I’m getting really tired of hearing how Trump is a bumbling, incompetent, idiot who can’t get anything done and is failing miserably.
Not because I like or support the guy. I don’t. At all. I think he is a horrible President in just about every conceivable way.
But to say he is anything but wildly successful seems… idiotic.
This isn’t a debate about whether Trump is a worthless President that will destroy the country or anything along those lines. This is a rant that people calling him a failure and making so many errors to his own detriment obviously haven’t checked the scoreboard.
At this point, he is completely and utterly above the law and he knows it. Hearing comments that he is a clown without a clue seem to be missing the obvious: he clearly is winning this game. I can only hope next November enough other people see the same thing I see and get him out of there but as is stands now he is in the cat bird seat. Stop saying he isn’t winning this thing, because he is. He is now openly talking about a third term.
What, specifically, is he winning? The only thing I can think of is getting elected and getting attention. He’s failed spectacularly at most of his policies. I mean, not just “we came close but Congress resisted.” I mean the trade war is a disaster, Mexico isn’t paying for the wall, there isn’t even a wall, Obamacare is still around and most of his braintrust isn’t, etc.
If your OP is meant to be a reminder that dismissing him as a failure who will inevitably lose is a bad idea, then I agree. He’s not gone until he’s been escorted from the building. Do I think he’s a successful president? No. Not on his terms (other than corruption), and not on mine.
If we evaluate by presidential standards, he will always be ranked low by historians. Probably bottom-ten or bottom-five out of 45 presidents. The guy has no coherent policy, if he is a dictator as some claim, he’s not even running a tight ship.
But if evaluating by individual standards, the guy has been wildly, wildly successful. No matter what, he is and will go down as one of the most famous individuals in history. Pretty much from his 40s(?) through old age he’s been a famous and well-known person. He won one of the most shocking upset wins in presidential-election history. Doesn’t matter whether you adore him or think he is the vilest contemptible scum, Trump will go down having left his mark on history and the world. He’s gone further in life than 99.999% of people.
Trump is supported by a Senate majority and a Senate majority leader who wouldn’t know ethics if they tripped over them. Trump is a bumbling, incompetent idiot. You’ve heard him try to speak coherently, no? How about the turnover in his so-called administration? That’s incompetence, defined.
Trump can talk about a third term all he likes, but to me that doesn’t indicate that he’s so successful he’ll get a third term - to me that indicates that’s he a deranged moron that gibbers idiot monkey noises because be barely understands reality.
Trump is successful in a few ways: he was successfully born into lots and lots of money (much of which he’s wasted), to date has successfully avoided most of the consequences for being an incompetent and criminal shitheel, and he successfully aligned himself with the angry idiot portion of the population, which (in combination with interference by his criminal and treasonous accomplices) ended up being a large enough percentage of the population to barely scrape him into office.
He’s not a successful president by any measure, and it remains to be seen how long he’ll be successful at evading consequences.
He has been this since day one, and he has gotten pretty fucking far with it because too many people think that being a deranged moron that gibbers idiot monkey noises because be barely understands reality will, in and of itself, somehow stop him.
I’m saying he is winning because not only is he not thrown out of office, broke and in jail, he is now is own judge and jury. He is lining his pockets with tax payer money and has even completely stopped any check Congress has on him, both through having Mitch in his back pocket and through just outright defying congressional subpoenas with no consequence.
Check the scoreboard. He is in power, untouchable, and raiding the country’s coffers to his own benefit. It doesn’t matter what other disasters he leaves behind, he is personally coming out WAY ahead. He is winning. Not the US. Him.
A deranged moron that gibbers idiot monkey noises that sits behind the resolute desk and is beyond having to face any consequences. How is that not winning?
In other words, he won the election. Winning. As for his fortune, how you can say he wasted it is beyond me. If he is really worth billions (highly doubtful), he clearly didn’t waste it. Even if he isn’t worth billions, he lives like he does, which is just about as good. Even more, he now holds one of the most powerful positions in the world effectively unchecked and is lining his pockets with tax payer money. Seems like a good way to have spent that windfall, if you ask me. Hard to call that wasting it.
Except if you measure it in terms of his immunity from consequence, which he clearly has. He meets with dictators, invites terrorists to meet him in our own country, outs high level spooks in foreign countries, compromises national intelligence abilities by releasing classified pictures, defies congress and subpoenas at every turn, his office regularly violating law after law… and still he sits in power. Sounds pretty successful to me. Anyone that can do all the things he has done and still remain in power seems successful. He might leave a wake of a disaster, but for him, personally, successful.
I suggest that any Republican who got elected President last time would have benefited hugely from the initial Republican majority in both Houses.
I agree with previous posters that Trump’s campaign promises have massively failed, but I imagine he would say that just being elected (and re-elected next time? :smack: ) shows how ‘successful’ he is.
P.S. There was mention in the thread of a ‘third term’ - I assume that’s a simple misprint for ‘second term.’
I think you’ve misplaced your, umm, admiration, for lack of a better term. Trump would be in jail or at least paying a price for all his transgressions if we had a Senate that wasn’t lawlessly protecting him for all they’re worth. It doesn’t matter who is occupying the seat in the Oval Office, so far as they’re concerned. One ass is as good as another.
Do you honestly believe Senate Republicans would have acted any different if, say, Pence was in the chair? They would cut their own mothers’ throats to fulfill their long-sought goals of appointing conservative judges, giving themselves a fat tax cut, destroying health care for millions, protecting their graft and removing all protections for environment and/or general citizen welfare. Trump is a fucking puppet. A particularly corrupt and ugly puppet, but still nothing more. These Republican goals are the only reasons why lawless Senate Republicans have gritted their teeth and turned a blind eye to his egregious behavior.
Trump was a knowable excrescence long before he hoodwinked the American public (with major assists from Putin!) into voting him into office. The reason we can’t fix it quickly is due entirely to obstructionist Republican Senators, who are ignoring their most fundamental duties to the Constitution.
I prefer to be fair and balanced, and I think he was much more balanced in his youth. He was always a disgusting criminal bully with mediocre intelligence and zero competence at anything other than self-aggrandizement and manipulation, but I honestly think he had something of a grasp of reality back in the day. Nowayears, not so much.
I, for one, don’t count the score until the game is over.
This game isn’t over, and I don’t think he’ll win. Honestly the best endgame I can see for him is to die of a heart attack, soon.
There was one commander in the US Civil War who was a master of deception, John Magruder. He would create fake cannons out of tree stumps, have men march around constantly so that it looked like there must be a whole bunch of troops - since usually it’s just a small portion that you have reposition itself- and so on.
Magruder was a success. But he was successful because no one came attacking him.
Bernie Madoff, for example, was successful right up to the moment where it was revealed that everything had been a giant sham. Suddenly a whole bunch of people were out billions of dollars. The success of deception just depends on whether or not anyone comes to poke their head over the sheet and look at what’s behind.
Now, the thing is, what if everyone knew that Magruder’s army was largely fake? In war, information is just amazingly powerful. I mean, if you know where the gunpowder is stored and how to get to it unseen, you might be able to rob an army of ten thousand men of their military capabilities with just a few guys. The potential benefits can (depending on the situation) vastly outdo basic numbers.
If everyone knows that nothing Trump does nor says is real, then that doesn’t necessarily mean that they reveal his secrets and make him out to look like an idiot. It may well be to their greatest advantage to help Trump maintain appearances.
Take, for example, China. If China knows that Trump is a useless idiot who doesn’t understand basic economics, they might make like they’re genuinely concerned about the Trade War; they might tariff us back; they might engage in trade negotiations. But that could all be a pretense to keep dragging Trump out while they build up the Polar North Road; while they sign deals with European markets to fill the gaps where US manufacturing used to be the primary supplier; and so on.
Say that Russia has video tapes of Trump having sex with 15 year old prostitute from back when he visited the country back in the 90s. They can tell him, you have to work to get us back into the G7 (Trump thinks that G7/G8 and other international networks and agreements are wasteful - yet somehow cares about whether Russia is a member?) and tell him to denounce the US intelligence organizations while standing next to Vladimir Putin. But they keep that all secret. Publicly they call him a great leader; they act like they’re afraid of the US; and so on.
Mitch McConnell has strapped Trump with Dan Coats, James Mattis, Nikki Haley, Jeff Sessions, and other more-or-less reasonable people despite Trump’s desire to stock it with people like Heather Nauert, Stephen Miller, and his sister. McConnell can successfully do that because, ultimately, Trump is an idiot who’s easy to play. He loves having Trump in office because it distracts America from what the RNC is doing. McConnell has probably not read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but he recognizes the value of a Zaphod Beeblebrox as President of the Galaxy (“a role that involves no power whatsoever, and merely requires the incumbent to attract attention so no one wonders who’s really in charge, a role for which Zaphod was perfectly suited”).
Previous to becoming President, Trump was wildly successful at appearing to be relatively successful. That is not false.
But, in terms of his actual success, his dad owned what were probably several hundred properties across New York and New Jersey - prime real estate.
Donald Trump owns Trump Tower, Mar-A-Lago, and a few other golf resorts out of the city.
If you liquidate dad’s holdings, it’s likely to have been worth more than the 5 or so buildings that Donald owns. So while it may be fair to say that it’s plausible that Trump is still a success in at least some terms - he does control genuinely valuable properties - it’s still a fair step down from what he should have. And a lot of that loss seems likely to be due to mismanagement, fines, giant debts, etc. Given that it’s Trump, it’s hard to know whether the balance of the things he owns versus what-all-he-owes is positive.
I do know that it would be really stupid to allow your personal (criminal) lawyer flip on you, when he’s being investigated by the FBI, if all it would take to prevent that is to help foot his legal expenses. That’s just a done deal that you’re boned and headed to jail if your personal lawyer - the guy who sets up your fake corporations and pays off your sexual assault victims - rats you out.
So when asking whether Trump’s assets to debt ratio is positive… I lean against.
It was in the OP. Not a misprint. Feckless Leader is floating the idea of a third term while a second term is still in doubt and so far getting little to no traction for the idea.