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

now that trump has finally called them 'radical islamic terrorists' we won right? its over?

ok, so one of my other scary/nightmare scenario predictions is this: Trump, Sessions at all use the "terrorist" label more loosely than ever and start going after organizations like ACLU, using federal civil asset forfeiture to kneecap their operations even when nothing is proven.

sry et al not at all

German officials haven't even released details about this yet, right? So we don't even know for certain that this was ISIS or any other Islamist group?

Has the Trump team said anything about the unknown assailant in Zurich who shot up an Islamic center? (Don't answer, it's rhetorical.)

I feel like W occasionally verged on sounding like that but it felt like someone was behind him whispering to tone it down. Not anymore!

it was a christmas market, why would non christians shop there amirite?

So Ron Paul got a fucking electoral vote

That statement is almost as terrible and dread-inducing as I could've possibly feared. I don't know how we get through four years of this.

A source tells ThinkProgress that the Kuwaiti embassy, which has regularly held the event at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, abruptly canceled its reservation after members of the Trump Organization pressured the ambassador to hold the event at the hotel owned by the president-elect.

isn't this finally illegal? please?

if people call it kuwait-gate then something like this has an outside chance of being noticed, otherwise no

the only possible scandals in this country can reasonably have -gate tacked on the end

Kuwaitigate is viable, push that

So Ron Paul got a fucking electoral vote

I am confused about how Trump learned to manipulate the media so adeptly. There were negative stories about him every day but by maintaining his ground and deflecting he somehow turned each egregious scandal into a he said/she said. Even that grim debate -- that awful night -- when he brought the Bill Clinton rape accusers to the debate, everyone who saw it seemed horrified at Trump, not Bill, but the discourse was suddenly murky. On the sexual assault front, Hillary was now tarnished too.

I think his alt right cyber brownshirts were used to his advantage and some of them might have been on some kind of Trump or Putin payroll. Whenever journalists or Hillary tried to tag him with them, with their racist intimidation tactics, they sounded like conspiracy theorists. Just like Trump. Now Trump wasn't the only conspiracy theorist in the race.

Over and over again he dragged people down to his level. And even when Hillary refused to engage, he would use that to make her seem haughty and superior. Not a straight talker. Hiding something.

The email scandal was perfect for Trump's strategy of confusion. A slow drip of substance-less "scandal" related to Hillary, that the press would dutifully report on. Even when they said there was nothing in the emails, people half-listening still heard "emails." It was like some sort of mass hypnosis.

None of this trickery worked on people who were paying attention but it wasn't aimed at them. Trump knew he could incur tons of awful press and still make it look like an ugly race on "both sides" to the average voter. How? How did he learn to do all of this?

Roy Cohn?

Yeah he was a key influence. I want to know what he taught him specifically, how Trump refined these lessons for the age of the internet and, most importantly, how to break through with a clear oppositional message when he is polluting the airwaves with misdirection.

Some scandal has got to stick. In some way he needs to be made accountable for his actions even though he seems to have a bag of tricks for avoiding accountability:

Short of everything Rick Wilson promised in October, nothing will stick. Nothing. He won after Access Hollywood.

He must have done things to weasel out of it, things that can be identified and confronted. Like he knew how to twist it around on Hillary. At the time the way he did this seemed idiotic and desperate but it worked somehow, whereas no Democratic politician had weathered a similar scandal as successfully.

You have to factor in the Hillary hatred that has been nurtured for decades as the complement to Trump's evasions, distractions, and wildly inflated promises. He was fortunate in his opponent.

Last I checked (right before the election), Putin was blackmailing Trump with a video of him having sex with (possibly underage) prostitutes in Russia. Presumably this tape can be employed at Putin's convenience. Or it's total bullshit.

I'm not hopeful about the tape's existence. And I am not confident that Trump couldn't have beaten another Democrat too. Hillary was a unique candidate, with particular strengths and weaknesses, but the manner in which Trump (and Putin) exploited her baggage was a thing to behold. The insinuations were there before but they became radioactive. I think he could do it again to someone else.

At this point we are all so used to this asshole, he is like a chronic illness we are all living with. But beating this illness will take a new treatment approach. We need to see him with fresh eyes, understand what game exactly it is that he is playing, and then nail him to the fucking wall. This is all going to start on ilx and spread outwards.

xp I'm not sure how being blackmailed makes one more media-savvy and able to evade scandal. But lets all hope Putin shits out his compromising video on Trump asap. C'mon Donnie, take one for the team!

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tom-arnold-claims-vulgar-donald-trump-apprentice-tapes-article-1.2916614

if he really has this he should release it, not that it fucking matters at this point, and he should have done it months ago.

Yeah wtf tom arnold

a question we've all been asking for 25+ years

maybe he's just doing this to piss of Rosanne

off. OFF

Again, don't make the mistake of assuming that Trump has hidden reserves of savvy. It just turned out that circumstances favor someone like him more than most people could've imagined. Reality television has gone a long way toward legitimizing crass and useless people as aspirational models. The devaluation of critical thinking skills in public education has done a marvelous job of ensuring that many people are drawn to whoever's the shoutiest. It turns out that Trump's one real skill, conning people, was just the skill needed to take advantage of a confluence of really gross tendencies in American life today. Add to that decades of name recognition and everything just fell into place. I think everyone (including Donnie) was surprised to learn that all he had to do was show up and take advantage of the confluence in order to win.

TL;DR: There's nothing special about the turd that finally clogs the toilet. Being in the right place at the right time doesn't make it any less of a standard-issue turd.

i somewhat agree with that but still think the turd has some sentience

OL my bro you say yourself he is good at conning people. What are his techniques? Just outrageous promises couples with dark insinuations about his opponents? Why did these insinuations stick to them and nothing ever stuck to him?

It's just that he doesn't care. Ppl admire that attitude, and also assume there isn't anything to worry about if the guy being accused of wgatever so obviously doesn't give a shit.

I think it's really as simple as people just being unequipped to deal with someone like him. Generally speaking but also specifically in the context of someone running for and ultimately becoming president. He's a being of pure id. Some find that seductive, some find it repulsive and terrifying, but relatively few non-psychologists have the tools to reckon with someone like that. If you try to interface with him as if he were in possession of a healthy mind, he'd run right over you.

It seems like most of his con man skill involves mirroring. He knows how to read a mark and fumble out a response that approximates what the mark wants to hear. What he says has no relation to anything other than whether it facilitates him getting his way. On the flipside, he seems equally adept at 'dark mirroring', AKA trolling people who don't buy into his shit and pissing them off. All of which lends credence to the idea that everyone should ignore everything he says (since his glossolalic manipulation is his main strength) and focus entirely on what he does.

he is a celebrity with 40 years experience, with way more media savvy than Clinton, and a far longer time in the public eye as a non-controversial figure.

Clinton was a risky candidate, and Trump was standing on the shoulders of 20 years right wing talk radio. thinking that he fooled people into mistrusting her is ignoring the fact that many people mistrusted her well before he entered.

some of his "scandals" the media were screaming about as "disqualifying" were actually not at all. like him losing a billion dollars, or being a misogynist prick behind the scenes of Access Hollywood. how did these things never stick to him? maybe some of these things aren't disqualifying at all.

he is like a chronic illness we are all living with. But beating this illness will take a new treatment approach

democrats need to run candidates that aren't just corporate establishment robots but that actually stand for something

i get the desire to want to think Trump has this magical mojo or whatever but imo Clinton was just a horrible candidate who was literally turning people away from helping her get elected

she got almost 3 million more voters that Trump

I mean, I know she lost, and she definitely wasn't a perfect candidate, but this does bear being noted, while you're saying she's horrible and that misogyny isn't disqualifying trait in a candidate

Adam has had an axe to grind for months and thanks to our obsolete system of democracy he has apparently earned the right to hone it to a razor edge, everyone else but him and Iago was wrong, lol fuck America

Treeship, you'r going to keep your sanity if you channel the energy you spent worrying about how Trump has befouled America into helping whoever your local candidates are. We need local people in 2018 and 2020.

I am confused about how Trump learned to manipulate the media so adeptly.

― Treeship

look let's not make Trump into some unconquerable superhero here. he had lots of money, and he got _lucky_. osama bin laden is not one of the great geniuses of the 21st century because he successfully masterminded a plan to fly planes into the world trade center. it was a stupid idea that somehow happened to work anyway.

the media was a pitifully weak institution, a paper tiger, after years of corporate buyouts neutering the power of old media and, especially, the cravenness of new media, which was in the hands of chronically irresponsible burning man attendees who spent the whole campaign denying that they had any power over anything whatsoever, which in turn led to the normalization of incitement of racial hatred and the legitimization of outright lies.

he was also running against a democratic candidate who was widely hated and feared, and he also benefited from an election had, over the past decade, been carefully rigged in his favor by his political party, and which the opposing political party did little or nothing to meaningfully oppose.

Hillary was a unique candidate, with particular strengths and weaknesses, but the manner in which Trump (and Putin) exploited her baggage was a thing to behold.

As a candidate, Hillary didn't have any "particular strengths." She brought no one to the table that wouldn't have lined up for the Generic Democrat they use in early polls.

think its a mistake to assume "nothing stuck" to the guy - he was the most unpopular nominee in modern history, has an abysmal approval rating for a first term president elect, and lost the popular vote by 3 million. if not for the EC we'd probably still be laughing at the GOP for running such an awful candidate. but it turns out the old adage "a duck would get 45% of the vote if it had an (R) next to its name" is absolutely true - most of those I know who voted for him were disgusted by him but talked themselves into it anyway. maybe like 10% of GOP voters showed some backbone and stayed home or voted Hillary, but that's made up for by the 4chan/the_donald/Infowars crowd that typically don't vote.

Trump's strength as a candidate is that he essentially broke the media - how do you cover a candidate with so many scandals, who knows so little, whose word is provably worthless, without giving off the impression of bias? Viola - weeks upon weeks of discussion about email and Clinton Foundation non-issues.

Have you guys figured out why trump won yet

Yes, it's because he's a winner.

Who became a doggy's dinner.

Nothing flusters him. Americans like an overconfident douche.

Plenty flusters him! Any expression that isn't overtly flattering and deferential is an affront to his fragile ego.

i don't think trump is invincible or "teflon" even though he won, he has very loyal supporters obv and many struggling people were willing to give him a chance bc he is "different" and a "change" candidate but as we work to undermine & resist him over the next four years we should not forget that he is still wildly unpopular and even many people who voted for him are skeptical. some poll i remember seeing recently (i have to dig it up) had like a sizable portion of his own voters who think he is going to be a terrible president

Everything flusters him, which is fairly similar to nothing.

Sorry you're right, I meant nothing flusters him out of his alpha posturing. When he is flustered he maintains that at least.