As ham handed and clumsily administered as this immigration executive order has been, it’s a success for Trump politically. All the American people hear is that the Democrats are only worried about foreigners. When the next terrorist attack happens, Trump can blame those judges. I mean tried his best to keep them out, didn’t he?
Man, I always get a good laugh out of reading your fantasies.
Democrats are worried about the American ideals that Trump is trampling into unrecognizability, all the while Republicans are doing their utmost to sell themselves out quicker than the next.
But hey, the more you say it, the more we’ll forget the GOP is all about power and wealth over patriotism, right?
Sorry, nobody’s buying it except the ones who were already wearing the red-colored glasses.
If this was a success, I’d really, really love to see what a disaster looks like. 
But I expect we’ll see a screwup even worse soon enough.
This Washington Post article did a fantastic job of illustrating just how shitty Trump’s implementation of the travel ban was. If this counts as his best effort, then we may need to invent a new slang word for “extreme incompetence”, because we’re going to be using it a lot.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. The article goes into a lot of detail on how EOs typically work, and why, and how thoroughly Trump fucked it up. Not to mention Trump’s constant yammering and how it undermined his court case.
I still don’t know if this will harm the GOP going forward. I certainly hope it will, but at this point, GOP mainliners seem to consider these embarrassing displays to be a feature, not a bug.
I’m willing to bet the average man on the street couldn’t name the seven countries in the EO. Most people don’t even understand the difference between a visa and a green card. All they hear is that the Democrats want to let Middle Easterners into the country the same way Obama kept letting people from Ebola stricken countries into the USA.
The next Orlando nightclub, Boston marathon, or San Bernardino will be owned by the Democrats.
Emphasis mine.
Do you know something we don’t?
Hoping for terrorist attacks to kill fellow americans just so that it can be blamed on your political opponent is pretty disgusting to me.
Cute.
And how would the ban have prevented any of these?
Doesn’t matter. It’s the optics. Trump protects Americans. Democrats endanger them.
The optics you use are full of rose tinting.
Trump is most definitely hurting Republicans. But where the OP goes wrong is to think that Bush’s incompetence could usher in an era of progressivism. It doesn’t work that way. Party governs badly means party gets kicked out and other party gets a chance. But the opposition party must remember why they won. It wasn’t to change the direction of the country but to govern better than the people they replaced. Now if they are clever they can make it seem like their ideology is essential to making the system work better, but that can only work if the public is also fed up with the ideology that held office before, rather than issues like scandal or incompetence.
FDR changed the direction of the country because he successfully argued that too much laissez-faire was not working for the little guy.
Reagan changed the direction of the country because he successfully argued that government had become part of the problem. He was also riding the success of tax revolts. The government was being sneaky and letting inflation increase taxes for them.
So fast forward to Obama, he failed to change the direction of the country because the country was mad at Bush’s incompetence and scandals and mismanaged wars. They wanted better government and better foreign policy. Attempts to change the direction of our domestic policy were punished swiftly and severely and nearly all of it is subject to repeal just eight years later.
This is still Reagan’s America and that won’t change even with Trump. Democrats will beat Trump but they’ll face the same country they’ve always faced: a center right country that wants the Democrats to deliver good government and smart foreign policy. That is the beginning and end of their mandate, and they’ve been punished every time they’ve overstepped, going back to the Johnson years. Democrats have still not cracked the code of staying in power even for two years without taking huge losses.
Some problems with the above.
Reagan didn’t successfully argue that government was part of the problem, he convinced people that yes there is a free lunch and we’re going to eat it. While inflation increased governmental income, it also increased governmental costs. Is the government just supposed to eat the cost of inflation? If your taxes went up, it’s because your income went up even more.
Obama’s foreign policy was of course much more successful than Bush’s, but he and the Democrats utterly failed to counter the anti-ACA arguments. They assumed the voters were too smart to fall for the death panel, socialism, takeover of health care nonsense. They aren’t, and the result is the utter disaster to unfold over the next 47 1/2 months.
Hats. They wear red hats.
The Republican party is, at this very moment, talking about and considering the best way to get good and affordable health insurance for every American.
That’s an enormous, huge, and unthinkable-10-years-ago win for progressives.
Or at least the best way to *say *they abolished Obamacare without actually angering too many voters to get re-elected.
It is. Guaranteed affordable public health care is now part of the political landscape, like Social Security and Medicare - which also are subject only to caterwauling by the ideologues. But don’t dismiss them either.
Are you sure? I saw a headline a couple days ago that said that Republicans aren’t really meeting or planning on the subject, and any repeal/replace might not happen until next year, at least.
Yeah, but they have conceded the argument that making sure people have access to health care is the government’s job.
What Robot Arm said.
And anyway, what they’ve said they want is for everyone to have ACCESS to health care/insurance, and the word “affordable” is not in there. Kind of like everyone has access to a Rolls Royce. No law says you can’t buy one, right?
Read about Tom Price’s views here:
“Through views and alliances, HHS nominee has long opposed government role in health care”
http://wapo.st/2k8JkEC
Then I suppose Trump will take credit for GE cutting these 300 jobs, too.
Wait…you forgot Quebec City and the Atlanta Massacree.
Sorry bub, the next one’s all Trump. And the next one. And the one after that.
“Hey Moran! What does ‘incompetent’ mean?”
- Highlander
The stupidity and incompetence of Trump won’t hurt the GOP because the GOP is the party of the stupid and incompetent.
Most people on the Left don’t get it. They assume that if they make logical and impassioned arguments or write articles demonstrating Trump or the GOPs stupidity, incompetence or brilliant competency at enacting laws that benefit corporate American and the wealthy 1% at the expense of everyone else, the general public will be outraged.
The reality is (and I see this every time I travel out to the country to visit the inlaws), people in Rural America (defined as just a bit more than an hour outside any major city) are mostly gung-ho Fox News watching Republicans. They will always vote Republican because in their mind the Democrats represent minorities, whiney effete Liberals, ivory tower intellectuals, pretentious Hollywood hypocrites and Socialists. And they have Fox News constantly playing passively in the background and right-wing news sites actively pushing to their web feeds de-legitimizing the regular media for their biased, violent attacks on Trump like something out of some weird dystopian fiction novel.
The most thinking they do on the subject is comment about when they might see Trump’s promised tax cuts or maybe nervously ask if we are anywhere near the protests in New York (like what the shit are you idiots talking about?)
So if you are lucky, what will probably happen in 8 years is that enough people in the middle will be sick of Trump for one thing or another and will vote Democrat, just for “something different”.