Quote Originally Posted by slack_pie View Post
Trump has surrounded himself with some decent people to be fair, some of whom are former Democrats - which tells you everything you need to know about the direction the Dems are going in.

It's a shame that someone else isn't the Republican candidate though. People like Vivek Ramaswamy and RFK Junior are clearly more dialled in and less controversial than Trump. Vivek is about as impressive a candidate as you could have as far as I'm concerned. Trump, on the other hand, is so divisive that some people will vote for Harris simply because she's Trump's opposition.

If Trump wins, I'm interested to see if he follows through on his idea to have Elon Musk audit the entire public sector. I'm convinced that with the right processes in place and the sort of dynamism and performance standards you see in the private sector, you could halve the state and enjoy a more efficient and fair system.
I watched Vivek Rawaswamy on Lex Fridman and he strikes me as certainly decent in the sense of very bright and articulate. I think he comes across well on a lot of issues, he explains his views on immigration very well. I think he is wrong to the point of being deluded on Ukraine and I'm concerned by how he can't bring himself to criticise Trump's fake elector scheme, which is worrying but I suppose that's politics. We are one month out from an election after all and he doesn't want those headlines.

RFK comes across more as eccentric uncle than presidential material to me.

Musk is loved by many but big question marks overbhis judgement for me. He's a great hype and ideas man but out of all his companies I think only SpaceX is well run. His audit of the public seccltor would probably start with the removal of any oversight and regulation of social media, self driving electric vehicles and satellites (while keeping the billion dollar government subsidies he's supposedly against). But maybe I'm being cynical.