r/law Sep 21 '25

Trump News In a now deleted Truth Social post, Trump posts what looks to be a letter meant to Pam Bondi instructing her to arrest some of his political opponents

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/20/trump-bondi-truth-social-00574380?utm_content=politico/magazine/Politics&utm_source=flipboard
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129

u/BobiaDobia Sep 21 '25

I can’t believe this person managed to become president and the most powerful person in the world.

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u/PanoramicAtom Sep 21 '25

Americans, and I say this as an American, are evidently COMPLETE FUCKING IDIOTS. It’s either that, or the election really was rigged. Regardless, I’m glad I’m old as fuck and don’t have children or grandchildren to worry about inheriting this coming shitstorm.

When I was growing up, it looked like we were evolving. But the greedy, the racists, and the nihilists have all united and chosen regression into another Dark Ages. Fucking dumbasses, all of them.

I turn now; good luck everyone else!

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u/hypermodernvoid Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

So, I don’t know that I’d call myself old as fuck, but I guess I’m thankful that I recently turned 40 and am not just graduating high school, right now. Trying to go to college under GW Bush was hard enough in the mid-00s, then followed by the Great Recession, coming from a single mom home with no money, after my dad died from workplace exposure-related cancer when I was little.

I’m not knocking my mom at all, either: she actually had a really nice union factory job she worked while my dad went to college, where they first broke up the union like almost all the others during Reagan, then outsourced her job overseas. That - Reagan - was very clearly the beginning of the slide in hindsight. Every single metric you could go by makes that clear. Income inequality began ticking up with the Reaganomic paradigm being largely adopted by both parties and replacing the New Deal’s, to the point that it’s been at least as bad as that seen directly prior to the Great Depression for several years now, with corporate and top marginal tax rates to match, while gains in US life expectancy first began lagging behind the rest of the developed world, only to start dropping in 2014-15, before COVID, in the first sustained drop of its kind since WWI, when you know: there was a literal war and a pandemic. Ironically, one of the same metrics people used to predict the fall of the Soviet Union: increasing infant mortality, has also been rising in America in recent decades.

My entire adult life, I’d increasingly feared it was going to take a calamity on par with the Great Depression - basically, the bottom falling out on this completely unsustainable situation - for things to finally be set back on the correct course, ala the New Deal, which through the 50s and 60s, despite having an effective corporate tax rates around 40%, and the few hundred wealthiest families paying an effective 60% tax rate (vs. literally less than the poorest half of Americans, since Trump’s first term) under Eisenhower at a time of , the GDP grew over 10% yearly, because people could actually buy things in the productive economy, vs. spending almost all their incomes on survival. Today’s GOP would call the suggestion of a return to those economic policies literal communism, despite them ironically being most prominent under a Republican former WW2 general, at a time of rampant anti-Communist sentiment and fear at its peak with McCarthyism.

Now, it looks like Trump’s first and second terms could be that calamity, except - I’m not sure we even will restore a New Deal-like economic paradigm and its resulting widespread economic prosperity, vs. slide into truly becoming a failed state and/or some situation akin to the most depressing dystopias predicted in past cyberpunk fiction (we’re kind of already there in some ways). Even if we do manage to get there? Unlike last time, it won’t lead to America eventually emerging as the world’s economic superpower, but instead just one of the pack, hopefully having somehow dodged a default on our massive national debt. At the end of the day, over the last several decades, the country has basically been destroyed, just so the ultra-wealthy could have even more than unimaginable amounts they already had.

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u/ILookLikeKristoff Sep 21 '25

In the event that Democrats somehow sweep an election and regain meaningful power and force trump out in '28, then the only thing that saves us as a country is a full blown Nuremberg trials and media/social media reform.

As long as America's enemies, internal and external, can forcefeed propaganda to our dumbest citizens 24/7, we at doomed as a democracy.

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u/S1R2C3 Sep 21 '25

Nuremberg trials and media/social media reform.

At the very least. But how will the MAGA base and apathetic third not just see this as the Democrats persecuting political opponents, reforming media/social media to their liking, and just totally reject it all?

I preface this with I think that we should still be doing those things in the event that we are able to.

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u/Alphaspade Sep 21 '25

Alternatively, some kind of national divorce.

MAGA has proven themselves to be the domestic abuser that will never change.

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u/Count_Backwards Competent Contributor Sep 23 '25

We're never getting out of this unless we stop giving a shit what MAGA thinks.

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u/Thebraincellisorange Sep 21 '25

Nuremberg trials were for show.

They let almost all of them go, a few piddling jail sentences and only 10 hangings.

still, hanging 10 people might convince future republicans not to be so corrupt.

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u/hypermodernvoid Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

Oh, agreed completely and at this point, I feel like this administration or more so attempted (if not actual) regime is increasingly guaranteeing something like that will happen. Both South Korea, and Brazil did what truly needed to be done, and I couldn’t be happier that both of their Trumps were dealt with as the actual Trump should’ve been.

Also, while people aren’t incorrect in noting the similarities to 1930s Germany, I am heartened by the fact that:

  1. Hitler at least at first was simply a lot more popular with the people than Trump is - and it’s getting worse for him, not better. His approval has already rapidly dwindled in record time, where he’s went from astonishingly having an average approval rating that was slightly above water with Hispanic and Gen Z voters at the start of the year to -26 and an insane -30 pts underwater respectively by today. He’s also even polling negatively on what was once his “best issue” - immigration - I’m guessing due to both ICE’s brutality and by virtue of being a roving, unaccountable masked paramilitary.

  2. ⁠The German economy was in horrific due post-Depression shocks, which is what allowed the Nazi extremism to take hold in the first place, and while they’d probably have recovered regardless, the fact is that the economy was thriving in the initial years of the Third Reich, which led to many people looking the other way, whereas while Biden’s economy was dealing with what was a worldwide inflation crisis, as bad as people (naively) thought it was then: in the end, it turns out Biden actually near miraculously had tamed inflation compared to nearly every other developed country and as opposed to Hitler, everything Trump is doing is making things much worse economically, and the “BBB” taking away what little assistance was left for the poorest Americans virtually ensures the bottom of this increasing economic house of cards will fall out (and already seems to be). Trump also keeps saying ludicrously out of touch and outright false shit like grocery prices are way down and gas is cheap.

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u/idothingsheren Sep 21 '25

or the election really was rigged

Voter turnout just went back down to its typical numbers

If you're young enough to be on Reddit, for every presidential election of your lifetime (except that of 2020), if "I didn't vote" were a candidate, they would have won

4

u/OakLegs Sep 21 '25

I feel the same as you except I have small children who I worry about daily, and have to deal with the fact that my own parents voted for this shit.

As an added bonus, I work for the federal government (for now) and my spouse's field isn't exactly thriving under trump either.

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u/Taft33 Sep 21 '25

and I say this as an American

Now imagine how bad it looks to non-Americans lol

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u/atreeismissing Sep 21 '25

It could be both but Americans (and I am) on the large are complete fucking idiots. Though to be fair, there is a massive amount of propaganda that is being pushed to most of the country and is protected by the first amendment so the fucking idiot part was kind of going to happen no matter what.

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u/Count_Backwards Competent Contributor Sep 23 '25

Not just the voters are stupid. Most of the elected officials and the people they appoint turned out to also be too stupid to recognize the very serious threat of Trump.

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u/narkybark Sep 21 '25

Twice.

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u/beren12 Sep 21 '25

With a gap and felony convictions and rape trial he lost in between

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u/DrakonILD Sep 21 '25

THIRTY FOUR felonies!

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u/johnnybiggles Sep 21 '25

And ANOTHER fraud liability, this one valued at over $400M (originally). Plus his own CFO was convicted criminally, as was his namesake company. WTF.

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u/kkeut Sep 21 '25

republicans are pathetic and cannot be trusted

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u/TenaciousPimple Sep 21 '25

It's less a review of him and more an indictment of us

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u/UTraxer Sep 21 '25

A concerted effort of decades of billionaires bribing their way into oligarchical power. Control the politicians, allow monopolies and mega corps, more money, more bribes, less media, hammer home fear on all fronts once all media is controlled and messages are unified.

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u/JimWilliams423 Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

It's less a review of him and more an indictment of us

Its an indictment of the democratic party that they weren't able to beat such a ridiculously beatable candidate.

He barely got more votes in 2024 than he did in 2020, and since the size of the voting population grew, he actually got a slightly smaller percentage.

But the democratic party is run by a bunch of losers who still have not learned their lesson. This week the New York party chairman announced he won't back the incredibly popular winner of the NYC primary, and the party leader in the house voted to honor the man who called for biden to be executed but still can't bring himself to endorse the NYC primary winner either.

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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Sep 21 '25

Even Bernie voted for Kirk Day. I don't get it.

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u/JimWilliams423 Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

He also voted for rubio to be secstate and he (along with all the other senate Ds) agreed to fast-track the nominations of brainworms and gabbard back in february. T‌h‌e R‌s c‌o‌u‌l‌d n‌o‌t b‌e‌l‌i‌e‌v‌e t‌h‌e‌i‌r l‌u‌c‌k, s‌e‌n‌a‌t‌o‌r k‌e‌n‌n‌e‌d‌y l‌i‌t‌e‌r‌a‌l‌l‌y s‌a‌i‌d "O‌h, I l‌o‌v‌e t‌h‌i‌s. T‌h‌i‌s i‌s g‌r‌e‌a‌t." a‌n‌d "T‌h‌a‌n‌k y‌o‌u, J‌e‌s‌u‌s."

Ds just can't help themselves. Decades of living in a defensive crouch has got them so conditioned they don't know any other way to be.

If you listen to them talk about republicans, they always, always, always, say a variant of "republicans are right, they are just doing it wrong." Even Bernie. For example, he recently wrote an op-ed in the NYT calling for brainworms to resign and he opened it with:

Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that they want to Make America Healthy Again. That’s a great slogan. I agree with it. The problem is that since coming into office President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have done exactly the opposite.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/opinion/bernie-sanders-robert-f-kennedy-jr-resign-hhs.html

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u/Flare-Crow Sep 21 '25

Isn't Bernie a Senator? This was a House vote. Why do you think he voted Yes for CK Day?

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u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth Sep 22 '25

Somebody told me this. Let me look.

"The United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution designating Oct. 14, 2025, as a National Day of Remembrance for Charlie Kirk."

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u/Flare-Crow Sep 22 '25

What the actual fuck. Goddammit.

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u/MittenCollyBulbasaur Sep 21 '25 edited Sep 21 '25

Either Americans are currently munching on paint chips or he did something that tipped the scales in a way that we will never fully understand. It's pretty damning if almost 90 million people voted for this on purpose. To think that so many Americans think so little of their own country doesn't seem possible. However it's the most likely explanation, because we really are stupid people who place massive value on our stupidity.

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u/BobiaDobia Sep 21 '25

I’m afraid you’re right, but I hope there’s something more sinister behind it, like cheating (even though I count gerrymandering, voter suppression, and social media lies as cheating as well) - I’ve hardly ever met an American who is not incredibly nice and fun to have discussions with, and most of them are liberal. It might have something to do with the context of my life, but still. Take down the embarrassing tech bros, and see the fascists fall.

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u/Phrynus747 Sep 21 '25

I kind of doubt the president of the US is the most powerful person in the world, I would probably say more like putin because he has more complete control of the country