What the hell is Trump?

Politics & Elections
201

No, he has no credibility.

Besides all the other issues many have mentioned Trump is a birther and he also shared a stage in a rally with another birther that supports him. That birther by the way is currently is going to court for contempt and abuse of power. Trump did not care at all about that so he as a pea did jump “into the pod” with him.

For more dubious associations Democratic presidents were accused to be radicals, and unworthy of the white house by the right wing; and yet the conservative media just conveniently forgets about the real woo woo and incompetency a candidate that is on the right is supporting and following.

202

Don’t get me wrong, making America great is a fine goal. The irony is that to make it great, it must be the case that it isn’t great now. So it is strange to make the issue a conflict between Trump supporters who think the country is great vs. lefties who think it isn’t.

I think America is great. I think it is fucked up, too. ‘Make America great’ could mean just about anything. I guess that’s why I am more interested in specifics- what exactly do you have in mind? It can feel a little jingoistic if there aren’t any details other than, “Better than Europe!!!”

I can see disappointed, angry people wanting to be reassured that things are going to be great again. I can see Jack Handy types saying to themselves, “gosh darn it, I have to believe in something, I’m going to believe America is going to be great again!” I can see the Trump credibility/trust angle. There are a lot of ways to view it, sympathetic and not. I personally think it is better than, “I will defund Planned Parenthood and invade Syria!”

203

It’s possible to think that America is still great but on a downhill slide and not as great as it used to be.

204

And a bizarre hairstyle, too! And totally dedicated to whipping up the populace into a hateful frenzy about the inferior races!

Trump’s bankruptcies also involved a big part of that “very large and successful empire” you’re so impressed with, not just the casinos. Go back to my link.

We’ve beaten this topic to death in many other threads and shown that it’s essentially a false accusation based on cherry-picked anomalies; the whole purpose of the ACA, after all, was to broaden coverage and make the insurers more accountable for actually spending most of their revenues on medical care and not their own self-interest and executive perks and bonuses. So without going into that again, let me ask where you think those co-pays are going. To Obama? To the evil government? Or to health insurance corporations once again gouging their customers?

Obama wanted a public option to compete with that. But your pals at Fox News chose to call it a “government option” to raise the specter of communist tyranny and death panels and all the other hobgoblins being conjured up by the PR spin of the insurance lobby, and Congressional Republicans, bought and paid for by the health insurance lobby, made sure there was no way a public option could pass. Guess what – where I live I have “government-run health insurance” – and I don’t have those co-pay problems because I don’t have any co-pays, ever. And premiums are basically either a few dollars or zero, depending on income. This was basically Obama’s long-term vision.

I’m sure that there must have been a time when some Republican actually did something useful, but all I’m seeing lately is pure obstruction by a bunch of corrupt shills doing the bidding of everyone who pays to get them elected.

205

Yeah, especially given the history of Dem candidates getting clowned by the supposed clown, e.g. Reagan and W. Dems should want anyone but Trump. He brings way too much energy and he’s so confrontational. Root for one of the boring, soft beta males like Jeb, Cruz, or Huckabee instead, easy win.

206

A review of public polling, extensive interviews with a host of his supporters in two states and a new private survey that tracks voting records all point to the conclusion that Mr. Trump has built a broad, demographically and ideologically diverse coalition, constructed around personality, not substance, that bridges demographic and political divides. In doing so, he has effectively insulated himself from the consequences of startling statements that might instantly doom rival candidates.
…
Tellingly, when asked to explain support for Mr. Trump in their own words, voters of varying backgrounds used much the same language, calling him “ballsy” and saying they admired that he “tells it like it is” and relished how he “isn’t politically correct.”

Trumpism, the data and interviews suggest, is an attitude, not an ideology.
…
[and here comes the strongest point and the glimmer of hope for Republicans in otherwise dismal election prospects: Terr]

Mr. Trump’s strength among less-frequent voters is a challenge for his campaign, which may lack the organizing experience and infrastructure to motivate them and turn them out in large numbers for a primary or caucus.

But those irregular voters, like Norman Kas-mikha, 41, a grocer from Shelby Township, Mich., represent a real opportunity for the Republican Party, which is determined to retake the White House in 2016 after losing the last two campaigns.

“Right now I don’t have a second choice,” Mr. Kas-mikha said. “They all blend in to me. It’s Donald Trump — and everyone else.”

“My second choice,” he added, “might be staying at home.”

207

I don’t think so, back then that “clown” had a lot of support from the Republicans, the current one is not likely to have that support when even moderated Republicans are on the record as not supporting him *. Looking at the polls Bush is the one that would give more trouble to either Hillary or Sanders. If Trump is the nominee (and even with the rise Trump showed recently) he still remains behind many other Republicans in the match ups with Hillary:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/2016_presidential_race.html

If Sanders is the opponent I have seen that the polls favor Sanders too against Trump.

  • And it is clear to me that if Trump is the nominee the Hispanic (and other minorities) vote is lost to the Republicans, Trump has set himself a big hill to climb in his more likely to be failed effort to becoming the next president.
208

I’d prefer not to tempt fate. Sure, it’s fun imagining that clown Trump as the Republican candidate, but really, why take a chance?

The wife and I are considering moving back to the US in the next couple of years. Looking at the country from afar, away from all the hoopla and propaganda of all sides, the US seems to heading in a direction that I like overall. But that would not include a Trump presidency.

209

I think it’s important to share this. I know a 12 y/o Kiowa/Comanche boy who was out walking his dog when a carfull of yahoos chased him, yelling, “Go back to Mexico!!”

"So two yahoos from Southie in my hometown of Boston severely beat up a Hispanic homeless guy earlier this week. While being arrested, one of the brothers reportedly told police that “Donald Trump was right, all of these illegals need to be deported.”

When reporters confronted Trump, he hadn’t yet heard about the incident. At first, he said, “That would be a shame.” But right after, he went on:
“I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country. They want this country to be great again. But they are very passionate. I will say that.”

This is the moment when Donald Trump officially stopped being funny.

[…] … most veteran political observers figured that the concrete impact of Trump’s candidacy would be limited in the worst case to destroying the Republican Party as a mainstream political force.

That made Trump’s run funny, campy even, like a naughty piece of pornographic performance art. After all, what’s more obscene than pissing on the presidency? It seemed even more like camp because the whole shtick was fronted by a veteran reality TV star who might even be in on the joke, although of course the concept was funnier if he wasn’t.

[…] It’s not exactly telling people to get out there and beat people with metal rods. But when your response to news that a couple of jackasses just invoked your name when they beat the crap out of a homeless guy is to salute your “passionate” followers who “love this country,” you’ve gone next-level.

People are tired of rules and tired of having to pay lip service to decorum. They want to stop having to watch what they say and think and just get “crazy,” as Thomas Friedman would put it.

Trump’s campaign is giving people permission to do just that. It’s hard to say this word in conjunction with such a sexually unappealing person, but his message is a powerful aphrodisiac. Fuck everything, fuck everyone. Fuck immigrants and fuck their filthy lice-ridden kids. And fuck you if you don’t like me saying so.

Those of us who think polls and primaries and debates are any match for that are pretty naive. America has been trending stupid for a long time. Now the stupid wants out of its cage, and Trump is urging it on. There are a lot of ways this can go wrong, no matter who wins in 2016."

Taibbi’s article contains a list of politicians saying things such as - “I’ll do anything short of shooting them.” Very frightening.

210

Matt Taibbi is always worth a read, thanks for sharing.

There’s also this quote from the article:
Trump is probably too dumb to realize it, or maybe he isn’t, but he doesn’t need to win anything to become the most dangerous person in America. He can do plenty of damage just by encouraging people to be as uninhibited in their stupidity as he is.

Trump is striking a chord with people who are feeling the squeeze in a less secure world and want to blame someone – the government, immigrants, political correctness, “incompetents,” “dummies,” Megyn Kelly, whoever – for their problems.
I wonder how Trump feels about blacks and Jews? The historical parallel to the hateful bigotry that Trump is exploiting is really quite startling.

211

The Trumpism I find disturbing is to characterize any sort of call for civility as “political correctness”, as if that absolves him of any accountability for crude or bigoted remarks. This appeals to the most vile human instinct, and encourages brutish behavior in his followers.

212

Political correctness isn’t a call for civility, it’s a group of holier-than-thous deciding for themselves how everyone else should think and which words they can use and what attitudes they can have and attacking anyone who doesn’t instantly fall in line. Not to mention the fact that much of it is silly and wrong-headed and goes way too far.

A wise man once said a primary human motivation is to seek out a branch from which to look down on everyone else, and political correctness has given that branch to way too many people.

213

I believe you’re totally missing the point. The defense of political correctness is not the point here, and I personally think a lot of PC is bullshit. The problem is that Trump is equating criticism of his bigoted and violence inciting hate speech as a misplaced call for political correctness. And as usual, Trump is wrong and is being an insulting narrow-minded bigot. When the Nazis incited Kristallnacht, lack of political correctness was not what they were guilty of. What they were guilty of was along the lines of “make our country great again by getting rid of the vermin of inferior races.”

214

My whistle translator reports that this is in reality just a new way to make the same old complaint about the “wrong” kind of people that are getting up those branches.

Just another complaint about why is not more common nowadays to see the good old time rulers of the past up there, with no minorities or gays or women in those “uppity” positions that they used to exclusively control.

215

Sorry, but Trump’s alleged bigotry and hate speech exists only in the liberal mind. Which of course is in keeping with political correctness, which in practice holds that any and all wrongful behaviors emanating from any politically protected group must be ignored and treated as non-existent, and that anyone failing to fall in line has to be guilty of hatred and/or some form of ‘ism’.

And it just ain’t so. You wanna talk about irrational hate? Take a look at soonerblue’s post, in which she (I presume, based the comment about Trump’s sex appeal) attempts to make Trump responsible for the actions of people he’s never met and who took actions he’s never come close to supporting, followed by a whole string of extrapolated hate-speech that she attributes to him and which he’s never come close to saying or iexpressed as a belief in any way, shape or form. And of course she insists he’s guilty by association with the bigots who beat this guy because his response wasn’t PC enough and he instead tried to use the occasion put the focus back on how fed up people are with how things have been going. I blame Obama far more than Trump for that attack. If he hadn’t been ignoring his constitutional requirement to enforce the nation’s laws in favor of allowing such a huge number of people to flood into the country illegally, it’s almost certain that attack wouldn’t have happened and that Indian kid wouldn’t have been harassed. Hispanics weren’t resented or disliked in this country at all prior to the government allowing this huge influx of illegal immigration, and it’s the fact that it has which is responsible for the resentment that exists now and the criminal behavior of a few outliers who’ve decided to attack them.

I note also that apparently we’re going to be hearing about it every single time a Hispanic is attacked in this country of over 300 million people while simultaneously being from shielded from instances of Hispanic on white crime. It’s the PC way, after all.

Frankly I sometimes wonder if a Trump presidency would be a good thing after all. I don’t know that I’m up having to put up with 4 to 8 years of the utterly hysterical, off the wall and nonstop nonsense that will be pouring from the left every. fucking. second. of his presidency. Hell hath no fury like social justice warriors thwarted and I just don’t know that I need the aggravation.

But then I come to my senses and realize this capitulation would allow them the victory they so desperately need and I take a page from iiandyiiii’s book and I shout “Go Trump Go!”

What the hell, if he can take it, so can I. :wink:

216

This kind of horseshit is so deeply dishonest and transparent that it’s hardly worth comment. But it’s an excellent example of just what I was talking about regarding political correctness. I make an utterly innocent comment about the nature of social justice warriors eagerly perching on their branhes, the overwhelming majority of which in this country have been white 'lo these many decades, and GIGObuster, relying on his own bigotry and seeing dog whistles where none exists, somehow manages to conclude I’m talking about minorities on the branches, and then extrapolates from that beliefs I’ve never had and would never want to see in place. But that’s okay. I’m a conservative, and as we all know, lies, misrepresentations and flat out horseshit are perfectly acceptable tactics to use against conservatives on the PC battlefield.

So while it’s pointless to expect my casting the light of truth on said horseshit will lessen its occurrence in any way, I can at least let its practitioners know that there are those among us those who can spot them at their dirty work and expose them for what they are.

217

No, Trump is pushing nonsense and he is fooling many into thinking that just by claiming that any opposition to his ideas are political correctness then that makes those dumb ideas OK.

Again, a lot of the opposition is coming from even Republican and conservative groups, Repeating again that it is all happening in the liberal mind is just wilfully ignoring the conservatives that do not agree with you or Trump.

218

Knock it off.

Take personal attacks to The BBQ Pit.

[ /Moderating ]

219

Piffle, all we have seen is how you avoided touching the evidence that showed how Trump is joined to the hip with people that the courts already found that ignore rulings that protected minorities in Arizona, like Sheriff Arpaio.

I was not born yesterday and you avoiding that does speak volumes about who is the one that is wilfully ignoring the bigotry of the candidates, or worse. Guys like Trump do not mind seeking and getting the support of bullies with a badge.

Don’t mind if I’m the one with the evidence of who is defending real dirty guys like Trump.

220

Yes, I get it. It’s OK to blame the “inferior races” for all your problems when they really are the cause of all your problems, right?

“A political leader who gains power by appealing to people’s emotions and prejudices rather than their rationality”. It’s in my dictionary under the definition of “demagogue”. In the extremely unlikely event that Trump’s campaign actually goes anywhere, his picture might appear there in future editions. In times past another guy with a funny hairstyle (and a peculiar little mustache) met the definition, too.