Is anyone else less than enthusiastic about Democrats making USAID the hill through die on when we have so many other things this maniac is doing every day that impact people directly?
I appreciate the switching gears to go after Musk so hard and this should be a precursor to making income inequality a main plank of our platform going for…
Is anyone else less than enthusiastic about Democrats making USAID the hill through die on when we have so many other things this maniac is doing every day that impact people directly?
I appreciate the switching gears to go after Musk so hard and this should be a precursor to making income inequality a main plank of our platform going forward.
However the political capital being spent to protest foreign aid, and of course I support it btw because I have common sense, seems very strange to me.
All Trump has to do is say- I'm trying to focus on America and Democrats are more focused on sending money overseas.
I mean it just seems a little out of touch to focus so much on this specific agency and saying they will do all sorts of boycots and filibusters of nominees over it.
I highly doubt the average American even knows much if anything about USAID.
Staking a big claim on the Dept of Education fight would make more sense.
Trump is throwing everything at the wall for maximum shock and awe effect and we can't tackle every action effectively. The USAID thing seems like the wrong thing to take such a big stand on imo....
We need to fight everything. USAID isn’t the only thing we’re fighting back on. I was at the Treasury building protest yesterday and there were plenty of people there, including a ton of high-profile Democrats in Congress. But USAID is important. We can’t throw people under the bus who are just doing their jobs and helping save lives just because we think it isn’t quite as popular as some other agencies. And if Trump gets a win here, it will embolden him to keep acting like this against every program and agency he doesn’t like.
I think you are seriously not understanding that this is exactly the reaction Trump wants and it is unfortunate that now ten years removed from 2016 Democrats think a winning strategy is to "fight everything."
Time and time again that strategy has failed. Trump does and says outrageous things every day to distract. This was a distraction movie just as the Gaza thing is.
And I've got news for you, he's going to do what he wants and nearly all of this is going to the Courts anyway.
Pick and choose your battles. The average American does not care about USAID, sadly.
Doing things that harm large amounts of people is never a distraction - stopping that is the entire point, and we can’t just roll over and let him do it because it’s not an easy marketing win. We have the capacity to do it all. I agree that our primary message shouldn’t be the sanctity of USAID, but that’s not the message. The message is Elon Musk is coming in and destroying our government, and this is just one example of that.
The issue is less USAID and more Musk’s unilateralism more generally. It’s just that they picked USAID first.
The comms I’m seeing is less about USAID’s pros and cons and more about “Musk is trying to take over all government functions with a bunch of glorified interns”
This. I've heard a lot of grief about USAID specifically but that's because I live in DC with a lot of friends directly impacted by its dissolution. The wider conversation I've seen is about Musk being an unelected official making unconstitutional presidential-level decisions. I'd like to see what OP is talking about specifically, because between this and some other comments, I'm getting some real "old man yells at cloud" energy.
I refuse to rely on software that resides on the Cloud, and I insist on having all my data stored right here, on my own hard-disks. While I don’t yell at clouds but am approaching two-thirds of a century, you may call me an "old man who is skeptical of the Cloud".
Nerdy aside: If you haven't already you should switch to solid state storage (SSD) storage instead of hard drives. More reliable in the long term and if you have multiple backups (as you should!) you can duplicate one backup to another one much, much quicker due to improved write speeds. Those of us relying on local storage need to make sure it's reliable and less prone to failure.
He is violating the law by trying to do it without congressional authorization. Letting him get away with it makes it much easier for him to violate the law next time. Do you want to stop him in the Rhineland or wait till he gets to the French coast.
I value your enthusiasm to participate in the protests, truly. Good on you :) and so I mean absolutely no offense when I say that USAID is very much a beltway bubble issue that most everyday Americans don't even think about.
My mother is a perfect example. She is someone that will vote but only if motivated. All she has been saying for two weeks is that she is freaking out about Elon Musk and billionaires controlling everything.
Keep our messaging concise and focus on a handful of "pillars" to hammer home our differences with the GOP every single day.
Don't detour into the weeds on every issue.
If we have to explain an issue for someone to get motivated/outraged, we've already lost.
My pillars would be:
1) Trump and his billionaire friends are seizing the government and giving themselves kickbacks and racking up our debt to do it. We will stabilize US finances by taxing personal wealth on billionaires.
2) Trump promised peace but now he is suddenly promising to attack our friends for land and returning troops to the Middle East to seize Gaza.
3) Trump is incompetent and outsources the tasks to dangerous Christian nationalists.
4) It's easier to build more wealth when you already have it. In order to combat inequality in addition to taxing personal income on billionaires we will also break up their monopolies. Billionaires control every facet of American media and can legally buy elections.
These the main ones I can come up with on the top of my head. But add one or two more planks and it would still be concise.
Democrats need to be focused and not engage on every issue. Average Americans need messaging to be kept simple.
Seeing Chuck Schumer scream like he's at the super bowl about winning while standing in front of Treasury is not helping break through.
Trumps approval is near 50%. Don't give him what he wants.
Shuttering USAID may well cost millions of lives! And, no, that is not hyperbole. Moreover, it will seriously weaken soft, non-military American influence throughout the world. And it dangerously increases the risk of a new deadly pandemic reaching our own shores.
You are mistaking me for personally not caring about USAID, which is untrue, and me trying to explain that the average voter does not know what it even is.
Methinks you are mistaking my mistaking. At no point am I suggesting you don’t care about USAID; such a thought had not even crossed my mind. My only objection is to labeling and dismissing this as a "beltway bubble issue".
I'd like to see polling on this. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think a majority are against the U.S. helping children fight malaria in Africa via foreign aid.
True, though as stated it would be better to focus on things like chaos, incompetence, fucking with services people need, and "who elected Elon Musk?"
Jared Golden says that in his red district he's been inundated with communication from people complaining about Musk's unwarranted influence and messing with things, though there's honestly something self-delusional about Trump voters complaining only about Musk and not Trump. Musk didn't just pop out of nowhere after the election.
Yeah well Mark, you would say that considering you think everything a Republican does is a genius 12D chess move while seeing Dems as too stupid to plug in a monitor. I don't even know why you continue to be involved when your responses boil down to walls of text that in sum total say "Republicans will win forever while Dems will regret abandoning white male manufacturing workers. Tsk tsk"
Am I being uncharitable to you? Maybe. But you don't have carte blanche to arrogantly proclaim what is and will be based on lucky guesses. Drop the ego
Yeah I would say "uncharitable" would be an adjective that at least partially captures the string of strawmen you've built in an attempt to spook me into submission. Feels like there should be a harvest moon to illuminate as many strawmen as you've constructed.
Do you attribute every correctly called election prediction to be a "lucky guess"? If so, then every single one of us on this board is no better than the average joe on the street. If not, then how do you distinguish my guesses being "lucky" when they're inconvenient but right and others' guesses as especially insightful if the results match your preferences?
Five of the last six election cycles produced results that I consider disappointing from a Democratic perspective. Was it really a "lucky guess" for me to have looked at the trend lines of those preceding cycles and determined that we had a problem going into 2024? Or could it be a signal that Democrats have become really bad at messaging to the contemporary electorate? And that you and many others have become really, really bad at evaluating the trend lines and correctly predicting outcomes?
Why it's such a BFD is it's the first domino to fall in terms of Trump ripping up the Constitution and defying congressional statute to act like a king. Today it's USAID, tomorrow Education, next EPA etc.
If you just wait until a target gets hit that is "popular enough" the precedent has been set and it's too late.
The Congressional Review Service declared it's an illegal act today. How no-one has been able to get a court injunction of some kind is mind boggling and depressing . .what the fuck are they waiting for??
We have a big-tent coalition and rely in part on that small part of the electorate in the middle that is, beyond being ideologically inconsistent, are often underinformed, uninformed, and/or misinformed. Point being, if we wait for the perfect issue that fires up everyone before we get mad, we'll be lining up at the executioners block and someone in the actual line will be telling everyone to remain calm and keep their powder dry.
Republicans have been consistently able, over multiple generations, to attack democrats over anything and everything. They manage to pick the most esoteric, boring, bullshit things and turn it into the issue that their base froths in rage over. Anyone who wants to tell me that we cannot successfully make use of outrage over USAID being *unconstitutionally* torn apart is wrong.
We, as a party and especially our officials, need to be angry more often and more visibly. The last thing we need is to repeat our consistently failed practice of self-policing the outrage within our own tent. That self-policing of outrage is the real messaging problem as far as I'm concerned.
Is anyone else less than enthusiastic about Democrats making USAID the hill through die on when we have so many other things this maniac is doing every day that impact people directly?
I appreciate the switching gears to go after Musk so hard and this should be a precursor to making income inequality a main plank of our platform going forward.
However the political capital being spent to protest foreign aid, and of course I support it btw because I have common sense, seems very strange to me.
All Trump has to do is say- I'm trying to focus on America and Democrats are more focused on sending money overseas.
I mean it just seems a little out of touch to focus so much on this specific agency and saying they will do all sorts of boycots and filibusters of nominees over it.
I highly doubt the average American even knows much if anything about USAID.
Staking a big claim on the Dept of Education fight would make more sense.
Trump is throwing everything at the wall for maximum shock and awe effect and we can't tackle every action effectively. The USAID thing seems like the wrong thing to take such a big stand on imo....
We need to fight everything. USAID isn’t the only thing we’re fighting back on. I was at the Treasury building protest yesterday and there were plenty of people there, including a ton of high-profile Democrats in Congress. But USAID is important. We can’t throw people under the bus who are just doing their jobs and helping save lives just because we think it isn’t quite as popular as some other agencies. And if Trump gets a win here, it will embolden him to keep acting like this against every program and agency he doesn’t like.
I think you are seriously not understanding that this is exactly the reaction Trump wants and it is unfortunate that now ten years removed from 2016 Democrats think a winning strategy is to "fight everything."
Time and time again that strategy has failed. Trump does and says outrageous things every day to distract. This was a distraction movie just as the Gaza thing is.
And I've got news for you, he's going to do what he wants and nearly all of this is going to the Courts anyway.
Pick and choose your battles. The average American does not care about USAID, sadly.
Doing things that harm large amounts of people is never a distraction - stopping that is the entire point, and we can’t just roll over and let him do it because it’s not an easy marketing win. We have the capacity to do it all. I agree that our primary message shouldn’t be the sanctity of USAID, but that’s not the message. The message is Elon Musk is coming in and destroying our government, and this is just one example of that.
They’re people who aren’t in the US. Most voters don’t care and it’s a trap like the OP said.
Like gutting the National Science Foundation
The issue is less USAID and more Musk’s unilateralism more generally. It’s just that they picked USAID first.
The comms I’m seeing is less about USAID’s pros and cons and more about “Musk is trying to take over all government functions with a bunch of glorified interns”
This. I've heard a lot of grief about USAID specifically but that's because I live in DC with a lot of friends directly impacted by its dissolution. The wider conversation I've seen is about Musk being an unelected official making unconstitutional presidential-level decisions. I'd like to see what OP is talking about specifically, because between this and some other comments, I'm getting some real "old man yells at cloud" energy.
I refuse to rely on software that resides on the Cloud, and I insist on having all my data stored right here, on my own hard-disks. While I don’t yell at clouds but am approaching two-thirds of a century, you may call me an "old man who is skeptical of the Cloud".
Nerdy aside: If you haven't already you should switch to solid state storage (SSD) storage instead of hard drives. More reliable in the long term and if you have multiple backups (as you should!) you can duplicate one backup to another one much, much quicker due to improved write speeds. Those of us relying on local storage need to make sure it's reliable and less prone to failure.
He is violating the law by trying to do it without congressional authorization. Letting him get away with it makes it much easier for him to violate the law next time. Do you want to stop him in the Rhineland or wait till he gets to the French coast.
Not to reply to my own post but I want to add:
I value your enthusiasm to participate in the protests, truly. Good on you :) and so I mean absolutely no offense when I say that USAID is very much a beltway bubble issue that most everyday Americans don't even think about.
My mother is a perfect example. She is someone that will vote but only if motivated. All she has been saying for two weeks is that she is freaking out about Elon Musk and billionaires controlling everything.
Keep our messaging concise and focus on a handful of "pillars" to hammer home our differences with the GOP every single day.
Don't detour into the weeds on every issue.
If we have to explain an issue for someone to get motivated/outraged, we've already lost.
My pillars would be:
1) Trump and his billionaire friends are seizing the government and giving themselves kickbacks and racking up our debt to do it. We will stabilize US finances by taxing personal wealth on billionaires.
2) Trump promised peace but now he is suddenly promising to attack our friends for land and returning troops to the Middle East to seize Gaza.
3) Trump is incompetent and outsources the tasks to dangerous Christian nationalists.
4) It's easier to build more wealth when you already have it. In order to combat inequality in addition to taxing personal income on billionaires we will also break up their monopolies. Billionaires control every facet of American media and can legally buy elections.
These the main ones I can come up with on the top of my head. But add one or two more planks and it would still be concise.
Democrats need to be focused and not engage on every issue. Average Americans need messaging to be kept simple.
Seeing Chuck Schumer scream like he's at the super bowl about winning while standing in front of Treasury is not helping break through.
Trumps approval is near 50%. Don't give him what he wants.
4)
"beltway bubble issue"?? Are you serious?
Shuttering USAID may well cost millions of lives! And, no, that is not hyperbole. Moreover, it will seriously weaken soft, non-military American influence throughout the world. And it dangerously increases the risk of a new deadly pandemic reaching our own shores.
You are mistaking me for personally not caring about USAID, which is untrue, and me trying to explain that the average voter does not know what it even is.
Methinks you are mistaking my mistaking. At no point am I suggesting you don’t care about USAID; such a thought had not even crossed my mind. My only objection is to labeling and dismissing this as a "beltway bubble issue".
We all know this. This isn’t a question about morals but a question of political strategy.
Unfortunately you're right. It's a loser. It requires too much explaining to articulate why USAID should be a priority for people.
I'd like to see polling on this. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think a majority are against the U.S. helping children fight malaria in Africa via foreign aid.
Polling would probably say they are against foreign aid but in favor of specific programs. Easier to be against something in the abstract.
Exactly. Same with stuff like the DOE
True, though as stated it would be better to focus on things like chaos, incompetence, fucking with services people need, and "who elected Elon Musk?"
Jared Golden says that in his red district he's been inundated with communication from people complaining about Musk's unwarranted influence and messing with things, though there's honestly something self-delusional about Trump voters complaining only about Musk and not Trump. Musk didn't just pop out of nowhere after the election.
This Treasury debacle has certainly opened the door for that
Would a majority of people say they're in favor of abolishing USAID? I have doubts.
I’m confident they would. Look how many of them voted for Trump.
Issue polling shows voters don't particularly like MAGA positions outside of immigration and anti-woke/culture stuff.
Exactly.
Yeah well Mark, you would say that considering you think everything a Republican does is a genius 12D chess move while seeing Dems as too stupid to plug in a monitor. I don't even know why you continue to be involved when your responses boil down to walls of text that in sum total say "Republicans will win forever while Dems will regret abandoning white male manufacturing workers. Tsk tsk"
Am I being uncharitable to you? Maybe. But you don't have carte blanche to arrogantly proclaim what is and will be based on lucky guesses. Drop the ego
Yeah I would say "uncharitable" would be an adjective that at least partially captures the string of strawmen you've built in an attempt to spook me into submission. Feels like there should be a harvest moon to illuminate as many strawmen as you've constructed.
Do you attribute every correctly called election prediction to be a "lucky guess"? If so, then every single one of us on this board is no better than the average joe on the street. If not, then how do you distinguish my guesses being "lucky" when they're inconvenient but right and others' guesses as especially insightful if the results match your preferences?
Five of the last six election cycles produced results that I consider disappointing from a Democratic perspective. Was it really a "lucky guess" for me to have looked at the trend lines of those preceding cycles and determined that we had a problem going into 2024? Or could it be a signal that Democrats have become really bad at messaging to the contemporary electorate? And that you and many others have become really, really bad at evaluating the trend lines and correctly predicting outcomes?
C'mon man. No need for this. Let's discuss elections, not each other.
Why it's such a BFD is it's the first domino to fall in terms of Trump ripping up the Constitution and defying congressional statute to act like a king. Today it's USAID, tomorrow Education, next EPA etc.
If you just wait until a target gets hit that is "popular enough" the precedent has been set and it's too late.
The Congressional Review Service declared it's an illegal act today. How no-one has been able to get a court injunction of some kind is mind boggling and depressing . .what the fuck are they waiting for??
I couldn't disagree more.
We have a big-tent coalition and rely in part on that small part of the electorate in the middle that is, beyond being ideologically inconsistent, are often underinformed, uninformed, and/or misinformed. Point being, if we wait for the perfect issue that fires up everyone before we get mad, we'll be lining up at the executioners block and someone in the actual line will be telling everyone to remain calm and keep their powder dry.
Republicans have been consistently able, over multiple generations, to attack democrats over anything and everything. They manage to pick the most esoteric, boring, bullshit things and turn it into the issue that their base froths in rage over. Anyone who wants to tell me that we cannot successfully make use of outrage over USAID being *unconstitutionally* torn apart is wrong.
We, as a party and especially our officials, need to be angry more often and more visibly. The last thing we need is to repeat our consistently failed practice of self-policing the outrage within our own tent. That self-policing of outrage is the real messaging problem as far as I'm concerned.
Calling it unconstitutional or illegal is the best argument I’ve read so far Dems could use against this action.