Trump: the endgame (op-ed)
Trump: the endgame
There was some economic news last week which is important for the long term, and I’ll try to post about it later today or tomorrow, but in the meantime …
I’m as interested in the latest Trump-Russia tidbit as the next person, but really, don’t we all already know the endgame?
Remember during the campaign, no matter what devastating gaffes Trump made, he always rebounded into the low 40%’s? Well, about the same thing has been true for the last 5 months. No matter what the news, Trump’s approval rating is 38% +/-3%:
So here, as a public service, to save you all the sturm und drang of the next 3 years, I present you in narrative form with the endgame:
PUTIN: Do as I say or else!
TRUMP: So what? I’m the President!
PUTIN: If you don’t carry out what I want, I will release my most devastating information on you.
TRUMP: Don’t you know I always welch on the last payment?
PUTIN: [releases devastating information]
DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT: We’re horrified! So horrified that now we can run on this, and we don’t have to offer an actual program to help people.
PRESS [to GOP Congress]: Are you going to impeach Trump?
GOP CONGRESS: … … …
GOP BASE: Attaboy! What a guy!
FOX NEWS: It’s Clinton and Obama’s fault!
GOP CONGRESS: We think Trump is doing a wonderful job.
PUTIN: Wtf?!?
TRUMP: See, I told you so.
RYAN AND MCCONNELL: Hey, Donald, while everyone else is busy, here’s some byootifull legislation for you to sign:
repealing Obamacare
repealing Medicaid
repealing the Voting Rights Act
cutting Medicare
repealing the Civil Rights Act
cutting Social Security
repealing the 14th and 15th Amendments, and what the heck, everything after that.
RYAN: He can’t repeal Constitutional Amendments!
MCCONNELL: Shaddup! He doesn’t know that. Besides, now the Kennedy is retiring, we’re going to have 5 Justices on the Supreme Court who will do whatever we want.
A reminder: the econometric election models actually performed very well in 2016, forecasting a very tight race, with most models showing Clinton winning *the popular vote* by a slim margin.
Don’t forget that Trump actually came right out and invited the Russian government to collude with him to defeat Clinton. Why should he care if the collusion turns out to have actually happened? The most likely case is that Trump has been neck deep funnelling Russian money to his “Investments,”whether or not it was lawful or merely unsavory. His base does not care. For Putin, he is the Mother of All Useful Idiots, nothing more.
What will defeat Trump and the GOP is either an unsuccessful major war, like Korea or Vietnam, and/or an economic downturn that hurts their base. That’s the bottom line. The rest is opera.
I agree about most of it, but not how trump and the gop will lose.
They will lose when progressives show up at the polls(which is why the GOP is trying its best to stop that from happening). And the only way that can happen on a regular interval is for progressives to become solid, every election Dem voters, even for Dems that are not “progressive enough” for them.
The Sarandonistas and their third party or non votes were a major factor in the election.. Of course there were other factors including the candidate herself, but this split in Dem voters is an ongoing thing, and contrasting it with the never changing, always faithful GOP voters you showed, is a major reason Reps have dominated our government for the last 50 years.
The left needs to wake up and smell the roses, and hopefully the current gop and trump inherent evil and their abhorrent policies will show the left exactly how evil the greater evil is.
Some don’t care what the greater evil is. They’re not going to vote for the lesser evil or even vote against the greater evil. They’re only going to vote for the ideological right thing. They don’t care what happens when the greater evil acts after winning. They are not going to hold their noses and participate in democratic government. They’re authoritarians at their root. As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the rest.
JD,
You sound like Mencken, whose quotes I have been rereading. When things are so bad, the pessimists of the world have their shining moments.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
and
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
and
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Finally:
On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/h/h_l_mencken.html
On 11 October 2007, the Wilshire peaked with an exhaustion gap higher than its previous day’s high to its housing bubble high at 15.94 T and ended on a low lower than the previous day’s low. The 11 October 2007 high was predicted a few days earlier using saturation fractal analysis, which represents the patterned science of the global macroeconomy. The 2008 collapse of the housing-overvaluation, over-production, over-consumption and consumer-over-indebtedness bubble resulted in a Wilshire nadir on 6 March 2009 at 6.79T. Over 9T in nominal wealth was lost. The M1 money supply is currently at a record >20% yoy increase and greater than the yoy increase in1987 and > than its first spike yoy increase with the initial quantitative easing programs. Bad consumer debt (high interest credit card and student loan debt ) has increased by 1.2T since 2007. The US macroeconomy has added only 8 million jobs since 2007, a majority lower paying service jobs. (With AI and robotics, the long future of the service industry is grim.)There exists a large element of subprime auto loans. The Wlshire now at 25.6T is perfectly valued on a daily bias, but is integratively overvalued on a forward basis dependent on its pyramidal macroeconomic foundational elements: the underlying total household debt, consumption saturation, and job dynamcs of its 99.9 percenters, (Albeit forwardly overvalued, the Wilshire is nowhere near its precarious high valuation level of 11 October 2007 supported by debt expansion by the peaking housing bubble milieu.
Expect an exhaustion gap and reversal day event for the Wilshire on 17 July 2017 similar to 11 October 2007.
A natural contraction of the economy over 8-10 months would likely result in lower level of presidential approval.
Welcome to AB. 1st comments always go to moderation.
My super-simple, uncomplicated answer (desperate plea): make making union busting a felony — at state by state level. Republicans will have no place to hide.
meh, when your party is President, it is hard to win elections. That is why Barry’s 2012 victory was a underrated upset, especially with a economy worse than Ronald Reagans 1984 angel poise(and before a slowdown in 1985/86 damaged Reagan’s cred).
Independents turned against Democrats in 2010 and then did not vote in 2014/16 while Scalia’s death caused a historic surge into the Republican candidate by the Orthodox Calvinists, boosting its vote total by 1.8 million from the previous election. Not everything is at what it seems.
With Tom Perez, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emmanuel et al. firmly in control of the DNC I think the Economist has a more likely prediction here: https://www.economist.com/news/world-if/21724905-forget-talk-impeachment-imagine-america-and-world-adjusting-four-more-years-suppose?fsrc=scn/tw/te/rfd/pe
In almost 9 months I haven’t seen a thing to indicate the party (especially those all important anti-democratic SuperDelegates!) has learned a damn thing. The Democratic Party will continue losing elections at all levels although some moderate republicans may end up losing their seats in the midterms. The Greater Evil Theory which failed so miserably in Nov 2016 and has kept on failing through several special elections is going to keep on losing. Sorry, EM but do go on with the ad hominems and invective I know you’re already typing by this point.
Speaking for myself I’m done. Thursday I will attend my first DSA meeting in Austin one of 14 that now exist in TX. The DSA has tripled their membership since the election. There are chapters organized in fairly red areas of north TX and even in the valley. Onward in solidarity!
Meh, AS, your trying to hard. Then when Republicans lose the 2018 election, what then?
The DNC is at the heartland of American economic consensus with the American people’s own biases. Your dead wrong there. You forget about the Calvinist vote which boosts Republican turnout and the ACA created “division” in the Democratic Party was suppressed turnout. Something tells me, that is sorta passing.
Special elections don’t work either for your case. Those are historically strong Republican strongholds. Why did they struggle to win them? Democrats in 2009 won all 7 off their “special elections”.
You people need to stop over analyzing elections. Clinton,2-3 Democrats in the Senate and 10-15 House candidates lost because of the email server/Comey Letter bomb. Pure and simple. The stupidity of the American people was the de Rothschild/Putin fake news crap effecting their vote. It did. Trump was ready to bail the shit out of there Tuesday night. He had his jet all ready and probably relieved it was over. I can’t even blame Comey. He wanted to heighten that Russia noose around Trumps at the same time as the email server stuff and Obama would not let him because blocks of Republicans told him they would not vote for Trump across the country. He was a fool. Clinton made gains in Georgia,Miss,Texas,Arizona,Montana and Nebraska, which gave her a popular vote victory. Yet, the Republicans in the swing states humped Republicans while Clinton’s support sagged. Boy, I wonder why?
Sanders as even his supporters are now admitting, were dupes and Sanders himself is a crook. Enough is enough with the fakers, including Trump himself.
EMIchael–They will lose when progressives show up at the polls(which is why the GOP is trying its best to stop that from happening).
Nah–actually it is the DEMOCRATS who have been stopping progressives like me from voting. I’m done with the evil of two lessers, and at this point would rather see Trump reelected than another Clinton or Obama.
Re: Kolchack
Guess your kid isn’t the one who will lose medicaid eh?
But at least you aren’t a trump voter, so your the lesser evil.
Kolchak,
Then say nothing to anyone about where our country is and where it is going. But that’s not what people like you want. You want to scream out how everyone is evil and only I hold the moral high ground, disregarding the effects of your moral purity.
Begone.
“The neoliberalism of the 1980s and 1990s has faded into memory, as its adherents failed to settle on a coherent set of principles other than a general posture of counterintuitive skepticism. (Peters’s new ideological manifesto, We Do Our Part, only mentions neoliberalism once.) But the term has been used to mean different things at different times, and it has returned to American political discourse with a vengeance. Then, as now, it is an attempt to win an argument with an epithet. Only this time, it is neoliberal that is the term of abuse.
And the term neoliberal doesn’t mean a faction of liberals. It now refers to liberals generally, and it is applied by their left-wing critics. The word is now ubiquitous, popping up in almost any socialist polemic against the Democratic Party or the center-left. Obama’s presidency? It was “the last gasp of neoliberalism.” Why did Hillary Clinton lose? It was her neoliberalism. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz? Neoliberals both.
The Baffler’s Chris Lehmann dismisses an Atlantic story on the Democrats, which touts Elizabeth Warren as a model for the party’s future, as just more neoliberal tripe. “In the world of neoliberal consensus, it’s a simple taken-for-granted axiom that senators — the lead fundraisers and media figures in both major parties — call the shots, and should be entrusted with charting an electoral comeback,” writes Lehmann. “All the reliable notes of arm’s-length cultural puzzlement are struck soundly here, from the putative identity-politics-class-politics divide on the left to the neoliberal wonk class’s painfully absent common touch.” Obviously, the authentic way to demonstrate a common touch is to throw around the term neoliberal as frequently as possible. Try it if you ever need to strike up a conversation with some strangers in a bowling alley in Toledo.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/how-neoliberalism-became-the-lefts-favorite-insult.html
EM:
The disconnect is legislators who no longer have to be beholden to their constituents especially in the House which is tied to the population. If your district is the average of ~700,000; who do you represent?
Obvious (if inconvenient) questions: What is the policy initiative or messaging or personality championed by Democrats that will drive voters to the polls in 2018 and beyond? If “We hate trump” didn’t do it in 2016 why will it work now?
Bloomberg has poll coverage today that indicates Madame Secretary has managed to have lower approval ratings than POTUS Trump. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-07-18/finally-a-poll-trump-will-like-clinton-even-more-unpopular Another ABC News poll last week showed a plurality of Americans (52%) identify the Democratic Party primarily with “Opposing Trump”. How is this supposed to work out in an endgame?
Evidence: http://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/democrats-split-over-core-message-to-voters-as-2018-midterms-loom/
Translation: “We’ve tried nothing and we’re out of ideas…”
First of all, who cares what Clinton’s popularity rating is right now? Meaningless.
Secondly, if you did not know the Dem platform in 2016, it is because you did not want to know.
I heard a guy talk about the Dem platform before the election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/26/transcript-bernie-sanderss-full-speech-at-the-2016-dnc/?utm_term=.c9c139ece88e
It was not Clinton who they wanted anyways, it was Joe Biden. He pulled the consistently most favorably and was good for a term. Especially after the email server “gaff” by Clinton, her popularity declined from where it was a year earlier and they put pressure on Biden for a term, but his son’s death sapped his energy, he was no good. Nobody stepped up to the plate.
They also gave O’Malley some openings to gain some ground and he failed miserably. By January, the money was pretty set in stone for all the candidates.
Upset elections are upset elections. Flukes happen. Surprising results. Bill Clinton had very little energy and imo, did not want to go back to the White House compared to 2008 Bill Clinton when he went on attack dog on Obama. Internal energy generally decides many of these things and Clinton did not have it. Then it took Comey breaking the hatch rule and a wimpy Obama to not tell how bad the Russia involvement was to “Clinton voters”. Those that refuse to play the game, lose, period.