I happen to believe that Donald Trump is a fraud, an asshole, and a repulsive human being. I’ve been saying that since long before he started running for President.
So I really don’t mind seeing him abused from the Left. He’s entirely deserving.
But frankly, I have no doubt that Marco Rubio or John Kasich would be getting exactly the same treatment if he’d been elected. No Republican, however even tempered and however polite, would be treated by the Left as anything but an ignorant religious zealot at best, or as a Hitler clone.
Chuck Schumer wouldn’t be any more accommodating to an ordinary Republican than to Trump.
It would all depend on what they do. But it’s highly unlikely that you’d see the nationwide protests (well, if they tried to pass the same health care bill, maybe). Unlike idiot Trump I don’t think either would be doing much tweeting, let alone espousing conspiracy theories or forcing their mouthpieces to respond with obvious lies and deflections. Sure, there would be discontent with them, but nothing on the scale of the Asshole-in-Chief.
It is not likely that we had seen the spectacle of incompetency seen by the people Trump did choose for his administration and the disruption caused to our diplomatic core.
Marco Rubio or John Kasich were likely to get some rough treatment, but in just any subject they would had been less reckless than the Cheeto in chief.
And in the subject of immigration and refugees both Rubio and Kasich tought it was Nuts to deport 11M people, a more humane and less wasteful approach would had prevented the debacle of Trump’s executive orders about Muslims, the wall and immigrants.
Are you asking that if Kasich or Rubio tried to repeal a piece of legislation that has provided over 20 million Americans with health insurance, would Schumer be more accommodating, then no. And, why should he?
Are you asking that if Kasich or Rubio tried to appoint a hard-right Supreme Court Justice after the Republicans had stolen the appointment from a Democratic President, then would Schumer be more accommodating, then no. And, why should he?
On the other hand, I don’t think Kasich or Rubio would try to build a stupid wall at the border or would ban immigrants from a bunch of majority Muslim countries or would accuse the previous President of wiretapping him with no evidence.
Kasich might even try to occasionally work in a bipartisan way with Congress. (Rubio probably not so much. Rubio only looks sort of moderate to some because the entire national Republican Party has gone pretty much bat-shit crazy.)
So, basically, I think your whole premise here is kind of confused.
What’s the basis of your opinion? Trump’s election is one factor–his slim Electoral win & Popular vote loss. (Not counting possible Russian influence.)
As a Democrat, I’m sure I’d find most policies of any Republican president not to my taste. I’ve lived through several. But Trump’s gang of dreadful advisers, his brain-dead Cabinet choices & his demented Tweets put him in a very special category. Worse than either Bush, worse than Reagan & worse than Nixon.
(Let’s have a special word for the Republican congress. Under President Obama, they specialized in opposition. Now it’s evident that they can’t govern.)
Depends. Part of it is trump himself, part of it is the circumstances of his election. I think that any president, like trump and Bush, elected against the clear wishes of the voting public would have faced a greater level of scrutiny.
But Kasich would have had experience both as a public sector executive and a member of Congress. Rubio, only the latter. But both could have stood up to that greater level of scrutiny at least as well as, if not better, than Bush 43.
And there is the fact that trump is an intensely polarizing figure in that the people who dislike him do so with a greater fervor than many other presidents generated. And it’s not totally unintentional. In order to gain the devotion of his fan base, he needed to behave in a fashion that would, of necessity, inspire contempt and revulsion, if indeed not downright hatred, in his opposition.
Kasich and Rubio would have had people opposing their policies (assuming the policies to be identical, admittedly a bit of a reach) but without the personal, nay visceral, opprobrium that trump receives.
President Rubio or President Kasich would mean that the Democrats had lost the White House and both houses of Congress; under such circumstances, I expect there would be widespread gloom and depression in the Democratic Party, and a full-scale circular firing squad in effect over the issue of “How did we just lose the entire federal government, not to mention most of the states? What the hell is wrong with us, anyway?”
President Trump, on the other hand, is incredibly unifying, because he’s so obviously an absolutely horrible president who does (or at least tries to do) very appalling things. Righteous rage, and a sense of being part of some great noble purpose–“The Resistance”–are a great tonic for depression and bitter self-recriminations.
The fact the Trump has rapidly become such a deeply polarizing and unpopular figure also really helps stiffen Democratic spines. A more conventional Republican would very likely still be in the honeymoon phase, not looking at double-digit deficits in his approval ratings.
(One point; in this scenario, would President Rubio or President Kasich have won the Electoral College, but with nearly three million fewer votes in the total popular vote? I admit, that might stiffen the resolve of the Democrats. Even then, though, it’s hard to imagine John Kasich, say, stirring the depths of fury seen on the Left, in the Center, and in a good part of the Right in response to Trump.)
And a question for the OP: It ain’t just the Left who have been giving Trump fits. Do you think President Rubio or President Kasich would have had any more luck getting “repeal and replace” through this Congress?
I think the answer is - yes, Rubio or Kasich would be treated much the same as Trump, the reason being that there isn’t something to compare Rubio or Kasich against (as in, something much more unnerving than Rubio or Kasich.)
If Kasich were to become POTUS now, after two months of Trump’s presidency, then yes, he’d be instantly welcomed by even many Democrats, since we have a POTUS Trump to contrast Kasich against. But if Kasich had been elected the conventional way in 2016, like any other Republican president - then, no, he’d get the usual pillorying.
A relevant analogy someone once used was that if we rank pain on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst, then we might consider getting burned all over our body, by flames, to be the worst pain imaginable. But if we were able to eliminate that worst pain from the universe, then the next level of pain - the previous “9” - simply becomes the new “10” in human viewpoint.
It goes both ways, of course. Even relatively conservative Democrats such as Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were portrayed as radical leftists by the GOP, because there wasn’t a far more lefty Democrat to measure them against. But if we had Michael Moore as president, then Republicans would suddenly embrace Obama.
I second what the others here have said too. The fact that many of us would like to see Trump resign or be impeached even though it would mean having as President a right-wing zealot like Pence is a testament to how much worse we see the combination of ignorance, bigotry, incompetence, fraud, cronyism, and lack of critical thinking skills that makes Trump even worse than the average Republican.
What I have been saying is how impressive the Republican Party has been: No matter how bad the previous Republican President was, they seem to have the ability to make you nostalgic for them in comparison to the current offering. That’s an impressive feat.
My fractured crystal ball says Rubio would’ve gotten 3/5 the loving attention that Trump’s experienced, and Kasich about one-third as much. In other words, plenty of hell but not close to the extent Trump has.
I am pretty certain though that had Kasich managed a miracle and unseated Trump for the nomination, all those Democrats/liberals who initially labeled him a reasonable alternative would have been painting him as a horrific right-wing demagogue.*
*I am not a Kasich fan. He had a chance to speak out about Trump’s gross lack of qualifications for office, and instead settled for finger-wagging about how Trump didn’t play nicely with others.
I disagree. People would oppose Rubio, Kasich or Cruz on the issues, but nothing like the left does with Trump.
There are a lot of criticisms of Trump that do not apply to other republicans.
His emotional immaturity.
His unprofessionalism.
His history of cons and scams.
His lack of intelligence.
The endless accusations of sexual assault.
His disrespectful treatment of others.
The shameless pathological lying.
His ties to Russia.
The sham marriage (maybe not everyone is offended by this, but its a marriage of convenience between a sugar daddy looking for a trophy wife and a gold digger. After years of hearing the right talk about how the Clinton’s marriage was a sham, watching this is really insulting to me)
His open appeal of the worst in people and the worst humanity has to offer.
His financial conflicts of interests.
His secrecy.
His blatant hypocrisy.
His hostility to an independent press and independent judiciary.
His lack of concrete policy proposals and empty rhetoric.
The list of negative traits not seen in other Republican candidates is endless.
Kasich would not get this treatment. The left would oppose his policy ideas, but there wouldn’t have been 4 million people marching in the street on January 21st.
In my opinion, the vicious rhetoric leveled against Trump would also have been deployed against any Republican. Bush was, after all, called a moron, a racist, and his very right to the office was denied.
The difference is that in Bush’s case, it was essentially empty political rhetoric, basically untrue.
In Trump’s case there is an unfortunate helping of actual truth in the mix.
This is a really important point. Chuck Schumer’s initial instincts seem to have been “Well, maybe we can work with this guy. Maybe an infrastructure bill?” The white hot fury of ordinary voters seems to have really stiffened his spine. I just can’t imagine “President Kasich” causing that much rage (not to mention terror) in such a large portion of the population.
Maybe I’m not remembering right, when was Bush called a racist the way Trump is? I remember Moveon asked people to submit homemade ads against the Bush admin, but deleted all the ones that made nazi references. Bush also made efforts to tamp down on anti-Muslim attitudes and reached out to latinos.
People called Bush a moron because he could be a moron. He constantly jumbled his words while giving speeches, he invaded Iraq w/o knowing what sunni & shia muslims were, and his faith in the market helped cause the housing collapse (among many other factors that caused this). But Bush was at core a decent person who wanted to do the right thing. Trump is not a decent person.
Both Obama and Clinton were capable of acting like phonies, but that doesn’t mean the GOP is just going to label every democratic president a phony or that we should discredit that criticism. The fact that Trump and W are both dumb in their own ways doesn’t mean that that criticism is invalid.
As a Hispanic I already pointed out why you are wrong just on the subject of immigration alone.
**
Wesley Clark** pointed to many more reasons why is that while Rubio or Kasich would had got a good dosage of bad treatment, it would not had been as bad as the one tossed at Trump. There is also the reality that a very significant number of Republicans are also criticizing El Trompo. Something that we would not see much if Rubio or Kasich had been elected.
A bit of hard data: The election of George W. Bush in 2000 was just a teensy bit contentious. Despite that, according to Gallup, Bush’s approval/disapproval ratings in 2001, before 9/11, ranged from 51 to 65% approval, and 25% to 39% disapproval.
Right now, Trump can only dream of favorability ratings as good as 51% for and 39% against.
Because Trump is in fact monstrously unqualified for the post which he holds, he has gone about doing things in ways that a less unqualified Republican president would probably have avoided. His EOs on immgration from Muslim countries, for example, have been an utter trainwreck that have exposed him to entirely justified ridicule and derision. Had he tried to deal with immigration with more though, more planning and a greater willingness to take heed advice from people whose advice he needed, he might have avoided much of the fallout. The shambles of his “immediate repeal and replacement” of the Obamacare legislation could easily have been avoided if he had not given the impression that it was going to be “so easy”. And so forth.
A Rubio or a Kasich wouldn’t jump on every passing banana-skin with quite the enthusiasm that Trump does.
A normal politician like Rubio or Kasich wouldn’t leave themselves open to the kind of treatment Trump invites. They wouldn’t be sending out tweets of whatever wanders through their heads at three in the morning.