President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

I will stipulate that nothing Trump does will ever lose his core voters, who support him because he's a racist authoritarian and that's what they want, to feel like they are the bosses of nonwhites. But there were also plenty of Trump voters who voted against the status quo and who believed his insane policy promises. Any President becomes the status quo. It happened to Obama, it will happen to Trump. My guess is not too much will happen between now and 2020 that'll make those voters happier with existing conditions.

 

And I recognize that the other reason YF frustrates people is his reliance on But-Look-What-The-Clintons-Did-ism.

 

I know what you meant, but that grain of truth is very tiny and that isn't why he frustrates people. It is the mass of hypocrisy and lies that surround it.

 

Who was the first player to sign a USFL contract?

 

And Leon is looking larger and larger.

 

I stand by my assessment.

I actually decided to take a few months off from posting here just to be able to assess the inter-personal dynamics from a distance. It really gave me some clarity, and I'm glad I made the decision. I'm pretty well-positioned now, I believe, to weigh in on such things. With all due respect, it's more difficult when you're in the thick of it.

 

Some of us are just that pretty.

 

I was having this discussion with a church friend recently: The reason legalism can be attractive in the church is how it levels the relational playing field; You give people some authoritative autocrat to tell them how this works or that works - even if that autocrat appears to know very little about scripture - and you'll get more followers than you think. People are always looking for organizing purposes - principles, passions, causes, even a person. There was this string of churches on the West Coast that, while successful for two decades, were run like the mob, and thousands just walked into it, fell for it, for years on end, in part because the dude running it was such an asshole, so irreverent - and such a liar - that people saw it as authentic.

So it goes with Trump.

 

What an interesting choice that you came back from your self-imposed three-month siesta exactly three months to the day it began. Good choice.

 

O2P knows about being in the thick of it.

 

Nothing would make me happier than for McConnell to be gone, be it a medical retirement or a legal entanglement. He's the responsible for the worst of the congressional obstruction. I don't think anyone else would have even considered not allowing the Garland nomination to go forward, let alone made it happen the way it did. The difference is that I've heard nothing, no speculation from unnamed "sources", no twitter chatter, nothing, that leads me to believe that he's doing anything more than cynically using Trump and riding him as far as he'll go before imploding. That is not true of Ryan, there is rumored to be tape on him. "People are talking".

I would add that Ryan fucking over twenty million people's healthcare so that he can give a big tax cut to the very richest is vile and odious.

Of course any and all of that speculation could be anywhere on the scale from dead accurate (if from an unorthodox source) to close to correct to inaccurate to completely fabricated bullshit. All of it is speculation from people who are sticking the puzzle pieces together, trying to find the bits that fit. Some of them are pretty good and have skills and connections that are useful, and some are conspiracy nuts who are a drag on the process. I'm watching it scroll by and trying to identify who was accurate, who made specific predictions that paid off, etc. I try to set aside my own prejudices and desires in doing so, with varying degrees of success.