I’m not sure he really wanted his “man the lifeboats” conference call to be a public announcement though I suppose it was inevitably going to get out. But to some degree, this wasn’t decided by him. There isn’t an obvious reason why we are all focused on Ryan’s tightrope act instead of talking about McConnell’s maintaining of periscope depth.
Trump will make America great again by losing. Checkmate, liberals.
Trump is still at it, tweeting again attacking “Foul mouthed McCain”. Signs are looking good for another 3AM twitter storm! Just checked Elizabeth Warren’s twitter, she hasn’t directly attacked Trump for a while, she should be poking him relentlessly at the moment, I am dissapoint.
The Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments are often called “The Populist Amendments.” You noted the 17th. I think nearly every sane person considers the 19th to be non-toxic, and, in fact, wholly admirable.
The 18th was well-intentioned…and we all know where that leads. It was “A good idea at the time.” Alas, the results were terribly toxic.
As to the 16th, well, there’s definitely gonna be some disagreement, but it was probably the only way the U.S. could have grown up into an industrial powerhouse and the arsenal (or just arse) of democracy. The economy was simply too large, and the government’s needs too vast, to get by on old-fashioned excise taxes. Call this one semi-toxic, like a good dose of salts.
Warren’s earlier childish twiiter attacks made me embarrassed for her. I’m quite glad she’s decided to stop it. She’s a Senator, former Harvard law professor and a financial guru; twitter taunts are incredibly beneath her.
He doesn’t care and his voters don’t care. The Republican Party had been committed to the Big Lie for decades now. Facts haven’t mattered to them for ever.
[QUOTE=snowthx;19693582 I expect there will be people saying Trump was the wrong kind of right-wing candidate - too flawed - there will be a better, and further right, candidate next time.
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All along, there have been Republicans saying that Trump isn’t a real conservative.
Unfortunately, what you shared has been true for quite some time. This election cycle is bringing the feelings of these people in our country who feel so disenfranchised to the fore, encouraged and inflamed by Trump and his rhetoric. Many of them are on a hair trigger at this point. Literally. (Said in the classic sense of the word.)
Y’know, that was discussed during the primaries quite a bit – American “national” parties are a peculiar sort of beast insofar as unlike, say, Tories v. Labour, just about ANYONE can just proclaim him/herself a Republican or Democrat and run for high national office without ever having to earn stripes on the trenches of the organization (heck, they don’t even have to proclaim themselves one, come to think of it, if their own state has an open primary…). Trump and Sanders are both examples of this. In practice it’s not so much that the Republican Party has a candidate or the Democratic party has a candidate, as that there are the guaranteed Republican Ballot Spot and Democratic Ballot Spot, and ever since the institutionalization of primaries post-1972 aspirants compete *directly *to win one of them.
Well yes, in the best case scenario, an actual collapse of the Republican Party into factional mayhem could in a way free the Democrats from the Fear Of The Word Liberal so that they can actually try and DO something for the working class. OTOH if the R division looks bad enough the mainstream D’s may instead be tempted to go up to the “Business Republicans” and say: “Look guys, we can be good for your bottom line, and admit it, you don’t mind who gets married to whom as long as the stock price is up. So why identify with these flyover losers?” and we wind up with the “centerline” shifted even further right. Or else it emboldens some of the Dems’ own factions into demanding a hard left turn or at least some heavy duty pandering under the premise of there no longer being the risk of losing to the R’s, and they wind up overreaching and shooting themselves in the foot as is their tradition.
The fault lines within a post-Trump GOP are not neat enough yet to be able to predict what will they look like after they emerge from the smoke of the inevitable Nov 2016-Nov 2018 barroom brawl and you wash the mud and blood off the survivors to see who came out on top. A party is not in a good position if it loses a third to two fifths of its “base” to a cult.
One interesting note:
The tweets today, were made using an iPhone.
Trump uses an Android phone.
Either he has switched phones, or this is campaign tweets. These used to be done by Kelly Anne or an associate, but she has gone incognito (again) and people are thinking that Bannon is fully in control.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo argues the destruction of Paul Ryan was (and still is) Bannon’s goal, but Trump has allowed him to dream of greater things:
I don’t think the republicans have the balls to fight off Trump. His voters will intimidate their representatives into supporting him. I think Ryan will get soft the moment his polls dip and the moment Trump’s show any signs of going up. The math isn’t there for a Trump victory outright but this election could go well past election night. And if it does then this will get unbelievably, off-the-charts nasty. The longer Trump stays in the race the more damage he will inflict. Think about it: he’s already almost certainly lost the moderate voters, but his credentials within the party are still solid, with 70-80 percent of republicans basically saying he should remain in the race.
Trump is going to go too far – God only knows what that will be, but the public will, over time, become palpably frightened and viscerally disgusted with the existence of the republican party. I think the best thing that could happen for the GOP is for Trump to quit. Replacement or no replacement, if his children approach him and convince him he has to pull the plug to save his brand, then that’ll be the win-win for the Trump’s and the GOP. Both would be badly wounded and scarred but will live to fight another day. But if he makes it through election night and does what I think he’s capable of doing and trying to contest the election and tie up the results in the courts and God knows whatever else…it will burn these images into the minds of voters for a generation and more. I think it is a definite possibility.
Donald Trump will do massive damage to the republican party now - of that there can be no doubt. It’s just a question of whether it will be damage that the party can recover from in 2-4 years with some cleansing and re-branding. Or will it be the Great Depression - New Deal kind that pushed an entire generation to lean Democratic even long after losing a chunk of its racist ‘base’? That is the question.
To the extent that the Democrats stopped speaking to the concerns of the working class, it’s because the working class decided that racial resentment, abortion, homophobia, religious supremacism and other cultural issues were more important to them than bread-and-butter policy matters that would actually benefit them and improve their lives.
If Trump merely loses the election in an obvious landslide and calls it a night, then we’re still left with a market for toxic populism. Their frustration won’t go away, and if anything they will feel even more embittered by the perception that elites unified to mute their voices. These people might seem deluded to us but they actually truly believe that they have a chance to win back their America – Trump represents that dream. These are the same forces that fueled the anti-civil rights movements of the 1960s and the Jim Crow era in the aftermath of the 1870s Reconstruction period, movements based on the notion that their America, their status and standing in society are under attack and that 'someone needs to do somethin’ about it’. That won’t go away if Trump loses and says “Well folks I tried.” That only goes away when it gets so ugly, so radioactive that even some within the movement begin to consult their own conscience on a human level and begin to have doubts about their own behavior. It only changes when people begin to see the obvious: that to support such madness not only threatens to disrupt the lives of ‘the others’ but also their own well-being.
I think Trump is on the verge of unleashing these forces, which is terrifying. But on the other side of it is a profound shock and disgust that will perhaps force even some of the people who think he’s a white messiah now to have second thoughts. If nothing else it would probably force the indy-leaning millennials to realize, “No, both sides don’t do it,” and maybe we have more important things to worry about than whether or not Hillary Clinton got money from Wall Street.
Sorry, but absolutely no. They are called the Progressive Amendments.
The Progressives and the Populists were two very different movements. They often get confused, but all the reforms we take for granted today were pushed by the Progressives, not the Populists.
Yep, I’m frankly tired of hearing about how mainstream democrats abandoned the working class – they didn’t. They were put into minority status by people who at the time were part of a stronger (white) middle class and decided that going on taxpayer funded panty raids and turning vaginas into crime scenes was more important than electing people who could fight for labor and the middle class.
Don’t you think they were helped along with that thinking by a gratuitous Republican party ginning up their passions when needed during election cycles via their favorite mouthpiece, Fox “News?”
It’s clear that when Trump is attacked or threatened by a strong woman he cannot help himself lashing out, even more than when attacked in general. As the second most prominent female Democrat, Warren is the one who is in the position to do that. Leave Clinton out of it and get Warren to sling the mud.
Anything that helps to push Trump into total implosion is fair game in my book.
Fox News didn’t exist in 1964. But, yeah. Still, the Republicans and Fox News are only half the story. The other half of the story are the people who let it happen to them. I don’t excuse them.
Just a reminder that Reince Priebus, without the vowels, is
RNC PR BS
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all night!
The Huff post figured that out in 2013.
Go ahead and take the night off. 