President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Outing alert: @The Big Ragu wrote a book:

THE COMPLACENT CLASS by Tyler Cowen | Kirkus Reviews

 

Where the fuck is Old Tony anyway? Don't tell me you lot got another one of my boys banned.

 

Are you kidding? They're in the drivers seat like nobody ever has been before.

 

Minnesota is too Canadian for Canada.

 

Star Man-
This is a season for surprises.
It's a rejection of what the party has turned into post-Reagan.
Nobody ever needed a good firing like Paul Ryan does, and the yam is the man to do it.

 

LOL

 

Leadership is only partly to blame. The real problem is guys like McCarthy, who is actually cut from the pragmatic cloth of conservatism, sold their political souls to the devil in order to take back the House in 2010. They recruited the Tea Party lunatics hoping they would fall in line to get shit done against Obama. What we got was a shitshow of brinksmanship politics because the Tea Party wouldn't listen to the guys who'd been there before. It's time to tell the lunatic fringe to go to hell, work with conservative Democrats and pass things to get us moving forward and keep Trump--who the Republican establishment doesn't trust--in check. Doubt that will happen as we've seen Ryan kissing the ring and McConell being nothing more than the Jon Stewart characture of him and McCarthy being more concerned with keeping his majority than giving a damn about his own Bakersfield constituency because there is no one in Kern County, CA who is in a position of influence brave enough to tell him no.

 

FWIW, one way or another this is going to be the Republican Party's last stand.
Either they do a great job, turn the country around, and turn people to their way of thinking to ensure not only a viable but a strong party going forward ...
OR they succumb to their infighting, Trump is as bad and ineffective a leader as everyone feared, and they run this thing into the ground. In which case, there is no coming back. The Republicans had total control and they blew it, and they are exposed and done. Democrats will galvanize around their failures and the Republicans will splinter at best, disintegrate at worst.
There's not much middle ground, and there sure as hell aren't any excuses.
It's a big moment for the Democrats, too. If the Republicans are effective, then their ideas and agenda are repudiated and exposed. If the Republicans are abysmal, the Democrats will crawl out of the grave like Dracula in 2018 and 2020 and might take over as the dominant party for the next 30 years.

 

The question is going to be how much longer before Texas has enough Hispanic voters to turn the state purple. If California, New York and Texas all go blue it's game over for the Republicans in the presidency. The problem is Dems need to get back to running an attractive JFK, young charmer like Bill Clinton and a charasmatic Obama. The Democrats need to get back to inspiring the base to vote rather than trying to tell them they have no other choice. This can happen if social gains over the last four years start getting rolled back and Millennials starting to throw out boomers from power and influence.

I hope all that happens in the GOP is a fracture between the Tea Party and the establishment. Anything more than that could spell some scary things in terms of which the kinds of conservative candidates start running for office and get serious support.

 

Spartan-
The Democrat Party is older than the Republican Party has ever been accused of being.

 

If the GOP sticks to tradition, it's all Halliburton, all the time.

 

Batman-
We independents will just wait for the Trumptards to mistake his election as a mandate to fuck everyone over, then clean all you bats out of the attic in '20.
For good.