Exactly.
Exactly.
Part of the problem is that many believe that simply disagreeing with them is a personal attack, and so it must be forbidden. And if you are wondering who I mean, who riots when a speaker they don’t agree with schedules a speech?
Don’t leave us hanging! Who?!?
Just some random musing on my part: It’s the trade war that will be the undoing of Trump, and it will be because he just didn’t understand his vulnerable spots.
First, he correctly understands that the economy is strong, but fails to realize that it has little to do with him. Rather, it is the result of many years of Quantitative Easing. And while QE worked, it isn’t free. There is going to be a price to pay for it in the form of rising interest rates. Unfortunately for Trump, the time for that is starting now. And while that alone may not result in a recession, the lower and middle class tax cuts are going to be eaten up by the rising interest rates. But if things go well for Trump, this effect might be slight enough to not be noticed by his base. He’d probably get away with calling the tax cuts a success, even if it didn’t actually net his base anything.
But the trade war, something of his own creation, will certainly expose that lie. On top of the interest rates due to QE, prices will rise due to tariffs, and it will be much more than the low levels of tax relief he gave the lower and middle class. There is going to be some pain, and soon. Rising interest rates plus price increases due to tariffs will lead to recession. Everyone knew that a correction/recession was coming, but didn’t know when. The trade war removes that uncertainty, which is actually nice if you are positioned for it. Trump’s base, of course, isn’t.
But the biggest error is that while Trump thinks that the USA will be able to win a trade war eventually (which is probably true), he is on a clock that the other countries are not on. Trump has to win the trade war before November mid-term elections, and that just isn’t going to happen. It’s not going to happen because the countries he is fighting don’t have this clock and they know it. While it’s likely not their preferred option, China could let the trade war go on for five years (hey, Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about re-election). And Trump doesn’t have the ability to unilaterally call off the trade war he started. He may capitulate, only to find that China may want to keep tariffs that hurt the USA in place. Why would they want to do that? Well, if China thought that Russia actually did have some leverage over Trump, they might want negate that power imbalance by reducing Trump’s power. It would be a blow to the USA and Russia, and good for China.
Probably a simplistic take on things, but I doubt that Trump put as much thought into it.
This doesn’t exactly belong here, but I didn’t want to start yet another thread. I’m liking the sound of this. My bolding.
Conservative columnist: I want Democrats to take over Congress
Trump supporters won’t blame Trump if they their jobs.
A nail manufacturing company in Poplar Bluff MO may have to close its doors due to the hardship imposed by Trump’s tariffs on imported steel. Locals say “He’s still our man!”
So yeah, fucking up the economy so bad that you lose your job? That’s obviously not going to do it.
The folks at Jonestown drank poison for their guy. I don’t see this as much different.
Well said.
I haven’t even bothered to engage my niece on FB whenever she posts some pro-tRump bullshit. Should I? I think I’d be wasting my time. She will go on and on about babies and kids and how terrible abortion is, but is not even slightly concerned about kids and babies in detention centers. She also shared a blurb from T. Roosevelt in which he said there was only room for immigrants if they became fully American and spoke only English. Yet she was raised bilingual since her mom’s from El Salvador, and her grandma still speaks mostly Spanish. “Disconnect” is only one of many words I can think of for this phenomenon.
I read this initially as “Johnstown” and started shaking my damn head. Stupid Pennsylvanians!
Sorry, all.
If he went “soft” on immigration, in the view of his base, I think he’d lose some of them. And we know he’s not going to go “soft” on immigration.
Other than that, I don’t think he can do anything to hurt his standing with them. He’s a misogynist, likely a racist, plays to xenophobia, definitely a demagogue who likes to demonize minority groups, con artist, scam artist, serial liar…all of that is what his base wants. The more of that stuff he does, the more they like it, because they want to piss off liberals and the evil media.
So, I think his base is essentially hunkered down, and in for the long haul with Trump.
To get him out of office, the Dems need to turn out their base, and convince some independents who voted for Trump to join their side and get the demagogue out of office.
If he were to pick a liberal for the SCOTUS, his base would abandon him in droves.
True. I missed that one, and there would be an issue if he picked a liberal.
I don’t think there’s any danger of that happening. He had a ready-made list for SCOTUS replacements before he even came to office, I think made by the Federalist Society, and he will pick from that list. None of the possibilities are remotely liberal.
They don’t have a watercooler here; it’s a kool-aid dispenser.
**Tariffs Trim a Factory’s Profit, but Loyalty to Trump Endures **
<shrug>
Trump’s base will never turn on him as long as the alternative is perceived as being worse. If there were someone better than Trump waiting in the wings (Pence is not Trump-like to some extent) then they would agitate for Trump to be gone, but as long as the alternative is a liberal and/or Democrat, then Trump’s better to them.
Again, I would like to note that since “Trump’s base” is largely defined as “those who support Trump”, the answer is “never”.
If the definition is “racists, assholes, and conservatives of varying stripes”, then when a competent “Trump” comes along, a large number of those will likely ditch the old DJT for the new DJT.
Articles like the above posted by ThelmaLou don’t bother me. People don’t care about hypotheticals, they care about reality. The “hypothetical” of a new cutter and 2 employees is irrelevant as long as they keep their jobs. When they lose their jobs and find out that their gov’t benefits have been cut or eliminated, then they will likely turn on him.
Something I read today made me want to ask this question, so I hunted down this old thread to ask it:
Would thump’s evangelical supporters turn on him/dump him if positive proof came to light that he had paid for several abortions for his various lady friends?
By “positive proof” I don’t mean articles in WaPo or the New York Times (i.e. fake news), but video testimony from doctors, nurses, the women themselves, invoices, canceled checks, credit card receipts, etc. Yes, people would question the validity of the evidence, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that the evidence is watertight and the evangelicals actually DO believe it.
My question is, would that certain knowledge of his paying for abortions, cause them to turn against him, or would they make excuses, consider him excused from their beliefs, say stuff (again) like “God uses evil men to accomplish His own ends,” etc.?
Would this be a case of “shooting someone on 5th Ave” and it would be okay with them?
I don’t think it would change their minds. They’d still say it was faked even if it didn’t come from WaPo or NYT. They’d say it was forged documents and actors from the deep state. Even if they believed it, they’d say he’s changed now (he’s obviously so mild mannered and family oriented these days /sarcasm).
There doesn’t seem to be anything that would change their minds. If they lost their jobs en masse and/or the economy otherwise tanked in some way that was unavoidable to them and was obviously based on a policy tRump enacted, then yeah I think he’d be abandoned. But he’ll do everything he possibly can to keep that from happening and somehow it always works. The stock market starts to go down a little so he relaxes some economic sanctions against China and stocks shoot back up. Ford (I think it was) starts to lay off some workers but tRump calls them to complain and they seriously do what he tells them. Etc. I wonder what a major business would have done if a past president had called them to complain about layoffs?
Of course not. As long as he is “sticking it to the Libs!”
Hur hur. Librul heads explode. Hur hur hur.
It saddens me that 60 million people think this.