President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

It will be fascinating to see how many Americans turn out to vote in the next 4 years. If this does not motivate people to vote, I give up.

 

If Hillary Clinton Had Won


Things are really different on Earth 2! Merrick Garland is on the Supreme Court instead of Neil Gorsuch. Clinton didn’t enact a “travel ban.” The United States didn’t withdraw from the Paris climate accord. Kellyanne Conway has a CNN show.

 

If he scores a major foreign policy success, like maybe getting NK to ratching down.

Plus, I think just as the polling and media were wrong leading to Nov 8th, there is a major disconnect with what the media blasts and approval ratings say versus on the ground reality. I firmly believe there's going to be a significant number of people who won't admit to pollsters that they support him or voted/will vote, thus, you should probably add 5 to 10 points in his polling.

And what BTE just said.

Combined with just how vicious the press has been. People shouldn't forget that a lot of Americans root for the underdog in sports and politics.

I knew Trump was a complete political rookie and, it goes without saying, a very unpolished politician. I was hoping some of the craziness would settle down after a month or two in office and am a bit dismayed at where we are after six months. But the GOP didn't exactly embrace him, and that's not only affecting getting legislative stuff done, but I figured he was going to have trouble building an effective Cabinet and executive branch team for awhile.

Anyway, I'm just saying, despite the bizarre zoo, it would be worth being unconventional and thinking the opposite of what you get bombarded with on a daily basis. Somehow, there's a hell of a lot of a Teflon around this Don.

VB

 

Thankfully that didn't happen.

 

You know what's funny? Trump won 63 million votes, and you all think that you know which of your friends voted for Clinton and which voted for Trump.

You know what? A lot of people you think voted for Clinton actually voted for Trump -- including folks here.

 

I agree with this.

 

How has the press been "vicious"? It may just seem that way because of the person/subjects they are having to cover.

 

Unrelenting, non-stop. It's their job, but there is a huge difference in this day and age compared to when I was young and stupid during Watergate.

Back then, news wasn't on 24 hours a day. It was more fact-based, investigative journalism and not 24 hours of some facts with a lot of talking heads spouting off editorial opinion to cram the remainder of the 24 hours full.

I think this works against the Dems, and is part of the reason DJT won.

 

Do you seriously think that Democratic, independent, and moderate voters won't show up in greater numbers to cast a vote against Trump? I can't help but think that at this point there are an awful lot of "Anyone but Trump" voters, and I don't see any reason to believe that their numbers won't continue to grow. I think that they're going to outnumber the "Anyone but Hillary" voters in the last election.

 

I scrolled through my Facebook friends and counted the ones I'd be willing to wager voted for Clinton last November. Came in right around 8 percent.

 

I really don't know anymore. In the past? Yes. Now? I have no idea. People are cynical and they are unengaged. And the voter blocs Democrats rely on are notoriously unreliable. Add in the barriers to voting Republican-held states can put up, the splintering of the left into business-friendly centrist and democratic socialist camps and the fact that Trump can put together a coalition of voters based on how recognizable and known he is and feed it with a Twitter feed, I'm not confident at all.

He might be the first candidate who can be loathed by a good majority of Americans, disliked by his own party and still be surgical enough to pull out a re-election bid.

George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012 proved that you don't have to be flying high to stay in office. You just need the apparatus, have good enough messaging and/or you need to fling enough dirt at the competitor to hold onto the Presidency. While we as a country like the new product, somehow we become very conservative and shy about ousting a sitting president. Presidents have become so good at creating cliffhanger issues that they convince us need to be completed. Bush had his war on terrorism and really, really framed Kerry in a light I didn't think possible: the soldier as unpatriotic. Obama's "Forward" message was impeccable. It framed Romney in the worst possible light (and somehow made a devout man with a rather spotless business record seem sleezy and underhanded in a way I also didn't think possible) and drew at the sentimentalism of the country pulling through the recession in a FDR sort of way.

That's a lot of words to say Trump can do it. I'm done doubting his Houdini act. Having grown up in the industrial Midwest, I had a knawing bad feeling Trump was going to do better than the polling, but the Hillary people just seemed so damn sure of themselves and Trump was so odious, I tamped those suspicions down.