I’m done underestimating Trump. First he handed the other primary GOP contenders their asses then he handed the Democrats their asses after being mocked to the heavens. He’s not a particularly nice man or empathetic man, but dramaqueenery aside I don’t think he’s a innately evil man and for whatever reason God and the Fates have laid their hands heavily upon him.
Everyone kept expecting him to grow up, be Presidential, be not-Trump and none of that happened and he still crushed Hillary. 53% of white female voters voted for Trump. Roll that around in your head for a second after all that went down. The twice divorced pussy grabber, the beauty queen and anchor woman insulter got 53% of the American white female vote. The Democrats to a large extent brought this on themselves with a poor choice for a motivating Presidential candidate in Hillary Clinton. She may have motivated some true believers but she left huge numbers of Democrats and other Progressives, including myself, ambivalent and holding their noses when voting for her as the lesser of two evils.
Honestly I kind of mentally dismissed Trump at some point as an object of concerned focus based on his wildly rude behavior for an aspiring politician and the assurances of the polls and media and all the mavens that there was no fucking way President Trump was every going to happen, and it turned out that they were ignorant and wrong. They had not been doing any kind of serious in depth analysis. It was all just parrots squawking and repeating what the other parrots said in an echo chamber where everyone was pretending to authority and deep knowledge.
So… if you expect that he will now straighten up and be less Trumpish I’m not sure you’ve been paying attention. He has a serious mandate and he is, hypothetically, the most powerful man of the face of the Earth. A person with an almost cartoonishly large ego is now POTUS, but by the same token he is not a fool. Love him, loathe him or wherever you are on the bell curve of opinion about him, it would be wise to regard him with some wary respect as a political player at this point. He was right about the polls and if the Democrats and other progressives are going to take him on they had better bring their “A” game.
On a sample size of one event, I’m not going to concede that Trump is a mastermind political strategist. He latched onto the zeitgeist, for sure. He marketed himself as a non-PC bully (of women and his creditors), the electorate wanted a non-PC bully to “shake things up”, and evidently felt that his bullying skills might be transferable. Feeling that the bus was going in the wrong direction, the electorate decided to give the drunk guy a chance to drive. The lesson from this election is not that we should stop underestimating Trump, it’s that you can never underestimate the stupidity and gullibility of the people.
You say Trump is not a fool, but what evidence do we have for that? I think what we cannot do is underestimate his narcissism and his capacity for self-deception. I have no doubt that he sincerely believes his own preposterous narrative. I think it would be a grave mistake to suppose that he’s a smart enough person that he would shy away from letting his ego take the country and the world down a disastrous path.
I have a new found respect for him. Don’t like him any more than I ever did but damn, he recognized that Americans will happily disregard reality if they take a notion to.
Like I said in another thread, I will give him an open mind and a chance to lead but if he fails I will be more than willing to criticize him. Policies aside, I dread listening to him speak for 4 years or however long he lasts. He has a sixth grade level vocabulary. Boring. Sad. Unfair.
The reality hasn’t set in for me yet.
I always took Trump seriously and thought he had a chance at winning early (though am surprised he did). He is a media master, a Machiavellian, a mendicant, a money-minded Maestro, Mencken’s madman. I’m sure he doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. Will be interesting if only since Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are so different, time will tell if it’s better, but the blind trust thing is not a great start for me, which says nothing about estimation.
The “Trump is lucky idiot” narrative is what informed much of the Democratic calculation in the race for POTUS. He may be lucky but he is not an idiot about what was really happening. He was right about the turnout trends and the opposition democrats were wrong. Even if you disagree with him dismissing him as a narcissistic cartoon is, I strongly believe, a similar mistake. He’s not nice or admirable but he has played the game and won.
Trump is a performer. That is where his skill lies and it’s what he’s been doing this entire campaign. A performer does not a world leader make. He’s good at reading his audience. Whether that translates into being a good president has yet to be shown. But Im doubtful.
No, I think the risk now lies in suggesting that his preposterous hyperbolic bluster was a clever act, the ploy of a master strategist. If that were true, he would be far less dangerous. But I think he believes his narcissistic narrative. With a populist mandate and his hands on the reins of power, the risk now lies in assuming that he is smart enough to avoid causing immense damage. He is not.
I don’t think he is innately evil, more passively evil. Meaning, I’m glad Trump isn’t an honest to god fascist becuase he could do some real damage. But he is evil in the sense that he doesn’t seem to feel remorse for hurting people who harm his ego, and I’m near certain he will use or try to use various illegal means to get revenge on wide swaths of people.
I think right now he is numb, but wait 6 months when the shock has worn off and he realizes all the power he has.
True ideologues work 16 hours a day, sacrifice everything, put their own lives on the line, etc. to push an ideology. I get the impression Trump wants none of that, he just wants his ego massaged. So I’m glad on that front. He isn’t going to do what a true alt-right candidate would, and actually push that agenda with any energy.
But we’ve been wrong about him up to this point.
I did totally underestimate him. I never suspected the northern midwest would go red.
I’m not saying he’s Lex Luthor, but if you, or other opponents, continue regard him as a clown you do so at your peril. His strategy “masterful” or not, won. He crushed the Democratic party 228 electoral votes to 290 that’s more than a lucky "Oops.’ He was tapped in and the opposition was not. He’s wily and dangerous and needs to be respected as such.
What are you talking about? He has a tremendous vocabulary! He has all the best words. It’s really great. There’s a tremendous amount of people saying this, and it’s just a mean and nasty thing to say. His vocabulary is YUGE. I promise you, there’s no problem there.
Trump didn’t “hand the Democrats their asses.” the Democratic Party ripped its own ass off and stood there looking at it wondering why they couldn’t sit down anymore.
He didn’t do any of that. His team did. He couldn’t help but attack people on Twitter, ruining his polling numbers every time. That was insanely stupid, and only he could have had that problem. He also has a low vocabulary, a lack of understanding of any of the policy, an inability to practice, an inability to sit still, and trouble parsing social norms.
I’m not saying there’s not something he did that won, but it wasn’t intelligence in any way we normally mean that term. He is an idiot. A lucky one that stumbled upon a single strategy that has worked for him, and then had other people come in and try to fix the problems it caused.
Then he got lower Democratic turnout, and barely eked out a win, not even beating the popular vote. His demographic stuff was not true–he did not tap into any new voters–fewer Democrats voted. Fewer people voted overall.
To say that Trump is not incredibly lucky is ridiculous. To say he’s actually “intelligent” in any way we normally use that term is ridiculous.
Senator Reid is correct in the same sense that Donald Trump is correct. Both people are using terms that mean different things to different people. Sen. Reid is correct if we use the word “Trump” to talk about a particular phenomenon-a repudiation of the Washington generalization of the world. It is easy and appropriate to underestimate Donald Trump as a person. As a person he isn’t much and much of what he is is bad. As a phenomenon he is a classic and very successful politician. Donald Trump the politician uses a set of words-ban the muslims, block the mexicans, that mean different things to different people. Many democrats took him literally-and perhaps they should. Trump supporters took those words to be a code or a shorthand for a complex and somewhat American way of addressing a problem. A way that doesn’t violate what the Trump supporters think of as fair. So two different understandings of the same words. Senator Reid is correct in being very concerned because it gives President Trump tremendous power. He knows how to say things that mean different things to different people and thereby gives him the ability to do anything he wants. He can say one thing, mean two things, and do whatever he wants because he can always say he didn’t say or mean what he said.
A very successful politician of the old school, Tip O’Neal, famously said “all politics is local”. Washington has forgotten that. Even today I see democrats quoting economic statistics about the fall in unemployment and the rise in economic growth with low inflation as reasons to be proud of the Obama legacy. Sounds great in Washington where everyone has a job. It has quite the opposite meaning to the person in Ohio or Michigan who has been out of work for 10 months and is looking at a 30K job to replace his old 70K job-if he is lucky enough to get picked. That person is exactly against a drop in unemployment or a rise in economic growth because he has learned that it means to him a 30K job replacing a 70K job and the loss of jobs overseas so that the country can import cheaper goods from China. Recognizing this is what makes Donald Trump so successful.
I’m truly gobsmacked by the response to this election. Not the push-back on Trump’s hyperbole. That’s deserved. It’s the complete and utter silence on Hillary from the media that got her through the Primaries and the General election.
She has a long history of corrupt behavior and is the poster-child of a purchased politician (for all politicians). We’re living in the information age and it’s is the height of media arrogance to ignore what is already known. Despite Hillary spending twice as much on the campaign and receiving an incalculable amount of media support she lost to Trump.
The Washington status quo (both parties) have dug themselves into a hole and their solution is to continue digging. The Republicans bent over backwards to keep Trump out and the Democrats bent over backwards to keep Hillary in. Neither party gets it.
IMO Trump wasn’t voted in, Congress was voted to go f#$% themselves.
I actually am a tiny bit encouraged by recent news.
From “FIRST: Repeal Obamacare!”, to “ya know, it DOES have a couple of good points” to “we’ll actually dismantle from the inside through rule-making”.
They may well gut it through rule changes, and then repeal outright.
That Great Wall of the Rio Grande was DOA. Even morons can see that there are great big bodies of water on both ends of that border. And there are lots of cheap, fast, invisible to radar boats.
But it sounds like “Holy Shit! This is real!”. Just as there were hundreds of “Make Abortion Illegal again” votes which were “Consequence-Free Pandering” because they knew the Courts would declare the laws unconstitutional.
Now that they actually have a shot at reversing Roe v Wade, I expect to see cold feet.
But: abortion is a State Thing. TX and IN can well abolish it within their borders. How many other States are reactionary enough to do so will be interesting.
Sadly, the environmental rape envisaged by the Great Con Man can still be delivered.
Once melted, the polar ice caps will not come back.
Paul ryan just said there isn’t going to be a deportation force.
So (crosses fingers) so far not ‘soo’ bad. Trump and the GOP are backing off the wall, deportation forces, wholesale repeal of obamacare.
I’m not ‘that’ worried about climate change. Renewable energy is still declining in cost 10-20% a year, which compounds. Plus China and Western Europe are still investing heavily in it. Plus I forsee more efforts on the state and city level to fight against climate change if the federal government removes efforts on this front. Under Bush, the state governments on the west coast and northeast passed their own climate change efforts, and so did virtually every large city. Combined they made up something like 40-50% of the population.
The United States made up about 15% of global spending on alternative energy in 2015. I’m guessing even if the federal government becomes extremely hostile, that figure doesn’t change much (and even if it did, it wouldn’t affect the other 85% of spending that occurs in other nations). But I really do not know, and I could easily be wrong.
FWIW, China is the world leader in renewable energy investment, I think they make up about 1/3 of global spending (about 100 billion a year). Western Europe makes up another 30% or so.