It’s not a coup in any literal sense of the word, not even in the autocratic sense. The reason it’s being used is a combination of the US having never experienced a real coup, and thus it’s citizens not really knowing what the word means, plus one side of politics being sore losers after having lost an election and using whatever insult they can think of in order to deflect rather than self reflect on why they lost.
it's an auto coup where the legally elected leader takes more control than they were given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
We have better words for that than "coup", esp. because is is not clear at all if Trump will uphold the constitution, law and traditions of the USA by just abdicating at the end of his 2nd and final term.
How about "Gleichschaltung", or "synchronization" for the English speaking folks, instead?
not really a coup, its a default. US government is already using pension fund money to pay its bills since early January (aka special measures), the interest on their national debt is already more than they collect in taxes.
This is what i never understand. Okay, not enough money, soooo _tax more_. Or at least stop giving tax cuts to the richest people in the history of the planet? Like, implement a 5% tax on their wealth, and just fix all the problems. We could have services _and_ rich people, we just have to make insanely rich people contribute to our world like we all do to theirs
Yeah, that’s not going to happen. That’s not why MElon elected a president using twitter to brainwash people. They are there to get rich, not to share their wealth.
Funny how democracy works, I recall an election recently not a coup. Government is not a monolith, this isn’t the action of one single person, but the result of tens of millions people voting for change (that you disagree with).
Nobody voted for Elon.
People don't vote for the millions of public employees. They vote for the president. Everything Trump has said so far indicates Musk is doing all of this at the discretion of Trump.
I dunno man my salary is six figures and I’m an academic scientist living in the Netherlands. My life is much higher quality than the equivalent could buy me in anywhere worth living in the USA. Like I agree the salaries can be low but you simply don’t need to make 300k usd to have a nice life here. I have a flat in the middle of the city of Utrecht where I cycle to work and pop off to the pub after and the gym is tw…
Hear hear - Utrecht might be the finest city in the world, too. And Europe is missing a gigantic opportunity right now. The fact that talent is cheap, there's a strong social safety net, and we don't have enormous amounts of entrepreneurship is really strange.
Yeah I don't get it. I know that Cherry Ventures just raised another 500 million euros but that is really nothing compared to what is in America. I think there is really a missed opportunity both from the government side of things and VC side of things. The government could relax restrictions on small businesses, hand out more tax credits, make it more beneficial to move here (e.g., my understanding is netherlands has a small business visa but it only lasts a year and you have to prove you are making money which is hard for a startup to do after a single year), more government money for research and more money to bring research results to market. Like the european research council (ERC) has a program called something like proof of concept where you get add on funds to an existing ERC grant to produce a proof of concept that could be taken to market but you are required to be the PI on the original grant to apply for the proof of concept. If instead you let anyone apply like the way NSF grants for startup work that would be better. for example postdocs that worked on the original ERC cannot apply for the follow on proof of concept money to try and make a startup that commercializes the research. only the PI of the original ERC grant can apply. That seems silly to me since probably the postdocs are better positioned to be startup leaders than the PI since the PI is more likely to have a permanent academic job and be uninterested in leaving that job to start a company out of one of the research agendas they are pursuing. you probably would get way more results out of the program than it generates now. I think from the VC side of things they could simply try and recruit more of these people who are working on such grants to become founders. In america there is a more clear MIT/Stanford/Caltech pipeline into silly valley and VC offices than there is in europe. VCs are responsible, imo, to create such a pipeline not academics. Anyways, if you are VC reading this feel free to reach out if you think that I am making sense. If I am not making sense feel free to tell me why. I am, of course, just some guy on the internet.
This is a coup and we are calmly debating budgets. Debating the % of budget and how useful organization x is and if y will still get grant money, and, and, and... All of this is ignoring the big elephant in the room that there is one single person deciding everything that happens in government as if they were a king. The right thing to be debating is how we can stop this from continuing and how we can hold those resp…
This is not a coup, because Trump is still in his lawful 2nd and final term. Until then let's call it Gleichschaltung [1], because that's what it is: bringing all aspects of society under totalitarian control.
Not an American, but my 2c - a good chunk of people are actively trying to find a reason why their lives are worse than others, haven't gotten better in decades, and are seeing how life is fine across the pond despite not being the richest country in the world. They'll keep blaming everyone, and everything, and whatever comes into their sights. At the same time group of people will exploit it for their gains, as "fig…
I don't disagree with any of this and I can definitely see this in the election results. But this has been the case for a while now. The US has lagged other developed nations on many indicators for a long time. Income inequality, life expectancy, education, you name it. There was a lot of heated debates and intense feelings during the Obama era too. But this time around something seems to have changed, where his supp…
I think you're misrepresenting. His side won, and now they get to do what they want. It's always that way, no? Like, isn't that the point of an election?
They get to do what they want within the rules established by the courts and constitution.
> I recall an election recently not a coup. List of dictators that achieved power via what were at the time, free and fair elections: Adolf Hitler - 1933 Ferdinand Marcos - 1965 Alberto Fujimori - 1990 Robert Mugabe - 1980 Alexander Lukashenko - 1994 Hugo Chávez - 1998
Which of these was elected, lost power, and were elected again? Normally dictators don’t let go of power
I like how your literal argument is that Trump failed at becoming a dictator so he's obviously not one. Despite you know, demanding people find votes and organizing a riot.
A failed dictator is still a dictator. What's next, the events in South Korea weren't the result of a failed attempt at a coup?
The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. As much as you personally disagree with these decisions, they are in line with the broad policy positions Trump et al communicated prior to the election, and can be considered the will of the people. Challenging the mandate the public gave them, by hyperventilating over minor procedural hicc…
> The left need to accept that they lost the election, that Trump won the presidency and the Republicans won control of congress. Shouldn't they then use Congress as intended rather than what they're doing now which bypasses it? As a bystander in another country your line of argument is mind-boggling. You don't just throw out the constitution and way the government works because one guy won an election one time. But…
Shouldn't they then use Congress as intended rather than what they're doing now which bypasses it?
They can’t because of the filibuster [1]. They cannot bypass the filibuster without a 3/5 majority which they do not have. Thus any bill which the Democrats oppose will be blocked by filibuster in the Senate.