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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 12:06 pm 
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Some more polling indicating that white people are getting bored of Trump's racist schtick. It's as though most of them have finally admitted he's full of crap.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 12:36 pm 
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It's not just a problem for Trump: his entire party still exists because they're the party of institutional racism. If they lose that they've got no national base worth discussing; disaffected white middle class voters won't come back at anything like the rate the overt racists will leave, and it will be a long time before they can sucker any other large group into trusting them enough to come flooding in. Besides, who would they appeal to? Incredibly selfish middle class whites aren't an electing majority either, and any other nominally culturally conservative group is going to be a while forgetting that the GOP has been the party of white supremacy for half a century. Well, except for incredibly selfish women, who may be a while forgetting that it's also the party of overt patriarchy and sexual discrimination.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 1:13 am 
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I don't think that white people, as a group, have suddenly become less racist in a matter of months, than decided that overt racism no longer appeals to them. I suspect that it was one thing to vote for "hug hur, blame immigrants for everything" when they thought their biggest problem was Obama letting trans people use toilets, it's another when the government is obviously botching a pandemic response. It's dawned on people that Trump is a one trick pony and he's got nothing to offer except internet poop-posting.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2020 8:00 pm 
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Not that anyone will accept blame for a much hyped rally which only filled 1/3 of the seats (6,200 out of 19,000), but apparently Trump got a smaller audience in that venue than the 2019 performance of the West Virginia touring company of La Traviata. Now yes, we are talking about a city noted for being full of effete elitists; but still.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2020 12:36 am 
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Even Oklahomans aren't reckless enough to go to an indoor rantfest during a pandemic. Hilarious prank the k-pop kids played on the Trump campaign by spamming them with fake registrations, though.

Apparently Trump spent more than 10 minutes talking about how yes, he really can walk down ramps and drink water, so there, so shut up you big meanie librul fake news!

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:32 am 
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Back in March Trump was briefed that Russia is paying the Taliban bounties to kill US soldiers. I guess they recall the Stinger missiles after all. So what did Trump do about it? Nothing. Whatever Putin's got on Trump, it's certainly paid for itself.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Wed Jul 01, 2020 1:57 pm 
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Not long ago there were three official responses from the Feds regarding police brutality. The Democrats in the house put forward a proposal which would reform the police (more or less). The Republicans in the Senate put forward a proposal that would protect the police from reform unless they really, really embarrassed the Republicans in the Senate. Trump signed an executive order that asked the cops to please stop embarrassing the Republicans, but only if they felt like it. It seems that this was at the advice of Jared Kushner, who felt that a fig leaf of pretending to care would be a good idea.

Apparently that was a bridge too far for Trump. He's decided (in the words of one of his confidants): "No more of Jared's woke s***." Indeed. It seems to be that you have to have an interesting view of the world to describe a professional racist slumlord like Jared as 'woke'. But this is the president who is threatening to veto the defense budget if it removes confederate names from Federal property, so I suppose he does have that interesting view.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2020 11:01 am 
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Thoughts thunk while thinking...it occurred to me that a really stupid political tactic going back nearly a hundred years might actually work now. Bit of background:

In 1932 the largest voting bloc in Germany was the left. They would have won the election in July if they had cared to; but the German Communists (the Bernie Bros of the day) were under orders from Stalin to split the left and let the Nazis win. The idea was 'after Hitler, our turn'; the Leader would do such a bad job that the radicalized German workers would fall into the Communists hands and they would take power. Needless to say it didn't work; the handful of surviving Communists only ever took power in a rump state in the east at the gentle behest of the Red Army.

Wander across the Atlantic, and you see the far left trying the same thing over and over since the 70s; voting for ever more openly corrupt and fascistic Republican candidates with the direct intent of seeing them screw things up so badly that the now radicalized electorate would sweep in a far-left Democrat. A quick glance at the list of presidents since Reagan would not see anyone to the left of Nelson Rockefeller, so apparently it hasn't worked out much better locally than it did in Germany.

Enter Trump. He took over a Republican Party that now literally can not survive without the voters who would cheerfully join the Ku Klux Klan by openly playing directly to the murderous racism and selfishness of those voters. The morons of the far left were thrilled; another horrible right winger to betray the country to because this time it would work, right?

Oddly, and sadly, enough they may finally be right: Trump has done so much damage, been so overtly corrupt, killed so many people, so blatantly stripped the pretense of respect for the law from the GOP, and so openly made his party espouse hard racism that the Democrats, who will probably now take power, will be forced (in large part all unwilling) to adopt actual significantly left of center policies to govern on. After Trump, Us may just do a significantly better job of pushing America to the left than helping Clinton win ever would have. Sucks to be those hundreds of thousands already dead or soon to die, but omelettes and eggs and so forth.

I'm wondering if we're going to see those clowns trying to take a victory lap should the Democrats sweep the elections in November. I suspect some of them will be tempted.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 13, 2020 7:03 am 
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I think eventually a leftward shift of the democratic party would have happened anyway. Sanders strong showing in 2016 would have made the left wing of the democratic party feel empowered anyway. They could have turned dissatisfaction with a Clinton administration to better primary results in 2018 and in 2020 (other then the presidental primary). I guess electebility would have been less of a concern to democratic primary voters in that case.

That could also have scared the establishment into giving them scraps.

IMO an unpopular establishment democrat president would be the ideal enviroment for the left wing of the democrat party.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Fri Jul 17, 2020 7:16 am 
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Isn't this essentially like Americans getting sick of Bush, but bigger and faster? It's hard to remember now but Bush was pretty bad. He started 2 wars, botched a natural disaster, sleepwalked into a massive economic crisis.

And American politics has been getting increasingly polarized, so that to Republicans, Obama was as bad as Bush seemed to Democrats. I mean they basically thought that Clinton would be the apocalypse.

I do not expect Biden to be a transformative president. He's going to be 78, and he'll probably only last one term. And I can easily see the pendulum swinging back again after him.

The American far left have been detached from reality for as long as I can remember. They're more interested in ideological purity and contrarianism than actual real world accomplishments. (There's even a small contingent of them that's so dedicated to anti-American imperialism that they'll lend knee-jerk support to any regime that opposes the US, no matter how awful).

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Sat Jul 18, 2020 12:16 am 
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Passiflora wrote:
Isn't this essentially like Americans getting sick of Bush, but bigger and faster? It's hard to remember now but Bush was pretty bad. He started 2 wars, botched a natural disaster, sleepwalked into a massive economic crisis.


This feels really different. Yes, we all hated Bush and couldn't believe he got re-elected, but he was a relatively conventional president. He was also a decent-enough guy who happened to be the easily led pawn of a dangerous, but competent puppet-master.

Trump has pushed things so far, and broken so many of the conventions of American politics, that things can't be the same after him as they were before. This is a big breaking decision point for America, and while things could go either direction, they can't go back to the old normal. At least, that's how I see it from the inside. He's forcing us to either repudiate what he stands for or embrace it.

That's a lot of why Black Lives Matter got so big. People had to decide to either be openly racist or anti-racist. No more polite, under-the-radar discrimination.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2020 12:57 am 
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Trump feels different because he is so personally repellent, but most of the (non-pandemic) damage he has done or attempted to do was carried out by so-called "normal" Republicans. I think President Pence, Rubio or Cruz would've done about 65% of the same things but made them sound respectable.

Shoddy attempt to repeal Obamacare without a replacement - was done by Republicans in Congress with barely any input from Trump. Only thwarted by John McCain.

Tax cuts for the rich - That was all conventional Republicans.

Irresponsible environmental deregulation - Scott Pruitt did that.

Gratuitously racist immigration policies - Trump got crowds worked up about it, but it was what people like Jeff Sessions had wanted to do for years.

Trump is an incompetent chaos monkey, so anything that did get done was done by the so-called normal Republican hacks and ideologues who worked for him. A more conventional Republican president would have had a less erratic foreign policy, but they also might have started another war in the Middle East by now if people like John Bolton had been listened to.

I think it was only in the disastrous pandemic response that Trump's personal qualities of ignorance, paranoia, incompetence, corruption, clientelism and pig-headedness actually made a big difference. I mean, I doubt Bush would've been much good based on his mishandling of Katrina, but he did not do as much damage to the federal bureaucracies as Trump has done.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2020 5:02 am 
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Previous presidents gave the impression, that they are commited to follow conventions and procedures. Trump believes he has been elected absolute dictator and gets cranky, when told, that this is not the case. I think that is a big difference in public perception.

Now i guess if Trump gets thouroughly routed in the election, i think chances are good, that you get soon to something close to the status quo ante. The etablishment of both parties will communicate, that the lesson is "Wild populism does not work" and it will be some time until the Trump base finds someone else to unite behind.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2020 11:07 am 
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That's going to be a really high bar to clear for the GOP for two reasons. One, there's already a large crowd of politicians who see trumplike pandering to the lowest common 65% of the party as the route to personal profit and power; and they're not going anywhere no matter what happens to Trump.

Second, Trump's racist and ignorant base is not going to go back into the closet any time soon. They know the party can't survive without them, and they see no reason not to be openly acknowledged as the majority of the party that they are. Any serious effort to muzzle the candidates pandering to them would simply alienate them, and that easily could be the immediate end of the GOP.

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 Post subject: Re: Trump.
 Post Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2020 2:04 pm 
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Somewhat interesting in a state of the race sort of way: nobody really cares about Biden. A fifth of Trump's backers are primarily interested in defeating Biden, and a quarter of Biden's supporters are primarily interested in electing Biden. Almost everyone else is primarily interested in electing or defeating Trump. Basically, the election that even Trump has quietly acknowledged that he and his party can't possibly win (without massive cheating, of course) is exactly the one we've got: a referendum on Trump.

And in passing, Biden is up over 50% and has been for a while. Trump somehow has to completely run the rest of the table to have a prayer of being saved by the Red Wall in the Electoral College; but even against Clinton, with Comey's help, he could only get 2/3 of them. So basically, get ready to watch him try to shut down the USPS in October while his party tries to sneak Russian hackers into various state electoral offices.

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