Trump, May 2017: 100 days of [unintelligible]

He sent an email to his list that said something like, "as steve bannon said, the swamp won't let itself be drained without a fight." As this goes on he is going to try to tell his reporters that all of this is about the establishment trying to stop him from making america great again.

Whether this spin will work with his base, idk

It is. If you believe the media/unelected government is a coastal elite with no love for you, and someone blowhorns your concerns on immigration and trade contrary to mainstream politicians, you might believe that the Trump revelations is a globalist (Jew?) conspiracy against your interests. The fact the guy at the center of it is feeding into these misconceptions worries me. I don't want an accidental civil war.

What I want is some way to get through to the less informed, to tell them this is why your jobs are gone and this is what each political party did about it, and wants to do about in the future, and the disenfranchised just ignoring the mainstream isn't going to help.

regardless of what happens now, in the distant future there will still be small pockets of white supremacist trump supporters who will stick with him to the end. it's a creepy thought.

Def. i don't have a good sense of what percentage of the country this is though. 25% are said to be "die hard" trump followers, but will all of them stick with him to the end? If he was impeached after not doing anything useful for them?

Whether this spin will work with his base

that spin will work for quite a large number of people, considering that 25% of 330 million is quite a large number. in terms of national politics, that number would not be enough to save him, but it would hugely piss all those folks off, because they would believe him and see ending his tenure in office as a massive betrayal.

it all comes down to how much evidence Mueller can amass and how clearly it points to criminal acts. the speed with which this has been rolling along and trump's propensity for never backing down on anything he does, however bad and wrong, I'm guessing he'll have dozens of republican congressional reps ready to pitch him overboard by August or September. they're already turning that idea over very seriously from all indications.

White supremacists were here before Trump, and will be after. They're not terribly important politically, and a few individuals have committed, and will continue to commit isolated terrorist attacks (from Ok city to Atlanta olympics, to maybe abortion dr assassins). The problem for American politics is the larger mass that supported Trump because he was the first politician in their memories to express their concerns in a language they could understand (even if almost incomprehensible to the literate). How do we get them to rejoin the mainstream? How do we get them to understand the complications and nuance of issues?

I don't think its really a matter of education. I don't believe education standards and critical thinking have declined much in my lifetime. The main thing that's changed is that once we received our news, and often opinions, from nuanced thinkers, and now many don't.

Like,during the campaign he had a kind of transgressive swagger that appealed to people. But that has evaporated now imo. When he talks he just seems fantastically out of his depth. The narrative he used to put forward -- drain the swamp, build the wall, jobs -- seems less convincing than it used to be when the prospect of a Trump president was purely hypothetical.

Sorry my last post was an addendum to my previous post. yall type fast

Aimless: what if Trump supporters are told Mueller is a tool of coastal elites? When basic foundations of Democracy like journalism are attacked (and in some cases, subverted), our institutions themselves may be seen as "enemies of the people".

CNN is not a basic foundation of democracy. the ability to say CNN is shit is.

If masses of die-hard Trump supporters are ever going to turn their backs on him, it will be because the far right wing media and its most popular mouthpieces like Hannity adopt a final narrative that diminishes Trump and paints him as a flawed and false hope, a shining lie, a vessel too weak to uphold the cause of The People. Or something like that.

Treeship: read the article linked by mookieproof above. We can't assume that the Trump narrative is less convincing among his supporters, as for many, they may never see his faults. What they will see is a career-successful maverick who said the things that other politicians didn't, went up against the establishment, and was taken down for technicalities they don't care about. "Obstruction of justice" probably doesn't mean a lot to many of them.

This is why I'm hoping the special prosecutor and impeachment process are dragged out over a long period, so Trump has more opportunities to put his foot in his mouth, so more of his promises can be ignored, so fewer will see him as some sort of knight fighting injustice and more will see him as a corrupt narcissist. So, nothing good happens till 2019. That's fine, and arguably better than Pence in 2017. The only caveat I have there is Trump starting a preemptive war before he's out. I've been looking into his cabinet, and I think there's Pence + half to prevent that, for now.

FWIW - not intended as an intervention in the current discussion - but the 538 poll-aggregator-tracker has been steadily descending for a while now. If I'm reading it right his numbers are now the worst they've been, at least since the start of his presidency anyway.

what if Trump supporters are told Mueller is a tool of coastal elites?

They will certainly be told that by at least some media figures at some point in the proceedings. It is predictable as rain in March.

Mueller has a reputation for thoroughness. Let us hope there are recordings, records of massive bank transactions, and the like, that deeply incriminate the top officials of the campaign, who then rat out Trump himself. It won't solve everything, but it would certainly help.

for those kinds of narratives to turn trump has to transgress against the people who believe in him in the terms set by the narratives

i'm not sure what they would count as him doing so, given that many of the possible failures are much more slow-moving and easy to evade blame for ('bringing jobs back to america' etc).

The percentage of true believers or whatever you want to call them is a very fluid number. As long as he's there and being attacked, there are people who will defend him for a bunch of different reasons. But once he's gone, whether that's in weeks or years, it will be hard to find anyone who ever loved him. Look at the GOP's total disowning of W post-2008.

W's rise wasn't thanks to a cult of personality.

I know it is an old saw, but it is worth dragging out into the air once in a while:

"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

It's the second of those three conditions we are considering here. As long as there are powers who benefit from keeping some people fooled all the time, those fools will be kept mired in their delusions. It's just that the apparatus for fooling people has grown more complex and consequently its reach has been extended. Don't ask me how to solve it, I don't know the answer.

W was a different figure than Trump for sure, but there totally was a cult of personality around him post-9/11. People on the right were practically messianic about him.

But my point is that nobody loves a loser. I don't think whatever fealty Trump commands will survive his White House tenure.

The hits just keep on coming.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/19/politics/michael-flynn-donald-trump-russia-influence/index.html

Russian officials bragged in conversations during the presidential campaign that they had cultivated a strong relationship with former Trump adviser retired Gen. Michael Flynn and believed they could use him to influence Donald Trump and his team, sources told CNN.

The conversations deeply concerned US intelligence officials, some of whom acted on their own to limit how much sensitive information they shared with Flynn, who was tapped to become Trump's national security adviser, current and former governments officials said.
"This was a five-alarm fire from early on," one former Obama administration official said, "the way the Russians were talking about him." Another former administration official said Flynn was viewed as a potential national security problem.

lmao

"If [Trump] took a dump on his desk, you'd defend it."-Anderson Cooper to Jeffrey Lord. pic.twitter.com/yhqb0gwVlm

— Jack Runyan (@JackDRunyan) May 20, 2017

I said uh COOPALOOP

How do we get them to rejoin the mainstream? How do we get them to understand the complications and nuance of issues?

I don't think its really a matter of education. I don't believe education standards and critical thinking have declined much in my lifetime. The main thing that's changed is that once we received our news, and often opinions, from nuanced thinkers, and now many don't.

― it's just locker room treason (Sanpaku), Friday, May 19, 2017 5:29 PM (forty-five minutes ago)

won't somebody please think of the white people

u folx don't take any time off from this? live a little

Anyone who wants to win has to. We on the Left need to dissect Trump's appeal, identify what is compatible with our other values (and some is), and use it to bludgeon the Right for the next generation.

The things are coming so hard and fast in this thread that I'll just throw this out here Re:the query about Trumpsters still on the bus and how they get news.

Trump has strong ties to American Media Inc, who publish, among other things, The National Enquirer, Globe, and US Weekly--all of which to varying degrees have become propaganda arms for his campaign and now the White House. Week after week Trump's remaining base is seeing on every supermarket checkstand fawning cover stories about "How Trump Will Bring World Peace", "How Trump Will Lock Up Hillary & Obama", "How Trump will DESTROY ISIS FOREVER" and so on. They eat that shit up.

WaPo On This In January

Trump may be bad but Hillary would have sold the Chinese the secret KFC recipe

knives comin out https://t.co/vekUIFSRwG

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 20, 2017

The comments are a joy.

first response hall of fame

What a bizarre metaphor

“If after all of the talk, after all of the chest-thumping, we can’t get anything done, we may get clubbed like baby seals in 2018,” said Stipanovich, who was an early Trump critic.

Sealthumping

ime you can push trump supporters pretty far by confronting them with the facts of this administration but only up until "but hillary would've been worse" which is a concession that trump is terrible but ultimately preserves their support. i hear this a lot in the form of, "well i don't even like trump but..." which admittedly weeds out his absolute die-hard fans (like the guy who tells me whenever he sees me that trump is the greatest US president and when i laugh he follows up with, 'well at least you agree he /is/ president, right?'). once you can replace trump with someone better (in their eyes - which is really the whole trick right there how to square that circle) a lot of them will move on willingly i think. the easiest way to co-opt trump's appeal is by running politicians who don't code instantly as 'educated coastal elites.' that doesn't mean you have to find someone pro-life or a racist or someone white or a male. you just need to find someone who ppl see as outside the system, not compromised by the dc corruption, a challenge to the party duopoly, etc, able to speak in a register that rings as 'authentic' in 2020.

like i don't think trump's cult of personality even has a whole lot to do with him qua his trumpness. it's all about how he ticks off the right people. that's easily replaceable. angela nagle (iirc) argues that the alt-right doesn't think he's competent or intelligence. in fact they like him because he's the opposite - a worthless troll & conduit for dank memes.

agreed but fp'd you for 'qua his trumpness'

tough but fair

ha! made me laugh...

Trump's aides did an "intervention" with him over his tweeting, WSJ reports: https://t.co/BNv5jAamEu pic.twitter.com/LgE3wbs5Lk

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) May 20, 2017

"we used to have a better class of criminal..." is my quote of the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrdEts4cHLc

the easiest way to co-opt trump's appeal is by running politicians who don't code instantly as 'educated coastal elites.' that doesn't mean you have to find someone pro-life or a racist or someone white or a male. you just need to find someone who ppl see as outside the system, not compromised by the dc corruption, a challenge to the party duopoly, etc, able to speak in a register that rings as 'authentic' in 2020.

This is like a game of Guess Who where the only card left standing is The Rock.

the easiest way to co-opt trump's appeal is by running politicians who don't code instantly as 'educated coastal elites.' that doesn't mean you have to find someone pro-life or a racist or someone white or a male. you just need to find someone who ppl see as outside the system, not compromised by the dc corruption, a challenge to the party duopoly, etc, able to speak in a register that rings as 'authentic' in 2020.

This is like a game of Guess Who where the only card left standing is The Rock.

nobody ever suggests en masse slaughter of the problem voters

yeah they do, it's called the american health care act

i might as well take that to the trenchant social commentary thread myself

youd best, im not touching it

I'm hearing that the Mueller investigation is likely to take at least 2 years. So isn't there anything that will sort things out faster?
Fingers crossed for assassination after the Saudis hear what Stephen Miller has to say , but not holding my breath.

Also what is the story on expelling foreign ambassadors? Hearing that John McCain is calling for the Turkish guy to get the boot. But what the F*** is Kislyak doing still being in the country last week? Or did Trump just say it's all ok and nobody object? Would have thought that somebody would have had him expelled by now, presumably any other President would have called for a replacement?

Kislyak isn't known to have done anything illegal and expelling him would mean the US ambassador in Moscow getting kicked out, at the very least. The Turkish ambassador is highly unlikely to be removed.

kushner getting fingered by the FBI puts his support of firing + comey + support of pushing back at special counsel in a new light

had a thought in the shower that what we need next is FBI director PREET BHARARA