I’m not sure where anyone got the idea that Trump was a fighter. Given his extreme fondness for litigation, at most he’s the guy who hires fighters, i.e. lawyers to argue his cases for him and negotiate out-of-court settlements on his behalf.
I think those are the smart* supporters among Trump’s base. The slow learners are still expecting him to lock up Hillary.
*Relatively speaking.
If Trump isn’t personally an anti-semite then he’s screwed up royally by empowering anti-semites the way he has. So it’s a toss-up whether he’s unqualified due to bigotry or due to incompetence.
And while it is true that there is a Jew in his inner circle, I see Trump as a more unhinged version of Nixon; even if he had Kissinger in his cabinet that did not stop Nixon from being a big time bigot and posterity does know about the humiliating things Kissinger was forced to endure coming from Nixon.
Your post is plagiarism unless you credit Scott Adams. 
I’m really hoping he’s not able to pull off the pivot. Seems to be working, though.
What a rational, reasonable post. Thanks for sharing.
What the OP doesn’t explain is why the Left would want Donald Trump is they had the opportunity to get him.
According to the OP’s logic, the Right is abandoning Trump because they’re getting enough use out of him to justify the harm he’s doing to their brand. Wouldn’t the same logic apply to the Left if Trump was their spokesman?
Well he’s just checked the “humanitarian intervention” box. He’ll fit right in.
Fascinating argument. If I understand the OP correctly (and I may not) the assumption is that because Trump isn’t doing every single thing the hard Right wants, he must be some kind of liberal. And while I’m the last person qualified to speak for either side, the idea that Democrats en masse would ever get on board the Trump Train sounds utterly preposterous to me. Hint: his approval rating seems to have been flatlining well before Alt-righters began getting a clue about what an incompetent boob they had elected.
I’m with Aspenglow, mostly. Ideologically, Trump is whatever happened to pique his interest on cable TV news five minutes ago, and whatever may placate the rubes while allowing him some leeway to line his Chinese silk pockets.
Donald Trump is the brown acid.
This is a lot simpler than the OP makes it out to be. Because he doesn’t have any actual principles of his own, Trump is, crowd surfing style, being passed between the anti-Semitic (paleo-conservative), anti-Islam (neo-cons), and anti-both (Pepe heads) branches of the right. Conservative Jews have managed to ignore the Nazis in their midst because they think he stands against Islam, and the Pepe-heads and paelos have managed to ignore the Jews who are there because they see (or, perhaps, saw) Trump as the only hope against white genocide. It seems for Trump, all there is to do is keep hanging on while the money’s rolling in. Anyone who considers themselves of ‘the Left’ has no use at all for Trump, and vice versa.
Bannon isn’t out, he’s still “chief strategist”, he just got removed from the Security Council. And no sorry I don’t think the left will give him any respect at all, there are some on the left happy that he killed the TPP, but that doesn’t mean that he’s worthy of any respect.
I’ll respect Trump the day he puts his head between his legs and kisses his own arse.
Well, actually, it was a rational, reasonable post. When those of us on “the Left” call Donald Trump “a sociopath, a narcissist, a huckster, inexperienced at everything, ignorant, prideful, thin-skinned, a believer of the worst and stupidest conspiracy theories on the planet, impulsive and stupid” this isn’t just “the usual rhetoric”. And it isn’t because he’s a “conservative” or even on the political “Right”.
The man is a clinical narcissist. He’s likely a sociopath, too, by which I mean I think he has “antisocial personality disorder”. His vaunted business career–allegedly as this great “builder” a la Howard Roark–has basically been one big con, and the man is fundamentally a con artist.
I wouldn’t say any of those things because I don’t agree with Donald Trump’s “policies”, such as they are. It’s true I don’t agree with his “policies”, and I’m sure Aspenglow and many other don’t agree with his “policies” either, but as many, many people–including some conservatives–have long been saying, practically shouting at the top of our lungs, Donald Trump Is Not Normal. He’s a malignant narcissist who used blatant demagoguery to gain political power. Now he’s the god-damned President of the United States, and it’s long past time for Republicans and others on “the Right” to wake up and realize that President Donald Trump poses a grave danger to the security of the United States (and that’s completely regardless of what happened between him and Vladimir Putin and any hypothetical Russian hookers).
For God’s sake, bring on President Pence already. I wouldn’t agree with any of his policies, either; nor would I fundamentally trust the man, since he agreed to become the running mate of a man who was blatantly unfit for the office of President of the United States. I would hope for him to be a less-than-one-term President and be voted out of office in 2020. But at least Pence isn’t actually deranged; he’s just a completely shameless politician who sold out for power. (“A Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order” my ass.)
Amen, MEBuckner. I was not overjoyed with the GW Bush presidency but I took fellow liberals to task for blind character assassinations and watched with relish when the survivor of a totalitarian regime handed a campus protester his ass for calling Bush a fascist. This isn’t about political allegiance, it’s about refusing to support a highly unstable and dangerous person and still grappling to understand what sort of person would. What alternative reality must exist, cobbled together with propaganda and poorly reasoned, emotional invective, in order for a decent human being to look at the openly vile human being that is Donald Trump and say, ‘‘Yeah, my vote’s with him’’? The ethical choice was not between Hillary and Trump. It was about voting for Trump or not voting for Trump. I don’t give a god damn whether or not people voted for Hillary, but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why anyone voted for Trump. Over 100 GOP national security experts put together a petition detailing why his Presidency would be disastrous for national security, on an unprecedented scale, and nobody fucking listened. Economists, traditionally conservative folks, declared his economic plans to be totally out of touch with reality and potentially disastrous. And nobody listened. I just don’t get it.
John Scalzi put it pretty well:
It’s actually pretty irrational, and pretty unreasonable, to look upon such blatant incompetence, irrationality, and poverty of character and defend it in any way. It’s not like he even tries to hide his moral bankruptcy – he’s proud of it. The man openly boasts about sexually assaulting women and disparaged the ass of the Secretary of State during a presidential debate. There’s policy right and wrong, and then there’s basic human decency right and wrong. And there is only one ‘‘reasonable’’ side to be on in the latter case.
I will tell you one thing, I’ve always hated arguments that smacked of elitism, ‘‘people are generally stupid,’’ whatever, but this election has made me seriously re-evaluate that position. I hate thinking of the masses as stupid people. I hate it. But I don’t see any alternative explanation as to why people are ditching the concepts of critical thinking and scientific evidence in droves and flocking to a clearly mentally unstable demagogue. Every day we have more evidence that people’s realities are shaped more by their faith in their own belief system rather than any sort of empirical evaluation of the evidence. I’ve seen decent, Christian human beings defend this piece of shit, and attack the women who reported his sexual assaults. It tears my fucking heart out.
You might recall that George Dumbya Bush sold the Iraq War as a humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately, support for such things is bipartisan, ranging from neoconservatives to neoliberals. But most people on the left have no patience for ‘helping’ people by dropping bombs on their countries. If we want to help Syrians, let’s take in refugees.
But Trump respected by liberals? Not in this reality. The best that liberals can hope for from Trump, as others have already said, is that he’s willing to be manipulated by lefties. But there’s little reason to hope even for that: if Trump were surrounded by lefties, he’d still be chasing every shiny object that cable TV put in his head, and he’d still be, per Kimstu, part of the “More Money for Rich People” party. He might change his mind on Planned Parenthood if Ivanka sweet-talks him enough, but he’s not gonna join the Fight for Fifteen.
But ultimately nobody’s going to respect Trump, because he’s ignorant about practically everything he needs to know to be a decent President, both incapable of and unwilling to do anything about it, and he’s got the emotional stability of a toddler with a thirst for revenge.
Besides, it was Republicans that fell in line behind Trump, and got him into the White House. We liberals are perfectly happy with his being an albatross around their necks.
I have no idea why the OP thinks that Trump reorganizing his lackies is going to suddenly result in “the left” giving him new respect. Trump is still a national embarasment who’s trying to destroy a ton of programs that the left (and even ‘the center’) consider important and is encouraging an upswing in bigoted violence. While people are opposed to antisemitism, they’re not ‘pro Jew’ and aren’t going to suddenly support him because he’s got a deeply conservative Jew talking to him. And this leave aside the extreme partisanship people show - you can see on this board where people criticize him for doing things that Obama and Hillary did or supported just because he’s an R instead of a D, shifting his cronies isn’t going to change that.
There’s another recent thread claiming that Trump is really a Democrat. I’ve seen that meme elsewhere, too.
Does Trump have any personal political convictions at all? He may have run with Democrats in the past, to fit in.
But he ran as a Republican & got elected as a Republican. Many GOP powers that be expressed disdain–until he won. Donald Trump is fully Republican and the party of McConnell & Ryan deserves him.
Coming soon (?) to the bottom portion of your television sets that are tuned to the Fox News Channel:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP (D) REMOVED FROM OFFICE BY U.S. SENATE…FIRST TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY A PRESIDENT HAS BEEN NOT ONLY IMPEACHED IN HOUSE BUT ACTUALLY CONVICTED BY SENATE AND REMOVED FROM OFFICE…CONGRESSIONAL ACTIONS FOLLOWED INVOCATION OF 25TH AMENDMENT BY VICE PRESIDENT, CABINET…DISGRACED EX-PRESIDENT IMMEDIATELY TAKEN INTO CUSTODY BY FBI…HISTORIC MOVES CAME AFTER SHOCKING NEW REVELATIONS THAT…