Should the default assumption discussing Trump be success w/o consequence

Great Debates
1

When discussing the future of the current administration, and by extension the Republican Party and conservatism in general, whenever someone brings up the id a of popular revolt or popularity decreasing, there’s always someone, of varying political stripe, who responds, “yeah, but no one thought Trump would be elected either! He still has a core of support! Nothing he did during the election harmed him, so why should it now?” Or something along those lines.

Which seems, at first blush, to be reasonable to me. But that made me realize in another thread that this argues that the default assumption when it comes to the new President and his actions should be “he’ll succeed without serious consequence to himself, his party, and his philosophy.”

Is that so? If you think it is, I’d like to see a direct argument to that, rather than dismiss the opposite as “well, you were wrong before, so why is that possibility worth discussing now?” And if it’s true, why bother discussing, opposing, or supporting a damn thing the executive branch does?

2

Twelve months ago, I thought that Trump was a dumb celebrity who was riding high in the polls because of fame and unearned media attention. Now I’ve changed my mind, and I think he’s quite intelligent: a strategic thinker with keen understanding of group psychology. Above all, he’s very aware of the modern media environment and how it’s changing the way that people think and get their news. (I laid out some of my reasons in this thread.)

So going forward, I expect Trump will succeed at most of what he attempts to do as President. Taking a list of major campaign goals:

[ul]
[li]A major, across-the-board tax cut[/li][li]A big infrastructure spending increase[/li][li]A military spending increase and growing the size of the Army, number of ships in the Navy, etc…[/li][li]Significant reductions in bureaucracy and cutting down the size of the regulatory state[/li][li]Building a big wall along the Mexican border[/li][li]Imposing tariffs on imports[/li][li]Appointing conservative judges[/li][li]Making significant adjustments to trade deals such as NAFTA[/li][li]Reducing American’s foreign military commitments and getting partners in NATO and elsewhere to pay for a larger share of the alliance[/li][li]Taking a federal role in promoting school choice[/li][/ul]

Overall, I would not be surprised if he achieved about two thirds of these things. In some cases he will doubtlessly take partial victories and present them as total victories, but even in such cases there will be major changes to how the federal government operates.

3

The default assumption should always be failure and unpopularity. Obama left the Democrat party a wreck, Bush left the GOP a wreck. It is always easier to criticize than to accomplish things. Especially with a government so unwieldy as what we have.

4

Trump won the election by fooling a bunch of idiots. But as President, he has to confront reality. And reality isn’t going to fall for his lies.

Look at Trump’s business history. He was always able to find people willing to invest money in his ventures. But many of his ventures failed as actual businesses. With Trump you have to distinguish between what he claims he can do and his actual ability.

5

I think the point is more just to recognize what your default assumptions are and to consider whether they have been serving you well.

If I’ve been wrong on a lot of my recent predictions, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to be wrong on my next one. It probably does behoove me, though, to think a bit about whether there’s really any reason to expect myself to be right next time.

6

(post shortened, underline added)

I was under the impression that the statement - “but no one thought Trump would be elected either” - indicated that the poster/writer/speaker was reminding others that many non-voters, as well as voters, had never even consider the possibility of anything other than Hillary winning the WH. Nothing else was possible. It was unthinkable. Until Hillary actually lost.

Taking the time to remind people, “but no one thought Trump would be elected either”, is a way of reminding people that they should not exclude other possibilities, no matter how remote those possibilities might be, or how high the odds of it actually occuring.

7

(post shortened)

Who was fooled? The people who voted for Trump wanted Trump to win. The people who voted against Hillary wanted anyone but Hillary to win. The only people who were fooled were the people who believed that Hillary could not lose.

It appears that the people who were fooled are now going to use the courts to get what they couldn’t convince the voters to give them, power over legislation and executive actions.

8

Trump is a symptom, and it really is that simple.

The hard part is understand what he is a symptom of. It’s easy to talk in broad strokes about a dysfunctional system, a bought AND elitist political class, a vested, corporate media … at some point you have to pull your head out of the sand and acknowledge a choice between a billionaire businessman and a representative of wall street is not democracy.

9

No, Trump won because a bunch of idiots didn’t realize that insulting the other side would only harden their resolve and make them line up against the side that kept calling them idiots. Is that really so hard a concept to grasp?

10

This just makes more questions to answer. Why is taking “sides” the major organizing principle behind one person voting? Why did anyone identify as “insulted” rather than “spoken to about issues” that affect them? There was a lot of that going on too. The insults?: well yeah if you’re looking to be insulted by political talk and listen to AM radio and watch fox. They might have just as easily seen the arguments made. Many did.

Bubbles come in all sizes and thicknesses.

11

I think only a small minority of Trump’s ventures failed. I’d say his success to failure ratio is rather impressive when it comes to private business. Not that this necessarily implies how well he’ll do as President.

12

Wait, what? Seriously?

This is a “businessman” who managed to lose billions of dollars running multiple casinos into bankruptcy. Casinos. Pretty much the closest business case for making money short of printing it yourself. Not to mention failed hotels, resorts, office buildings…an entire airline.

Or is this a Poe’s Law that I’m missing…

13

I think that there were a lot of people who voter for trump who thought that even he didn’t believe the crazy @#$% he said. That he was just saying it to differentiate himself from more “conventional” politicians. Now they will know better.

As someone once said. “You can ignore reality. You can not ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”

14

I would submit it is harming him now.

To wit the massive and unprecedented rallies opposing him the day after his inauguration or the absolute glee that the media, from CNN to SNL, is having with him.

Certainly he has a core of supporters who quite literally ignore anything bad said about the great leader but so what? Trump barely eked out a victory by the rules. He lost the popular vote. If some core loves him no matter what so be it. I do not think they are remotely enough to change things.

15

History suggests, not well

16

Is this supposed to be about judging whether or not Trump is seen as a successful President?

That’s always more of a politicking question than a factual one, especially during the Presidency.

I don’t know about Trump being all that “brilliant,” myself. So far, his actions during the voting season and after both, have more of the look of “try whatever seems fun at the time” than it does of crafty strategy.

We are in a very different kind of time now than the US has ever been through before, for a lot of different reasons, and I think Trump’s victory at the polls reflects that. The Republican Party has never been this oriented towards deception before; the Democrats have been as disorganized, but never had such a dearth of people at the top who had a clue, before; the relative stability of the world that began after World War Two, has been completely shattered; the US has never been seriously challenged economically by another single country in modern times.

The Republican’s titular leader, Trump, NEVER had the full support of “his” own party, with strong opposition from within remaining high, right through the election. Remember, 100% of Trump’s efforts to lead so far, have NOT involved a unified, energetic action of the Republican controlled Congress. No spending bills have even been introduced to support Trumps agendas, and the Republicans aren’t doing any visible work, even to get the ACA reversed.

Trumps successes so far, are political, and only favor his support from his fans. He still behaves as though he is an outsider criticizing the government, instead of the leader of it.

And then there's the Agenda items.  A President can succeed in getting his agenda items through and done, but still be seen as having failed, if the agenda items end up being problematic.  Bush seemed to "win" the wars he got us in to, but the fact that those "wins" didn't accomplish an end to the dangers we were facing (more like a seeming increase), achieving those goals led to a Democratic victory.  Bush got his radical tax cuts, but they didn't fix anything in the economy, which proceeded to come to near complete collapse.  Obama "succeeded" in getting the ACA passed, but only in a messed up condition, and it turned into a relative debacle for him and for the Democrats despite the fact that they "won" that item.

If Trump builds his wall, ostentatiously ejects a lot of illegals, upends all the international trade agreements, and gets other governments to take over the military defense that the US has led since WW2, that will go down as a successful series of AGENDA items, but unless the RESULTS make most Americans think well of them, they wont go down as successes. If the decline in the American middle class continues, if wages remain flat, and if medical costs remain problematic, Trump wont be seen to have succeeded whether he gets his to-do list completed or not.

17

Exactly.

Running a business is the same as running the Federal government in the same way that building a canoe from a mail-order kit is the same as designing a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. Or how the local tech school is totes the same as Caltech. Or fixing the network at your brother-in-law’s insurance office on the corner is just like running a supercomputing research center’s fiber interconnects.

“I don’t really know how to run the government, but I watched CSPAN at a Holiday Inn for a couple of hours last night and I got the gist…”

Sigh. It would be a lot funnier if this didn’t seem to be pretty close to what’s actually happening these last couple of weeks.

18

This is normal with businesses. And indeed, try, try again is the American Way, isn’t it?

19

I disagree. IMHO Clinton lost the election by failing to convince people she was the better candidate.

On this side of the Atlantic, we have a saying that oppositions don’t win elections but governments lose them. It’s the easy, lazy, way to blame Trump for everything, but in truth the Democrats are have only themselves to blame. They nominated Clinton. They focused on the wrong areas, allowing Trump to win the Electoral Collage.

20

Replacing “I’m going to vote for Donald Trump” to “I’m going to drive the car we’re both in off a bridge because I think it’ll save time on our commute” is more than a little bit instructive of this logic. Not saying you’re wrong, but it does not reflect well on that “other side”.

It’s hard to blame Clinton when her opponent was easily the most dishonest candidate ever, and people still listed “I don’t trust Clinton” as a reason they voted for Trump. At a certain point, the blame must reasonably be given to the people who were fooled, and to the people doing the fooling.