Makes me wonder how he’d even have time to review all that, not to mention consider rational decisions, what with ya know, other President job stuff to do?
What question was that? The “Trump phenomenon”? I answered that. A fairly small segment of the society prefers seeing the world as being on the brink of collapse. We have always had such people among us: the Moral Majority, the Silent Majority, the John Birch Society, (the KKK). Fox News made it a point to cater to the paranoia of that group for years and Trump has now tapped into it. Trump has never had an approval rating as high as 40% His poll numbers are slightly higher because a certain number of people are adamantly opposed to Hillary Clinton, but he is not really a popular candidate. The majority of people supporting him for president seem to be opposing Clinton more than supporting Trump.
And are you going to provide a post of any substance or simply continue posting one-line rants with no substance?
As to your odd fear mongering about the commutation of sentences, (in which you appear to have linked to a subscription page instead of the actual article), that is old news. The people whose sentences have been or are being commuted are people who were found to have possessed a tiny amount of drugs that managed to cross the line of our draconian laws regarding presumption to sell. They tend to be people who have not actually been caught pushing drugs, but only having made the mistake of buying too much for their own use. The effect of his commutations will be to allow a rather small number of drug users to return to their families.
Is your factually-supported endorsement of Liberalism the “takeaway from the Trump Phenomenon?”
A simple yes or no will do.
You do know, (on reflection you probably only listen to the Trump campaign and so you don’t), that Clinton did not call all Trump supporters deplorables. She referred to the half of his support that is driven by racism, misogyny, religious bigotry, and other negative qualities deplorable. The other half of his supporters, the frightened ones, she said we should listen to their complaints and try to reach out to them.
Ahh! The “I am going to sit in this dark closet and pretend that the world is the way I see it instead of actually looking at the numbers produced by scientific polls” defense. You do know that you are pretty much exactly repeating the claims of the Romney camp in 2008 that the “real people” did not pay attention to polls, that the polls were wrong, and that Romney was going to sweep into office. All those “real people” are who elected President Romney. . . oh, wait, no they didn’t.
Landslide? I will not claim he cannot win, but there will be no landslide in this election.
What you said was
Now socio-economic chaos might be obvious to you, but it is far from obvious to me. Given the facts that were shown you it is kind of hard to argue that liberalism has failed. You do remember the crash, don’t you? Was that the fault of liberalism? And don’t say that the big bad government forced mortgage companies to write bad mortgages, because that is crap.
If you start with nonsense, you don’t get to demand a specific answer.
I challenged your odd claim that the last 8 years have been regrettable. I have taken no stand on liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, or mysticism.
That you wish to assign me a philosophical position does not actually make it a position I hold and I have no reason to answer a silly question based on a false premise. I have twice now explained the “Trump phenomenon” (whooopeee! 37% of Americans, only 3 in 8, like him), and see no reason to provide “answers” to badly posed questions.
The takeaway from Trump’s popularity is that any number of people would rather pretend that the world is scarier than it is and can be “fixed” with simplistic and bad “solutions” and are willing to like a misogynistic, racist, narcissistic liar than to have supported any of the reasonable candidates who offered themselves for the Republican Party.
The real issues aren’t going away. We’re fortunate that the republican party, or what’s left of it, keeps embarrassing itself by wallowing in its own anger, and in the process, they seem to be just as eager to fight with each other over matters of ideological purity and hammering out some sort of coherent platform, as they are their opposition.
Interestingly enough, there was a report today overseas about two UKiP delegation members slugging it out while meeting with European officials about the process of initiating Brexit, which seems to underscore the intensity with which the now trans-Atlantic anti-global movement seems to be operating.
Anyway, I digress.
We’re fortunate in that they have put forward clowns like Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. If we’re lucky, the republicans will produce anything from an open civil war with each other to over-playing their hand and making people realize just how nuts their movement has become. I think Hillary is counting on overt partisanship that will cause a backlash at the polls in 2018 and 2020. But the right type of demagogue, like a Ted Cruz (not necessarily him but someone like him) could be the ultimate nightmare.
Listen: while I can’t speak for the others, I’ve been constantly and consistently following the polls ever since Trump announced in the summer of 2015. When it became clear that he wasn’t just a flavour of the month and would be consistently and constantly leading, I predicted his victories in most of the primary/caucus contests as well as his eventual nomination even as everyone else on this board tried to poo-pooh his polling. While polls are by no means perfect, it’s clear they do provide meaningful projections for elections and if they are accurate, then it’s very unlikely Trump will win much less in a landslide.
Mr. Uber’s complaints don’t seem well-specified.
Oh. It’s about that Kenyan who pretends he’s half-white. What is it specifically we don’t like about him? The death camps? His support for Islamic terrorism? Was he the Zodiac killer?
Well, at least we’re getting specific! What exactly contributed to the “socio-economic chaos”? The U.S. incarcerates 6.9 people out of every 1000. This compares with Spain (1.3), China (~1.5), Sweden (0.5). Do we need a higher incarceration rate to improve our “socio-economic chaos”?
It isn’t the “Makes me wonder how he’d even have time” blather that caused the chaos, right? That was just some drug-addled kitten playing with your keyboard, right?
Thanks, Tom. I’ve only skimmed the thread — what was Mr. Uber’s reaction when he learned for the first time the Dow-Jones more than doubled under this chaotic Kenyan?
So what’s the takeaway, then? Lots of pontification about how I’m wrong, yet not indication to prove it. If not Liberalism’s utter failure, then what?
Please explain and save the veiled ad hominems for the pit. I’ll see you there later next month. 
Your posts are so content-free that they are not even wrong. Just vacuous.
So still no answer, but the old veiled ad hominem to avoid mod warning in GD.
Looks like The utter failure of Liberalism remains the only legitimate takeaway from the Trump Phenomenon.
Right! Because the past eight year’s liberal agenda has pushed the sicio-econimic trend in a direction that makes alot of people Trump supporters. Your value judgments on them outlined above matter not. It’s so simple I can see how it flies straight over your head, lack of content, facts and all.
Congratulations for availing us with a bunch of facts and flawless reasoning that has abosultely nothing to do with the fundamental issue.
Assuming the veracity of all the pedantic nonsense you’ve presented, it still does not propose, explain or support a takeaway from the Trump Phenomenon.
Are we supposed to believe a great economy and low unemployment spurs all the stupid, fearful irrational people to vote for Trump?
The Trump phenomenon, and its earlier incarnation the Tea Party phenomenon do tell us that regardless of statistical metrics of how the country and the community is performing, there are still a large number of citizens for each of whom times suck, personally; or the tenor or personality of the national leadership rubs them the wrong way, emotionally; or they just Have A Bad Feeling About This where things are headed, and no reasoned explanation you can give them will satisfy them. Whatever’s up is bad and the solution is to throw the bastards out and put in someone who will be on “our” side. They “want their country back” even though it never went anywhere, they just failed to notice it was evolving right under their feet.
The person who himself lost their house and savings in 2008 when the measurable economy as a whole was tanking under an ostensibly conservative leadership, or the other person who has not gotten a good job in 2016 while it is measurably recovered under an ostensibly liberal one, would both tell you that the country is in the wrong track… because THEY are on the wrong track. Similarly on social and cultural issues: it may be that the data does not support what they claim are the things make them feel we’re going to hell in a handbasket, but they ARE feeling it so they want someone to address it. It is their reality, whether or not it looks like it to those not in their shoes, and we would be wise to admit that indeed large numbers of the population feel so – and that they will not welcome our Elitesplaining.
Heck, the Trump followers are especially notorious for not caring that he contradicts himself on points of “movement conservative” orthodoxy – economic, geopolitical, religious and cultural. So if it were to be called a failure of presentation of the Liberal case, it must also be called a massive failure of presentation of the actual Conservative case.
You keep making snide comments with no connection to reality. You might want to begin by explaining what your phrase “Trump phenomenon” actually means to you. You keep posting as though there was a specific situation to which you are referring, but there are actually multiple phenomena connected to Trump and it is unclear whether you are talking about his xenophobia, (a part of American culture dating back to the 1840s), his reliance on racism and misogyny, (with roots going back well into the 19th century), his appeal to some great unidentified “majority” of people that does not really exist, (such as the above mis-named “silent” and “moral” majorities and similar groups that preceded them), or to something else.
As noted above, the ideas and positions, most of them false, many of them lies, that underlie the support that Trump has received began with the Tea Party, not Trump. The original complaints raised by the people who later morphed into the Tea Party began under the presidency of George W. Bush, being formally organized in 2002. If “Liberalism” (or your vision of it) provided the motive for this attitude among a number of people, why did it originate under a deeply conservative president at a time when the U.S., responding to the WTC/Pentagon attacks, was displaying a surge in Conservatism?
He sure has a lot of 'em, though.
Perhaps the “Trump Phenomenon” comes from racism and misogyny (and homophobia) becoming increasingly objected to by society, which makes those who thing objecting to them is just political correctness feel like outsiders and not on the top any more.
Trump being racist makes him one of them, unlike most other politicians these days.
JRDelirious really nailed the economic portion of uber’s poorly expressed demands for an answer. **Voyager **just above gets close to the heart for many of the social aspects.
Leftism has failed the working class since ~1980. Rightism has failed the working class since ~1950. History today is failing the working class in the US and indeed all over the first world. They’re not happy for many reasons. Some of which are very well-founded, some of which are just entitled lazy whining, and some of which are socially pathological attitudes and lifestyles that are rapidly becoming entrenched as multi-generational feedback loops.
The term “Trumpism” is a misnomer. An -ism is a (mostly) coherent body of thought. Trump stands for exactly nothing.
Trump is simply a primal scream. That’s the role he plays on TV. Trump is simply the latest in a long line of rabble-rousers worldwide. He happens to be a particularly talented showman, so his screaming is attractive to the disenchanted and disenfranchised. His being able to start with an existing celebrity brand gives him a yuuge leg up over other would-be rabble rousers who first need to build name recognition. Notice that Beppe Grillo in Italy is the same sort of mad-as-hell celebrity character. There are or have been others both in the US and elsewhere.
It *is *the case that angry working class folks with economic grievances and angry socially conservative folks with social grievances will not disappear on Nov 9th. No matter who wins.
A much more ideal situation would be for the US to have 4 parties split orthogonally along social and economic lines. That would encourage ideologically consistent parties. As it is with our two-party system each party is such a large tent that the real politics that matter is done inside each party and the parties’ overall ideologies necessarily end up somewhere between inconsistent and incoherent.
The working class has not been effective at that party internal politics. As an old political saying has it: “If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu.” Working class interests, narrowly defined, have been eaten *as *the menu for a long time.
I’m not going to propose a solution in this post. But I’ll post this as an outline of the problem and see how much it resonates with the crowd.
Remember the Monty Python bit (on an album, not sure if it was on TV) about curing cancer? Trump’s policies in general are exactly like this. Defeat ISIS? Just tell the generals to do it. Bring back manufacturing? Tell Apple to stop making stuff in China.
Those who say the solutions to these problems are considered wishy washy by the Trump base. They got set up this way by the Republicans for the last 8 years and by Fox News. Trump saw this, and had the nerve to appeal to them while avoiding having to give any details.
It’s not like Trump invented the concept of increasing spending on the Wall and the military and cutting taxes and having the budget be balanced also. He can just spout this crap more convincingly than the rest of them.