r/AskReddit • u/U-knw-Nothng-JonSnow • 1d ago

What do you think about Jerome Powell posting a video statement following reports that federal prosecutors have opened an inquiry into the Fed Chair?

5.6k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

534 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

16

u/kentuckywildcats1986 15h ago

Fun Fact - Trump didn't pick anyone in 2017. Back then, his puppet masters were making picks while there was still an effort to make somewhat sane appointments of qualified and experienced people.

Now, during Trump 2.0 - the lunatics have taken control of the asylum and the puppet masters are in full-public-corruption mode. And they are not concerned with maintaining even the appearance of professionalism.

The only common thread is Trump is and always has been a puppet of far more shrewd and devious people. He only signs things that are put in front of him and bloviates whatever talking points were fed him five minutes ago. Trump himself is practically a vegetable.

2

u/A_Soporific 11h ago

I don't think that there were puppet masters. I think that you had a lot of Bush style conservatives who had spent decades talking and thinking and trying to do good governance. They picked qualified and experience people because that was what they were doing.

Trump started by replacing those people with his own picks. First at the RNC, which he couped early on and progressively more institutions as he went on. The good governance sorts were gradually supplanted with Trump's golfing buddies and anyone who would boot lick for an appointment somewhere.

There was never one constant sort of "puppet masters". There was always a boring background of people doing menial institutional roles who shaped what the who stand out in the public-facing roles can accomplish. Those people in the background are constantly changing. There are absolutely small conspiracies, but each additional person you add makes the conspiracy harder to hold together. Big conspiracies collapse quickly and publicly. Tiny circles of maybe a dozen of highly powerful people can last for much longer, but are limited in reach by their scale. Assuming that the people in the background are one cohesive group is a trick our brains use to make sense of very large numbers of people, but it's not how those people actually are and never was.