Wow, what an election! I’m tempted to say the FBI gave it to Trump but the results are too strong for that to be the sole reason for his victory. There’s a real movement behind this result and it isn’t in any sense a triumph of Republicanism. In fact I think it may be hard for the Republican Party as we knew it to even survive. Time will tell.
Until such time, the world will go a little crazy. Stocks will slide, women will swoon, babies and men will cry. But eventually we’ll pick ourselves up and get back to work.
Having won the election, one thing of which I am absolutely sure is that Trump won’t be building a Mexican wall. That was just a ploy to get elected. He’ll invite the Mexican President to visit, they’ll eat taco salads and come to an agreement that recognizes the fact that the immigration flow has already reversed itself. Problem solved! The more problems Trump can claim to solve with his pen the better.
He’ll also find that most of the vindictive threats he made not only won’t be followed through — they can’t be followed through. We don’t just “open up” libel laws, even if the President nominally controls both houses of Congress.
When contemplating General Eisenhower winning the Presidential election in 1952, retiring President Harry Truman said, “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”
While this doesn’t mean there won’t be twists and turns ahead, I see those as twists and turns of positioning and diplomacy, not business. Everything that made sense yesterday will still make sense after January 20th.
George W. Bush was another President partial to bombast and we survived him. Trump might be a nightmare but maybe the instincts of the electorate are correct and we need someone to do a cannonball in the pool, getting everyone wet. In the long run he’ll get very little done because he doesn’t know how government really operates and his helpers aren’t that helpful. It’s in the short run that he’ll really shake things up, not by doing anything, but through people imagining what he might do. Imagination tends to be worse than reality.
I worked for awhile in the Carter White House. His first foreign trip was to the UK and at some point on that long flight President Carter decided he’d like a drink. But knowing him to be a born-again Christian, the stewards had removed from Air Force One all alcohol. Big mistake. Similarly, people will believe the worst of Trump or hope for the best and both will be inevitably disappointed.
1st. A person like him would have never run with just a pair of shoes (FBI). He surely sported a number of different “tools” in order to get the race won. The total is always given by the sum of the addends.
2nd. I am with you. All that barking was just for the election race. He won’t implement most of the things he declared. Verba volant, scripta (acta) manent.
3rd. Don’t be scared. In Europe they had Hollande, May, Berlusconi and Putin. They didn’t blow up yet. So you won’t either. Not that soon.
4th. Mr. Trump has his own Air Force Zero, with plenty of alcohol and girls. But surely he’ll travel to UK.
P.S.
All the above is just my opinion!
Of course Trump will follow thru. Abortion will be illegal in 2 years and 20 million Americans will be without health insurance by next January.
Republicans will anoint Trump the 2nd coming of St. Reagan.
Abortion will be a states right issue, so they won’t become illegal throughout the USA.
If Trump does not deliver on his promises, his supporters will feel betrayed. They will support an even more extreme candidate in 2020.
/Roe v. Wade is history
Not necessarily. SCOTUS judges, even conservative judges, even when it comes to Roe, are not likely to overturn 50+ years of settled law. When you look at the history of SCOTUS decisions based on settled law, there might be a tweak here and there.
Frankly, the more liberal areas of the USA are going to be OK – e.g. California is going to be fine; NYC is going to be fine, BOWASH is going to be fine. The poor suckers who voted for Trump are giong to be hurt more than anyone else. Trump is not going to be able to stop workplace automation,
For example in 2014 Ford was making as many cars as it was ten years earlier, before the recession, with a third of the people. Steelworkers in Pittsburgh are paid very well, 80,000 starting pay but there is less then 3 thousand of them now when before it was over 300,000. Coal isn’t going to happen because demand for coal, worldwide, is dropping.
The sad thing about this race is that Trump’s Neanderthals might hurt the USA just enough to keep it from moving toward a tipping point of true economic and social innovation.
Bob – I really, really, REALLY hope you’re right, and in four years there is a credible opposition to take over – assuming he doesn’t get impeached first.
From a concerned Brit.
Trump can’t be impeached with a Republican majority in the House for the next two years.
Nixon thought himself above the law also, lol how that turned out.
Hillary and Bill thought they were above the law… and I imagine that will not work out well for them.
There is some take that the Republicans themselves might want to impeach Trump, putting the more mainstream-Republican Pence in his place. That same supposition anticipated letting the Democrats lead, “permitting” just enough support to so it happens. The idea being leaving the Democrats holding the bag with any fallout.
Well, for starters, it looks like Clinton’s heavy investment in Big Data really paid off, didn’t it?
hahaha, good point!
Read Nate Silver’s post on the election results at fivethirtyeight.com. Pollsters cannot accurately predict outcomes when margins of victory are below 3 percent.
…so they are useless unless the result is already pretty obvious. Well, that describes Big Data pretty well alright.
And I completely agree with you on that one. Most big data systems are there for high paid executives to spend money and justify results (when the facts line up, and they ask questions to make the facts fit the narrative) to a board of directors, sell an idea to customers or an audience, make pretty dashboards, and build KPIs that don’t measure the correct things. My tag line for big data is “big data only works when you ask the right questions and use clean data”…
The panacea that is the AI and Big Data coupling, points to what I’ve been railing about for years to my peers: we really really really need *curation* of the data to make it worthwhile – and AI isn’t smart enough to deal with that just yet, if ever.
(Forgot to add to previous post)…also curation in general is needed in abundance for various things beyond big data – including ‘news’ coverage, blogs/vlogs, etc. The only real answer for the problems of misinformation and outright propaganda are two things taken together: curation, and the willingness of people to prefer curated material over the alternatives. Add to that certification/verification of authorship, and you have the perfect trifecta.
While it’s true that big data can be wrong, it’s also true that the curator can be both wrong and biased.
The problem is the Clinton campaign simply didn’t use “Big Data,” at least not properly. There are countless reports of data never sent back to HQ, HQ telling the state offices just to leave them alone, etc.. For Big Data to work, one needs…you know, the data!
As bad as Trump is, the lousy ways in which Clinton has managed each of her presidential campaigns, her similar character flaws, and her general record make it clear to me we’re no worse off this way (though unfortunately either way we’ve been screwed; what surprises me is more Americans weren’t somehow resigned to this and so many were actually upset one of the two actually won I at least take pleasure in Clinton’s defeat, even as I don’t enjoy Trump being president.)
The media, the polls and the data analysts got it spectacularly wrong, and they need to do some serious self-examination. They believed what they wanted to believe, and distorted the facts to suit their beliefs.
I agree with Bob that Trump’s bark is probably worse than his bite, but I can still see a few rough years ahead.
I can’t say that I’m sorry to see the last of the Clintons, with all their baggage and their connections to neocons and the 1%.
If Bernie Sanders had run against Trump, he would probably have won, because this election was all about people being fed up with the system, and not wanting more of the same.
It may be time for new political parties in the US. It’s certainly time for a restructuring of the whole way the system works. Globalization and technology have changed everything, and will continue to drive change. Society has been functioning with old patterns which are no longer adequate. Perhaps the old systems need to be broken down before a new and better system can emerge. Trump may function as a wrecking ball.
Agreed. The message I see in this result is a populist demand. Trump was the best fit after Bernie was defeated.
“The government of Venezuela is controlled by Socialists! Bernie is a Socialist! Bernie will do for the US what the Socialists did for Venezuela!”
And that’s just the easiest, most obvious, line of attack. Because Bernie is a Socialist. Maybe Warren could’ve beaten Trump, but not Bernie.
I think you nailed this: nothing easier than tarring the self-proclaimed socialist with the label. Even the moderate Republican Obama (flying death-bots!) was an easy target. Counter-question: what chance do you think Joe Biden and his A1 “Scranton!” working-class cred would have had?
The Red Scare garbage from the DNC completely jumped the shark. Just give up, guys.
I don’t know about the polls being “spectacularly wrong”…they were within the margin of error +/-3%. It’s just that 2-3% was enough to flip the expected results upside down in a lot of swing states.
Not just within the margin of error, but ordinarily that would be considered a very good result. The only thing that was spectacularly wrong was the analysts who declared Hillary was guaranteed to win. 538 tried to warn people giving Trump about a 1/3 chance(down to 1/4 by election day thanks to a NH poll that had Hillary +11), but got attacked by HuffPost and the like.
Polls had Hillary +3, and it looks like it will be Hillary +1.
Keep in mind the margin of error is for one candidate’s number, so a 3% margin of error means a difference of 6.
47-44 Hillary could be 47-44 Trump or 50-41 Hillary.
On top of that, people forgot about the high number of undecided voters, who likely had decided a long time ago they didn’t like Hillary.
I completely disagree with Bernie winning against Trump.
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People underestimate the electorate’s anti-communist and anti-socialist stance, and Bernie was treated with kid gloves by Hillary because Hillary needed Bernie’s voters to win the general election. Trump did not, because he wasn’t going to pander to college kids wanting a free education. Trump was aiming squarely at the working class blue collar voters, who are suspicious of anything and anyone who claims they’re a socialist.
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I’ve seen the anti-liberal smear campaign in action in my part of the Midwest for decades now, and that’s what’s used against moderate to liberal opponents, not true socialists like Bernie is. They’d first dig up some dirt on Bernie –which they apparently did, according to a Newsweek article– plaster it all over billboards and local media, and then carpet bomb the crap out of Bernie’s operation with the “commie” designation.
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Bernie would be covered in napalm before he knew what was happening.
>> The media, the polls and the data analysts got it spectacularly wrong
The national polls had HRC leading by 2%. This is precisely the final result, now that the majority of votes have been counted.
The pollster’s mistake was believing that white America was telling them the truth. Hidden in the state-by-state and county-by-county “big data” was the undecideds who had actually made up their mind to vote for Trump, but would not — could not — publicly admit to it, let alone to a pollster.
There is a great deal of shame revealed here; Trump voters must own the whole biscuit — they cannot say “I only voted for economic reasons” or “I couldn’t vote for her” and ignore all the rest.
They cannot say they voted for 20% of Trump. They must own it all.
The uncontested bigotry, mysogyny, white supremacist nationalism (yes, NAZISM) and anti-sematism via Bannon, religious discrimination… the whole thing.
And they will all be called to account for it over the coming 4 years.
Re: “The uncontested bigotry, mysogyny, white supremacist nationalism (yes, NAZISM) and anti-sematism via Bannon, religious discrimination… the whole thing.” Like Paul Ryan, most Republican voters were doing just that, voting for Republican principles, as opposed to socialism or communism. Equality of opportunity should be guaranteed, not equality in fact. The Federal government should protect all its citizens, not non-citizens, foreign or domestic. Just because some right-wing nuts voted for him doesn’t make him one of them. Trump did not achieve all that success by using any form of illegal discrimination. His construction business could never get away with it.
Honestly I am happy. At the very beginning of this mess my big statement was no more Clintons and no more Bush’s.
I agree his bark is worse than his bite and I think most of it is negotiating tactics – start at an absurd position in your favor and meet somewhere in the middle that you can both call wins.
I am not sure if you read the blog of Dilbert creator Scott Adams, but he called this a long time ago looking at it from the persuasion perspective.It has been an interesting and humerous read throughout the process from before the primaries all the way through yesterday.
Amen to no more Clinton and no more Bush. I could support a Constitutional amendment barring the spouse, siblings and children of a President from running for the office. In the long run we may lose a few good candidates, but we have a lot to choose from. The benefit of preventing “dynasties” would be worth it.
I do read Scott Adams’ blog, and found his prediction wrong.
He said Trump would win in a landslide. He lost the popular vote and the Electoral College isn’t a landslide.
He was correct that Trump supporters (and Republicans in general), don’t have a concept of truth and facts. Everything is how it feels and can be spun. That’s sad, but let’s hope for the best.
I agree with his prediction that as the Hillary campaign was then being run, Trump would have won big. They eventually changed course and started painting Trump as the nuclear threat.
Did you see his interview with VLAD news? He said Trump would have won by a landslide except for the Hollywood Now tape and no one can predict that. 🙂 So he’s good AFAIK..(adams that is – Trump not soo miuch)
Trump’s bark may be worse than his bite, but the House Freedom Caucus? This is their golden opportunity to advance their agenda.
Karl Rove was right (pun intended!). But Trump has taken “wedge issues” to a whole new place. It doesn’t matter who you offend (women, minorities, the Mexican government, etc etc) — just so long as the offence you create actually inspires and energises LOTS of the rest of the population.
This is a lesson for all democracies — a race to the bottom actually works. The trick is to choose which bottom-feeding issues will do the trick. Trump has shown us the way. Let’s hope that this approach can’t (ever) be used again.
I’m not holding my breath.
Success by racing to the bottom only guarantees repetition. The real question is will we collectively, the electorate, learn enough so it stop working. I hope so as it’s such an ugly spectacle with dubious results.
So these wedge issues race card should only be done in one direction?
Is it OK to declare to blacks that ‘If you don’t vote for Democrats another church will burn’ or that Republicans will drag you from the back of a truck, or put you all back in chains?
At the beginning and the end of the day, Trump is a businessman.
He’ll play hard to win, maybe even at a heavy cost. But should that fail, he won’t burn Rome to the ground (even if it needs it).
I pray this is so. The horror is, which words Trump utters are reliable? What methods will tell us?
Trump would burn the White House to the ground rather than admit he made a mistake. His casinos in Atlantic City are proof.
I don’t understand. Did he burn his casinos to the ground?
Trump will fiddle while the economy crashes and blame ISIS and Obama.
That’s not a fair characterization. He will try to do things, and then he’ll blame someone else when everything bogs down in reality.
The fact is that he promised much more than what anyone has a solution for. Set aside the exaggerations made during the election and we all have to admit some things:
– We’ve had a long stretch of recovery over the past eight years..
– Much of that rise can be attributed to the depth of the hole we were in eight years ago.
– Technology has changed the ways people can work, and many types of jobs that can be done more cheaply will not be returning to what and where they were fifty or twenty or even ten years ago. We compete with India or Costa Rica or where ever in a much wider range of jobs than ever before.
– The halcyon days some people are trying to return to were not set on sound financial foundations, with way too much of that lifestyle rooted in home equity borrowing that eventually collapsed. People save more now (though that may change with short memories crumbling under the weight of an unspent $20.)
– We need to find a way to connect some of the jobs being done overseas with people living in rural America that do not have easy access to more traditional jobs. And for those who are not going to succeed in careers that require higher education, we need to find some way to keep them employed.
– Mining is leaving or highly automated. Manufacturing already left or is highly automated. Saying you’ll bring back manufacturing is really not possible, and raising the cost of everything on earth so we look cheaper just means we need to earn much more to stay where we are now.
This is not simple, and his promises are going to make him look dumb. But these issues need to be solved. It’s the challenge of our generation.
Trump used the old Microsoft tactic of FUD(Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) to his great advantage. Fear of immigration, Uncertainty of future economic prospects, and Doubt of Clinton truthfulness. People bought it hook, line and sinker. The result is we have an ex game show host as the leader of the free world.
Oh you young guys—-IBM is who founded FUD, long before Microsoft was born.
FUD is as old as politics. The best that can be said is IBM used it first in technology markets.
Having the other side call for expanded immigration and blaming Christians for Islamic terrorism doesn’t help. Saying everything’s going great with the economy doesn’t help. And then declaring that there is nothing proven as far as illegal acts on your part really doesn’t help. People still haven’t realized how great Donald Trump’s campaigning was. He won the election by saying ‘Crooked Hillary’. Every story after that, people didn’t need to understand the details. They understood – Crooked Hillary. Hillary had to prove she’s not crooked.
A quiet word to my Republican friends, there is an ancient curse, “May all your wishes be granted”
Yes, the worst problem Republican apparatchiks have is Trump will feel beholden to none of them.
More than that, they’re completely on the hook for whatever happens. As much as they’d love to have a Hillary to blame for everything, they don’t have that anymore. If the economy goes south or they instantly run up a huge deficit, it’s all on them.
Very happy at the result….without doubt the best candidate won.
Bob, admit the truth, Hillary bought this on herself by breaking the law with (1) her email server and (2) pay for play with the Clinton Foundation. She was without doubt the most corrupt politician on our lifetime. Nixon comes nowhere close.
Get over it you old Lefty
Yes. More than anything else, this was the “average” American saying no to the corrupt, establishment, Wall Street-backed, Washington elites.
Yes, nothing says “stick it to the elites” better than electing a billionaire as President.
All those adjectives, and you just choose “elites” to refute? lol
Considering that the Trump Foundation has been barred from raising funds in the state of New York because of violating rules against making political donations and failing to properly register with the state, I would say Trump’s pay for play corruption rivals the Clintons’. Just in the opposite direction. Trump used foundation money to influence politicians, while people donated to the Clinton Foundation trying to gain influence with them and in the government.
I don’t think it was so much the corruption angle as the “four more years of the establishment” angle that kicked the Clintons to the curb.
Collects a million dollars as a birthday present from Qatar, 12 million from the King of Morocco, 145 million from Russians involved in a uranium deal, all on the scale of Trump University.
And I called out the fact that Trump was as much a Washington insider as Hillary when he said in the first primary debate (with the other Republicans) “Hillary Clinton HAD to come to my wedding!” He has paid off so many politicians and owns them that he can’t possibly be a Bernie Sanders. I really expected the Bernie camp to jump on that statement and make it an ad on TV. Trump and Hillary, two of a kind! His buildings in New York, Atlantic City, and Vegas are built on “deals” he made with vendors, subs, and the political powers. His taxes would have shown all the politicians he “owns”. But this is now done, the social safety net will be drug tested and starved, and we will spend billions and trillions on military hardware which is out of date and we can’t afford. He’ll reverse Obama’s private prison announcement. He will lower taxes on the rich, balloon the deficit and eventually wreck the economy at the end of his first term.
No hangover here, Bob.
Now if there had been an alternative outcome, then I could see your point….
The crowds didn’t lie: 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 for Trump compared to 300, 800, 1000 for Clinton. The numbers showed real enthusiasm and fervor for one candidate over the other.
Andy, your sincerity is crystal clear and respected here. His winning margin contains a powerful if not obvious message.
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Based on what I saw, Trump is not qualified in part because his core message was targeted so narrowly and nothing will change the country’s demographic direction. Where I wasn’t before, today I’m ready to believe facts are relative.
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IMO, the new bottom line should become helping each other. Most importantly, can you help me keep it one country?
I think you’re going to be happy to see her replaced as Most Corrupt Ever once Don gets his people in place. This is going to be a circus fraught with real peril for real people. Deportations, loss of existing rights and the normalization of hate speech that had been driven from polite company are real things that will change real lives. It’s not some over-wrought election hyperbole.
My hope is that Trump is just a liar who was telling rubes what they wanted to hear and can’t even remember what he said last month. My concern is that he said some pretty dangerous stuff to some very earnest and far-right people and they aren’t going to let it go. They’ll remember, and the next few years are going to be terrible. In fact if the Republicans want to hang on to this tiger they’ve caught one more time they’ll have to make the most of the next two years or they’ll be stomped in the 2018 cycle. Pray for this country.
Explain to me again how desperate you think things will get. This country is tired of having progressivism shoved down our throats. The average “flyover” person doesn’t think giving a transgender the keys to the women’s restroom is the biggest issue for freedom when anti-business people like Obama and Clinton practically boast about killing coal jobs all in the sham that is global warming. And please explain why Rebups now hold the House, Senate and oval office? Dems lost 919 seats at the city, state and federal levels since 2010. Trump WILL build a wall, or at least get started on it. He WILL enforce our laws no matter if it involves sending people back to where they came from, and he WILL go after the corrupt Clintons who need to go to jail in regards to the Clinton Foundation, a money-laundering scam that Hillary ran while in an official government position.
We are a country of laws. Let’s start acting like it. If anyone doesn’t like the laws, then change them. In the mean time, let’s stop having illegals draining resources and taking jobs away from people who are on welfare. There is a win-win there if people would stop acting like our government should be benevolent to immigrants when we are $20T in debt.
On immigration, deporting 10s of millions of illegals will wreck the economy. No one in their right mind will do it. I have a colleague here on a work Visa from India. He has been here 16 years. He is sponsored by my company. He applied for, and has been waiting over 2 years for his green card. If he is laid off before it arrives, it is likely he will end up having to move back to India even though he has raised his kids here, and has much of his family here. He makes a six figure salary. Someone joked on late night TV that Mexico will build the wall, to keep Americans from going there to look for jobs once Trump’s policies are fully in effect, the economy collapses, and the dollar is no longer the world’a reserve currency. Republicans need to be careful what they vote for, because the result may be to crash the economy and isolate the US from the world? Are we the new Iran or North Korea?
“George W. Bush was another President partial to bombast and we survived him.”
Sadly, Trump makes Dubya looks like a Rhodes Scholar and a top notch diplomat.
“The result is we have an ex game show host as the leader of the free world.”
Speaking as someone living outside the US in the free world, he’s not our leader. Just saying.
Can you add a permanent residency visa offer to that? 🙂
We survived George W, but I lot of people didn’t. Hardly a inconsequential president.
Bob, your column after 9/11 was excellent. You were dead on. I hope you are right again.
“Everything that made sense yesterday will still make sense after January 20th.”
Had no clue that I, Cringely was an outpost of the Cloud People.
Hell has frozen over.
Thanks be to God. Nø “spirit cooking”* is going to be served in the Whitehouse for at least the next four years.
Dan Kurt
p.s. The Dirt People, like me, are sooo happy. Now if Trump can just stop the wanton demographic changing of America and begin draining the swamp in Washington, D.C. there is a chance to avert the Glubb Fate** for a time.
*Spirit Cooking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkAVgsOgaw0
**Fate of Empires:
http://people.uncw.edu/kozloffm/glubb.pdf
This is why many people have trouble taking a Trump presidency seriously. It’s also why folks worry.
Personally, I think people like this are as much fringe as people who believe the government UFO conspiracy.
No, I think the people wanted to send a distinct message – which they did, and loud enough for all to hear.
We’ve tried logic and intelligence and while it did save us from the brink of economic collapse, it did it in a way that brought a whole new set of problems and people are sick of it.
Whether Trump is the cure or the symptom is yet to be seen. But my fellow citizens made their choice clear and now it’s time to see if we can pull it together. Whether it was my candidate or not doesn’t matter anymore. What matters now is that a mandate has been clearly stated. What are we going to do with it?
Mandate? Trump did not win a majority of the votes cast.
Gee, I would call it a mandate when the MSM was all for Hillary and she still lost, and the Rebups have the House, Senate and oval office. I don’t care about who won the popular vote. If that were the tactic then I am sure Trump would have changed his. Just because CA and NY gave Killary 1M more votes says nothing to me. And look at the counties Trump took. It was a landslide.
The government UFO conspiracy, another thing that John Podesta believes. Between this and Hillary’s seances, the media would have pounced if she were not the anointed candidate.
Dan, I don’t criticize self identification but don’t have to agree. I do respect you this morning. 🙂
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“… the wanton demographic changing of America …” was baked in decades ago and won’t change direction short of another holocaust that makes the Nazis look decent. Demographic change is driven by the current population composition and birth rate distribution.
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What impact does demographics have on your life? IMO that’s the important unheard message.
re: @Conrad T. Pino “What impact does demographics have on your life? IMO that’s the important unheard message.”
Demography is destiny. The conversion of a nation with a mean IQ of 100 to one where the mean IQ is declining precipitously by importing Brown and Black migrants to just permit the Democrats to rule indefinitely (See: California and New York) affects me and my descendants as we are being dispossessed. See: https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2016/08/20/black-people-are-worlds-largest-liability/#comments and https://alfinnextlevel.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/world-flooded-with-low-quality-youth/.
Read the corpus of La Griffe du Lion https://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com and especially https://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/imm.htm.
Dan Kurt
@Dan, Thank you for the personal reply.
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I hear you stating causes leading to “… we are being dispossessed.” Can you elaborate on or name the specific losses? I’m not making the mental connections I would like because the loss picture is still fuzzy here.
Snopes, on “spirit cooking”: https://www.snopes.com/john-podesta-spirit-cooking/
Weak. All we have is the host has such recipes in her cookbook and a video and art installations and used the same name, but in the heat of a political campaign she denied that this is what happened.
Yikes. I saw the map of how 18-25 voters went, so I can understand why the alt-right might be concerned. But “stopping demographic change” is absolutely crazy. I’m not sure which part of his message was most attractive to you, but some of this is not stopping. There are real economic issues that need to be solved for a lot of people, and the huge money influence in government by the very few must be addressed. But gays and pot and racial and religious tolerance are not going back in the closet or bottle or where ever they were back in the sepia-toned Goode Olde Days from this election. There is writing on the wall, and if the progress of the past eight years got punched in the nose this week, the flinch will only be temporary. This has happened, this is happening, this will continue, and you guys have to come to grips with it.
The FBI is not the cause unless one talks about the fact the FBI gift-wrapped the investigation of the Clintons (no thorough searching of the laptops, which were later wiped at their request, no grand-jury investigation, the list goes on) and people noticed. Regardless of who would have won, pray for the country.
I am fascinated that the Dow futures were down heavily overnight and yet the market is currently unchanged.
It means the fix is in. Goldman Sachs has had a chat with President Trump and straightened a few things out.
Not that easy for them. They banned their employees from donating to Trump.
We will NOT just go back to normal. Everyone has consistently understimated how far Trump will go and what he is about.
When he declared he was a joke, wont get past the primaries.
He picked off 12 GOP candidates 1 by 1, but no worry, he has no chance against Clinton.
He was going to quit, things were going so badly, any day now.
He wont do the debates, cant concentrate.
He cant win the thing, too many enemies
The people will see him for what he is and turn away at the last minute.
And now we are saying – he’ll never do all that stuff, “they” wont let him.
In Britain, when 3 impartial judges ruled that the gov should pass the law to leave the EU through parliament, the media outlets went full National Socialist and accused them of being traitors to the people. They are planning a demonstration on the day of the appeal to intimidate the judges into finding the way they want.
So OF COURSE Trump will do all that stuff. He and the guys in Breitbart, Fox News and the racist wing of the FBI will intimidate any opposition into acquiesence.
There is enough historical precedent that it is a no-brainer.
We are at the beginning of a very very dark time.
Surely you mean a very “white” time…
Please, go read Scott Adams Blog about Trump. He has been blogging about Trump using persuasion since the early primaries, going on a year.
First, it is a different take on the election.
Second, it makes a whole lot of sense.
Even if you are not a Trump supporter, you can see through the bombast and comments to how the election was made and lost.
http://blog.dilbert.com/
Thanks for the link, Doug. His blog is a great read. (I also purchased his book.)
I think Bob is right about the immediate effect of a Trump presidency.
The point that I think everyone seems to be missing is the Supreme Court. His picks will last for at least a generation. That is what is going to screw the country long term. 🙁
Why? His picks would just follow the Constitution and let the people write the laws. Unlike Hillary who declared that the Supreme Court and judges should be making political decisions.
Everyone has underestimated Trump and he has over-performed at every turn. It is wishful thinking to think that will stop now.
Bob is right in his comments. Just go back and see what Obama wanted to do as president and see how much of it he got accomplished. Not necessarily his fault.
Thanks Bob for the uplifting read. I’ve always said Trump could be a closet liberal. Only time will tell.
Bob: possible huge blindspot: “The Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures.”
That’s 33 state legislatures. You think the “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” will just putter around? The Alt-Right could end up hacking the country’s OS, and then all bets are off.
This one (your possible Constitutional Amendment) is just too hard to do. If a guy can’t win the popular vote he can’t mobilize 33 legislatures. And what would that Amendment say? Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have very similar beefs with the system yet each would write a very different Amendment. And given the demographic shifts in our society there probably isn’t time for the present coalition to get this done.
I respect that opinion (and hope it’s right), but I think you’re overlooking another big thing: Trump would be more than willing to have a constitutional amendment say *anything* (abortion ban, etc.) that the tru-right Republicans and their legislatures want as part of a horse trade for something he actually cares about. Nothing too complicated about that to me. I think it’s negligent to discount this too soon, and I have written this response in part to anchor it in your mind — I think the Republican Party will try this, and I’d be gratified if you remembered my call.
Horse-trading is a failed model. Consensus and collusion always works better. When it’s the public benefit we’re talking about, we have no real other choice.
Content with the result. Could not wrap my brain around the idea of educated folks giving the Clintons a pass to continue their cronyism. (I’m against the RNC Bush, Romney, etc. cronyism as well). Was that the working class schooling the educated on ethics? Obama should have done much more to help get a strong working class re-established as a backbone in the large population areas. If Trump can actually figure out a way to do this, it will go a long way to heal the divide. I will consider it all worth it if President Trump eliminates the H1B program. Maybe he will surprise us… I know that Clinton would not have surprised me.
Ambition and aspiration are a toxic brew. STEM grads were bound to win big under her. TPP means strong IP rights means moar sales and moar jawbz (and more interest for Wall Street). Also means moar foreign workers and moar rainbow friends who can show us where the good cheap vindaloo place is.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DEctACo3ESM
South Africa isn’t a cautionary tale but a model2follow.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/rjhx1-qU9jM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7wVsvoM6tE&feature=youtu.be
I think this ain’t rocket science…Hillary was simply a frightening dangerous prospect as President and the American people simply got scared off by her and chose Trump, the lesser of two evils. Put the spoon-fed major media pablum aside for a moment and think about it:
Hillary was corrupt – she accepted money for favors. This scared us.
Hillary was a liar…not just a minor lie about sex like her husband, but continual congenital lies and changing her story with a new lie each time she’d get caught on the previous one. This scared us.
Hillary was far more of a fascist than Trump…..everything from her decision what industry’s workers she determined needed to be “put out of a job” to her selection on supreme court justices (whom during the debate she said their job would be to “fight” for certain approved groups rather than to do what their only job is…interpret the Constitution) made the American people aware that she was determined to dictate to specific demographic groups how they should live according to HER definition of right, not the people’s. This scared us.
It was Hillary who was more racist and sexist than Donald Trump…she simply hated (and wanted to discriminate against) a different race, and a different sex. And her campaign staff said horrible racists sexist comments that the media of course covered up. This scared us.
Hillary was more frightening and dangerous than Trump on the international stage….it’s generally accepted she’s much more of a hawk. Her saber-rattling to Putin….who all of a sudden became her #1 concerning threat only after it became convenient to use against Trump…as well as how troubling and dangerous her years as Secretary of State made the world……scared us.
The mainstream media was corrupt and more than willing to gleefully lie about her every chance they got, while they decided their purpose was no longer to report the news, but rather to make the news by telling people what they should think, along with an almost bizarre fixation with dividing America into dozens of separate groups with cross-purposes. This was done SO blatantly and arrogantly and dishonestly that it scared the heck of the American people.
Bottom line as ol’ Honest Abe put it: you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but Hillary and the mainstream media found out you can’t fool all the people all of the time. Hillary was a frightening dangerous prospect as President and the American people simply got scared off by her and chose Trump, the safer and lesser of two evils.
I’m with Bob W. on this.. Hillary Clinton represents all that’s wrong with America today. Corruption, Complete lack of Ethics, Complete lack of accountability, She believes she is above the laws and foundational principles of a just American society. We don’t need lifelong politicians who don’t understand what it’s like to work for a living.
That’s what people voted against, and that’s why she lost. I am not happy that Donald Trump won the election but I can live with it – I am absolutely thrilled that Hillary Clinton lost!!
Her health was failing rapidly, and it was becoming harder and harder to cover it up. Eventually, the people who worked so hard to cover her flaws would have been smoked, had she been elected. There were just too many to hide. Even the FBI under AG Lynch could not pretend she was clean.
Holy crap. That “crooked Hillary” marketing really worked with some people. There has been few people (bogusly) investigated as much as Hillary (Whitewater, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, email server). Every investigation has come to the conclusion that Hillary broke no laws. Benghazi alone has 8 separate Republican led investigations – more investigations than 9/11 – and each one could not find any laws that had been broken. In this innocent until proven guilty country, that should mean something. But Hillary had been smeared by the right to such a degree that she could never shake that perception.
Those investigations found she broke laws, except I have never heard of any investigation of Clinton Foundation other than the ongoing ones from five different FBI offices and the IRS.
That you think they found she broke no laws is the problem. The media covers for her at every step.
The National Archives has sealed an indictment of Hillary regarding Whitewater that they refused to release under FOIA.
She declared Benghazi was due to a video, while telling Chelsea and foreign leaders it was a terrorist attack. Under President Hillary, the truth she tells you will be whatever is politically convenient, and the media will not correct her. She later followed up this lie by having the filmmaker locked up.
Email sever, FBI director declared she had broken the law, then made up a standard of intent and also claimed he didn’t think they had enough evidence to prove intent. Big difference between saying you don’t have enough evidence to prove she intentionally broke the law and saying she didn’t break the law. One of them means you don’t go to jail, but it doesn’t mean you should still be elected. Hillary would not qualify for a security clearance.
Holy crap. That “racist misogynistic Trump” marketing really worked with some people. There has been few people (bogusly) pilloried by the media for unproven so-called “assault” allegations as much as Trump has with no proof or backing evidence. Every mainstream media outlet gave front page full-volume attention to every wacko or attention-seeker they could dig out (with appropriate coaching) of the woodwork without a shred of any corroborating evidence other than a proclamation 15 years after the fact. A senior citizen’s public claim out of the blue that Trump had inappropriately touched her leg 35 YEARS AGO (after 35 years of silence) was treated as a confirmed murder conviction with thousands of prominent reports and articles. Yet when her story was clearly and publicly refuted by a British man on the same flite who said he was there and remembers it well and what she claims never happened, all we heard from the media was….crickets. In this innocent until proven guilty country, that should mean something. But Trump had been smeared by the left to such a degree that he could never shake that perception.
Can’t say you’re totally wrong about the points you make about Hillary … but I am SO SICK of hearing this “mainstream media” crap. They bent over backwards giving Trump free advertising every time he said something completely ridiculous.
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I’ve spent some time recently wondering how Walter Cronkite would have dealt with Trump. I’m pretty sure he eventually would have gotten fed up and torn him a new one.
The polls have been incredibly accurate for the past few decades, and especially so in the last decade. How did they go so wrong this time? It smells suspicious, and with so much for Russia to gain…
A far right Supreme Court for decades to come is a scary thought. “Original intent” is just lazy judicial thinking. Abortion being illegal is just going to lead to more criminals and welfare recipients that we are all going to have pay for. Privatizing our airports, bridges and highways with concomitant high tolls and fees is also going to suck. On the other hand, I’m fine with Obamacare being repealed, stopping all immigration, and deporting all illegals. At least H1-B will be toast.
Apparently they seriously underpolled the rural vote. From WaPo: “Kathy Cramer is one of the best people to ask. For the better part of the past decade, the political science professor has been crisscrossing Wisconsin trying to get inside the minds of rural voters.” This interview with her is the best Monday morning quarterbacking I’ve run across so far.
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It’s a long read, so I’ll try to do a not too crappy job of summation. Basically, Dairy farmers and other rural folks who work themselves to the bone day after day and see less and less from their efforts are VERY pissed off. It’s a simmering anger against governments (Federal AND State) that have ignored them for literally decades.
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These are intelligent, definitely not deplorable (I’ve known a few) people who were likely as disgusted with some of Trump’s antics as anybody else. But – and it’s a big but – you can only hold a deep resentment for so long. This election was a genuine chance to toss a stun grenade into the whole “they never listen to us” works. So they did. In a big way.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/08/a-new-theory-for-why-trump-voters-are-so-angry-that-actually-makes-sense/
You wrote “George W. Bush was another President partial to bombast and we survived him.”
Don’t you think the world would be significantly different today if Gore had defeated Bush? Iraq? ISIS? The environment? …
The worst thing Trump could do is move to the middle – make nice with the Republican establishment and Democrats. He comes in as a “cannonball in the pool,” as you put it so well, so he has to do – or attempt to do – some shake-things-up things. Some of them have to succeed–though hopefully not the destructive things.
If he fails completely – if he can’t make anything happen, if he is blocked by Washington and the bureacracy – that will prove to his voters that the fix, indeed, is in. And they will get madder and madder.
And next time, maybe we *will* get a Hitler character in there. And woe betide us.
People voted for him because they are mad that they send people to Washington who promptly get coopted by the establishment bureacracy. The Tea Party was an attempt to force radical Republicans to stick to their promises. Interestingly, Bernie Sanders is the left-liberals’ attempt to do the same at their end – push Democrats to act on their leftist promises. Listen to the Bernie supporters calling Hillary Clinton a right-wing Democrats, and you’ll see what I mean.
Thus the growing intensity of the political divide. Neither side can win — the Fix is in — and the Fix is the immovable Washington establishment and the government bureacracy – built by each side to acconplish its ends, but serving in the end only itself.
“People voted for him because they are mad that they send people to Washington who promptly get coopted by the establishment bureaucracy.”
People we get to choose from on the ballot are already corrupt. It’s monied interests that got them on the ballot in the first place.
Let’s get real, people. Trump is a narcissistic, racist, birther, habitually lying amoral con man with no interest in life but his own self aggrandizement. He was only kept afloat in business by daddy’s credit line and his inheritance. He went bankrupt several times and only one bank remained that would lend to him in the world, Deutsch bank. He habitually screwed over vendors, creditors, employees and customers. Nearly all of his side ventures failed (Trump steaks, airline, multilevel marketing, etc.). He has upward of 4000 lawsuits against him, and he is going to trial for fraud in a few weeks for Trump University. He’s fine with the proliferation of nukes, war crimes and torture. He think the Chinese invented Climate Change. He has an obsession with violence and retribution and seems to admire the world’s despots for their “strength”. And he’s a misogynistic sexual predator. But, hey, what could go wrong.
I don’t know enough about the psychopathology of a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder to predict future actions with any accuracy, although I’ve been told that such people are all too predictable. Trump will in all probability make an enemies list, but what lengths he will go to in order to accomplish his revenge is an open question. Suspension of habeus corpus is a possibility; presidents have used it before, though not in quite the way Trump would. His contemporaneous speechifying in the campaign was right out of the Josef Goebbels playbook, so he might reach for more ideas from that murky milieu. The point is this: he is not a rational person and is incapable of changing into one. By the way, he wasn’t running for President, he was running for Emperor.
The Supreme Court and federal appellate choices we will have to live with for a long time, as well as 2020 census gerrymandering.
Liberals have for decades been declaring the Republican nominee as anti-woman, racist, dumb, etc. So the attacks on Trump feel like more of the same.
We know that once Trump is no longer running, liberals will declare that the new nominee is horrible and that Trump is good. They were saying that about George W Bush now.
Careful, your rich white privilege is showing when you say nothing much will happen. People are going to lose their health coverage, immigrant families will be split up, racist groups are already feeling empowered, and more lower class kids will enlist in the military due to fewer job opportunities — and then die in needless wars.
Trump, who is white, ran against another white candidate, Clinton. A lot of people are dumb enough to think that Hillary is black, perhaps because her husband once claimed to be the first black president. Van Jones may be one of these poor dumb souls, but no one has ever taken him seriously.
Legislative racial privilege meant to be temporary, has turned into a permanent racial entitlement since 1970. Time for equality to finally settle in after 240 years.
Millions have lost health coverage. Immigrant families won’t be split up- kids can go back with their parents.
There will be more job opportunities. As for racist groups, DNC and La Raza are not feeling very empowered right now.
Pretty casual with the “there will be new jobs”. It’s not a trivial problem. So far all he’s offered is the same thing Obama did, except he’s using Eisenhowser’s “Infrastructure” rather than Obama’s “Stimulus” phrasing. Spend like h*ll is not a core conservative principle, so at the very least expect a bunch of friction on that axis.
No he’s offered many more things.
Tariffs that would encourage factories to stay in the US, and for those outside to be placed here.
He talked constantly about Carrier moving factories out of Indiana, that it is doing purely because labor is a little cheaper in Mexico. They are very profitable with the factories where they are. If there is a small tariff, those jobs stay here.
Then there are the tax cuts and regulation cuts, starting with ObamaCare. I have seen firsthand people getting their hours cut to 25-29 a week so that businesses don’t have to eliminate their jobs, because they can’t afford the ObamaCare mandate.
Oh yea, you are perhaps too wealthy to care about it, but the Wall will reduce the number of illegals competing for jobs, meaning Americans get those jobs and wages rise. He has even talked about cutting H1B which Cringely is always harping about.
If you think that companies will shake in their boots about tariffs, you’re smoking some seriously strong weed.
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If a company moves to Mexico and President Trump slaps a 35% or 45% tariff on their goods, that company will just shrug and either a) pass along the cost to consumers, or b) be contacted by China or another country saying “hey, want to sell over here?” Maybe even both.
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If Trump blows up NAFTA, China will move in and secure a trade deal with Mexico which likely includes China’s assistance in major port expansions so that Mexico won’t have to deal with US ports ever again. Mexico would also become a (cheap) player for all of the Americas’ import and export traffic.
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The world isn’t so economically beholden to the US as it was even 20 years ago; other countries have caught up, and unless we have a sudden massive baby boom (or immigration) sheer demographics will dictate that other countries will surpass us economically as they continue to modernize.
“Spend like h*ll is not a core conservative principle…”
Maybe not, but if one examines spending over history you might find they managed to spend at least as much as “liberals”.
The issue is partly what government agency spends it on which projects. Conservatives don’t believe in wealth redistribution from productive to nonproductive workers in the name of equality. Rather, we believe that the Federal government’s job is to protect us from foreign governments that would forcibly take what we have. That, plus light the tree and pardon the turkey.
Cringely, you are a jerk for using that picture of President Trump. Now, refund my Mineserver investment and we will never talk again.
…Or just deliver the Mineserver
Bob,
I can understand there are a lot of transformed expectations and hurt feelings to deal with. That will take a while to process. If you read your article carefully, I would point out that you are already condemning the man before he even takes office. That’s not a very objective analysis.
I was never “for” Trump. It was always about preventing a criminal from entering the White House for me. As one reader put it above, she made us afraid, and justifiably so. And even though the DNC position has always been that Hillary did no wrong, I predict that one of Obama’s last acts in office will be to grant her a pardon.
Trump is no gem, that’s for sure. I console myself with the following line of thinking: Trump surprised America when he won the GOP nomination (with a little bit of help from Hillary’s directives to the media). Trump surprised America again by winning the election when no one thought he had a chance.
Perhaps Trump will surprise America once again by being a President that doesn’t suck.
Bill Colemen –
As much as you want to say you aren’t for Trump, you did vote for Trump. There’s no room for nuance in that binary act, at least from other people’s perspectives. The thing is, most of America was voting against someone instead of voting for anyone and the end result was a lot of people voting for Trump. You think she was a criminal but Bob thinks he is both a criminal and a dangerous demagogue, but on Wednesday it kind of doesn’t matter.
Here’s the new problem for everyone: Trump said whatever it took to get elected, and a lot of it was pretty terrible. He has to either deliver on some vile stuff or renege on his words. There are a lot of people who will be affected by how he splits this baby: deportations, lost health insurance, lost civil rights, criminal indictments, etc. Done poorly it could break this country, and done well it could be revolutionary. The world awaits to see what character he plays in this new phase of his life.
Cris,
I’ve been hearing a lot of this sort of response from all quarters. My only conclusion is that Democrats have fallen into believing their own propaganda.
Millions have lost health insurance while many more are paying a lot more for worse policy.
Deportations, Obama has done millions of those.
Be glad Trump won because a Clinton presidency would be like a Cringely kickstarter — full of promises and talk but NO ACTION.
Where are the mineservers? It has been a YEAR. A FULL YEAR!!!!
The kickstarter acted like the only thing that needed to be done was funding so they could be bought and shipped.
Why do we never get updated anymore on Thursdays?
“George W. Bush was another President partial to bombast and we survived him.” The middle east didn’t survive him.
Middle east, relations with allies, supreme court and federal judges, THE PLANET – all things that may be crippled by the coming presidency.
Thanks for the optimism, Bob, but you weren’t too convincing today.
To quote an article today “I suspect that what it means to be a Democrat in 2016 is this: to be so focused on ‘what’s in it for me’ as to be blinded to one’s conflicts with the societal norms for decency, corrupted beyond redemption, and paranoid about competition, discovery, and prosecution. It means that one is so consumed by one’s lust for power, money, and control that one is utterly incapable of recognizing their culpability in the unintended consequences. It means that lies cannot be questioned if they are brazen enough, and hypocrisy is only a thing if one has objective standards to begin with. Above all else, it means to be distraught, confused, and angry (but not sure why) about the Western world’s first successful attack on Political Correctness (PC), yet earnest about attempting to repair the damage. PC is essential to the operation of today’s Democrat party, because PC has never been anything more than a method by which to prevent those with sense from revealing the lies to those without it.”
Feh, to all those, and Robert C himself with his blase’ indifference to all that corruption, political correctness, and the tyranny therein, that has brought them to their own knees by those americans who have finaly had enough of the indecency, the elitism, and yes… the bigotry of political enterprise that was hillary, obama and the democratic party.
Feh yourself. That entire quote could be pointed at the Republicans, except you’d need to replace the PC claptrap with a challenge to somehow keep pushing white power without recognizing its central role in Republican party politics. Two sides of the same knife. Your whole conclusion applies to the Republicans as well, so take a deep breath and do some self-examination before the pendulum comes crashing back through in 2018. Everyone needs to change. Everyone.
The 2013 Supreme Court ruling that reduced Voting Rights is the biggest overlooked issue of the election cycle. It allowed Republican operatives to disenfranchise Democratic leaning demographic groups and flip key states from Blue to Red.
YES – what Bob wrote is correct. YES – HRC while highly qualified, was a poor candidate (she lost to Obama and nearly to Bernie). BUT I disagree with you Bob, on this statement: “There’s a real movement behind this result…” No, he barely won. He won, but by a hair. I’ve spent the last 2 days looking over county returns in PA, OH, WI, FL, and others. Without voter suppression, HRC is President Elect.
Needing ID to vote is voter suppression? Just how dumb and incompetent do you think black people are?
Whatever it is, could you write it down and say it on a loudspeaker in inner cities. Republicans will pay you.
It’s the Democrats who have been caught on tape talking about how they commit voter fraud. Project Veritas has the evidence. He described how they avoid using buses, because it is too easy to prosecute, but they take people from polling place to polling place in Wisconsin. Without this vote fraud and illegals voting, again encouraged by Democrats including Pres Obama, it would have been a landslide.
I think the most damning thing was the leaked email from a HRC campaign staffer, who decried legal or ethical objections saying, “we need to win this motherf*cker”.
Bob said: “I’m tempted to say the FBI gave it to Trump but the results are too strong for that to be the sole reason for his victory.”
I hope this is true, and more importantly I hope the incoming (or outgoing) government can find a way to demonstrate this.
However, on its face it looks like Obama tried to be bi-partisan and appointed a Republican to run the FBI — and the FBI turned around and stole his legacy by stealing the election from his successor.
In 2000, thank God there was a process and the Supreme Court ruled on it. Without a similar process (or some sort of outreach by Trump – hahahah) — this can only lead to Very Bad Things happening due to the desire for revenge. I hope I’m wrong.
Comey went out of his way to avoid the attack on the FBI for interfering in an election, by rewriting a law to avoid charging Hillary Clinton with the crimes that they determined she committed.
Interesting perspective. I hope you’re right, but you’re likely not. First off, Bernie never came under Trump’s glare and he would have withered. The socialist thing would not have flown at all. If that hadn’t work, then maybe his age. Maybe he would have found some dirt on the guy. I’m happy Bernie’s legacy is still in place. Second, the violence I’m most worried about isn’t from the narcissist-elect, it’s from those who are becoming emboldened in their racism/etc. That is going to turn out very badly. And they aren’t going to get those jobs they think they are.
His legacy may not last much longer. There is in Wikileaks mention of an ‘arrangement’. They appear to have picked Bernie to run, with the assurance that he would not hit them too hard.
They did find dirt on Bernie. There’s the usual one of Vermont trying a single payer health system that collapsed because it cost too much, but also video of him at a Sandinista rally in Nicaragua in the 80s saying it’s patriotic to support the Sandinistas. There’s also a paper he wrote in college that implied he was okay with rape as well (both of these are in a Newsweek article by Kurt Eichenwald that should be looked up to fully understand the crap that Republicans would have flung at Bernie.
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Do I think Bernie has some good ideas? Yes, but I also acknowledge that they also need to be integrated with reality. The Bernie Bros, however, see is just a wee bit differently.
The sad result of this race – no matter who won – is that it has opened up divisions tat have been widening for a long time. Who are Trump’s supporters going to blame when very little of what Trump promised gets done, except for the vile GOP fixing SCOTUS to their liking for the next 20 years and gerrymandering themselves into power until 2030, minimum.
Add to this the gutting of the workplace by automation, wordwide; it’s happening! Factories, construction, retail, transportation, medicine, legal services, financial services, agricultural production, and many others are fast approaching SAI (super artificial intelligence) tipping points, worldwide.
The “divide” is very wide right now; Imagine in 20 years as capitol continues to be concentrated in fewer hands, and the people who control that capitol control universal surveillance systems (Trump has already said “universal surveillance; THAT would be power!”).
Are the people that voted for Trump going to go all kumbaya in 2020? Nope. They will be further in the drink by then.
We’re in a post-capitalist phase that nobody is talking about. Work is decreasing and population is increasing; the climate is warming. I see a world population at slow boil; there is going to be a scramble for resources. And we get a Trump? We get a guy who doesn’t believe in science?
Prepare yourselves!
gutting the workplace with h1b hindu guest workers, but automation sounds better than slave labour from third world india replacing american graduates
Rodney King said it best.
Do I see a Trend here: Greek bailout referendum, 2015, Brexit, Trump ?
Maybe the people are getting immune to the media created reality?
If you think the FBI caused 1 in a 100 voters to Switched from Clinton to Trump as I do the Clitnton wins. She would have won Florida, Pensivania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
I was a state legislator in a very conservative area, and it amazed me how liberal Democrats treat small town Americans–with open contempt. They refused to listen to the fact that Obamacare was putting business owners out of business, that it was just a fine for not being able to afford coverage, that the Democrats are increasingly pushing Common Core and other educational experiments that hurt their kids, that Democrats continue vilifying anyone who calls for greater border security or even a fair immigration policy. Even high tech workers who’ve had to train their replacements are being shouted down by social justice warriors with H> and O bumper stickers and pins.
The problem gets worse with blue collar workers and retirees being taxed out of house and home, only to hear both self-identified liberals and Democrat politicians breaking their promises not to raise taxes–then telling us that a middle class tax cut would be “a waste.”
Interesting and at times very personal discussions.
Most people will never know their candidate on a personal level or be familiar with how they carry themselves or treat others in real life.
People will see what they want in their candidate & vilify the other candidate.
From NY but been on West Coast 25 yrs.
Trump MO hasn’t changed – just more known by non outsiders.
NYC: ~ 90% Clinton, 10% Trump.
Trump won because he was a better Democrat than the Democrat candidate. Hillary was so busy courting fringe voters, she neglected her party’s core base constituency: blue collar workers. Donald Trump — The Blue Collar Billionaire — was able to pierce Hillary’s “Blue Wall” by appealing to them.
Trump is a pragmatist, not a right wing ideologue. If he had (D) next to his name, Democrats would be very happy with him and there would be none of these hysterical accusations of racism. Conservatives should feel quite lucky Trump ran as a Republican or they would have lost, as none of the other Republican hopefuls that Trump dispatched in the primaries would have been able to get enough of the blue collar vote to win.
I suspect Trump could win the presidential election in Mexico in a landslide.
Contrary to Truman’s quip, Eisenhower was quietly quite an effective president. I guess wrangling difficult personalities such as Bernard Montgomery and George Patton, and herding hundreds of thousands of American, British, French, Canadian and other Allied forces in Europe during WWII taught him a thing or two about how to get things done. I believe that you [Cringely] likewise underestimate Trump. He looks to be actively surrounding himself with knowledgeable staff and advisers. He knows how to schmooze and cut deals. Most of all, like Reagan, he seems to know how to appeal directly to American people – bypassing the filter of the news media – that can be the deciding factor in moving the pile in a political scrum. If Trump can do so, he may prove to be a highly effective president. If not, he will join Ahh-nold Schwarzenegger and Jesse “The Body” Ventura on the ash heap of failed celebrity politicians.
Re: “Trump is a pragmatist, not a right wing ideologue.”, from your previous post: I was going to say that that applies to all the elected Republican Presidents since Eisenhower, but you provided examples in this post. As someone who generally votes Republican, I’m just as opposed to the right-wing nuts’ philosophy as Rosie O’Donnell, but I welcome their votes. My only concern is the seductive philosophy behind the Democrats’ positions, whether you call it socialism, communism, or robinhoodism.
She didn’t listen to us. We’re hurting out here. She didn’t listen to us. You stinkin Springer watchin white low information voters … Obama gave your jobs back and Health Insurance for 20+ million….. FBI, Julien, Putin…. No other woman in the fricking world had to put up with that !!!!!
What’s missing from all the analysis is the fact that Trump is a pure clinical narcissist; he is also a genius at using hyperbole to play people like the con that he is. I have known some really good cons. Even though I KNEW they were cons it was always interesting to see myself getting drawn in by them until I reminded myself about who they were. Human beings – especially human beings in any kind of self-perceived pain – are easily conned.
So what is behind Trump’s con? Nobody REALLY knows because a true con will use hyperbole to draw you in. Trump has feelings, just like any other clinical narcissist (who has co-morbid sociopathic tendencies). Really, his *primary* interest is in self-aggrandizement. Really! I don’t get how the press has missed this angle, and when I bring it up to people they disregard it.
Three psychiatrist buddies are the people who frame Trump like this, and it’s very interesting to consider. the thing is that Trump has some VERY cynical people around him (every politician does),but the *degree* of cynicism is far more extreme than what we have seen in the past.
Automation is steadily and increasingly eliminating work, worldwide, period; it’s a structural change that will *not* be stopped. The press doesn’t address or see this structural change as the looming crisis that it is. Combine with unchecked population growth in world hotspots. Trouble!
Last, in a world that is wired, and becoming more so, and where work is disappearing, political hegemony can disappear in the virtual “blink of an eye”. Americans are conditioned to our accidental Post WWII hegemony as a permanent thing; it’s not.
Electing Trump is going to continue to burn our intellectual and social capital at a time when we should be stockpiling it. I don’t know exactly how Trump’s term will work out, but our pile of intellectual and social capital embers is fast running out, relative to the rest of the developed world. We’re about to find out just how much time we have wasted over the last few decades. Black Swans might even fly in flocks.
You could replace ‘Trump’ with ‘Obama’ in your post and it would read identically to sentiments expressed eight years ago. Just Google it and you will be deluged by articles making the claim, including some by people with legitimate backgrounds in mental health. I’m not here to say that Trump is not a narcissist or that Obama is. Both men undeniably exhibit strong narcissistic tendencies. But so does every other successful politician. It was said of Buba. And Dubya. And don’t forget Reagan and Nixon, and everyone with the last name Kennedy or Roosevelt. Alt-rockers Incubus wrote the song “Megalomaniac” about Dubya. Megalomania is not the same as narcissism, but most people don’t really understand the difference (Brandon Boyd probably didn’t). That song could have been written for any of our recent presidents. My point is that accusing a politician of being a narcissist is about as insightful as accusing grass of being green.
Popular vote lead has passed 1,000,000 and continuing to climb.
So what!?! The objective was to earn the most electoral votes, not the most popular votes. Donald knew that. Hillary knew that. Hillary lost. Had the rules been different, e.g. national popular vote wins, then both Trump and Hillary would have campaigned differently. Both would have campaigned almost exclusively in large population centers such as California, New York and Texas, rather than just fundraising in those states. They would have carpet-bombed those big states with advertisements that were instead used in battleground states significant in an Electoral College race. And the RNC and DNC would have set up major ground game operations in those states. The resulting popular vote counts would most certainly have been different. Maybe Hillary could have won the presidency under those rules. Maybe not. But none of this speculation matters because — like it or not — those were the rules of the game played.
Just a word about Trump’s proposal of repatriating corporations overseas cash versus a potential tax of 10%. I’m surprised by the lack of professionalism of financial journalists in this matter. Most of them are confusing cash with cumulative profits. Looks like they have a limited knowledge of what is a balance sheet. Just one example : by no way has IBM $65 billion cash overseas, their total cash – home and abroad – is about $10 billion currently. For sure IBM has generated over time more than $60 billion profit at a minuscule tax rate, but most of it has already been spent for operations worldwide or….for shares buyback.
The citizens had finally had enough of the democrats and media’s 10 years of unmitigated lies. People will put up with a lot, but when they are told over and over that things are one way, and it’s obvious to them that it’s not that way, a course shift is what happens.
As a non-right-wingnut conservative voter, I’d like to agree with you. But let’s not be to overconfident, since it wasn’t a landslide and he didn’t even win the popular vote.
Once and for all, can we PLEASE stop with the “popular vote” line? IT IS MEANINGLESS! Nobody cared about the popular vote and nobody TRIED TO WIN the popular vote. Had it been a popular vote contest both would have run THAT race
It’s like entering the Indianapolis 500 and being judged for having lost the Grand Prix of Monaco. That wasn’t the race you entered!
It’s like training a basketball player for 5 years and then put him in a baseball game (maybe Michael Jordan excepted) and trying to tell us that he “lost.” You can’t enter a Presidential race focusing ONLY on wining electoral votes and then be judged for not winning popular votes. If you want a popular vote election, change the Constitution and let the ENTIRE contest be fought that way. Otherwise the popular vote count is a meaningless artifact of the actual contest that WAS fought.
This is the exact same hypocritical two-faced “do as I say but don’t expect those rules to apply to ME” and “let’s make up and apply new rules after-the-fact” meaningless garbage that the left-wing and its media branch had been spewing out that is what got everybody so fed up with, and resulted in Trump’s election in the first place!
Ridicule those who are concerned with “rigged” elections and mock those who won’t agree to accept the results but if those same results go against you? Then don’t accept them…riot instead. Demand “inclusion” for the groups YOU like but when that same “inclusion” includes groups who you may not agree with? Then exclude them and prevent them from expressing their point of view. Demand equal pay but when that equality comes at the expense of equal sacrifice and equal danger? Well, no, that won’t apply to you. Raise a stink about man-made global warming only to find out that it’s actually cooling? Fine, let’s change the name to “climate change” and continue on as if everything’s still the same.
The honest and real world doesn’t work that way and the American public, with their 240 years of common sense and sense of fair play and equal responsibility behind them, finally said “Enough.” I pray we can all learn from that, but so far it doesn’t appear that is gonna be the case.
You’re forgetting that the election doesn’t just depend on campaigns, which are mostly for the undecided voters. It also depends on the political philosophy of the people in the country. My dad decided to vote Republican back in the 40’s, and nothing that has happened since would change that. That’s why it scares me that there was so much support for Sanders and that the Democrats won the popular vote. Americans have become more and more immune to advertising, spam, and political campaigns. All that’s left are core beliefs which appear to be on a delicate balance between capitalism and communism. This time a great capitalist won. Next time we may not be so lucky.
Touché, and agreed. The choice of capitalism vs. communism (and vice versa) you speak of may become a matter of shifting demographics, but who knows? We’ve been polled, surveyed, speculated, and pundit-ized to death to the point that none of us trust (or care about) anyone’s analysis (i.e. guess) anymore….least of all from the biased corporate media. My guess is that in the end Trump’s argument of “the last 8 years haven’t worked so you may as well give me a try (i.e. a change…after all didn’t Obama win on HIS promise of “hope and change?”) was as effective as anything else. We’re always good at throwing someone out (justifiably so) and I think this was more a case of throwing the Democrats out than inviting a Republican in. It certainly was in my case. I guess we’ll find out! Thank you for the intelligent, reasoned commentary….something that’s been in vey short supply this past year!
I’m surprised that there were no comments here related to the tech industry for US IT workers. In a last minute campaign speech in Minnesota, Trump slammed IBM for laying off tech workers. We need more public shaming of companies that offshore professional jobs or bring in cheaper high-skilled labor from overseas.
Having said that, I doubt Trump would do anything to counter the offshoring or inshoring of IT workers through guest worker visa programs.
Several people have commented about H1b. It may be enough to just eliminate H1b abuses, which Trump may do simply by enforcing existing laws.
Lets also not forget that it’s impossible to predict the behavior of a true clinical narcissist; that’s Trump. It’s all about narcissistic supply, so that the smarter and more clever people around him – including some members of his immediate family – can tweak him in their direction. Trump isn’t running anything; he *says* he is in charge, but what is REALLY in charge is the call of the vessel of emptiness that lies at the core of every clinical narcissist’s being. The pure clinical narcissist will gravitate towards whatever action he can be convinced – or has convinced himself – will deliver the largest amount of narcissistic supply. With a narcissist, there is no “there, there”, relative to firmly held positions, relationships, loyalties, etc. The only danger Trump poses is if he somehow finds himself cornered in a way that he cannot escape – anticipating a permanent loss of narcissistic supply; that’s when things could get very scary, because when faced with that scenarios, narcissists often panic and/or break down – we saw hints of that on the campaign trail when Trump was falling behind.
Your last paragraph needs correction.
We did not survive the Bush presidency. You survived because you were not whiped out economically or killed physically. That’s not true for many people. We don’t know that yet. We won’t know for perhaps another fifty or seventy five years.
The damage of the Bush presidency is still unraveling.
Wall Street was made whole in a fortnight after the Bush implosion but Main Street is still waiting, which is why Trump won. All the damage Trump does is an extension and consequence of the Bush Presidency. Obama’s big screw up was not getting a bigger stimulus. South Korea’s reaction to the Great Implossion in 2008 was a four year stimulus equal to 25% of their GNP. As a result S.Korea was one of only two 1st world economies to grow at all in 2009 and by mid 2010, with GNP growth at 7% and 3% unemployment their local media referred to the Great Recession as ancient history. A similar size stimulus in the U.S. would have been $4 trillion over four years. All of our infrastructure would have been fixed. Employment, the middle class and wages would have been restored. Instead we learned just a little over a year ago that the middle class fell below 50% for the first time in many decades – that’s the very end of year 7 of the Obama presidency and 8 years after the implosion. Tens of millions of lives were devistated.
Bush’s great recession destroyed the economy of Mediterranean Europe and threatens to destroy the EU.
Bush’s war in Iraq triggered Isis, helped amplify the implosion of Syria and triggered a title wave of emigration into Europe from Syria that threatens to destroy the EU and European identity and liberalism (the classical kind) and inflamed nationalism.
The Roman Empire collapsed because of the concentration of wealth: the rich and powerful used their influence to avoid paying taxes, the Empire couldn’t afford to raise armies large enough to protect their borders (Nobel Laureate and Econ Historian Douglas C. North’s “Structure and Change in Economic History” page 100-115).
I for saw lots of this and tried to protect myself from ruin in advance, but like Eadipus, my actions to avoid ruin actually helped impell me into it and I never restored my career in Info Systems. I myself, specifically did not survive Bush.
Going in I foresaw dark days under Bush. Compared to Trump, Bush looks like Churchill to me. I don’t see how we avoid disaster with this guy
Of course I may be wrong but I think things are going to keep getting funkier and funkier.
Among other things Trump’s public persona is that of someone with antisocial personality disorder. Right away that means he sees his own interest far above the countries interests. The guy will destroy the world before he allows himself to so much as minutely be affected in a negative way.
Again, I hope I am wrong, but I haven’t been since 2000.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Tweeted
“If my many supporters acted and threatened people like those who lost the election are doing, they would be scorned & called terrible names!”
Really Trump? I saw and heard You say that you’d like to punch your heckler in the face and that in the old days, they’d be carried out on a stretcher. Jackie Evancho, If u sing at the inaug is up to you. Just wear some protection so our wonderful new President doesn’t get you alone and grab you between your legs. Oh and better get paid upfront or he wont pay you maybe. Oh and you better sing 100% perfectly and dont gain an ounce of weight or he may criticize your singing and your body.
Oh and one more piece of advice, if your ever walking down a sidewalk in Washington, and the Trump limo pulls up on your left and a car driven by just then (perhaps) released Charles Manson (as your parents who he is), pulls up on your right, and Mr Trump rolls down his window and asks you to get in, then run fast to Mr Manson’s car and ask him to help you.
All states have laws against cyberbullying, which includes social networking sites such as Facebook, emails, and mobile text messages. Cyberbullying behaviors can include teasing, threats, intimidation, stalking, harassment, physical violence, theft, and public humiliation. Kennnnn Daily, hey Mr Wizard we all know there are more Republicans in Congress. So impeaching Trump wont work? Really how many of those Republicans want liberal, unstable Trump and how many would want STRONG REPUBLICAN Mike Pence? They want Pence. Sounds like a real incentive for them to Dump Trump when they can?
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