Is this actually a satire and the real Presidential race is going on in secret?
You do realize that the President has almost no real power? If the Legislature ignores all of his policy, that policy is never going to come into reality.
He can shut the government down, by threatening to veto everything, but all that means is:
- The parties will collaborate enough that they create sufficiently limp-wristed policy that both parties will pass it with a large enough majority to override a veto, so they can ignore the Executive branch.
- They’ll actually let him trade for the things he wants, but at such a steep cost that it would still effectively amount to the Legislature running the country in the Executive’s stead.
Just look at the Clinton Presidency. If a President is doing well with the public, Congress will follow limply along, especially the President’s own party. Clinton doesn’t have to keep any of her more left-wing promises because once in office she has to appeal to the median midterm voter, and so do most Democratic Congressmen. She will govern the way she wants and that will be that.
As he trashes our foreign relationships and sends drones at Kabul because he heard there’s a terrorist somewhere in there.
Or says he loves clean air this morning in California, conveniently forgetting how he wants to dismantle the Environmental Department (“Uh, Mr. Trump, that’s the EPA…” “Yeah, whatever.”).
Yes, because Bill Clinton was a hated outsider to the Democratic party. :dubious:
We were talking about how beholden they’d be to their left and right wings. Both are centrist if we are to believe their history rather than their words. It’s reasonable to assume that both will govern as centrists and their parties won’t have much to say about it. As long as they are popular. If they are unpopular, than the knives come out.
I am not trolling with this, I am serious.
Omarosa
Trump’s problem isn’t that he’s a centrist, it’s that he isn’t part of the gang (either gang) and his policy is stupid. No one in the Legislature has any reason to give a damn what policy Trump lays out. It’s not a compromise/centrist version of what the party believes in, it’s just a bunch of random nonsense from some snake oil salesmen who happened to work the right angles to get the job.
Think of it like a workplace. Say that a gap opened up in management and there’s a few different people eligible for the promotion. You like some of them, you don’t like a few others, but all of them know the job and can probably do it to a better or worse but reasonable extent. If one of the guys you don’t like is hired, you’ll still follow the orders that come down the pike. You’ll bitch about it, but that’s really all it means. But then, instead of one of the candidates being promoted, or HR finding a qualified candidate from outside the company, the CEO puts his 20 year old Russian mistress in to the role. She has no qualifications beyond her bossom, doesn’t care about the job, and mostly just interrupts meetings to complain about the decor of the office and to make ludicrous recommendations. So what does everyone do? They ignore her, and work around the gap, internally selecting one of the people who had been eligible for the promotion to be her surrogate. On the whole, they work around her, but on cases where they have to explicitly get her approval on something, maybe they agree to add some paintings to the wall or whatever as a trade. It’s stupid, but sure, so long as there’s no large harm to it.
And that’s basically what the Trump presidency would be like, unless he can convince the Legislature that he is capable and qualified to do the job. And part of that is to be smart enough to kiss up to them a bit, and show that he knows how to trade horses. Trading horses is, after all, one of the key aspects of the job. He needs to demonstrate that he can study up on policy and make practical recommendations. If he can study up on what one of the parties likes and list off how he can give them some of that, it’s at least an indicator that he can do research and tailor his actions to the realities of his situation.
But if, instead of that, he just goes around talking about forcing Mexico to build a border wall, and other nonsense, then he’s just going to immediately become the country’s largest lame duck president in history since the Constitution was founded.
He needs to get a party on his side not because the President is meaningless otherwise, but because he needs to prove his qualifications for anyone in the rest of government to even care what he says.
I read your post and get what you are saying but snipped it down just to save space.
Like I said, I understand your point. I actually think a large number of the Republicans who are supporting Trump, such as McCain, McConnell and Graham, are thinking along the same lines as you are. They have probably convinced themselves they can work with this guy because he isn’t really into the nuts and bolts of running things and will get easily distracted from the details of things. When something needs to be done they will tell him what to do and then convince him it was his idea all along anyway. IOW they are going along with Trump because he is what they are stuck with and they believe they can control him.
Unfortunately I think the reality would be much different. Trump is an authoritarian with a narcissistic personality. He is used to barking orders and having people jump to it. It’s his way or the highway. If he gets elected I would expect there to be a serious clash of wills pretty quickly and for him to try to implement things in ways that will be unconstitutional. I don’t see much chance he would survive four years without a serious clash with Congress and the Federal Courts ending in impeachment.
See post 262. It doesn’t matter how authoritarian or not he may be. There have been lame duck presidents before. And that’s not because those Presidents were meek and allowed it to happen. A lame duck president is a feature of the system, caused by no one giving a damn what the President says. An authoritarian in a teapot just doesn’t have any functional importance.
I saw that already. The problem is I don’t buy the premise you are putting forth. Given the expansion we have seen of a President’s authority over the last 20 or so years through executive orders and a President’s role as commander in chief of the military I don’t see a President Trump being powerless or a lame duck. An authoritarian put in office would still be capable of doing an enormous amount of damage before he could be removed.
There’s more to it than power within the government. The President affects foreign relationships and markets, too.
Particularly if that authoritarian were to be “forced” to declare martial law.
Trump couldn’t get away with that on his own, of course. The danger lies in the possibility that other authoritarians (closet or otherwise) at the top of the power structure might see an opportunity to remake the USA in a way they consider Right and Good. It would be very easy for them to convince themselves that they were acting out of patriotism. This ‘democracy’ stuff just doesn’t work in the Real World of militant leftists and Islamic terrorists!
As we’ve already seen, there is no shortage of people willing to throw rocks and worse. A false flag operation would be absurdly easy to set up. Next thing you know, we have President-For-the-Duration Donald J. Trump. And somehow, it would never be safe to hold elections–those subversive elements must be put down, first! Perhaps we’ll be able to resume elections next year…
(You know he would go for it.)
Interesting VOX piece; thanks.
But whatever Manafort says, the smart VP-pick money is on Marco Rubio.
Paul Lepage. He has expressed interest in this, and the two have very similar political beliefs. They’re even both racist blowhards, so they won’t offend each other!
Well given that Trump has not taken so kindly to Newt’s calling his judge comments “inexcusable” he’s likely off the list.
Carson has condemned it too, so not him … Sessions is left I guess.
Mark Cuban says he’s open to it.
See posts 249 and 250.
The Governor of Oklahoma, a woman, may be in the running: What you need to know about Mary Fallin, Donald Trump's potential running mate
Some conservatives seriously believe that Trump is just a sideshow to insure a Clinton Whitehouse. And that Trump himself is in on it.