Current Affairs Donald Trump POS: Judgement cometh and that right soon

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abelard said:
I'm saying that he pushed the bounds of racial demagoguery - exactly as successive Republican Presidents have done before him.

Anyone who thinks Trump is something new and shocking has not been paying close enough attention. It stems from a misunderstanding about the actual nature and history of the United States - not the prevailing West Wing/George Washington and the Cherry Tree PR nonsense. Read about George Wallace, for example. Or look up Reagan's campaign speeches - or how he and Nixon were regarded in polite society before taking office. Republican presidents have always succeeded by demonstrably shocking "decent" opinion, ever since Nixon. Trump is merely the latest manifestation of a movement.
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well that's pretty patronizing.
I disagree, I think Trump is something different to what went before.
 
abelard said:
Racial demagoguery has been essential to Republican success since Nixon (and to Democrat success until Kennedy). It's simply bad history to think this begins with Trump. All he's done is turn up the volume, even louder than Nixon and Reagan turned it up before him.

Toward the end, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan were all arguably just as mentally unstable - but the media treated each of them with far greater reverence, and they didn't have twitter. There is nothing Trump has said which you can't also more or less also find listening to the Nixon tapes.

Trump is no doubt up to his eyeballs in shady Russian real-estate financing, but his apparent reverence for Putin is clearly overblown, if not invented. What has substantially changed in US-Russian relations?

On foreign policy (as opposed to on twitter), "the blob," as the Obama team used to call it, has been granted everything it could ever want and then some.
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Yes there are some similarities to historical presidents (especially Nixon) but your question was "what are the outrages Trump has committed so far which a generic Republican president wouldn't also have done?" and I took that to mean what would have happened now in 2017 if some other Republican than Trump had been elected rather than comparing what Trump has done that other presidents have done that were just hidden by the conventions of the times.

Whilst the other Republican primary runners each had personal flaws none of them have anywhere close to the same emotional/mental instability as Trump, in particular I can't see any of them undermining their own Cabinet members in the manner Trump has.

I think that increase in the volume of racial demagoguery is substantial and it doesn't appear to just be a cynical use of an undercurrent that has existed in the Republican party - with Charlottesville comments added to those on Curiel/Kahns/Puerto Ricans/NFL players/Central Park 5 etc there is ample evidence that Trump is himself racist. I don't think there is anything equivalent in the statements or actions of the Bushes/McCain/Romney/Cruz/Rubio/Kasich.

Trump has often praised authoritarian rulers and his election team was quite clearly willing to work Putin in a way I couldn't imagine any other campaign doing. I agree the "blob" has overpowered him on relations with Russia now he has been elected but I think that is largely because Trump isn't very effective at getting policy implemented rather than his personal desires. There are certainly good indications he wanted to drop sanctions, give compounds back and indeed he gave sensitive security information to the Russians.
 
All of the internal US stuff is utterly lost on me, (although I did decode that DHS is the Dept for Homeland Security. I think).

But to an observer, it seems to me that Trump is acting like the ego maniac he was as a powerful business man; snaps his fingers, doesnt like the result, fire the mandarin he hired, starts again.

No accountability, no care outside his own world, the exact opposite of the more collegiate approach politicians of any hue, in any proper democracy, have to use.

Probably why he likes Putin.

Or I might be wrong.
 
LinekersLegs said:
Yes there are some similarities to historical presidents (especially Nixon) but your question was "what are the outrages Trump has committed so far which a generic Republican president wouldn't also have done?" and I took that to mean what would have happened now in 2017 if some other Republican than Trump had been elected rather than comparing what Trump has done that other presidents have done that were just hidden by the conventions of the times.

Whilst the other Republican primary runners each had personal flaws none of them have anywhere close to the same emotional/mental instability as Trump, in particular I can't see any of them undermining their own Cabinet members in the manner Trump has.

I think that increase in the volume of racial demagoguery is substantial and it doesn't appear to just be a cynical use of an undercurrent that has existed in the Republican party - with Charlottesville comments added to those on Curiel/Kahns/Puerto Ricans/NFL players/Central Park 5 etc there is ample evidence that Trump is himself racist. I don't think there is anything equivalent in the statements or actions of the Bushes/McCain/Romney/Cruz/Rubio/Kasich.

Trump has often praised authoritarian rulers and his election team was quite clearly willing to work Putin in a way I couldn't imagine any other campaign doing. I agree the "blob" has overpowered him on relations with Russia now he has been elected but I think that is largely because Trump isn't very effective at getting policy implemented rather than his personal desires. There are certainly good indications he wanted to drop sanctions, give compounds back and indeed he gave sensitive security information to the Russians.
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Don’t forget though, he’s not a politician, he’s a businessman with an enormous ego.......
 
roydo said:
All of the internal US stuff is utterly lost on me, (although I did decode that DHS is the Dept for Homeland Security. I think).

But to an observer, it seems to me that Trump is acting like the ego maniac he was as a powerful business man; snaps his fingers, doesnt like the result, fire the mandarin he hired, starts again.

No accountability, no care outside his own world, the exact opposite of the more collegiate approach politicians of any hue, in any proper democracy, have to use.

Probably why he likes Putin.

Or I might be wrong.
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Exactly......we posted similar points.......
 
LinekersLegs said:
Yes there are some similarities to historical presidents (especially Nixon) but your question was "what are the outrages Trump has committed so far which a generic Republican president wouldn't also have done?" and I took that to mean what would have happened now in 2017 if some other Republican than Trump had been elected rather than comparing what Trump has done that other presidents have done that were just hidden by the conventions of the times.

Whilst the other Republican primary runners each had personal flaws none of them have anywhere close to the same emotional/mental instability as Trump, in particular I can't see any of them undermining their own Cabinet members in the manner Trump has.

I think that increase in the volume of racial demagoguery is substantial and it doesn't appear to just be a cynical use of an undercurrent that has existed in the Republican party - with Charlottesville comments added to those on Curiel/Kahns/Puerto Ricans/NFL players/Central Park 5 etc there is ample evidence that Trump is himself racist. I don't think there is anything equivalent in the statements or actions of the Bushes/McCain/Romney/Cruz/Rubio/Kasich.

Trump has often praised authoritarian rulers and his election team was quite clearly willing to work Putin in a way I couldn't imagine any other campaign doing. I agree the "blob" has overpowered him on relations with Russia now he has been elected but I think that is largely because Trump isn't very effective at getting policy implemented rather than his personal desires. There are certainly good indications he wanted to drop sanctions, give compounds back and indeed he gave sensitive security information to the Russians.
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Fair enough - that's quite thoughtful. Lavishing praise on authoritarian leaders is routine for the American political class. Working behind the scenes with authoritarian leaders who are ostensible enemies is less common, but hardly unprecedented. Whatever happened between Trump and Russia is likely not even worth mentioning compared with the optics of Iran-Contra, for example. My point is that Trump is different more in style than substance (as indeed were most of his predecessors before becoming 'normalized' ex post facto). And I think that each of the leading Republicans would have (and in fact have) capitalized on the same "culture" issues as Trump - the NFL, the Muslim ban, anti-Black Lives Matter or Antifa - only with slightly more subtlety and decorum. The cynicism and intent is all there though. And I expect the 2018 midterms will be instructive in this regard. The Central Park 5? I mean, off the top of my head, what about Bush's Willie Horton ad? I'm beginning to think people really don't remember very much about what Ronald Reagan once meant (he once declared, after the Hearst kidnappers demanded the provision of soup kitchens for the poor: "We can only hope that there is an outbreak of botulism"). Trump is unique only in he delivers the same basic message but with less refinement (though that was also true at one time about his predecessors).

All I'm trying to suggest is that it is a bad political mistake to think of Trump as uniquely evil, or as the source, rather than just a reflection, of the problem in American politics.
 
abelard said:
Fair enough - that's quite thoughtful. Lavishing praise on authoritarian leaders is routine for the American political class. Working behind the scenes with authoritarian leaders who are ostensible enemies is less common, but hardly unprecedented. Whatever happened between Trump and Russia is likely not even worth mentioning compared with the optics of Iran-Contra, for example. My point is that Trump is different more in style than substance (as indeed were most of his predecessors before becoming 'normalized' ex post facto). And I think that each of the leading Republicans would have (and in fact have) capitalized on the same "culture" issues as Trump - the NFL, the Muslim ban, anti-Black Lives Matter or Antifa - only with slightly more subtlety and decorum. The cynicism and intent is all there though. And I expect the 2018 midterms will be instructive in this regard. The Central Park 5? I mean, off the top of my head, what about Bush's Willie Horton ad? I'm beginning to think people really don't remember very much about what Ronald Reagan once meant (he once declared, after the Hearst kidnappers demanded the provision of soup kitchens for the poor: "We can only hope that there is an outbreak of botulism"). Trump is unique only in he delivers the same basic message but with less refinement (though that was also true at one time about his predecessors).

All I'm trying to suggest is that it is a bad political mistake to think of Trump as uniquely evil, or as the source, rather than just a reflection, of the problem in American politics.
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Agree with the bolded bit, Trump has certainly articulated thoughts that were already there and unfortunately they will probably be an even bigger problem going forward - Roy Moore in Alabama is in many ways even more explicit on the cultural issues.

We'll have to agree to disagree though that it is all "style over substance" - in particular I find Trump's instability uniquely disturbing, I genuinely could see him ordering the ripping up of a trade deal or launching a military attack in a fit of emotional pique due to a personal slight.
 
LinekersLegs said:
I genuinely could see him ordering the ripping up a trade deal or launching a military attack in a fit of emotional pique due to a personal slight.
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Pretty much nailed on that he would do at least one of those judging by what I read.

But can he actually just do that? Like just on his say so?
 
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