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

Paul Ryan shoves through the end of Medicare, Trump vetoes it or relies on public accommodation with Sanders or Warren to kill it is a scenario I could easily see used to make him more palatable where he currently isn't

we're all well aware of how the ability of a legislative minority to gum up the works is deeply embedded in our system (thx slave-owners!), time to exploit it. shoe's on the other foot now.

Trump isn't gonna veto shit.

Trump doesn't even wanna show up for work

You really think Trump would veto a Medicare-end bill? He won't even read the bill.

^^^

first you would have to explain to him what Medicare is, how it works, why Ryan wants to kill it... by that time he's already fallen asleep in his taco bowl

I've said repeatedly that Sanders would have won, but the discussion of what Clinton did wrong should take into account that she actually won the popular vote, and it's not really that close. Her mistakes were strategic, not fundamental. If it was a change year, why did the establishment candidate get more votes?

Daily Beast: CBS reports Trump wants top secret clearance for kids

It would be all about popularity and approval ratings for him - he doesn't actually need to read the bill or know what it is if he thinks it's going to make people not like him.

how is he gonna know if people don't like him or not? the polls are all wrong! plus people are so excited at his rallies, they're just amazing! he will never think that any sizable chunk of the population legit does not like him.

i don't see why total Rs-against-obama-style oposition isn't our #1 priority

who could possibly think we owe Rs any good faith? or that if we gave it they wouldn't abuse it?

it is our #1 priority, you're not going to see a serious voice on the left advocate working with trump

Sanders already did!

and pvmic, but fuck this "senators in red states get a pass" nonsense. vote with your party

xp no he didn't..........................................................

Republicans re Obama: "Our primary goal is to make him a one-term president."
Democrats re Trump: "We need to find ways to work together."

Yeah, it's gonna be an awesome eight years.

multiple xposts obviously

sigh.

the norms of american politics and peaceful transitions of power dictate that people say nice things after an election. he's not gonna vote with the republicans xp

i'm sure you can find plenty of examples of republicans making nice after obama's 2008 win. it's not binding and doesn't mean shit

right - and I am hoping that all this "hey let's give him a chance" bullshit evaporates by January 21st but otoh idk Dems post-Reagan have been really stupid/cowardly when in this position.

i'm sure you can find plenty of examples of republicans making nice after obama's 2008 win.

would be curious what you dig up tbh

xp

the norms of american politics and peaceful transitions of power dictate that people Democrats say nice things after an election.

I do remember more than a couple Republicans in November 2008 muttering about Working Together For the Sake of the Country.

Before the inauguration.

remember Judd Gregg? He was all set to be appointed to the Cabinet until he got pressure in January 2009.

Biden says that during the transition, he was warned not to expect any cooperation on many votes. “I spoke to seven different Republican Senators, who said, `Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything,’ he recalls. His informants said [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell had demanded unified resistance. “The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’” Biden says.

The vice president says he hasn’t even told Obama who his sources were, but Bob Bennett of Utah and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania both confirmed they had conversations with Biden along these lines.

this feels like bizarro world. Sanders being grown up doing the dirty job of consensus politics while Hillary stans want him to rage against the system.

ah good old arlen specter

^^ I thought I'd seen every kind of sentence

the deplorables comment was badly calculated and i would see it as a major misstep in any other campaign. it still defies understanding why that was seen as worse than virtually anything trump has said in public over these past eighteen months

I'm sort of interested in whether that was the first time anyone used "deplorable" as a noun.

Like, it was remarkable poetic for HRC.

Aargh, remarkably

it was used before, just by snooty 19th century robber barons

basket of remarkables

deplorables was a fake controversy

oh come on

certainly doesn't make her seem less like a reptilian space alien

it was a "fake controversy" in the sense that clinton wasn't wrong, but it's still a pretty dumb thing for a politician to say about people who might be voting for her

she was saying it about people who explicitly wont vote for her

the repurposing of the nasty woman thing was good.

I knew it was a mistake when defenders rushed to say, "But if you read the NEXT paragraph..."

im just saying there are exactly zero people who weren't already not voting for her who decided not to vote for her when she said it

there's not a soul on the planet, including the deplorables themselves, who don't believe there arent some "deplorable people." It's like making fun of Trump's skinny hands but for the right, it's a dumb meme that convinces no one & only exists to assert in group status among conservatives

*tiny hands, dunno why i said skinny.

gotta think that most people who are willing to change their vote over something like that are just looking for an excuse

Sure, but that's what happened with the high levels of late-breaking undecided voters - if you've seen 10 minutes of Donald Trump and you're undecided, you're trying to find an excuse for yourself to vote for him when you know it's indefensible. And if you don't find one, you'll still find one.

Obama & Trump - Come on, he's finally found a Republican who will listen to him!

Actually pretty much that - It's obviously uncomfortable to him that here's this idiot who won't have a fraction of the trouble that Obama had getting stuff done, but Obama is def. exactly the kind of dork who will suck it up in the hope of getting some good done.

The excuse for late-breaking voters were given to them by Comey.

xp xp xp

lopk. last sunday i read a piece where west virginians who were already pissed about hillary's stance on coal were literally saying clinton had 10,000+ gullotines ready for her opponents' necks:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/politics/2016/11/05/west-virginia-citizens-paint-dystopian-picture-under-clinton-presidency/jDCbxZ0Dkz8Xd5B2MUdp3O/story.html

this was not a normal election and you can't use normal narratives to explain it away. one side had been demonized extra (because she was already in the hole for being an ambitious woman) by right wing BROADCAST media for a quarter century. there were "impeach hillary" bumper stickers when she was FIRST LADY.

i feel like this race was in some ways a particularly rancid manifestation of nostalgia culture. (which is not to say there weren't other curdled elements, but bear with me.) clinton and trump are both brands that have been molded in the public since the "gosh, 57 channels do seem like a lot" era, and in a lot of ways they were fighting as their avatars from 20 years ago. what up and comers have that sort of name recognition among a mass quotient of the electorate? jeb, maybe. but i don't think he wants to run again. the national parties' benches are alarming to me because i feel like an even worse demagogue could capture the electorate's imagination (if we have a functioning government in four years, which, lol).

(i swear to god if i don't have a stroke before the year ends i'll consider it a success. i've already had two aura migraines in the last week and quitting fb and twitter has yet to help. also anyone who doesn't think sanders would have been strung up by anti-semites is delusional. trump's final campaign ad was a 21st century rewrite of THE PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION ffs!)

can't believe we're still talking about "deplorables" but imho it felt like an obvious misstatement where she obviously started out intending to say that half of the people in trump's inner circle or half of the people running the media outlets that have been aggressively backing him. i really can't believe any politician means to say half of the guy's supporters or voters, period, and clearly given the timing she was trying to talk about those smaller groups of backers. but the damage was done and it was very hard to convincingly walk back or 'clarify.' but i think if she had said the first thing, clearly, it would not have blown up, and it would have helped maintain a space for surrogates and others to spend the week calling out these specific and repulsive alt-right characters. instead it was a week of clinton surrogates having to say she misspoke, etc.

it was, in other words, your basic, classic, "gaffe," moreso than romney's 47%, where he really DID mean to say 47% of the people voting for obama! no slip of the tongue there. given how close the race was in the states that mattered, every gaffe probably matters so i guess in thirty years the conventional wisdom for kids may be that clinton lost the election because of "deplorables," notwithstanding everything else. so it goes.

the deplorables thing was bad, bc you never want to insult any segment of the people who are rallying behind your opponent, bc everyone else who's voting for him will take offense to it and rally behind it. the 47 percent thing from romney should have been a cautionary tale to follow but she went and said it anyway, and now anytime i see an anti-trump comment on twitter there are half a dozen replies from, idk, "Deplorable Dave" or others w/similar proud names.

xp!

after Putin talks on phone w/Trump, Kremlin releases statement that says there is mutual hope for "noninterference in the other’s internal affairs”

worse thing about deplorables is how small a role schwarzenegger had

That doesn't make any sense though DC - the speech is here, it's pretty clearly what she meant to say: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/11/context-hillary-clinton-basket-deplorables/

I mean one thing we can all agree on is that she's not a spur of the moment improv master - this is the speech intended.

I can see the argument for it as threading a needle between the idea that yeah these people have been screwed and we should do something about that*, without lapsing into the "legitimate concerns about immigration" type of talk that has sprung up all over the UK, which would damage her with the base.

I'm not suggesting it didn't blow up in her face, of course.

*If you're cynical you can consider this similar to Trump making his inner-cities pitch to a room full of white people - they're not going for the black/poor vote, they're going for the "don't want to feel like I'm voting for someone who doesn't give a shit about the black/poor vote" vote.

Trump the populist: http://qz.com/813976/you-will-never-see-the-populist-donald-trump-in-jeans-or-a-t-shirt/