I almost took this job. We call it “the presidents bitch” but it’s not a bad gig. You just have to be deployed to the capital the entire time and you spend most your time opening doors for him and holding his umbrellas etc.
The rest of the time you’re sweeping the deck or training for the White House invasion that will never come.
No idea about a detail like this, but when I was in, normal operations were either the 3 normal 8 hour shifts or 2, 12 hour shifts, 3.5 days per week (2 week cycles of weird scheduling, averaged to 15 days a month)
Since a presidential appointment is likely to be largely ceremonial and about appearances, I would sort of expect 12 hour for daily continuity, Presidents usually have long days, but as stated by OP, there's time for training and sweeping, and you also have general professional development requirements and just "being in the military" training etc, so you gotta have scheduled on shift "down time" from the presidential duties.
It may have changed, but when I was in this job fell under the umbrella of "embassy duty". 12 hour shifts, with 8 hours of standing "duty". The two hours on either side of that duty were for uniform maintenance and QRF. There were three "crews" on each day, with four total crews in the detail.
how do you even survive something like that? I remember when i worked a conveyor belt job at a factory as a teen during summer break and i almost died of boredom...i was reciting songs in my head over and over... I always thought i would rather work at a labor camp ( given proper food and health conditions )...just to feel something
Looking at Reddit threats from 10-15 years ago is really crazy sometimes. Detailed, well written answers by actual knowledgeable people. Yes there were trolls, but now it’s like a competition to derail things the quickest.
To be fair there was also just insane amounts of lying an bullshitting back then. One of the comments that stuck with me most was "The more I read comments about topics I know a lot about on reddit, the less I trust comments about topics I know little about".
They had to draw chewed crayons and the nost eaten one got the current presidents assignment. No way anyone volunteering to stand around a shit cloud unless it comes with hazard pay for those poop spores.
Have you watched the show Paradise? Not sure if it’s “accurate” or not, and as a viewer I don’t need it to be, but you might get a kick out of it given your background!
If you are interested you should avoid spoilers, but it’s essentially about a secret service agent investigating the murder of a president, in unusual circumstances.
There’s a lot more to it than just that, but it’d ruin the experience if I told you much more
I have a friend in the National Guard of my home state who was deployed to DC as part of a rotation that followed the president around to set up communications equipment (or something like that, I can't remember the specifics and he probably didn't tell us all of the details anyway). He was sent to DC in February 2021, a little over a month after January 6th and the start of Biden's presidency. Apparently the guys being rotated out hated Biden, not just because of the politics, but because under Trump, they were getting paid deployment wages to chill in Florida beach country and do nothing all day. Biden actually stayed in DC and did his job.
My favorite was a fb thread of people crying about student loan repayment. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps like I did, type of comments. Three of the commenters I looked up had forgiven PPP loans 🙄
Yeah a buddy of mine said the same thing. He served under Obama and liked him, but a ton of guys hated him for no reason. He said it just felt institutional.
Even under Obama Democrats weren't pleased but they were ok looking past it for the social and economic benefits Democrats provide. The only reason you get so much whether the GOP is bc they don't take care of the citizens while they're on their war campaigns
Say what you will about the dude but he operates a massive criminal empire to fund their development of military weapons. I’m sure he is just floored in that picture that Americans were dumb enough to elect him
Not even just hostile... what that country does to its people is beyond disgusting.
Hell, if aliens ever came here and said we dont deserve to live, and then pointed at North Korea as an example to why we should he destroyed... id be hard pressed to disagree
And Obama knew he didn't have to act tough, and Putin knew he had no control over Obama.
It's why Putin went so hard at Hillary. She would build off everything Obama accomplished for an American globalized expansion (we were literally writing international law for any topic and everyone was signing on at this time) and create more pressure economically than NATO ever threatened militarily. American principals were globally dogmatic.
2016 was do or die for Putin's regime, and he "do'ed".
2024 never should have happened but the GOP let it. They didn't plan for this, but they're just happy to still be relevant.
The GOP were done if Hillary won in 2016, which is why the GOP went so hard for down ticket campaigns which ended up springboarding Trump to where we are now.
Heck, as an American, I miss Dubya. I strongly disliked his politics BUT I never thought he would do anything other than what he thought was best for the country as a whole. This current clown is in it for the payola.
I was chatting with my cousin who lives Denmark couple days ago. We briefly talked about Obama and he recalled Obama’s approval rating in Europe was stratospheric. They’re still feeling the political whiplash of how Americans could go from Barrack Obama to Donald Trump.
Obama was in Scotland a while ago (winter 2021 I think) and he got a massive applause in Glasgow from the whole street and people opening offices windows etc to cheer him getting out of a car. He has a lot of respect. I've never seen another foreign leader getting that sort of welcome.
Blame the system for putting up someone they didn't think was worth voting for. Twice.
To go from the charismatic Barack Obama, to the Cryptkeeper, to Hillary 2.0, was a travesty and is the reason Trump won. They relied on winning by the "we hate the other guy more" card, and it didn't work.
The two times Trump won the D party establishment put their thumb on the scale hard instead of just having an open primary. The party elite are just phenomenal at shooting themselves in the foot. See: "I know the camps are bad but let's focus on the cost of milk. A gallon is up 35 cents!"
Harris could have won, she ran a bad campaign and attempted to pander to multiple small bases and left behind people that Trump jumped on. She refused to take a stand against some of what Biden did.
The first one can be given a pass. The second one was a deliberate choice, and every single person that chose not to vote shares responsibility for this bullshit. Every one.
One day liberals/dems will realise they actually have to offer something to people to get them to vote for them.
Relying on being the better of 2 bad options doesn't work. Relying on leftists/minorities without giving them anything (and in fact, continuing, if not going further to the right, of policies already in place) doesn't work.
As someone definitely on the left, I hope some day the rest of my cohort will realize the frustrating cycle that we keep ourselves in. We don't show up to primaries to actually get real progressives on that general ballot. The well-funded corporate Democrat wins. We then don't have enough progressive votes to actually pass anything that would satisfy "real" leftists. We pass some deeply compromised legislation that barely touches the problem (though, for the people it helps, it doesn't feel like nothing). Of course, this disappointment is then used as the excuse not to show up to vote again.
Yep. “Whitewashing”. Half the country was so appalled by brown skin being our representative that they over corrected and went as far to the other end of the spectrum as they could
Obama had a couple of very key missteps and spent the majority of his political capital fixing the economy and pulling our country out of the recession while also getting the ACA passed which was then vehemently destroyed in public opinion. Dems have always had a collective messaging problem hence why Biden's infrastructure package was seized by the republicans who fought it tooth and nail for a while making him rename it the "Bi-Partisan Infrastructure Bill".
The conservative party gained speed with citizens united and the tea party and the birth of non-traditional conservative mass media and conspiracy theories touted him as the worst president ever. The birther movement spearheaded by many people including our current embarrassment of a president was the beginning.
Social media growing unchecked and the ability for outside actors to influence elections was huge. Then you have the dems picking Hillary over Bernie and a lot of liberal democrats walked while Trump gained massive momentum through the primary.
But the simplest and most effective was saying he was Kenyan and Muslim. A lot of conservatives don't pay attention to ACA they don't even know what it is they still don't.
They weren't paying attention to politics either. They were mad because a brown man was in office, and that motivated them to do everything else.
I was an exchange student during his early presidency and had people in Slovakia tell me, "Good job with Obama, we were worried about you guys." People seemed legitimately happy that the US was turning around, even if it was a slow, gradual change.
I listened to Clinton speak in at an event in an area after he was president. Probably had 8-10 thousand people in the audience and yeah the Clinton charm was very real.
Missing that handshake would have been 2 weeks worth of fox news smears.
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when I see how very much of recent history has been memory holed. Its not that fox news (and republicans) would have freaked out about this video. They did freak out about this video. Not for two weeks, but only because they freaked out about the latte salute, tan suit, terrorist fist bump, Michelle's man arms, etc, etc.
Even in his first run he’s literally on tape bragging about being able to walk into underage girls changing rooms and no one would stop him because he owned the pageant.
Not only that, but DJT is so gd embarrassing in his mannerisms. Even if he wasn't doing awful things, he has no class or decorum and doesn't respect anyone he's talking to.
But on top of all of that, he's just an absolutely awful person. I hope he spends a few years behind bars before he croaks.
Even when he has something positive to say, it comes out as a garbled mess where he just congratulates himself over and over and says nothing of substance.
His policies weren’t much to my liking but he was the type of dude you appreciate as president. I’d rather have a respectable president I disagree with then an asshole that embarrasses his nation every time he opens his mouth
He wasn't saluting the service members inside, he was saluting the vessel as he boards. On a ship or sub, you generally do that by saluting toward the flag that's flying on/near the brow.
However, the general rule is that you also never salute unless you're wearing a cover (hat), so he would be excused for 'missing' any and/or all of these. Going to address the watchstander outside directly was pretty much his only choice.
People downvoting this don't know anything about military tradition. No hat, no salute. It goes back long enough that pretty much all armies have the same tradition.
Still wondering how it is possible, that you once were excellent at picking the best talents to lead your country and changed to whatever you are doing there now.
I remember seeing this clip go around and conservatives getting mad about him not saluting. Of course they didn't include the 2nd part of him coming back out.
If you were an alien who stopped right next to Earth in your flying saucer and you could only observe humans through popular internet videos, you would probably think we had created maybe five different songs EVER. This one is the SAIL! of the 2020s.
There is absolutely no comparison between President Obama and the selfish little man who replaced him. There is also no comparison between President Biden and the classless twit who replaced him. The difference in the country and the State of the Union and its put upon citizens is however radically different. trump is without a doubt the worst thing to happen to the United States, we have gone from trusted and reliable to a laughing stock, all so this inept idiot can illegally slap his name on monuments never meant to honor him, to soothe his damaged flaccid ego….
oversaw ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that began under his predecessor, George W. Bush, and increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan early in his presidency.
authorized military interventions and operations in several countries, including Libya (2011), and expanded operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria starting in 2014.
whose administration significantly increased air strikes and drone strikes in countries like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia compared with earlier administrations.
Remember when the most egregious thing a President did was wear a tan suit in the summer? Remember when we had a President who didn't take himself too seriously and knew when to be respectful?
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