TRUMP is seriously dangerous

[8bitagent]

I believe Trump will win in the same way I knew back even in 2006 Obama would win 2008. There is a certain charisma and magic, however dark.

Plus, the exposure of DNC and Team Clinton screwing Sanders and the left is going to come back to bite her November 8th.

If you don't like Trump, blame the DNC for not giving a real progressive like Sanders a chance. Funny...80's was Ronnie and Margaret...2017's may be
Donnie and May

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Trump actually has one really good point to him, which I think has been overlooked. He has done everyone a great favour, in one specific instance.

I believe it was the medium-term strategy of the Republican Party to ease off on exploiting prejudices against Hispanic people, and start seriously courting their vote as a bloc, while exploiting prejudices against other people as a replacement. The Republican Party obviously recognizes that Hispanic people are now a demographic key to victory in the states that matter to them most. The nominations of Rubio, Cruz, and Jeb Bush with his Mexican wife were not accidental - though Jeb's wife obviously predated this strategy.

So the aim was to soften the Republican message as regards non-whitebread folks, in hopes of benefitting from the changing demographics of key states - like a reversal of the Southern Strategy. A bit like what the Unionist parties in Northern Ireland have been trying to do with Catholics and Nationalists over the last decade. Baby them into the fold, little by little. Win their votes by signalling non-hostility, but not by meaningful actions in their favour, so you can keep your core vote on board too.

But Donald Trump steps out onto the stage one day and says: "They're rapists."

More than a decades' worth of hard work and serious Republican strategizing went whirling down the drain in seconds, as if the ghost of Ian Paisley had suddenly materialized at a DUP outreach event on the Falls Road.

[Novem5er]

Both great points, above.

Like 8bitAgent said, if the DNC were so worried about Trump, then they shouldn't have pushed a candidate with the highest negative ratings of any Dem candidate in history; who has a track record of working against progressive values when it comes to peace and economics. It's funny now that this last week has been nothing but media pressuring holdouts to Not Let Trump Win, the very same week that Hillary chooses a moderate-to-right-wing Democrat for her running mate (Kaine isn't terrible, but does not at all represent the Bernie revolution within the party). Trump picked Pense to help calm his conservative base, while Hillary seemingly picked Kaine to appease HER conservative base, and left her progressive base out to dry (again.

Back to Trump and Ahab's comment above:

I see it as Do-or-Die for the GOP. If they can pull off a victory, then I think America is screwed; it will prove that coalitions are trumped (ha) by anger and hate and every future election will be amped up another notch to keep the hate train rolling.

If they lose, however, then I think it's the end of the GOP as a national, competitive party. Oh, they will still win congressional districts, senator seats, and governorships, but they will not be able to ever compete again for the presidency (or for many elections to come). They are completely ignoring ALL of the research/soul-searching that they did after the 2012 election, and like you said, they are actually backtracking.

Like I said a few pages back, I'm conflicted with Trump because I really hate his rhetoric and his style, but I've applauded him for destroying GOP favorites like Jeb! and Cruz, and the GOP in general.

[Luther Blissett]

His camp will make something ostensibly worse than the old GOP. This is actually a given even if he doesn't win. When people warn to be even more scared of who Trump paves the way for, this is appropriate. Trumpists are hungry and I'm sure any one of us could ghoulishly design the perfect followup candidate to take the reigns.

[seemslikeadream]

can a person convicted of a felony while president of the United States remain in office?

[Novem5er]

can a person convicted of a felony while president of the United States remain in office?

That'd be funny if a felon was allowed to serve in office, but in most states not be allowed to actually vote.

[Burnt Hill]

can a person convicted of a felony while president of the United States remain in office?

That'd be funny if a felon was allowed to serve in office, but in most states not be allowed to actually vote.

He will pardon himself and then we will have another impeachment brouhaha.

[semper occultus]

...I fully admit I know less than nothing about the grass roots nitty-gritty of the US electoral system but seems to me Trump can't win by slicing up the existing electoral "cake" but needs to mobilise significant elements of the currently non-voting politically disaffected electoral population..

...some of the open primaries appeared to show he was able to do that.....is that a fair comment..

....were there any particular results Trump got in key swing or big states during the seemingly endless and extremely confusing nomination election process that indicate he might win the big enchilada ...

...does it require a level of enthusiastic ground level political organisation to get the vote out - people knocking on doors etc that Trump's media driven campaign doesn't have at its disposal....

..will the existing Republican base turn out to do this or is he still too divisive and toxic to some to rely on the full weight of the party machinery kicking in behind him...

..is the tea party element within the RP a major dedicated group of activists or just a noisy bunch of blow hards moaning about Obama at BBQ's in their back yards....

...is that even how it works over there !?

( ...in your own time... )

[Novem5er]

Semper, those are great questions. In truth, I don't think anybody really knows how this is going to go down.

The ugly truth about American presidential elections is that the whole things comes down to a few million votes in a couple "swing states"; states that have gone back and forth between voting for Republican and Democrat presidents over the last two decades. Pundits are telling us this year it will be Nevada, Ohio, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Virgina, and Florida (my home state). All the other states have solid majorities of either Republican or Democrat voters, so their electoral college votes are taken as a given.

(remember that America does not elect a president based on popular vote; each state has an electoral college value, and the majority vote of that state gives those electoral college votes to the winner. The candidates rack up victories in states to collect electoral college votes, and they need 270 out of the 538 to win).

So Trump doesn't need a national strategy of door knocking, he just needs a strategy for these seven states. Now that he is the Republican nominee, he can tap into resources of the Republican National Committee, which will spend money and gather volunteers, etc on his behalf. Because both the DNC and RNC are full time organizations, I don't think Trump will be at a major disadvantage here.

But who knows? Will he inspire new, angry voters to come out for him? But will he lose far more voters who are turned off by his rhetoric? Will new minority voters stay home without Obama at the head of the ticket? Or can Clinton count on those votes and leave Donald Trump in the dust? I really don't think we will know until election night!

[SonicG]

Seems like there is an ongoing effort to link Trump and Russia/Putin:

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."
Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tru ... ly-a-thing

It's Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against Vladimir Putin

I am not suggesting that Donald Trump is employed by Putin—though his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was for many years on the payroll of the Putin-backed former president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych. I am arguing that Trump’s understanding of America’s role in the world aligns with Russia’s geostrategic interests; that his critique of American democracy is in accord with the Kremlin’s critique of American democracy; and that he shares numerous ideological and dispositional proclivities with Putin—for one thing, an obsession with the sort of “strength” often associated with dictators. Trump is making it clear that, as president, he would allow Russia to advance its hegemonic interests across Europe and the Middle East. His election would immediately trigger a wave of global instability—much worse than anything we are seeing today—because America’s allies understand that Trump would likely dismantle the post-World War II U.S.-created international order. Many of these countries, feeling abandoned, would likely pursue nuclear weapons programs on their own, leading to a nightmare of proliferation.

Trump’s sympathy for Putin has not been a secret. Trump said he would “get along very well” with Putin, and he has pleased Putin by expressing a comprehensive lack of interest in the future of Ukraine, the domination of which is a core Putinist principle. The Trump movement also agrees with Putin that U.S. democracy is fatally flawed. A Trump adviser, Carter Page, recently denounced—to a Moscow audience—America’s “often-hypocritical focus on democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.” Earlier this week, Trump’s operatives watered down the Republican Party’s national-security platform position on Ukraine, removing a promise to help the Ukrainians receive lethal aid in their battle to remain free of Russian control.

Now, in an interview with Maggie Haberman and David Sanger of The New York Times, Trump has gone much further, suggesting that he and Putin share a disdain for NATO. Fulfilling what might be Putin’s dearest wish, Trump, in this interview, openly questioned whether the U.S., under his leadership, would keep its commitments to the alliance. According to Haberman and Sanger, Trump “even called into question, whether, as president, he would automatically extend the security guarantees that give the 28 members of NATO the assurance that the full force of the United States military has their back.” Trump told the Times that, should Russia attack a NATO ally, he would first assess whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.” If they have, he said, he would then come to their defense.

These sorts of equivocating, mercenary statements—unprecedented in the history of Republican foreign policymaking—represent an invitation to Putin to intervene more destructively in non-NATO countries such as Ukraine and Moldova, and also represent an invitation to intervene directly in NATO countries—the Baltic states, first and foremost. This is why the Estonian president tweeted in a cold panic immediately after Trump’s interview appeared online: “Estonia is 1 of 5 NATO allies in Europe to meet its 2% def[ense] expenditures commitment.” The president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, also noted that Estonia fought “with no caveats” with NATO in Afghanistan.

Unlike Trump, leaders of such countries as Estonia believe that the United States still represents the best hope for freedom. In his interview with Haberman and Sanger, Trump argued, in essence, that there is nothing exceptional about the U.S., and that therefore its leaders have no right to criticize the behavior of other countries: “When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”

As someone who has covered President Obama’s foreign policy fairly extensively, I feel confident in stating that he has never expressed such a negative view of the U.S. We are truly in uncharted waters.

Republican Party foreign policy, to date, has been fairly clear on a number of subjects: The United States, Republican foreign-policy thinkers have argued, should help to expand the number of free countries in the world; they believe that the U.S. should come to the defense of free peoples whether or not those peoples can, or will, reimburse the United States for expenditures in pursuit of freedom; that Europe represents the stable platform from which the United States projects its power, and ideas, into the world; that Russian imperial dreams should be countered in a robust fashion by the U.S. and its allies; and that the withdrawal of the U.S. from three key regions of the world—East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—would create vacuums soon filled by non-democratic regimes that would operate counter to U.S. national-security interests.

Donald Trump, should he be elected president, would bring an end to the postwar international order, and liberate dictators, first and foremost his ally Vladimir Putin, to advance their own interests. The moral arc of the universe is long, and, if Trump is elected, it will bend in the direction of despotism and darkness.
http://www.theatlantic.com/internationa ... to/492332/

[8bitagent]

I'm calling it now: Trump will become the 45th president. You can screencap this post now for November 8th.
The reason will be obvious: Virtually none of the left or Sanders supporters will vote for someone who cheated them, and the right wing will
finally coral around their nominee despite some not liking Trump.

Let it sink it...the bizarro buffoon who was an icon on 1980s, 1990s, and 2000's television is set to become president of the United States. Making fascism hip and chic
in an uber celebrity obsessed, reality tv post social media world. And the DNC can thank themselves for screwing the one candidate who could have stopped him.

I made a post in 2011 here about Trump, and I'll state it again...he's a serious force.
But don't take my word for it. Here is Michael Moore today, on why Trump will most likely win

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-m ... 56794.html

[Nordic]

I'm calling it now: Trump will become the 45th president. You can screencap this post now for November 8th.
The reason will be obvious: Virtually none of the left or Sanders supporters will vote for someone who cheated them, and the right wing will
finally coral around their nominee despite some not liking Trump.

Let it sink it...the bizarro buffoon who was an icon on 1980s, 1990s, and 2000's television is set to become president of the United States. Making fascism hip and chic
in an uber celebrity obsessed, reality tv post social media world. And the DNC can thank themselves for screwing the one candidate who could have stopped him.

I made a post in 2011 here about Trump, and I'll state it again...he's a serious force.
But don't take my word for it. Here is Michael Moore today, on why Trump will most likely win

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-m ... 56794.html

Moore thinks we should all vote for Hillary, so his judgement is seriously in question.

[82_28]

He's a "force" alright but he is also extremely dangerous. I'll wait to see what Sanders has to say and the further goings on at the convention. WTF Democrats used to be the good guys. That ended with Carter.

The racism, for one, will not be going away. I don't typically say "thank god I'm white" but the Ds always sorta meant there was someone better -- someone more fair. Gah.

[backtoiam]

nordic
Moore thinks we should all vote for Hillary, so his judgement is seriously in question.

I agree. The thing is, is this:

It wont matter. Only those vetted to play the game will be allowed to play the game. Obviously Trump has been vetted to play the game. All else is folly on a huge scale.....

[kool maudit]

Democrats are now the right-wing in terms of foreign policy, while Republicans remain on the right – and farther to the right than ever, given the damage done to US-style, free-market/movement conservatism by nationalism – at home.

It's a strange season.