There’s nothing remotely intelligent or sophisticated about that. Wanting things to be “shaken up” has no meaning. It’s just a buzzword. There’s a reason why the example you gave made no sense–how is electing Trump going to make politicians keep their promises? (Nevermind that presidents keep the majority of their promises to the best of their ability. Obama kept over 70%).
Knowing that Trump is horrible doesn’t make someone intelligent or sophisticated. Voting for that horribleness doesn’t suddenly become an intelligent decision because they knew they were doing it.
I mean, World War III would also be “shaking things up.” So is “first female president.” There’s just no real meaning to that buzzword.
I take this to mean that you believe that the Trump supporter you spoke with doesn’t just want to “shake things up” but agrees with Trump ideologically on some level. Or do I misunderstand your statement?
No, you’re understanding correctly. Not on every issue, as will generally be the case (and he doesn’t take seriously everything that Trump claims he will do).
You know how the words most guaranteed to make an angry person, angrier, is “Calm down?”
Hillary was the equivalent of the calm person saying “Calm down,” which pissed off the angry folks even more.
I don’t want to put you in the position of defending this person. Especially since we fundamentally agree that Trump is wholly unfit for the job of POTUS.
But it seems to me that this person may not have been completely honest when he told you he was voting for Trump only because he felt like shaking things up.
This guy is completely honest and the chances that he was lying about this are zero. And he did not tell me “he was voting for Trump only because he felt like shaking things up”. That happens to be what our conversation was about. We weren’t discussing ideological issues (I know where he stands because we are old friends).
The point I was making was that he voted for Trump despite his contempt for him as a person, because he thought even on a personal qualification level, what Trump brings to the table counteracts his many personal failings. I have no doubt that if he was a hard-core liberal he would have voted against him anyway.
[FTR, I personally prefer Trump as prez over Clinton. Where I diverge from my friend is in that I think his personality/temperament and and ignorance are very much net negatives. But I think the damage will be significantly ameliorated by other power centers, and what’s left is trumped by ideology. (I voted write-in for Kasich.)]
What I said originally. The fact that he wouldn’t be constrained by the notion that “everyone knows that you just don’t do that”. This guy feels there are many things that fit this category that are worth doing, but would never get done as long as the people in charge are very constrained by convention and tradition.
I keep hearing about how people voted for Trump because they were angry. No one ever seems to follow that up with the obvious question “do you make smart decisions where you’re angry? When the anger passes, are you proud that you hit your spouse or kicked your dog?”
You know, I think many people voted for Trump because of the sheer novelty of watching a man run for political office who didn’t use the mealy-mouthed equivocations of most politicians. When asked what he thought he’d tell you and even if it was an answer that sent the media into a frenzy at least it was an honest answer. Seriously how many politicians behave like that? I think a lot of people found it refreshing. I certainly did. Even if you didn’t agree with him 100% ( and I don’t) here was a man who wasn’t speaking from a teleprompter and hadn’t had every possible reply vetted by a host of aides.
It felt different. We could use a little more straight-speaking in politics.
Being excited by a politician who doesn’t think before he speaks is a lot like getting excited by a doctor who doesn’t wash his hands before he operates.
He wasn’t giving you honest answers-he was telling you what he thought you wanted to hear. The fact that he (usually) didn’t use a teleprompter just meant he got a little out-of-hand sometimes with his promises and threats losing track of what he said before.
A lot of people think children are inherently honest, but in reality they have a very weak sense of honesty and a weak grip on reality. Where people think kids are honest is because they sometimes blurt out things that adults would never say. But that’s not because they’re honest, it’s just because they don’t appreciate the implications of what they’re saying and that this is something that you need to lie about.
So that’s Trump. He’s a pretty big liar himself, but he’s just not constrained by PC, so he’ll say things that a lot of other politicians won’t say. Some of them are even true.
Bolding mine. An honest answer? If by honest you mean whatever nonsense popped into his head at the time. To later be denied by him, clarified by others or contradicted by the next “honest” thing he said. I would define an honest answer as one that was a thoughtfully considered, from the heart reply. Trump can’t come close to either of those things.
If it felt different, it’s only because you fell for the con. Donald Trump lied 560 times in his presidential bid. He offered more and more outrageous whoppers than any candidate in history. He lied about anything and everything. He wasn’t willing to make sure that what he was saying wasn’t going to create an international issue, or that it made any fucking sense whatsoever. You ended up with someone who sounded like he was talking straight, because, “Hey, if he was going to lie, wouldn’t he lie about the stuff that doesn’t make him look like an idiot?”
Also, a word on “straight-speaking”.
The reason politicians speak from teleprompters and have their replies vetted is because their words hold significant power. When your allies and enemies have to determine your foreign policy from your actions and words, and you say that we should “blow them out of the water” for taunting our warships stationed off their coast, that speaks volumes to them. To them, you are threatening war. It’s not funny. It’s not cute. It’s actually dangerous.
Or another example? Back when Trump floated his idea to give US treasury bonds a haircut, the world was collectively in “No fucking way will this moron ever be president” mode, and he (thank god) walked it back. But imagine he said that now. What kind of absolute chaos would that produce in the global bond markets? Holy shit guys, the president of the united states just said the bedrock investment that the entire global financial market is based on might not be a guaranteed return any more, what the fuck do we do?!
Or hell, what about his comments about NATO? Trump has made it unclear whether we’d actually defend our NATO allies in the baltics. What happens if Putin decides to take that statement literally or seriously and puts it to the test by invading some dinky NATO member Trump probably can’t even find on a map? Do we cave on our international defense treaties, or do we go to war with Russia? Being unclear on this sort of shit is a big fucking deal. Others have linked a similar lack of geopolitical clarity to the start of both world wars, and justifiably so.
This is why politicians get their statements vetted. Because not doing so is stupid, dangerous, foolhardy, arrogant, and in the case of a political neophyte like Trump with so blatantly little understanding of any issue, COMPLETELY INSANE!
Bill Clinton was a “straight talker”. Donald Trump is a huckster con man.