This is why you don’t put Christian Evangelicals in charge
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01397-1
https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-doe-office-science-face-deep-cuts-trumps-first-budget
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/06/10/proposed-nasa-budget-cuts-impact/
Colonized, looted, and impoverished countries. Conquered and despoiled countries.
That’s the wages of capitalism. You’re not building a prosperous domestic state, you’re robbing your neighbors and dolling out the spoils to your minions and allies.
Okay? After Greg Abbott wins the next election, he’ll have been governor longer than Xi Jinping has been the Chinese president. Nobody seems to care.
We can also play this game with the UK, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, Israel…
Ruling governments can hold power for decades, sometimes even centuries, with capable leadership and popular approval.
The fundamental difference between Abbott and Xi is that Abbott uses his power to export the wealth of his state abroad on behalf of his sponsors while impoverishing enormous swaths of his local population.
Xi’s brought wealth back into China, developed it’s domestic industry and improved the quality of life, and raised over a hundred million of his people out of poverty.
Abbott’s party has to fight tooth and nail to oppress his people in order to stay in power. Xi’s party enjoys enormous native popularity and broad national support.
Okay, the only thing I really care to respond to in all that is your comparison of Abbot to Xi, because it demonstrates how much you’re missing the point. Abbot keeps getting elected; Xi is functionally president for life. Learn what a dictatorship is.
I think I’m done here. Anyone who goes as far as you have to defend despots is not someone I care to waste my time with.
The office is the Chinese president isn’t even particularly powerful. Xi’s influence is exerted through his chairmanship of the Party and of the Military Commission, neither of which are elected positions in either China or the US. His position as president is an appointment by Congress and has functions more equivalent to our Secretary of State (another unelected US position). He holds these offices by cultivating support within the elected Congress and popularity with the general public.
Abbott, meanwhile, secures his position as elected governor through strategic and systematic disenfranchisement, voter caging, and voter intimidation. He has mediocre public approval and is constantly, often viciously, fighting fellow members of his own party for control of government. His greatest influence comes from fundraising, which remains his forte. Unlike Xi, Abbott maintains his position as a conduit for bribery between private business and public officials.
Adios.