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The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns. The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: No smocking guns.

03-14-2017 , 08:14 AM
Also, Trump's standard move has been to throw out something completely absurd and then walk it back just a bit. Sends his idea up the flag, sees who salutes, and then recalibrates. Like we saw with the Muslim ban that got reworked into Muslim Ban v2. I expect when AHCA gets shot down Trump will fire back with a more Ryan-friendly bill.
03-14-2017 , 08:15 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
Remember too many of these people are in fact animated and motivated by white identity politics but are self-aware enough not to put that on display.
I'd actually argue self awareness is lacking for this group; that this kind of prejudice has become so taboo for decades on end that the many, many white Americans who experience it have that **** locked up in places they never open unless they're behind closed doors on like Thxgiving with friendlies and are 3 or 4 drinks deep, and even THEN it just accidentally spills out.

I say this as someone who was born and raised in upper middle class suburbia and only came across minorities as a youth when being served food or having my golf bag carried for me. These very people we're discussing were my entire world.
03-14-2017 , 08:20 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
Also, Trump's standard move has been to throw out something completely absurd and then walk it back just a bit. Sends his idea up the flag, sees who salutes, and then recalibrates. Like we saw with the Muslim ban that got reworked into Muslim Ban v2. I expect when AHCA gets shot down Trump will fire back with a more Ryan-friendly bill.
The AHCA is Ryan. When it gets shut down, a proposal from Trump would be the first Trump proposal.

Right? Or am I ****ed up here
03-14-2017 , 08:36 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by PocketChads
The AHCA is Ryan. When it gets shut down, a proposal from Trump would be the first Trump proposal.

Right? Or am I ****ed up here
This isn't Pure Ryan, because I think Pure Ryan (aka Max Bootstraps) would be $0.00 spent on subsidizing health care. But probably this bill is as much Ryan as is politically viable, and probably even still too much. As Fox News commentators have noted, this bill isn't very Trumpian, except in the sense that it is poorly thought out. But where is the white populism? I would guess that's the direction they go in if this bill fails.
03-14-2017 , 08:53 AM
None of AHCA is Trump. It's 100% lock he could not speak intelligently on the subject for 2 minutes nor could he name it's three main components.

Trump has nothing to do with policy. He is the clown at the head. That is all.
03-14-2017 , 08:54 AM
yea im pretty confident in assuming donald has exactly 0 to do with the mechanics of this healthcare legislation, or any healthcare legislation for that matter
03-14-2017 , 09:21 AM
Tillerclown looks like a deer in headlights. They were not expecting the Russia stuff to get so crazy so fast. Now he's stuck.
03-14-2017 , 09:57 AM
Neither Trump nor Ryan want to spend money on poor whites either. If they put together something that looks like rural white health care for people with a valid confederate ID card it'll be a scam even for whitest poor person.
03-14-2017 , 10:00 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Melkerson
So, first can we at least agree that when it comes to getting other lawyering jobs, it doesn't matter the least bit whether these guys resigned or were fired. The post you were responding to was clearly alluding to those types of jobs, which is what most of these guys are going to do when they're done. There's not really any mention of this in your post above. In that scenario (which is the common one), the decision makers are well-informed fellow attorneys and not random citizens.

With that out of the way, I guess you thesis is that well if these guys someday run for office it will look better if they resigned rather than if they were fired. I seriously doubt that it will make a difference, but even if it did, I think it probably works the other way. Do you think Bharara's political future was enhanced or hindered by forcing trump to fire him? Given all the coverage in the last few days, I think it's pretty clear his chances of winning a nom and getting elected are improved by being fired than if he just quietly resigned.

These guys are all Obama appointees who are probably Dems. To get elected they need to get their party's nomination. Making Trump fire him is just the kind of thing that will raise their profile within their party and get the nom. Given that most Americans have an unfavorable opinion of Trump, getting fired by him is not only not a big deal, it's practically a badge of honor. Possibly in a red state this analysis is debatable, but that doesn't explain why every one of the other 45 just resigned. In a blue state, forcing Trump to fire is much more likely to help political aspirations than hurt them.
What everyone always forgets about people in public office is that they are human beings too. A simple explanation is that Preet Bharara was promised by trump he could stay, then trump changed his mind with no explanation and told bharara to resign, so bharara was like "**** you fire me."
03-14-2017 , 10:13 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by jman220
What everyone always forgets about people in public office is that they are human beings too. A simple explanation is that Preet Bharara was promised by trump he could stay, then trump changed his mind with no explanation and told bharara to resign, so bharara was like "**** you fire me."
Preet and other hold-overs were sabotaged by other hold-overs who were leaking and otherwise mucking up the work of the new administration instead of doing what they were supposed to do ---> create a smooth transition and keep the government running.

You can't not do the job you agreed to do and expect to keep your job. And if they can't identify the culprits they have to get rid of all hold-overs to get rid of the culprits.
03-14-2017 , 10:16 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by poconoder
Preet and other hold-overs were sabotaged by other hold-overs who were leaking and otherwise mucking up the work of the new administration instead of doing what they were supposed to do ---> create a smooth transition and keep the government running.

You can't not do the job you agreed to do and expect to keep your job. And if they can't identify the culprits they have to get rid of all hold-overs to get rid of the culprits.
Thread title needs to be changed to "The Regime of Donald J. Trump".
03-14-2017 , 10:20 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by jman220
What everyone always forgets about people in public office is that they are human beings too. A simple explanation is that Preet Bharara was promised by trump he could stay, then trump changed his mind with no explanation and told bharara to resign, so bharara was like "**** you fire me."
Or maybe he was buying time to preserve the integrity/evidence of on going investigations into team Trump, Fox news, Russian money laundering....who knows what else what is in the mix.

Team Trump got rid of all of them in a hurry. If one didn't want to draw attention to firing one in hurry then just fire all of them in a hurry. Then come out with the line that US attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president blah blah blah. Misdirection is how Trump operates. I don't think we have heard the last from the southern district of New York or Bharara.
03-14-2017 , 10:22 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by poconoder
And if they can't identify the culprits they have to get rid of all hold-overs to get rid of the culprits.
The leaks aren't coming from Obama holdovers, they're coming from Trump staff.

I mean some of them are probably coming from holdovers but Sean Spicer's phone check was leaked almost immediately and I doubt he has staffers he didn't hire.
03-14-2017 , 10:37 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by wheatrich
US amb to UN is nikki haley, who only took down the confederate flag a couple years ago off the state capitol of south carolina because of extreme pressure is somehow currently last by a large gap on the list.

You missed Sessions/Devos/Pence/etc, hell just google the cabinet, they all go on it somewhere. Nunes/Burr (house/senate intel committee chairs)/Chaffetz (ethics chair of apparently everything but trump)/ damn still forgetting a few/that iowa congress guy/ben carson
Kushner too

worse, we still don't have all the people with russian ties since there's at least one in our ****ing CIA/FBI/NSA/etc and probably multiple.

oh right nat sec mcmaster's a neocon but he hopefully won't get on the list. Wish they all got the YOU JUST MADE THE LIST chris jericho treatment.

Gone is turkey agent and russian dinner with putin flynn.
This Mulvaney chump they ran out there on Sunday Morning RAW is giving Kellyanne a run for her money, my god what a bald faced immune-to-facts liar this clown is
03-14-2017 , 10:39 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by PocketChads
Yeah, West Virginia has a long history of being favor of socialistic tendencies as long as black people don't benefit or get to live there

People kinda have the wrong idea about a lot of states that way, but WV has a history of turning it up to 11
My takeaway from that WV town hall last night: Even WV Trump-voting coal miners are fine with FREE HEALTHCARE FOR ALL as long as they can keep mining coal.
03-14-2017 , 10:42 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DVaut1
I mean here we are, where the GOP is throwing off the bonds of racial and religious egalitarian norms in rhetoric but largely not in health care policy yet (e.g., no one on the GOP side is proposing racial or religious tests to get government assistance).
Well I mean they kind of are here with all this "tax credit" stuff, just in a more muted way. Given that the unemployment rate for (for example) blacks is roughly double that of whites this plan they're pimping right now disproportionately hurts blacks more.
03-14-2017 , 10:56 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Trolly McTrollson
Because Trump/Ryan aren't terribly bright and they aren't very good a dealmaking, that's my guess.
It remains a 2nd best option because I suspect the Ryan wing realizes that ****ing poor people and giving tax breaks to the rich is perfectly legal whereas if they compromise and try to give stuff only to whites and less to blacks, etc., they'll run into legal trouble.

And I suspect the Trump wing is trying to deduce how much they have to give away to keep angry whites docile versus toe-a-line on being seen as giving one red cent to black person, aka a traitor RINO apostate.

So they're still spitballing how to solve. I think it's more likely they'll just bungle the whole thing but a pivot to a more fascist white nationalist plan has to be in the range of eventual long-term outcomes.

Last edited by DVaut1; 03-14-2017 at 11:06 AM.
03-14-2017 , 11:01 AM
03-14-2017 , 11:03 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by fatkid
Tillerclown looks like a deer in headlights. They were not expecting the Russia stuff to get so crazy so fast. Now he's stuck.
He strikes me as a strictly political appointment, a man who legit has no fing idea what he is doing, no skills whatsoever in diplomacy, just a yes man empty suit who was hired because he's a Friend of the Program. The fact that they seemingly refuse to let him talk to the press further confirms this.
03-14-2017 , 11:06 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by DudeImBetter
DV if there's one thing I've taken away from your summaries on what animates the GOP base it's that we absolutely must rethink public education and emphasize the **** out of critical thinking in high school (among many, many other things).
Not so sure. That may help on the fringes but the Baby Boomer whites and others fueling the Trump movement are not universally uneducated and relative to the past, they're far more educated than white Americans of prior generations who were in many ways far less openly hostile to blacks or at least weren't manifesting so much paranoia, resentment and anger and then acting on it politically.

I've said my piece on this but I think so long as we continue to live segregated and the growth of income inequality persists without a large accompanying economic boom, I'm not confident even small growth or education or critical thinking or anything like that is going to solve this.

I've also said my piece on the parallels between the transition from rural agrarianism to industrialized manufacturing economy and the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era in the late 18th/early 19th century is very much like our own times with significant upheaval in the labor market and accompanying social and cultural changes, but one key, critical difference is that urbanization in the early 20th century promoted a certain form of white integration but Jim Crow persisted to keep blacks an underclass, and the Great Migration of blacks out of the south didn't come until later.

So a lot of the social factors that produced the Progressive Era which lead to meaningful changes in policies that satisfied populists and leftists alike, and solved the gridlock and extreme partisanship and strife of the late 19th/early 20th century (in some ways which were very exceptional and unique to America) don't look like they're on the immediate horizon for us.

So while I wish we could just school right-wingers into submission, I'm skeptical that in and of itself is the quick solution. I've also remarked at length numerous times is that angry whites are totally hip to that and they've often made schools the #1 battleground to maintain their segregated, special advantage in American society and so schooling alone without meaningful integration and addressing problems with wealth inequality might perpetuate the problem, not solve it. White parents fight hard over schools so simply trying to dump money into education and incentive more education may just result in endless supply of more literate vDare bloggers with far better syntax, command of the language, coherence and literary references but just as much anger and paranoia and dislike of outsiders that they never interact with or live near. Like just as a simple and obvious political example, Africakaners in South Africa improved their education levels along with the rest of the west during the middle 20th century AND instituted more segregation and deeper forms of apartheid.

Last edited by DVaut1; 03-14-2017 at 11:13 AM.
03-14-2017 , 11:08 AM
There is a hero worshipping assumption that only the cream could rise to the top of a giant corporation instead of it being the best golf buddy who knows how to repay favors.
03-14-2017 , 11:10 AM
Just look at Trump's plan for the school system. He wants to create a national voucher system, sending public funds to private and charter schools. But what is a working class family to do when their voucher is $5,000 but that only covers one semester at the local private school? Middle-class families and above are able to take advantage of the voucher, while working class and below families are even worse off than before. Everything about the Trump administration will accelerate income inequality and diminish opportunity for those who need it most.
03-14-2017 , 11:15 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by einbert
But what is a working class family to do when their voucher is $5,000 but that only covers one semester at the local private school?
Or their youngest child is denied entry to Local Private School because his grades suck and they don't want their scores dragged into the toilet? Or their middle son is denied entry because he has autism and Local Private School has no way to deal with all that and also doesn't want their scores dragged into the toilet? Private schools pick their students the way politicians pick their voters.
03-14-2017 , 11:17 AM
The only thing that's going to convince right wingers is getting completely screwed over. That's it. No rhetoric or dialectic or ad campaign or education is going to do it.

And even then, they'll just stop voting.
03-14-2017 , 11:21 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by FlyWf
Drug testing for premium support but fentanyl and oxy don't count as positive tests. "Work requirements". More broadly, what would absolutely work beautifully for this is to make it about geography, pass a "Rural Health Improvement Initiative" or something and then just repeal the ACA. Subsidize people who live far away from hospitals because they need the help more.
Right on the bolded. That was my gut instinct of where this was headed; part and parcel of our increased segregation and living in segregated communities is that we make these kinds of projects easier. Making the rewards and harms geographical could easily pass de jure scrutiny and be easy to game racially and reward whites disproportionately.

Related: don't forget federalism. This constitutes some risk for the white nationalists and they know it but "let's have the federal government just give resources to the states with their magical local control, 50 incubators for policy, it will be perfect" have also been part of the white supremacist toolbox. They know if they can't swing it in Washington then they just beg and plead for more money for the Rust Belt and the South and let the GOP governors there handle the dirty work. Time honored tradition.

      
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