2016 US Presidential Election Thread Part VI

[Headache in a Suitcase]

This is all just surreal.

I should be thrilled that an outsider who leans fairly left on most things is destroying the Republican establishment... but not this outsider. Not this pariah.

It's baffling that we've come to this. It really is. Baffling and troubling.

[BigMacPhisto]

Again, to take things into context, Trump is getting barely more than a third of the Republican vote so far which was about 20,000,000 in the 2012 primaries. That means there's about six or seven million Republicans that are actually wildly enthused by this guy...not to mention that the bulk of his support comes from those that previously weren't even involved in the process but absolutely love the red meat he throws out there.

So, six or seven million people (roughly) out of a country with like 319 million....not really that big a number. Plenty of people that live in trailer parks.

[BVS]

Trump's son took part in an interview on a white supremacist's radio show yesterday.

Really?! You'd think they'd be a little more careful.


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[nbelcik]

Originally Posted by BVS

This is what one would think given his stances, but he's done a good job fooling the far right. Everything the Tea Party was apparently railing against for the past 8 years. Everything they've tried to pin on Obama, Donald actually is. But he hates the right people, he's white, and he placed an R behind his name, so all their "principles" are thrown out the window.


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The number one predictor of a voters support for Trump is support for authoritarianism. They don't give a shit about freedom. They just want the government to oppress black and brown people.


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[LuckyNumber7]

I honestly think it's mostly about anti-establishment voting. You'd be surprised how many Trump supporters are pro-Bernie. Not all of them, of course. Lots are big nationalists who are anti "communist" Sanders.

They don't give a shit how the government gets it done. They just perceive Donald's self funding as less likely to cross them. I think beliefs are contagious. People will only be as racist as they're told to be by their dear leader.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by LuckyNumber7

I honestly think it's mostly about anti-establishment voting. You'd be surprised how many Trump supporters are pro-Bernie. Not all of them, of course. Lots are big nationalists who are anti "communist" Sanders.

They don't give a shit how the government gets it done. They just perceive Donald's self funding as less likely to cross them. I think beliefs are contagious. People will only be as racist as they're told to be by their dear leader.

Or it could be they believe he has a better chance against Bernie.

I know the "antiestablishment" thing is part of it, but there are very few that would be fine with either side as long as they're an outsider.

These were the same people who tried to use Obama's inexperience as an issue.


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[LuckyNumber7]

Originally Posted by BVS

Or it could be they believe he has a better chance against Bernie.

I know the "antiestablishment" thing is part of it, but there are very few that would be fine with either side as long as they're an outsider.

These were the same people who tried to use Obama's inexperience as an issue.


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Take a look at the independents that both of them are pulling in. There's certainly an overlap. It's not the size of a base, of course, but it is the size of a difference in an election.

[Axver]

Originally Posted by BEAL

At this point my motto is, Anyone but Cruz

Yeah, to be honest if Trump or Cruz must win the nomination, I'll take Trump. He may be evil (and he's definitely stupid, his allegedly great business experience can attest to how much of an idiot he is), but Cruz is definitely evil - and competent enough to implement his lunacy.

I'll also take Trump over Rubio, because I actually believe Rubio can win at a general election and I still think Trump will be a flop. Cruz probably can't win either, but his evil competence means I'm more willing to roll the dice with Trump.

Either way, the last thing the world needs is a Republican presidency, especially not any of these cranks.

[LuckyNumber7]

For the longest time I thought "Cruz is worse than Trump."

I don't know if I can answer that question. They're both equally terrible for different reasons. I get the impression that Cruz would set us back domestically over a decade. But Trump would probably destroy the world.

[corianderstem]

Trump as prez would make us a laughing stock (moreso than we already are, anyway). But from what I know about Cruz, he would technically be worse for the country.

[Irvine511]

what had seemed not-so-bad about Trump was that many of his positions aren't all that conservative -- just populist. and you know he doesn't give a shit about god, guns, or gays. he's a New Yorker.

but the racist authoritarianism and the growing nastiness of his crowds is very, very concerning. the fringe elements of the party have become its mainstream, dog whistles are now chants. what he is trying to harness in order to win shouldn't be meddled with. there are bad people out there, and my guess is they don't vote all that much. they could start.

this has been coming for years, at least since Palin. probably since the rise of hate radio in the 1990s. here's some smart analysis:

If we do a project in a rough and ready way, which is often what we can manage under the time and budget constraints we face, we will build up a "debt" we'll eventually have to pay back. Basically, if we do it fast, we'll later have to go back and rework or even replace the code to make it robust enough for the long haul, interoperate with other code that runs our site or simply be truly functional as opposed just barely doing what we need it to. There's no right or wrong answer; it's simply a management challenge to know when to lean one way or the other. But if you build up too much of this debt the problem can start to grow not in a linear but an exponential fashion, until the system begins to cave in on itself with internal decay, breakdowns of interoperability and emergent failures which grow from both.

This is a fairly good description of what the media is now wrongly defining as the GOP's 'Trump problem', only in this case the problem isn't programming debt. It's a build up of what we might call 'hate debt' and 'nonsense debt' that has been growing up for years.

This crystallized for me after the last GOP debate when Trump told Chris Cuomo in a post-debate interview that the IRS might be coming after him because he's a "strong Christian." Set aside for the moment how this unchurched libertine was able to rebrand himself as a "strong Christian." What about the preposterous claim that he is being persecuted by the IRS because he is a devout member of the country's dominant religion? Republicans simply aren't in any position to criticize this ludicrous claim because they have spent years telling their voters that this sort of thing happens all the time - to Christians, conservatives, everyone the liberals at the IRS hate. And this, of course, is just one example of hate and nonsense debt coming due. Shift gears now and they're "RINOs."

Take Trump's plan to deport 11 million people living in the US illegally or build the planned Trump Taj MaWall. As John Kasich has futilely tried to explain in debate after debate, whatever the rights and wrongs of it, this is simply never going to happen. Such an effort would be more on the order of a post-War World II population transfer than anything remotely like a conventional immigration enforcement action, costing probably hundreds of billions of dollars and perhaps even constituting something approaching a war crime. As for the Wall, of course, in the real world net immigration across the US-Mexico border has actually gone into reverse in recent years. More are leaving than coming. But in the Republican/Fox news world, hordes of feral Mexicans are still streaming across the Southern border - them and a layering of ISIS death squads who fly from Ankara to Belize and then walk to the Arizona border.

But this is just the hate and nonsense debt coming due from 2013. You can either let the status quo go on or you can devise a way to regularize at least the majority of people who are here illegally. There's no other option. Unless you just want to say 'No Amnesty' and pretend the problem will go away with 'self-deportation' or some other such nonsense. And that of course is precisely what Republican congressional leaders did. All Trump did was say openly, clearly, more coherently what Republicans were already saying themselves, while also saying out of the sides of their mouths that somehow they'd get to the mass deportation later.

The truth is virtually Trump's entire campaign is built on stuff just like this, whether it's about mass deportation, race, the persecution of Christians, Obamacare, the coming debt crisis and a million other things. At the last debate, Trump got pressed on his completely ludicrous tax cut plan. He eventually said growth (which if you calculate it would need to be something like 20% annual growth on average) would take care of the huge budget shortfall it created. But Republicans can't really dispute this point since all of Republican campaign economics is based on precisely the same argument. What about Obamacare? Can Marco "Establishment" Rubio really get traction attacking Trump for having no specific plan to replace Obamacare when Republicans have spent the last five years repeatedly voting to repeal Obamacare without ever specifying a plan to replace it with? On each of these fronts, the slow accumulation of nonsense and paranoia - 'debt' to use our metaphor - built into a massive trap door under the notional GOP leadership with a lever that a canny huckster like Trump could come in and pull pretty much whenever. This is the downside of building party identity around a package of calculated nonsense and comically unrealizable goals.

On other fronts, Republican party leaders have sanctioned repeated government shutdowns, threats to default on the national debt and various other totally crazy things. But if you notice, it's always in the outyears - not in election years and never during presidential election years when more is at stake and the electorate leans more Democratic.

There's some metaphor or analogy here about a hostile takeover, though hostile takeovers don't usually take place because of excess debt. They're proxy battles or stock purchases. But there are numerous ways that profligate spending and excess debt can leave a highly leveraged company vulnerable to a guileful schemer who strangles the ownership and takes the carcass for himself. Some version of that is the story of Trump - a raid on a hopelessly leveraged GOP 'establishment' which barely realized that it scarcely exists.

Having said all this, I always try to remind people that as observers of contemporary politics we ascribe far more power to political leaders than they actually exercise. They are more like riverine engineers. They can reinforce the banks, shift a river's direction a bit. In extraordinary cases they can even dam a river. But even that only regulates the flow of the water. It seldom stops it entirely. The deeper causes of the recent trends in the GOP go deep into the society and culture of the American right and American society generally. But Republican elected officials have increasingly coddled, exploited and in some cases - yes - spurred their voters' penchant for resentment, perceived persecution, apocalyptic thinking and generic nonsense.

Until now GOP elites have managed to maintain a balance or needle-threading sleight of hand wherein the GOP had become the functional equivalent of a European rightist party (UKIP or French National Front) yet masqueraded as a conventional center-right party (UK Conservatives or French Republicans) - all under the go-along leadership of the people The Washington Post editorial page imagines run the GOP. But the set up was already under extreme strain, as evidenced by the 2011 debt default drama, the 2013 Cruz shutdown and the end of the Boehner Speakership in 2015. Trump is very little different from the average candidate Republicans elected in 2010 and 2014, in terms of radical views and extreme rhetoric. All Trump's done is take the actual GOP issue package, turn it up to eleven and put it on a high speed collision course with RNC headquarters smack in the middle of presidential election year.

Inside the GOP Implosion and the War to Stop Trump

[Mack_Again]

Originally Posted by BVS

Trump's son took part in an interview on a white supremacist's radio show yesterday.

Really?! You'd think they'd be a little more careful.


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but what if those white supremacists are actually supporting Trump's campaign? then his son is right to see white supremacists on the radio to get more support from those racists in the south. It's same thing as Nixon did in the 60s/70s.

[BVS]

Originally Posted by Mack_Again

but what if those white supremacists are actually supporting Trump's campaign?

What do you mean "what if"?


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[Mack_Again]

Originally Posted by BVS

What do you mean "what if"?


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I know they are actually supporting Trump. but I'm still in denial.

[Mrs. Garrison]

Is TRUMP! better than Cruz? Is diarrhea better than constipation? Obviously both are a shitty mess...but i have to go with TRUMP! being the better choice because Cruz is just a horrible person. I can say this without ever having met the guy. TRUMP! has on a couple of occasions shown slivers of decency, which he probably didn't intend to do because he knows that type of thing will confuse (perhaps alienate) his supporters, however he still accidentally did.

[LuckyNumber7]

Originally Posted by Mrs. Garrison

Is TRUMP! better than Cruz? Is diarrhea better than constipation? Obviously both are a shitty mess...but i have to go with TRUMP! being the better choice because Cruz is just a horrible person. I can say this without ever having met the guy. TRUMP! has on a couple of occasions shown slivers of decency, which he probably didn't intend to do because he knows that type of thing will confuse (perhaps alienate) his supporters, however he still accidentally did.

Sort of like when Trump said that planned parenthood does other good things for women? I agree. I was like, woah, I think he accidentally just used logic.

[Mack_Again]

Originally Posted by LuckyNumber7

I agree. I was like, woah, I think he accidentally just used logic.

But others in Republican aren't capable of doing so, apparently

[VintagePunk]

Originally Posted by Irvine511

this has been coming for years, at least since Palin.

This is what I have been thinking all along. I don't understand how this turn of events can be shocking, after the whole Palin debacle. He's appealing to a similar segment of the population.

[Mack_Again]

This whole Trump phenomenon, to me, is just an extension to his overblown personality that he's been selling forever. why the hell people think it's new "political event" or "new wave of politics"? people wanting someone with larger-than-life personality isn't all that new.

[PhilsFan]

Originally Posted by bobsaget77

Trump's biggest challenge with the republicans is getting conservatives to vote for him, not moderates. He does very well with moderates.

Not moderates, just the sizable portion of conservatives that other conservatives like to pretend doesn't exist when it's convenient for them.