His supporters were fact shy when they voted for him and they remain fact shy now. I’m not sure anyone is surprised. But the determined willful ignorance among his supporters continues to disappoint those of us who believe there ought to be natural limits to stupidity.
Trump voters are not going to change their mind until Trump’s fuckups personally affect them. The media keeps trying to paint the failure of the healthcare bill as a huge catastrophe for Trump when the reality is that it was a huge dodged bullet and it’s passage would have been the real screw up. If Trump keeps “failing” to pass his incredibly harmful agenda most of his voters are going to be perfectly happy.
Trump just sent another tweet telling China to take care of North Korea. But I guess it didn’t come from “President Trump” so it doesn’t count, right. And China should know this, I guess.
Here’s what astounds me. Let me step outside myself and say I agree with the premise that “we don’t need another politician, we need a businessman that can make deals.”
If I had voted for Trump on this premise, I would be furious because the man has proven himself to be a horrible negotiator. Much of this lies in how he approaches “winning”. It’s not enough to be a winner, someone else has to lose. A Trump negotiaton isn’t successful unless you bend your opponent over the table and put it to him hard until he screams “I’m a loser, I’m a loser, I’ve lost and you’ve won!”
Predictably, ( at least to everyone but DJT) this is not a good way to get your opposition to sign on to your legislation. Even if they really want to buy what you’re selling. Even if they are supposedly on your team.
And when there is another party that is so dead set against what you are doing that you don’t even attempt to negotiate with them, you can’t blame them for your loss with a straight face. It’s like the Falcons blaming the Patriots for their SuperBowl loss. It’s technically true, of course - but still a stupid way to frame it.
And he doesn’t know what he’s selling, that’s another problem. Negotiations are about information and knowledge - if you know your product you can find a way to give something to the guys on the right side of the table without taking something from the guys of the left side.
And at the end of a successful negotiation everyone should feel as if they won. But this doesn’t happen with a Trump negotiation because he will never forgive you for not being with him 100% from the beginning so he won’t let you feel like a winner.
This is a pitfall of every negotiation ever. Whenever a client doesn’t go for my initial proposal, I can’t get all butt hurt about how he doesn’t appreciate my skills, he doesn’t appreciate what a fine deal I offered, he is insulting me with his counter-offer. Because it’s not personal, it’s how the game works. Because I want to “get to yes”, as it were - then the client will be my new best friend and the past will be forgotten. And you have to be able to forget it. And we are both winners when we close the deal. it’s not a zero sum game.
But Trump is a lousy negotiator and he made so many elementary mistakes during the health care debacle that I laughed out loud. Like when they pronounced that “ObamaCare is the law of the land” and pretended to walk away, only to find that no one chased after them and they had to come slinking back.
I confess, I love it and I sincerely hope that Trump spends the next four years unable to negotiate a path to the potty in the morning, but if I thought I had voted for an astute businessman I’d be pissed.
Plus there’s the thing with the promised Wall and the Rio Grande - really, I would have thought a major real estate developer would have looked at a map and picked up on this complication early on.
His supporters don’t understand these things. They do not understand negotiations, they do not understand business, they do not understand the economy.
They do see things as a zero sum game, and not only do they feel as though they have not won unless someone else has lost, they also feel that if someone else wins, that means that they have lost.
They do not understand that negotiations are a part of an ongoing relationship, and see them as a time to extort as much out of their negotiating opponent as possible, regardless of how this effect the future relationship. This is borne up by TV and movie depictions of negotiations, where inevitably, one person walks out of the room grinning, and the other with the look of defeat.
Mistakes and failings of the so-called trump can all be chalked up to his enemies, deviously plotting against him and the american people. I mean, how else can you explain why no one told him that healthcare was complicated, or that the Rio Grande took up a good portion of our border?
Basically, in the hypothetical that you had voted for Tump on the premise of him being a great businessman and negotiator, you are already so blinded by partisan bias that his current actions are not going to change your opinion on him.
Everybody I know who voted Trump did so explicitly to piss off the Left. They all express complete satisfaction with him on that account. One young lady I know likes to peruse this very board just to savor the anti-Trump frothings.
Yet they probably consider themselves patriotic.
I don’t know about that. Never heard them express it in terms of patriotism. What I have heard is glee at “libtard” rage and an intention to vote Trump again if the Left “hasn’t learned their lesson.”
I’m stealing that.
For me the Trump outrage acid test is: what has Trump done that any other Republican president wouldn’t have done.
I don’t think any other Republican nominee that was still in the race when Iowa had its caucus would have done anything like this. This is a Trump thing.
This is the number one reason not to be a Republican president. They have been proposing a solution that doesn’t exist for the past 5 years.
Just about any Republican president would have done the same thing.
This is a Trump thing. Most Republican presidents would not have torn apart otherwise law abiding families to send the mom and dad back to Mexico and leave their teenage kids here.
I think any President Democrat or Republican (other than Obama) would have done this. Direct proportional response is something we have been doing since the cold war. Obama really fucked up in his response to Assad the first time around.
I think the muslim ban and the deportation of otherwise law abiding illegal immigrants would sway people. It certainly swayed the trump supporter whose husband was deported.
Remember when they confirmed Timothy Geithner as Secretary of Treasury despite the fact that he (probably knowingly) cheated on his taxes? The Nanny tax probably derailed half a dozen nominees over the last few administrations but not Timothy Geithner.
Which even Obama admits. He overextended himself on the assumption that if he needed to respond to Syria the US would be leading a coalition (as assumption bolstered by David Cameron’s assurance that the UK would support it). When the UK Parliament rebuffed Cameron’s request for approval for such action, Obama was suddenly left to choose between taking unpopular unilateral action or doing nothing.
Of course, now the Republicans are all for bombing Syria. Not so much when Obama was in charge.
Do you mean the $34,023 in back taxes, which he paid back (including the $8,679 in interest)?
Thelma, your response to me seems to accuse me of hyperbole, and seems to indicate that I am inaccurate in stating what is being reported in “legitimate” media. I would say you missed my point entirely. At no point was I referring to “legitimate” media (the big papers and TV news/commentary). The bubbles I was referring to are not the mainstream ones, and they are engaging in the hyperbole I describe. If one listens to them and reads them, those are the messages the consumers are getting.
I think this is basically correct, unfortunately. Trump’s big, unspoken campaign promise was “vote for me and I will make all those people you don’t like really, really unhappy,” and this is probably the only one of his campaign promises he actually has the ability and the know-how to fulfill.
I wanted to mention that my elderly mother voted for Trump ( in a highly contested swing state) and now regrets her vote. Deeply
She, by her own admission, had seen a lot of either fake or exaggerated stories about Clinton ( mostly e-mailed links sent by some of my late fathers crazy friends) and actually believed that Hillary was guilty of heinous crimes and that she was going be indicted and sent to prison.
She realized that she’d been taken in after the election when Trump walked it back and called the Clintons “good people” and then nothing more was ever said about Hillary’s crimes. She feels like she was scammed. I’m surprised that she fell for it in the first place, but she’s over 90 and she’s more gullible than she was when her mind was younger and more alert.
Considering that he has accomplished more in three months than Obama did in eight years, I’d say he’s doing quite well.
nm.
Not quite.
Trump has barely gone golfing 20 times in his first 3 months.
Over the 8 years, Obama went 333 times. So it will take most of Trump’s first term to catch up.
And somebody suggested a golf contest for charity, Obama vs Trump, and Obama asked “Is he any good? What’s his handicap?”. And Joe Biden says “The personality of a rabid spider!” And Obama says “Dammit, Joe!..”
What are your favorite examples (he asked querulously)?