Why is this incredibly narrow definition of progress your metric for his presidency?

That is a laundry list of character faults you listed, and you managed to completely avoid mention of the damage his presidency has done to women, minorities, immigrants, the rise and support of Nazi-ism in America, the blatant and the transparent strides they are making to push America to a dictatorship ruled by themselves., among other horrors I can't remember off the top of my head, because my god there are just so many with this lot.

I can't engage with your question, he is a corrupt mobster who has his eyes on power and money and is doing everything in his power to ensure he gets as much of both at the cost of anyone who gets in his way, and has emboldened not just other corrupt politicians to join him and capitalize on the new found culture of open corruption, but everyone in the country with hate in their heart to fly it in proudly in the street. He and everyone around him are monsters of human beings, and if America ever manages to recover from the damage they're doing, it will takes decades.

However, I am very curious why you are so willing to give up everything that America purports to stand for, for the sake of helping the common worker? Where is the line? If corruption, a love of dictators, nepotism and a lack of qualifications aren't enough to disqualify him from the position, what is? Do we wait until he finally acts on those impulses before we do anything? What makes you think he won't? Why would you trust a man with a love affair with dictatorships and a clear disregard for the law with a gaggle of power hungry supporters around him to stop at looking lovingly at dictatorship through the front window just because he's helping the common worker?

Frankly dude, that sentiment is one of the most terrifying things I've ever heard.

(Let's be reeeeeeeal careful with this thread. 200% benefit-of-the-doubt in all directions. Everyone's worn out.)

Teague, Killer of Threads :p

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(1) his personal characteristics
* An egotistical man known for making absurd and ridiculous statements and creating controversies day in and day out. yay. -_-

(2) his administrations policies.

I would argue there is quite a bit of discussion of his administration's (and his party's) policies. I see them mostly as negatives.
 
* Tax cuts specifically aimed at the upper class. Who like, really need it. oh so much.
* Nationalistic, to the point of deliberately starting trade wars with China. Having to bail out farmers affected
* removal of Laws pertaining to protecting the environment/fighting climate
* A supreme court confirmation being delayed INTO his presidency so the previous President could not bring his nomination to a confirmation hearing.
* An attempt to repeal rather than improve the Affordable Care Act.
* Filling lower courts with conservative judges after the deliberate stalling of the previous President's attempts to fill their vacancies.
* Distancing ourselves from our allies, Germany, Britain, etc.
* Weirdly cozy with Dictatorships, (meeting with North Korea and Russia)
* Being okay with Neo-Nazi groups.

it goes on and on, but I'm tired and saddened already by the above list..

(3) whether people are better off (whether deliberate or unintentionally).

I think people will be fine with most things as long as they don't feel as though their life is being seriously affected by what is happening, blatant corruption be damned. Most people don't vote, largely due to apathy.

I wasn't really paying attention during GWB's years, as I was a young child busy with Pokemon at the time. Reading about that is just.. crazy. Sorry you guys had to go through that emotional roller-coaster of a few years.

I just hope that Trump doesn't begin a military conflict of some kind in the future in an attempt to raise support soon. I could absolutely see it.

I don't think his administration is good for most things, based on what I have seen. I wish I could pay even closer attention than I am, but I'm studying for exams and not sleeping enough already.

For the record, in absolutely no way was I referring to Trump starting a war. That, honestly, doesn't even factor into the situation at the moment for me, sure he could, but that's very clearly not the gameplan right now.

I'm talking about the fact that Trump and the republicans just ramrodded a clearly unfit, possibly to illegal and almost certainly immoral levels, Supreme Court judge through the process, despite massive outcry from the public and official institutions, and with active effort to cover up anything that might be there to be found, because they wanted HIM.

Kavanaugh is a firm believer that the President should be exempt from the law for the simple reason that he is President, he also believes that any sort of federal pardon should also pardon that person at a state level. And the US currently has a sitting president that also believes those things because he is a man overburdened with shady criminal activities and connections, surrounded by people with the same. And I have no doubt the thought that he could pardon himself and his entire corrupt little family and they could all get away scott free gives him waves of orgasmic pleasure unparalleled in modern history. And I'm sure there's more than a few Republicans that wouldn't mind having someone with that power in their back power, owing them a favour for giving them that power.

How long until those bills start hitting the floor do you reckon? A month? Maybe two? Hell, they might try to push it through before novembers vote while they still definitely have the numbers for all I know. But what happens if they go through? We have a sitting president with the power to pardon himself and anyone around him.

That sure as hell sounds like a solid first step to proper dictatorial take over to me.

And if the blue wave doesn't happen? What then? They've got another 2 years to kill off programs, plant their puppets in more sectors of the government, push through more bills to funnel money to themselves and corporations, and who knows what else. Are we so sure a democracy would still come out the other end of it?

Maybe this seems a little doomsday crier or what have you, and maybe it is, maybe they'll be satisfied with just taking over the government and shaping it to their whims as is and then give it up in 2 or 6 years like the good little proud Americans they all are. But the fact that we're even having a discussion where it's even a possibility let alone one that seems to be pretty likely is more than enough cause to say something is wrong and that maybe the people in power, shouldn't be.

There's a like 5 separate threads here to untagle:

1)Current events: USG/Politics
2)American/Western Imperialism
3)Global Populism
4)Global War on Terror
5)America's War for Greater Middle East

Auxiliary:

6)The lack of any editorial control on social media
7)The Internet war
8)Youtube and Twitter as commercial ventures rather than free social platforms.
9)Advertising as a revenue stream
10)KIDS THESE DAYS!

Hmmm, A triage.  OK, I'm game.

Trump Specific Worries: A List
1)The chance of 9/11 II happening while he's president seems like the absolute worst.  So I guess I'd put that at the top.
2)Someone turns their back for one second and he actually just straight up starts a war
3)No one is keeping an eye on the CIA right now.  What are they using him as cover/permission for?
4)The ongoing GWoT is a really complicated booby trap.  Hope that all keeps going great.
5)All the krazysauce he's been doing to the economy explodes.
6)The various trade theatre/bullshit doesn't actually seem all that harmful other than the boatloads of foreign political capital we're pissing away for basically nothing in return.  Hope we don't need that for anything.
7)He could take his rallies to the streets and start inciting riots.
8)He uses his power as president to make sure he gets away with all of his various fraud and tax evasion bullshit.
9)Twitter somehow goes his entire term without banning him
10)He uses his reelection to claim a mandate to do something really awful.
11)His impeachment/indictment/subpoenaing explodes the supreme court
12)Another one of his advisors getting up the gumption to go full Cheney like Bannon did.

I'm not worried about his...
1)Building a wall.
2)Joining with Ronna Romney McDaniel to do... anything.
3)Shutting down the New York Times.
4)Constant lies.
5)Anything his children do, beyond existing in positions they aren't qualified for / should be barred from holding.
6)Wife.

Last edited by Beeg (2018-10-08 20:32:36)

I guess as an outsider I'm puzzled why Trump's support has held fast (and by some measures even getting stronger) if the people/workers/middle class/99% are not getting better off.

If they were worse off (and this is the point that's not much talked about as all the oxygen is sucked up by Trump's late night poop-tweets), then it makes no sense that he's still popular with his base.

So I'm assuming there has to be SOME truth to the claim that 'jobs are coming back' and 'unemployment, even African-American unemployment is low'

It may well be that the jobs that coming back are low-wage jobs. PBS Frontline had a program on Dayton, Ohio last month where the old $35/hour jobs pre-NAFTA were all replaced by $13/hour jobs today. NAFTA was Clinton's thing, so I can see it makes sense for working class people to be suspicious of "globalist" Democrats. But I can't understand the support for Trump if ordinary working folk are doing worse under him. I don't know, I'm an outsider, so I was hoping you Americans could shed some light on the mystery. Is it just racism? Tribalism? Brain-washed by Rush Limbaugh and FOX (which begs the question why they are attracted to those sources in the first place).

And the ugly truth of it is that a lot of the people who still support Trump don't support him in spite of everything we've talked about, they support him because of it.

"Those fucking immigrants. The fucking women. The fucking foreigners taking our jobs and our factories. We need to go back to the way things were in the good old days. America is for good clean American families." Trump promises all of that, despite it being fundamentally impossible because that's not how the world works anymore. I wish I could find it, but there was a great article breaking down the entire myth of "bringing back the jobs" to coal towns and industrial towns and how that plays into supporting Trump. The basic breakdown as I remember it is a lot of industry in America was the backbone of the community (Coal towns, steel towns, car manufacturing towns etc) and that's how you got rich, you became a manager and worked up the ladder. But as the world globalized and technologically advanced those jobs started disappearing overseas or to more efficient factory systems and these towns started getting poorer.

So now, you have all of these old, embittered people (Old white men) that see all the rich liberal pussies in the cities getting rich off the money that should have been theirs. So you have Trump wander in and go "You're right, all those people in the cities are getting rich off your money, we need to fix that, bring back the factories and mines, get your job back and make you rich." and they go fuck yeah. But it won't work because the world doesn't work that way any more and even if they do open the coal mines (As they are trying to do atm), so what? The demand isn't there any more the world has other sources, the world is moving away from coal, and so on and so on. So you have this entire subsection of the population that is willing to overlook the couple little things they don't like about Trump if there are any, because he's gonna make them rich again and bring back the jobs. Hope is dangerous drug, is how the line goes I think.

There's a reason Trump's primary support base is almost entirely rural middle America.

And yes, media plays a big part in it. An entire generation grew up with their news source (Fox, or related, usually from what I've read) and that was the news you didn't watch anything else, that's the direct line to the truth. The Republicans and by extension Trump effectively have completely control of what comes out of there so yeah, it's literally a propaganda machine pointed directly at the people that support the current administration to keep them angry and scared and supporting the plans of the people in power.

Those are just the couple things I can think off the top of my head, and I'm sick of typing. But hopefully that helps a bit. The thing to remember is that Trump is a force of charisma to the base he targets, he's incredibly skilled at lying and manipulating and telling those people what they want to hear. Facts have, as we know, played effectively no part in his entire campaign and administration.

*against better judgment wanders into the thread after holding off for days* Also worth noting that economic growth = / = a better economic situation for the majority of the population. Sluggish recovery from the 2008 crash doesn't really mean all that much if most of it is centered around massive corporations and the wealthiest of the wealthy rather than stable growth of longterm jobs.

Also (I'm sure many of us on the forum can speak to this), it's quite possible that a significant amount of job "growth" we're seeing is workers taking on multiple jobs to try and stay afloat. Which, not ideal.

Trump isn't solely to blame there—the Obama administration took a lot of half measures and reaped the whirlwind—but he most definitely isn't helping and will almost undoubtedly make things actively worse in the long run, to BDA's point.

Last edited by Abbie (2018-10-10 03:04:26)

Thanks for all your answers. Really appreciate it. If Trump pretends to be a beacon of hope to the little forgotten person in flyover states, it's weird that he'd hijack the GOP, the part that obviously (even to an outsider) only represents the wealthiest 1% of the country. That false hope should go down better if offered by a left-wing populist, like say Bernie Sanders. Even an idiot should know Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc are wholly bought by corporate lobbyists.

And then massive tax cuts to corporations and billionaires are passed, and the GOP support doesn't budge. The tribalism is so entrenched. And Democrats could promise universal health care, and sick people in rural mid-America will fervently campaign against socialised medicine.

So, yes, Trump offers false hope to poor rural people. Got that. But if a Democrat offered the same false hope, they'd be hated, even though the Democrats can demonstrate an historically (slightly) better track record.

The media has done an excellent job in painting Democrats as in bed with Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, Hollywood, etc. But the message that the GOP is in bed with defense contractors, big Pharma, banks, hasn't got through.

I find it fascinating that brainwashing can be done so effectively that someone will act against their own interests. A drowning man will reject the (commie, Chinese, Jewish, liberal, insert hate group here) rope thrown to assist him.

The phenomenon of poor voting for upwards wealth redistribution certainly happens in Australia/UK as well, but to a much greater extent in the USA.

We'll see what happens in the mid-terms... it seems like a no-brainer that there should be a blue-wave after all that Trump has done/said in the last few years, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a swing towards the GOP.

Does the left have any share of the blame? Lame Pelosi/Schumer mainstream DNC? Distracted by identity politics rather than inequality? No charismatic leader to rally around?

You seem to forget that there are no poor people in America, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. (Steinbeck) Improvements for the rich will mean improvements for anybody that something something bootstraps.