Pretty much exactly this. You stick useless people in these important roles so they can't get enough traction to try for your chair, but you also want people who are at least smart enough to do whatever you tell them to do. Patel is actually a smart pick, he's just too dumb to know how to push around actual field agents and only knows how to push around analysts and media.
Additionally, a lot of hospitals and doctors in those states are being very shaky about providing prenatal or neonatal care because of the potential of opening them to liability if a baby dies.
Not really doomerism when we literally had the DHS secretary on mic in public say "we're going to have ICE making sure the right people vote for the right leaders".
When the enemy tells you their plan, believe them the first time.
Yeah, if they're wanting to do the old castle thing, they forget castles had funny things like ways to produce food and unblockable access to clean water.
He might look it, but not feel it. There's a LOT of eyes looking at the big chair and saying "wow Trump is doing a shitty job, I could easily do better if only he'd move out of the way."
I still don't see what keeping him alive does. Sure, I'm assuming rational actors, but this is a guy who already got caught twice, was dragging other people into the gravity of his criminal investigations, and killing him makes way more sense. Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, as they say.
No no no! I don't know who started this fucking thing, Cincinnati chili has never contained cocoa. I literally live here, and I've heard it from tons of transplants and natives alike. No chili parlor here uses it, no recipes I've seen use it.
Ehhh, the idea predates Cyberpunk pretty well. Digital immortality was a theme in some sci-fi going all the way back to the 50s with Asimov's "The Last Question" (though that was more Matrix-style consciousness upload).
Bingo. You use ML to narrow down results, not to give you answers. I have a friend who uses ML models to analyze radio telescope data, because it's really good at the mind-numbing work of throwing out noise and junk from broadcast satellites and known radio sources. Then you go through the narrowed stuff to see if anything in that is more interesting.
It's the question between sifting a million hits or a thousand.
There's also the fact that there's an enormous machine of conservative think tanks and funding groups and PACs and corporations that will fight every and any change tooth and nail. The obvious ones like abolishing ICE? They're an enormous source of revenue for dozens of companies, from tech to defense, not to mention that private prison companies are running the concentration camps. They'd need to be ready to effectively run things as a true dictator in order to get anything done, because large portions of the economic sphere have been retooled to rely on things continuing the way they are.
Remember that one of the biggest internal dangers to average people in Nazi Germany was literally children. The Hitler Youth and the girl's group that I can't remember the name of literally turned kids into snitches against each other, against neighbors, against parents, everyone. This was all dressed in the clothes of "being a good citizen".
Or the judge in Netanyahu's corruption case dying in a single vehicle crash.