Umm, him being Canadian might have something to do with it.
I’m not American.
did Ford keep the Nixon cabinet members? I think he kept most if not all.
That about nails it. But did you miss a “not” in that last sentence, as “not like”?
As for Pence, I don’t like most of his politics, and I really don’t like his religious nutteriness, but as long as the Senate doesn’t have a Republican super-majority, the Democrats can keep at least the most egregious legislation in check. And I have a good feeling about them taking the House in the midterms.
But perhaps Donald Trump is this level of corrupt because far too many people already assume “they all do it anyway” and that this is what presidents do now and there’s not much they can really do at this point. This is how populists succeed. They’re constantly struggling and battling against institutions that point out the truth by purposely wrecking the concept of truth. But what doesn’t get talked about enough is that populists can’t just come to power anywhere. You don’t get populism in places where people are educated and have relatively healthy levels of confidence that their administrations work and that there is civilian influence and control over these institutions. You get corrupt populists when people don’t have confidence that they have influence over their institutions. Voting for Trump was the act of an electorate that is angry and in despair. They don’t know how to solve this problem, so they attempt to do so by supporting people who reflect their emotions, which is anger and increasingly to an extreme degree.
Most likely, this trend will continue for some time to come, either with Trump remaining in office or with someone else who can pick up his battle flag and carry on the fight. The politics of normal are probably over for some time.
Fortunately for us, I think Trump is a one-of-a-kind. I don’t expect to see another president like him. Call me an optimist. 
I think that a great deal of good is going to come out of Trump’s presidency, and that Trump’s removal from office (one way or another) will be just the last step of that great good.
Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was an organized crime boss. He was laughably incompetent, so much so that he and his organization would quickly go down against any moderately thorough investigation. But fortunately for him, he was much too petty and small-scale to ever attract even a moderately thorough investigation, so he was able to keep on swimming in his secretions of mediocrity. And all of the other organized crime bosses, the competent ones, wisely kept him at a remove, either not doing business with him, or making the business indirect enough that he couldn’t take them down.
But then, suddenly, this petty crime boss became the most powerful man in the world. Now, all of the other crime bosses couldn’t ignore him any more: They had to do business with him in order to retain any of their power and status. But he was still incompetent, so much so that the only way he was able to do business was in obviously dirty ways, and with all of the connections clearly spelled out for him in small words.
But despite being no better than he was before at shielding himself, he’s now under much greater scrutiny. And more importantly, so are all of his connections. And so now, when he goes down, he’s going to drag down all of his new business partners with him.
The Mob could survive having J. Edgar Hoover and Elliot Ness and so on as enemies. But they won’t be able to survive having Trump as a friend.
It will solve the problem of having a corrupt narcissistic mentally ill incompetent being President of the United States. Which is about the biggest problem in the entire world right now.
Donald Trump or not, we will not really have a healthy democracy until we neutralize the power of the billionaire class that dominates our politics and economic system. Simply removing Donald Trump from power doesn’t change that. As there has been in the past, there might be the occasional election in which people power is expressed and we push back against the plutocrats, as we did in 2008, but the empire always finds ways to strike back with their political clout and propaganda machine. Worse, the rollback of net neutrality policy, in tandem with aggressive media mergers and consolidation, will be to the free flow of and access to information what the Citizens United decision was to the limit of excessive influence of billionaire interests in political campaigns. The wheels of democracy are beginning to loosen and wobble, and without serious intervention from voters in the next 2-3 election cycles, they will spin right off their axles. We’ll probably still have a democracy on paper, but in many regards, we will lack one in fact.
Asahi wrote: “We’ll probably still have a democracy on paper, but in many regards, we will lack one in fact.”
In many regards, we already do.
Trump is just a symptom. The disease is in sixty million hearts.
This is really an untested assumption. Pence managed to govern as a fitful conservative in a ruby red state. There’s no real track record on how he’d manage to perform is a less extreme political environment.
Plus, the press corps would tear him a new one every day of his life. He’s whack-a-doo in a way that would get their juices flowing.
Yes, so “ruby red” it went to Obama in 2008. While there are certainly “ruby red” pockets in this state there are also some “sapphire blue” ones.
Not to mention he managed to piss off quite a few of the conservatives here (because some of his religiously driven bullshit hurt business, which is the other major religion around here). He’s pretty much universally loathed around here.
Except he’s squeaky clean in his personal life (of course he is, the man has a chaperone) and not known to take bribes. They would have some trouble getting a grip on his teflon-coated ass. The only “wack-a-doo” part of him is the religious, which if they attack will leave them open to a counter-attack of themselves being anti-religious.
Pence is very good at presenting a benign appearance. It’s only skin-deep. Underneath he’s just as evil as Trump.
My concern is that the damage he is doing can not be repaired. Much like when ISIS was busy blowing up ancient monuments, these things that took generations to build are not replaceable. It will take generations to rebuild.
It’s not going to be like at the end of WWII when the allies liberated the concentration camps, and all of the starving prisoners walked out into freedom. When Trump goes away, however he goes away, there is not going to be some universal awakening with the sun finally parting the clouds.
We are still going to have intractable political divisions, we will now also have a large swath of the populace who does not trust any form of federal investigative law enforcement, or any form of reality based media trying to explain why something is bad and important. Trump has so far successfully thrown out any standards of behavior and adherence to rules governing the Presidency (Nepotism? Emoluments clause? Pfft!) This is not going to go away soon.
The legitimate (and illegitimate) gripes that the various voting factions have are not going away. And the reputation of the US internationally as a stable bulwark against whatever has been proven to be worth less than any paper it was printed on. Again, this is going to take generations to put back together.
I think Jonathan is largely correct in his analysis, even if “ruby red” is not the best descriptor. From wikipedia:
Indiana is like Texas - it’s been red a long time, but there have always been pockets of blue and they’re getting larger.
And, as I said, Pence pissed off a lot of the reds because his administration was bad for business and make no mistake - the red in Indiana has as much, if not more, to do with capitalists and making money as it does with religion.
I think we’re hearing the last enraged scream from a dying demographic and progress will resume post-Trump. Of course, if what remains of government is unable to shed the influence of monied interests into the political process, it will fail to regain the people’s confidence and that’s a trend that I don’t think can continue for much longer. Responsible democracy will have to find a way forward.
There is a whole world out there. I, personally would welcome not having the majority of the news time dedicated to one particular person.
Bill Maher once said of Pence (paraphrasing): He was a Catholic, but left that church because it wasn’t repressive enough.
”Tradition politician-buyers”, as you term them, might not be motivated to destroy the institutions of basic liberalism (in the traditional use of the term, not the political menaing), but nor are they interested in improving American society except insofar as it fits their particular world view and makes their investments more profitable. They do not care about the essential principles of democracy or benefitting society as a whole, hence the anti-education, anti-science, anti-universal health coverage, anti-minimum living wage standpoints, and it is exactly that agenda and the economic and social stratification resulting from it that has allowed foreign interests to gain influence over domestic issues and elections. It is all of a piece, maintained by people who do not give a fuck about “American democracy” or mortality rates and poverty levels.
To be fair, the cable news networks have never done any real journalism. CNN started out as “Headline News” and then migrated to the McLaughin Group model of talking heads arguing bullet points without depth. MSNBC isn’t much better, and Fox News is outright partisan hackery that might as well be a subsidiary of RT News. What anyone gets out of cable news is beyond me, but the current focus on whatever nonsense Trump shatweeted out this morning is ludicrous even by high school journalism standards. The day he tweeted “”Covfefe” and the newsheads spent the entire day trying to tease out the meaning of a nonsense word so arythmic even Charles Dodgson wouldn’t have used it made clear that they have no real focus or standards other than to make enough noise to get the best ratings, which puts them at just about the same level as Trump himself.
Trump is unique in his abiliy to exploit his “Trumpy-ness” but there are plenty of imitators in conservative politics who are trying to engage in the same level of outrageous and inflammatory comments with greater or lesser success. And the problem with bomb-throwers like Trump (or Bernie Sanders) isn’t that they’ll succeed in fully destroying the existing system, but that they can do enough damage to undermine essential norms in democracy that are understood but not explicitly guranteed by anything in the Constitution. Of course, Trump may well appoint one or more Supreme Court justices, damage the security posture and defensive capability by undermining critical strategic relationships, and do any number of other things with long term impacts on the security and well-being of the United States, notwithstanding what the lack of leadership is going to foster autocrats and demogogues in other nations.
But let’s be plain; although the corruption here in plain sight is a novelty in US politics within living memory—you’d need to go back to the Teapot Dome scandal to find something comparable to how Trump and is cronies are enriching themselves at the public trough—it’s hardly unprecidented in recent politics. Most of the senior leadership in the Reagan Administration had a hand in the Iran-Contra Affair, and not one person served a day in prison for running an illegal arms (and drug) trafficking operation which provided weapons to an unfriendly foreign power in order to give aid to a terrorist organization in directly violation of federal law. The justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was wholly manufactured intelligence about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, about which again no one was directly convicted or removed from office. (Colin Powell was pressured to resign, and Scooter Libby was convicted for obstruction and perjury over the Plame Affair, but nobody took direct responsibility for the falsified intelligence that went into the claims of yellowcake stockpiles and weapon of mass destruction manufacture by the Saddam regime.) Mike Pence would be fully amenible to continuing these policies as long as it got him the support to impose his hyperconservitive social and religious agenda, which even if not fully effective could still have long term effects.
Getting rid of Trump doesn’t eliminate the institutional problem of not holding corrupt people accountable for getting the US involved in destructive wars and conflicts on illegal and unfounded premises, notwithstanding the myriad of other social and political problems plaguing the nation, and indeed the entire world, today. But at least it’s a start.
Stranger