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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Dec 21, 2015 1:59 am 
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Knowing Trump, he'd be flattered by the compliment.

For some strange reason, some segments Fox News have a boner for Putin. He's tough! He wrestles bears! He rides a horse shirtless! He's homophobic! The latter two facts have nothing to do with each other! He threatens anyone who looks at him sideways! Never mind that his military is overextended and Russia's economy is in the toilet. Look how manly he is!

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2015 7:07 am 
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At least to me Trump gives the impression, that he believes as president he can rule by fiat and don't care about legal niceties. Like banning muslims from entering the US and he propably thinks that some staffer can write up something, that makes the unconstitutionality go away. In short he thinks he is going to be an American Putin, an elected autocrat.

If he actually gets elected and finds out that things don't work that way, he will likely not roll over quietly, but try to give himself the powers, he now believes the president has. I don't think he will be successfull with it, but thats an opinion on his competence and how established rule of law is in the US.

Now in theory he might be aware about the powers that the office actually has and just talk like that, to impress voters. But then his experience in running businesses likely is, that no matter the fine print, if the boss insists on it, eventually it is done. It's mostly not a good business strategy to rely on that, but given his bankrupties there is no contradiction. And AFAIK Frank Stronach, who seems a lot like him and dabbled in Austrian politics, got suprised how the parliament and party lists work, after his party made it into the parliament. So i consider it plausible, that Trump did not do his homework regarding the acutal powers of the office he runs for.

So my interpretation is, that a good deal of what he (yet?) lacks to fit the fascist picture, is due to being unprepared and disorganized.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Tue Dec 22, 2015 9:15 am 
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Nothing Trump says makes any sense or is remotely feasible because he's simply not interested in policy. He represents a strain of thought (if you can call it that) begun under Bush in the American right wing that thinks that facts are for wimps, nuance is for suckers, and expertise is for snobs. Macho posturing is equivalent to good leadership. It may be the case that he is just too stupid and disorganized to qualify as a fascist, but I think it's because he hasn't ever thought through what needs to happen in order to make his crazy plans a reality.

I'm not even convinced that he really intends to become president. He's playing well in the polls right now because he's running against a field of lackluster Republicans, and he's excellent at shamelessly pandering to a small but extremely vocal group of angry white old men. Everybody's racist uncle, if you will. But even someone as egotistical as he is has got to know that come the general election, he's toast. He's doing it for the personal glory and publicity.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Dec 28, 2015 12:11 pm 
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Kea wrote:
I'm not even convinced that he really intends to become president. He's playing well in the polls right now because he's running against a field of lackluster Republicans, and he's excellent at shamelessly pandering to a small but extremely vocal group of angry white old men. Everybody's racist uncle, if you will. But even someone as egotistical as he is has got to know that come the general election, he's toast. He's doing it for the personal glory and publicity.


I agree 100%, he's an attention whore with an excellent bully pulpit he's not ready to give up yet. There's little cost and much benefit for him to run if he doesn't actually care about winning.

I used to think the best case scenario was he gets denied the GOP nomination and runs 3rd party, but I'm beginning to think that might be the worst case scenario. Not that he wins, but that it might be the right kick start for a viable 3rd party focused directly around racism, nationalism and regressive economic policies.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 08, 2016 1:43 am 
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It's still hard to believe that a person like Trump could get so much traction in modern day America.

His political strategy is somehow brilliant in a modern political climate. His strategy seems to be this:

1) Make whatever grand statements you want about anyone.
2) Everybody immediately points out all the ways you are wrong, drawing wrong conclusions from technically true statements, or just outright lying.
3) It's okay, because all the news stations have been talking about it so now it's the central issue of that person's campaign.

Donald Trump is literally the fox from Chicken Little. I don't think he's going to win but my only concern is that all of Hillary's baggage by crest just before election time. He may be smart enough, if he got the republican nomination, to focus on more centrist points in the general election. Ted Cruz is a generally awful person, but he's certainly not disqualified from running for president because he was born in Canada. The law explicitly states if your parents are American you are American, but the moment Cruz started approaching Trump's numbers, Trump managed to make his citizenship the central issue of Cruz' campaign.

Trump is on CNN ALL THE TIME. Every stupid unsubstantiated statement he makes, CNN talks about nothing except it for the next day. This is what makes me nervous that he could actually win, that all the news networks are basically campaigning for him and making the election basically a Trump yes or no.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2016 10:21 pm 
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Quote:
It's still hard to believe that a person like Trump could get so much traction in modern day America.

Maybe not. Maybe it's been a long time coming. I mean the US Republican Party has basically been an alliance of plutocrats, social conservatives, and er, bigots. There's also a small libertarian wing, but in reality they don't hold much sway. Their basic formula has been to claim that they are for family values and traditional America (e.g. the imaginary time before all those liberals, gays, minorities and immigrants ruined it) while giving big tax breaks to billionaires. The white working class has been hampered by lack of economic advancement for decades. All the numbers point to rising inequality. There's a lot of really scary health data showing that white people with high school educations or less are literally killing themselves out of desperation, opioid abuse, and alcoholism in alarming numbers. Meanwhile, aside from social security and now Obamacare (1), the US runs only bare-bones social welfare programmes that cater to the basically destitute. People who are just above the cut-off incomes still struggle, and they look down at the people who do get help and say "why are those people any more deserving than me?"

Sooner or later, those white working class people were gonna figure out that the Republican elites weren't really helping them. All this time the Democrats have been waiting for this moment, thinking that it if it finally happened, people would line up in droves to vote Democratic.

Nope. Ahahahaha. Nope.

It's really easy for demagogue like Trump to march into a situation like this and blame everything on the immigrants and the blacks and the Muslims. He says, "The Democrats only care about undeserving minorities and poor people, they laugh at you and call you rednecks, they are your enemy." And then he says things that embarrasses and pisses off the Republican establishment, while cackling with glee. And it works because when people are angry they're already looking for someone to blame.

(1) Although this is a mixed bag.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2016 7:27 am 
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And a lot of people hear from various "authorities" (such as goverment agencies, employers, banks ect.) that they can't live the live, they expected to live, for reasons, that are too complicated for them to understand or argue, and quite often the person who tells then, does not either, but is just a messanger who tells them "no", and they are powerless against that.

Then someone comes, who tells the auhtorities, to put their complex arguments, where the sun does not shine, and the authorities cringe and throw up their hands, but are not (at least immediatly) to put him in his place. I think the apeal of that is understandable, even though i am confident, that it all will end in tears.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2016 12:14 am 
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I truly believe that Trump will carry the GOP nomination. All the vaguely rational people (and I never thought I'd call Jeb! vaguely rational after his brother's 2 terms) have been pushed to the curb at this point leaving Trump and guys who are campaigning as Trump Lite (TM) like Ted Cruz and Ben Carson floating around. 2 weeks to Iowa and Trump is leading by unheard of levels in polls. This thing is going to happen, people!

I also believe that when the general election comes around, once independents and moderates of either stripe have a chance to get a good whiff of what "The Donald" is distributing, the election landslides to whoever wins the Dem nomination. Trump can win the nomination with the voter base he's built, but there is no way someone who's managed to lose pretty much the entire "colored" voting public and most moderates during the primary has any chance whatsoever in the general.

I want to hear idiots like Karl Rove try and spin that loss as "Our candidate wasn't a REAL conservative, we needed somebody to the right of THAT guy" again.

Whatever happens, this is the most entertaining the primaries on either side have been in recent memory.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2016 12:13 pm 
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I think you're right - the Donald is likely to be the nominee. Unless Cruz gets it, since he's just as nasty but slightly less buffoonish.

I don't know what would happen in a Clinton/Cruz contest. I get the feeling that Cruz isn't as radioactive as Trump simply because he doesn't get as much publicity. If so, he probably has more flexibility to make himself palatable to mainstream Republicans during the general election. Enough to become competitive against Clinton, I don't know.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2016 1:16 pm 
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I think anointing Hillary is premature, I think in the end she'll be the bridesmaid again, but point taken about Cruz.

What I can't for the life of me figure out where all the birthers are when it comes to Cruz. He wasn't born in the US, his mother's citizenship status when he was born is fuzzy at best... Unless *gasp* the birther movement around Obama was actually a race/political thing? The only thing I've heard about it lately came from Trump, and he's got his own reasons for that fetish.

Also, if there is one person everyone in the Senate hates more than Ted Cruz, I really couldn't name them. I don't mean the Dems, I mean the Republicans. This guy constantly buddy-screwed senators of his own party to the point where they truly hate him, primarily over his part in the last government shutdown that went so badly for everyone with an R behind their name besides Cruz. It could be a point in his favor in the primaries but when nobody wants to help him as the nominee it could get squidgy.

Also, can we call him Latino or not? Despite the last name this guy acts just as white and racist as Trump after the Donald plows the racist way ahead of him. I can't imagine him getting the Latino vote after some of the things he's said this primary season.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jan 17, 2016 11:03 pm 
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Kea wrote:
I think you're right - the Donald is likely to be the nominee. Unless Cruz gets it, since he's just as nasty but slightly less buffoonish.

I've really been starting to feel the argument that Cruz is not as dumb as he acts has merit. His gaffes are too measured. Considering how he has convinced so many that he is an outsider he may really be a master manipulator, the thought of which makes him that much scarier.

Quote:
I don't know what would happen in a Clinton/Cruz contest. I get the feeling that Cruz isn't as radioactive as Trump simply because he doesn't get as much publicity. If so, he probably has more flexibility to make himself palatable to mainstream Republicans during the general election. Enough to become competitive against Clinton, I don't know.

According to recent polling, at least in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders would do better against him and Trump than Clinton would.

baconbotsforever wrote:
I think anointing Hillary is premature, I think in the end she'll be the bridesmaid again, but point taken about Cruz.

Despite the aforementioned polling, the mainstream media and DNC are still pushing her very hard.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 4:31 am 
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I think even if the entire Senate hates Cruz's guts, if he became the nominee they would suck it up and endorse him. If the big Republican donors can stomach him (especially compared to Trump), the politicians will have no choice but to go along.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 11:46 pm 
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s.i.l. wrote:
Despite the aforementioned polling, the mainstream media and DNC are still pushing her very hard.


Which is precisely why she'll lose. The one similarity between Trump and Sanders is they're both enjoying a certain anti-establishment wave in American politics; the hatred makes them stronger. Also, nobody really trusts Hillary in the general public. I can't blame them, I sort of feel the same way. I think if it got her into the White House she would paint herself blue and hop on one foot naked on national TV. Ew, even I don't like the image I just conjured up. It's like Avatar with wrinkles...

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:28 am 
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I want to hear idiots like Karl Rove try and spin that loss as "Our candidate wasn't a REAL conservative, we needed somebody to the right of THAT guy" again.

They're doing that already. Conservatives are saying that Trump isn't a real conservative because he's too populist. He's hitched racism to white working class resentment, the "Get your Government Hands Off My Medicare" crowd. Establishment conservatives think Trump isn't pro-business enough because he doesn't want to slash Medicare and Social Security and he's not wedded to the principle of drowning government in the bathtub.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2016 1:02 pm 
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Hmm. On reading up a little more, it seems I was wrong about Trump vs. Cruz. The GOP political elites hate Cruz way more than Trump because Trump is an opportunist but Cruz is a sincere extremist. You can negotiate with or buy off an opportunist but a real live crazy person is just gonna Hulk Smash the establishment regardless of the consequences.

The Republican intellectuals (or what's left of them) hate Trump more than Cruz because they think Trump isn't a real conservative, but they're not the people who control the money.

I guess this means a Trump nomination is looking more and more likely.

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