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

xp: The fact that we can't force health care providers and drug companies to publish and charge the same rates to all is one of the biggest failures of the health care market.

Literally the only reason I had high-deductable insurance for some years was to get the insurer price.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-and-aides-hedge-on-major-pledges-including-obamacare-and-the-wall/2016/11/11/9196b364-a82f-11e6-8fc0-7be8f848c492_story.html

So is there any single campaign promise his people have *not* hedged on? This litany pretty much covers ... everything. Which means that everything specific he promised he may not do, and everything people are truly hoping he does - jobs, etc. - never had any specifics to begin with. Welcome to the ad hoc presidency.

We can judge him from his concrete actions, starting with selection of Pence. Ignore the palaver.

They will scapegoat their enemies within the administration. They're already goi g at each other trying to divide up the spoils of victory. Trumps management style is to let his subordinates fight it out and fight they will.

I don't trust that they're going to hedge on all this any more than I trusted that the campaign promises would be kept. Much of this "hedging" talk could simply be a way of pacifying the opposition and protests until post-Inauguration Day.

Well, it's at least a tacit acknowledgement that his goals are, if even possible, very difficult to achieve.

The wall won't happen. Further militarisation of the border and roundups of "suspect" immigrants will happen, and people will say "at least he didn't build the wall".

Trump's campaign was based on an implicit promise that he would make minorities know who's really in control. He clearly has done that, people are terrified. So I'd suspect most of his voters think this is working out just fine.

If he doesn't start building a wall he can blame Dems for stopping him and when he runs again, assuming he does, he can make building the wall a campaign promise.

I doubt there will be a wall but the border patrol and ICE will get unlimited funding which is why they endorsed trump in the first place

"Did I say wall? I meant I was going to build a MALL! A great mall! A mall of America!"

at the bong store to buy gatorade - welcome to america - and i asked the owner what they were saying about trump in pakistan - he always has pakistan news on the radio - and he immediately started telling me how long he had been in the states and how his family went to school here and he hadn't been back to pakistan in 17 years.

and i told him that sounded fine and i wouldn't have him rounded up for deportation. okay, i didn't really. i didn't know what to say. i just wanted some insight into what people were saying in pakistan.

so, yeah, people are frightened. in case anyone still wasn't sure about that.

Lol

So hope hicks is going to be press secretary? Has she been on tv one fucking time during the election? This could be hilarious or excruciating.

John Barron should be press secretary.

If you have "non-racist" friends or family who voted for Trump, there's a handy analogy for them here:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/

Agreed re 'tacit acknowledgment' Josh.

I mean he had already started hedging on the wall before Election Day. I never put much stock in the wall per se, but read it as a shorthand for ramped up enforcement and deportations. The Trump voters I've seen interviewed pretty much read it that way as well.

My lol was an xp btw

i don't have any problem with the mitt romney communist health care that my family enjoys. it has paid for so much stuff. major surgery. all kinds of things. more states should do that. trump can't take it away either i don't think.

Good on john scalzi

I'm not comforted in the slightest, but Trump trying to play the uniter is somewhat comic.

longneck - i'm really sorry. there's never a good time for that news, but to have it happen this week. oof. :-/

re: clinton being a bad candidate

there was a really obvious problem, occasionally stated but apparently ignored by her team: she never gave anyone a reason to vote for her. what would be different about a clinton presidency, what would people have to look forward to? she did have a few initiatives she could have talked about, even if they weren't exactly the most inspiring, like addressing student loan debt. maybe she thought that since the GOP would block everything single thing she wanted to do, it wasn't worth highlighting. and of course, i realize that it's tough to talk about a brand new inspirational vision when you're following 8 years of obama, 4 of which you served in as a cabinet member. but regardless, in the end she effectively stood for nothing, offered nothing to vote for. she could have let her surrogates and the rest of the entire fucking world tear Trump down while offering her alternate future, but since she had nothing else to offer, she joined in as well.

yeah, clinton came off as weirdly vague about things. even her sloganeering was in no way memorable.

"she never gave anyone a reason to vote for her. what would be different about a clinton presidency, what would people have to look forward to?"

it's because trump was so fucking awful and rising in the polls she wasted all her time tearing him down; look at the debates, they were 90% about Trump and Trump's views. She never got around to making a case for herself.

like if you asked people what her goals were and what she wanted to do most people would have trouble remembering. i realize that doesn't say much when people don't even know who the vice president is in this country but still....

"even her sloganeering was in no way memorable"

you mean you didn't like "Chillary" beer cozies???

but it really is the complete opposite of trump. everyone remembers what he said he was gonna do. wall. deport. more jobs. etc.

what would be different about a clinton presidency

Why should anything be different? Obama has been a great president, is broadly popular, and the economy has pulled back from total collapse. "Four more years of this, basically" is a good reason to vote for somebody.

yeah, sadly, i'd settle for status quo hillary. obviously.

she was clearly gonna bomb even more

but then the angry people would have just been four years more angry. i don't know. i don't know how to make Indiana a more robust state.

but eh, foreign kids and future terrorists, fuck em xp

"everyone remembers what he said he was gonna do"

and in that period where Hil just repeated every word Bernie said, all of her words sounded like lies including "and" and "the'

anyway KM otm

"Four more years of this, basically" is probably a better slogan than "I'm with her", tbh.

One of many reasons I hope protests continue, at least to some degree, is that Trump is above all else a man who defines himself by his success, and president or not, he's still a private businessman. I can't imagine his properties will seem that appealing with hundreds, or even dozens, of angry protesters out front, or even the threat of same. This might be the first president in eons, if ever, who is *financially* vulnerable if not politically. He may or may not give a shit if people are upset, but he'd sure care if his fortunes started faltering.

i don't know, i thought it was pretty clear what she was offering, whether via rallies, debates or ads. she's just not a good seller of it. by her own admission. she's a list-maker. during the debates, whenever hrc would speak about her proposals, i could see my friends' eyes glaze over, and their comments would be about her demeanor, about trump's expressions on the split-screen, or about "how she was doing." i don't think we're listening, that's all -- partly because we're watching the "theater" of it all, but compounded in her case because of her rhetorical/charismatic shortcomings.

I hate paying money for something I never use.

You are using it though. You aren't paying for health care, you are paying to be insured against the chance that you have medical issues that result in large fees. But if you want to look at is as directly paying for "health care you're not using"...you almost definitely will use it at some point. Relying on paying out-of-pocket for med bills is what has caused millions of Americans to go bankrupt. They all didn't see the utility in "paying money for something I never use" either.

https://www.greatagain.gov/

i'm sick

xp:

"Stronger Together" is memorable enough, but most voters simply care little about celebrating diversity. The civil rights struggle doesn't win new voters. Many of the Bernie slogans were just as bad: "Not Me. Us." The slogan should have focused on bread and butter issues that expand the coalition while still addressing the Occupy movement concerns. Something like "A Fair Deal".

Let’s say you want HBO. So you go to your local cable provider to get HBO and the only way they’ll let you get HBO is to sign up for a premium channel package, which includes HBO but also includes Cinemax. Now, maybe you don’t want Cinemax, and you don’t care about Cinemax, and maybe never personally plan to ever watch Cinemax, but the deal is: If you want HBO, you have to sign on to Cinemax too. You have to be a Cinemax subscriber to get HBO. And you go ahead and sign up for the premium channel package.

finally someone able to explain politics to the economically disadvantaged in a way that everyone can appreciate -- overpaying for subscriptions to premium cable so you can keep up with the latest Girls. "oh, that's what's going on? i hate that" said frank dirt of yatesboro, "paying for those extra cable channels just to get HBO was what kept me from keeping up with mortgage payments after I lost my job."

Or "A New Deal"

Sorry bad jk, point taken

Scalzi's not addressing the disadvantaged. He's addressing literary sci-fi fans.

Clinton underperformed with them as well?! Damn

It's an analogy. And the last time I checked most of Trump's voters are middle-class or higher.

Bigger issue with "Fair Deal" is that its the slogan Harry Truman ran under, TBH. But the point is, slogans based on identity poltics may make Democrats feel good about themselves, but mean nothing to those whose concerns aren't in the identity politics world.

Replace "HBO" with "premium sports package," then.

Whose identity ?