Yes, you can up until you have only one option to vote for.
I don’t understand this criticism of people who don’t support Trump. Things he did in his first year were horrific and unprecedented for a US President, or at least a modern one. The Mueller report laid out how terrible he was as a candidate and President. He was doing things that would have unraveled another president on a regular basis. Just because he’s gotten worse, more incompetent, coarser, more petulant, doesn’t mean that the earlier criticism was wrong – it was as bad as it got, from, say, President Wilson forward, until it got worse again.
If I’m being tortured and someone asks me how bad is the pain, and I give it a ten because I can’t imagine any worse pain, and then the torturers come up with something even worse, my previous ten was still valid – I couldn’t imagine worse pain.
Similarly, I thought his obvious graft, lies, and campaign violations were really awful, worse than anything before. I didn’t expect the level of incompetence at the border that would have him separating parents from children and then losing track of the children! I thought that was the worst, but then I didn’t expect him to be treasonously fishing for dirt on his political opponents! I thought that was the worst, but then I didn’t expect him to respond so badly to the current crisis!
Good point - Trump keeps moving the peg!
“I voted for Trump because I really like his policies. However, I can’t defend his lying, womanizing, self-enrichment at the taxpayer’s expense, incompetence, and so on. However, I would vote for him again over Biden, because, policy-wise, he’s a straight-up Republican. His debasement of the presidency is a price I’m willing to pay for looser regulations, (or whatever).”
Now, that’s not what the OP is looking for – he’s looking for someone to say they support Trump the man, even though he lies, etc.
ETA: None of those prominent conservatives are planning on voting for Trump. Stephens was iffy when it looked like the nominee might be Sanders, but he’s not iffy anymore.
And trump delivers the goods because he (with the help and support of Moscow Mitch) has got the Republican party by the balls. In order to deliver the goods, the president has to control the party. The Republican party belongs to trump now. (Although I suspect that if Mitch wanted to, he could throw a bucket of water on trump and watch him sizzle and melt into the floorboards in about 30 seconds.)
NO ONE controls the Democratic party. They can’t get together on anything. The fact that Bernie is still in the race illustrates this. The fact that Obama lost his majority after he was reelected illustrates this. Even if (when) Biden gets elected, and even if he has a majority in both houses of Congress, he won’t be able to deliver the goods like trump can because the way Congress works has changed. Cooperation across the aisle is a distant memory. Trump represents the culmination of the breakdown of our way of government. Can anyone restore it? I don’t think so. It will have to be rebuilt, but I can’t picture what that will look like.
I know people who say it’s abortion. There is no other issue.
So, while yes a dog turd might have found its way into the pot of Chili con Carne, it was only a small one and the pot still contains lots of lovely ground beef which is sorely lacking in the turd free pot of vegetarian chili so I see no reason to switch.
This is a Warning to refrain from expressing an disagreement with another poster as “You are full of shit.”
[ /Moderating ]
Understood.
Apologies Shodan; it’s not that I don’t respect you, I do and have for years, its just that you are so often wrong.
Regards,
Happy Fun Ball 
If he has been around these boards for very long, he should know that he will be waiting a long long time for someone to come defend Trump’s, the person.
Start rebuilding by figuring out a way to remove all the monetary benefits you get from being a politician (of any rank)
I thought for a while that term limits would limit the power accumulation that you garner over lengthy terms but I don’t think it goes near far enough. We ought to treat politicians like we treat our teachers. The pay is shit, and so is the support you’re likely to receive. But hey, you have summers off!
I’ll try to respond if you provide a correction to your intended link.
When I was playing catch up at San Jose State, there was a fellow student in a similar situation to mine. He was also married with 4 kids and had a job. But, he and his wife were school teachers, living at a subsistence level by choice. During the summer the whole family stayed in itinerant worker camps and picked fruit. He and his wife felt it was the best education experience for the children - work, in a diverse environment, that contributed to the family income. They were all studious, interesting people.
Perhaps we could get one of them to be President.
You must be joking. Those aren’t policies, they are vague aspirational goals. Delving into most of them reveals the false premises they are reacting to.
For example, “We need an immigration system that secures our borders, upholds the law, and boosts our economy.”
Nobody disagrees with this. But if you ask them what this aspirational platitude means in action, they will tell you it involves building walls and putting people in cages, and if you ask them why we need to do that, that’s when they repeat ideas that are demonstrably untrue, and events that either did not happen, or are statistically not representative of reality.
Another example: “We need to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, make government more efficient, and leave the next generation with opportunity, not debt.”
This is from the political party that increases debt every time they’re in office to pass tax cuts that enrich the wealthiest Americans. Republicans claim to be a party of fiscal responsibility, and this has been a transparent lie since at least the Reagan administration.
Republicans believe and/or speak fiction. That’s how they rationalize support of Trump. There’s no other way to rationalize support of Trump.
Abortion itself isn’t a simple issue. It’s about control and power, and imposing one’s will on others. People who subscribe to religious fundamentalism don’t just want to restrict abortion. They fundamentally believe that they have the ultimate worldview and that others would be better off if the world would be seeing it their way.
We fundamentally fail to appreciate an important truth when it comes to abortion: people who obsess with outlawing abortion aren’t just fixated with controlling people’s reproductive health; you’ll find that they enjoy controlling other people in other ways, too. They just get bent when government tries to control their controlling behavior.
In this case, the ends justify the means - doesn’t matter how it gets done. Trump is preserving their America. Immigration is an existential threat and from their point of view, Trump is justified putting people in cages if that scares visibly foreign (and visibly poor) folk from coming into the country.
They’ll tell you that stimulus is okay if it means bailing out the chosen ones: big business. If it involves paying for the losers in the game of social Darwinism, OTOH…not so much. That gives you a peek into the Republican psyche: they value power over humanity.
They mental gymnastics that enable them to justify government bailouts would impress Simone Biles. But the short of it is that they’re powerful, so they’re naturally first in the lunch line. Power is a virtue. That’s how they clawed their way up the food chain, and they’ll keep clawing until people rise up and restore the balance of power in some meaningful way.
I assume that this was what he intended to link to.
It is certainly possible that there are other variables that correlate with the presence of absence of a rallies regardless of party and also correlates with an increase in hate crime. If the creators of the original study didn’t adjust for population density, then that is a serious flaw in the study. Of course it also could be that Clinton and Trump both tended to hold rallies in swing states that were being blanketed with Trump messaging. But for now I’d declare both results as suspect.
Of course just because a study was done poorly doesn’t mean the conclusion in wrong. Sometimes statistics can get in the way of common sense. The last three times I hit my head with a hammer I got a headache, but since its only a sample size of three and doesn’t take into account what I ate that day, I can’t actually conclude that hitting myself with a hammer caused the headaches.
Excuse me but can you provide specific examples of how President Obama was “divisive”? Because I can’t think of even ONE way that he was “divisive” except for “he was a dark-skinned person elected President when it’s obvious that there are still a LOT of people (and I use the term “people” loosely in reference to them) in this country who simply could not (and still cannot) cope with a non-‘white’ person being elected president in this country.” Got anything more persuasive than that? {I’m betting you DON’T!}
Precisely. As has been the case with so many Republican presidents of late, he’s nothing more than (as my wife puts it) an “empty suit” who does exactly what you posted: he allows the Republican Party to get things done while he’s in power that they know damn well would NEVER get done if a Democrat were in the White House. Simple as that.
No, but here’s a question for you: “Where are you getting your information from?” 'cause from your viewpoint on things it sure doesn’t sound to me like it’s a reliable and authentic news source, whatever it is.