What does the future hold for Donald Trump? - threadbans in OP

Anyone with an R beside their name will pick conservative judges for the supreme court. That overrides anything to do with Trump. So many flaws to their system.

I've read that years ago, that if California was actually a sovereign country, they would economically be as strong as Germany or France or the UK, if not even more.

I've often noticed that California and the whole West Coast doesn't have much in common with the South.

But after all, it's a large country as well with a large population size.

I've also read once that one US state can't secede that easily as well. Apparently they'd have to get the OK from a large majority of the other states as well.

This all certainly didn't start with Trump.

But voting for Trump seems exceptionally stupid and dumb, for a dumb old man who only likes to argue. At least voter and candidate seem to have equal minds on this one.

Their strong support for russia/putin and how strong they are in the east of the country always confuses me. Do they not remember before the wall fell?

I hope you don't mind me barging in here, but I elaborated on a very similar question over in the Russia thread back in December 2023, and I think that post might be somewhat useful here. So I'm just going to plagiarize myself, if you don't mind:

There are multiple threads at play here.

For starters, at least as Germany is concerned, a lot of the initial support for the AfD came from East Germany, the states that formerly made up the GDR, and there in particular in the parts of Thuringia, Saxony & Saxony-Anhalt that, due to their geographical make-up would have been shielded from western radio & TV broadcasts. As such, post-1945 Soviet indoctrination worked much better there than it would in the areas around Berlin or up in the North, which is generally flat as a board. East German propaganda & education was also a lot more nationalist than you'd expect from a country subscribed to a supposedly internationalist ideology which, coupled with a lack of any proper attempts to process the events & crimes of the nazi years, created a witches brew of anti-western sentiment and nationalist ideology in the southern parts of the GDR, primarily in the post-war generations.

As such, there was a real feeling of betrayal when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and this feeling of betrayal and alienation only increased when, in the years following reunification, Eastern German industrial plants, which had often been built in poorly-developed regions (Just look at places such as Eisenhüttenstadt or Leuna to see what I mean) and were often decades behind in terms of technology, were shut down or laid off vast numbers of their pre-unification work force. At the same time, the successor to the SED (East German Communist Party), the PDS, later Linkspartei or Linke, moved away from its previous martial & nationalist positions, moving more into a traditional far-left political party, alienating a lot of its former members in East Germany. This allowed more extreme parties, first the unabashedly neo-nazi NPD and later the AfD (NPD in suits) to take advantage of a readily-prepared support base, one that had generally good memories of the time when the big brother in Moscow was still on their side.

Then, there are the social aspects. For all the propaganda about freeing the working people, GDR society was surprisingly conservative/reactionary and sealed off. While women were far more common in the workplace in the GDR compared to West Germany, particularly in the first twenty years of the GDR regime, their place in society wasn't all that different than it was in Germany pre-war, with a very clear emphasis on men being the pillars of society. The LGBT scene was actively suppressed, and to a far more extreme degree than in the west, with once again the first twenty years being the worst. And finally, there was basically no immigration. While there was an exchange with fellow socialist countries such as Vietnam, this was highly regimented, almost always tied to major infrastructure projects and for the most part, these foreign nationals were restricted to their own compounds, with only limited cultural exchange events under strict supervision of the party and the Stasi. This stood in stark contrast to the far more liberal situation in West Germany, and the resulting clash of ideologies post-reunification only reinforced the feelings of alienation & betrayal I mentioned earlier.

So when Russia seemingly sorted its troubles out in the early 2000s, coupled with embarking on a decidedly conservative social policy under Putin, this became a welcome point of focus for a significant number of East Germans. Russia was seen as a welcome oasis of calm, a country where the proper order of things was being reestablished. It was also a welcome logistics base for some of the more radical elements of the far-right, with weapons readily available, loads of isolated areas for "training" and local authorities that could easily be bought off with hard currency.

Of course, Russia also expertly played on the collective societal guilt of German society for the crimes committed during WW2, reinforcing the need for reconciliation and positioning a deepening friendship with Russia as the best way to do so, with an accompanying cooling of relations with the US & NATO being positioned as the best way to break out of the circle of post-war guilt. And for a while, this actually worked. Russia was seen as a "natural ally", public service broadcasters ran massive documentary series about Russia, from Kaliningrad to the Urals, highlighting the people and the culture. Hell, they even let a camera team onto a Typhoon class submarine during a routine deterrence patrol. Even my dad, who was an old-school left-wing liberal, was taken in to a certain degree, believing that the "Atlantic Bridge" as it was called in Germany, the close partnership between Western European states and the US, needed to go.

So yeah, it's a complicated situation with no quick & easy answers, as you can see from this rambling reply.

EDIT: There's one more thing that needs to be pointed out, despite the length of my post already: Yes, there was already an active far-right scene in West Germany at the time of reunification. The NPD, which I mentioned before, was a west German party. However, the far-right & neo-nazi scene in the West were generally disorganised, chaotic and impulsive, preferring direct action and violence over working their way through the system. They were also generally cash-strapped, so when the AfD started its rise in the late 2000s, with a well-established party structure and ample financial resources, it was able to not only absorb far-right movements in West Germany, but also weed-out the "undesirable" elements of these movements, while adopting their political positions & outlook. An AfD-internal strategy paper actually stated this in 2016: "We differentiate ourselves from the NPD through our conservative supporters, not through our policies"

There are multiple reasons.

Poor education leads to a lack of critical thinking, ripe for misinformation.

Poor healthcare leads to poverty, and poverty breeds fascist leaders.

Latent racism undertones are motivated by a racist.

Misogynists feel emboldened by his contempt for women.

Anyone with a prejudice against gay people contorts him into an alpha, red-blooded male.

Deeply religious types are happy to gloss over his transparent lack of morals so they can push for anti-abortion laws.

And then you have those that always voted republican, regardless of who was on the ticket.

"A.K.A FREEDOM! And if you don't agree you're a commie socialist!"..

Although, if Trump says so..

or if you're not a straight white christian male

If he loses the case he will appeal and try to use the gag orders as limiting his right to free speech etc., the object is to delay and delay, the gamble is he will get re-elected, find ways to throw out the 4 cases or stop them.

How lng will the cross examination of Cohen take? And how long after that will the jury be sent to make their decision?

One more day, the prosecution has one more witness, then it's over to the defence.

I wouldn't expect too much on the verdict.

Trump is probably going to get away with a suspended sentence in the worst case.

The judges ae also very much in favour of him even if they pretend to be unbiased.

Lot's of other court proceedings are procrastinated as well.

If not some gun crazy American shoots him first, the world would have to prepare for another Trump presidency with all consequences.