I'd be cautious about the "incompetent" part at least as far as advancing their agenda. It's a given that they'll have some early struggles with process, but I'd suggest that in spite of that, rapid implementation (even if sloppy) works to their advantage right now. It's pretty clear that the GOP have been promised their wealthy-folk tax cuts and will be on board, Dems are going to have to pick their battles very carefully.

Bottom line there's a strong risk here that his overreaches will extend into things that will make it hard to unseat him or his cronies in the future. They have a lot of resources that can be used to undermine future elections what with SCOTUS + the House and Senate + a fairly rabid voter base that will go along with anything. Some of these actions here in the grand scheme are probably going to serve more as distractions. I doubt very much that the Muslim Ban or Mexican Wall are the actual priorities for Trump or Bannon.

Your link's 7 points articulate my position on what's unfolding pretty much perfectly. Seems like there's method in the madness to me. I think those 7 points important enough speculation to post here in case folk don't follow the link:


I can't see why anyone would conclude that Bannon & co are inept but ultimately well intentioned towards democracy (The link's poorly analysed counter argument). Certainly they could just be inept and I liked the take offered by the poly-sci prof posted earlier about the difficulty in establishing intent exclusively through looking at outcome. Sorry to say, though, that these inept people took on the Republican establishment, the Democratic party and the vast majority of the 4th estate and were competent enough throughout to now sit in the oval office. Luckboxing, weakness and incompetence don't seem to sufficiently account for the facts.

I think we have to assume they're cunning f*ckers and plan accordingly.

The difference between cruelty and incompetence is often blurry. That blurriness itself isn't even a vague legal concept: We even have a definition of legal conduct known as negligence which is basically the failure to protect others against unreasonable risk of harm. The idea is usually applied to criminal conduct when parents leave their kids in a car all night while they go out to party or sit in a casino or something.

Is the Trump Admin strictly offensive, cruel and actively trying to harm people, or just too stupid and careless to care? Well, I'd ask: why should we care? The question gets to the collective Trump Admin mens rea so to speak, but we don't need to bother with it. The results speak for themselves.

A certain class of soft-Trumpkins or Trumpkin admirers with enough self-awareness to not totally grovel at his feet will try this game with normal people where they admit Trump maybe does some bad things but it's just because he's so eager to act, like an effective executive, sometimes he just can't iron out the details, but he means well. The path to making America Great Again will have some broken eggs, they say, but Trump is a fantastic chef, just look at what a successful businessman he is!

Don't fall for that, don't engage in the discussion, don't care about his mental state in that way. It's just an excuse. The distinction between ineptness and targeted-abusive behavior isn't always clear but the standard we've always or should always hold executives to is that you need not care where the line is drawn because either is a drastic failure. These kinds of questions hold sway when judging the conduct of like third-world doctors not washing their hands with anti-bacterial soap during an environmental catastrophe when performing an emergency amputation because it wasn't nearby. Trump is under no such constraints, he has no excuse, careful crafting and execution of the laws is one of the core competencies of the job, not some trivial detail.

Also, by the way, I'm become ever-more convinced that the Democrats and fellow-traveler opposition should be speaking like 90% more about just how inept and poorly executed Trump's Presidency is and maybe 90% less about how cruel and unfair it is. This is Sun Tzu Art of War stuff but Trump's strength, particularly with the persuadable low-information voter types, but also with his base, is that he was some sort of uber competent efficient businessman who knew how to get things done and make deals. It was never that he was racially egalitarian or lived by high-minded principle. That his conduct is in violation of some ideals about how to treat refugees are going to be completely lost on persuadable people. That is: liberals and the opposition are never going to damage his credibility by pointing out his lack of virtue. It's baked in already. Remember that, IIRC, President's Bush's largest week-to-week sinking of his approval rating was not related to the Iraq War but instead his perceived complete bungling of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, and he never really recovered. Bush could create a drastic humanitarian and foreign policy crisis that produced misery and suffering among millions but couldn't fade looking inept.

It's why Democrats turtling on the SCOTUS nomination would be such a drastic, terrible mistake. They should be incredibly obstinate and then taunt that Trump can't manufacture consent because he's not good at his job. Of course the Trump Admin will scream and pout that the Democrats are obstinate and cheating: obstruct further. Make him try some drastic power-play. He is likely to **** it up and create more of these kinds of messes. Voters won't get to the bottom of whose at fault but with Trump and the GOP in control of Congress, it will just signal that things "aren't working" and that Trump isn't effective which is doubly-damaging: Trump and the GOP aren't getting what they want, of course, but it's a strong signal to voters Trump isn't effective.

Also, I'm becoming tired of the palace intrigue and royal court politics stuff but I found this instructive:

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/...trump-scandals

Remember that when critics pointed out Trump sure just seemed like a brash right-wing idiot during the campaign, Kushner and Ivanka were supposed to be The Moderate Influential Ones or something like that that would keep him centered and not going full Breitbart. I forget if that was before or after Trump took the office and got serious due to the gravity of the Presidency. But that was another argument in there somewhere.

The palace intrigue is the only interesting part of this whole cluster****.

The problem with the Democrats not playing ball is that they will just eliminate the filibuster. I think in the end Trump nominates Hardiman and they get enough votes for cloture.

Maybe, and it's good to know in some respects where the power is and how it's being used (e.g., Bannon vs. Kushner vs. Preibus or whatever).

But I'd just reiterate my point from above, and it's related here: part of the fools' hope stuff is that Trump is some blank slate, empty portrait just waiting for a wise adviser to come by and fill-up the canvas. And if we can just supplant Bannon and get him out of the White House, well, it might be fine then.

Give Trump agency. This is his job now. If the results are poor it's because he's bad at it. The palace intrigue stuff ultimately gives Trump an out. You can imagine Trump is clever enough to know this, that he knows people are watching his little Team of Rivals act and he'll survey the landscape and toss whichever part of the team becomes inconvenient with the signal that it's changed and he's changed. When the money vanished or the deals fell apart in Trump's historical business scams, it involved tons of 'you'll get paid later' -- which is where the border wall is headed -- or that this and that have changed so the situation is different and then pivoting back to his personal reputation, with the idea that he's managing it now, so have trust.

Hold Trump responsible instead. This is his Administration, he's probably not a blank canvas, and Bannon is an extension of him.

Let the White House and the GOP Senate do that, then. Let them own this. Trump's one week into the job and apparently can't manage to get up and down the stairs. Let Trump and the Senate GOP navigate the politics of the nuclear option and subsequently being able to pass laws with 51 votes. Democrats shouldn't be capitulating with the idea that Trump and the GOP will fail slightly less spectacularly by preserving their right to filibuster some other thing, and the story ends with voters returning to reason and giving power back to technocratically competent Democrats as a reward for their patriotism. That's the fairy-tale here.

and provides some joy which we badly need. More importantly it's the most likely thing to bring trump down quickly - bitter divisions in his own camp with people who know where the bodies are buried.

Also while I'm ranting before I likely go away for a week, some self-defeating nonsense I've seen from some people is mind-boggling. Some combination of either: 1) the travel ban is under inclusive because it doesn't even include the countries where all the Mohammedmen terrorists breed, like whatabboutery Saudi Arabia or Pakistan?! And 2) oh, Trump has business interests in these other countries, see, look at his self-interest at work!

Both of these are missing the point.

To wit:

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...xecutive-order

No! Don't set the moral and humanitarian questions!

But then: the technocratic point is terrible too! Making the law more inclusive to include Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt wouldn't make anyone materially or significantly safer either.

Like I just got done ranting about virtue signaling being pointless, but jesus, wtf is this ****? Would we be happier if Trump's ban was MORE inclusive to include any nation with a lot of Muslims?

Like, OK, hammering Trump for his lack of virtue is a bad idea, but what the **** is this "well, come to think of it, Hitler really should have stayed focused on the Jews, but he didn't even bother Belgian Jews and got distracted by the Roma! What a moron" ****? Like, what the ****?

If we insist on virtue signaling, can we at least do it correctly? And we should be lampooning Trump as inept, but can we do it in ways where his logical pivot isn't more heinous? These arguments all read that basically, Trump is correct to institute the travel ban, he just forgot Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No wonder voters wind up confused.

While this is certainly true, you might want to take a look at the bigger picture here.
Here is a list of deadly terror attacks for 2016 (including only the banned countries)
Iraq 500+
Syria 200+
Somalia 70+
Lybia 50+
Yemen 50+
Sudan 4
Iran 2

source: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/at...s.aspx?Yr=2016

There are clearly hundreds if not thousands of (potential) terrorists living in those countries. Which means that the probability that a person coming from Iraq or Somalia being a terrorist is much higher than someone coming from Italy or Russia.
That's it. I'm not saying this travel ban is great or super likely to make the US a safer country.
I'm just saying that there are thousands of people living in those places who are willing to kill and even give their lives to harm others.

With that said I don't think this ban is the most ridiculous and absurd thing someone could think of given the facts.
For instance it's not even coming close on any scale to making up evidence and invading a country because terror. Did you guys think of Bush as the next Hitler, too? Because that has got to be like a hundred times worse. Invading a country vs. not letting people in for a couple of months.

The unsung heros of the Republic for the next four years are going to be the Senators who cross party lines. The McCains and Grahams of the right and the McCaskill and Testers of the left.

Watching Warren with the megaphone and Schmurers fake tears is so cringeworthy.

And you know there's at least a dozen of R senators who would sieg heil Daddy if he asked them to.

We're going to have our Constitutional crisis soon enough.

This might be the right move for the SCOTUS nomination, but I would be careful about embracing obstinacy for obstinacy's sake. There has to defensible reasons for being obstinate. Being obstinate merely for the purpose of making Trump look incompetent may be strategically sound, but it's really bad government, as the GOP has proved for the last 25 years.

In other words, I don't endorse a strategy of making the country as terrible as possible for four years just so the GOP can stew in it and get blamed.

^ Right, Dems could try to block only to be overrun requiring nothing of Trump in the process. This will basically play like "I put up a quality nominee, sore loser liberals wanted to stomp their feet, and were totally ineffective and we made it happen anyway. Sad!"

A much bigger reason, even if unfortunate: the vast majority of Americans just don't give two ****s about SCOTUS. You had Obama writing an op-ed for Garland, and I'd bet that 90% of people on your typical American street today wouldn't even know who that is. They're not on TV much. This is a public relations war as much as anything.

There's certainly the possibility the nomination is a shocker, then yeah do what you gotta do I guess, definitely milk it for what it's worth. Otherwise I think there are much bigger Trump vulnerabilities they can focus and continually pounce on (that could produce an actual result). It doesn't help anybody if Dems end up looking completely ineffectual because right or wrong voters see that too.

It's already a fait accompli. That is to say, the norms to maintain good government are eroded and degraded and the party in power is not respecting them.

So: If the GOP wants to organize their priorities and come to the table with meaningful compromises to govern, I would urge Democrats to join them.

That isn't happening. The Democrats being the party of pluralism and compromise just to signal a willingness to do it while the GOP obstructs endlessly is how we got here with a functional minority class enjoying almost total rule at all levels of government and trying to further entrench it.

The democratic norms we cherish (e.g., do not obstruct just to make the opposition party look bad) only work when they are genuine norms that are shared. They aren't, anymore, so there is no use maintaining fidelity to them.

Democrats actually have an added benefit here in that more or less everything Trump is trying to do is worthy of obstruction.

But I feel like we're all that dog in the thisisfine.jpg, whistling about democratic norms and how we're really maintaining a tradition of good governance and sound civic virtues.

I don't get what you are saying at all.

People look at the past data etc to justify the view that the ban does not increase the safety of Americans (and people also make the point that ISIS are making hey with this etc). So, you get that the ban is not a policy that can be justified in order to achieve the stated objective.

People look at the countries involved (ie no 9-11 linked countries, none of the 6 countries in the world with the highest number of Muslims etc) to make the point that if the "risk" was genuine and the only concern then the ban wouldn't look like it does. Hence, there must be other factors to this.

Both look like reasonable arguments to me, especially when simple = good when putting points to the masses. If people are amenable to changing their views, then it's not likely to happen by bombarding them with a huge wall of text.

You saw this,

TheReligionofPeace
TROP is a non-partisan, fact-based site which examines the ideological threat that Islam poses to human dignity and freedom.

and thought, yep, good enough for me?

Uh huh. So 'simple' = good, and these kinds of arguments are simple because a huge majority of people who are functionally math-illiterates just need to 'look at the past data' and 'the countries involved' which presumably most Americans couldn't even find on a map to see how it refutes Trump's swirling tornado of moving objectives.

Maybe for you and I they are 'simple' but for most people they hear Trump signaling "I will protect you from the brown people" and the Democrats bringing out color coded maps to show how Trump didn't even get the whole Middle East with one color and some spreadsheets of refugee/terrorist kill ratios.

So, as I said: bad arguments are like Vox's. Wonky, technocratic, but if only half-way understood, suggest the failure of the EO was that it wasn't broad enough.

Better arguments:

It's a bad to issue blank visa bans of countries like this because almost no global travelers intend to harm us, and Trump screwed it all up anyway by abusing lawful citizens who can expect to travel out of and back into the US without harassment.

The end. One sentence, declarative, doesn't require a map or a spreadsheet, speaks to shared negative-liberty type values, and is hard to misunderstand or misconstrue the underlying point.

What's wrong with that? Do you think this site makes stuff up and fabricates a list to make Islam look bad?
So you don't believe that there have been hundreds of deadly attacks in those countries in 2016 and thousands in the years before? All lies?

Get em

What's complicated about, for instance, giving the number of past terrorist deaths arising from people from those specific banned countries? You realise that there are loads of people online referring to 9-11 etc, and thinking that they are suddenly safer as Muslims are now barred.

You think these people will read your line and suddenly think "Huh, almost none of these darkies intend to harm us you say? Hummm...I'm going to re-think." I'd suggest that you are more likely to get somewhere challenging people's prejudice if you try to address their concerns with facts, rather than come up with a line that they can easily dismiss as lefty stuff in their minds.

I know so. I mean, this is InfoGathering101, how does that site not cause any red flags to go up in your mind?

The state department has stats. Why would you rely on a site like THAT?

I didn't even look at the stats, I just saw the site you were linking.

Not to cut to the end or anything, but if 2 'radical terrorist' organizations are fighting each other, then, yeah, there are going to be a lot of 'terrorist attacks'.