Trump General Discussion

[bono_212]

Originally Posted by gump

The economic anxiety of Trump voters is running amok.



https://www.buzzfeed.com/tasneemnash...Nn8#.qvxM5r07A

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.

Originally Posted by Axver

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?

[deep]

At least in my neck of the woods we get a better class of demonstrator closing down the freeways
Demonstration by 20 women briefly blocks traffic on 405 Freeway in Costa Mesa - Daily Pilot

[Headache in a Suitcase]

Originally Posted by Hewson

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.

[deep]

A tale of two trumps



Donald Trump heaps praise on Hillary and Bill Clinton in first television interview since election


I am not surprised, it is kind of what I had expected

[anitram]

Originally Posted by Axver

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.

[LemonMelon]

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.

[iron yuppie]

Originally Posted by anitram

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.

[LuckyNumber7]

That was the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to anyone on this forum ever.

[Vlad n U 2]

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.

Originally Posted by LemonMelon

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.

Originally Posted by Irvine511

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).

[Vlad n U 2]

Originally Posted by LemonMelon

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.

Originally Posted by iron yuppie

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.

[bono_212]

Originally Posted by anitram

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.

Holy crap. I did *not* know that story. Wow. Ever thought of writing a book?

Originally Posted by iron yuppie

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.

I--What? Clinton's entire campaign from 08 revolved around debt-free public education and the only reason she wasn't as vocal about it this time was because the debates prevented it. It was still at the forefront of her site, her social media presence, her stump speeches, etc.

This is why I feel like no one ever listened past "EMAILS!" on either side of the aisle. It seems like no one ever actually paid any attention whatsoever to what her policies were. It wasn't like she hid them.

[iron yuppie]

Originally Posted by bono_212

I--What? Clinton's entire campaign from 08 revolved around debt-free public education and the only reason she wasn't as vocal about it this time was because the debates prevented it. It was still at the forefront of her site, her social media presence, her stump speeches, etc.

What I read - directly from her website - was temporary interest reprieves and possible renegotiation of rates for student loans, which isn't a hell of a lot in the long run. Plus no specific plan on how she would fund free community college aside from the usual tax the rich, close corporate loopholes rhetoric. Nothing that I can recall either about the massive disparities in public secondary school funding based on property taxes etc. I think you're being quite charitable to her in this regard.

[Hewson]

Originally Posted by LuckyNumber7

That was the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to anyone on this forum ever.

You weren't here when Diamond joined in 2001.

[bono_212]

Originally Posted by iron yuppie

What I read - directly from her website - was temporary interest reprieves and possible renegotiation of rates for student loans, which isn't a hell of a lot in the long run. Plus no specific plan on how she would fund free community college aside from the usual tax the rich, close corporate loopholes rhetoric. Nothing that I can recall either about the massive disparities in public secondary school funding based on property taxes etc. I think you're being quite charitable to her in this regard.

I know this is from 2007, but this is the education reform plan I associate her with, the one that she preached constantly back in 08 and that I went and listened to Bill Clinton campaign for in person as well:

Hillary Clinton: Speech on College Affordability at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire

I don't know how much of it changed between then and now, but most of it sounds like what I've been under the impression she was still pushing for and then some. I'll do a bit more research, because if I'm wrong, I'd like to know it. Don't want to make a claim and not be able to back it up.

EDIT: A quick look at the fact sheet for her current education plan seems to be her 08 plan on steroids. Probably Bernie-induced steroids, but you can see the skeleton of her original plan right there if you read both back to back: https://www.hillaryclinton.com/brief...cas-graduates/

[Moonlit_Angel]

Originally Posted by bono_212

This is why I feel like no one ever listened past "EMAILS!" on either side of the aisle. It seems like no one ever actually paid any attention whatsoever to what her policies were. It wasn't like she hid them.

This.

And anitram, I think I've heard parts of your story before, but don't know that I heard the whole thing. I admire your family for doing what they needed to do to make it, and I appreciate you for actually understanding and having sympathy for others who find themselves in similar situations.

Originally Posted by anitram

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.

This is what's killing me about the poor/working class Trump supporters in this part of the country. They have the audacity to sit there and gripe about other people being on welfare, and cheer on the politicians who call those on welfare "lazy moochers"...

...and yet here they are legitimately believing that Trump is going to save them from THEIR economic woes? Like you said, why aren't they just "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps", like they expect everyone else to do?

And then there's people like a cousin of mine, who's extremely conservative, very anti-Obama, who's been consistently unemployed and living off unemployment checks. Yet he has the nerve to yell at Obama for "giving people handouts". Uhhhh, hello?

I wholeheartedly agree that there can indeed be some condescending rhetoric from the left. The teasing about those of us in "flyover country", acting legit shocked when any part of this area of the country actually supports some progressive idea (I remember people on the left being stunned that Iowa was one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage, and I'm sitting here like, "...yeah? We're not ALL backwards-thinking people here." There's probably other examples, too, that I'm blanking on at the moment.

But I also think that a lot of people in this part of the country tend to bring a lot of their problems on themselves by voting against their self-interests, and sometimes bring those negative stereotypes on themselves. After seeing how utterly red Iowa went the other night, I can't help but think my state basically proved so many of the stereotypes many have about this part of the country, and that upsets me. I thought we were so much better than this.

Anytime a politician starts going around blaming some minority group-gays, Hispanics, blacks, Muslims, you name it- for all of society's ills, that is a sure sign the politician in question has absolutely no substantive policy to offer. They have no plans. They don't care about people-if they did, they wouldn't stand up there insulting them. You would think more people would catch on to that fact, but of course they won't, because the voters who support those candidates are just as fearful and, yes, ignorant, as the very politicians they support.

It's possible to talk about immigration reform without resorting to calling Mexicans druggies and rapists, or insulting the Hispanics who live in this country, whether here legally or illegally.

It's possible to talk about welfare reform without calling the people who use it lazy moochers who just want handouts.

It's possible to talk about the struggles that tear families apart without blaming gay people for "destroying traditional Christian values", or insulting single parents, or so on.

It's possible to talk about the very real threat of Islamic terrorism without making it seem like all Muslims are violent and ready to attack this country at a moment's notice.

If voters don't get that and vote for a politician who spouts racist, sexist, xenophobic bullshit in the end, then I have no sympathy for them. They brought the inevitable troubles that result on themselves.

[gump]

Originally Posted by iron yuppie

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.

I take issue with an economic explanation of the rise of Trump. It sounds compelling, but the logic is quite flawed in many ways. The fact that people in the old industrial areas have economic difficulties is not a sufficient explanation of why they join a populist movement. There is an almost post-marxist tendency of attributing the outcome to class, but that completely overlooks that ethnic/racial distinctions and the more granular data that is available.e Why isn't the non-white working class joining the populist movement? Or why is it that you see consistent support to Trump across class?

I spent a lot of my academic life doing research on why people join social movements. My subject matter is mainly recruitment by rebel groups, and not simply political participation, but the underlying theories are similar. And personally, I feel that the class/economic explanation to social mobilization has been basically disproven since the mid-1970s, even though it continues to pop up from time to time.

I subscribe more to a cultural approach to social mobilization, i.e. the consolidation - and subsequent instrumentalization - of a collective identity that a certain group of people share as a means to get them to participate in a political process. Basically, many social movements start by creating a concept of "us" (some of them good - like the civil rights movement or the LGBT movement more recently - but many of them bad, like ethnic mobilization). That concept then supersedes any other social bounds that would normally tie people together. For example, gender identity can become less important than ethnic identity (see white women voting predominantly for Trump).

This, to me, is quite clear in Trump. The exclusionary rhetoric creates a concept of "us" - white people - that is shared across class divides. The dog whistles and slogans - Make America Great Again - further point to that collective identity it tries to create. And that is, ultimately, an exclusionary identity of white supremacy/privilege. People of different backgrounds join for different reasons, but I think it is a mistake to ascribe it simply to economic status. The data shows that it wasn't the case. Without the exclusionary rhetoric, I very much doubt Trump would have built this base.

[deep]

More Trump violence, Bystanders yell anti-Trump taunts as man beaten after car crash - Chicago Tribune

[kiwilad]

Originally Posted by gump

I take issue with an economic explanation of the rise of Trump. It sounds compelling, but the logic is quite flawed in many ways. The fact that people in the old industrial areas have economic difficulties is not a sufficient explanation of why they join a populist movement. There is an almost post-marxist tendency of attributing the outcome to class, but that completely overlooks that ethnic/racial distinctions and the more granular data that is available.e Why isn't the non-white working class joining the populist movement? Or why is it that you see consistent support to Trump across class?

I spent a lot of my academic life doing research on why people join social movements. My subject matter is mainly recruitment by rebel groups, and not simply political participation, but the underlying theories are similar. And personally, I feel that the class/economic explanation to social mobilization has been basically disproven since the mid-1970s, even though it continues to pop up from time to time.

I subscribe more to a cultural approach to social mobilization, i.e. the consolidation - and subsequent instrumentalization - of a collective identity that a certain group of people share as a means to get them to participate in a political process. Basically, many social movements start by creating a concept of "us" (some of them good - like the civil rights movement or the LGBT movement more recently - but many of them bad, like ethnic mobilization). That concept then supersedes any other social bounds that would normally tie people together. For example, gender identity can become less important than ethnic identity (see white women voting predominantly for Trump).

This, to me, is quite clear in Trump. The exclusionary rhetoric creates a concept of "us" - white people - that is shared across class divides. The dog whistles and slogans - Make America Great Again - further point to that collective identity it tries to create. And that is, ultimately, an exclusionary identity of white supremacy/privilege. People of different backgrounds join for different reasons, but I think it is a mistake to ascribe it simply to economic status. The data shows that it wasn't the case. Without the exclusionary rhetoric, I very much doubt Trump would have built this base.

What an insightful and, i suspect, correct summation.
And that's what the left must do. Find leaders, champions who pull along a movement. Bernie did that. Hillary didn't.

I saw Michael Moore suggesting the Dems go for star power, as opposed to the same old same old. One name he suggested was Oprah. Whether you like her or not, chances are she'd be president elect right now, had she run in Hillary's place.

And hasn't it always been this way? History is full of charismatic leaders who pulled movements along with them.

Sent from my SM-G920I using U2 Interference mobile app

[bono_212]

There are nearly zero celebrities that I would want for president. There was a time I thought Jon Stewart could maybe do it, but I've completely changed my mind on that.

[Mrs. Garrison]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCabT_O0YSM