POTUS 2016

[Squad]

On peut se trumper 

[Vorontsov]

@D3ads This is an amazing analysis

[D3ads]

On a lighter note...

Welcome to Mega City One folks!

[twiz]

2 hours ago, D3ads said:

So now what? Well It's going to be an interesting 4 years, I believe that he is going to tone his rhetoric right down, he pretty much has to now. He's going to have a tough time trying to achieve building the wall, banning muslims and other rediculous things without serious opposition in Congress (from the Democrats AND the Republicans), measures are in place to stop any kind of "dictatorship" forming so the Hitler analogies are just hyperbole. It's far too early to tell at this stage just what he will actually achieve, but since he a businessman rather than a career politician, unlike the latter who often make pledges that they don't keep, he might actually make progress in at least attempting to do some of the less radical, sensible things he wanted to do.

I really really hope you are correct about the toning down of his rhetoric, but I would be quite shocked if he did.  I just don't think he's that type of person, he's loud and crass and always has been.  There are moments in which he speaks in a respectable manner, but those are fleeting at best.  I think with this election win and huge buff on his ego, he will be more of himself.  After winning while wholly rejecting the notion that he has to be in any way respectful of others, while everyone was calling for him to tone it down, I think if anything he will be emboldened to say and do as he pleases regardless of what the GOP establishment wants.

It will be interesting to see how the Senate and House check him.  It is disheartening that he has a majority Congress throughout, but at least it is a slim majority.  As we have all seen through the years, partisanship runs extremely deep here.  Many many Republicans have rationalized even his most batshit crazy ideas throughout the campaign.  After 8 years of Democratic leadership in the White House, I think the GOP gov't will be eager to push their issues and in doing so let some of his craziness pass along with it.

I don't think Trump would use nukes against Russia.  I am afraid of him using them against other countries though.  He has said things along those lines many times - though I believe and hope this was just verbal bully posturing, and not something he would actually act upon.  He is a bully, and I hope he just sticks to being an all-talk bully.

He and Putin are both self-centered, self-aggrandizing bullies.  They both stroke each other's and their own egos, and by doing so maybe they will get along famously and maybe the animosity between the countries will assuage. However, their friendship will be balanced on a razor's edge.  If they can maintain that balance, things will be fine.  But if Putin rubs Trump the wrong way, given Trump's fragile ego and volatility, it could set off a shit storm (probably via @POTUS on twitter ).  Trump would run his mouth and Putin would lash back.  I hope those close to Trump will be able to stop the spiral.

 

All that said... Today is the first time I can truly say I am wholly ashamed of my country.  I can't tell if I'm rationalizing with myself or not - but for my own sanity, I have to believe that this was not primarily a YES for Donald Trump, or even a "lesser of two evils" vote, but in the largest part a "fuck you" to the government.  I cannot believe that 50% of the people in this country would choose bigotry, racism, xenophobia, machoism, bullying, crudeness, extraordinary sexism, exclusionism, islamophobia, antisemitism, arrogance, selfishness, and hatred.  I cannot believe that 50% of people would really think that is the lesser of the two evils.  I can believe that 50% are so disappointed with our system that they want to burn it down, that it feels good to proudly pound up two big middle fingers to the heart of our government.

I hope that we struggle through the next two years, that they aren't quite as damaging to our country and values as I dread they might be... And centrists and liberals and progressives come out loud and strong and proud and with a renewed vigor for inclusion of all peoples that has apparently been lost, and vote in a strong Dem Congress to block Trump's craziest schemes.  And continue that strength for the following two, til the next Presidential Election.

Edited November 9, 2016 by twiz

[twiz]

One more note -

What I think will be telling of what we're in for will be the following:

Does he,  when he gets sworn in,  proceed with his claim to appointing a special prosecutor to look into HRC.   That is something he could do with little pushback or checks on his authority,  and would indicate just how fragile and vengeful he is. 

What,  if anything,  does he do to move against the press and freedom of speech and libel laws.

What does he tweet from @POTUS.  His Twitter has been the mouthpiece of much of his most heinous rhetoric,  and I think it could give an early insight into his level of respect for the office he has been trusted with, and whether he plans on toning his hateful speech down.

[-HP-]

Kind of ironic when exactly 27 years ago today the whole world celebrated the falling of the Berlin Wall, 1989.

And 27 years later, we're getting ready to build a new one. 

[Vorontsov]

I don't think he will go through with the wall, but if he does I would like to see how exactly he would pull it off. Also I don't think a nations border is comparable to the Berlin wall, hundreds of nations have secured borders. But there are nice doors here and there that you can pass through after being checked. I would agree with your analogy if he was building a wall to separate California from the rest of the US (just an example), but no such thing is being done.

[Deathy]

The poll race was a close call, first on Florida and lastly on Pennsylvania, finally making it impossible to get her the victory. Most of the support for HC came from metropolitan regions concentrated (based on won states) from the east and west coasts, while Trump basically had the rest. This also showed almost always in inner-state results for rural counties going to Trump and urban to Clinton.

So yes, the assumptions, that people were definitely fed up that politics weren't made in favour of them lead to a huge support for Trump. And although he had a lot of scandals in the past, he is a man of the media business. They wanted someone who would look good as a president (not literally, performance and appearance-wise), while having core topics at heart that affected the issues people had on their minds.

Hillary Clinton on the other hand is an establishment hardliner who knows politics and acted way too intransparent in a lot of cases in the past, which made her a lot less appealing than a DJT, although you might say that Trumps transparency was to neglect/negate statements from the past. In a way, there was no lesser evil to choose from, it was the choice of the voting population to choose their lesser evil.

Here's the interesting part for the next 4 years (especially for Europe):

With Brexit and Trump to take effect in 2017 and also a few elections in Europe (in Germany with support in regional elections for populist parties up to 25%) there might also be a new strategy for EU-NATO military relations coming up, e.g. Germany and France announcing to cooperate more. Or "trading" agreements like TTIP and TISA seem unlikely at this point, or atleast postponed.

Now, this might be a good message for some people on the other side of the big pond, but what I fear the most, is that people will have real anxieties in the US of A, because they may or may not lose some parts of their life, identification or freedoms. Nobody should assume that all Trump voters will slaughter illegal immigrants confirmed by the general vote, nonetheless all eyes should always be open to unjust actions and repression.

P.S.: Oh yeah, with such a big majority as Republicans, it's time to get a federal Identity Document, so you can finally stop claiming voter fraud or rigged elections. Just a nice idea from Europe.

P.P.S.: The wall is just a metaphor for better border control. Perhaps some better fence installations at the borders.

Edited November 9, 2016 by Deathy

[D3ads]

I'll address some of the points made in a bit, but first did anyone watch Trump's victory speech? I mean.. it's hardly amazing and he waffles on a bit like he tends to do but he thanks his supporters and reaches out to the Democrats and Republication voters who didn't want him and pledges to unify the country:

 

[Steppenwolf]

2 hours ago, (HP) said:

Kind of ironic when exactly 27 years ago today the whole world celebrated the falling of the Berlin Wall, 1989.

And 27 years later, we're getting ready to build a new one. 

That's a false analogy. The Berlin wall got constructed by the East German government for the purpose to keep its own people in.

[Sentura]

Some good points being made in this thread. I agree 100% with @FrieChamp - let's see how it pans out. @D3ads, pretty solid analysis, I came to many of the same conclusions. I definitely think if HRC had been elected and had opted for the NFZ we'd be closer to a nuclear war than ever. Even if a nuclear escalation wasn't in the cards, the destabilization of the area would cause Europe to be under much greater pressure than what we already have today.

There are of course (many) negatives to his presidency, but overall I just hope he has the mind to put his business above his personal beliefs. In which case everything is probably not going to be as bad as we imagine.

[-HP-]

1 hour ago, Steppenwolf said:

That's a false analogy. The Berlin wall got constructed by the East German government for the purpose to keep its own people in.

Yeah I know that, my point was that walls fix nothing, quite the contrary.

[Radu]

8 hours ago, D3ads said:

I'll address some of the points made in a bit, but first did anyone watch Trump's victory speech? I mean.. it's hardly amazing and he waffles on a bit like he tends to do but he thanks his supporters and reaches out to the Democrats and Republication voters who didn't want him and pledges to unify the country:

 

The way he gesticulates and speaks makes one think of highschool prom queens. Just my two cents.

[Skybex]

This does not come at all as a surprise to me that he won, but first I will point out that I had no horse in this race. I have been following Trump since before the primaries simply because he was an entertaining character, listened to a lot of his speeches and read up on his proposed ideas. For me this whole ordeal was like watching a soap opera.

But I have to say that the liberals/left brought this on themselves. I has been clear for a long time that the "ordinary" people feel very disenfranchised by the status quo. The biggest most recent example being the brexit result, but also the rise of more right wing parties over Europe. The left recently have been pushing too far left with crazy ideas such as safe spaces, trigger warnings, what toilets trans people should use as well as more every day things that people care about such as immigration, BLM and certain socialist views. So much of this goes against what many ordinary people care about that you end up with groups such as the alt right cropping up. It feels that a lot of people just want to push back against all this neo liberal ideology.

Then of course you have the whole political ruling class thing. Clinton represents everything that supporters of both Sanders and Trump were against. You couldn't have a more clear cut case of someone being more of the same, yet they pushed so hard for her to be the nomination and in doing so cheated a very popular Sanders out of the nomination which of course made much of his voter base go over to Trump. 

And then of course you have the attacks. Anyone who didn't think Trump was "Orange Hitler" is and uneducated racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic. They tried these attacks on people who wanted to leave the EU with brexit and it backfired. Trumps opponents in the primaries tried it and it backfired. And then Clinton tried it and it backfired. All while the media is reporting such obviously biased news that it turned so many people away from them and reinforces that the media is in Clinton's pocket. The polls are saying that Clinton is ahead, but Trump is bringing in many thousands of people to his almost daily rallies while Clinton's rally every few weeks gets a couple of hundred at best. Clinton has such strong supporters that she needs to invest millions into CTR to blanket online communities to support her. Then you have all the criminal activities that they tried to deflect onto Trump. All of this just united all the Trump supporters and turned off so many on the fence people to just avoid Clintons horror story.

In this soap opera I watched for over a year, Clinton is the clear cut villain of the story while Trump is the anti hero and Sanders the defeated hero.

http://i.imgur.com/8o8MKrM.gifv

 

[dux]

I found this an interesting read.
 

Quote

 

Needless to say I was right. Hillary had no plan against Trump. She used the same attacks against Trump that his Republican rivals did: he's a bigot, a racist, a blah blah blah. That didn't work in the primaries and it didn't work in the general election. 

As I stated back in March there is no political strategy to beat Trump. He's not playing by political rules, that's the whole point. I did see two paths to beating him, and neither was about Hillary:

The first strategy was Bernie winning the Democratic Primaries. He had the swag, the charisma, the cuddly Grandpa mentality. His appeal was the same as that of Biden: Go-lucky, real, passionate. Unfortunately he was running against the Clinton Machine/DNC and he got churned out like a hunk of beef.

The second strategy was Bernie, yes THAT Bernie, again. He should have been the VP even though Hillary leans center way more than progressive. Her inability to negotiate was her undoing. It's not just about the Bernie voters that refused to vote Hillary, it was about their enthusiasm. Like it or not they were a ground-game unlike anything anyone's ever seen. The ridiculous amount of donations, the millions of phone calls, the millions of doors knocked. Their passion was most needed against Trump. 

Yes, Bernie campaigned for Hillary during the general election, but it was no longer the same. Bernie used to be their guy, their champion that could fight against the 1%, for $15 minimum wage, free healthcare, and free tuition. He couldn't do that while campaigning for Hillary without being on the ballot because everyone knew she didn't really care about any of that.

So what was Hillary left with? No passion, no drive, no enthusiasm, no Bernie, no Presidency. She was too proud, and that, ladies and gents, is what Trump exposed to perfection.

Yes folks, Trump is a master strategist, and he knew Hillary's weakness was her stoic character. During the campaign you often heard Hillary mention that the Republicans have been attacking her for 30 years and never found anything to hurt her. She wore that as a badge of honor, she thought that made her stronger. But, as Trump had done in the Republican Primaries, he took the quality his opponents covet most and he turned it on its head.

Crooked Hillary. Hillary Rotten Clinton. Drain the Swamp. Lock her up. 

Much like Picasso's abstract paintings, Trump's brush strokes made little sense to most people. Yes, she's a political power house, yes she's a stalwart in her convictions. But that also makes her stiff in her beliefs. The world is ever-changing, how can someone maintain their convictions for 30+ years unless they're crooked and a cheat? How can they maintain power with the elites unless their entire cesspool of a swamp was also polluted? Lock her up.

Trump took her stoicism and grounded it into a pulp. His first attack on Hillary during the general election was that "If she wasn't playing the woman card she wouldn't even get 5% of the vote." BOOM, head shot. How did Hillary respond? "If fighting for women's rights and equal pay is playing the woman card, then deal. Me. IN!"

This played perfectly into Trump's hand. He knew she'd be defiant in being a woman and take that attack personally. He used her soundbites to wedge a gap between men and women voters. The male vote wasn't 2:1 for Trump because they were misogynists, it was because Hillary's words excluded their existence. Remember 'The Art of War'? It's all about divide and conquer. When did Hillary ever talk about men's issues? Never. While Hillary thought she was being stoic in protecting the woman card, Trump was actually playing the man card.

I could go on and on, but truth be told I haven't slept yet and I've written too much as is. If you're interested in reading more I'll post again tomorrow. There's plenty to talk about. How Trump had more Hispanic voters than any Republican in history, how Trump had more LGBT voters than any Republican in history (even though his VP is the biggest anti-LGBT in politics), or how Trump ended up with 48% of the woman vote even after those Access Hollywood tapes.

Regardless of how you feel about the election, it truly was a masterful performance by Donald Trump. One that will go down in history as not only the most shocking victory, but I would dare say the most expertly perfected victory in US political history.