I think we can take option Numero 3 off the table: Link and link.
Possible, but unlikely. He was canny enough to actually make it to the Presidency. Like Steve Jobs, he’s gone through a complete business failure and figured out how to make it back, and stronger than before. While he may have inherited his wealth, he doesn’t seem likely to be all that similar to GW Bush and bend like a narrow reed in the wind of his cabinet.
I could see him having a problem with falling prey to yes men, but his current cabinet list doesn’t look like a cabinet of yes men. And, yes men would result in option #1 not #3.
I don’t think he was canny - he lucked into the presidency. I think he was clearly a capable businessman but just as clearly ignorant about the details of public policy. And he’s also uninterested in the minutiae of policy as well, and as long as he’s getting the credit he’d be happy letting others deal with the pesky details.
He has several redeeming qualities.
#1–Not being a typical politician. (That’s not entirely an advantage, but on balance it is.)
#2–He will let much, perhaps all, of the GOP Congressional agenda become law.
#3–He will nominate people for SCOTUS that actually respect the Constitution.
#4–He already has shown Europeans how stupid and short-sighted they were to look down on George Bush. They should have praised Bush while he was in office–now they have to do it in hindsight.
I thought conservatives wanted to get the feds out of schools. They want to kill off Dept. of Education.
But he wants to pay for school choice? So maybe he is a closet liberal after all.
No one works as hard as Donald J. Trump.
He was doing 3 rallies a day all over the country in the last few weeks. It was amazing, he has more drive and energy than most people half his age.
How does that compare to Clinton?
Yes and no.
We’re talking about a New Yorker business tycoon who voted Liberal for much of his life and supported Hillary Clinton’s previous primary, who now has suddenly become an impassioned pro-life advocate, traded with the Republican party to pack the Supreme Court with their people, take on the world’s most Christian Vice President, accept a grab bag of the most Conservative candidates for his cabinet, and convinced the great masses that he was one of them and understood their needs.
If you were to ask me what it would take for Donald Trump - TV icon and Hillary Clinton supporter - to do, to use the full force of the Republican party and the general public, to become President, the answer that I would give is the things that he has done. We’ll have to see how things play out, but it all seems rather perfect that he happened to become the person he was on the campaign trail and accept those particular criteria from the Republican party.
He probably did get lucky that the Republican party put forward 12 clones of one another to all compete for the same primary votes. As the only person who had anything different to offer, he was always going to be at the top or bottom of the hierarchy. And Hillary Clinton helped him, similarly, on the opposite side of things.
But even with all of that luck, I would still call it pretty impressive for the Donald Trump that we all knew and mocked to win the election. Minus those lucky elements, he might not have been able to make it. But by the same token, minus some very specific moves, he wouldn’t have made it either and he made those moves. It just remains to be seen how honest his intentions were with most of them.
- He’s old.
- He’s probably not terribly healthy.
- He has a bad temper, so more likely to trigger something fatal.
- The only drawback is that Pence is none of these things.
Oh, wait…Trump voters…sorry. Missed that.
It doesn’t take any sort of brains to figure that that’s what you needed to do to compete in the Republican primaries. And whatever Trump’s personal views on issues are (to the extent that he actually has any) it’s also not hard to figure that his resume plays a lot better to Republicans than to Democrats.
When I say he was lucky, it’s not just about the dynamics of the race that you describe. It’s that the things he did while running for office were 180 degrees opposed to what any expert in the world would had said are helpful in getting elected. Trump did them anyway and won. Does that mean he had some sort of unique insight that no expert had? I don’t think so. I think he was just being himself and lucked out that the experts happened to be wrong about what worked and what didn’t (at least in this particular instance).
Yes, but he was helped by a particularly stupid electorate, on the extremes of both ends of the spectrum (apparently it was progressives not voting that did it again).
Again, we’ll have to see. As noted in another thread, all of the anti-Muslim stuff has been banished from his site, the day he won the election, while the term limits and financial plans remain.
And, I think it’s reasonable to say that if there’s one talent that Trump seems to have, it’s understanding the common American. He and PT Barnum could probably go neck-and-neck in a competition on that one. It may be crass, for example, to always include one fat person in every episode of a show - as someone to pick on - but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t play well to the audience.
Is it more likely that he just, personally, enjoyed picking on fat people or that he’s trying to make a buck and he’s going to use the realities of the world to accomplish that?
- Doesn’t hang on to broken things (3 marriages, 6 business bankruptcies)
- Says what he thinks (even if it is rude, crude, or unkind)
- Not afraid to defy convention (first presidential candidate in many years to not release his tax returns)
- Knows the legal system (3500 lawsuits in 30 years;“He has a lot of lawsuits partly because he owns a lot of businesses, and partly because he uses litigation as a bullying tactic”)
- Playful-Mr. Trump: “I do play with bankruptcy laws-they’re very good to me.”
- Works with his children-each of his older kids spoke up for him at the Republican National Convention (no one else would)
- Fresh views on international diplomacy (I’m going to build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it; ban on Muslims entering the United States)
- Unconventional ideas with the military (“We have nuclear weapons, why aren’t we using them?”
- Flexible: 1987-1999 Republican, 1999-2001 Reform Party, 2001-2009 Democrat, 2009 Republican, 2011 Independent (5 months), 2011-Present Republican
He may be a crook, a sexist and a bully - but at least he’s an honest one.
He proved the old saying that anyone can grow up to be President. :smack:
It doesn’t matter how big a screw-up you guys elect, GWB is still going into history as a torturing incompetent.
Which Europeans are praising Bush in hindsight, and for what?
He seems to have lowered expectations for many, whilst raising them for many others. There are going to be a lot of pleasantly surprised and a lot of disappointed people.
The thing is, Obama didn’t have a anti-business mindset. That’s just something RW media told you.
But he does. It’s an extremely powerful and sinister form of telekinesis that prevents people from signing their kids up for taekwondo lessons.