s similar to the past few months. I would think if people were upset about missed promises it would be reflected in these. It's been ~5 months.
You might say people are giving him a chance to implement a plan or that some action would take time therefore they are willing to give a thumbs up for now, hence the polls. The reason I discounted this is because I'm not aware of any plan or current actions by Trump that would reduce prices. The trade wars will either increase prices due to tariffs or increase prices if products are made in the US.*1
I believe you but maybe float a question to your neighbors - "If prices don't come down would you vote Democrat in 2027?"
Political polls are extremely misleading. Ask someone if they still agree with a decision they already made, they will more often than not find a reason to say yes.
> I believe you but maybe float a question to your neighbors - "If prices don't come down would you vote Democrat in 2027?"
The fact that you're assuming people should align with one party or the other is the problem.
Who gives a shit what letter is next to a candidates name? What matters is what the candidate stands for, what matters to them, and whether you believe they'll stuck to their guns when the political machine that is DC fights back.
You have to be fair though, politicians always blame someone else and its usually the last person that was in charge.
How often do you hear any one politician claim the glory of a situation that they had nothing to do with? And when was the last time you actually heard a politician own their failing or apologize?
> You have to be fair though, politicians always blame someone else and its usually the last person that was in charge.
I don't think this is a reasonable or informed take. It's quite obvious that the tarrif lunacy is single handedly causing an economic downturn. Trump himself has downplayed the relevance of this downturn with inane comments over how tarrifs would also be painful to the US economy. If you see a politician like Trump claiming both that tarrifs will be painful to the US and that the economic pain caused by Trump's tarrifs is blamed on whoever was there before him, you need to be massively disingenuous or naive to claim that "politicians always blame both sides". There is nothing normal about Trump's actions.
My claim wasn't whether trump is responsible, of course his tariffs are having a very real impact. My point was that one should never expect a politician to admit that, at best they dodge claiming responsibility but more often than not they point at someone else, often the last person in office.
If you'd like to say my claim is uninformed that's fine, but I ask again for examples when a politician directly owned their failure or apologized for it.
Trump blaming predecessors for the problems created by his tarrifs policy goes way beyond your run-of-the-mill predecessor blaming. Trump is simultaneously warning his tarrifs policy will cause economic damage and that the economic damage created by his policies were caused by someone else.
To be clear, this is the quote that article references.
> “WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN? YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!),” Trump said in a social media post. “BUT WE WILL MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, AND IT WILL ALL BE WORTH THE PRICE THAT MUST BE PAID.”
That doesn't read to me as Trump claiming responsibility for any pain that we might see, and it isn't an apology. Even better, he ultimately doubles down on the tariffs and claims the end result will be worth any of the pain that he doesn't directly acknowledge he will have caused.
In 2024 two bills (merged later) went through the Republican controlled House with a bipartisan vote (350+ for) [1] then the Democrat controlled Senate [2] with another bipartisan vote (79-18, attached to an Israeli funding bill) basically following whatTrump wanted.
Late 2024 - Trump then offered to save the service when the Public turned against the ban and used it as a campaign item.
2025 - His supporters were all over Tiktok praising him, including the CEO of Tiktok when he put a pause on the required sale. He's also extended the deadline multiple times now.
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Republicans might start using this tactic more now that it's been shown to work. It's similar to the "Fuck the next admin" tax bill that he put in his first term.
This civic control correlation can simply have more to do with the most-white-supremacist Democrats switching to the GOP en masse and also simultaneously leaving multiethnic cities and school districts en masse after the 1960s. That self-selection left Republicans not a competitive amount of credibility or voter pool behind to work with. Your implication that policy dysfunction has ensued on that account rather than because of fiscal drain -- that's a separate topic. Individual states and individual cities have too many fiscal policy similarities and differences, overlapping, to responsibly compare in any online discussion.
> New York is a better governed state than Florida
Yes, New York is significantly more successful than Florida in almost every way: Better education, better healthcare, longer life expectancy, less pollution, lower crime, more productivity, higher wages, more amenities, better transportation infrastructure, less poverty, happier residents, and so on.
> So by your logic New York is a better governed state than Florida? Net internal migration would seem to disagree.
Yes, and it's not even close. Choose just about any metric and NY is running laps around Florida.
And, not just Florida, but red states in general. If you look at the metrics, they typically are some of the poorest states with the worst outcomes. Bad infrastructure, bad education, not a lot of job opportunities, horribly impoverished, under-developed.
It's just that nobody cares. Nobody expects Louisiana or Florida to be decent places to live. But since California is the economic powerhouse of the US, people do expect it to be decent. That's the issue, the blue states are essentially carrying the economy of everything else on their back, so they now get a new, unfair set of standards.
I think quality of governance is a major reason, yes. When my parents immigrated to this country, they moved to a deep red state (Virginia) instead of the deep blue state next door (Maryland). Why? A focus on good schools, low crime, and low taxes, instead of a focus on economic redistribution.
I may have misunderstood, when you said internal migration in the earlier comment I assumed that was referring to people moving from one state to another rather than immigrating from another country.
> A focus on good schools, low crime, and low taxes, instead of a focus on economic redistribution.
That's also interesting. I wouldn't have rolled that up to quality of governance, but I could see why you would. To me that falls more into a sign of long standing culture, I could see a place with existing policies that match now having a terrible administration in charge.
> may have misunderstood, when you said internal migration in the earlier comment I assumed that was referring to people moving from one state to another rather than immigrating from another country.
I was just giving an example—people moving within the U.S. make the same choice. When I was growing up, Virginia was like Florida is today: a red state with a booming economy, low taxes, and a good business climate. Why did AOL start in the farmland of Loudon County instead of the farmland of eastern PG County (which is closer to DC)?
> That's also interesting. I wouldn't have rolled that up to quality of governance, but I could see why you would.
It’s a cultural trait that strongly affects governance. The government can focus its energies on making things better for middle class people and businesses, as Virginia long did, or it can focus on poor people and minorities, as Maryland long did. And the resulting differences in governance are quite apparent. Virginia has better schools, ore employment, and has grown faster than Maryland over the last 50 years.
... because nobody moves to Florida for (what they perceive of) the weather, right? Especially not retirees tired of the idea of one more winter in NY.
A government that runs the richest city in the country (SF trades this spot with NY every few years) and makes it look the way it does is the definition of dysfunction.
And Detroit... well, I guess now that they've bulldozed all the abandoned buildings it looks less like a post apocalyptic hellscape and more just abandoned. An improvement I suppose.
California also has easily solvable housing, education, transportation and mental health crises that are entirely driven by mismanagement by the state government. They haven’t done anything meaningful to address these issues in 25-40 years depending on the issue.
Heck, they ignored the water crisis for twenty years, and what they’re doing now for aquifer replenishment is still less than what makes sense.
I say they are easily addressed because simply reverting to California’s policies from ~ 1975 would greatly improve the current situation.
The biggest root problem with California governmental structure is harmful constitutional features added by public referendum, especially Proposition 13 (1978). I guess you can blame "government" for that, but it doesn't seem like quite the right target.
The water crisis is a difficult problem because water rights are complicated and central valley farmers are an influential political group very focused on short-term preservation of water access and not as concerned with long-term sustainability.
> easily solvable housing, education, transportation and mental health crises
I submit that these are much less "easily solvable" than you claim. (What have you personally done to work on these problems, if they are so "easy"?) Legislators don't get to wave a magic wand, but need support of a wide variety of stakeholders who have contradictory demands and expectations (some of which are fairly unrealistic, but anyway..).
Education for example has competing goals of local funding vs. inter-city equity. Should the wealthiest towns get to spend arbitrarily much local property tax money on their own children's public schools while the poorer town next door is running out of toilet paper, or should the state try to equalize funding between schools to give every child the best opportunity? There's not really a "correct" answer to this, and every possible choice has some serious disadvantages.
