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

idk bros. dissimulation starts to feel like a strategy when someones uses it to marshawn lynch his way through countless scandals all the way to the presidency

unsettling thought:

Her culpability prevented her from condemning the status quo, and her ideology prevented her from proposing a big fix. Unfortunately, much of the progressive movement also seems to be only vaguely aware of the concerns of, let alone the specific thoughts of, Americans who are suffering in the decline. And because of that, if Trump figures out how to lead his movement while governing—as Obama inexplicably decided not to do—then we’re in deep, deep trouble because we will be utterly defenseless against it.

http://inthesetimes.com/features/left_organizing_donald_trump_zack_exley.html

Coulter and Palin already getting ahead of the curve on former supporters criticizing Trump from the right - who else is up to bat?

idk, this is good stuff though. i was also a big fan of glenn beck's swerve to the center.

i strongly disagree with the idea that trump is not using lies, conspiracies, and gaslighting to manipulate the media and by extension public consciousness. people who are simply idiots don't end up being elected president.

― Treeship, Saturday, December 3, 2016 5:40 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

serious question: If everything we've seen so far is not enough to convince you that Trump is genuinely dumb, what would it take?

like, what are some things he would have to do/say that would make you reconsider?

i think he is genuinely ignorant and incurious but that he knows how to fuck with people to get what he wants.

my grandfather called people like this "dumb as a fox."

like, i don't think he has some grand, sophisticated diplomatic scheme, but i do think he knows how to use spectacle to distract people while he does stuff like leverage his new political power for profit

Trump believes what he says (he lacks conviction and consistency, but at the moment something comes out of his lips believes it) and is not intentionally gaslighting, imo

i think it just seems like he believes what he is saying because he is utterly shameless and comfortable with lying to an extent none of us can really comprehend

i don't think, for instance, that he ever thought millions of people voted illegally, or that ted cruz's father killed jfk, or that hillary clinton misplaced 6 billion dollars, or any of this infowars bullshit.

idk the former would be easier for him to force himself to believe considering the implications of him accepting a popular vote loss of 2.5 mill makes him partially a loser, and a hypocrite for saying such a scenario should lead people to 'take to the streets' in 2012. if it makes him look/feel better, he probably believes it.

tbh it doesn't matter what he "actually thinks"

otm

it kind of matters. if he literally believes everything he hears on infowars that will lead him to pursue different policies than if he just understood that stuff to be useful as propaganda.

I was thinking today that the one weird trick to his success is that he's a fake everything. He's a fake politician, fake conservative, fake Republican, fake businessman, probably a fake billionaire, there is literally nothing there but the con, moving from one realm to the next, real estate to publishing to mass merchandising to tv to politics, every bit of it a sham that consistently benefits nobody but himself. It's not that he has no compunction about lying, it's that anything he says is as honest as anything else he says, it's all just keeping balls in the air. That stuff about facts-have-no-meaning is exactly how he has always operated. And our institutions of government, media, civic society, etc are just not set up to deal with someone like that. I know an auditor who used to work for PWC, and she told me candidly that all of their auditing procedures are set up to catch people who are sloppy or careless, but they're not very good at catching people who just straight-up lie and make things up. Same thing we're dealing with now.

real, fake, con, or not, he's going to sign Paul Ryan's legislation. That's what matters.

sadly also otm

tipsy mothra otm

Yeah Treesh this isn't a person who has beliefs. He has one, deeply held, which is "I am the greatest and I am entitled to everything!" Everything else in his mind is arbitrary drivel and nonsense jumbled from daytime TV and the last conversation he had.

the NYT public editor on the preoccupation with the use of "alt-right"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/public-editor/alt-right-stephen-bannon-liz-spayd-public-editor.html?smid=tw-share

Trump just lives moment to moment, speaks word to word, breathes in, breathes out, and hopes that a thought pops into his brain in time. He's basically an automaton. Sure he'll plunder the government and enrich himself, yet I don't even get the impression he's thought that stuff through; he's just acting opportunistically without thinking too much, situation to situation. All his justifications and rationalizations are post-hoc. There were moments in the debates when you could see the fear in his eyes, just grasping for something coherent to say but coming up empty.

I was thinking today that the one weird trick to his success is that he's a fake everything. He's a fake politician, fake conservative, fake Republican, fake businessman, probably a fake billionaire, there is literally nothing there but the con, moving from one realm to the next, real estate to publishing to mass merchandising to tv to politics, every bit of it a sham that consistently benefits nobody but himself

Yeah, seeing how every other sort of jackass figures out a way to get air time as a commentator nowadays, I sorta want multiple ex-/convicted grifters to start being interviewed as an ongoing deconstruction of how this shit works from here on out. There's a full coterie of thinktank/public policy talking heads already, why not talk to someone actually experiences at how the game works

Politics and language have been riding in the same passenger car for decades. And The Times, like most news outlets, is well-practiced in negotiating the linguistic land mines.

and in metaphorical pillows smothering faces.

Listening to Baratunde Thurston's podcast today, one of the media types mentioned that dude seems to value family over everything else. ("This is what cronyism looks like when you don't have any friends.") and I'm wondering if the most effecting way to influence the most suggestible guy on the planet is to work on Kushner & Ivanka for a while, so that their voices whispering in the ear of the throne can alter the ship's course in a slightly better direction, to torture a mixed-metaphors.

to work on Kushner & Ivanka for a while, so that their voices whispering in the ear of the throne can alter the ship's course in a slightly better direction

Nothing I know about those two suggests that their choice of direction would be any better. OK, it does seem like Ivanka maybe believes in climate change, I guess that's something. Kushner is irredeemable though, and plainly aspires to be the National Wormtongue.

efits nobody but himself

Yeah, seeing how every other sort of jackass figures out a way to get air time as a commentator nowadays, I sorta want multiple ex-/convicted grifters to start being interviewed as an ongoing deconstruction of how this shit works from here on out. There's a full coterie of thinktank/public policy talking heads already, why not talk to someone actually experiences at how the game works

― THE SKURJ OF FAKE NEWS. (kingfish), Saturday, December 3, 2016 8:55 PM (twelve minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good idea. bernie madoff could be a good starting place.

liz spayd is so bad

xxp:

Trump doesn't have intellect. He has audacity.

This can have the power to stun opponents into inaction. Think Herman Cortez v. Montezuma.

Audacity is terrible for sensible governance but powerful for dislocating opposition.

In warfare, the best counter to audacity is well-prepared traps. Static warfare. Logistic troubles. Patient traps.

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with the political parallels.

I just feel like most Trump voters are basically this person

https://twitter.com/TaylorMcCrory

like, she's not enthusiastic about racism, but she does retweet somebody else who posted a little bouquet of "white people should all die" tweets and said "what if they said that about BLACK PEOPLE!?!"

she's in college and asking people to do her online quiz for her for money because she just needs to get a 7/10 so she can get her math credit, and she probably feels like college (a branch campus of U Alabama I think) is making her jump through meaningless hoops for no reason and she's probably right

she's super into how much she loves her boyfriend and how hard he works and how she can't wait to have a baby

she likes laying out and going to falcons games and going to vegas

during the rnc she posts #rnc with a little flag

just saying, this is 80-90% of who's voting for trump, not the freaks who are trolling twitter all day and reading the daily caller, just deeply apolitical people in the suburbs who are probably perfectly nice in real life but who would find someone like me totally culturally alien. and will vote for someone who seems sympathetic to "our kind of people."

don't be fooled. taylor mccrory is a hipster, just one that has embraced a burgeoning, little understood fad called "deep normcore"

i apologize in advance if lolhueg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyhpO-GXcAIuibA.jpg

actually it makes more sense to look at vote share on the vertical axis. less of an outlier, only 1876 is worse. not sure what happend in 1824

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CyiHa8RVQAAmVq4.jpg:large

1824...four candidates get significant vote share, andrew jackson won a plurality, but lack of electoral college majority meant it went to house of reps where jq adams was selected

As it seems that we're trying to parse Trump again, I'll reiterate my previous thoughts on the matter: Trump is a con man, full stop. He is good at nothing but the con. Like literally nothing. He has no other skills whatsoever. But he's great at the con. I mean, he just pulled off the biggest con ever. He's King Con, man. Beyond the con and whatever feeds the con, though, he is a void. He is not crafty, he is not clever, he is not intelligent or strategic or in anyway curious or concerned about the world around him beyond how he can manipulate that world in favor of the con. He got control of the country and he will milk his position for everything it's worth (to the limits set by his diminished intellectual capacity) and he will leave the country a dried-out husk and move on to another con. People will try to color in his seemingly-inscrutable actions and ascribe loftier intentions to his maneuvering, but everything he does is fueled by at least one of two questions (posed here with more acuity than the questions formed in his mind): 1) Will this action gain me material favor?, and 2) Will this action or person who persuaded he into taking this action make me feel good about me, Donald Trump? If you stumble upon a thing he did that seems to have a more complex motivation than one of the two I suggested, please let me know. Otherwise, I'll continue asserting that he's basically a dumb, sick animal.

'or the person who persuaded me'

US policy on Taiwan has been to edge closer to treating it as a de facto state, while maintaining the official 'one China' policy and the idea that a phone call from a president elect is a huge change of course seems a bit of a stretch.

China has lodged a formal complaint. It would seem they think differently than you do.

Formal complaint was entirely predictable. They are ultra-serious about this shit. Their enormous holdings of US Treasury bonds may not mean much to Trump, but if they dumped a big batch of them on the market, surely the market would react badly.

They are ultra-serious about this shit.

otm, SV not so much this time around, I'm sticking with my previous "terrifying" assessment

Remind me of how they reacted to the warship deal.

iirc, they lodged a formal complaint, called the US ambassador in for a bollocking - saying it threatened permanent damage to Sino-US relations and promised a wave of retaliatory sanctions against any US business involved in any aspect of the agreement. The reaction to this has been relatively mild so far.

Assuming there is any strategic thinking going on at all, the call is a perfect way to very visibly put China's nose out of joint without actually incurring any direct consequences. It will inevitably contribute to starting his relationship with them on the wrong foot but his plan to formally brand the country a "currency manipulator" probably indicates he's not bothered by that. It's a piece of domestic theatre and, as such, i think will probably be quite successful.

Trump may not have thought deeply about any of it but Feulner, Bolton and Bannon seem to be the ones pulling the strings and are not incapable of (admittedly terrible) strategic thinking.

...He's King Con, man. Beyond the con and whatever feeds the con, though, he is a void. He is not crafty, he is not clever, he is not intelligent or strategic...

King Con just got himself elected POTUS, you have to grant that he is at least crafty, with some strategic ability.

They had to confiscate his twitter feed. What kind of strategic mastermind can't handle twitter?

Nobody conned the media into both-sides equivocation. Nobody conned republican governors into passing voting restrictions. Nobody conned Comey into torpedoing Clinton in the final weeks. There's been an assault on every societal institution from the right, and Trump to s a result of that breakdown.

I'm not sure you saw the same election as the rest of us - a crucial factor in the run-up was that his aides took his twitter account away from him.

hah xp!

>>I just feel like most Trump voters are basically this person

>>https://twitter.com/TaylorMcCrory

>>like, she's not enthusiastic about racism, but she does retweet somebody else who posted a >>little bouquet of "white people should all die" tweets and said "what if they said that about >>BLACK PEOPLE!?!"

I tried to think that, but I have old school friends who voted for Trump, and
they're all on this FB group "Americans for Trump", which posts stuff like this.
They can't deny the role of racism when they see it on FB every day. I wonder
if they are ashamed. There's no excuse for subscribing to this shit without
saying anything about it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Cy04QGeVEAA344Y.jpg:large

https://68.media.tumblr.com/156bbaa60d90f0e7f05e9e2c7a7f47a8/tumblr_ohiykvMvUE1qap9gno1_1280.jpg

Question of diplomacy: Trump is going goofy with his world leader greetings, but he is not president yet. So doesn't that mean current US leaders/diplomats/grown-ups have likely been making reassuring follow-up calls and whatnot, cleaning up after his messes? Or does everyone in the current administration have senioritis and is just waiting it out until Christmas break?

i don't think, for instance, that he ever thought millions of people voted illegally, or that ted cruz's father killed jfk, or that hillary clinton misplaced 6 billion dollars, or any of this infowars bullshit.

there's a bunch of media analysis on him being a bullshitter vs a liar

I dont know how this holds up throughout history but in my lifetime it seems like we always just go for the more charismatic guy

Mostly, yes.

http://images.mentalfloss.com/sites/default/files/styles/article_640x430/public/johnny-cash-richard-nixon_5.jpg