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

idk, I think that the Sandinista stuff would have damaged him. Isn't there some old article where he says some vaguely positive stuff about the USSR as well?

xp: because normally I'd say that the latter is definitely a campaign killer but after what just happened I guess it's all up in the air

it's a GS world after all

Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner Steven Mnuchin has been recommended by Donald Trump’s transition team to serve as Treasury secretary, according to two people familiar with the process, and the choice is awaiting the president-elect’s final decision.

Mnuchin, the campaign’s national finance chairman, has been considered the leading candidate for the job. Trump has displayed a pattern of loyalty to his closest campaign allies in early administration selections, and Mnuchin, 53, had signed on at a time when many from Wall Street stayed away.

Before joining Trump, Mnuchin rose through the kind of elite institutions the president-elect spent his campaign vilifying. Mnuchin was tapped into Yale’s Skull and Bones secret society, became a Goldman Sachs partner like his father before him, ran a hedge fund, worked with George Soros, funded Hollywood blockbusters and bought a failed bank, IndyMac, with billionaires including John Paulson. They renamed it OneWest, drew protests for foreclosing on U.S. borrowers, and ultimately generated considerable profits, selling the business last year to CIT Group Inc. for $3.4 billion....

Mnuchin is best known for his 17-year career at Goldman Sachs, although he also served as a Hollywood producer for movies like “American Sniper,” “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Suicide Squad.” He has also been widely regarded as one of the chief villains of the 2008 financial collapse.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-11-14/trump-advisers-said-to-recommend-mnuchin-for-treasury-secretary

http://www.salon.com/2016/11/14/draintheswamp-steven-mnuchin-ex-goldman-sachs-banker-tapped-to-run-treasury/

Sounds a lot like the opposition research they had on Obama. "Goddamn America," ties to the radical left, etc.

um, you realize there's opposition research in every election, right?

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Monday, November 14, 2016 4:42 PM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

sanders really faced basically none in the primary and that gave people an inflated view of how strong he was as a candidate

the first thing mentioned in that tweet was widely circulated during the primary

What's with old lefties and weird rape apologia in the '60s and '70s (I mean, aside from the usual misogyny) - doesn't the leader of the German Greens have something like that too?

Totally agree with those saying nothing can change the mind of the Trumpverse. My good buddy is a Trump supporter and it seems that he's able to shrug off anything Trump does by saying stuff like "I don't need to approve of all of his behavior". Regarding Trump's followers, he will brush it off with "They're not all like that" or that he's not like that. In summation, seems like my friend is probably angry and dissatisfied with how his life is and Trump keeps that loop going.

Voters in Michigan and Wisconsin voted against higher wages, stronger social welfare and stronger healthcare. I have no idea what 'fair trade' entails in concrete policies, and 'economic justice'? Michigan voters rewarded the party that poisoned Flints water supply.

obama was super charismatic candidate

bullshit controversies sticks to the candidates who aren't e.g. kerry w/ the swiftboat stuff

xp

tbh I think all Bernie oppo research stops and starts with "self-described socialist." Much as I respect the guy it's hard to see that not driving away a lot of people who are still scared of the word.

stick to* xp

I don't think it's even just the charisma deficit (though ofc that would be a factor), Obama was patently a fairly centrist democrat, so attempts to paint him as a left wing radical just looked hysterical, Sanders isn't a centrist dem and doesn't come across as one.

Iatee otm

what is a face attack

― ¶ (DJP)

ever seen "alien"?

on charisma - http://www.paulgraham.com/charisma.html

obviously a super simplistic framework...but the argument certainly doesn't seem worse 3 elections later

that sanders opps shit is some weak ass shit

this election was overdetermined. so many factors. you can propose just about any explanation and you'd be right.

"Mnuchin is best known for his 17-year career at Goldman Sachs, although he also served as a Hollywood producer for movies like “American Sniper,” “Mad Max: Fury Road” and “Suicide Squad.” He has also been widely regarded as one of the chief villains of the 2008 financial collapse."

That's... twisted

re: the ridiculous Sanders counterfactuals: https://twitter.com/FutureBoy/status/798226845070069762

smfh @ the NY Times: https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/798136951324995584

― Listen to my homeboy Fantano (D-40), Monday, November 14, 2016 4:31 PM (thirty-seven minutes ago

yo dawg we heard you liked counterfactuals so we countered your counterfactual with a counterfactual of our own, dawg

fact is we don't know what would have happened if bernie (or warren, or anyone) ran. i agree that people saying bernie or whoever "would have won" are being silly. but he might have. and the fact is, hillary did run and she lost. also lol @ the "environmental racist" thing, that was an attack point in the primary (lol peter daou) and no one cared. i have a hard time believing it would have mattered in the general

lol

xp

We welcome you to Mnuchin land!

The liberal media, folks

http://jezebel.com/the-washington-post-served-napkins-off-a-womans-body-at-1788966492?rev=1479160916499&utm_campaign=socialfow_jezebel_twitter&utm_source=jezebel_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow

obama was super charismatic candidate

bullshit controversies sticks to the candidates who aren't e.g. kerry w/ the swiftboat stuff

I think there's a lot to be said about that

Hillary came off as someone who was way too prepared for everything, who constantly rehearsed in front of the mirror and memorized lines from her campaign website. Trump on the other hand had a whole lot of "come on, you know what I mean, right?", y'know, fill in the gaps. I think it was easy for people to believe that Hillary was being disingenuous and dishonest because she was so calculated. We don't know a whole lot of people who regularly talk like that.

sure we do. and we don't trust them at all.

Michael Moore lamented how Hillary missed a chance to be cool 'n' loose after her first post-pneumonia public appearance, i.e. responding to one of those shouted "How do you feel?" questions with "Like crap!"

people wanted a Dionysian Prez

the real reason why Sanders counterfactuals are fucked is because it's so far out of the bounds of anything we've ever experienced. same w/ Trump, which is why the polls were so uninformative; the past relationship between polls and turnout were out of wack bc no one knows how polls translate into votes when one candidate is an explicit white supremacist. forecasts, formal or informal, only predict well within the range of history. I admit this goes both ways; he may not have lost! but it's just ridiculous to confidently maintain that a Socialist would have won president over a Racist/Fascist

personally I would have been happy with Clinton or Sanders. I donated money to his campaign but ultimately weakly preferred Clinton, partly because i'm a "Shitlib" who believed that the 'next step' to a just society in the US was through left-neoliberalism rather than somehow leap-frogging to the exact institutions of Denmark via a political revolution by ppl with bumper-stickers, but also I kind of believe u have to give ppl *one* status quo choice, and Obama was a very popular president so why not have one candidate running on 'hey let's do more of the same'. I really hate all the Bernie ppl on twitter, with few exceptions I find them rude, lazy, pseudo-reactionary, and waaayy too addicted to social media and over-obsessed with petty debates with *scornfully* liberals; it's depresses me that they will be a big part of the media far left during the era of President Donald Trump. but we're all gonna die so w/e

xxpost: reminded of some sarah vowell piece from like 2001 where she lamented that al gore hadn't tried to come across as more of a lovable, self-deprecating nerd, rather than an uptight awkward nerd

gore did subsequently kind of do this but i was never rly convinced that it would play well in a general election

what is a face attack

― ¶ (DJP), Monday, 14 November 2016 21:43 (thirty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fly @ u

omfg this connection:

http://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-louise-linton-memoir-20160706-snap-htmlstory.html

Until last week, Louise Linton was a little-known Scottish actress living in California, whose most prominent roles were guest spots in the television shows "CSI: NY" and "Cold Case" and the movies "Intruder" and "Cabin Fever."

Now, thanks to a self-published memoir she wrote about her experiences volunteering in Africa when she was 18, she's become the target of outrage and mockery on social media. On top of her literary missteps, Buzzfeed has discovered that she’s dating Donald Trump’s finance chief.

The trouble began with an article by Linton that appeared in the Telegraph in the UK on July 1 under the headline "How my dream gap year in Africa turned into a nightmare," accompanied by a photo of the blond actress.

The article was meant to promote Linton's book, “In Congo's Shadow: One Girl's Perilous Journey to the Heart of Africa," co-written with author Wendy Holden, which was published via Amazon’s self-publishing platform CreateSpace in the U.S. in April.

In the article, Linton, who was in Zambia, described hiding from armed rebels as a nearby village was being attacked. "As the night ticked interminably by, I tried not to think what the rebels would do to the 'skinny white muzungu with long angel hair’ if they found me," she writes, using a Swahili word for a foreigner of European heritage.

I mean this is really dumb but I honestly think "only Rosie O'Donnell!" was a huge moment for Trump

xp
this election was overdetermined

this election was over-everything'd. After the second debate, I started noticing the default reaction from people I encountered was "I'm tired of hearing about it, wish we could just get it over with".

And yeah, charisma seems really obvious to me (to use that linked article's terms) -- most of the Hillary supporters conceded her deficiency here, no? For me, it wasn't a matter of me not trusting her, more like being uninspiring. IMO Trump single greatest asset as a candidate was his "charisma".

bless u dmac

'charisma' could also be defined in part as people knowing why you want the job - Hillary never really gave people an idea WHY she wanted to be President other than she'd wanted to be since 2000 or 2008. Even the historical nature of being the first female President got subsumed with Trump's shittiness about women. I think most people thought the ads of him saying terrible things juxtaposed with young women were a good idea at the time but maybe they should have been her talking about why being the first woman in the White House would be so important.

elections where neither was charismatic: 1988 maybe 2000? I don't remember people thinking Bush was anything special even among supporters

Hillary never really gave people an idea WHY she wanted to be President other than she'd wanted to be since 2000 or 2008.

this is bullshit.

personally I would have been happy with Clinton or Sanders. I donated money to his campaign but ultimately weakly preferred Clinton, partly because i'm a "Shitlib" who believed that the 'next step' to a just society in the US was through left-neoliberalism rather than somehow leap-frogging to the exact institutions of Denmark via a political revolution by ppl with bumper-stickers, but also I kind of believe u have to give ppl *one* status quo choice, and Obama was a very popular president so why not have one candidate running on 'hey let's do more of the same'. I really hate all the Bernie ppl on twitter, with few exceptions I find them rude, lazy, pseudo-reactionary, and waaayy too addicted to social media and over-obsessed with petty debates with *scornfully* liberals; it's depresses me that they will be a big part of the media far left during the era of President Donald Trump. but we're all gonna die so w/e

― flopson, Monday, November 14, 2016

haha "ppl with bumper-stickers" is a little harsh but i love it

bless u dmac

― goole, Monday, 14 November 2016 22:27 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tryin to stay cheery for yall tbh

I totally think that Hillary should've put herself in her ads - why do we need to see the same clips of Trump that the media has been covering nonstop again? What happened to "when they go low, we go high?"

Hillary never really gave people an idea WHY she wanted to be President

I'd go along with this -- and other than her general ideology regarding how to take the country in particular directions, I still don't think I know the answer to this. Ambition? You're just that big a patriot? Dunno, to me it doesn't seem like the kind of job to go for unless you REALLY REALLY WANT IT, IN A WAY THAT NO SANE PERSON COULD DOUBT. Whereas with Trump, it was like "well everything's terrible, and I won't apologize for being an asshole because I'm the only guy with balls enough to fix it." We may all die a horrible nuclear death because of it, but dammit that's charisma!

pretty counterintuitive to not focus on the fact that your opponent is LITERALLY ONE OF THE WORST HUMAN BEINGS IN AMERICA

eh one of the worst to run for president yeah sure, one of the worst public figures well probably, but

Yeah, at the time I thought it was a common-sense approach because I still can't grasp anyone finding his blustering narcissism palatable much less his offensiveness acceptable. Even in a light-red area literally everyone I interacted with was horrified by his behavior (or said they were). I made assumptions about how other people would view it.

But I don't go to church and the median age at bars is closer to 30 than 50 and comic book customers don't really talk about politics and even though my county went for him @51%, the urban part I'm in 98% of the time mostly voted for Hillary.

Hillary never really gave people an idea WHY she wanted to be President

i don't understand this response. she repeatedly said she wanted to serve working families, and in particular, address wealth inequality, improve paid family leave, reform the criminal justice system, safeguard LGBT rights, and a ton of other things. she did not reflect my personal politics in every particular, but she had a very clearly articulated platform. are you saying it was too specific? not broad enough strokes?

also, for serious, she spent a bunch of her early career advocating for children's rights. i feel like her campaign rhetoric grew pretty directly from that.

like, why did we spend all this time focusing on the fact that this guy is a serial rapist / criminal instead of 'talking about the issues'?

because we assumed most americans had at least a tiny bit of decency and wouldn't let that shit slide, regardless of politics. in retrospect that was a pretty bad thing to assume!

xp

that is several dozen words longer than "to make America Great Again"

i suspect this will be read as shrill + reactionary on ilx, but if you tell me her campaign wasn't about anything but ambition, i am going to assume that your reaction is in part about her gender.

I'm not saying she didn't have reasons, I don't think she communicated them effectively. There was no grand MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN narrative to tie into, or Obama/Bill's hope.

How about 'to break every barrier'? 'To prove we're stronger together'? Yeah, they're bad, but slogans are like that. Anyone on here not actually horrified by 'make America great again'?

my wife, who is not American incidentally, watched the first debate with me. a debate Hillary was widely said to have won, and Trump to have lost (badly). after 5 or 10 minutes of seeing them go back and forth she said "he's going to win the election". and i was like whuuuut. she said he had a simple message, and delivered it simply. he knew how shit worked, and he was going to fix what was broken. he knew how to get good deals, and he'd get a good deal for the american people. vote trump. i was like "well don't you think that's a bit reductionist"