Is there some indicator that Trump has stopped trying to acquire even more wealth?
At best, the number of people who can afford to buy him is a little smaller than the typical politician, but there’s no shortage of multi-billion-dollar corporations internationally.
Also, his adult children will have major roles both in running his businesses and in running his government, apparently. How confident can anyone be that they can’t be bought? This is like trusting Rodrigo Borgia while ignoring Cesare and Lucrezia.
I suppose what he means is that it’s better that Trump subvert the government into his own greedy pocket than have some other candidate subverting the government into a third somebody else’s greedy pocket.
Billionaire Trump directly stealing = OK. Billionaire Koch / Whoever indirectly stealing = Not OK.
I guess. It’s hard to understand some folks some times. I may have misunderstood.
Clearly, he will blame everybody under the sun except himself and his poor ideas.
His hardcore supporters, who will stick with him no matter what, will buy Trump’s excuses and even be energized by them.
The rest of the country will not only see that Trump has failed, but be revolted by the spectacle of him blaming everyone but himself. Re-election was always a long shot for him given that he won the Electoral College thanks to about 0.1% of the electorate pushing him over the top, so I predict he’s a one-term president unless he happens to get bailed out by a fantastic economy or a major crisis creating a rally-behind-the-president effect at just the right time.
Maybe the view stems from the noble fictionalized millionaires from Atlas Shrugged:
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They’re all workaholics, driven toward maximum productivity and maximum efficiency in their various industries, paying for scientific research because it’s good business sense.
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They all pay their workers top dollar because that’s how you get top talent. They simultaneously maintain that their personal goals include seeking maximum profit from their work. Potential contradictions between these policies simply don’t exist.
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The idea of manipulating government contracts in their favour is inconceivable to them - they even have misgivings about having lobbyists to represent them in Washington, viewing them as a necessary evil and not being able to fully understand what the lobbyists do on their behalf because the idea of using flattery or bribery is utterly alien to them - contracts should go to the company with the best product, of course, isn’t that obvious to everyone?
Your screen name - and you joined 10 years ago!
Yes, an amusing turn of events, is it not?
H.L. Menken wrote: “there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong”
Donald Rump wrote: " major crisis creating a rally-behind-the-president effect at just the right time."
Jackson Browne wrote: “I’ve been waiting for something to happen, for a week or a month or a year.”
I should amend this:
or unless he does a total about-face and ends up basically governing as a third term of Obama. This seemed unthinkable two weeks ago, but based on his recent statements I could see him doing little to alter major Obama achievements like Obamacare, the Iran deal, or even climate initiatives.
The political reality is that beating the second most disliked candidate in history by a mere 100,000 votes is hardly a repudiation of the incumbent administration/party. And the positions that most distinguished him from Obama were an asset in getting the nomination, but probably a net liability in the general.
I don’t agree for the reasons I already suggested above. First crystal balls were very cloudy about Trump, it’s surprising so many people don’t skip a beat confidently predicting what will happen next with him. I put that caveat on my own comments.
But basically I think the unconventionality of Trump tends to be overstated. He won IMO in significant part because enough, no huge landslide obviously not even a plurality , just enough well placed votes, voters were in fact fatigued by two terms of a Democrat (as they typically are after 2*GOP as well). Part of Clinton’s failure to get good turnout was this. Some of it was her specifically sure, but not all.
And by same token once a party is newly in the WH it has the advantage in seeking re-election. Obama had a still pretty bad economy in 2012, the power of incumbency might have been what got him past Romney at the margin. Same with Bush even as Iraq was souring in 2004 (not as harmful as it would be to GOP later). Now anyone can make a long list of how Trump is worse than Obama or Bush, but I personally tend to think the personalities and caliber of the people are overemphasized compared to underlying political momentum, given the fact that nobody can ‘solve’ the nation’s problems, just ameliorate them more or less. And all kinds of sh*t happens, plus and minus that puts voters in good/bad mood.
So again if the economy is doing better than now, even slightly, in 2016, no big foreign policy debacle (again like Iraq War big debacle), Trump probably gets re-elected IMO. The mass of unrealistic voters ready to throw him to the wolves if he doesn’t solve all their problems doesn’t exist IMO. Mainly it will be same as usual, marginal success is enough to put an incumbent in good shape, even if the good things aren’t his doing.
Could Trump lose re-election? Absolutely. If you want to call it 50-50 even, no reason to argue. But can we place a meaningfully accurate high % chance on him losing? Not IMO. Maybe you in particular were pretty sure Trump was going to win the primaries and general, in which case it would be fair for you to cash in some of that credibility predicting he’ll lose re-election. But most people, especially here, thought it very likely he’d lose this time. So now they think it’s very likely he’ll lose next time. 
Somebody in another thread predicted there will be a lot of redefining of what success is.
Trump and his ilk will move the goalposts and claim victory no matter what happens. There’s a crater where the United States used to be? It’s a GREAT crater!
Not really. He could have financial ties to Russia and China. His businesses could grow dramatically by him engaging in behavior that wins approval of foreign powers.
Also a spy said Russia is blackmailing him with a sex tape. No idea how true that is.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald-trump-2016-authoritarian-213533
Maybe this link instead?
Me, I gotta admit that it was a pretty good trick to win the election while appearing on tape talking about grabbing pussies, plus spouting an endless stream of insults and nonsense. Maybe the solutions to our problems seem hard to the OP, but to Trump the Genius, they’re actually a snap. I hope that’s it.
But if it turns out that the economy tanks, millions become jobless and homeless again, I suspect Trump will label the giant homeless camps “Obamavilles”. He’ll take the same approach Wayne LaPierre took when Trump got elected- seeing that he couldn’t stir up gun-buying hysteria with that result, he changed his message to pointing out all the Obama-appointed judges still in office, threatening Our Freedoms :eek: even though the Rs are in control again.
Bottom line: bad things are always liberals’ fault. Good things are the result of the proper application of conservative principles. Discard facts when necessary to maintain this view. For example, how do conservatives rationalize the fact that Reaganomics launched the modern era of massive debts? Why, it is really liberals’ fault with their fixation on spending spending spending on things like helping poor minority slackers, education and anything that isn’t the military. See what I mean?
Can you define ‘liberal’ for me, please?
The only way I can accept your statement is by noting that conservatives predominate in every way that Americans get misinformation, accompanied by the common conservative belief that everyone who doesn’t support the Republicans is a liberal.
I say, Chauncey, never mind the Crested Mangrove Warbler, I’ve spotted the rare and elusive PatriotX bird!
In my experience, people who present oversimplified-but-wrong solutions to complex problems, simply double down and reiterate their stance, when confronted, “No, that’s not actually how it is.”
So…
Yup, wrong link. According to the spy the Russians have a video of him in an orgy that they are using as leverage.
Granted this is all hearsay, but I have heard Trump has been involved in orgies in the US with teenage girls. So if the Russians have a video of Trump engaged in statutory rape or pedophilia, that is a pretty serious issue (FWIW, this would not be the first time Trump has been accused or expressed interest in those subjects).
Getting re-elected is the only objective benchmark of presidential success. Otherwise there can be 15 page threads about whether presidents generally viewed as successful really were successful, or contrarian arguments that poorly thought-of two termers were really more effective than is believed.
I’m not saying Trump will get re-elected, he may well not. But I interpret the OP thesis in terms of the objective benchmark, saying that there will be some meltdown in Trump and his support because ‘in fact there are no easy answers to our problems’ that prevents his reelection. The quoted phrase is absolutely true; the problem with the thesis is either a) assuming some big group of Trump voters who’ll reject him if he’s only modestly successful in 4 yrs because they really think our problems are easy to solve. I don’t think so. Modest success moving in the direction his near plurality (in an EC winning geographical distribution) of voters want to move is probably enough to generate a reasonable chance of reelection, it usually is.
Or b) it could be the OP, rather than ‘Trump and his ilk’, who is moving the goalposts to say Trump will fail when his critics decide he hasn’t solved all our problems. Which we can predict: most of Trump’s staunch critics now will probably call him a failure in 4 yrs, or 8 if it comes to it. When’s the last president about whom that wasn’t true? Reagan to some degree, but on this forum I’m sure you could fire up a thread about how Reagan was actually a failure. So back to, there’s no objective benchmark beside winning reelection.
Or just to add, maybe another quasi-benchmark is getting a successor elected, still not as direct because failure is partly that person’s fault.
I think you guys are taking Trump too seriously. He is very thin-skinned but his attention span is so short he seems to be able to move on without looking back. The EC hasn’t been counted yet and he’s already backed off on going after HRC even though that has hacked off a bunch of his rabid supporters. Was there a promise he made more often the going after Clinton?
I’m not sure I agree with this. One of his biggest block of supporters (at least the one we talk about the most) are the working class, who are traditionally democrat. I don’t think they can be labeled as true believers in Trump. I think it would be better said that they voted for the candidate who talked most about stopping trade agreements, something which I think Trump will be able to do to some degree. It will be interesting to see what those voters will do when the jobs don’t come tumbling back.