A lot of us assumed that this nation has a core set of shared American values that we all stand by. Like, all the apple pie jazz about freedom of religion and being a nation of immigrants and respecting the troops and whatnot. What Trump has shown is that a frightful segment of the population is either opposed or indifferent to all that ****. You can kick out refugees bc of their religion and piss on Gold Star families and cuddle up to dictators like Putin, and it's still all good with these people. As someone who watched Republicans constantly spazz out about Russia in the 80s, it's shocking to see that it was all more or less pageantry. Basically, the only two things that are sacred are low taxes for the wealthy and hating women & minorities.

I would argue, given our multi-faceted history of great conflict and turmoil, we clearly don't have a core set of shared American values. Therefor, I think any patriotic calls to return to the great old days of shared American values is specious.

One way to square this is sort of what we're talking about in the LC thread -- the grand idea of Harari's Sapiens is that we all operate with a bunch of shared fictions and our success depends on a level of cognitive dissonance to put aside empiricism and what you can really touch and allow collective unrealities to drive us.

One way you might describe the pre-Trump America during say the 1980s-1990s of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years and even reaching back to the immediate post WWII era is that BOTH sides were engaged in a bit of pageantry and consensus-building-by-fiction. The GOP played along with the rhetoric and virtues of human rights and cosmopolitan values as a way to differentiate against the Soviets and build consensus with the left against a common enemy. The Democrats trigulated and nominated a guy like Clinton who could comfortably campaign on Sister Souljah and sidelining Jesse Jackson as a way to signal that we remained collectively beholden to the white identity and preserving the special status of white people in America.

Which is why all the "Trump is tweeting to distract us from his Rosneft derivative swap" 12D chess bullshit is SO BAD.

This NEED of Dems to invent an opposition that doesn't exist instead of fighting the one that does is ****ing pathological.

Conway is on form.



https://twitter.com/DanielSchulman/s...63974159118336

This isn't true. He had to sell of all of his Exxon stock. And his "future" stock options were paid out in cash, into a trust, not allowed to invest in Exxon.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/04/inve...-donald-trump/

Excellent post DVault. (Of course most of your posts are).

While we don't yet know how Trump would respond to a national emergency, somehow, I don't think he'd take the "Bush" approach. Trump is a showman. No doubt he would fly down, "help out", get the positive media coverage, "demand" the Congress send money and help. He wouldn't be Katrina'd like Bush was. In my opinion of course.

Or maybe he would send in troops just to stop looting and do some light deportation hunting, assuming, of course, it was not during a weekend off at his southern plantation.

Was just gonna say, if it happens on a Friday, maybe he will go down and give awval's rah rah speech, but he'll have to wait until Monday, since the weekends belong to Mar A Lago.

"A terrible disaster, a shame, really a shame. Almost as bad as Arnold's ratings."

When it turns out bad: "Obama's failed emergency response structure must be dismantled!"

Responding to a natural disaster is not whether you make a personal appearance. In fact, an idiotic rally is just the thing Trump would do. The actual response will be a deficit of aid followed by a surplus of graft.

A Katrina style natural disaster where the problems beset a city or a region would probably play out in the Trump style much like it did with the Bush Admin, just amplified -- so Trump blames local officials, and all the better if they are largely black and/or Democrats. That was part and parcel of the right-wing response to Katrina -- all Ray Nagin's fault, all Blanco's fault, look at all those school buses just sitting there unused, clearly Democrats fell asleep on the job, tsk tsk.

The second Trumpian wrinkle would likely to be even more conspiratorial, paranoid, and entrenched in denying reality. So Trump would say the people on the roofs pleading for help were actually criminal thugs who were just play-acting desperate on the hopes they might get to shoot an unsuspecting hero white cop, and in fact the levees only failed because egghead liberal enemy-of-the-people scientists seized the opportunity to make Trump look bad, and actually everyone is thrilled to have the extra water and the enemy media is making a big deal out of nothing, and also, the real problem here is all the rioters stealing food or whatever.

That's more or less how Katrina played out if your only source of news was Drudge and AM radio, and that is more or less Trump's main source of news.

I figure he'll completely ignore it and tweet something that would get the news coverage instead.

https://thinkprogress.org/is-sam-bro...628#.q5yy651lv

Good planet money episode a few years about his economic plan.

Looks like it didn't pan out

Re: Putin/Trump collusion, there's definitely a Rounders analogy that can be made there.

Pretty hard to make contact with the people, when you're out floating in the Gulf of Tonkin.

It is known.

Trumpkins talk about surveillance the way the olds talk about using credit cards on the internet. I assume the Venn diagram is a huge overlap though. So like the olds hear some anecdotal story on cable or local news about an old who got fleeced out of their social security money because they had their identity stolen due to the fact they used a credit card to buy their grandson a book on google.aol therefore the entire internet exists to steal their credit card and all transactions on the internet are fundamentally insecure and in fact, they personally are the targets.

Trumpkins up to people who serve in the Trump Administration have heard about the internet of things and the existence of PRISM so therefore Barack Obama watched Trump shower with a local microwave because that's just the way the world is these days, just a topsy turvy world out there.

lol @ Conway thinking that your microwave can spy on you. Any idiot knows that it's only your television, Amazon Echo, iphone, and laptop webcam that can be used that way!

The post-shower Hot Pocket is an essential part of Trump's daily routine.

We kind of know. This is exactly what he did during the Louisiana floods last year while still campaigning. Even though the Governor said he didn't want politicians visiting and interfering with the recovery efforts.

He has also dealt with a couple minor emergencies with the tornados in Georgia/Alabama just after the inauguration and the Oroville dam. As far as I can tell he just authorized federal help through FEMA and I haven't heard any complaints so I guess he hasn't bungled anything to Katrina levels yet.

Maybe Kansas can replace him with someone who isn't an economic disaster but since they reelected him in 2014 even after over 100 state Republicans endorsed his Democratic opponent, odds are slim.