I’m getting a lot of deja vu here from 08.
“He’s not my president!”
“I didn’t vote for him!”
“He’s not even eligible for the position”
“He’s going to ruin this country”
“He’s going to destroy this country from within”
“He’s putting a lot of people in prominent positions whom I disagree with”
If things are just repeating themselves from the opposite side, will reading the tea leaves of opposition in 2008 lead to any prognostication for 2016 (well '17-'18)?
Will the minority leader again say that the legislative agenda is to prevent any and all legislation? Will people begin to cry out for the president to release his private records?
What else do you think could repeat itself from the opposite side in the coming years?
I have not heard a single person say that Trump isn’t eligible to be president. I’m sure that you can find some Democrat somewhere saying that but this is most certainly not the consensus of Democrats. You are either allowing incredibly slanted media to shape your views or you don’t care about facts.
Illegitimacy was Trump’s attack on Obama and was uniquely used to discredit him because he’s a black man with a funny name. It also became Republican orthodoxy. That might be because Republicans are immune to facts. What they feel and what they believe is more important to them even if those things are demonstrably wrong.
Trump was trying to manufacture a constitutional crisis over stupid things he read on the internet. Fortunately, no one with authority took the bait. He did manage to fool a certain portion of the incredulous populace. They seem to predominantly vote for Republicans.
The rest of your points would have some validity as typical grumbling by sore losers being repeated after this election. You’re right. These are the types of things people said after the last election and some are saying them now.
You fail to acknowledge though that while the complaints about Obama and Trump are of the same kind, they are of radically different degree. For example, I thought Bush’s second term would be bad for the country because his regressive tax policies wouldn’t help the economy and because his lack of judgment greatly exacerbated troubles in the Middle East and he wasn’t likely to improve them. In fact, I was right. I also disagreed with his social policies. I was not fundamentally afraid for the future of our country, however. In contrast, Trump presents existential threats unlike those of any past president. Among his promises are ignoring constitutional protections for free speech and free religion, starting nuclear war in the Middle East, destabilizing Europe by effectively abandoning our NATO allies to appease Russia, abandoning the Asian trade partners we hoped would befriend us over China, and destroying the limited progress made against global warming during the Obama administration. This last one is probably the greatest current threat to the world and we will never again have the opportunities we have now to mitigate its damages.
Interestingly, I was talking with my friend about her family in North Carolina. They didn’t vote for Trump because he is a rapist but they don’t seem disappointed with his election. They are literally of the view that Trump will destroy the world and bring about the apocalypse so he is a better choice than Hillary. That is, for some Trump supporters, creating existential threats to life and well-being is a selling point. They would have us all live in their distorted version of a doomsday cult and they voted accordingly. I happen to believe that destroying the world is not in the best interests of the human race. I will have to disagree with the people who have this view.
I’ll substantiate one of your snarky claims. He is NOT my President, and never will be. In fact, he and his white nationalist cohorts are everything I hate about the conservative movement, and now they have all the reins. And I will fight them with every ounce of will in my body, because they represent a complete repudiation of positive change. (And because in general they have a complete immunity to proven facts, but that’s another story.)
Just to pick out a random example… Obama may have put people you could have reasonable political disagreements with in charge of prominent positions. Okay, fine. But Trump has racists, white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists in top advisory and executive positions. That’s not just a political disagreement. Two of those are morally abhorrent choices that serve to signal to a growing portion of the electorate that this very much is not their country. One of them is flat-out dangerous - Trump’s national security advisor cannot be reasonably trusted to tell the difference between real and fake news! So while people may have made this complaint about Obama, back then, it was spurious at best. Now? Very different story. Flynn being Trump’s national security advisor is a legitimate threat to the nation; he cannot be relied upon to do his job, or even to just not do his job in a way that is innocuous.
It’s like if one group of people spent an entirely reasonable administration crying and screaming about wolves that never ended up coming, then actual wolves showed up and the people who cried wolf reacted by saying, “Hey, you’re just crying wolf like last election” - firstly, that’s rich coming from that side of the aisle, and secondly, Mike Flynn, who “exposed” an “anti-American alliance between China, Cuba, and jihadist terrorists that the Obama administration is covering up” is the national security advisor to the president-elect, we’re not crying wolf, we’re watching it eat any odds of the USA keeping up its generally positive reception on foreign policy earned in the Obama years.
If you are American then he most certainly is your President. I am a veteran who served 13 years under Presidents I did and did not vote for. They all, once voted in, were my Presidents. And they were yours too. I served under Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton. I did not vote for Obama, and he was my President. I did not vote for Clinton, but if she won then she’d be my President.
Get with the program, Johnny and all who think this way. Suck it up, deal with it, and make the best of it.
Or else it will be eight long and painful years for you while this nation improves, gets stronger, creates more and better jobs for many, reasserts itself as a leader in this world, and while other nations’ leaders no longer laugh behind the back of today’s President, my President.
Can we revisit this in four years? I don’t see how any of this is likely, other than perhaps luck. And, btw, the leaders of other nations have not been laughing behind Obama’s back. He’s quite respected at home and abroad.
Never understood the “He is not my president” talk. Whether one likes it or not, the president is your president, be he Obama, Trump, or whoever else is POTUS. Unless one is saying that one plans to renounce US citizenship, which I think it’s safe to say that most Trump-is-not-my-president folks aren’t going to do.
I think people are confusing “eligible for president” with “has the experience or character the job typically requires.”
If you are American-born and 35 years of age you are eligible. Plenty of horrific people in America are eligible to be POTUS.
Read my lips. FUCK THAT. My country right or wrong is bullshit. It’s an excuse for all kinds of chicanery, the majority of which, unsurprisingly, is committed by conservatives.
I am a veteran too, but I never signed on for some kind of poor man’s P.T. Barnum who knows nothing about governing whatsoever. And here’s another key point: I am no longer in the military, so I am relieved of any obligation to follow that fat-ass, grabasstic megalomaniac’s commands.
I wouldn’t count too many chickens before they hatch, chum. It’s a loooong stretch from president-elect to re-election. You suck it up. I’m gonna throw it up against the wall and see how many people see how much of it sticks. And you can thank your conservative leaders for giving me the example.
As an aside, it’s really funny how there were maybe three posters supporting Trump posting on this board before the election, and now they’re coming out of the woodwork.
Either they don’t have the courage of their convictions (looking at those posters whose join dates weren’t even close to recent) or they’re just here to undermine free expression, which I find unsurprising considering their figurehead.
Do you really think that since Trump won the election that everyone else disappeared? Or that admonishments to support a Republican de-evolution would be successful? There’s about as much chance of that as of your changing.