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

The weapons trade with Taiwan has been going on for decades as well as the constant USN and USAF presence in key parts of the Pacific. It's not like we hide all that, or the existence of the AIT and TECRO. In fact, hey look it's all right here: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35855.htm

The phone call is symbolic of our President-Elect is a dipshit.

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. As president elect, Obama was in direct contact with Ma Ying-Jeou, albeit via letter, to congratulate him on his election win - which came shortly after Obama's own and has pushed for Taiwan to be included in a number of international federations (in addition to the billions of dollars of defensive weapons sold).

It's a fairly easy bit of symbolism for Trump - cutting through the fiction that the US does not have contact with senior Taiwanese politicians, showing his base that he's not afraid of China and giving a domestic message that diplomacy will not be business as usual. Actually breaking with the 'one China' policy would be massive, Trump meeting with Tsai face to face as president would be big, but there's still a question mark over whether he would ever actually do either of those things.

The Duterte praise is pretty disconcerting to me, because I've already had a lot of images in my head of paramilitary/death squad type forces arising under Trump. Lots of armed right-wingers in parts of the country, could also involve Blackwater which has massive ties to the administration (Pence is a friend of Prince and DeVos is Prince's brother). A little cooperation/head-turning from sympathetic police departments, a justice dept that refuses to deal with it, it all seems plausible to me. As the brilliant Matt Stoller pointed out in a podcast I listened to the other night, it's not like it hasn't happened before in the US.

yes let's not forget the widespread FEMA camps and Obamacare Death Panels

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-risk-behind-trumps-taiwan-call

this is pretty harrowing

Would be great if China took it out on Trump and his family, personally.

No way that anyone who voted for Trump or the minority of #NeverTrump people are going to give a a damn about the "foreign policy establishment" being "appalled." That's why they voted for him.

And guess who approves?

https://www.cotton.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=547

http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/12/former_pow_bowe_bergdahl_asks.html

whoa, some of the shit trump has said about this

President-elect Donald Trump was particularly critical of the prisoner deal during the presidential campaign, describing Bergdahl as a "no-good traitor, who should have been executed." Trump has at times held up an imaginary rifle as if he were taking aim at Bergdahl and declared at a Las Vegas rally in October that "30 years ago, he would have been shot."

so obscene. as if trump could have withstood the psychological pressure of being a solider deployed in a combat zone.

https://68.media.tumblr.com/f826d223e1b6c029de46aa87165aac74/tumblr_ohmoi9H2l21qdmmiqo1_500.gif

A metaphor for the year to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh4jm0aYUPM

holy shit, that was a disturbingly moving video to watch on mute while listening to tim hecker's whitecaps of whitenoise II. thanks!

It's a fairly easy bit of symbolism for Trump - cutting through the fiction that the US does not have contact with senior Taiwanese politicians, showing his base that he's not afraid of China and giving a domestic message that diplomacy will not be business as usual.

You appear to be talking about a completely different person named Trump than the one who is currently the nominal US President-elect.

Also this, from the NYer piece linked above, is completely OTM

If you work in foreign affairs, you learn that a highly unexpected event is often the result of intent or incompetence. (You also learn that what looks, at first, like intent often turns out to be incompetence.)

I assume by now he knows what he's in for when he's actually the president, though I suppose it's possible that ... he doesn't.

i think he is consciously trying to act in a chaotic, unpredictable manner in order to evade accountability

steve bannon: "darkness is good"

Anybody suspecting Donald Trump of deliberately trying to produce something beyond the immediate first order effects of his actions is crazy.

A 140 character limit plumbs the depths of Trump's thoughts.

i strongly disagree with the idea that trump is not using lies, conspiracies, and gaslighting to manipulate the media and by extension public consciousness. people who are simply idiots don't end up being elected president.

he is certainly ignorant but he knows how to use language to suit his own purposes.

people who are simply idiots don't end up being elected president

I'm sure there's a modicum of reassurance in believing this, but history begs to differ.

Trump barely knows how to use language to get his point across. I direct you to Trump, explaining why he "saved" the Carrier jobs that he told people he would save.

idk bros. dissimulation starts to feel like a strategy when someones uses it to marshawn lynch his way through countless scandals all the way to the presidency

unsettling thought:

Her culpability prevented her from condemning the status quo, and her ideology prevented her from proposing a big fix. Unfortunately, much of the progressive movement also seems to be only vaguely aware of the concerns of, let alone the specific thoughts of, Americans who are suffering in the decline. And because of that, if Trump figures out how to lead his movement while governing—as Obama inexplicably decided not to do—then we’re in deep, deep trouble because we will be utterly defenseless against it.

http://inthesetimes.com/features/left_organizing_donald_trump_zack_exley.html

Coulter and Palin already getting ahead of the curve on former supporters criticizing Trump from the right - who else is up to bat?

idk, this is good stuff though. i was also a big fan of glenn beck's swerve to the center.

i strongly disagree with the idea that trump is not using lies, conspiracies, and gaslighting to manipulate the media and by extension public consciousness. people who are simply idiots don't end up being elected president.

― Treeship, Saturday, December 3, 2016 5:40 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

serious question: If everything we've seen so far is not enough to convince you that Trump is genuinely dumb, what would it take?

like, what are some things he would have to do/say that would make you reconsider?

i think he is genuinely ignorant and incurious but that he knows how to fuck with people to get what he wants.

my grandfather called people like this "dumb as a fox."

like, i don't think he has some grand, sophisticated diplomatic scheme, but i do think he knows how to use spectacle to distract people while he does stuff like leverage his new political power for profit

Trump believes what he says (he lacks conviction and consistency, but at the moment something comes out of his lips believes it) and is not intentionally gaslighting, imo

i think it just seems like he believes what he is saying because he is utterly shameless and comfortable with lying to an extent none of us can really comprehend

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.

idk the former would be easier for him to force himself to believe considering the implications of him accepting a popular vote loss of 2.5 mill makes him partially a loser, and a hypocrite for saying such a scenario should lead people to 'take to the streets' in 2012. if it makes him look/feel better, he probably believes it.

tbh it doesn't matter what he "actually thinks"

otm

it kind of matters. if he literally believes everything he hears on infowars that will lead him to pursue different policies than if he just understood that stuff to be useful as propaganda.

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. It's not that he has no compunction about lying, it's that anything he says is as honest as anything else he says, it's all just keeping balls in the air. That stuff about facts-have-no-meaning is exactly how he has always operated. And our institutions of government, media, civic society, etc are just not set up to deal with someone like that. I know an auditor who used to work for PWC, and she told me candidly that all of their auditing procedures are set up to catch people who are sloppy or careless, but they're not very good at catching people who just straight-up lie and make things up. Same thing we're dealing with now.

real, fake, con, or not, he's going to sign Paul Ryan's legislation. That's what matters.

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