The correlation between what Trump sincerely believes at any given moment and actual fact is coincidental at best unless it’s a belief in his own greatness, which I’m prepared to assume is fairly constant.
Not even a Kindergarten, you need to be aware of the target the anti-vaccine guys are preying upon. 
I doubt that what Trump sincerely believes and what he says he sincerely believes has any significant correlation at all.
Valid point, adequately supported by evidence.
Because it isn’t Trump I’m primarily interested in. It’s what the Republican Congress and a conservative majority in SCOTUS can achieve. Reagan was no genius either and believed in some incredibly dumb things but I happen to believe that his Administration achieved great things. It sometimes takes a very ordinary man to look at something like the Berlin Wall and say in effect, “What the fuck is this thing doing here? Tear it down, Mr Gorbachev.” Obama is a considered an intelligent guy. He achieved sweet fuck-all in the Middle East and in fact left the US in a poorer position there. Reagan was considered a dummy. He left the Soviet Union in the dumpster. Go figure.
Soviet Union climbed in to the dumpster on its own. And its path was always going in that direction. Reagan may well have speeded it up a bit, but to be fair, I’d give more credit to Bush I for handling the fallout.
Wakefield was in it for the money. Politics had nothing to do with it.
That is truly a bizarre other-wordly sequence of argumentation. Trump’s anti-vax blathering is just the most extreme of Republicans’ general anti-science and anti-reality positions on a wide range of issues – climate change denial, ridiculous made-up views on when sentient human life begins, used to justify their draconian anti-abortion stance, bizarre views on sexuality used to justify human rights violations against the gay and transgendered, who believe that the solution to America’s gun problem is more guns and a re-interpretation of the Second Amendment to make it so, and, on the international scene, who hold dangerously militaristic views about American global hegemony – or have we already forgotten that Bush-Cheney and their gang of PNAC accomplices destroyed an entire country, cost thousands of American lives and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, and provided a major new haven and incentive for terrorists?
As for Reagan, the guy who spent the early part of his career ranting and frothing at the mouth against Medicare, calling it an evil that will end freedom and destroy America as we know it – that’s when he wasn’t starring in a B-movie in which he shared top billing with a monkey – your logic there is equally bizarre. Conservatives have been telling us for years how incredibly deeply flawed communism was. When a country has to build a huge wall patrolled by armed military guards to keep in its own citizens and shoot them when they try to leave, it has surely reached the nadir of ungovernable madness. Yet when such a system does finally fall apart, you give all the credit to the monkey’s co-star who happened to be the US president at the time, and none at all to Gorbachev and the political realities of the time.
If you’re not interested in rolling back gay rights and abortion rights and drug liberalization and science-based environmental and public health policy, then exactly what are you hoping a Republican Congress and a conservative majority in SCOTUS “can achieve” that couldn’t have been achieved with a Democratic administration?
Remember, under the Obama administration net immigration from Mexico went negative, crime and illegal immigration reached decades-long lows, the number of federal government workers decreased, the economy has largely recovered from the disastrous Bush collapse, over 11 million private sector jobs were created, and the federal budget deficit was substantially reduced.
What makes you think that Republicans are going to do better on those issues? Or what other issues are you focusing on where you think Republicans are likely to be more successful?
They don’t actually care about any of that.
It all comes down to guns and fetuses.
Not that the pubbies will do any better than the Dems. They aren’t protecting gun rights any more than the democrats did, and I do doubt that they will get any substantial movement on abortion.
But they talk the talk, so that gets them votes.
And that’s why it’s okay for a clueless conspiracy theorist to occupy the highest office of the land.
Genius.
I would say “you’d better hope that the republicans rein in his worst instincts”, but they wouldn’t do that during the election when news arose that he had sexually assaulted dozens of women and bragged about it, so I think any hope there is about as delusional as the hope that I’m going to wake up and find that it was all a bad dream, and America didn’t just elect a deranged conspiracy theorist with no knowledge of government who may be in the pockets of Vladimir Putin to its highest executive office.
And somewhat ironically, the next 4 years are going to see a drop in gun sales (due to the “fear factor” not being a card manufacturers can play), as well as an increase in abortions, due to the Republicans removing access to birth control and family planning.
Not “all” – that’s incomplete. It comes down to guns, fetuses, denying climate change so their industrial friends can continue to destroy the environment with impunity, crippling the EPA and dismantling other environmental regulations for the same reason, cutting down public education to the point of complete dysfunction, pandering to the bigoted religious right by pretending that hate and discrimination against gays somehow makes us a better society, making sure that universal health care never happens because Jesus clearly intended that only people who can pay for it should have decent health care, and asserting American military dominance wherever there is oil or anything else of value.
It’s actually quite a long list of stuff that aldiboronti and his pals would like to see happen, via legislation, executive order, and unprecedented judicial activism of the Scalia/Thomas/Alito variety. In terms of social progress and respect for science and education it might set the US back 50 years, maybe 100. Trump’s statement about vaccines and autism should be seen in the context of all the other lie-per-minute idiotic pronouncements he keeps uttering, basically typical rather than anomalous to the mental illness that pervades the deluded minds of the far right.
To be fair, I don’t think anybody can sort out the shit storm that is the Middle East. Any policy will piss off either the Israelis, the Sunnis, the Shiites, the individual countries, the terrorist factions, the religious factions, the economic factions, or any combination thereof.
Reagan didn’t do anything to the Soviet Union except outspend them in the arms race. They collapsed because they ran out of operating capital. 30 years later, Russia is still a menace and the old Soviet bloc isn’t resting any easier.
I think it’s about taxes, actually. The GOP is appealing because they have all pledged for life never to raise income taxes.
They also have lost their ability to attract sensible conservative grown-ups to office because sensible conservative grown-ups wouldn’t make that pledge for life. The other dumbness follows. Sure, a lot of it is old anti-FDR dumbness that was already around, but the Eisenhowers and Nixons–the realists–can’t get in and moderate the party they way they used to.