As noted **your **single argument to vote for Trump was shot down, I’m not a single issue voter.
As others pointed out executive orders can do a lot of harm and I did point at the expense (just in court expenses) and loss of revenue before common sense prevails as reasons not to vote for a guy that will try to do the things that his supporters want that are reprehensible.
One has to point at fellow travelers of Trump like racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio that have been found by the courts to be abusing of his power and wasting lots of money from the state of Arizona to get an idea what is coming. Trump will not give a damn if he bankrupts the nation just to get his hateful ideas a start up. (And Trump still loves Arpaio and what he is doing, the media has not to this date demanded Trump to repudiate Arpaio meaning that we do not need to guess, we have a very good idea of what is coming, lots of money to defend hateful actions, more of the stupid war on drugs, more money for jails and less money for science and education)
First, though, you have to have laws by which you can prosecute them. Most, if not nearly all, of the previous decades shenanigans were entirely legal. It is pretty challenging to find ways to lock up investment bankers for not doing illegal things.
I’m not sure how serious you are here, but Trump himself is a major fraudster. Is the idea “It takes one to know one” and we need an experienced fraudster to crack down on fraud?
The only possible explanation for the ascent of Trump is the emergence of the phenomenon described in this story. Maybe not quite to the same degree, but the same idea. Seriously. The irony of that particular story is that the protagonist was described as a real estate swindler.
No, the rise of Trump can be explained by a worldwide phenomena: the political class has failed, what they thought was best for us and that we were supposedly too stupid to know was good for us turned out to not be so great.
There’s a Trump in every Western country, and frankly, their Trumps are a lot better than our Trumps. Americans are so busy worrying about how Trump will play with our allies they are forgetting that Boris Johnson, a guy who said Obama hated Britain because he’s Kenyan, is their Foreign Secretary. Sounds like Trump will not only fit right in, but will be joined by others like him soon enough if current trends persist.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the future for historians to recognize that books like, “What’s the matter with Kansas?” were pretty unfortunate. Because the structure that’s been built means a lot more to the elites than to the common man. The common man doesn’t mind burning your whole edifice down, even if it hurts him too. IT’s time to take the wahoos seriously. They get one vote just like the postgraduate degree holders.
No, although some economic phenomena are worldwide, to consider xenophobia and political demagoguery to be “worldwide” is only true if you consider “worldwide” to be US and Britain right now, with the ascent of Trump and Brexit as the evidence.
But it’s more complicated and nuanced than that. Trump is a danger that political leaders all over the world have been subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly warning about. And you might recall this thread I started last November celebrating the election of a progressive, inclusive, and inspiring new leader in Canadian politics. Six months later, he’s still riding high in the polls, while the former Conservative leader was so badly defeated that he quietly slunk out of politics altogether and is apparently going to work for private equity firms that will no doubt be screwing the public in a prime example of one of the major problems that voters are revolting over.
So, no, it’s not a “worldwide” phenomenon.
The Ascent of Trump is all the more mysterious because there seems to be very much an ideological alignment of the right with the plutocracy and the capitalist screwing of the middle class, yet to solve this, the idiots are supporting a billionaire real estate swindler. The mind boggles.
I’m horrified that I actually feel compelled to answer a question like this – that this is necessary in a society that is democratic and in which information on such consequences is fairly easy to research.
Someone else already mentioned the damage done by the decision to invade Iraq, which is enormous. That single decision has created ripple effects that have led to everything from the globalization of Islamic radicalism (and violence) to the rise of Islamism in Turkey, and thus the probable loss of a critical NATO ally – that’s just one decision and those are just two consequences related to it. It also has meant squandered resources that could have been used to stabilize Afghanistan were instead diverted to reversing the likely irreversible collapse of secular but stable Arab states. Over the long run, these ripple effects could lead not only to the complete collapse of US partnerships in the Arab world, but also the collapse of NATO, and beyond that the collapse of the entire post-WWII American geopolitical and economic model. A single decision, with enormous consequences. Like it or not, we live in a world of complex relationships. Ignorance has a very steep price – we’re still paying for a single wrong decision.
I forget who said it when Dubya was president: “When he said he was going to run the government like a business, I didn’t think he meant one of his businesses.” With Trump, it will be the same, but even worse.
It’s little to do with right-wing extremism. It’s much more to do with the disconnect between the elites and the proles. Trump is the ultimate protest vote. The elites simply cannot conceive of the problems the proles are having, and Clinton is perceived as part of the problem, not the solution.
Holy crap that makes my head hurt. The elites cannot identify with the problems of the common man, so the common man goes out and supports a man so fucking elite that he has 18K gold spittoons in the parlour in his number eight house.
I am equally baffled and bewildered. Trump isn’t fit to shovel shit from one place to another. So to me, it feels like the entire nation is being punked.
But what’s even more horrifying is that it’s become shockingly clear that as much as 40% of the US population either actively advocates or tacitly supports abject bigotry & ignorance.
Yeah, this is what I’ve been thinking this whole time. Any single ones of these things, taken in isolation, should disqualify him from the presidency. And yet not only do people not throw him out, they actually applaud him for it.
It used to be stuff like Howard Dean’s cheer or Michael Dukakis looking silly in a helmet instantly nuked their election bids. Trump demonstrates he is an incompetent, uneducated, bullying, racist demagogue on a daily basis and people seem to love him for it.
Yep. Trump is fulfillment of deliberate policies the Republicans have promoted for decades. He is like the perfect Republican Frankenstein come to life.
Trump is a protest vote - but it’s not really about economics. It’s about the rise of White Nationalist “anti-pc” sentiment. That’s something that extremist right-wing Republicans have been banking on to win elections for decades. That’s why all the Republican candidates tried to tip-toe around calling out Donald at the start, because they didn’t want to drive away the racist right-wing extremists.
This study by the American National Election Studies organization (ANES) studies various motives which drive political supporters.
This inital study was done in January of this year. The results and methodology are at that link above.
Here’s a link to an analysis of these results, published at Salon -
The analysis found that there was a strong correlation between people who displayed racial animus and Trump voters. Supporters for the other political candidates showed that there supporters were far less likely to hold racial animus.
The author of that article, Sean McElwee, published a followup last week, looking at some of the data that has emerged lately. Again, it was clear that the main factor in determining support for Donald Trump is racism and white fears of losing advantages.
There’s more analysis (with graphs!) in the article. They’re both worth a read.
The newest article concludes:
Rightwing extremism in the form of support for racist white nationalism is the determining factor behind the choice of the Republican Nominee, Donald Trump. By choosing to embrace and support Trump, the Republican party is embracing right-wing extremism.
The other factors - including economics and income inequality - fade out compared to support for Trump’s racism.