I’m surprised he’s a serious contender, let alone the frontrunner. But I’m not surprised at his popularity among the Lumpen. My oldest friend (as opposed to my best friend) is a Teabagger. His racist, nationalist, thuggish spam and glurge got so bad a few years ago I blocked his email. So I’ve seen what’s been going on for the past eight years.
Tea Party = Fascist Party. Fascists always want a ‘strongman’ to fix their problems for them (while they convince themselves that they are solving their own problems by electing a strongman). So though I’m surprised that Trump’s mouth and history hasn’t knocked him out of the race already, I really shouldn’t be.
Technically, the IQ test is baselined to 100 as the median raw score for a population.
I am and I’m not surprised by his success. Certainly his rhetoric strikes a chord with certain groups of people. If Facebook is any indicator, it is the group of people of below average intelligence who spent most of their high school years smoking and drinking and bullying anyone different from them, barely graduated, possibly enjoyed an unremarkable stint as an enlisted person in the military and now live their adult lives performing some unremarkable job (possibly for a bar, restaurant, small local business or the town/state) 20 miles from where they grew up.
I’m not surprised to see the GOP finally implode, the writing has been on the wall for some time. I am very surprised it happened now, during a winnable election against a Democratic party that has been in power for eight years. I figured the GOP would manage to find a semi credible stooge to throw out there against Hillary and someone like Trump might show up in 2020 when reality would have set in that if they couldn’t win 2016 they had no chance in 2020.
How do you appeal to large amounts of people? You build a brand and market it. Can the average Democrat articulate in detail the differences between the parties and how changing a tax or a wage floor will impact the country? No. But they’ll vote (D) because it’s not (R).
Politics in this age has nothing to do with being best or brightest. It has to do with selling a message that resonates with enough voters in order to claim power. Look at the various religious sects in the world. You think all those gurus and priests believe that nonsense?
I am utterly surprised. I figured, at first, that he was a goof candidate looking for attention. He’s goofed with the idea of a Presidential run before, but it never came to anything. The guy is not a politician. He’s never been a Mayor, or a Governor, or a Representative or a Congressperson, and now he’s the GOP leading candidate after Super Tuesday. His own party is working against him at the top levels, but they don’t like his opponents, either.
“No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
Or
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Trump’s rise has been a source of amusement for me because all of the sanctimonious bullshit from supporters of democracy falls away and the truth of the state has become more clear for many.
To answer your question: Not at all. Neither am I surprised by the primitive Bernie Sanders’ comparable rise.
This. I am used to such demagogues grabbing the favor of 10 to 15% of the american populace at any one time, but confounded by how Trumpy has commanded such a large following.
Though I suppose his popularity amongst those voting in Republican primaries may not translate to much more than 15% of the total american voting population. At least I hope not.
To whatever degree we’re baffled, it’s *our *fault for our lack of understanding, not the Trump camp’s fault for refusing to follow our preconceptions. We can, and do, bash them gleefully, but they’re nevertheless real and numerous, and should be understood and interacted with instead.
Rather stunned actually. In California, we had something somewhat akin to this when Schwarzenegger ran for governor. At first, there were plenty of jokes and bad terminator lines but, eventually, we saw that he was taking the position seriously and had reasonable policies and intentions. And, before my time, we had the same thing with Reagan as governor. It seemed funny at first but the people saw that he was serious about being a politician and doing what he believed was best for the state.
With Trump, I don’t see any of that seriousness or intention on willing to work to make things better. He seems like the kid who runs for school president because it gets him lots of attention and then, when he wins, doesn’t know what to do other than “$%*@ it… Let’s PARTY!”.
It’s his success with evangelicals that floors me. It’s certainly not solid, but it’s enough to win him the nomination. I guess some evangelicals just really need a messianic figure even if he doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.
According to one Christian evangelist (clergy) I heard interviewed on NPR: while evangelists don’t see Trump as someone who reflects their religious tenets, he does appeal to their core social values.
I predicted on this very forum that Trump would fall by the wayside when the actual campaigning started. I couldn’t picture him standing outside the factory gate in the New Hampshire snow, shaking hands. And I was right – but it turns out that retail politics is apparently not essential any more. Trump flies in, bloviates at a rally of supporters, and flies out. And it seems to work.
I keep telling myself that everything will work out in the general election…but I feel like I’m whistling past the graveyard.
I believe I posted something to that effect as well. I thought he would troll a bit, and then come up with an excuse to drop out before the primaries started.
I’m very surprised. I’m as surprised as I imagine many 1920s/30s Germans were while watching the Nazis come to power.
I expected him to hit 30% in the polls at some point. The last election cycle gave every wacko at least a week of 30% before people came to their senses. I didn’t think that would last longer than a couple of months and didn’t think it would turn into actual delegates won in primaries.
He’s such a hypocritical blowhard, and so offensive in what he says, that I can only imagine supporting him if you just want to take a wrecking ball to the whole government, regardless of what form that takes.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised about that, given the willingness of Congress to shut down the government over every tiny budgetary squabble, and I guess hypocrisy is standard procedure when the Republicans are blaming the Democrats for their own sequester bill… but I’m still surprised.
