Trump cheats at golf - the ONE and ONLY politics thread

She was an elitist candidate in a year of populism. I think it is that simple.

The only reason it was close is that he is a doofus and a bullshit artist. But he had a populist message that appealed to gullible, disaffected people, and enough of them grasped onto his bullshit to make him president. They weren't voting for him the person obviously, as much as they were voting against the same corrupt elitists who have been ruling for decades and seemed to have disdain for the people they were actually ruling. I think that "basket of deplorables" tape summed it up perfectly.

I have watched this election feeling ridiculously sad, and at the same time saying over and over again that "America is getting what it deserves." In an almost gleeful way (sadly), because I have seen the future unfolding in slow motion for the last 2 decades, and I really do think it was all avoidable if people weren't so dumb.

I half wanted her to win, even though I despise her and all of the corruption that comes with her, because America was going to be hit with a serious debt crisis and forced deleveraging very soon. Regardless of who was president. And people tend to blame the person sitting there at the moment when shit hits the fan. I wanted her to get that blame, I guess, because she is a giant ball of corruption, and because she was part of the idiocy that created the mess we are in over the last several decades.

Instead, we get a bullshit artist and a jerk as president. Just a terrible person. So it really isn't any better, unfortunately. The crazy thing is that I suspect that his idea of what a president does is a giant cartoon, and with the honeymoon period he is going to get, we have a good chance to see a run up of wasteful spending in the face of the mess he is inheriting. He may as well be Bernie Sanders, I suspect, once he gets in there. What we have needed all along, though, was someone with the guts to allow a deleveraging to happen -- and for people to understand that there are no magic wands. In fact, every magic wand they have been promised and they voted for, actually led to the type of government that is slowly destroying the country.

The person I am talking about -- who starts to unwind the mess -- can never get elected president, of course. And even if he or she was elected, it would come with immediate pain (that will lead to what we need in the long run to ACTUALLY fix things). So instead we have gotten more and more debt as an answer to a debt problem that has been built over decades, and most importantly (and what people don't get) massive monetization of that debt to keep it all going -- even as our economy slipped into a depression after 2008 because we effectively reached our limit.

Our election is about whoever slings the best bullshit to match the mood of the gullible masses, whether it is "Yes we can," . ... or "Make America great again" when the last line of bullshit they bought leaves them even more disaffected. That is what happened. The depression we are now in, got a lot of working class people who feel fucked over to grasp onto a clown as the new answer. The only legit thing that clown COULD do if he had a clue (and he doesn't) is allow a lot of pain to happen so we can begin to heal a giant mess. We have lived a fantasy for a long time, and there is a price to pay for that -- from entitlements to the rest of the trillions to all of the monetization of debt that has created a mountain of PRIVATE debt, there needs to be a serious deleveraging and defaults. That is the cure. But people won't want the reality that entails and Trump won on a message of "fixing" it. So he will make some lame attempts at more of the same and ultimately preside over a disaster -- his rhetoric has been all over the place. But he isn't going to be that much different, if I am right about that (and I have no clue). It amounts to slapping bandaids over tumors. Those tumors have gotten big -- and that was the reality whoever got elected was facing. I suspect people won't look back over several decades, when 98 precent of a disaster was sowed, to really understand the cause of their problems.