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

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

Yeah but johnny cash won the popular vote

a world in which donald trump is seen as charismatic is a broken broken world

Carrotmastic.

I don't think you can say he's not charismatic. He's a TV star! His charisma might not work on you personally, but objectively he obviously has star power.

(His status as a TV star is something that I think got seriously underplayed and underevaluated during the campaign. He's not a businessman -- he plays one on TV.)

he's definitely a businessman

can everyone on this thread posting crisp declarative statements on aspects of trump's personality and how he is perceived by "america" please refer back to their own posts from July 2015-November 7 2016

i mean you're probably all correct about everything and were right from the start but sometimes it's good to reevaluate and adjust the confidence dial

sorry, i've been grumpy for several months

the republican race is arbitrary. none of those losers is going to be president.

― Treeship, Wednesday, April 27, 2016 10:22 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That is lovely wishful thinking the Huffington Treesh, but in sober reality what is actually going to happen is that more republican voters are going to vote than democrat voters, and they are going to elect president Donald whatever Trump

― • (sleepingbag), Wednesday, April 27, 2016 11:26 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Truly impressed that you both know exactly what is going to happen in the future

― Sean, let me be clear (silby), Wednesday, April 27, 2016 11:36 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no only me

― • (sleepingbag), Wednesday, April 27, 2016 11:37 PM (seven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have adjusted my view of America after November 8th, but I don't think Trump ever did anything surprising during the whole campaign, nor this transition period?

Sorry, sleepingbag, but April 27 clearly falls outside the "July 2015-November 7 2016" time frame Karl referenced above.

adjust yr bifocals and try again

sorry i just... this is fun

kinda surprised everyone is freaking out so hard about PRESIDENT TRUMP, calm down you guys

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, February 24, 2016 2:28 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's going to happen. dems have been bigger idiots than reps this election by like a million miles. they've talked themselves into believing that 'old white guy with empty promises' represents a real political revolution, and on the other hand have managed to paint their own 'potential first woman president in us history' as worse than hitler. meanwhile every time trump says something that you think should end his candidacy... really, where do y'all think this is going?

― • (sleepingbag), Wednesday, February 24, 2016 2:48 PM (nine months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really, where do y'all think this is going?

Trump needs huge chunks of a population that currently hates him to vote for him. how is that going to happen. There are just not enough angry white guys to win the office anymore, that is a demographic fact.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, February 24, 2016 2:55 PM (nine months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

taylor swift look like a lorax

― • (sleepingbag), Sunday, January 31, 2016 3:42 PM (ten months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Go fuck yourself.

― markers, Sunday, January 31, 2016 3:43 PM (ten months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hahaha

He must have realized that even Palin was mad about the Carrier deal, back to tariffs and protectionism... on Twitter... in the middle of the night.