a clown car full of millionaires: the 2016 presidential primary thread

Trump comes from money.

He's lost his fortune at least once, though.

real estate magnates are uniformly terrible, aren't they.

trump comes from very big money - his daddy built huge swaths of the outer boroughs. daddy was the son of immigrants -- originally the drumpfs -- who i do not think were particularly wealthy. wiki says they ran a restaurant during the klondike gold rush. huh. i would guess fred had tens of millions in the bank by the time young donald set out to learn 'the art of the deal' but maybe way more than that (adjusted for inflation) - not sure.

the donald today is slightly richer than ross perot (4 vs. 3.7 billion according to very quick searches) and thus about sixteen times richer than mitt romney's supposed net worth ($250 million), which is a hundred times poppy bush's. old money ain't worth what it used to be. hillary's just below the h.w. level. bloomberg, america's eighth-richest person, is worth $35.4 billion dollars. mark zuckerberg (#7) will be eligible to run for president in 2020. look out world.

dudes, walker is not gonna get close to the nomination.

xpost

holy christ bloomberg is rich. couldn't he just solve NYC's problems by giving away his cash (yes, i know he's a big philanthropist)

amazingly, even that would not really be enough. even just talking transit, the unfunded budgetary hole in the MTA's capital plan for just the next five years is fifteen billion. and most of that is just to bring things to a state of good repair and implement a new farecard system, with very little in the way of new track, etc. cities are expensive.

We should all move to seasteads!

I don't think he has any actual interest or capacity for the nuts and bolts of running a campaign, he just wants to show up and shoot his mouth off

yes, & afaict (though tbh haven't bothered to check it out) trump has no thought-out set of policies he's presenting; he's just bloviating clickbait

which at this stage might seem, to some, blunt speaking truth to power (or just provides audience with entertainment value; trump knows reality show after all)

btw DC otm upthread that walker vs public unions not necessarily political handicap, not in the primaries

v improbable he'll get nomination, but it's within realm of possibility at least

Trump couldn't carry Perot's jock.

His aggressive racism and misogyny is more compelling electorally than the flat tax was for Forbes tho.

it is shocking to me how many of my friends are throwing in for Sanders, who I'd consider a sure loss against generic (R)

That's the spirit!

mark zuckerberg (#7) will be eligible to run for president in 2020. look out world.

― a chamillionaire full of mallomars (Doctor Casino), Wednesday, July 1, 2015 7:05 PM (3 hours ago)

this makes me feel worse than anything i have read on the internet all day (and i have checked the facebork)

xp it’s understandable
on gop side, presumed inevitable nominee jeb at least has competition & fight ahead

only person challenging inevitable nominee hillary in any way so far is bernie
& afaict her campaign so far consists in avoiding answering any difficult questions
(ultimately imo bernie is mirage too)

how many of your pro-Sanders friends think he has any chance of being elected?

O'Malley and Chafee are also challenging Herself, technically

xp zuckerberg as potus is fascinatingly dystopian prospect

but tbh don't think u.s. presidency holds much if any allurement in terms of will to power
for chairman & ceo of faceborg

wd like to hear more from o'malley, really don't know anything about him

Well, he still wakes up white in a city that ain't, and we're still not sure whether Norman actually voted for him.

heh, i see so many politicians through prism of carcetti

o'malley strikes me as a john edwards type -- mouths the right words, lacks substance

i would have said he's not as transparently phoney as edwards, but then again i had friends who were fooled by edwards so

The Donald's wealth is a matter of wild speculation - a great article (that I can't find) goes over his history with Forbes' Richest Persons List, which dropped him for a few years after overestimating his wealth massively, but which he rings and goes over in detail every year (he's generally arguing for a figure 2-3 multiples of theirs, but again that fluctuates wildly).

All real-estate empires are built on a mountain of debt. Trump may still have money, but IIRC the equity investors in his public companies have lost everything invested, twice.

Trump leads among ppl who are fans of circus geeks

Morbsbait:

In December 2009, toward the end of her first year as secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed to a joint interview with perhaps her best-known living predecessor, Henry Kissinger.

As she pondered the encounter, she began to worry that her distant relationship with President Obama, who beat her for their party’s presidential nomination, might contrast unfavorably with Mr. Kissinger’s close collaboration with President Richard M. Nixon.

“In thinking about the Kissinger interview, the only issue I think that might be raised is that I see POTUS at least once a week while K saw Nixon every day,” she wrote in an email to aides, using the acronym for the president of the United States. “Of course, if I were dealing w that POTUS I’d probably camp in his office to prevent him from doing something problematic,” she added cheekily before returning to the main point: “Do you see this as a problem?

twice
Ahem,

Donald Trump has filed for corporate bankruptcy four times, in 1991, 1992, 2004 and 2009. All of these bankruptcies were connected to over-leveraged casino and hotel properties in Atlantic City, all of which are now operated under the banner of Trump Entertainment Resorts. He has never filed for personal bankruptcy — an important distinction when considering his ability to emerge relatively unscathed, at least financially.

Found it: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/business/yourmoney/whats-he-really-worth.html

Yeah that was posted earlier - good article.

Required financial disclosures are gonna be a problem for Chump

that I see POTUS at least once a week while K saw Nixon every day

"Hillary, I know we do not share the same faith, but we do believe in the same God. I ask that you kneel down and pray with me."

"I'M A METHODIST."

Some Facebook back-and-forth has made me realize that Trump is totally Morrie from Goodfellas: 1) the hairpiece, 2) "He's a nut job. He talks to everybody...Nobody cares what he says, he talks so much."

I always thought of Trump as a kind of LaRouche dude. No one really gives a shit, or knows why he is in jail, but everyone still knows his name.

There's still some time to go, but the country seems like it's in such a weird place that I have no idea what may happen come election day. In my little region, the fact that certified moron Scott Walker has stuck around and Walker wannabe Bruce Rauner got elected in IL reflects some real discontentment, but also a sort of incoherent discontentment. I could easily imagine HRC losing, or winning while losing further local Dem ground in the states. I think her biggest problem - and this stems from general Clinton fatigue - is that after the burst of excitement about fresh, new candidate Obama, can election-on-a-silver-platter Clinton really rally people to campaign for her? Obviously awareness is not her concern, but getting out the vote I imagine could be tough, given our general disinterest in going to the polls in the best of circumstances.

The only thing really working in her favor on this point I think is the near total lack of enthusiasm about the dozen GOP candidates. To keep things interesting, maybe they should do a reverse Monopoly house rules election to see which candidate can get the least amount of votes. Lowest tally wins.

President Pataki for life!

I am hoping that if a real cackler like Walker gets the nomination, that will push up Clinton's vote - I can see that a Bush-Clinton choice would probably not.

feel like sanders could beat most of the GOP candidates

mostly because they're all insane, but maybe i'm being too charitable to the voting public

thinking about sanders again. still think it would be cool if his momentum holds out for a while. not so much for what it'll do to the presidential race but maybe, hypothetically, if people see an out-and-out leftie barnstormer actually performing competitively in primaries etc., it could have some kind of impact on other races. people running for congress or the city council, collectively ratcheting back down that giant invisible party ticker that says "well, we can't run on THESE issues, they're seen as 'too left' these days" etc. not expecting a miracle but some kind of very mild adjustment back in the vague general direction of ye olde democratic party would be nice to see. probably naive of me though.

ratcheting back down that giant invisible party ticker that says "well, we can't run on THESE issues, they're seen as 'too left' these days"

this is already happening afaict

(albeit not really because of Sanders)

So the Post has this headline: "As Donald Trump surges in polls, Democrats cheer."

As a Democrat I understand the impulse: "Yes, PLEASE, let us have more trainwreck on the GOP side."

Though I wonder whether this is tipping our hand too much, if we're seen to be cheering on the trainwreck.

There was a conservative talking point in 2008 along the lines of "the left and the media (but I repeat myself) will tell you who they fear." According to this view, tearing Palin down was an indication that you feared Palin, which means Palin would be a sure winner in a fair fight.

Can we repeat this magic with Trump?

At this point I go off into spirals of head-fakey tactical horse-racey shit that can get to truly absurd levels. See here: http://acecomments.mu.nu/?blog=86&post=357581#c23822017 "I see more libs raging about Trump than I do conservatives. Hmmmm, gets me thinking. He scares them." So. A conservative believes liberals' denigration of Trump means that Trump is ACTUALLY a viable candidate.

Great! So we could continue to push the message that Trump is unsuitable for a dignified public office. So the right will conclude that we're doing this in order to hamstring someone who is a genuine threat. (Of course, he isn't, which is exactly the kind of Republican nominee Democrats truly want.)

But this line of thinking is a little too much like a double agent trying to convince a triple agent that he's actually a quadruple agent, and that way lies madness.

u mad, puffin

*bites cyanide cap*

But this line of thinking is a little too much like a double agent trying to convince a triple agent that he's actually a quadruple agent, and that way lies madness.

this is 47th dimension chess, where you look up from your eternal concentration and find that your opponent is actually yourself

A new poll shows Sanders, a self-described "democratic socialist," winning 33 percent of likely participants in the Iowa Democratic caucus, while 52 percent said they would vote for Clinton if the Democratic caucus was held today.

The poll was conducted by Quinnipiac University, which surveyed 761 likely Iowa Democratic caucus participants from June 20-29, with a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points.

Sanders still has a long way to go to catch up to Clinton. However, Thursday's poll shows he has more than doubled his support from a May 7 Quinnipiac survey that showed him polling at only 15 percent to Clinton's 60 percent among caucus-goers. Thursday's poll shows the Vermont progressive having particular appeal among participants who call themselves very liberal, who chose him 47-43 percent over Clinton.

Dem primary base has moved left, as evidenced by the NYT piece about how Dem funding has shifted left as well

Polarization: it's what's for dinner.

For more Trump fun, see

http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=357640

"The Trump bubble is what you get when a significant part of the GOP is tired of being lied to and screwed over. They want to be heard and they want to see their values (in this case anger, which is an emotion not a value but it's a reasonable stand in at this point) reflected in a candidate.

"The mostly mealy mouthed response to the recent Supreme Court ruling from most GOP candidates does not match the anger a lot of conservatives are feeling.

"There's almost no recognition by candidates that people feel something important about America is slipping away. They aren't seeing that being acknowledged by Jeb, Marco or even Walker."

This sort of through-the-looking-glass perspective is instructive. Ace of Spades and his commentariat typify the sort of conservative who feels the Republican Party is too lefty-squishy, and is not doing enough to fight Obama.

Reading there is an interesting inverse of reading here, and seeing e.g. Morbs criticizing Obama and Hillary for being insufficiently liberal.

In any case, people (left or right) who view electoral politics as primarily entertainment are obliged to be grateful for Trump in all his Trumpiness.

that site is bizarre. not sure why they call Trump a liberal

Left of Goldwater.

is he though?

it's prob fair to say trump isn't a coherent political anything

comments on that site are a p awesome pic of how fractured and dispirited the GOP is, there's no way they're gonna win this or unify behind anybody

sanders is a dead end, i love bernie but he won't win the nomination and honestly in another universe when it's bush v sanders there is no way old man bernie would win