Oh, please. In a Pratchett novel he’d be named something clever and witty like…
Trump.
:smack: OK, who’s hiding the turtles?
I’m pretty sure a certain type of conservative has been convinced that the minorities are out to get him, if he doesn’t get him first, since the first civil rights law.
It’s not a paradigm shift so much as every once in awhile the public gets tired of being jerked around and flirts with outsider candidates. The last time this happened was 1992. The establishment usually ends up responding in a way that appeases the masses enough to stay in power and that’s probably what will happen this time as well.
Trump is a direct result of the current political failures. The national debt doubled, 44 million people on food stamps, high unemployment in poor communities, the health care debacle… In spite of this the current political drive of Obama is to bring in more outside labor.
Most people who are polled today about their favorite Republican are not focusing on politics and may not even vote in next year’s primary. It’s not unusual for there to be an odd winning candidate over a year before the main event.
As for white males feeling victimized, whining isn’t a new thing either.
What Trump has done is cracked the conservative code: knowledge of policy, i.e. what has a remote chance of actually working- is irrelevant for vast swaths of the Republican electorate. They have been fed a steady diet of radio and TV heavy on assertion and light on substantiation. And they lack the cognition or vocabulary for self-awareness. He gets fawning attention from right wing foreign policy hysterics, though he basically knows squat about their pet topics. It’s all rather sadface.
Ignorance in this country is wide and deep: we have a lot of work to do. The percentage of Americans lacking health insurance has declined from a high of 16.3% in 2010 before the ACA had kicked in, to 13.0% in Q1 2015. Predictions that the health care market would go belly up have been proven to be horsepucky. Big financial institutions are plotting an orderly divestment of subsidies so that they can avoid the To Big Too Fail designation. Fiscal policy has been insufficient, but unemployment continues to decline and falling inflation makes Ron Paul and other folks who yammer about inflation and devaluation look like crackpots and charlatans. So what’s the big deal of another enters that game?
Agree to that.
I also think people like that Trump stands up to the special interest bullies.
As is Bernie Sanders.
It’s interesting how the US and UK are mirroring each other atm. At grassroots it looks like people are resisting the pre-defined spectrum of options presented to them saying there is more to it than this, there are other ways.
You could even argue they are resisting the pre-selected (by corporate financial backers) range of candidates.
It’s also interesting that this follows the societal shift on gay marriage, the political issues raised around the healthcare debate and also the increasingly significant grassroots rejection of the War on Drugs,
Well put-the fact is that Obama has ignored every real issue affecting most Americans. his utter refusal to stem the tide of illegal immigration is telling. Meanwhile, the nation is obsessed with HC’s emails-when the NSA has copies of everything that she received/sent. The debt-laden economy is close to collapse, but Washington carries on without concern.
:rolleyes:
Oh, please. By every measure we’re in a far, far better place than we were under the previous administration.
You want to know how Obama’s responsible for Trump? He’s black. Trump is the white male reaction to the erosion of their centuries-long rule.
I don’t know if it’s reputable but FactChecker says almost 8 million more people have jobs and a similar number now have healthcare:
Due to Bush’s war put on the credit card combined with disastrous tax cuts. Good reasons to vote Democratic.
Down from 47 million in 2012, projected to fall to 35 million in 2022. Most thinking people would agree that the trends are good.
Trump supporters could not possibly care less about minority unemployment.
If record low number of uninsured and slowing rates of insurance increases constitute a debacle, count me in.
These immigrants would be surprised to learn that Obama brought them in. I thought the Trumpian view was that the Mexican government decided which ones to send over.
Trump may be known for his ego, but he’s really the American id. His supporters want everything to be in black and white and all the answers to be simple. He represents the primitive tribal instinct- we’ve gotta keep THEM from getting what’s OURS. We can somehow make America great again by sheer force of will and by building walls to keep out those dirty brown people who are after our jobs and our white women. We can’t talk to Muslim nations as if they are human, we have to treat them as savages who understand and respond only to brute force and threats of brute force. Is anyone surprised that a majority of Trump supporters think Obama is a foreign-born Muslim? Hate is a very powerful motivator of the Republican base, Trump is bringing it out in the open. Where there used to be coded signals such as making speeches at Bob Jones University or in Philadelphia, MS, the dog whistles have become train whistles as Trump openly courts the white supremacist vote. He represents all that is evil in American politics and the sooner the GOP lances this boil and drains the fetid pus from its buttocks, the better.
Agree. Trump and Sanders rising to the top are both due to increasing distrust and dislike of the political establishment in the two parties. Trump’s popularity at this point is partly due to his celebrity, no doubt, but he is also an outsider. The only outsider in the entire race on either side, as a matter of fact.
White male angst has anything to do with it, and neither does racism. Christ, how many race cards come in a deck, nowadays? Seems like more than in all of Las Vegas. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It’s still very early, and it’s easy to tell a pollster on the phone that you support Sanders or Trump. The GOP has quite a few good candidates, but they are lost in the media Trump carnival. All Trump, all the time. Funny how the media doesn’t spend much time pointing out that Sanders is drawing more supporters at his rallies than heir-to-the-throne Hillary does to hers.
BobLibDem you remind me of the tobacco companies of years past touting the benefits of smoking.
I think I’m more like the guys who first linked cigarettes to lung cancer but opinions obviously vary.
It’s a little sad that anyone thinks Trump is indicative of anything other than the vagaries of polling. Trump is attracting the angriest, lowest-information Republican voters. The more serious candidates are, unsurprisingly, splitting the more serious votes amongst themselves. Right now, that means they’re splitting the smart vote a dozen ways. Once some of them drop out, their numbers will go up. Trump’s will stay almost exactly where they are, because he’s already captured most of the morons.
In other words, Trump looks good against 15 real candidates. He’s going to look awful against three or four (and even worse if he’s one of the last two). The following post sums up the situation rather well:
If by “utter refusal”, you mean “deportation of more illegal immigrants than any prior president,” you are absolutely correct. And this is why Trump is drawing votes: because many, many voters are ignorant. But not enough to win him the nomination.
Educated white middle to upper class liberals are hilariously bad at empathizing with poorly educated white blue collar workers and are thus constantly confused and dismayed by their actions. They do very little to sway them to their side and allow right wing demagogues to have the final say. Eh, who cares anyway? Just a bunch of racists anyway, right? Screw 'em. Maybe they’ll care after Trump is sworn in. Or maybe it’ll be like after 2004 and they’ll blame the sheeple and the media.
It also doesn’t help that large swathes of America are, basically, insane. Many are swept up in a sort of religious and xenophobic delusion that is more commonly found in war torn third world countries. They believe foundational tales that make Romulus and Remus seem reasonable. Maybe there’s something in the food and water.
I’m definitely stealing “the sooner the GOP lances this boil and drains the fetid pus from its buttocks, the better.”
Would you like to place a little bet on Trump’s candidacy, then?
I can see some people are getting it. If you listen to the political talking heads on the subject you’ll end up confused because they have no idea what’s going on. Trump is putting on a dog and pony show, and since his audience is the GOP he’s pandering to their traditional issues. Sanders has a different approach, he’s had a consistent traditional liberal position for decades and he’s just now getting heard. Even though he can be considered an insider, he’s never stepped all the way into the room and still holds credibility as non-mainstream candidate. That’s what appeals to the candidate about both Trump and Sanders, their independence. At the moment this looks like a significant number of voters are deciding to go with the devil they don’t know this year, because the devils they do know have consistently misled them over the years. A friend of mine came up with his own idea for a new religion founded on this basic principle; “We believe what you believe”. More and more of the electorate has rejected that notion, they want a change, not a change in the rhetoric, not a change in the ruling party, they want a change of people. Trump and Sanders have credibility as ‘different’ candidates. We can’t tell if they’ll actually be any different, but we all know that the establishment candidates do not represent change. We need a new house and their idea of change is simply to re-arrange the furniture.
I think I see what you guys are getting at; there’s a very vocal, angry component of the white and conservative segment of the population that somehow feels like they’re being disenfranchised by the mere fact that blacks and other minorities are getting a more reasonable piece of the pie. Or at least, that’s as best as I can describe it- there’s this conservative (political and religiously), somewhat rural, or at least cleaving to “country” values and ideas, crowd that seems to be extraordinarily reactionary. These are the people who like Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump and the like, because to them, these guys are sticking it to the Washington establishment, and the godless liberals who would have us all having gay sex with black people, and lube’s on the taxpayers’ nickel!
These are the same people who seem to be framing “Police Lives Matter” as an exclusive option to “Black Lives Matter”, as if both aren’t equally true and valid.
As best I can tell, there’s a huge amount of looking at the past through distorted, rose-colored glasses, and then crying foul when the present differs from whatever past they think they lived through, or whatever past that they believe was present in the 1950s or whenever. It’s a shockingly naive viewpoint, in that if you were a middle class white person, in a small town in 1955, things were probably pretty good. That doesn’t mean that the entire country was that way, or that things were so good for everyone else in your town, especially minorities. But they don’t think about it in those kind of terms- back then was the very apex of a sort of mythical Golden Age of America for them, and everything since then has been a decline, and they blame anything they see as a change from those days for that decline, even when those changes are for the better. So things like equal opportunity, less defense spending, social welfare, different laws and treatment of immigrants, etc… is seen as changes for the worse from the ideal state in the 1950s.
Trump in particular, seems to play to this mindset well with his belligerent, simplistic and bombastic sound-bite solutions to complex problems. Saying dumb stuff about border walls and Mexicans plays well to this crowd- it makes them think Trump is one of them, and not a politician who’s saying whatever the voters want to hear.
Personally, I think that right now, this crowd is the loudest and most motivated, so they’re the ones making Trump look more successful than he is. When there are fewer candidates, the more middle of the road Republican crowd will support the other candidates overwhelmingly, as they’ll realize that Trump is a narcissist and a publicity whore first and foremost, and not a serious politician.
Beyond that, I foresee a sort of schism in the Republican Party; right now, that crowd I spoke of has sort of got the party by the short and curlies, because they’ve proclaimed themselves more conservative than thou, and the keepers of the tradition and arbiters of what is Right. I suspect that the more moderate (and numerous) wings of the party are going to eventually push them back into the basement, and get back to real business, after a few crazy right-wing candidates in a row get seriously stomped in the polls.