Oh for sure, there's TONS wrong with him that have nothing to do with the fact that he was a life long liberal, I was meaning that they voted for a con artist who convinced them that he wasn't all of those things you just listed and more. He's probably one of the worst people alive honestly.
I don't know if he's one of the worst people alive. I think he's just your typical low class buffoon who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It's the combination of his incompetence, arrogance and insecurity that makes him so dangerous. Sadly that is the way many low information Americans are. He just happens to have been born into a wealthy situation and used a reality show to blow up his fame enough to have name credibility to run for president. It's a black mark on the GOP forever though that they managed to spend a decade enraging their voters about liberal boogeyman and "political correctness" to the point that they would rebel against all common sense and decency and nominate a man who was so obviously incapable of manning the position. Nominating Donald Trump for your presidential ticket is like signing Aaron Brooks to be your starting center. He's already below average at what he's supposed to be good at and now you are asking him to fill a position that he's just too small of a man to handle.
Ronald Reagan was a Democrat until age 51, too. But he genuinely became more conservative and switched parties. Trump, on the other hand, doesn't really give a **** about being liberal or conservative. He is just self-serving.
Sure, there's a difference when someone legitimately changes, Trump never did he's just running a scam....and it worked a lot better than it had any business working.
He doesn't give a flip about any ideological stances. He's a thin skinned, uniformed, arrogant, reactionary loud mouth authoritarian. If anything though, he is liberal in the extreme sense that he believes government should solve everything, and he definitely fits the liberal caricature that he doesn't care about constitutional restraints on government. He genuinely seems to believe that government should be all powerful and that the power should be held by his tiny hands. He'll fix everything by issuing orders to "fix it" and if any foreign leaders want to comment on his dick being small he'll drop a nuke on them.
Very true, it's absolutely a black mark and pretty much everyone tried to warn them. To the credit of the GOP, 15 million+ Republicans voted against Trump but that wasn't enough to stop the 14 million that voted for him. Honestly that party needs to really figure out who the hell they want to be or just close up shop and allow for a new party to emerge.
Even if he loses the election he is already a winner, as his business will get a major boast from his new found fame/infamy in the future, too bad for all the Republican voters who voted for him.
Honestly, even setting aside the fringe like true libertarians, we are ripe for a three party system. Democrats-Shift to the left and become the Bernie Sanders party. Call themselves "Social Democrats" "New" Republicans-Capture the business conservatives that advocate lower taxes, fiscal restraint, strong national defense but are generally libertarian on social issues. Tea Party/Conservative-Anti government. Elimination of taxes, public education, xenophobic immigration policies, weird blend of isolationism and extreme aggression on the international stage.
The style of government the US has all but prevents 3 legitimate parties from existing. There will always be 2 major parties, then fringe parties.
What I want is a Neo-Democrat party that is socially liberal but fiscally sound/restraint and not go nuts on defense spending as well as not getting involved in every international dispute in the world. The party should address the obvious inequality in wealth as well.
The question is, though, why did the "scam" work? It's not because Trump successfully disguised himself as a "true conservative"-- it's pretty apparent he doesn't agree with, say, the Ryan Budget and doesn't know the first thing about Evangelical Christianity. Hell, the religious right leaders who support him know this and just shrugged and said "God has used worse people." https://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppi...bet-on-trump?utm_term=.aaQaxKGR3Q#.yug3rG0yoE The "scam" worked and still works because a substantial chunk of your people (Republicans the rest of the "coalition") don't actually care about conservative principles, either. They are in your coalition because, over the last few decades, your coalition is more tolerant of white resentment than the other one. Remember, the racists used to be Democrats until Civil Rights Movement and Southern Strategy-- they don't exactly care much about the rest of the parties' platforms. Trump caters to this group better than the rest of the candidates do so he won. By the way, is it really a "scam" when the customers know what they are signing up for? Also, the "white resentment" folks are not the only one who go with the coalition not so much on, say, economic policy but rather with where they feel welcome. In recent years, the GOP has been bleeding votes from Asian Americans-- a generally affluent group who used to vote mostly for the GOP until fairly recently. It changed when the resentment toward immigrants became more apparent within the GOP coalition. My parents, for example, are Chinese American at age around 70. They have pretty conservative views economically, but can't stand being in the same party as the kind of people who turned out for Trump. So guess how they will vote?
I don't think they really did know what they were signing up for. I think mostly it was angry people voting for an anti-establishment candidate and they assumed everything said about him was lies because they didn't trust the "establishment" who was one of those telling the people how r****ded they were for supporting him. An angry voting base can do really stupid things and we saw that.
This is it. Trump just substituted literal shouting for the metaphorical dog whistling, all while dropping the thin veneer of "conservatism". Case in point: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/us/politics/donald-trump-supporters.html?_r=1
What is the nature of this anger? Have the Democrats never experienced such anger? Why didn't a "Trump" take over the Democratic party? It looks like much of the "anger" is fueled by racial and religious resentment: <iframe title="New York Times Video - Embed Player" width="480" height="321" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen="true" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" id="nyt_video_player" src="https://static01.nyt.com/video/players/offsite/index.html?videoId=100000004533191"></iframe>
The nature of that anger is the "establishment" wing of the party has been shoving garbage like Mitt Romney and John McCain down their throats for years and they were tired of it. Of course, the problem is that it was mostly unfocused, really stupid anger, thus you get an unfocused and really stupid hero for them and that's Trump. The Democrats have a bit of that problem as well, the Bernie Bro nonsense wouldn't have happened if there wasn't anger with the establishment over Hillary. Fortunately for the Democrats, the party controls the nomination process a LOT tighter than the Republicans do, or there is a good chance Bernie would have won.
Bernie is quite a bit different from Trump, though. The man is a long-time member of Congress (if not a long-time member of the Democratic party) and has at least shown himself to be not insane during his career in politics. His ideology leans more left of establishment of the party, but at least he has an identifiable ideology. A good number of people voted for him because they genuinely favor his ideology and policy over those of the Clintons. The vast majority of them are going to vote for Hillary now. The real hardcore "fart in" Bernie Bros are a small minority and they are voting for Jill Stein now. To the extent the Democrats have any "crazies," they are relatively few and marginalized. As for Republicans, the crazies are pretty substantial in number-- and, more than any other dimensions of ideology, is defined by resentment toward blacks, immigrants, Muslims, etc. Many Republicans may not have actively supported them, but at the very least you guys didn't do enough to make the party intolerable to them, either. In fact, that's being charitable in light of the documented cases of Southern Strategy and dog whistle politics.
Completely agree. Bernie isn't the least bit crazy. In fact, I agree with the majority of his views on the issues. Of course, some here would view me as crazy. ;-)-
Sure, he's not the same as Trump, but he's a fringe type candidate that gets his support from the extreme left. Without Hillary being awful and a polarized Democratic party the old Socialist wouldn't have even gotten the 15 minutes that he ended up with. When it comes to "crazies" both parties have them, they are just different. If you can't recognize that.....well there's probably a reason for that.
Wrong. The anger stems from three areas: 1) The Republican party making the conscious choice to present the democrats as insane radicals so far to the left that every policy they supported was on the brink of communism. As part of this strategy of fear, they opposed every single initiative proposed under Obama and painted them as radical. This led to any Republican who wasn't diametrically opposed to everything Obama supported being seen as a liberal. Talk radio has fanned these flames. Even on this very board you have losers who say that the Republicans have given Obama "everything he wanted." It's so demonstrably false that it is amazing they can claim this, but they do none the less. 2) Racial resentment: Whether it be blacks or Hispanics, the Republican party has fostered the narrative that minorities are "taking over our country." Whites have been stoked up to believe that Mexicans are taking your jobs and blacks are taking your taxes. 3) Intellectual resentment: In order to make the first two work, the Republican party has declared outright war against intellectualism. Politics isn't the only place this is happening, sports are rife with it as well. The Republicans are playing the role of the old baseball writers who want to use the eye test instead of statistics, or Byron Scott who doesn't believe in the three point shot. Scientists are wrong and liars, universities are full of communists who can't get real jobs, college isn't important (people like Michal Berry regularly dismiss college education), the media is full of liars and liberals, etc. By continually assigning groups the label of "liar" and members of some vast conspiracy to turn us into a communist country and make money off the green movement, they have set the stage for an authoritarian like Trump to rise. His whole schtick is that the political elite hate him, the media mocks him, the smart people hate him, the minorities are against him, etc. but it's ALL because he "tells it like it is" and doesn't play the games of the "elite."
