I’ve become convinced Trump’s candidacy is like a giant Rorschach test for whichever liberal is writing about him. There seems to be no end to the fantastical lengths they’ll go to in order to explain his popularity in a way that is demeaning to his supporters at the same time. The truth is that no matter who the Republican candidate had been we’d still be hearing pretty much the same thing. To the liberal mind there’s simply no rational excuse for voting Republican so there just has to be crackpottery afoot somewhere.
To this liberal(ish) mind there’s simply no rational excuse for buying all the bullshit that Trump obviously spews…and you know as well as I do that Trump is the definition of RINO.
You are so very wrong. Voting for McCain or Romney is not preposterous. Voting for Dubya was pretty dumb, but he talked about compassionate conservatism and had a clever Svengali in Karl Rove.
Voting for Drumpf, though, is “full retard”. And not the lovable, huggable kind, but the inbred hillbilly kind, with dried spittle in the corners of his mouth and fear and loathing in his heart.
Realizing that Trump is a crackpot is not just coming from our imagination.
From Dr. David H. Gorski AKA Orac that also publishes the site Science-Based Medicine and knows a lot about quacks.
Indeed the people he is choosing speaks volumes about the agenda that he will try to make a reality if he becomes president. Supporting Trump is a trap, and if the Republicans just want to polish that turd they are welcomed to it, they are the ones getting dirtier because they will be embracing more than just anti vaccination.
Sure there is, if you’re rich. But rational =! ethical.
For me, one of the most absurd, groan-inducing aspects of Drumpf’s personality is one that gets relatively little attention. Some may find it relatively subtle compared to some of his outrageous rhetoric, but I key off on it because it shows him to be incredibly insecure, and surprisingly bad at hiding it, for a demagogue with millions of fans. To illustrate, check out this section of his Meet the Press interview last weekend, and note how many times he repeats some variation of the Stuart Smalley line “That’s OK”:
He’s so very butthurt, yet he knows on some level that it looks weak to whine about it. But instead of doing a good job of hiding his poutiness, he just crudely inserts “that’s okay” or it’s okay, I’m a busy man, I don’t care ". It’s so incredibly transparent, it makes me cringe and even involuntarily blush every time I hear it.
My point was that to the left there’s no rational reason for anyone to vote Republican, therefore those who do must be crackpots of some kind.
Just a difference in interpretation I guess. To me when he says ‘it’s okay’, what he’s really saying is that it’s of no real consequence. What he’s doing in this case is letting people know of the betrayal so they’ll think ill of Romney, but also letting them know that said betrayal wasn’t of any great consequence to him.
But what he’s really doing is punishing Romney for turning on him. Trump’s always made it a practice to punish people who attack or cross him. One of the primary reasons for this is that it teaches other people not to attack or cross him. I wouldn’t have thought such an approach would work in a presidential campaign however, and I’ve been very surprised at how effectively he’s been able to employ it so far.
I thought it was creditable of you to finally say that you could no longer support Trump, but stuff like this just demeans your credibility again. Trump’s popularity is an indictment of his supporters because the man is an idiotic demagogue of appalling ineptitude and a sociopathic bigot to boot. The backlash the voters feel against the political establishment is understandable, but choosing Trump as their standard bearer is incomprehensibly stupid.
The truth is that with different Republican candidates at different times you’ve been hearing applicable criticisms based on the evidence at hand. I actually had relatively few criticisms of McCain, for instance, until his inexplicable choice of the moose from Wasilla as his running mate.
And then there was Romney, who actually had potential, as Republicans go, until he decided that – as Andy Borowitz so nicely put it – he had to wear a rubber chicken on his head to prove that he was crazy enough to get elected by the current Republican mainstream. The craziness manifested in things like outright rejection of the ACA despite it being both a historical conservative policy recommendation and his own policy in MA, and appointment of Paul Ryan for the VP slot, he of Ryan budget fame destined to completely decimate what little was left of progressive taxation and social policy.
And for a variety of reasons this election cycle has led to Trump and Cruz being the front runners, and there’s really nothing more that need be said about that. It doesn’t matter that Cruz is out, at that point there was no sane choice on the Republican side. In 2012 people thought the Wasilla moose was some crazy aberration in the Republican party, in 2016 insanity is the norm. Even the nutbars in the party are rallying against Trump, and the moose itself came out of the woodwork to support this lunatic demagogue by giving a screeching speech comprised of an incomprehensible jumble of words devoid of sense or meaning. This is supposed to be a presidential election. It’s a freaking circus sideshow.
I certainly don’t. My view is that TRUMP is the expression of the anger of the American people.
Why is it “not preposterous” to vote for candidates who’d advocate such insanities as endless foreign war, destruction of Social Security and Medicare etc. but “full retard” of the “inbred hillbilly kind” (to quote your regionalist/classist language) to vote for a candidate who opposes it and who in fact in a nationall televised Republican debate denounced the Iraq War as based on lies, which no Democratic presidential candidate excepting possibly Dennis Kucinich has done? Seriously, I can’t believe how liberals have ignored that remarkable moment in favour of same old “Drumpf” jokes.
I think both theories are true. Trump is an expression of the legitimate anger of many Americans, but he’s also a very poor outlet for that anger because he’s a con man. The people chose poorly, and if he’s elected, I’ll say the same thing. I understand why the voters did it, but it was still a very bad idea.
Yes, the Republican nominee reflects the desires and thoughts of Republican voters.
Tell us again why you’re one of them.
For a long time it was considered “beneath” someone respectable to be openly vindictive and do his settling of scores in public for applause. The Trump style of the Middle School nicknames and the “yeah whatevs” one-liners would also have been seen as gossippy and dirt-dishing and not how a grown-ass executive deals with things in public. The Way was: You ream people out in private, whip them at the negotiating table, and letting the audience see them shut up and fall in line while you a have your way is the best revenge.
Trump however had nothing to lose on that front before public opinion, having been consigned to punchline status by the “respectables” for decades and this entire last year having been a chance for him to cut them down to size in front of everyone. And the audence loved it because they wanted to see others squirm.
His unpredictability and inconsistency becomes a virtue because what becomes important in the Trumpian worldview is what puts you on top RIGHT NOW and to have everyone else on defense always; you do what it takes to assert dominance for dominance’s own sake.
Isn’t it time you laid this silly all-caps thing to rest? Does Trump deserve some super-duper respect that FDR and Lincoln did not?
Trump represents anger, all right, but not legitimate anger. He represents fear and loathing of “the other”. It’s those Mexicans coming over to steal your job, sell you dope, and go after all the white women. It’s those Muslims who want to come here and blow up your town. It’s those liberals who want to take your guns and give all your money to lazy black folks. Trump is just one more plutocrat saying “I feel your anger and I want to fuck over those other people just as much as you. Oh, and all I ask in return is to keep those tax cuts coming for the elite.”
Trump’s history on the Iraq war is not as squeaky clean as you state. On Sept 11, 2002 he was asked by Howard Stern if he was for invading Iraq and said “Yeah, I guess so.” So this noble opposition that Trump the con man is selling is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Does Trump oppose endless war? Not when he talks about seizing the oil fields. Not when he refuses to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against ISIS.
Think Trump gives a rat’s ass about preserving Social Security? His serious proposal is to save it by eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Seriously. You really think this would be a priority for him?
If you are seriously considering voting for this con man, you cannot call yourself a good citizen. He is nothing less than the greatest threat to the nation since Jefferson Davis. Fawning over him and giving him these written curtsies in the form of all caps just emboldens the sick fucks who want to elect him.
BobLibDem, FWIW I’ve come to believe that Trump does not represent (or appeal to) anger, or even fear, as the prime emotion at all, but resentment without the baggage of anything else.
(Of course I feel that is also the prime motivation behind some of Sanders’ support as well.)
Trump’s resentment fires in all directions. SAnders’ only has one target, and it’s the target Americans resent the least: the rich. Trump targets the rich more specifically(outsourcing), and on what used to be Democratic ground no less, as well as the political class, and of course foreigners.
One thing that a lot of liberals miss about his “message of hate” is that he does not blame poor people, or even American citizens at all, for the nation’s problems. He’s not out talking about “super predators” or “welfare queens”. His bugaboo seems to be mainly foreigners and how the political and business class sell us out to them for votes and profits. Which is a message that can strongly resonate in places where it wouldn’t traditionally resonate. Trump is the first Republican candidate ever whose base is not the wealthy elite or Christian conservatives. As Silver points out, Trump’s base is wealthier than the average voter, but a lot poorer than his Republican opponents. And unions are worried about their membership. The troops also like Trump best by a wide margin.
He also fires his resentment at women addie.
Of course the gender prime impacted women too, in the other direction. But half as much: a 12 point impact.
His path depends on resentful White males coming out in numbers way beyond they ever have before.
Trump’s gender resentment is personal. He has no policies planned to deal with the “woman problem”. Nor are his supporters motivated by sexism. They just look past his sexism. Nativism is the primary driver of Trump’s support, as well as disgust with the political class.
Why does no one ever understand that racism and sexism do not need to be explicitly endorsed to impact behaviors, including voting behaviors?
I am sure that fairly few of those men who would have said Clinton without the priming question and said Trump with are explicitly sexist. Most would explicitly endorse statements in favor or equal opportunities and equal pay and would reject policies to deal with any “woman problem”. Nevertheless priming with a resentment inducing question about women increasingly making more than men led to a 24 point male swing to Trump.
This is clearly not just “looking past”; it is motivated by, on an implicit level.