I don't follow politics too closely, but I keep hearing Trump is the first president who started no new wars. He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?
Don't believe everything you hear. This is false.
> He also supposedly brokered numerous peace deals
Like what?
> and had 4 Nobel Peace Prize nominations.
As others have noted, this means nothing.
> Is there a lot of violence I'm missing that warrants calling him "violent and authoritarian"?
The violence is largely hypothetical, and would, if it materialized, probably be perpetrated by white-supremacist militias rather than the U.S. military. But that Trump is authoritarian there can be no reasonable doubt. He has a long record of using his power to fire anyone who speaks against him, to harass anyone who speaks against him who he does not have the power to fire, and to protect and grant favors to anyone who supports him politically, even if they have been convicted of crimes. That kind of behavior is the textbook definition of authoritarian.
FWIW, Nobel Peace Prize nominations are worthless. National level politicians, professors can nominate anyone.[1] You could find someone (or three people) to nominate you.
> Nominated but not awarded
> Joseph Stalin, the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-1953), was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945 and 1948 for his efforts to end World War II.
> Adolf Hitler was nominated once in 1939. As unlikely as it may seem today, Adolf Hitler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1939 by a member of the Swedish parliament, E.G.C. Brandt. Apparently, Brandt never intended the nomination to be taken seriously. [...]
> Other statesmen and national leaders who were nominated but not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize:
> Italy: Benito Mussolini
Yes, the fact that we didn't get into any hot war is pretty much the only thing that Trump has going for him, though it was partially due to others backing him off bad ideas.
He wanted to remove us from a South Korean defense agreement, which would have been huge for each country's economy and defenses.
He bombed an Iranian general in Iraq - it was a huge gambit of arguable utility, and the only reason the Iranians didn't get more international support for retaliation was because they shot down a civilian airliner on accident.
He talked so much crap to NK that there was serious concern of an escalation in fighting.
But, yes. We didn't have any major foreign-based terror attacks, and we didn't get entangled in fighting a new conflict.
As far as the peace deals, I think they could be good, but they haven't "fixed" anything yet. The Palestinians still have no sovereignty, the Israelis still deny Arabs rights of citizenship, Iran and SA still are at each other's throats while Yemen, AFAIK, is still a humanitarian crisis.
China is perpetrating a holocaust on ethnic minorities, and Trump congratulated Xi on his success there.
The man is no human rights hero.
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edit: Not to mention his domestic policy failings, his characterizations as sitting president of all who disagree with him as "enemies", his rhetoric around protesting, his encouragement toward violent right-wing actors, and his use of the National Guard to clear out a public square to get a picture taken with a holy book he has never read.
This is an outright lie. About 20% of Israel's citizens are Arabs, and there are Arabs in the Knesset, the Courts, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel#:~:tex....
@dang please don't allow HN to become a platform for spreading absolute lies.
The utility of his action against Qassem Suleimani is not in question. It was clearly a very effective move. Whether this was justified depends on your viewpoint of Iranian actions in the Middle East.
No need for "supposedly": https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-do...
If you spent all of your time in a bubble reading these opinion pieces from a select group of sources and news aggregators that presumably aggregate the news that is most likely to generate ad impressions/clicks (Reddit, Google News seems to push highly inflammatory opinion pieces), sure, I can see how you'd think Trump is some sort of fascist dictator hellbent on destroying the world. The average political junky isn't going to spend brainpower trying to understand the diametrically opposed.
To be clear though, most level headed individuals don't actually believe Trump is a fascist. That's an extremist view (and obviously insulting to anyone who has lived under fascism) that's just used to sow discord and get a reaction.
He always avoided distancing himself from fascist and racist movements and their actions in the US. He teargassed people just so he could get a couple pictures taken in the middle of a protest. He tried to cast a democratic election into doubt and talked for months about his intention of not conceding the oval office in the case of a loss in the election.
I don't think Trump could ever be a dictator, but he clearly does not oppose the idea and undoubtedly contributed to the political divide in the US.
I'd argue against Trump being an incompetent fascist. That's still giving him too much credit.
He's authoritarian, a narcissist, views the world through a zero-sum transactional lens, doesn't see anything wrong with cronyism or nepotism, and as far as he's concerned you're either with him or against him.
Some of that has certainly allowed fascistic people to accrete around him, and enact policies that are fascistic, but as far as I can tell, that's only because the lowest hanging fruit and the clearest path to avoiding blame was in removing restraints and checks and balances. IOW writing (and reading) and passing regulations is hard, removing or ignoring them is comparatively easy.
If it were easier to avoid blame, punish enemies, line his pockets, and put his stamp on things by nationalizing industries, he'd have been doing that instead.
And I wouldn't quite rule anything out as an attempt at some kind of "grand bargain" before he leaves office if he decides he wants to punish the GOP.
This is what we really need to fix.
What we need to watch for is whether or not the Republican Party interprets this as a repudiation of Trumpism, or merely of Trump himself.
The problem runs deeper than that. Unfortunately Trump's blend of populist rhetoric fueled by conspiracy theories, divisiveness, and victimization coupled with a vindictive/authoritarian agenda has seeped out of the US borders and reverberated in european countries that are now struggling (again) with he rise of fascist parties.
Take for example Spain's Vox party, which is quite literally a fascist apologist which copies Trump and recently even went as far as claiming that Spain's current government is the worst in 80 years, subtly bundling Franco's fascist regime in comparison and thus stating that it was a better alternative than the current democratic regime.
The free world has a problem with fascism in specific and authoritarian regimes in general, and Trump contributed to whitewash these political movements to the point that they might regain mainstream status throughout the world.
But it’s understandable that some of us non-US citizens are glad to see Trump go.
The scariest part, to me, regarding the way the Trump administration whitewashed fascism is that those of us who live in countries who experienced it are fully aware that fascism doesn't dawn upon us with a bang, and more often than not it just seeps in.
Therefore, people are desensitized towards fascism because they expect it to come as a bogeyman that strong-arms his way into power in an obvious way and against everyone's wishes. It does not. It sneaks in with overwhelming popular support, based on a rhetoric that there's an inhuman enemy threatening the little people and that the fascist hero is here to save everyone from evil by doing whatever it takes. That's precisely what we are seeing with Trump, with their supporters demanding beheadings and bullets to the head of reactionaries, while their supporters praise Trump for being a bully that's on their corner protecting them.
I feel the same way about socialism and communism.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-u-s-electio...
When I vote I make sure I pick the candidate that other countries would be happy with.
Is not something that the common voter could control. You will do in the 50% of the cases in fact, just by chance.
And is great, because deliberately burning all bridges with all your allies and to pee in the curtains just to make a vanity statement, is not a productive way to work in a multinational team to obtain your goals.
The US understands that stick very well when the topic is its opponents.
Edit: I’m not saying US citizens should think of other nations when casting their vote. Just glad — as non-US citizen - that Biden won and that our national far-right politicians can finally shut up about Trump