Americans: he won legitimately using the system that has been in existence for generations. Suck it up.

That's an extremely dangerous (and rather authoritarian) position to take. Many dictators and tyrants have come into power legitimately (to be clear, I'm not classifying Trump as that - yet).

No one (or very few) are arguing that he isn't the legitimate president. But that doesn't mean we aren't allowed to resist his policies.

Americans: he won legitimately using the system that has been in existence for generations. Suck it up.

That's an extremely dangerous (and rather authoritarian) position to take. Many dictators and tyrants have come into power legitimately (to be clear, I'm not classifying Trump as that - yet).

No one (or very few) are arguing that he isn't the legitimate president. But that doesn't mean we aren't allowed to resist his policies.

Trump and the Republican party being able to remove all your civil liberties, to the point where you can't get rid of him in four years by legitimate election is extremely unlikely.

I think its quite safe to say that US politics has a lot more checks and balances than post world war one Germany.

On the other side of the coin, some of the situation is similar.

Germany was in the depths of a depression looking for a scapegoat. Hitler came onto the scene promising to put it right, and tried to hide his bad things within many massive building projects such as building the autobahn. Most people in Germany had no clue what was really going off and those that did were too scared to speak out.

In America they are currently recovering from quite a long and deep recession same as the UK. Trump has promised to "make America great again" via a bunch of quite sensationalist building works.

He certainly can't be compared to a twentieth century fascist dictator, but the situation would be ripe for someone sly enough and patient enough to do such a thing if their endgame was measured in decades or a generation. For example, you'd have to replace the entire supreme court with poeple on your side, replace the police and army chiefs etc with people sympathetic to your cause to prevent a coup, etc. It wouldn't be easy.

I'm sure such a thing isn't going to happen and the guy is just an arse in need of the "things that aren't appropriate to say any more. Grandpa" book, in hardback form.

If he can be reigned in, it's likely that someone with some business sense outside the usual establishment might be an engine for positive change.

But hey, I'm just an ignorant Englishman. Time will tell...

I don't get why it's so important for many brits like us to get so bent out of shape about another countries choice of leader. It's not like we had any choice or can do anything about it.

It's less about the leader and more about what he is doing (or being told to do..) and the protests... well that's many fold frankly.

Firstly, where the US goes the UK tends to follow - given that Brexit means we need to secure trade deals we are even more likely to suck up to the USA; this is already in evidence given how long it took May to say something about the ban (any other country, or other time, it wouldn't require pulling teeth) and how quickly she offered a state visit. (Obama was in his second term, Bush and Clinton didn't get one; Cheeto Hitler - 7 fucking days!). So the protests here are as much against Cheeto Hitler as they are directed at our own government in a "Don't try this shit here" way.

Secondly, it is about support. It is supporting those in the states who are protesting so they don't lay down and take it either. To know that 'hey, many of us agree his actions are bullshit and we stand with you'. Given the people in power, a mixture of White Supremacists and Religious wackjobs, I suspect those protesting like the support and knowing that others stand with them to protest this dark direction the USA is heading in. (I wondered to myself earlier, if the world was as connected as it is now back when Hitler was rising to power if the protests might have stopped him, when people in the country knew others stood with them and that it wasn't them alone so they had to go along with it.)

However it isn't just about giving American's support as their Government starts to go to shit; most people realise that the ban which triggered all this isn't a sane move (heck, the US intelligence agencies didn't ask for it!), it is the perfect propaganda tool for people like ISIS to point at and say "See! The West hates you!" and with everything directed at Muslims these days for many it could be the straw which breaks the camel's back. The protests show that not everyone thinks that and that message also gets out to places like Iraq.

Indeed, I saw something earlier where someone serving in Iraq was talking to someone they were working with and they said (paraphrased slightly as I don't have a direct quote to hand) "We thought that having worked along side you, thought along side you, and tried to make the world safer along side you that America would be more welcoming to us..." - a pause, and the American in question thought they knew what was coming next - "... and we see that it is from the protests.".

The message gets out there, sitting idly by and making no noise just enforces the notion that the West doesn't care and thinks they are all terrorists.

Which leads in to my next point; geo-political stability.
For the longest time the world was getting better in many ways; China, while not perfect, were in the fold (tense in recent times, but still talking). Russia was doing it's own batshit thing but at least the USA could counter them. Iraq was proving a focal point for anti-ISIS actions with the likes of the USA and UK doing something to improve the clusterfuck they created working along side the locals. Even Iran was coming back in to the fold and becoming less of a crazy state.

Things weren't perfect of course, battle grounds persist and dickmoves continue to happen but there was a degree of healing, however slowly.

We are now 12 days in to Puppet Hitler's term - he has pissed off the Chinese, he has pissed off Iraq, he has pissed off Iran. He is no longer a good balance against Russia. And everything is sliding backwards.

So you protest, you protest in your own backyard to stop yours becoming as bad as your neighbours and stop the whole place going to shit - because ultimately the shit the USA is flinging will impact us all; there is an old adage - if the USA sneezes we all catch a cold. It is as true then as it was when I first heard it in the 80s.

But ultimately the reason to protest is because we are all human. Countries and boarders, it's all PR and propaganda - you protest and make a noise because fellow humans are suffering. The moment you lose sight of that, the moment you think 'the suffering of another person isn't my problem because they aren't born here', that's the moment you fail any future humanity might have in this universe because, if there is one thing I'm sure about, we don't stand a chance as a species if we don't pull the fuck together...

... and right now, with how the world is going, I don't see that happening before we have another global war; maybe after that those who are left will learn to work together.

Ya know, assuming anyone is left...

I don't get why it's so important for many brits like us to get so bent out of shape about another countries choice of leader.

@[member='phantom'], already explained this, but for me it's pretty simple.

If Austria or Brazil or Sri Lanka elects a dangerously unstable idiot, well... that sucks for those countries and I'd certainly support those populations if I could, but ultimately, it doesn't really effect me.

But the US is still (for the moment) the world's biggest economy and by a considerable margin the world's most powerful military. Ever hear the expression "When America sneezes the whole world catches a cold"?

The US affects the entire world; culturally, economically and militarily.

Frankly, I don't see how anyone could not protest Trump.

Americans: he won legitimately using the system that has been in existence for generations. Suck it up.

That's an extremely dangerous (and rather authoritarian) position to take. Many dictators and tyrants have come into power legitimately (to be clear, I'm not classifying Trump as that - yet).

No one (or very few) are arguing that he isn't the legitimate president. But that doesn't mean we aren't allowed to resist his policies.

Trump and the Republican party being able to remove all your civil liberties, to the point where you can't get rid of him in four years by legitimate election is extremely unlikely.

I think its quite safe to say that US politics has a lot more checks and balances than post world war one Germany.

On the other side of the coin, some of the situation is similar.

Germany was in the depths of a depression looking for a scapegoat. Hitler came onto the scene promising to put it right, and tried to hide his bad things within many massive building projects such as building the autobahn. Most people in Germany had no clue what was really going off and those that did were too scared to speak out.

In America they are currently recovering from quite a long and deep recession same as the UK. Trump has promised to "make America great again" via a bunch of quite sensationalist building works.

He certainly can't be compared to a twentieth century fascist dictator, but the situation would be ripe for someone sly enough and patient enough to do such a thing if their endgame was measured in decades or a generation. For example, you'd have to replace the entire supreme court with poeple on your side, replace the police and army chiefs etc with people sympathetic to your cause to prevent a coup, etc. It wouldn't be easy.

I'm sure such a thing isn't going to happen and the guy is just an arse in need of the "things that aren't appropriate to say any more. Grandpa" book, in hardback form.

If he can be reigned in, it's likely that someone with some business sense outside the usual establishment might be an engine for positive change.

But hey, I'm just an ignorant Englishman. Time will tell...

Or (god forbid) another major terrorist attack could happen in the US again, "extraordinary measures" may be claimed to be needed to protect the American people from "bad dudes", until, you know, "we figure out what's going on", with enough popular support for that and enough far-right allies in Europe...and nobody knows what happens from there.

I'm not saying it will happen. It's an extreme case scenario, maybe. But it also doesn't have to happen *exactly* like the "last time". And it doesn't have to be as blatant as a straight-up dictatorship. If fascism does rise again in a major liberal western democracy, nobody can predict its exact time, form and trajectory. It doesn't have to necessarily be like 20th century fascism. You don't have to expect to see browshirts marching on the streets.

And many people have the (false, by my standards) impression like "this isn't the Weimar Republic of 1933, we know/are better by now". Do we, really? Or the only difference is that we carry iPhones now?
Advanced technology is potentially something that could *aid* a future fascist regime, not something that necessarily protects us from it.

In any case, let's hope the best case scenario is 4 years of a demamogue clown and not much else, really. But it's needed to be vigilant. The much-touted "checks and balances" are not an unbreakable mechanism or an unbreachable fortress. When a lifetime conservative like David Frum is writing articles like this, one at least starts to get a bit worried.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/how-to-build-an-autocracy/513872/

People crack jokes about Trump’s National Security Agency listening in on them. They cannot deeply mean it; after all, there’s no less sexting in America today than four years ago. Still, with all the hacks and leaks happening these days—particularly to the politically outspoken—it’s just common sense to be careful what you say in an email or on the phone. When has politics not been a dirty business? When have the rich and powerful not mostly gotten their way? The smart thing to do is tune out the political yammer, mind your own business, enjoy a relatively prosperous time, and leave the questions to the troublemakers.

In an 1888 lecture, James Russell Lowell, a founder of this magazine, challenged the happy assumption that the Constitution was a “machine that would go of itself.” Lowell was right. Checks and balances is a metaphor, not a mechanism.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

Of course, Frum here posits that this can be stopped by "individual citizens" respectably phoning and writing their representatives and so on...not by massive collective action...but then again he is a neoconservative, he's not going to turn into a liberal, let alone a leftist. But the fact alone that he writes about a danger of Trump establishing an "autocracy" is telling enough.

I do agree that a fascist regime is an extreme scenario. However, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities. @[member='mikeman'], has stated a pretty good possibility. That isn't super far fetched. I'm not saying likely, but it's possible enough to be a bit worried.

There's also lots of possibilities where he tries and fails fairly quickly to make this regime. Thing is, even that's pretty damaging. I do agree though, for a variety of reasons, there are a lot of terrible scenarios that imo are more likely than Trump succeeding in creating a full on fascist regime and ruling for some time.

History doesn't repeat itself. It tends to echo older events, but always with something different going down.

phantom has pretty much nailed it completely.

I do agree that a fascist regime is an extreme scenario. However, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities. @[member='mikeman'], has stated a pretty good possibility. That isn't super far fetched. I'm not saying likely, but it's possible enough to be a bit worried.

There's also lots of possibilities where he tries and fails fairly quickly to make this regime. Thing is, even that's pretty damaging.

History doesn't repeat itself. It tends to echo older events, but always with something different going down.

phantom has pretty much nailed it completely.

Of course, a full facist regeime being created under the noses of the US citizenship is possible, but if it was happening, you wouldnt likely know it until it was too late.

Anyone of their right mind trying to do such a thing would be careful, calculating, moving their pawns like a long game of chess, waiting for the right moment. For an example in fiction, you only need look at Star Wars and how Palpatine played everyone, manipulating them and orchestrating a war to suit his goals. When I watch this i see historical allegories with such things as how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Or, in darker fiction, there is George Orwell's "Animal Farm", which is a political allegory of the rise of communism in Russia (and well worth a read if you've never read it).

I am pretty certain that such a thing as replacing a democratic government with a dictatorship (facist or otherwise) wouldnt be something that could be done "third world style" in the first world - involving tanks, the army, and a coup, and that there is too much communication, too many groups such as anonymous and wikileaks etc, too many subversive types who would soon have such plots unravelled and out on the internet that anyone planning such a thing would have to be extremely careful how they did it and who they let in on their plan.

I think its far more likely though that Trump has become president purely to capitalise on the position, exploit it for business goals, and after four years it won't matter to him if he's still in office or not, his purpose will have been achieved and he can retire comfortably with his family's wealth assured for another two generations...

I do agree that a fascist regime is an extreme scenario. However, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities. @[member='mikeman'], has stated a pretty good possibility. That isn't super far fetched. I'm not saying likely, but it's possible enough to be a bit worried.

There's also lots of possibilities where he tries and fails fairly quickly to make this regime. Thing is, even that's pretty damaging.

History doesn't repeat itself. It tends to echo older events, but always with something different going down.

phantom has pretty much nailed it completely.

Of course, a full facist regeime being created under the noses of the US citizenship is possible, but if it was happening, you wouldnt likely know it until it was too late.

Anyone of their right mind trying to do such a thing would be careful, calculating, moving their pawns like a long game of chess, waiting for the right moment. For an example in fiction, you only need look at Star Wars and how Palpatine played everyone, manipulating them and orchestrating a war to suit his goals. When I watch this i see historical allegories with such things as how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Or, in darker fiction, there is George Orwell's "Animal Farm", which is a political allegory of the rise of communism in Russia (and well worth a read if you've never read it).

I am pretty certain that such a thing as replacing a democratic government with a dictatorship (facist or otherwise) wouldnt be something that could be done "third world style" in the first world - involving tanks, the army, and a coup, and that there is too much communication, too many groups such as anonymous and wikileaks etc, too many subversive types who would soon have such plots unravelled and out on the internet that anyone planning such a thing would have to be extremely careful how they did it and who they let in on their plan.

I think its far more likely though that Trump has become president purely to capitalise on the position, exploit it for business goals, and after four years it won't matter to him if he's still in office or not, his purpose will have been achieved and he can retire comfortably with his family's wealth assured for another two generations...

I don't disagree with that logic. It is fairly likely that Trump became President to make himself and his friends even richer. That being said, you've got people like Bannon, who I'm fairly certain does indeed aim for something like fascism. There's also the rhetoric, which is frightening. He's also actually going through with his absurd promises that were grounded in some seriously twisted rhetoric. There is a lot more to this tho than somebody who just wants to get incredibly rich. I'm not certain what Trump really aims (or if he even has any aims for that matter). It may be that Bannon is using Trump, who just wants to make money.

There's a lot of mind numbing possibilities. There's a lot of uncertainty. That's really why I don't peg a weightage to rise of fascist regime, because, to be honest, anything can happen. And that's really what's scary.

Occam's razor. Odds are Trump just wants to build a legacy because he's obsessed with his brand, and he wants to be known as a well-liked president/will probably do everything in his power to fulfill all his campaign promises ASAP (executive orders) when work on his approval rating.