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

Pence would be more likely to start a land war in Asia and I feel confident that the whole oath to protect the Constitution thing would step in if Trump ordered a nuke launch without incredibly good reason.

well it's less 'mad' and more the enthusiasm gap would still be an issue. only so many bernie bros out there.

iatee otm, Clinton lost because of her surname, her campaign was tight. she also did talk about the issues, it's just.. no one really gaf

Sometimes I think Dems, especially Dem candidates, maybe have too many ingrained habits from standing up to bullies their whole lives. I haven't thought hard enough about this to explain much further. But K&P's "anger translator" sketches touch upon it a little bit.

A president not running for re-election is an extreme rarity, but Trump seems much less likely to run again than almost anyone ever elected who hasn't been president for a single day yet. He's old and the job will wear him down. He's deeply bothered by criticism and opposition, which a president attracts in greater quantities than any person in the world. He's promised his followers an impossible agenda that's doomed to fail. His general inexperience (leading to general incompetence) will probably make him deeply unpopular before his first term ends.

I admit there's a reasonable chance that the party leaders and the Congress may be able to prop him up and run the country for him, and the media can paper over his deficiencies and maintain his popularity, through stupid shit like Reagan's jellybeans, so that he survives to run again. But right now it seems doubtful to me. His ego is bound to keep getting in the way and he'll continually insist on making decisions he knows little or nothing about. He is good at media, as was Reagan, so if anything saves him, it will be his talent for projecting an image.

The Bernie bros thing is incredibly lazy and stupid at this point, given that in the primaries he was getting 35-40% or more with women and not all that far off from Obama 2008.

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I respect your opinions to the extent I can discern them but just once in a while, Adam, I would really love to see you post more than a one-liner (or image/quote +/ one-liner)

above all (well maybe not all) i think bubble dwelling non-dems view dems' outrage as being disingenuous, self righteous, and showy, e.g. the whole SJW pejorative

seems like the bubble didn't work? up above i posted about their failure in Wisconsin, a state she didn't even visit during the general election, where they didn't coordinate w local labor unions on an economically-focused message, choosing instead to serving up more footage of Donald Trump saying bad things. maybe she did talk a lot about the issues, but here's a good example where she didn't.

this is like a twitter troll bring granted ownership of the account they were trolling

Sometimes I think Dems, especially Dem candidates, maybe have too many ingrained habits from standing up to bullies their whole lives

I respect your opinions to the extent I can discern them

it's this patronizing bs that just lost the election smarty pants

having lost the election we can now take a break from having to flatter people w/ incoherent opinions

adam you telling others to lay off with the patronizing bs is pretty rich
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I was just thinking back about the Al Smith dinner and how much it felt like Hillary was already elected at that point. Trump completely bombing and sounding like an idiot and getting booed, and then Hillary with an extremely powerful speech at the end of her roast. It's kind of heavy to think back at that now. Inconceivable how things completely went upside down after that.

In a similar vein I think back to all the SNL skits. So much of the humor, and McKinnon's Clinton, felt premised on the notion that she was running clearly ahead and was destined to win (even post-Comey).

It's disorienting, actually. Like if you were taking a plane to the Bahamas and someone says "What if we actually land in Detroit" and you go "Haha that's ridiculous, here's all the evidence why that would be an insane outcome". Then sure enough...

i saw from reports on clinton call with some of her top donors today that the campaign's data tells them the election was lost in the last week or so, when the first comey letter hurt them in the polls and consolidated republicans and the second letter actually made things worse by firing up trump voters.

i believe it. i recall getting this sinking feeling when the wash post alert came in on my phone sunday afternoon saying that comey released another letter saying the email case was closed. my fellow canvassers were happy about it but it felt to me like it only accomplished injecting BUT EMAILS into the campaign one more time at a critical moment.

not to mention the NY office ties to giuliani who bragged on television about having something up their sleeve and how he knew how angry the fbi was about clinton! will any action be taken to investigate this?? probably not, right?

among the many unknown unknowns right now regarding trump's business ties and many conflicts of interest which they intend to reveal nothing about to the press.. i really do wonder in a serious way what kind of intelligence russia has on trump. whether there is anything for potential blackmail in there. not joking. we don't know.

Still say he is vulnerable, both as a person and as a president, to financial pressure. Maybe it will bring him down legally, maybe it will cause him to reassess the sacrifices he will have to made to hold office, but there is no indication this is a type of guy who could pivot from 100% narcissism and selfishness to public service. He will continue to micromanage his empire, and either make a conflict of interest mistake, for personal gain, and get busted, or watch his net worth decrease until the novelty of the White House fades.

for all the "Bernie was the only one who could have beaten Trump" stuff going around at the moment, I'm sure I remember quite a few of his supporters arguing during the primaries that he should be the nominee over Hillary because Trump was obviously doomed in the general, so the Dems were free to pick a real left-winger for once, without having to play it safe and be too worried about "electability"

does anyone know why on earth obama nominated comey for fbi chief? he had been deputy special counsel for the whitewater committee -- a clinton hater from way back. why on earth? he had to have known that hrc was gonna run.

Did Madonna keep her BJ promise?

Comey bucked dubya once, thats why

make a conflict of interest mistake, for personal gain, and get busted

Who is going to bust him in the Republican Congress?

Eric Holder was great on Bill Maher last night

there's a chance he'll do something so illegal that they'll have no choice

there's also a chance that he'll actually fight w/ congress a lot and republicans will begin to wonder whether they wouldn't prefer president pence

these things sound crazy but so does 'president elect donald trump'

xp

it's this patronizing bs that just lost the election smarty pants

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau)

hillary clinton's meme stash was just not dank enough :(

Sticking your name in huge letters on projects around the world does wonders for branding, but it also makes Trump the person on the planet <i>most</i> vulnerable to boycotts, protests, and outright legal expropriation.

My hope is that the rest of the world pursues this when Trump threatens to harm the planet by leaving or ignoring the Paris Accords.

For a while I thought the best-case scenario was that Trump would just do all the things a generic 2016 Republican president would do (which I admit is a pretty bad scenario). Now I wonder whether he won't start feuding with Congress based on imagined personal slights, vetoing unpopular bills and getting more and more frustrated that he can't just wave his hand and things happen automatically. Bizarro Obama situation.

(best-case scenario, I'm sure it will be worse than that)

forget protests, what about terrorism? what would the security issues be for the united states today if the obama family owned/licensed their names to properties around the world with OBAMA on the front in big letters?

xp yeah there may be friction not just between factions within a trump admin but between trump himself and the gop congress -- but not on everything, because there are a few points on which trump, the gop, and the people who think trump's their champion agree. one of them is letting the police do what they feel.

on the one hand it's very possible that the trump people dedicate plenty of time/energy to feuding with the republican establishment (i understand brietbart today has a lead story attacking paul ryan)

on the other hand they are going to be (and are right now!) forging alliances with rightwing nationalists in europe instead

i live in indiana, and i hate the fuck out of mike pence, but a pence presidency, or a cruz presidency, or any of those other presidencies don't fill me with the despair and raw fear that the prospect of a trump presidency does. i'd be talking tactics, chewing over the post-mortem, all the stuff that the losing party does after a regular election, instead of waking up every morning and waiting for the shaking to stop.

donald j. trump is, even within the context of his party, a uniquely unqualified individual to hold the office of president of the united states.

my wife was talking about how rudy giuliani was going to devote the entirety of his job to putting hillary clinton in jail. my reaction to that is "thank god", because i can imagine what he would be doing if he didn't have a meaningless personal vendetta to keep him busy.

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uh South Florida becomes South Toronto in November

been thinking about this and i really would prefer a Pence presidency, however it were to come about. i'm pretty concerned about god emperor Trump's cult of personality and his team's unique ability to keep the swarm of assholes engaged in a way that a run of the mill GOP idiot simply can not.

i think one of the fundamental mistakes of the Obama admin and dems in general was not being more aggressive in keeping his voters stoked past the elections (partic w/r/t white rust belt supporters) when his goodwill was still high. some 20/20 hindsight qb'ing there i know.

tbf i don't really know what this would have looked like in execution, or if it wouldn't have just petered out regardless. the psyche of the avg Obama voter and Trump supporter is clearly very different.

'Pence is so much worse' arguments are both probably true but he also just wants to fight the culture wars that Republicans are losing or have lost so...

yep. looks like a one-termer if i ever saw one

people were not just voting FOR hrc, but were totally stoked about her, and yes, the historic nature of her candidacy.

maybe so, but not enough of them actually fucking voted.

also believe that the MSM really dropped the ball on not going all in exposing the alt-right

there are very few investigative news shows in America. 60 Minutes. and... 🕸🌾??

also believe that the MSM really dropped the ball on not going all in exposing the alt-right

― acerbic (sic)s (will),

MSM afraid of ad revenue and accusations of bias

Also: MSN benefited from Trump-related clicks. Pot meets kettle.

also: msm has hated the clintons since the 1990s.

I think the idea of who the MSM hates or whatever is a bad road to travel down - aside from Fox News and maybe MSNBC, all the media gives a shit about is money. Whichever candidate or side or horserace gives them clicks and highest ratings.

been thinking about this and i really would prefer a Pence presidency

do you really think that's not what you're getting?

http://store.harpers.org/products/fools-for-scandal-how-the-media-invented-whitewater

i think one of the fundamental mistakes of the Obama admin and dems in general was not being more aggressive in keeping his voters stoked past the elections (partic w/r/t white rust belt supporters) when his goodwill was still high.

not just keeping enthusiasm - organizing, building the party and devoting time/resources to this at the state and local level, which i feel like has really been neglected thus the GOP taking over state legislatures and gerrymandering districts to entrench themselves in power. the DLCC works on this but they are sort of neglected and underfunded.

it's a long time ago now & i hate to relitigate this, but i recall when i was wrapped up in the long obama/clinton 2007-2008 primary battle, one of the issues some of the diehard clinton partisans (who had been engaged at the local/state level for some time) brought up was that clinton would be working much harder at party building - to a great extent, obama's coalition depended on obama, the person, and much of it wouldn't be doing other work for the party or showing up in the off years and that sort of thing because they really didn't care so much. and here we are