I agree with what you are saying. Obama and Clinton are sane people that the right likes to pretend are insane dictators. Trump really is a danger by comparison. He has unqualified, mentally and emotionally unstable, has no empathy, terrible ideas based on nothing, etc.
However, what if it turns out that the checks and balances against the executive branch work and Trump can’t do much damage. If Democrats and a handful of Republican block his worst ideas, judges block his ideas, his executive branch is staffed with sane people who mostly ignore him and he spends all his time trying to win adulation from his base rather than govern.
Will that change the philosophy of the Executive branch on the left?
I’m not sure if you were responding to me or the OP, but I’ll address this anyway.
I have enough confidence in the US government to smooth out the worst of the rough edges. There are a lot of checks and balances and just simple inertia, and the Constitution guarantees that inertia strongly favors inaction. Trump and the Pubs will do their best to break everything, but generally the result of that is gridlock and stagnation. I’m reasonably confident that the Dems in the Senate will be able to filibuster and the courts will be working overtime with injunctions and rulings. Even with a cooperative House, it takes time to pass and implement laws.
Beyond that, I’m also reasonably confident that two years of a Trump presidency will hand both the house and senate to the Dems.
This is all quite bad, of course, but it’s not WWIII or the collapse of civilization. Certainly not by 2020.
Pay attention to what I pointed out in my previous post: Trump does not have to make his plans become reality, he is counting on the unrest and problems that will crop up just because of the efforts he will make in the attempt at making those dumb ideas reality. He (or his business) will benefit no matter what.
And with the current congress (a victory by trump does mean that congress will change little), he might even make the dumb ideas a reality, but it will be then just gravy for him.
Yeah but I doubt he cares. He will be the best president evar. He doesn’t feel any loyalty to a party. He will go with whatever pops into his mind for a particular situation regardless of party line. I’m not excusing him. I’m not trying to make him seem better. To me that is the worst trait we can have in a president. I would rather have a president that is reliably right or left wing. An unpredictable president is the worst thing I can think of.
Why would his executive branch be staffed with anyone other than those who will flatter him and tell him his every idea is brilliant, and that he should implement those ideas immediately? Why would anyone in his executive branch ever act as any sort of check on his worst excesses?
The one thing we got lucky with with Trump is that he’s lazy and incompetent. Trump will never be a Hitler because he’s not willing to do the work that Hitler did in taking over Germany. Trump just wants to run around holding rallies and listening to people cheer for him. Getting laws enacted takes hard work and organization. So the key to dealing with the Trump administration will be always outlining all the steps it will take to do something and then outwaiting Trump’s interest in doing it. As long as we can keep his finger off the nuclear launch button, we should be able to muddle through.
The danger I see from a Trump presidency is his legacy. Trump is Nixonian in his obsession with inventing enemies and attacking them. He’s done it throughout his life and I’m sure he’ll continue to do it as President. Trump’s going to use the power of his office to seek vengeance on everybody from Hillary Clinton to the kid who gave him a wedgie when he was seven. Fortunately for these “enemies” Trump’s incompetence will hold true here as well.
But even if his efforts are ineffective, they will establish precedents. Just like sending troops overseas or refusing to use funds designated for a government program, harassing people you don’t like will become a power of the Presidency. And future Presidents who are smarter than Trump will abuse those powers much more effectively than Trump will.
A President Trump would also mean a Republican congress and an emboldened Tea Party. Checks & balances will be meaningless. All that right-wing-fringe legislation that they’ve been been demanding and voting on, knowing that it would never actually get enacted, WILL get passed, and Trump will sign it.
20 million people will be without health insurance, environmental and financial regulations will be totally gutted, there will be massive tax cuts for rich folks, with a fig leaf of pretending to be for the middle class, massive budget deficits etc., etc.
I think it’s more nuanced than that. For example, individual states could choose to continue Obamacare at a local level and with so much of the administration of the program at a local level, such a transition would mostly be hard because they’ll have to find a way to pay for it.
Nothing in American politics is ever as extreme as its opponents declare that it will be. (But I do want to emphasize that I do not think Trump will be a good thing. He’ll be very, very bad. Very bad. A yuge problem, folks. But I do think life will continue.)
This sums things up very nicely and kind of fit my view.
Even if Trump is elected president, he lacks the intelligence, social skills, ambition or work ethic to actually be president. He just wants people to call him Mr. president and enjoy the ego boost of having the job. Most of the job of governance will be done by people appointed by him and the VP.
However I agree it will move the overton window (if that term is applicable) to what is acceptable policy from the executive branch. Using the powers of the executive branch to engage in illegal behavior to suppress, terrorize and intimidate your political foes will be seen as more legitimate after a Trump presidency. I watched a frontline special recently that implied Trump decided to run for president after he got roasted by Obama and Seth Meyers in 2011 at the correspondents dinner. So Trump’s entire run could just be an attempt to get revenge on all the people who made fun of him in 2011. To get the satisfaction of ‘kicking’ Obama out of office.
I’m sure Trump will sign whatever the congress passes for him, but I’m hoping the dems win the senate back and can block the worst of it.
I think this is an overly-rosy view of the likely outcome.
Trump won’t just go around holding rallies. Many on the far right will seize the opportunity afforded by a Trump Administration to reduce civil rights and increase repression; if anyone believes there are no powerful figures in US military and intelligence who sincerely join Trump in admiring Putin and Putin-style suppression of opposition, they are dreaming. Trump won’t want to be bothered with the details, but he will certainly sign executive orders put in front of him and appoint Federal judges and Supreme Court Justices who will put the ‘rule of law is a luxury we can’t afford’ program into action.
You don’t see that as being a significant problem?
Trump is out for personal glory, ego stroking, and profit.
He’s going to be very easily manipulated, and it’s anyone’s guess as to who will do the manipulating. If Vladimir Putin offers him ten billion dollars to abandon NATO and let Russia invade the Baltics, that will happen. If he’s paid to appoint fundamentalist zealots to the Supreme Court, they will be appointed. On the flip side, Trump lashes out; if he feels Putin or China or whomever has double crossed him, there will be war.
When it comes to the “what can President Trump do” question, here are two aspects I find most interesting:
He’s made an awful lot of promises to some very angry people. Which issues that those voters care about can he actually follow through on (“can” in both the practical sense and the “want to” sense)?
He will want to fulfill personal grudges against a good many people and organizations. How far will he go to do that, and to what extent can he keep himself from going too far?
Yeah, he personally wouldn’t care about them, but they would care. And they are the segment of the GOP base that regularly challenges sitting incumbent candidates in the primaries, if they feel the incumbents are not living up to the One True Conservative Agenda. It’s almost unheard of to challenge a sitting President in the primary for their second term, but these guys won’t give a crap about that.
The reliable base of idiots that got Trump nominated with about 40% of the vote will turn on him if they think he’s a RINO, and that might be enough to turf him out in a contested primary.
Clinton may be less loud about it, but she’s also quite paranoid and sees enemies everywhere, from the FBI, to the NY Times(the media as a whole, actually), to the public(her obsession with keeping secrets from the public that aren’t supposed to be secrets). She also refused to rule out firing James Comey in an interview yesterday.
If Trump were to win, I predict that the dollar would devalue, the stock market would drop, and violent crime would increase, all before he actually took office. As President-elect, he would engender wall-to-wall coverage when called to testify at his fraud trial and later, his rape trial (I believe that both are civil cases; he can’t avoid being called as a witness). His testimony will help tank the economy, and we will be in a full fledged recession on the day he takes office.
Once in office, he will delegate any policy making to his staff. He’ll focus on attending rallies or shaking hands - with strict instructions to the Secret Service to hide any protesters from his attention. Given no oversight, his staff will be rife with corruption. At some point, some noteworthy scandal will come to light, and will be the focus of the remainder of his administration, complete with daily news coverage.
He doesn’t have any meaningful political values, so he will sign off on whatever legislation congress gives him. A Republican Congress isn’t going to give him anything progressive, but we should expect tax cuts focused on high wage earners. The debt will explode. Interest rates will rise. Congress will also probably roll back the prohibition on insurance companies excluding people for pre-existing conditions or dropping people who have had too much coverage.
Russia will annex territory.
We may get mired in another ground war in the Middle East.
And I will unfriend a hell of a lot of people on Facebook, but not before posting some nasty things on several pages.
This question is impossible for partisans to answer without spin. Certainly now. I’m not saying I or anyone else is purely neutral. But I know I dislike and disapprove of both Clinton and Trump a lot, which contrasts me with many posters here who seem to actually think well of Clinton, as well as a small handful positive about Trump.
Risk market reaction to changing margin in the race makes it clear risk assets (like stocks) will sell off initially if Trump wins, perhaps several % in US stocks or more. It’s not going out on any limb to say that’s more likely than not. The degree or duration of the sell off is a lot harder to predict.
What a Trump admin would look like IMO is pretty much impossible to say. That’s one reason it’s easy to say risk markets will be unsettled: higher risk premium due to more uncertainty.
Trump himself is not a conservative. However he would likely govern in potential concert with GOP majorities in both houses, if he were to win. So there’s potential for a united Congressional/WH conventional conservative agenda, in most respects, with Trump going along with it though he has no ideology himself. Or, he might feud with them over the aspects of his current pitch most actual Republicans don’t agree with (radically more protectionist trade policy, serious difference in internal immigration enforcement, etc). Or he might emphasize his more pro-welfare state instincts (no reform of existing unfunded entitlement liabilities, add a child care entitlement on top, etc) and work more with Democrats than Republicans. One likely tendency is tax cuts Ryan-like GOP’ers want without the fiscal reform (reduction in future spending increase) they also want, so inflationary relative to likely gridlock between Clinton and a GOP House.
In foreign policy Trump and the Democrats don’t really disagree fundamentally, the US shouldn’t be activist like it was under Bush but more passive like it has been under Obama. For example, OK, Trump has a strange admiration for Putin which is disgraceful IMO, but the Obama position has been only soft push back v Putin’s aggression, and though Clinton is viewed as a bit more hawkish I’d except actually similar policy from her or Trump, most likely. Again, Trump is less predictable, that’s worrisome, but saying he will do this or that more risky thing in foreign policy than Clinton is just election spin, IMO.
Going back to the basics of what makes Trump run, he’s a textbook case of narcissistic disorder. My prediction is that he will very quickly lose interest in governing, because there’s nothing in it for him, will use press events to complain about how unfair everyone is (while promoting his properties), and will continue late-night tweets sending out childish rebuttals to criticisms. At some point he will abdicate all decisions to the worst of his cabinet choices, including who will be on the Supreme Court, and will sign any bill put before him with Republican stamped on the front. I doubt that he will even read the paperwork necessary to have an intelligent response to major problems. The sky won’t fall, but the damage will be substantial.
Narcissism is a pretty common trait in politicians. And a LOT of politicians out of the public eye are just as bad as Trump. The primary difference between Trump and your average politician is that he can’t play pretend.