I wonder how the Free Speech Absolutist "trigger warning" people are taking Trump's threats to repeal the first amendment

In this sense I can only guess that "conservative" means "right-wing". There is nothing conservative about outlawing free speech.

Eh, he's creating a lot of structure for things he wants to do in the future + animating his base + flag burning is not new as a wedge issue at all + distracting from bigger issues like conflicts of interest. I've mentioned before that this strategy is easily synthesized by Bannon and whispered into Trump's ear through Bannon. I am also beginning to think that the Deplorables themselves (ie, Breitbart readers and heavy Trump enthusiasts on Twitter) may be driving the messaging as well. But it's all coordinated in a certain way, although it's also a lot of angry lashing out at the world randomly. That's all part of the TRUMP package.

What I said was, you cannot walk back "con-artist".

So once Rubio went there. He had no shot at the Vice Presidency.

Truthfully though, I think there is only one dig that Donald J Trump finds unforgivable. You can say he has small hands. A con-artist. Tell him he has a mail-order bride. That his hotels suck. That he has bad hair.

But one thing, is so unforgivable, so unmentionable in his presence of His Excellency...

Predictit has a "faithless electors, 1 or more, y/n" but I didn't see anything else.

I used to think Trump was a big joke. I'm not laughing anymore. This dude gets scarier by the day.

I have never studied government, I don't know all that much about foreign affairs, have obviously never studied/prepared to be President, and have no connections in D.C., but I am being 100 percent serious when I say that right now, as I sit on my couch trying to motivate myself to do some work while drinking a morning Coke Zero, I would make a better POTUS than Donald Trump. Teleport me behind the Oval Office desk and the country's next four years are automatically better.

Not a huge fan of liberals jumping on the "media distraction" bandwagon. Turns out the media just reports the dumb **** they think people want to hear about and they're probably correct. Conflicts of interest that might affect Trump's ability to govern? NBD, we want to know who is and isn't standing for the national anthem! In that sense I guess Trump is pretty savvy - ignore the real effects of his policy and go ham on FLAG BURNING.

does the guy in TX who decided to resign and be replaced by an alternate who will cast the vote count?

I'm seeing a lot of "checkmate, liberals" posts pointing out that Hillary sponsored a flag burning bill in 2005. As if we liberals didn't scream bloody murder when she did it. Hell, I was still in high school, and I remember it distinctly.

A decade seems like a long time too. I don't think pollsters even check public opinion on this issue. Seemed dead.

Trump needs to look to Scalia on the issue of flag burning.

Elaine Chao - Mitch McConnell's wife, former deputy transportation secretary under HW, and a Heritage Foundation fellow - is transportation secretary. Swamp = Drained.

Seems like some hilarious leverage over ole Mitch on any infrastructure bill.

Dammit I knew her name was familiar but the first thing on Google was just her role in the W administration.

Her family owns The Foremost Group, an international shipping & trading company. Should be good for them.

One thing I would give Trump credit for is if he campaigned on "draining the swamp" and then just makes appointments that appease the Seattlelous while his original supporters have nowhere else to go. Most likely this is all just happenstance but seems to be working OK. He can even appease liberals by not picking the worst possible person each time! So far mixed bag on that

Remember this is one of those things where they will cackle at you for not understanding their unspoken premises: They'll just say Trump did what he promised by draining the swamp of liberals. Oh, they didn't say that part? YOU took it to mean some generic populist sloganeering? Well that's your fault, sucker.

Not a single Trump voter is going to lose sleep over bringing the Bush Administration and GOP power brokers back. I mean maybe a few of the truly stupid, or literal deplorables who thought this was going to be the Fourth Reich who thought like David Duke was really in the running for something. For everyone else, only in the alternate pretend world they constructed where Trump getting a smaller share of the total electorate than Romney did constituted some populist uprising of non-partisan struggling working class whites would this be alarming.

Instead see the vast, vast, vast majority of Trump voters as your standard-issue GOP straight-ticket voter and realize they are probably thrilled by this. Trump's more or less perfect for them. He's governing like a Bush on steroids but talks like George Wallace. This is everything they could have asked for.

Do you think that in a perverse way they're correct?

The #NeverTrump movement was 99% based on the premise that Trump couldn't win and would damage the brand. The other 1% was like George Will. Now that the dog has caught the car, the establishment guys look a little silly, but they can go back to doing business as usual with conventional Bush administration appointees and the occasional alt-right clown to keep the kids distracted.

imo, the Trump voters are a lot more savvy to this kind of thing than the left gave them credit for. The left tried to patiently explain why a wall would be impossible when many of the Trumpers understood all along that it was theatrics and bluster. Reading the reactions at Chiefsplanet when Trump flip-flopped on prosecuting Hillary, the standard reaction is like, ofc he's not *really* going to do that. That was just standard election bull****ting, lol you libs got trolled pretty good.

You know that Sartre quote that being passed around on Twitter? The left is just now becoming woke to those ideas, but the Trumpers understood all of that the whole time.

The Sartre quote is good. Also, the same thing was happening on the left. How many people really believed Bill McKibben, Cornel West, James Zobgy, and Deborah Parker were going to have any influence in the Clinton administration? How many were cynically saying "that's smart politics" while fully hoping for and expecting her government to look a lot more like Larry Summers. How many people in this forum have vociferously argued that she had the most progressive platform in the history of the world while thinking that Hillary knows better than to raise the minimum wage all the way up to $15/hr?

Then it seems the wall (along with every other Trump election promise) was a catch-22 subject for Hillary and the dems. If Hillary called his bluff and said that he was just using the wall as a point of enthusiasm for trumpkins and that it had no basis in reality, the response would have been: the wall just got 10 feet higher.

His cabinet picks of Sessions and Price are much harder right/tea party oriented than I would like.

Those have been bad and if he goes Rudy for SOS I'd say that idea is completely bunk

Oh Erick-son-of-Erick, never change.

Wasn't he supposed to be a Never-Trumper? And now he's tweeting **** like this?

(links for the twitter-impaired users - shot and chaser)

Yeah Rudy is just crazy these days.