Donald Trump for President Thread

[Groucho]

anyone else think that voting trump in is the american people using their voice?

compared to england where we all accept things? Leaving the EU might not even take place if parliament don't let it apparently which makes that a whole storm in a tea cup by itself.

Protest vote? Perhaps.

Scary though.

 

[degsy]

How has it been doing that Dave?

I would hazard that in both countries there is a fairly substantial portion of none minority section of the country, spread across geographical, age, political beliefs, education and gender, the only thing they may have in common is they are not too well off.
They may think, I won't say do think, but being one of these 'silent minority within the majority' Both results came as no surprise to me.

Back in the day it was 'simple' Labour was for the workers, the Tories weren't, The liberals, a throw back to Edwardian times, were for both workers and landowners strangely enough, in the countryside like Devon and such.

It seems to me that somewhere along the line Labour ( and by labour I mean the labour of Wilson ) stopped being the party of the Employed majority and became the party of the minorities (employed or not).
The Tories are, as ever, still for themselves
The Liberals don't exist any more
and the Lib Dems shouldn't
#disenfranchised

 

[Boss_Blue]

Two questions for you Dave.

1) When has life been better for the poor in Britain and America than it is today?
2) What will Trump and/or Brexit do to help the poor in the two countries?

1) depends on your definition of relative poverty

2) Christ only knows

 

[kev]

Hi Kev, that's a confirmed load of bull. He never actually said that

"99% of quotes on the internet are made up"

*Abraham Lincoln 1863

 

[Ashtonian]

Protest vote? Perhaps.

Scary though.

Well yeah, to vote for trump simply to stick their middle finger (being america) up to the establishment and use their collective power to do something rather than say nothing?

Whereas here we have just seen a new prime minister elected without a single vote cast from the public. So whatever May does between now and the next election is completely unhindered by public promise. With us as a country, have done or said nothing to go against that, and anyone who dares be different to the norm (corbyn) is still attacked by us!

 

[Prevenger17]

This just in from Trump HQ...
View attachment 30954

Uh oh

 

[orly]

1) depends on your definition of relative poverty

2) Christ only knows

Absolutely.

We are now in completely unknown waters. What America could have voted for last night was a tacit acceptance that the current way of doing this could be allowed to continue for 2 years, 4 years, 8 years. But they didn't.

What should be more scary is not that this is a rise in bigotry, fascism, sexism etc. but that even the most ordinary people are so fed up with it all that they are willing to take a monstrous gamble for change.

"Make American Great Again". To date, I've never really met an American who didn't in their hearts really actually love the country. But this phrase was a massive departure from the Reagan doctrine, that America had a divine right and purpose in the world. It was an acceptance that actually, things are pretty turgid, and we can either all hide away from it or get very messy as we work towards change. If he still has the energy someone like Bernie Sanders is going to be very difficult to beat next time round.

 

[degsy]

5s on betfair last night, and well above even money for +74.5

wonder what you could've got for the treble, Leicester, brexit, Trump

 

[Bruce Wayne]

I know that this was directed to Dave, but the answer is (at least for the UK):

1) 1962 - 1997
2) Themselves? Very little. Because of the changes that those victories will force on their opponents? Far more.

Could you explain more how you come to that? It seems life is infinitely better. In the 60s a tiny proportion of the country went to university compared to now. Heck, many folks still had outdoor loos in the 60s, and the concept of going on foreign holidays or having the entire worlds content freely available at your finger tips would have been a fantasy.

The 70s we couldn't even keep the power on, and few households had the kind of white goods we regard as basic these days, much less the televisions, smartphones and so on that are ubiquitous today.

You could go on throughout that period. Heck, I'd argue that even the Internet and smartphones on their own make 2016 much better than 1997.

Regarding your 2nd point, it does suppose that we will recover from this, and it's a temporary jolt to the system and a degree of normality returns in a few years time. I'm not so sure. Brexit for instance isn't going to be reversed any time soon, so that's about as permanent a change as we'll get. I worry that the rhetoric and lack of basic honesty in recent campaigns is also now normalised and therefore a feature of political discourse, especially as people seem to get elected despite it. I mean when Trump's last debate was fact checked, it revealed that around 90% of what he says was a lie. It's incredible.

 

[mezzrow]

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility.

But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history.

A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

Amazon product ASIN 0062300547

 

[chrissyjack]

Where has this fella actually come from ? I know he's a businessman and stuff. Did he wake up one morning and think " I know, I'll run for the presidency "

 

[Boss_Blue]

This just in from Trump HQ...
View attachment 30954

*unzips






What?

 

[neil999]

NOAM CHOMSKY: "What do you think about the antics of Donald Trump, in tangent to your earlier idea about American exceptionalism?"

Well, actually, I think we should recognize that the other candidates are not that different. I mean, if you take a look at—just take a look at their views. You know, they tell you their views, and they’re astonishing. So just to keep to Iran, a couple of weeks ago, the two front-runners—they’re not the front-runners any longer—were Jeb Bush and Scott Walker. And they differed on Iran. Walker said we have to bomb Iran; when he gets elected, they’re going to bomb Iran immediately, the day he’s elected. Bush was a little—you know, he’s more serious: He said he’s going to wait 'til the first Cabinet meeting, and then they'll bomb Iran. I mean, this is just off the spectrum of not only international opinion, but even relative sanity.This is—I think Ornstein and Mann are correct: It’s a radical insurgency; it’s not a political party. You can tell that even by the votes. I mean, any issue of any complexity is going to have some diversity of opinion. But when you get a unanimous vote to kill the Iranian deal or the Affordable Care Act or whatever the next thing may be, you know you’re not dealing with a political party.It’s an interesting question why that’s true. I think what’s actually happened is that during the whole so-called neoliberal period, last generation, both political parties have drifted to the right. Today’s Democrats are what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just drifted off the spectrum. They’re so committed to extreme wealth and power that they cannot get votes, can’t get votes by presenting those positions. So what has happened is that they’ve mobilized sectors of the population that have been around for a long time. It is a pretty exceptional country in many ways. One is it’s extremely religious. It’s one of the most extreme fundamentalist countries in the world. And by now, I suspect the majority of the base of the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, extremists, not—they’re a mixture, but these are the extremist ones, nativists who are afraid that, you know, "they are taking our white Anglo-Saxon country away from us," people who have to have guns when they go into Starbucks because, who knows, they might get killed by an Islamic terrorist and so on. I mean, all of that is part of the country, and it goes back to colonial days. There are real roots to it. But these have not been an organized political force in the past. They are now. That’s the base of the Republican Party. And you see it in the primaries. So, yeah, Trump is maybe comic relief, but it’s just a—it’s not that different from the mainstream, which I think is more important.

Chomsky, 22/09/15

great read that mate, cheers

the religious stuff is deeply troubling...makes me thankful that at least it wasnt ted cruz

 

[Pienaar's gloves]

"Choice of saviour"

So by that statement, you'd have seen Clinton as the lesser of two evils.

Tell us again how Obama was hamstrung for 8 years and in no way created a climate whereby Donald J. F'in Trump has just become President.

You won't, you'll retreat to a Guardian best of 10 list of go-to obfuscation because you've allowed yourself, as you've already admitted, to be blinded by Twitter and memes.

I'd like to see this, I don't really tweet.

 

[tommye]

Uh oh