The tipping point, if there is one, will be one things are so badly fucked up for the average Trump voter that the Trump voters too proud to admit they fucked up by voting for him but realize he’s a disaster just stay home, and those who actually believed he’d make America great again vote for a 3rd party candidate or, gasp, even consider voting for a Democrat.
I agree that there will eventually be a tipping point. I just don’t agree that his legal troubles will be the catalyst of his demise. It could well be the excuse that people need to turn on him once they figure out he’s a disaster, but Trump voters won’t turn on him until that condition is met, when they realize that he’s royally destroying the country. People need to feel pain first. People need a taste of reality first. Trump is a problem for the country…but there’s no problem a good, long, massive recession or depression can’t fix.
I think that even when this happens, the hard core supporters won’t blame him. They will say (just as he will) that it is someone else’s fault (Obama, Hillary, Libruls, Democrats, etc.), that things had been going bad for years, and that he was trying to fix things and save them but the Other Guys had screwed things up too badly to be fixed, PLUS that they stood in his way every time he tried to make it better. The hardest of the hard core will never desert him.
I sincerely believe the tipping point will be the thing that most orange yam supporters find fascinating and trustworthy about him = money.
If there’s ever a day where we find out he’s NOT rich, not even a multimillionaire, or if he owes Russian banks $25+ billion, that would be the thing. For many people, rich = smart, rich = competent, rich = presidential. I’ve heard plenty of people tell me because he’s rich and is so successful (he’s not) at real estate, then he is qualified to be POTUS.
Seriously, what you’ve seen for the last year hasn’t convinced you that voting for trump is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with Putin’s gun? Is party line that important?
No, what I’ve seen for the last year has not “convinced [me] that voting for trump is tantamount to playing Russian roulette with Putin’s gun”. Is it difficult for you to understand that there are people out there that feel differently than you do about his job performance thus far? ~42% of the country approves of the job President Trump is doing.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion on the matter. So far (~1/3 of the way through Trump’s first term), things seem to be plodding along more or less like they always do.
If you ignore issues of immigration, international trade, international diplomacy, wars we are getting involved in, the federal deficit, the environment, education, and civil rights.
Which, if you happen to be a middle class/upper middle class straight white male living in a mostly demographically homogeneous area, would seem to be more or less the same to you.
In my city over the past few days, ICE has been waiting by school bus stops to arrest parents as they walk their kids to the stop in the morning. This does not feel like anything I’ve ever experienced in my life. For the first time in my life, I feel like Weimar Germany.
In case you didn’t catch it, this was a CBO estimate was from January 2016
Did Trump change that? Yeah, a little bit (2017-2026 period is now expected to add $9.9 trillion). Most of the federal deficit was already baked into the cake before President Trump. In other words, more or less plodding along like usual.
ETA: I don’t have time to try and quantify all your claims, but I’d invite you to provide some data-backed arguments for how you think things are not “plodding along more or less like they always do” in the areas you’ve mentioned. As noted, I think you’re wrong about trade and deficits.
I don’t know if ICE has ever waited at school bus stops before (I’m not particularly well-acquainted with their tactics), but certainly the idea that ICE might enforce immigration laws is not unprecedented, and it was hardly controversial until recently. I think making comparisons to Weimar Germany seem like chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling arguments that look silly, but I suppose you’re free to make whatever argument you like, however serious or unserious it might be.
Things are not plodding along as usual despite your well-sourced claims. If things were plodding along as usual you would have a state department with people in it and your president’s cabinet would consist of people who are familiar with their roles, for instance.
I imagine others grasped my meaning. Anyway, you haven’t addressed the ways in which I’ve pointed out things in the US are not plodding along as usual. Why not? Are you under the impression every president destroys his state department and supports nazis, or have you not been paying attention to those things as well as how ICE operates during Trump’s plodding administration?
So, you didn’t notice all the talk of trade wars and tariffs and all that stuff? Is any of that included in your link? Not so much.
Interestingly, though, most of the real pain from the trade wars will be felt by trump supporters. I wonder who they will end up blaming.
And on the one hand, we had people that would have looked to raise taxes to fill that deficit, and instead, we got people to cut taxes to make it grow.
We had a massive financial crisis in 2008, and we had massive deficits growing our way back out of that. The proper thing to do at this point is to bring those deficits back in. The economy is doing just fine, it doesn’t need “rocket fuel”, in fact, it needs to cool very slightly. Maybe it wasn’t quite time yet to raise taxes, maybe it was, that’s a toss-up, but it was a terrible time to cut taxes.
We will enter a recession at some point in the future. That’s how business cycles work. At that point, it would be useful for the govt to have some sort of reserve to feed into the economy. Us just burning deficit now, does not benefit the economy, it does not benefit the citizen, it only benefits the wealthy, and it costs us the ability to deal with economic downturns in the future.
Okay, international diplomacy. How many ambassadors do we have to other countries? How many people are in the state department? Are you claiming that it’s just plodding along about the same?
Do you also deny that our stance on the environment and protections for it have changed drastically?
As noted, I think that your answers show a simple surface understanding of trade and deficits, and that the problem is far more complicated than you are trying to make it sound.
But yeah, things are just plodding along to a large extent. You have 300+ million people and a close to $20 trillion gdp. Govt spending and staffing is a small fraction of the US. So, things keep plodding along, in spite of what is going on at the upper levels of our govt, for now.
That is not thanks to trump, that’s thanks to the people of this country who wake up everyday and go to work, no matter who the president is, no matter what the deficit is, no matter what wars we are in. There is quite a bit of inertia in our plodding, and it takes quite a while to make substantive changes. Trump was handed a country in good and improving economic shape. The only thing he can take credit for is that he hasn’t manged to mess up what he inherited too badly, yet.
But, if you happen to be a straight, white, upper middle class male, then you will be the last to be harmed, but you don’t have to be the last to notice.
This is exactly my point. My claim that “things seem to be plodding along more or less like they always do” was in response to this post by Procrustus:
Certainly not everything is exactly identical to previous years, but at a macro level, America is generally doing fine, just like it usually does. “We” collectively are hardly “fucked”.
I wasn’t attempting to give Trump credit for anything, I was trying to point out that Procrustus’s chicken-little-esque “we’re fucked” analysis is overwrought.