It’s easy to commit a crime. It takes brains to commit a crime and then get away with it.
Trump’s still in the middle of the crime. We’ll see if he gets away with it.
That was a nice take on it. So far, lots of his dear friends and highly placed criminal bastard cronies have not.
I’m reassured, ever so slightly, by the conviction that at his rate of decline, in six years Trump will be sitting in piss-drenched Depends in a dayroom somewhere blowing raspberries into a cup of tapioca pudding. Then again, I’m still living in a fantasy world of nostalgia where there’d be bipartisan agreement that this makes him unfit for the office of the President of the United States of America.
Fuckin beautiful.
(my bolding)
I dispute the bolded text above. Defying congressional subpoenas requires resolution through the courts; this takes time. There is an abundance of chickens coming home to roost re: Trump that may not be readily apparent due to Congress coming off a lengthy summer break.
The Presidency is not a fucking football game. The “scoreboard” (which in this case seems to be little more than how many times Trump gets talked about) is beside the point. He is not “untouchable” in any way; at best, he has some skill at gaming the system to delay his day of reckoning.
Talk to me in April of next year, and we’ll see what percentage of potential voters agree Trump is “winning”.
I agree with OP.
Trump is above the law and he knows it. He can be as corrupt and criminal as he wants, worse case scenario is some toothless investigations that lead nowhere happen.
He has stacked the appellate court with conservative judges
He gave trillions in tax cuts for the rich that are paid for with tax hikes on the middle class and potentially cuts to social security and medicare.
He is winning in a lot of ways. Yeah he may lose in a lopsided election in 2020, but the GOP will just win again in 2022 and take back power in at least one house of congress.
OP definitely has a point. This is a man who has lived the lifestyle of a billionaire, whether he actually has a billion or not. He managed to become President of the United States, amazingly enough. This was especially remarkable given that, as is now fairly well known and documented, he didn’t even want to win. His campaign was all a publicity stunt, hoping he could make a TV comeback and improve the value of the ‘Trump’ brand. And his Presidency has been successful on his terms: he’s stolen many millions from taxpayers, wielded the wanton power he craves, improved his relationships with foreign gifters like Putin and MBS, avoided indictment and so on.
Perhaps most remarkably, he’s done this all despite having little intellectual capacity, and with a brat-like personality devoid of any normal compassion. I’m not sure what the psychiatrists say, but he seems like a supreme sociopath. He will go down in history as a special and unique American personality. One possible comparison that comes to mind is with William Randolph Hearst. Hearst was also an egomaniac with a huge appetite for political success, who had fondnesses for rich living and publicizing lies. (There are big differences between Hearst and Trump. Hearst had a keen analytic mind, and was extremely hard-working. Hearst got huge loyalty from his employees, and was generous to an excess. Politically, Hearst favored minimum wage laws and other ideas that were very progressive for his time, while Trump has helped return the country to the kleptocratic excesses of Hearst’s time.)
Ya think? Only four or nine past Presidents worse than Trump? It might be amusing to hear who you think they are.
Since we’re in the Pit, let me ask fellow Dopers: What is the deal with Velocity? He doesn’t come across as a right-winger(*) exactly, but he sure does Just Ask Questions a lot.
(* - And no, admitting that Trump is one of the “five or ten worst Presidents” doesn’t mean someone is not a right-winger. ALL Americans, left or right, with an IQ bigger than a centipede’s understand that this abomination is by far the worst President ever.)
Trump didn’t “win”; winning implies some sort of responsibility for the result. Just like everything else in his life he was handed victory by a system built to reward rich, evil people like him. His entire life has been a matter of him staggering from one disaster to the next and being rewarded for his failures. He flails about randomly and is rewarded over and over in spite of his own utter incompetence.
He was railroaded into the Presidency by a rigged electoral system and a Republican party that carved a Trump-shaped hole into itself he only had to step into. And he’s supported by people who only care about how much harm he can do; the Republican base is composed of people willing to suffer and die as long as they can watch the world burn.
When you define “success” as ruining everything around you, any fool can do that. Even a fool like Trump.
He is deeply concerned. Deeply.
Yeah, the OP definitely has a point. As best I can tell, Trump is ALL about self promotion and ego gratification, combined with material greed. With respect to the first 2, it is hard to imagine how one could be more successful than to become president of the US, driving daily news reporting and water cooler discussions with tweets from his shitter. The extent to which he has financially succeeded will have to be judged later. I HOPE there are prosecutions when he is out of office which seriously harm his and his family’s portfolio, but I’m not holding my breath. I’d imagine he will live out his years being feted by the same mouthbreathers who attend his rallies. All the while enjoying the security, benefits, and advantages of an ex-president.
Bolding mine. He is winning. How else do you define victory? Handed to him or not, rewarded out of luck or because of others, he is the one sitting in the presidency and is untouchable. You might say he didn’t earn it, but that doesn’t change the result.
He’s a successful swindler but an incompetent president, surrounded by sycophants who are taking advantage of the situation.
Until that day comes, and I have serious doubts congress will ever have the courage to stand up to him, he is winning. And with each passing day he gets more and more of his lackies in positions to help him. Everyone that crosses him ends up in jail or out of a job. There are very few left that will have any chance of herding those chickens.
The scoreboard is a metaphor for whether or not he is ahead of everyone else. He is. He is the fucking president. The scoreboard isn’t about name recognition. It is about power and influence, unchecked at that. If that isn’t winning, if that doesn’t mean he isn’t ahead of everyone else, I don’t know how you are defining winning.
I hope you are right about April. But North Carolina was lost yesterday and that is a strong indication Trump is still going to be around. If Trump were so much of an imbecile, so much of clueless feck, he wouldn’t keep falling up.
As an aside, how come you get to use farming metaphors “chickens/roosting” but when I use sports analogies I’m sorta chastised that this isn’t a “fucking football game.” Should I point out that using the phrase “chickens coming home to roost” is wrong because this isn’t a fucking farm?
Agreed. But he is the one in power and there seems to be no way to remove him from it since the only ones available to do so refuse to act.
My point wasn’t whether he is a good president, it is whether he is winning. He is winning.
In fairness, he started in life ahead of 99.99% of people.
I agrew with the OP. In the end, Trump is only concerned for himself. He knows he can cry and spittle like a baby and his supporters will overlook it. Anyone in a position to tell him “no” gets thrown under not just a bus, but a whole fleet.
After his reign is over, he’ll still enjoy the benefits of his notoriety. All his shady legal situations will have been defanged by his and Mitch’s policies, and he can rely on the snail-paced speed of government to not be able change them back until he’s long past dead and buried. He’ll make zillions from endorsements, speaking rallies, more autobiographies, and foreign investors who previously had to contend with legal barriers.
Trump is winning for himself, not the US. We’re just a means to an end. That’s all that matters to him. It doesn’t matter how incompetent he is as president, and he knows it. If he can’t find enough toadies to help him get away with murder, he’ll “I didn’t know them that well” them out of his way and find somebody else.
King Joffrey was winning too. Had the crown handed to him, too, thru the luck of his birth.
If people insist that a fool is a king, that does not mean that he is a king-it means that those people are fools.
Aragorn: Are you frightened?
Frodo: Yes
Aragorn: Not nearly frightened enough, I know what hunts you.
The OP is bordering on histrionic, but I just can’t find it in myself to fault that. Trump has got the fucking ring.
It’s the way our political system is designed. Getting into the Presidency is difficult. But one you get there, it’s easy to stay there for at least four years.
I’ve always said that Trump is a great salesman. That made him a good candidate and he was able to get enough votes to be declared the winner. And while Trump benefited from a voting system that has been set up to favor Republicans, he had nothing to do with setting it up.
Trump succeeded to becoming President. He’s failing at being President. He stopped winning on January 20, 2017.