What will the VP do in a Trump presidency?
A lot of this: http://tinyurl.com/gnduuyz
Despite finding no evidence that Trump is “hella smart,” that he knows exactly what he’s doing, or that he has some special insider knowledge of the electorate, I share your apprehension that he may somehow win.
It must be somewhat comforting, even if you don’t want Trump to be President, to see him as a kind of savant master manipulator that thinks ten steps ahead of everyone else and is merely dropping each subsequent piece of his carefully considered plan into place. Less so when you see him as I do: a half-clever showboat, a shallow thinker and deeply self-conscious narcissist whose only true talent is self-promotion and— for lack of a better term, bullshitting— who’s tapped into something very ugly and dangerous, in large part by being at the right place at the right time, and is thinking no farther ahead than how he can best capitalize on the fact that a shocking portion of the population of the United States appears to be in the process of losing its collective mind.
Exactly. The notion that Trump is some sort of chessmaster is laughable. He just follows his gut and says whatever pops into his head.
The scary part isn’t that Trump is a random bullshitter. We’ve had plenty of guys like him run for office over the centuries. The scary part is that almost half the Republican party thought he was great. Adolf Hitler in 1923 is just a random asshole and the Beer Hall Putsch is laughed away. Adolf Hitler in 1933 is the exactly same guy, the only difference is that the country has installed him as Chancellor. Hitler being a psychopath is fine, there are plenty of psychopaths all over the planet, and they cause their problems and we deal with it. The random nutcase on the streetcorner ranting about Jews is just a random nutcase. The problem is when a plurality of people decide that the ranting nutcase should be put in charge of the country.
There’s actually a broad range of possibilities for a TRUMP administration. The worst-case scenario is that he ends up combining the worst tendencies of the Harding and Nixon administrations and thus appoints a bunch of incompetent cronies while being grossly unfit for the tasks of President himself and orders numerous overreaches of power and war crimes. The best-case scenario is that his pragmatic tendencies come to the fore, making him willing to work with Democrats in Congress much as the Governator did in California. Depending on various factors, this might even be the best long-term case scenario as an incompetent enough Trump presidency in its early years opens the possibility of significant Democratic gains in the 2018 midterms which in turn might lead Trump to work with a new Democratic majority to retain his own power. At the same time this would position the Democrats well for the 2020 elections which will be critical in terms of redistricting and allow them to nominate a strong candidate (Elizabeth Warren? Sherrod Brown?) who can take power with a majority Democratic Senate and House.
I expect a lot of pigs will be more equal than others.
I have a feeling that if elected, he won’t have a real liking for the actual making of the sausage, so to speak, and will concentrate on the hyperbolic rhetoric and bluster, while leaving a lot of the day-in, day-out governing to his cabinet members and White House staff.
Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen; I can envision plenty of situations where having as little Trump as possible is a good thing.
I doubt he will select a right wing Cabinet or have right wing advisers. He’ll select folks he’s comfortable with, and I think much of his right wing rhetoric is just feeding the faithful.
It’s still unsettling, since folks that this guy trusts and is comfortable with are probably going to still suck, big time…but it won’t be a bunch of goose stepping right winger types he picks.
Or Clinton or even Sanders. There is only so much a president can actually do, and with how tied up and contentious our political system is today wrt Congress and the Senate there is little wiggle room for a president to push through broad changes…not unless one posits one side or the other gaining an across the board overwhelming numerical advantage, which I just don’t see happening.
On the foreign policy scene, however, the president can definitely have a negative impact on both friend and foe alike, and that’s what I personally fear in a Trump presidency. I think he’d be an unmitigated disaster.
Trump’s looking pretty healthy there. 