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Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
This is actually easier than you think. One of the things I've pointed out itf is how quickly W Bush went from a widely supported Republican who won the presidential election twice to a persona non grata within a decade. You talk to Republicans today about W and they'll tell you he wasn't what he claimed to be or he was the lesser of two evils or some other bit of apologetics. It's easy to see the Trump cult disappear in much the same way: oh I guess we were nuts for him at the time but he sort of fooled all of us and wasn't the guy he seemed like --who could have known at the time?
The hard part is getting anyone to learn from their mistakes. W posed as a kind of cowboy outside-the-Beltway businessman who talked like a moron. Trump is posing as a racist-ass outside-the-Beltway businessman who talks like a moron. You can get people to see that Trump is a corrupt scam artist, but they'll still latch on to the next outsider businessdude who speaks their language. W's target audience was more evangelicals instead of neo-Nazis, but the basic recipe is the same. Basically Trump and W are symptoms of the larger structural problem: that this country is full of gullible angry morons who are fed on a constant stream of Fox News talking points.
This is part of the point I think Dvaut is making: yes, you can maybe prove that Trump was in cahoots with the FSB and impeach him or whatever, but he'll immediately be replaced with another far-right blowhard dingbat unless the real underlying problems get addressed.
Sure, that. And that is important to note about my argument: that the political attacks which start and end with Trump's personal failures or highlight his personal corruption are ultimately limited in scope and don't serve any long-term political interests short of destroying Trump. Destroying Trump is important but doesn't get you THAT much in the end. See all my posts above on this.
But remember too a corollary point: Bush didn't get taken down with Iraq. At least not in the ways you would think a total cluster**** disaster of a war that plunged a whole region into chaos and achieved basically no strategic interest should sink a politician. I grant it probably eroded his standing but he was able to get re-elected and maintain broad-enough popular support to govern after Iraq; after it became clear Iraq was disasterous.
It was Katrina that ultimately undid Bush and erased his political capital. His largest week to week drops in popular support were during the Katrina aftermath.
The Undoing of George W. Bush
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Americans across the country were shocked by the television images they saw in Katrina's immediate aftermath. People stood on rooftops waving their arms and pleading for help as the flood waters inundated their communities. Desperate folks in the Superdome appeared in heartbreaking TV interviews begging for aid in their time of need. Making matters worse was that 67 percent of New Orleans was African American and 30 percent of the residents were poor, creating the impression that the government was insensitive and neglectful of minorities and the less fortunate.
While all this was going on, the president of the United States remained aloof from the disaster. Day after day, George W. Bush continued a long-planned vacation at his 1,600-acre Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, and his staff didn't want to burden him with detailed information about the situation on the Gulf Coast. When Katrina made landfall, Bush had been on holiday at his ranch for 27 days, according to a tabulation kept by CBS News.
As the hurricane grew into a catastrophe, and as the nation watched the TV coverage in horror, Bush's aides decided they had to inform the president about it in stark terms. One of his aides put together a video showing scenes of hurricane-ravaged communities and showed it to the president. At this point, Bush decided he should cut his vacation short and return home two days early to preside over the federal response from Washington. He flew back to Washington on August 31, after 29 days at his ranch.
On the way back, he had Air Force One fly over part of the devastated area and he glimpsed the wreckage from the plane. White House officials allowed news photographers to take photos of a grim-faced Bush looking out an Air Force One window but the PR gambit backfired. Many Americans saw the photo, which was widely disseminated, as evidence that Bush was too distant from the misery below. In a 2010 interview with NBC, Bush conceded that allowing the photo to be taken was a "huge mistake" because it made him seem "detached and uncaring."
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"He never recovered from Katrina," says a former Bush adviser and Republican strategist who wants to remain anonymous to avoid offending the Bush family. "The unfolding disaster with the Iraq war [a conflict which Bush ordered] didn't help, but it's clear that after Katrina he never got back the popularity that he had." Referring to Bush's decision to fly over the ravaged areas and allow photos to be taken of him peering out the window, the former adviser added: "He's rued that decision ever since."
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Polls at the time bear out this negative assessment. A Washington Post-ABC News survey found that the bungled response to Katrina dragged down Bush's job approval rating in mid-September 2005 to 42 percent, the lowest of his presidency until that point, while 57 percent disapproved of his performance. Only 49 percent said he could be "trusted in a crisis" compared with 60 percent who felt that way a year earlier.
"It raised fundamental questions in people's minds about how in touch he was while there was chaos in people's lives, and how much he cared about it," says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin. "And it raised questions about the basic competence of his administration."
It proves the principle, imo -- one of the ones I'm talking about
: Republicans could thump their chest enough and yell about national security and scaremonger about evil Muslims and hide behind the flag and the military and whatever else, and weather the storm, pun intended, of Iraq.
Democrats aren't going to land a crushing blow to Trump on Russia without the seminal smoking gun evidence/investigation because MOST of the meta messages are all fundamentally right-wing ones. A lot of the public simply doesn't have the imagination to deduce why Trump would genuflect to Putin; he wants to Make America Great Again, he's a rich old white guy, it doesn't make sense. Oh, he wants to enrich himself, you say? Well that we understand, but isn't that what great negotiating is? He's such a great businessman negotiator, he's got this, we're sure of it.
Democrats aren't going to win long term there, in the same way they never were able to cripple Bush on Iraq. You're not going to out-patriot the GOP in ways that are fundamentally questioning the right's Americanness. You're fighting like generations of political stereotypes there. Plus, while I find it totally plausible Trump and Putin are colluding to scam people, it's like actually highly unlike they worked up some kind of secret "Plan of Transfer of American Assets to Russia for Krelmin Dominance of USA" dossier together. The sort of scams are going to be the more simple garden variety wealth transfer grifts. The most likely sort of corruption and collusion between Trump and Putin isn't anything that actually genuinely threatens national sovereignty but instead simple graft, e.g., the Trump Admin gives Russian and extraction/oil industry a more friendly American regulatory climate to operate in and in exchange, Trump et al get money. That's probably the best Democrats can hope for to prove that. It's still going to be pretty distant and esoteric for a lot of voters.
But being inept at governing was beyond the pale for Bush. THAT was the moment Bush went from a product of a sharp partisan divide (basically where Trump is now) that still has political space and capital to operate, and morphed to reviled and widely disliked, the guy that was effectively abandoned by his party and highly toxic and couldn't move on his agenda after that.
Obviously Democrats can't manufacture a national disaster and make Trump seem aloof and inept, and ldo no one should root that on. So Democrats can't Katrina Trump without outside help. But it shows how you can break through partisanship and really crush Trump; unfortunately it's hard for Democrats to move the needle in ways that question the right-wing's strongman, America First bonafides. Even if they wage globe-altering, catastrophic wars.
But being seen as fundamentally inept is politically crippling.
This really shouldn't be a hard case for Democrats to make about Trump since the dude is a walking clownshow who can't manage to even scam people competently. But it's harder when you're spending a lot of time on Russian co-option.
Last edited by DVaut1; 03-13-2017 at 04:29 AM.
