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

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.

Trump pissed off a lot of his "culture-war/Merry Christmas" base when he referred to same-sex marriage as "settled law." But surely AG Sessions and Shadow President Pence would like a crack at reversing it; is Trump going to forbid it?

Not sure what you mean by AG/VP taking a "crack at reversing it." That's not something they can do, it would be the Supreme Court.

and we know that could become a distinct possibility

Even all of the 80s bullies that have perfectly mirrored him had that moment where the hero sends them away with their tail between their legs and it seems impossible to do that to Trump. When he's cornered he employs some fifth grade "no puppet no puppet YOU'RE the puppet" shit but does not ever allow himself to appear defeated.

xpost to self

i'm not sure if that list of SC candidates he put out last summer had any anti-abortion/pro-gay-marriage advocates. xp

I don't know if it was something inherent to him that made him weather these controversies and succeed in manipulating the media to present a false equivalency picture, at least to un-discerning citizens. I think it was things he did. I think he said things that seemed horrible, but which had the effect of reframing issues to his benefit. I think he was involved in the false news disinformation campaign. The idea that he just won because "45 percent of the electorate always goes Republican" would only make sense if he didn't also win the Republican primary.

He seems to know the down the line ripple effect of certain words, actions and postures. I don't think he is a pure id or whatever.

I promise that all it takes (or, y'know, would have taken before he became the most powerful person in the country) to chip away at Trump's alpha shit is standing up to him. Having been raised by someone not terribly dissimilar in temperament (feel free to armchair psychoanalyze to your heart's content), I can tell you that refusing to be cowed and learning to tell people like Trump to just shut the fuck up goes a long way towards taking the bluster out of their sails. But everyone has been mystifyingly deferential to him for decades so he'll continue to throw his weight around.

Hillary Clinton treated him like the contemptible toad he is during the debates, I thought

xxp - Primary was a different phenomenon, and one I think he genuinely had some (accidental) political skill at - he got four times as much media coverage as every other candidate combined, and his "platform" was more extreme in a way that pandered hard to the GOP base - "it's not politically correct to say this, but...". Kinda similar to how Bernie was really far left, but Trump benefitted in that there was no Hillary on the GOP side - most all of his GOP competitors were awful in their own way and they all split votes, and the ones who were decent (like say Kasich or Rubio) couldn't compete because the media and the debate moderators let Trump dictate the rules, all the time

There have been disinformation campaigns in every election in history. I really don't think "fake news" is this new thing Trump discovered and that's why he won.

and I hate to say it but Trump's strategy of revoking credentials or refusing to do debates when he felt attacked absolutely worked. the media softballed him all the way to the presidency in part because they were hurting and Trump was nearly singlehandedly saving the industry.

Great for Ratings

This disinformation campaign seemed more insidious than ones in the past. Also Trump's penchant for lying straight to people's faces while knowing they know he is lying felt new to me.

OK so at what point do I print our findings here and fax (for obvious reasons) this thread to Podesta?

maybe y'all can meet for pizza

It's worth noting that, since 1900, up until yesterday, there had been a total of five faithless Democratic electors. There were six yesterday. Six Democratic electors thought it terribly important to cast their votes against their party's candidate, who had already lost the election on paper. More than in the previous 116 years combined.

http://www.panoramicbusinesssolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Dollarphotoclub_61989268-e1419519550495.jpg

nothing about the EC charade is "terribly important"

i bet Bill Clinton loved making the trip to Albany for the losing cause

(yes, that's right, Bubba was a fuckin' elector)

trump's good fortune in november has much less to do with his supposed 'strengths' (however we define them) and more to do with the fact that roughly half the voting public in america is human garbage.

xxposts

holy fuck you guys isn't it possible for something to have a long list of causes that can't be pithily summarized

sure. but in this case i'll stand by my assertion.

Great. I'm glad y'all have solved our problems.

Lock thread

It's worth noting that, since 1900, up until yesterday, there had been a total of five faithless Democratic electors. There were six yesterday. Six Democratic electors thought it terribly important to cast their votes against their party's candidate, who had already lost the election on paper. More than in the previous 116 years combined.

― Lauren Schumer Donor (Phil D.)

it's almost as if the left's spending the past month and a half saying that people in the electoral college ought to vote their conscience instead of listening to their party had some effect

"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?"
it is not even sure that it was a terrorist attack in berlin. the suspect the police has arrested does not seem to be the driver of the truck.

it's almost as if the left's spending the past month and a half saying that people in the electoral college ought to vote their conscience instead of listening to their party had some effect

― increasingly bonkers (rushomancy), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:32 AM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

How is this "the left"? The people I know pushing the faithless elector thing are all mainstream democrats. The lefties I know are rolling their eyes at people for seeking deus ex machina solutions.

the left's spending the past month and a half saying that people in the electoral college ought to vote their conscience instead of listening to their party

this was the center, just like it's the center that's now screaming that the election was scripted in the kremlin. in their grief they seem determined to stamp out the last embers of public faith in democratic institutions at the precise moment all of them have been seized by fascists. i don't know what they think they doing. xp.

they don't, and it fills me with SUCH confidence about the coming Resistance.

a nation turns its lonely eyes to HOOS