I live in Europe. I know lots of people who would vote for Trump. Also nearly every European country right now has similar idiots gettings lots of votes. Start with le Pen ...

Yeah, we used to have illusions about how low we could go. Don't be complacent.

Donald Trump is a ****ing coastal elite Jesus Christ stop blaming him on poor people

Similar to Euros thinking they are better than that, coastal elites, ivy leaguers, and especially rich people are not better than that.

And "oh I want to talk to an American Trump voter"?? Uh, ask a Leave voter. UKIP is pretty much just the GOP.

(again it speaks to the odd presumption that white people who support terrible **** are in some way confused or mislead. You wanna poke somebody in ISIS with a stick? Maduro voters? Ultra-nationalist Turks?)

Seems like this is something fly over racists should try to learn.

Leave voters outnumber UKIP supporters by a huge margin.

Of all the Leave voters I know (all of whom I work with) only one has ever expressed support for Trump, and he was very drunk at the time (possibly in the same state that many of Trump's votes were cast).

when I was in germany , I was repeatedly asked "Why Bush"? as if it was my decision. they all seemed to think that bush was overwhelmingly chosen by the populace. I had to explain (when I felt like it) that first off, only half the country voted, and of those who voted more took his opponent.

it was kinda weird how invested so many people were when in merica, no one really talked about it.

Except UKIP doesn't have any MPs (they only ever had Douglas Carswell, a Tory defector who re-defected to become an independent and didn't stand at the last election, and the entertainingly-named Mark Reckless, a by-election winner in 2014, who promptly lost his seat in 2015) and Nigel Farage has failed to gain election to Parliament seven times over.

I tend to get issue-related questions now that the election has passed, mostly about guns and healthcare. It's understandable because the solution is so goddamn simple and most of the countries in Europe implemented them with success ages ago. Yet, America has these mass shootings and millions of uninsured and doesn't take the proper steps to fix it. Even more absurd is that people are being offered government healthcare but don't accept it.

There's the Trump voters who try hard to hide it, there's vocal Trump supporters who pipe up when drinking or given an opportunity, and then there's the deplorabliest who wear Trump / MAGA garb in public. They all warrant different approaches IMO.

Finally found some trump voters who have flipped irl.

My wife's family are Vietnamese immigrants. Her parents generation and trickling down to hers as well are republicans. It is pretty crazy to me because much of the actual issues are directly not in their best interest across the ****ing board. Also crazy is they were enormous McCain supporters because of his stance on Vietnamese immigrants and giving him credit for being able to come here after a few failed attempts in the early 90s, but Trump's attacks on him didn't sway them, or they didn't hear about it. Her dad was imprisoned in a reeducation camp for years including being caged in a seated position.

Anyway, some of her parents friends brought up regret at voting Trump last week. Her parents are still backing him because her sister is a vocal full-on deplorable pos of the worst order, like could be an actual Trump herself, and she influences them.

I asked her why they changed their minds on Trump and was not super pleased with the answer tbh. A lot of it was superstitious **** about how all the storms and fires etc are because trump is bad luck. They did say that they voted Trump because they knew Hillary was a liar, but they regret they didn't do any research into who trump was. They took responsibility for that.

There was a lot of hate toward Obama that was actual voiced racism during his terms as well, but the anti-communist/socialist position that the repubs own plays well with her family even as they take advantage of every social program imaginable.

From Chiefsplanet:

That the American UKIP is much more successful than the British GOP doesn't really change things. The Democrats here are a mix of Tories or Lib Dems, and Labour is essentially a party that doesn't exist in the US(but the Dems are moving towards it).

I just noticed that; vintage, essential TS.

So my favorite part of this Wolff book so far is the Gary Cohn email:

wtf is this gary cohn email stuff that im hearing about? that quote provides no details, unless that's the quote of the email gary sent (to lloyd blankfein or something?)

That's just an excerpt from an email written by Cohn that's quoted in the book, I forget what the bigger context is, I just thought it was a good burn.

ya it's definitely a good burn. my gf's mom (who is a card carrying lib) was watching stephanie ruhle i think on msnbc the other day and apparently stephanie was speculating that gary cohn wouldnt be so stupid or that it otherwise didn't make sense to sign his name at the end of an email (i challenge the notion that anybody in this admin is so competent/capable as to be able to say "oh he wouldn't dare do THAT!"). obviously any "signature" at the end of his personal emails could just be some auto-signature and im not familiar with the referenced email, so i asked for details but she didnt really know anything about it and google has turned up nothing. but i pointed out that whether unwittingly or not, stephanie was really just doing the GOPs job by trying to poke holes/discredit insignificant parts of the book in an attempt to cast doubt over the whole thing, which we both agreed was a pretty weak angle to take, but standard operating procedure for these clowns

so in short, idk wtf the email is, idk who the **** stephanie ruhle is, but from what i gather she seems like *somewhat* of a hack.

I've gotten absolutely bored of giving my opinion on Trump, but at the bottom it's just a conversation piece, and people looking to confirm their biases. One thing everyone in Europe likes to believe, however false it is, whatever their political orientation, is that whatever corner of Europe they live in is a better place to live than the US is. Trump is exhibit A. Even for Italians who voted for Berlusconi. Hearing it said by an American is just an added pleasure.

With respect to the Cohn quote - imagine what kind of epic ******* you have to be to run Goldman.

With the advantage of hindsight it appears that the die was cast decades ago when the US decided to embark on an absurdly expensive arms programme instead of investing it its infrastructure and population.

Wait. I thought Michael Moore was joking. Is he really putting in place the pieces to frack off the coast of Palm Beach?