Can you name anyone other than Strom Thurmond that switched parties? Practically all those Dixiecrats remained Democrats, including Al Gore’s father.
Bull Connor, George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox, Ernest Hollings, Robert Byrd, J. William Fulbright, Richard Russell, …all lifelong Democrats. Some “Southern Strategy”, huh?
Note that Strom Thurmond switched to the GOP AFTER the GOP overwhelmingly voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act and continued to vote just as overwhelming for Civil Rights bills in 1965 and 1968.
It’s not a coincidence that the Obama Justice Department was looking at media that was basically friendly. They were investigating leaks, something quite different from trying to intimidate critics.
In my memory as a 65 year old lifetime mainstream newspaper reader, this is normal press-administration sparring, in the U.S., and other democracies. Mainstream media seeks out secrets, and the government tries to protect them. I like for the papers I read to present me with leaked stories. But each administration trying a bit to stop this (even when, often, the newspaper has endorsed that President!) does not significantly harm democracy. It is nothing like having the President whip up hatred against mainstream media at rallies with enemy of the people rhetoric.
Moderating
Lets drop the southern strategy hijack. If you want to discuss it, start a new thread.
To then get back to answering the thread title question:
If it wasn’t for the pandemic, and the resultant depression worsened by administration mismanagement, Trump hasn’t been as bad as I expected.
The big item here is making Mexico pay for the wall. I thought that it would be hard for him to weasel out of that promise without something approaching war, or war itself.
Another pleasant surprise is that he hasn’t, as promised, stolen the oil of a foreign nation.
If I remember correctly, I knew he made idle threats, but did not think the two biggest threats (take the oil and make them pay for the wall) would both be idle.
I’m not surprised he makes so-far idle threats of nuclear war. I knew he would be totally irresponsible and that, to some extent, idle threats from a super-power can work.
What I didn’t know was that the worst adversary refusing to back down would be a virus.
Word for word, spot on.
Exactly, he did better than I expected. I thought we would be in a war with Iran by now, or have used a nuke. Granted, even if he is voted out and accepts the results, he still has until January.
I thought in 2016 and still think that his election has done permanent and catastrophic damage to the US. Red and blue America never be countrymen again, but Trump is more a symptom of the disease, than the root cause.
I distinctly remember when he mocked that reporter with MS (was it?), and thought to myself, “this guy CANNOT be president”. Thinking that was just unredeemable and couldn’t imagine it getting much more embarrassing. Um…
I live near Atlantic City , NJ and was employed in the casino industry in my younger days. Trump had/has a well-earned reputation around here as a charlatan and con man. That said, there many Trump lawn signs and flags to be seen - I don’t know if its short memories or willful ignorance I never watched his TV show but knew enough about it to know it wouldn’t change my opinion of the man-child. I am still dumbfounded as to how anyone could vote for this buffoon. Also, I agree about him being a symptom but don’t know what should be done to treat the disease, other than excising the tumor.
What I thought we’d get: a cross between Boss Hogg and Mel Brooks’ governor character in Blazing Saddles. Someone with enough working digits to sign whatever McConnell and Ryan would put on his desk while at the same time skimming off all the graft he could and screwing all the interns.
We all knew he was racist, but never dreamed he could turn ICE into the modern SS. Deliberately separating young children from their parents was more cruel than I thought he would be. I didn’t expect the GOP to lose their moral compass entirely in devotion to him. I thought at first that Bill Barr would be a moderating influence, little did I know that he was just as big a Nazi as his boss.
I knew he was a Putin fan boy, but I never dreamed that he could openly talk about falling in love with Kim Jong Un and not lose his homophobic base. I knew he was a money-grubbing prick, but didn’t think he was cheeky enough to get the US ambassador to UK to try to steer the British Open to his golf course.
I knew he and the GOP had no plan to replace the ACA, but thought while they had the majority they would at least make an attempt to do so. Instead, they’re pushing repeal without replacement through his hand picked Supreme Court. Why? Because the law was signed by a black guy.
In short, I knew he was a racist, corrupt, and uncaring but not to the degree that he has shown himself to be. His antipathy to democracy caught me largely by surprise. His adoration of dictators was somewhat a surprise but I thought at first it was limited to Putin. His disastrous response to the pandemic shattered the illusion of the tiny speck of humanity I thought he might possess.
Regarding his love of Putin, remember that during the Obama administration, the right wing started praising him. I assumed at the time that the Kremlin was spending some lobbying money to raise its profile among the right wing whites. Trump was able to ride that trend.
ETA: what I didn’t foresee was Trump killing John Prine, that one hit me hard.
Here’s an article from 2014 about conservatives love of Putin.
I was like most people here - I had no doubts that Trump was a narcissist free from morals with a lot of bad traits like blatant racism, but I didn’t think he’d do as ‘well’ as he did. I expected him to make a lot of noise and to be mostly blundering and incompetent at the job, but to also do a lot of grandstanding and taking credit - if I knew there would be a pandemic, I would have expected him to let the experts handle it and take credit for everything they did, not to contradict his own experts and start playing weird little power games to make the situation work. I also thought the GOP politicians would have some backbone and that they’d use him to achieve goals but make a point shutting him up when he did too much ‘saying the quiet stuff out loud’, but that’s not the case. I also didn’t think that Republican voters in general would be awful enough to keep supporting him through starting concentration camps, a quarter million American deaths, jackbooted thugs kidnapping people in unmarked vans, and talk of ignoring the election results if he doesn’t like them, but they are.
So I didn’t think anything positive of him as a person, but I didn’t expect that he would have so many people willing to enable the destruction that he’s wrought.
This is true - whereas other Presidents ordered military actions to further American global interests or fight against authoritarian regimes, Trump has praised and capitulated to authoritarian regimes and ceded American global hard and soft power to rival powers, and most notably to Russia (you remember Russia - the ones the Republicans have been working with (and funded by) to destroy democracy in America, implement authoritarianism and - as the Russians themselves have been saying - to instigate civil war). I mean, it’s not like he hasn’t been willing to send our troops abroad (but it’s okay, because someone else will pay for them), or to escalate tensions, but to be fair, he’s always backed down. Every time.
Personally, even I didn’t see Trump’s unique combination of treason and cowardice being the path to peace in our time, but I suppose for some people that’s a feature, not a bug.
There’s no polite way to put this but that is a complete and total lie.
Russian money was funneled to the NRA and used for pro-Trump ads.
I’m not going to give him any points for having a lower body count than George W. Bush.
I will say that the ongoing freak show that is Donald Trump and his administration has sometimes caused us to be forgetful of the carnage that Bush and his genuinely evil cabal unleashed upon the world.
That article is over two years old and you must have missed the question mark in that headline. Robert Mueller looked into that bogus claim and found nothing.
You know, they already have
I could do this all day, really.
I’ve always known Trump was a grifter and nothing more than a grifter. Trump University, Trump vitamins, what more proof do you need. The debates always piss me off because it’s like being expected to listen to Warren Buffet and Bernie Madoff pitch retirement planning strategies then pick the best one based on that pitch. It makes me want to scream.
There is substantial evidence of Russian and Russia-linked oligarchs funnelling money to Republican PACs and campaigns.
So no, it’s not a “complete and total lie”. And that’s just the funding part - there’s a shitload more evidence for the “working with” point.
The Mueller team met with Butina once; the investigation into her was separate to his investigation. As for finding nothing…
The week after the election there was a robust debate among my college classmates (from 30 years ago) on WhatsApp.
I took a beating for saying that Trump would be orders of magnitude worse than Bush II or Reagan or indeed any mainstream Republican in the last 40 years.
Everyone was confident that he would be constrained by the “establishment”. This year it’s been fun dragging up their posts from back then to prove that they had been so wrong. Because they all developed some kind of amnesia about what they said (and thought) back then.