Trump General Discussion

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Unfortunately it really doesn't quite work that way.

There is zero chance the Democrats take Congress in 2018. The Republicans have gerrymandered it such that this is impossible. Until the 2020 census and beyond, Congress is essentially lost. Worse yet, almost all of the Senators up for re-election in 2018 are Democrats.

The Dems have the advantage of having 4 years to regroup and having to go through possibly painful primaries in 2018 to figure out what will be the soul of the party. The Republicans will own every single inaction and failure in 4 years, and on top of that almost all the Senators up for re-election will be Republican and on top of that Democrats tend to do better down ballot in a Presidential election year. So really 2020 is the earliest you can have any sort of meaningful legislative change/impact.

Interestingly, Obama is taking this on as his work after he is out of office. He's going after gerrymandering in a big way. I'm hoping there is progress quickly.
 
Unfortunately it really doesn't quite work that way.



There is zero chance the Democrats take Congress in 2018. The Republicans have gerrymandered it such that this is impossible. Until the 2020 census and beyond, Congress is essentially lost. Worse yet, almost all of the Senators up for re-election in 2018 are Democrats.



The Dems have the advantage of having 4 years to regroup and having to go through possibly painful primaries in 2018 to figure out what will be the soul of the party. The Republicans will own every single inaction and failure in 4 years, and on top of that almost all the Senators up for re-election will be Republican and on top of that Democrats tend to do better down ballot in a Presidential election year. So really 2020 is the earliest you can have any sort of meaningful legislative change/impact.


Damn... Well that's depressing...
 
I'm convinced he didn't actually want this. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say everything sucks and Washington is corrupt. Whole other thing to actually do something. I'm sure he wants his lifestyle in his golden penthouse surrounded by the rich and famous, glamorous parties, booze and coke, etc. He wants to get even richer and stir up the masses not actually put in the work. Bye bye trump tower, won't see the inside of that for a few years and bye bye phone and twitter and trump TV, etc etc

Same in Europe, few of these extremist populist right wing parties actually have any real power yet (thank god) but they'd be similarly out of their depth. Speaking of the global phenomenon, this is not terrifying at all: http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/11179774?


I can totally see this happening tho (re. your link) - it is truly terrifying.... The Front National in France is being funded (or at least was until very recently) by loans from Russian banks- nuts eh...
 
Aside from the Harry Potter thing, more startling revelations...

Was Hillary imitate-able enough? Think about it. There hasn't been a president less imitate-able since George HW Bush. Bill... Dubya... Obama... we've had 24 solid years of imitate-able presidency. Maybe America wasn't ready to give that up?
 
not that this is good political strategy, but Trump supporters would do well to read and understand the concerns and fears of people who aren't white and working class living in the Rust Belt (like they demand the rest of us do):


To all of those who posted cute little think pieces about how liberals better start listening to the white working class yesterday, let me say this:

No. Fuck the white working class.

Know that even though Trump won the electoral college, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, so when you tell us to stop being terrified about the very sanctity of our bodies and listen to the plaintive whines of the white working class, you are telling the disenfranchised to pay more attention to the over-franchised. You are asking us to consider that our very safety is less important than getting some coal mining jobs back. You are asking us to stop and reason with a screaming toddler. You are urging us to negotiate with terrorists.

I have read dozens of longform pieces this election season about the plight of the white working class. I’ve skipped over many more because I’m fucking done with it. The white working class was not under-covered. The problem is not that we don’t understand the white working class. The problem is that they’re not the only people here.

I am sick of being told, as I have my whole life, that middle America is the “real” America, and we “urban” elites just don’t get it because we don’t live there. As if that were our choice. As if we could just live our brown lives, our black lives, our queer lives, in the middle of Trump country. As if that were a safe thing to do.


As if they would welcome us.

I am done being told that I can’t make the occasional snide comment about rednecks but that every time I travel to a red state I have to politely endure being degraded as a woman and as a child of immigrants, listen to jokes about mincing gays and ching-chong Chinamen — and if I complain about this, if I say, you’re being fucking offensive, I am told that I’m too PC and am forcing my libertard vagenda on salt-of-the-earth red-blooded Muricans and in this way Trump is once again my fault, a monster I brought on myself.

No, I’m not going to read your shitty piece on the white working class because I have to figure out right now whether my family is safe, whether we’re still considered the good kind of brown and if so, how long that will last before they start coming for us, too. I have to figure out whether my child is safe at his Jewish preschool now that the anti-Semites have been emboldened, and whether my parents and sister will be okay. I know that I’m one of the lucky ones, because I live in a very blue state and have relative economic privilege, and so I hope that I can stay and help those who will need it most: the brown and black working class, the poor folk who’ll really be ground to dust by the Republican economic agenda, the women in red states who won’t be able to get the health care they need once Mike Pence gets his hands on their vaginas. They are the ones who need us now; this is the America in peril.

And for you Bernie bros who gave us three minutes to mourn the loss of our champion, an accomplished, intelligent woman who many of us were genuinely inspired by, before you started in with your “Bernie would have won if the DNC hadn’t rigged the election!” bullshit, know that what you’re telling us is that black and brown votes — the votes that actually won Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination — don’t matter, that an election can’t be legitimate unless white people say so. You are not better than the Trump people, and I am done with you, too.

The 'White Working Class' Can Kiss My Brown Ass
 
If only that rage and terror could have translated to a few more in the rust belt.

If only Hillary had been inspirational to more than 25% of eligible voters.

I understand where authors like her are coming from and it's perfectly fine to vent, but such rhetoric isn't going to enact meaningful change when an enormous chunk of the population is still 30+ and white.
 
This feels like the narrative of Harry Potter.

Don Riddle aka Lord Voldenord ascends back to power. All of his death eaters who were working behind the scenes finally came out and showed their true colors. Their intention: to rid the United States of the non-wizamericans. Most typically despise the first generation wizamericans, and some have publicly declared they should have no right to witchcraft and wizardry like the pure bloods. Coincidentally, one of Don Riddle's own parents wasn't even pure blood. Anyways, this is around the part where Don's questionable faith in Severus Snapaulryan puts Snapaulryan on the line to join him full force and urge congress to build the wall. If he doesn't, he will no longer be speaker of the house. There's Barron Malfoy. Soon to be Melanatrix L'estranged. And who could forget our future token Secretary of State... someone we once thought was a nuisance but now legitimately fear for her idiocy... Dolorah Umbralin.

You have to squint really hard, but I applaud your efforts here.





not that this is good political strategy, but Trump supporters would do well to read and understand the concerns and fears of people who aren't white and working class living in the Rust Belt (like they demand the rest of us do):

This is fine and all, but, no, if she thinks other people can't crack jokes about her, then she can't crack jokes about 'rednecks'. That mentality is probably what got us here in the first place.
 
She had a right to be enthusiastic about Clinton; others had a right to be enthusiastic about Bernie. Neither is more legitimate than the other.

Or is the assumption still out there that Sanders supporters are as bad as Trump supporters?
 
As intense as my efforts have been to conceal it, I'm still deeply depressed and in a mental fog because Hillary lost. And I have been a Bernie Bro since day 1.

I don't want to hear for one fucking second that progressive thinkers with serious qualms about Hillary that nonetheless want the country heading in the right direction are "worse than Trump supporters." It's absolute nonsense.
 
As intense as my efforts have been to conceal it, I'm still deeply depressed and in a mental fog because Hillary lost. And I have been a Bernie Bro since day 1.

I don't want to hear for one fucking second that progressive thinkers with serious qualms about Hillary that nonetheless want the country heading in the right direction are "worse than Trump supporters." It's absolute nonsense.



There was a misogyny and racism quite evident with many of the Bernie Bros, we had wonderful examples right here in FYM from our own BMP about how southern black women were too dumb to vote for anyone not named Clinton.

I see no racism or misogyny in you.

I'm also not the author of the article. I'm sure you could comment on the website. I posted it for thought, especially because I'm finding this "stop ignoring the disenfranchised white people" line of thought to be getting tiresome.
 
The economic anxiety of Trump voters is running amok.

In the video, Nkhama said while she was on her way to class, a guy “went out of his way to bump into me and shove me off the sidewalk.”

“He said, ‘No n****s allowed on the sidewalk,’” Nkhama said. “I was just shocked, like I had no words.”

She said another male student who she did not know tried to come to her rescue and told the guy, “Dude what are you doing? That’s not cool.”

According to Nkhama, the guy then said, “Dude, like what…I’m just trying to make America great again.”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/tasneemnas...ter-she-was-al?utm_term=.ux307ONn8#.qvxM5r07A
 
not that this is good political strategy, but Trump supporters would do well to read and understand the concerns and fears of people who aren't white and working class living in the Rust Belt (like they demand the rest of us do):

I agree with the criticism of those who urge us to now sit down with the "white working class" or however they choose to formulate the angry group that elected Trump and seek to "understand" them. Get fucked. Stop being the appeasers of our time.

First, it offensively paints all people within the selected demographic as racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynistic people who like authoritarianism and possess fascistic tendencies.

Second, with regards to those who do hold those views or are willing to overlook them and work with those who hold them (i.e. anybody who voted Trump), there is no compromise, there is no understanding. These people must be condemned in no uncertain terms, and destroyed politically. There shall be no appeasement.

Third, and this is a tangent, I am so fucking sick of the assumption that academics/journalists/inner city residents/pollsters/"experts" are some sort of detached elite. As if I, or most people I know, have spent all our lives in trendy inner suburbs rolling in cash and cold drip coffee. Try harder motherfucker. Funnily enough, all the people I see idealising the working classes, or suggesting we need to "understand" the anger inaccurately generalised to all of them, are people who have no experience of the working class or poverty. And have a look at all the shit cunts in the alt right, a movement of people who by and large have not experienced disadvantage or prejudice. You reckon most of those drink-spiking "nice guys" aren't from comfortable middle class homes?

Fucking hell everything is awful.
 
So...

Donald Trump: I may not repeal Obamacare, President-elect says in major U-turn | The Independent

Donald Trump's 'big, beautiful wall' may end up being a fence - NY Daily News

I see this as the the beginning of an epic backpedal, signaling a completely empty, rhetoric-supported campaign. But that might just be the optimism remaining in me.
Which has kind of been my point about him all along.
He just wants to have a 4 year long dinner party at the White House.
 
God, so many of these stories sound like r/thathappened fodder. I don't know believe it, it's just insane how people are acting. Seems so unreal.

Third, and this is a tangent, I am so fucking sick of the assumption that academics/journalists/inner city residents/pollsters/"experts" are some sort of detached elite. As if I, or most people I know, have spent all our lives in trendy inner suburbs rolling in cash and cold drip coffee. Try harder motherfucker. Funnily enough, all the people I see idealising the working classes, or suggesting we need to "understand" the anger inaccurately generalised to all of them, are people who have no experience of the working class or poverty. And have a look at all the shit cunts in the alt right, a movement of people who by and large have not experienced disadvantage or prejudice. You reckon most of those drink-spiking "nice guys" aren't from comfortable middle class homes?

Fucking hell everything is awful.

It's like Anitram said, we're trying to help all of these people, even if it's counter-productive to ourselves financially. My education and slight privilege (I'm still not making bank, but I get by) have made me see how shitty other people have it and have made me hyper focused on getting involved in my community, and helping out with social programs where I can. Why should that mean that I be treated like less of a citizen than others?
 
Which has kind of been my point about him all along.
He just wants to have a 4 year long dinner party at the White House.

so let's say the best case scenario is true... a guy who really doesn't care about politics and did this all for show and as a way to create a TrumpTV to further capitalize on his rhetoric from the campaign, but really had no desire to ever take the job, just saw it as the ultimate money making con.

We now will have a man utterly disintwrested in leading in the office for 4 years, who will be in charge of making decisions when shit goes down, and will likely just give all his real power to the worst elements of the conservative and alt right movements, like Steve Bannon and Mike Pence, scum of the fucking earth that they both are.
 
I am so fucking sick of the assumption that academics/journalists/inner city residents/pollsters/"experts" are some sort of detached elite. As if I, or most people I know, have spent all our lives in trendy inner suburbs rolling in cash and cold drip coffee. Try harder motherfucker. Funnily enough, all the people I see idealising the working classes, or suggesting we need to "understand" the anger inaccurately generalised to all of them, are people who have no experience of the working class or poverty. And have a look at all the shit cunts in the alt right, a movement of people who by and large have not experienced disadvantage or prejudice. You reckon most of those drink-spiking "nice guys" aren't from comfortable middle class homes?

This x10000.

I have recounted my own experience here a number of times. I was a child refugee, separated from my parents and in foster care in another country with strangers and a language I did not speak. I had my 8 year old brother that I had to take care of and nobody and nothing else. We were eventually reunited and came to Canada with nothing, not a penny to our name and not anything other than the clothes on our backs. As an extra bonus point, and you can't make this shit up if you tried, Air Canada lost our one checked suitcase and never recovered it, I think we got $600 at some point later on. Again we didn't speak the language. My Mom went to graduate school in Toronto, became a very successful education consultant and published a pretty successful book (if you're a teacher anyway). My Dad never quite recovered because of language barriers and worked hard at manual labour jobs until he retired at just over 65. I became a corporate lawyer, I graduated first in my elementary school (despite arriving in the country 2 years prior without speaking English), first in my high school and third in my law school. Became a corporate lawyer and worked in probably the best Canadian corporate firm and worked as a corporate lawyer for them in NYC as well. My brother is a teacher. We worked hard and were poor as fucking dirt. Everything I have now, I mean everything, came from a combination of my own ambition and hard work and the help I received from the country that owed me nothing but gave me everything. That is why I have a deep sense of duty to people who maybe weren't as lucky or maybe were just too tired to fight as hard. If I can help them then that is what I have to do. My husband and I do really, really well, not as a point of bragging but to conclude the story.

So when these people, whether they be rural Canadians or rust belt Americans start telling me about how hard their lives are and how I am the smug elite who doesn't get them - fuck right off, guys. Because you didn't see death first hand as a child, because your economic situation growing up was roughly a thousand times better than mine. I could be very smug now and look at you and conclude that maybe if YOUR ass pulled itself up by the bootstraps like you like to preach at the "welfare queens" maybe you'd have put 2 and 2 together and realized that you're living in a dying town with a dying industry and done something about it. Maybe you wouldn't be waiting for the government to save you like some sort of lazy socialist. But no, instead I keep voting and behaving in ways to assist you and frankly I'm kind of getting tired of it. So maybe it's really time you go out there and fend for yourselves and I throw off the shackles of noblesse oblige and go off hand in hand with those elites that you despise.
 
I try my best not to take the "liberal elite" accusations to heart when I hear them. Absolutely I understand what middle America is facing. I lived in the thick of it for 16 years. Ashley and I have been living check to check since I was 20 and we're only recently finding our feet, a mere layoff and a few months from being flat broke. Yet I still supported some expensive policies on Tuesday that will ultimately benefit those less fortunate and improve the social landscape of California while significantly impacting my wallet. It's the right thing to do.

The "liberal elite" that deserves criticism is the Clinton campaign for their arrogant refusal to visit their blue collar midwestern constituents. For believing that Beyonce and Jay Z would connect them with a voter base that felt abandoned. I wasn't behind those decisions and in fact actively opposed them.
 
Last edited:
This x10000.

I have recounted my own experience here a number of times. I was a child refugee, separated from my parents and in foster care in another country with strangers and a language I did not speak. I had my 8 year old brother that I had to take care of and nobody and nothing else. We were eventually reunited and came to Canada with nothing, not a penny to our name and not anything other than the clothes on our backs. As an extra bonus point, and you can't make this shit up if you tried, Air Canada lost our one checked suitcase and never recovered it, I think we got $600 at some point later on. Again we didn't speak the language. My Mom went to graduate school in Toronto, became a very successful education consultant and published a pretty successful book (if you're a teacher anyway). My Dad never quite recovered because of language barriers and worked hard at manual labour jobs until he retired at just over 65. I became a corporate lawyer, I graduated first in my elementary school (despite arriving in the country 2 years prior without speaking English), first in my high school and third in my law school. Became a corporate lawyer and worked in probably the best Canadian corporate firm and worked as a corporate lawyer for them in NYC as well. My brother is a teacher. We worked hard and were poor as fucking dirt. Everything I have now, I mean everything, came from a combination of my own ambition and hard work and the help I received from the country that owed me nothing but gave me everything. That is why I have a deep sense of duty to people who maybe weren't as lucky or maybe were just too tired to fight as hard. If I can help them then that is what I have to do. My husband and I do really, really well, not as a point of bragging but to conclude the story.

So when these people, whether they be rural Canadians or rust belt Americans start telling me about how hard their lives are and how I am the smug elite who doesn't get them - fuck right off, guys. Because you didn't see death first hand as a child, because your economic situation growing up was roughly a thousand times better than mine. I could be very smug now and look at you and conclude that maybe if YOUR ass pulled itself up by the bootstraps like you like to preach at the "welfare queens" maybe you'd have put 2 and 2 together and realized that you're living in a dying town with a dying industry and done something about it. Maybe you wouldn't be waiting for the government to save you like some sort of lazy socialist. But no, instead I keep voting and behaving in ways to assist you and frankly I'm kind of getting tired of it. So maybe it's really time you go out there and fend for yourselves and I throw off the shackles of noblesse oblige and go off hand in hand with those elites that you despise.

I say this with a lot of respect, because honestly I see you as the most intelligent poster in this forum. But I think there is a danger in this type of thinking that because someone had it really bad, that "Middle America" types aren't also in rough situations.

There is a very real economic malaise underlying the rise of Trump. And I sure as hell don't see him as the solution, but neither was Clinton. Essentially there has been a mass corporatization of paths to establishing a stable livelihood: especially higher education, professional training, and parenthood. People have to mire themselves in debt even to have a fighting chance at economic comfort. IMO the only candidate who understood that and made it a campaign priority was Sanders, and that's why I supported him while he was around.

As I said before, Trump is peddling the easy, short-term solution: keep the plant open another year through tariffs, dig up a coal mine, etc. But that shit is not a long-term solution for the folks he purports to represent.
 
Re: the discussion a few pages back on Soros. Whilst I think he's awful trash, any sort of intense fixation on one figure is inherently dodgy - as exemplified in a certain far-right poster here.

As intense as my efforts have been to conceal it, I'm still deeply depressed and in a mental fog because Hillary lost. And I have been a Bernie Bro since day 1.

I don't want to hear for one fucking second that progressive thinkers with serious qualms about Hillary that nonetheless want the country heading in the right direction are "worse than Trump supporters." It's absolute nonsense.

And many of these relevant qualms (much more so than the emails) go/and have gone ignored.

There was a misogyny and racism quite evident with many of the Bernie Bros, we had wonderful examples right here in FYM from our own BMP about how southern black women were too dumb to vote for anyone not named Clinton.

I see no racism or misogyny in you.

I'm also not the author of the article. I'm sure you could comment on the website. I posted it for thought, especially because I'm finding this "stop ignoring the disenfranchised white people" line of thought to be getting tiresome.

Is there actually any real evidence that these "Bernie Bros" were necessarily more racist/misogynistic than their "Hillary Men" (if it's fine to use 'Bernie Bro' then why not that ;) )counterparts?

Sure, you could use BMP as one example, but he had proven that his political views were wholly inconsistent and not necessarily representative on someone on the left (see his sycophantic views towards the police force).
 
I try my best not to take the "liberal elite" accusations to heart when I hear them. Absolutely I understand what middle America is facing. I lived in the thick of it for 16 years. Ashley and I have been living check to check since I was 20 and we're only recently finding our feet, a mere layoff and a few months from being flat broke. Yet I still supported some expensive policies on Tuesday that will ultimately benefit those less fortunate and improve the social landscape of California while significantly impacting my wallet. It's the right thing to do.

The "liberal elite" that deserves criticism is the Clinton campaign for their arrogant refusal to visit their blue collar midwestern constituents. For believing that Beyonce and Jay Z would connect them with a voter base that felt abandoned. I wasn't behind those decisions and in fact actively opposed them.

I say this with a lot of respect, because honestly I see you as the most intelligent poster in this forum. But I think there is a danger in this type of thinking that because someone had it really bad, that "Middle America" types aren't also in rough situations.

There is a very real economic malaise underlying the rise of Trump. And I sure as hell don't see him as the solution, but neither was Clinton. Essentially there has been a mass corporatization of paths to establishing a stable livelihood: especially higher education, professional training, and parenthood. People have to mire themselves in debt even to have a fighting chance at economic comfort. IMO the only candidate who understood that and made it a campaign priority was Sanders, and that's why I supported him while he was around.

As I said before, Trump is peddling the easy, short-term solution: keep the plant open another year through tariffs, dig up a coal mine, etc. But that shit is not a long-term solution for the folks he purports to represent.

Both of these posts sum up my progressively increasing distaste towards the Democrats in recent years.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom