Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

"If you succeed, we succeed." HELLLL NO

Re: the Oval Office picture of Trump-Obama, it's not so much that he looks terrified (although there's a little of that) but that he looks, for the first time, actually ashamed to be sitting there with Obama. It's a mixture of shame and fear. He looks like a 70 year old boy who's done a bad thing and who's embarrassed that the adult in the room is still being civil towards him.

Of course the shame will only have been temporary as I'm sure he switched as soon as he left the building.

I feel like the greatest immediate mitigating factor is that he and his "people" seem to be very lazy and don't know how to do anything. If leading Dems and career officials remember Rule #5, never forget Rule #5, always stick to Rule #5, then we might live through this.

History implies America will not fall prey to fascism, at least as it has traditionally manifested itself. But if the country was indeed going down the darkest path, what are the first warning signs to look for (other than electing a fascist)? The weakening of the press? Punishing enemies?

given the general consensus that Trump has little interest in policy or the day to day donkey work of being President, and will delegate most of that side of things to subordinates - do we have an idea of who these people are likely to be, of who is going to be actually making the big decisions? Who does Trump listen to? Is the administration likely to be chaotic as different subordinates fight for dominance in the absence of a strong/engaged president?

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/796900183955095552

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!

9:19pm · 10 Nov 2016 · Twitter for Android

okay yeah so he's going to have people massacred at his inauguration

this is gonna be the longest 4 years

Give him a chance!

LOL

there are brief moments when I can cheer up but I'm so depressed, so scared, so sad. my heart goes out to all of you. I love you all. I see no cause for hope anywhere, this is something we can only defend ourselves from, not actively fight for good, just less bad. it's going to be so bad. worse than Reagan 80s.

― flopson, Thursday, November 10, 2016 8:09 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think I am going crazy, like literally as in suffering mental illness. I hope not. but I'm really, deeply terrified

― flopson, Thursday, November 10, 2016 8:30 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i feel this way too flopson. im not doing well

"Professional protesters." Welcome to Russia.

I think the Cabinet is going to be completely off the rails and they're going to ask for crazy things but mostly just not do their actual jobs. They will likely treat all the career civil servants beneath them like shit. It's probably going to be supremely annoying for the SES corps, since those folks can actually be fired - but only if you work at it, and they won't.

even if you cant make it all the way to Stalin, the mind reels at plausible damage Trump can do domestically with Republican House and Senate, and in foreign policy. it feels like the end of something, to me. not sure what, but were clearly not just going to resume our previous path before this. and it just feels so unnecessary

I agree with this 100%. I'm scared and frightened and I feel an immense sense of loss and for nothing. Just emptiness. But I don't want to go crazy - even a somber conservative analysis is bad enough.

― Mordy, Thursday, November 10, 2016 8:27 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea the "best case scenario" i come up with is an awful but typical republican presidency. reagan & gwb eras. that's pretty bad and depressing enough, honestly right now i feel like we'd be lucky to have that instead of trump. we'll see

seriously spooked by that DJT tweet :(

Imagine if Michael "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" Brown held every cabinet position.

I was at the protest last night, where's my money?

OK, so even as president elect he is tweeting umbrage? The fuck does he care, he won. Man, four years, two years, one year, two months ... who knew Trump would destroy time, too.

i feel like this all happened because from day #1 of obama's first term the GOP leadership decided to obstruct him and stop the government from functioning no matter what. i can see how it resonates in middle america to look at the struggling economy there and poor infrastructure and wages being flat & saying we need change. if only obama had been able to get a big infrastructure and jobs bill done

― FREE BRADY (daria-g), Thursday, November 10, 2016 9:16 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yea this feels right to me

instinctive "oh for fuck's sake" when I read that tweet

Wouldn't professional protesters be hired rather than incited?

that tweet, jesus

So the tax plan is going to slash revenues by epic numbers - will he follow along with the GOP austerity standards which means zero job growth and no infrastructure projects or does he buck them and push for Huey Long-populism where we just run enormous deficits to fund projects for the Rust Belt he needed?

this is going to be very bad

@tripgabriel
Interviewing Trump voters in Erie, Pa., many don't much like him, voted reluctantly, suggesting he won't get much slack if he can't deliver

It's weird because there was lots of stuff written about how voters found Hillary was "unlikeable", similar to all the articles in 2000 and 2004 about how ppl found Gore and Kerry cold and disatant, and they would "rather share a beer" or whatever with Bush, and I can see that Bush had this laid back frat-boy charm that would appeal to some people. But with Trump, I kind of get impression that *most* of his voters don't "like" him, he's more like an avatar of their ugliest, most shameful feelings. I can't imagine that even his most enthusiastic supporters think that hanging out with Trump would be anything other than unbearable, but I don't think it's necessarily the case that Trump voters may stop supporting him because they don't "like" him as Gabriel suggests, that's not the level he appeals to ppl on.

So the tax plan is going to slash revenues by epic numbers - will he follow along with the GOP austerity standards which means zero job growth and no infrastructure projects or does he buck them and push for Huey Long-populism where we just run enormous deficits to fund projects for the Rust Belt he needed?

― Kiarostami bag (milo z), Thursday, November 10, 2016 9:53 PM (seven seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

he won't do shit, GOP is just going to run with this, they have the strucutral advantages to keep congress for a long time

god i am so depressed right now you guys

this morning i woke up from a better sleep and the sun was out today (yesterday it was dark and gloomy as fuck in cleveland) and i had some better moments but ultimately i am just so scared and depressed and angry about this

His margin was too thin to not offer anything to the [racist/economically anxious/other as you prefer] white working class that turned out for him, if it's a standard GOP budget they won't come out again.

gop doesn't give a fuck about vote margins or approval ratings though. you see the glee in paul ryan right now? these guys just view this as their ticket, they weren't expecting it but here it is and they know it

ahhh idk i just so little faith right now

That's how they feel but Trump is desperate for approval and will be second for another term - he might just want to be a figurehead but if that starts to hurt his numbers or threaten his next time around he's still the damn President.

between this and a couple things in my life this is by far the worst week i've had in about 8 years

@tripgabriel
Interviewing Trump voters in Erie, Pa., many don't much like him, voted reluctantly, suggesting he won't get much slack if he can't deliver

a trump voter who saw me & canvassing partner out knocking on doors for hillary in a small pennsylvania city literally yelled at us (in a friendly way!), "good luck with that, it's too bad i have to vote for the guy who's mentally retarded"

i am not even joking. we had to take a moment to unpack because 1) why do you *have* to vote for him?! 2) casual slur against the disabled (i suppose this means he's not 'politically correct') 3) the guy was trying to be nice!

wow, that is something

Sad!

this is sickening

Not really tbh. He lived a full live and left it with highs most artist would be envious of.

between this and a couple things in my life this is by far the worst week i've had in about 8 years

― call all destroyer

:-(

one upshot of all this is that even though his cabinet is going to be filled with people who suck like Newt Gingrich, he's going to be constantly firing and replacing them

reflecting on it more it also makes me wonder how the campaign team could have done better to realize what was happening in the field.. i'm really new at this so i don't know how the whole operation works other years, but in early fall at least when you're still trying to gauge where the voters are at & ask them to commit to vote..

the list of doors to knock should be all democrats but anyplace besides philadelphia it was always coming up with a not insignificant number of "we won't say" (which probably means trump?) or straight up "we're for trump"

i assumed this was normal but i didn't have other years to measure response against. i wonder how many of us sounded alarms about this kind of thing on tally sheets because it really wasn't emphasized to note it down in training

Government Apprentice, coming to CSPAN

xp daria I found this interesting and possibly related to yr door-to-door experience, have not seen it yet - the Clinton campaign's reliance on a data simulator named ADA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/

(I mean, have not seen this mentioned in the election threads so far on ILX)

Not really tbh. He lived a full live and left it with highs most artist would be envious of.
alink
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 11 November 2016 03:21 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RIP Donald Trump :(

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/796900183955095552

― Allen (etaeoe), Thursday, November 10, 2016 9:38 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/266034630820507648

Guessing at Trump having a slightly elevated heart rate and somewhat high blood pressure along with age and BMI, it still only looks like he has a 3% of chance of dying of congestive heart failure in the next four years

this guy is a fucking con artist and thug

obama is trying to reassure people for the sake of the country and is biting his tongue. we should not. no matter what he does in office -- if it turns out he compromises or whatever which seems unlikely -- it doesn't matter. he has already put our country through hell with his racist campaign and no one should forget it.

yeah i read that article about the Ada data machine

i don't think you can pin this on any one factor but one thing that tracks with my experience when we were still going after persuadable voters (as opposed to later on GOTV canvassing) was the people who refused to say who they were voting for. how do you handle that in polling? how do you put that into your data model? this is where i feel like there really is a need to be more engaged with these folks because if you are a member of the community and people trust you then maybe you'll actually know who they're voting for and what is happening and be able to persuade them otherwise. intuitively it felt like a cultural thing to me, older white people from rust belt cities/towns who refused to tell you what they thought or who they were voting for, because they didn't know you. i grew up around these people. they voted for trump

I may play the banjo, but I'm a Mexican-American. I have no fuckin' idea what I should feel. It's so weird when you realize just how many people hate people who's skin color is the same as mine. I don't feel safe anymore and every white person is now under suspicion in my mind, which is horribly unfair and which I hate. But the worst thing is knowing that there's a part of me that does feel inferior to white people (I'm 61 years old; there was nothing cool about being Mexican when I was growing up) and that now a small part of me will "know" that I am low-class and worthless always. Right now, I want to pull the blankets over my head and sleep forever. I thought I was done with most of this shit, but apparently I'm not. I'm old and I'm tired and now I'm not good enough to live in my own country.

So is trump going to keep blaming the media for his entire presidency?