OK, I guess we can play this silly game further: They could have influenced an equal number of people to switch sides for both Hillary and Trump in the same precinct and not changed the result. So, no, your statement is not correct. The vote tallies would have been identical with or without influence.
Also noting that Trump proposed eliminating the Appalachian Regional Council.
Trump’s proposed budget calls for the elimination of all funding for the commission, according to a report by Time. Ninety-five percent of the counties the commission supports voted for Trump, according to the Time report.
The Appalachian Regional Commission is a federal-state partnership that invests in resources in Appalachia. From 2015 to 2017, the commission supported a total of 662 projects in the region totaling $175.7 million, according to data provided by the commission. Over $257.4 million of that funding was matched by other organizations.
The commission was founded in 1965. At the time, over 30 percent of Appalachian residents lived in poverty. From 2011 to 2015, the poverty rate was just over 17 percent, according to the commission website. Additionally, the number of high-poverty counties in the region has declined from 295 in 1960 to 87 in 2015.
…So once again, it comes down to what Velocity said - perception trumping reality. Republican voters are perpetually misinformed, and they’re kept that way by an insular right-wing media bubble. The explanations offered in this thread from the right based on what Clinton or Trump actually proposed or did are almost exactly the opposite of the reality. So what do you do about that?
I haven’t read the thread and I’m not on the left.
Based on a comparison to the House election, Trump won because everyone voted straight party-line. It is damn near a perfect match, if you compare the maps (if you translate the Congressional districts to the Presidential ones)
Usually there’s a middle who can be convinced to go against their personal, minimal leaning by a better candidate. In this case, there was no better candidate. It was crook A or crook B. As such, the middle went with their personal leaning.
When it comes to ever elected position except the President, no one knows anything about the candidates, so it’s straight-line anyways. So when the Presidential election matches the House election perfectly, it means that no one felt there was a better candidate between the two.
Now that could mean that they were both awesome, both middling, or both terrible in equal quantities. I think it’s fair to say that “terrible” is the safe bet.
Seems infinitesimally unlikely that the enormous Russian campaign to elect Trump actually convinced an equal number of people to vote for Clinton, by some unidentified mechanism, as vote for Trump. Seems likely (certain) that the enormous Russian campaign to influence the election to elect Trump changed the result in favor of Trump. Which is why they bothered to do it in the first place. Which was my original statement.
It’s like the lame argument that steroids didn’t actually help Bonds hit more home runs. Really? Then he took a ridiculously huge risk for no reason at all? Despite all of the evidence that he hit a ton more home runs because of the steroids?
Yep, the morons that voted for trump believe that Clinton is as bad or worse than trump. This just goes to show you how easy it is to fool people that don’t pay attention to facts.
That is why Trump won. The quote is Hilary Clinton, explaining who the non-deplorable half of his support is.
Also my opinion is that if the media were trying to help her, the second half of that paragraph would have gotten much more coverage.
Donald Trump once put is name on a vitamin business. The way it worked was you sent Donald Trump $139.95 and a vial of your piss, and in exchange he sent you a bottle of vitamins. I don’t know why the man has such an infatuation with pee or what he did with the urine his marks sent him, but that’s a subject for another thread.
This man is now president of the United States. There’s a sucker born every minute and Trump found a way to scoop up all of them.
Donald Trump is a singularly dishonest businessman and a con artist. New Yorkers have a huge amount of Trump hate because familiarity breeds contempt. His business career has been a string of high profile broken promises and bankruptcies. His building have a reverse cachet among New Yorkers, partly because of the outward Richie Rich style ostentation but also because he cheaps out on the general construction, especially the electric and mechanical systems - I always see these weird forced air HVAC systems in Trump buildings that are more suitable for a suburban Best Western. That’s one reason his buildings are so loaded with foreigners - New Yorkers won’t buy them.
But he’s playing a long game - sometimes the first couple of checks from the deposed Nigerian prince actually clear the bank. It’s called a long con. Which is why his first step was to borrow several trillion dollars and throw it at his friends and his base. This improved the financial lot of his supporters a little bit, but mostly he convinced them the economy was better but just telling his supporters that it was better and ballyhooing the typical statistics of a recovering economy into some sort of personal success.
Yes, it’s true that people were hurting and feeling that their government wasn’t helping them. That’s the cancer he identified. And his base is buying the snake oil he’s selling as a cancer cure.
The divisiveness he’s promoting is simply protection. Because when you’re the deposed Nigerian prince there’s always the chance someone will get to your victims and talk sense into them. So the technique is to turn the tables and convince your marks that the people that are out to talk sense into your victims are the enemy. Then you work on making the law enforcement agencies that are trying to protect people against con artists the enemy as well.
Maybe once he’s no longer president, he can go back into the piss vitamin business. If he collects $139.95 from all his supporters he will truly be rich, and he’ll collect enough piss to bathe in for the rest of his life.
Funny you should liken Trump to a Nigerian prince. Election night, I posted similar on Facebook: calling his campaign the political equivalent of a 419 scam.
Yes, because the Kremlin interfered in the Election, because Trump lied to the Rust belt that he could get their factory jobs back (he can’t), because The DNC and Clinton didn’t fight in the right states, and went in over confident, and because Bernie didnt rein in his Bernie-Bros who kept attacking Clinton long after the Nomination was Clintons.
But no, we’re not gonna stay away for the Russia topic. Sure, at this moment there is no evidence that Trump himself, personally colluded. However the arrests, convictions and intelligence reports make it perfectly clear that Russia interfered. Russia tried to fix the voting machines, but as far as we know, failed. However, there is scads of evidence about their disinformation campaign vs Clinton.
So did Trump, and in fact Trump isnt pro gun at all. However, he did put a conservative on the SC, so that is a pro-gun move, in a way.
Whether or not Trump was historically pro-gun is immaterial. With only a few exceptions (trade, protecting Social Security and Medicare), since he began his campaign, he’s been either a standard-issue Republican or an extreme-right Republican, depending on the issue.
I think it’s fair to say that Trump is pro-gun. Whatever his stated positions may have been when he lived the life of a New York business hustler, he has not done or said anything as president to indicate that he is not 100% behind the most pro-gun agenda that someone can have.
*"Trump’s remark at a televised session with lawmakers on Wednesday that government officials should have the power to seize guns from people who might pose a danger without going to court — “Take the guns first, go through due process second,” he said — directly contradicted that view.
Trump didn’t stop there. He urged the assembled members of Congress to pass a “comprehensive” gun control bill, as Christi Parsons wrote, saying that it should expand background checks, limit gun purchases to people 21 or older and perhaps even include a ban on the sale of some assault weapons. He harshly put down Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) when he tried to push for an NRA-backed proposal to expand gun owners’ rights to carry concealed weapons from state to state."*
*"President Trump said on Monday that his administration would leave it to states to set an age limit for buying assault rifles. It was a reversal of weeks of repeated promises to act, and the latest of years of conflicting positions he has taken on a range of gun issues, from background checks to arming teachers.
Vague and contradictory positions on background checks
Mr. Trump has said he supports requiring background checks for gun purchases, and at various times has even called for strengthening such measures. However, he has also questioned whether background checks work and opposed expanding the system…A full reversal on the assault weapons ban
While the ban was in place, Mr. Trump voiced his support. Fifteen years later, he called it a “total failure.” He recently suggested that he was open to at least considering a new ban on assault weapons sales."*
So, not pro gun at all. Flip-flop, wavering and mugwumping.
Well, he’s talked about banning printed guns, so now we have a divide forming between being pro-gun and being pro-NRA, since the NRA is largely funded by gun manufacturers and thus has an incentive to oppose printed guns.
Trump reads polls & the news and reacts before thinking things thru. However, his record, so far, (other than appointing Gorsuch) has been a series of flip flops and nothing solid pro or anti gun.
Indeed, the only thing consistent is the lasting delusion of his supporters that he has a position, and not just on this issue but a number of others.
Trump’s genius is realizing a subset of people who desperately want to be fooled, and figuring out what lies they want to hear. His downfall will be that this can’t last forever. I have to admit it’s lasted a lot longer than I expected, though.
That’s brave talk, my friend. Let’s hope it’s true.
Regardless of what trump is philosophically, he is, operationally the most right-wing president we’ve ever had.
Boy, is that an understatement.