One thing I’ve learned.
When you know you can get away with anything and everything…
That’s when you back the fuck off
I know how hell thinks. I know how the heavens think.
They don’t like people who do that.
I voted for President Trump twice. I didn’t do that because of any great fondness for the man, but rather because I supported his agenda. I still view him as a very flawed vehicle for policies that I strongly support. That means that if somebody better promotes similar policies in the Republican primaries, I most likely will support that person.
Policies first, personalities second.
The biggest change that he worked was changing the Republican party from being the party of the globalist Wall Street elites, to being the party of the American middle and working classes. That’s how he breached the democrats’ vaunted and supposedly impregnable “blue wall” and won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016.
I personally see it as the beginnings of a wholesale reorientation of American politics. The Republicans have moved to appeal to the democrats’ traditional working class base, while the democrats are increasingly the party of elites, whether governmental, financial, academic or entertainment celebrities. (Everybody who thinks that they are better than you, the new analogue to Europe’s aristocratic classes.) American politics is undergoing a historic transformation that historians will talk about for centuries, with our parties essentially changing places as to who in the electorate they appeal to.
Perhaps it revolves around whether minorities want a neverending obsession with their race/ethnicity, or whether they want to fit in and be accepted as Americans. If it’s the latter they want, what’s needed is a new emphasis on those things that we all share in common, on those things that bring us together as one. As opposed to a constant politics of anger and grievance.
It was that aspect of Trump that put me off a bit in 2016. He talked the talk and said the kind of things that I felt needed saying, but the fact remained that he was a new york billionaire. I feared that I was being played in a giant confidence game and that if he was elected he would turn out to be just another Manhattan liberal.
So I was very pleased to see him keep pretty much all of his campaign promises.
I agree. Isn’t Trump the only president who actually followed through on all his campaign promises?
I’m not sold on voting for Trump a third time if he continues as a Republican. More than half of the Republican swamp rats did their best to work against Trump’s agenda, reducing the number, size and scope of his successes. Sure, vote out all the Republican swamp rats, but that doesn’t seem likely. Currently, there are several democrats who posed as republicans to win elections but toe the democratic line which is disgustingly slimy to me.
Other Republican campaigners may talk the talk, but odds are against them walking it. Hoping a Rob DeSantis/Kristi Noem duo runs in 2024 or something comparable arises, fighters for the people.
The USA(heck, the world) needs new contending parties that leave the old world parties in the dust. Or scrap parties altogether. I’m tired of their dynamics.
Ditto!
I used to be a Republican, but they lost my vote, and I surely won’t vote for a Dem. That leaves me Independent.
They lost me when they put that slimy Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. All that testimony and people coming forward about how he is a sloppy drunk and serial rapist, and what does Mitch McConnell say? He says he isn’t there to be fair! LOL What a slimy piece of crap! They are all useless trash in my book. The only Republican I would vote for now is Liz Cheney. I liked her Dad and I like her too.
I’m sorry.
Trump supporters are delusional. All he cared about was Wall Street … he bragged about the Dow everyday.
Middle class?
Wealth disparity went up during his administration.
But you’re talking to a guy (me) who hasn’t liked a single world leader and doesn’t think America has ever been great.
You want to be a real world leader?
Give a state of the union address that explains that we need to fix the:
-
pleasurable exclusive access problem
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Negative zero sum problem.
“Make existence great for the first time”
That’s my slogan.
No.
Plenty of presidents, for good or ill, have followed through on at least some of their campaign promises. Some have followed through on all of them.
Trump is not one of them.
He promised to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a bigger, better health care deal. He did neither.
He promised a huge infrastructure bill. He never even proposed one. Biden is currently trying to get one of his own through Congress, redeeming a campaign pledge that he made.
He promised to end U.S. military involvement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and did neither, though he did make a dirty deal with the Talilban to pull out U.S. troops. Biden did pull the troops out, and now Trump and his idiot followers are complaining about Biden fulfilling a pledge Trump made but did not keep.
He did follow through on a promise to slap tariffs on China, which had the effect of hurting, not helping, both Midwestern farmers and consumers.
He did not follow through on his promise to conclude a nuke deal with North Korea. He failed miserably.
He did not follow through on his promise to reform the tax code to benefit the working class. Instead he gave trillions of dollars in tax goodies to the ultra-wealthy that blew a huge hole in the deficit.
He did not fulfill his promise to make NATO pay more of their fair share of the alliance.
He did not fulfill his signature promise to build a “great, big, beautiful wall” on the border with Mexico, and make Mexico pay for it. In the end managed to build a few extra miles of wall that Mexico did not pay for.
He did not fulfill his promise, at the start of the Covid pandemic, that he had it “all under control.” The results of that failure speak for themselves.
Few presidents in American history have failed so spectacularly as your Orange Dimwit. As noted above, presidential historians rank him fourth from last among all American presidents. I think that is much too generous.
Don’t forget…
He promised to send Hilary to prison.
Yes, there’s that, too. He broke so many promises I’m sure I’ve forgotten a whole passel.
He also privately ridiculed his own supporters. Told that the Covid pandemic might prohibit him from mingling too closely with his supporters at his rallies, he said, “Good. That means I won’t have to shake hands with those disgusting people.”
There are numerous attestations from multiple independent sources of Trump expressing contempt for his own supporters.
Well, he got what he wanted.
He has our attention.
Here are a few more:
He promised to bring back manufacturing from overseas. He did not.
He promised to save and rejuvenate the coal industry. He did not. The coal industry continues its ever quickening decline, which is a good thing actually.
He promised a four percent annual economic growth rate. The growth rate never even approached that even before the economic collapse caused by his bungled Covid policies.
Trump was an epic failure as president.
As to Hillary, he specifically promised to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her, even though there was nothing to investigate. He did not appoint a special prosecutor.
So pood.
We’re having a global debate between the rational and irrational.
That really is the only war that exists.
You and I are on the rational side. So are others.
We just have to accept that this is a real war, a war of ideas (or lack thereof) and move from there.
Do you have access to a list of Trump’s campaign promises?
I remember cutting taxes(done), securing our border by building a wall(the financing was done, but Biden halted the walls completion), getting the US out of bad agreements(done), cutting regulations(done), pulling US out of long wars(done), not starting any unnecessary wars(done), incentivizing US companies to return their manufacturing to the US(done).
What did I miss?
Trump did try to bring about a special prosecutor to investigate both Clinton and Comey. The Justice department full of democratic supporters thwarted his efforts.
On one hand you people act as if Trump can do “anything,” above the law, and now that I show you that his political opponents were in a better position to do “anything” and did do “anything” as seen in the Clinton hired Steele Dossier and the illegal spying on the Trump campaign, you people will still act as if Trump was in the wrong, absolving yourself of the facts about Clinton’s dossier and the spying.
You smart, good people win, you have your Biden and he has your China too. Yay!
How many more democrat-fueled, trillion dollar economic bills can our broke country handle? May you win even more.
Wendy!
That’s funny.
I’ll only pick apart 2 of what you said.
Trump did reduce taxes for the ultra rich…
Which kept companies in the US.
He kept his promise.
Biden is working a plan to tax all (tariffs actually) on mega corporations that move outside the US.
Trump cut everyone’s taxes. Facts don’t care about your feelings of who the “real” beneficiaries were. Everyone benefitted.
The rich pay 85% of all taxes.
Wendy,
If trumps tax plan was so great. And we don’t need to get into the details. Why did wealth disparity sky rocket in his administration?
We all know that fact.
Are you going to blame that on the democrats?
Go for it, because I can get into the details.
But just answer that simple question the best you know how.
Are you getting your “facts” from media and academia supporting the agenda of the democrats? Part of the democrats agenda is to blame everything on Trump. You understand that, right?
Wendy,
That’s funny. I don’t have a political party.
But it’s a known fact that the higher your education level and IQ, that you’ll vote democratic.
You’re barking up the wrong tree on that one, unless you think scientific studies with millions of people are also conspiracies.
It’s even been proven that Democrats process information from the logical frontal lobes and Republicans process from the lizard part of our brain… I think it’s called the amygdala if I recall correctly… the part that processes information from fear.
Tens of thousands of brain scans.
You can look all this shit up.
As Phil Torres writes today at Salon
Wendy drinks the right-wing epistemological Kool-Aid. She belongs to the Trump Cult, every bit as sinister as that of Jim Jones. Wendy writes:
Yes. Do you?
Everything. You are simply wrong about everything.
His tax cuts were massively skewed toward the ultra-wealthy and blew a huge hole in the deficit you claim to care about. Biden halted further building of the wall, but Trump built only a few extra miles of it during his four years in office, and Mexico did not pay for it. Trump broke his promise to build a “great, big, beautiful wall” that Mexico would pay for. What “bad agreements” did Trump get us out of? Wendy doesn’t know. Wendy doesn’t know anything. He did cut some regulations, but so what? Lots of presidents cut regulations — sometimes with good results, sometimes with bad. He did not pull us out of long wars. He did not pull us out of Syria, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Biden pulled us out of Afghanistan, not Trump. It’s true he didn’t start any unnecessary wars, and I am glad for that. He did not incentivize U.S. companies to return to the U.S. They have not done so, so that is a lie. Plus you have ignored everything that I said above. You actually said that Trump kept all his campaign promises, and is the only president to do so. Both claims are false. Please go back and read my first post in which I enumerate all the ways in which Trump failed to keep his campaign promises, starting with his promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. Your ignorant worship of your Orange Idiot is disgusting, but you worship him because you live, as Torres notes, in a different epistemological regime in which facts do not matter, only Wendy’s darling little “feelings.”
In fact, if a further restructured narrative is required, then, let us suppose that while all this 'Trump vs. Biden search for the odds is going on, just perhaps, they are secretly hunkering down in some back room, laughing at the idiotic plume’de faire they intentionally created to smoke the mirror into a comic flair preparatory into the brave NWO.
Fun, fun, fun.