Trump to win?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Some Trump supporters seem to think (hope?) that a lot of his more outrageous statements are just to attract certain voters or get news coverage. He doesn't really mean that. And they point out his expertise in Persuasion.

I wonder how they always assume he's not lying about the issue they care about. If his expertise is telling people what they want to hear in order to get what he wants, why should we think we know what he wants to do? In your case, can we be sure he will support a strong military?

i don't know that we can be SURE about anything. however, i think a strong military would be meaningful to someone with trump's personality. he is very caught up in appearances.

[DSpencer]

Re: Trump to win?

i don't know that we can be SURE about anything. however, i think a strong military would be meaningful to someone with trump's personality. he is very caught up in appearances.

The US does not need to increase spending to have a strong military. We could could cut our defense budget in half and still spend more than any other country. As far as appearances we have as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined.

This isn't to say that a President couldn't want to spend more, but it's by no means necessary to increase spending to have, or appear to have, a strong military.

Personally, I think our huge "defense" budget undermines its purpose. We are more likely to fail economically at this point than be outmatched militarily. We also end up with huge investments in projects that may be outdated if/when we ever need to truly defend our country. Imagine spending $300 billion extra each year on infrastructure projects and still having a defense budget that is far more than any other country.Would our country really be less safe in that situation?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

The US does not need to increase spending to have a strong military. We could could cut our defense budget in half and still spend more than any other country. As far as appearances we have as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined.

This isn't to say that a President couldn't want to spend more, but it's by no means necessary to increase spending to have, or appear to have, a strong military.

Personally, I think our huge "defense" budget undermines its purpose. We are more likely to fail economically at this point than be outmatched militarily. We also end up with huge investments in projects that may be outdated if/when we ever need to truly defend our country. Imagine spending $300 billion extra each year on infrastructure projects and still having a defense budget that is far more than any other country.Would our country really be less safe in that situation?

you're talking reality, not appearances. your rational arguments have been true for a long time, but haven't changed behavior. the big budget is as much or more symbolic as all the carrier groups combined. also it will boost jobs that will not be outsourced, and will provide bargaining chips in dealing with congress. what's not to like? more debt? he's "the king of debt"!

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

The US does not need to increase spending to have a strong military. We could could cut our defense budget in half and still spend more than any other country. As far as appearances we have as many aircraft carriers as the rest of the world combined.

This isn't to say that a President couldn't want to spend more, but it's by no means necessary to increase spending to have, or appear to have, a strong military.

Personally, I think our huge "defense" budget undermines its purpose. We are more likely to fail economically at this point than be outmatched militarily. We also end up with huge investments in projects that may be outdated if/when we ever need to truly defend our country. Imagine spending $300 billion extra each year on infrastructure projects and still having a defense budget that is far more than any other country. Would our country really be less safe in that situation?

Seconding JK. I think you're on to something, DSpencer. We already spend an obscene multiple than our so-called peer competitors:


http://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/00...nse-comparison

I think this is what is driving the insane push for war with Russia, China, and the continuing disaster in Syraqistan. The war profiteers can't be satisfied with the highest profits ever in an ocean of otherwise declining expectations.

"Cheer up, Donald Trump fans! It turns out there is an American manufacturing industry that is not only booming, but it's running a massive trade surplus of more than $100 billion per year. And it's chock full of factories and jobs that can never be moved overseas.

I'm hoping that most of you know I'm talking about aviation and defense... or the aerospace and defense industry as it's officially called. A new report from Deloitte says the sector's gross exports grew a healthy 3.6 percent to a whopping $143.3 billion in 2015. And the export part of the business has grown an incredible 59 percent just since 2010. Again, that's just exports, not the revenues received from contracts exclusive to the U.S. government.

It gets better because remember that unlike much of the tech and all of the financial services sectors, the weapons and aerospace business is very manufacturing intensive and national security rules keep those factories on U.S. soil. And here's the icing on the cake: Our No.1 foreign customer pushing up its massive trade deficit with the U.S. in this industry with virtually every purchase is none other than China."

This US manufacturing sector is booming

They want more and they mean to get it. The Donald he's an entertainer, but he also knows about real estate and financing it creatively. The neocons only know about moving dirt with bombs and care more about building prison walls than border walls. The only concrete they know about is the sort their bombers roll off and whose bombs break back down into rubble.

People play to what they know and ultimately it's all about who gets to spend those fat, debt financed dollars and how. If Hillary and her neocons remain in power, the dollars go to guns and by the looks of it they are planning to buy an unprecedented amount of them.

“Increased military spending is an alpha and omega of all U.S.-Europe talks today,” Stropnicky said. “Europe has grown a bit sclerotic. It needs the directness and decisiveness of the U.S.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...to-member-says

Think of the profits war with Russia, cold or hot, will bring.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed the alliance would deploy "batallion-sized" multinational units on a rotational basis in the east. Andrei Kelin, a department head at Russia's Foreign Ministry, said the proposed NATO deployment was a source of concern for Moscow. Russia once held sway in eastern Europe as the Soviet-era overlord. "This would be a very dangerous build-up of armed forces pretty close to our borders," Kelin told the Interfax news agency. "I am afraid this would require certain retaliatory measures, which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about."
Russia warns of retaliation as NATO plans more deployments in Eastern Europe

They were planning on it until Trump goes and spoils the party. Because I speculate based on the recent chatter on infrastructure and debt that if it goes to him he'll spend the dollars on butter instead of guns. I think they plan on a big infrastructure spend. I think the plan is to portray the Trump administration as businessmen whose business acumen generated a deep and wide economic recovery and made America great again by rebuilding it.

Hillary and her neocons could give a shit about economic recovery. The more misery, the better for them. I think they are perfectly content with the status quo suffering of the domestic and global hoi polloi. I think this is based on their confidence that the security apparatus they've built can keep the rabble in line. Only if Trump were to redirect those dollars to a big infrastructure/TECI project, Hillary and her neocons lose and get locked out for a generation. And then there's the prospect of prison time.

I don't think they're going to roll over so easy on that score. Consider the staggering speed and Orwellian character of the neocons effortless embrace of Hillary after 25 years of showering her with vitriol. To me that demonstrates there's nothing these snakes won't do to stay in power.

I hope Trump has good private security and has greased the right palms. He's put himself in quite the spot. Is he brave or a big a fool as we thought?

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

The latter.

It's Friday and the temptation to call it a day overwhelms me. May I be lazy and point to this? Sabato usually plays it straight.

Exclusive: Top reason Americans will vote for Trump: 'To stop Clinton' - poll


By Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The U.S. presidential election may turn out to be one of the world's biggest un-popularity contests.

Nearly half of American voters who support either Democrat Hillary Clinton or Republican Donald Trump for the White House said they will mainly be trying to block the other side from winning, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday.

The results reflect a deepening ideological divide in the United States, where people are becoming increasingly fearful of the opposing party, a feeling worsened by the likely matchup between the New York real estate tycoon and the former first lady, said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

An essential problem with democracy is its very con job nature. The illusion of control.

voting-illusion-control-e1461513571471.jpg

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Trump to win?

Went to UVA.

Sabato doesn't strive to be an accurate political observer. I have about as much respect for him as I do for Bob Woodward.

The article doesn’t really answer the question…why you would vote for Trump over Hill/Bill? I was just curious, no rush.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Went to UVA. Sabato doesn't strive to be an accurate political observer. I have about as much respect for him as I do for Bob Woodward...

Oh, let's hear the dish on Larry. What do you have on the brother that makes you doubt his commitment to accuracy?

Woodward (and his mentor Ben Bradlee) was a pretty good intelligence officer masquerading as a second-rate journalist, so it's not really fair for anyone but his case officers to demand accuracy from him.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Trump to win?

You're ducking the question. I sent Bernie some money. NC despite the bathroom debates will probably be close. I'll probably hold my nose and vote for Hillary, but after reading most everything you've posted on this site, I'm intrigued...why would you vote for Trump?

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

You're ducking the question. I sent Bernie some money. NC despite the bathroom debates will probably be close. I'll probably hold my nose and vote for Hillary, but after reading most everything you've posted on this site, I'm intrigued...why would you vote for Trump?

Nothing profound, I'm afraid. I would support Trump to deny HRC the presidency. It's also nice that it would help hasten the end of the GOP. As I've said, the right people have lined up against Trump, so that makes it easier still. It's been said that Trump would have a better go at getting us the big infrastructure spend we need than Sanders might and I agree with that, generally.

But mostly to keep HillBill away from the presidency.

[loweyecue]

Re: Trump to win?

Isn't the point of the article that both candidates suck? This election will be about who sucks less...right now they both suck so bad that they suck the suck out of sucking itself.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Isn't the point of the article that both candidates suck...

Well, there's one that hardly sucks at all and doesn't even really blow. Only the Very Smartest People tell me he can't win no matter how many votes he gets or primaries he beats Hillary.



Now the Very Smartest People tell me the unmitigated disasters a Trump presidency will bring. Now the shit is real, they tell us. Now it's time to panic, the smart set say. But to get the future they believe in, the rest of us have to give up our futures and pretend the past never happened. That's the smart and responsible thing to do, they tell me.

Well that's never going to happen. Not ever.

Now this panic alert, designed to get us in line behind Hillary, is raised by the man who ended The New Republic as we knew it (which then went on to end and then end again), promoting racist and imperialist dogma during his reign at the magazine in the 1990s, and then, with his finger in the wind (which to him and that other arch-hypocrite Hitchens meant being like George Orwell), turned into one of the biggest shills for the war on terror, the Iraq war, the whole works, all the while denouncing the fifth column within our ranks. This so-called journalist, who has no record of liberal consistency, who keeps shifting to whoever holds moral power at any given moment, is scaring us about the mortal threat that is Trump.

No, the danger is the elites, who have made such a joke of the democratic process, who have so perverted and rotted it from within, that the entire edifice is crumbling (to the consternation of the elites). Both parties are in terminal decline after forty years of ignoring the travails of the average worker (the Republicans admit they’re in the intensive care unit, while the Democrats calling for Sanders to quit already have yet to come around to admitting that they might have the flu), and voters on both right and left have at last—and this is a breath of relief—stopped caring about the cultural distractions that have kept the elites in power. No, they want their jobs back, even if it means building a wall, keeping Muslims out, deporting the illegals, and starting trade wars with China and Japan—because what else did the elites give them, they’re still opposing a living wage!

Why? Because the "Bernie Bros" and the Trump rabble just won't get it - there's just too much democracy! And unless we accommodate ourselves quickly to a most undemocratic moment, well the bad man will build a wall, keep Muslims out, and make it much more expensive to hire people to maintain lawns and golf courses. Well, I'm thinking that's too damn bad and also that there's someone else who might deserve credit for the rise of Trump.

You, Andrew Sullivan, and the Democratic party flacks who want the Bernie supporters to throw our lot behind the most compromised Democratic candidate of all time, Hillary Clinton, and you, who are so worried about the wall and the ban on Muslims and the attack on civil liberties, will you please tell us who started it all?

You did!

You’ve all now, the elite punditocracy on either spectrum, suddenly become nostalgic for George W. Bush, because he didn’t—well, not always—use the crude and blatant vocabulary that Trump deploys to demonize Mexicans and Arabs and Muslims and foreigners. But Bush is the one who actually implemented, with your full support, plans to surveil, discriminate against (in immigration proceedings), and impose a de facto bar on Muslims from the “wrong countries” that is still, under Barack Obama, a severe disability on Muslims who may want to emigrate to this country.

Where were you elites when Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic party elite spoke as one with Republicans on endlessly strengthening border security, on the need to mercilessly enforce immigration laws, on imposing such punitive measures against potential legalization that it becomes possible only in theory not in reality?

The natural conclusion of these ideas is the literal wall, but Trump didn’t start it, he’s only putting the finishing touches on the discourse that you elites, on both sides, have inflamed for twenty-plus years. Bill Clinton started the demonization of immigrants—legal immigrants were made ineligible for benefits—for the first time since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965. Bill Clinton ended welfare, tapping into racist discourse about African Americans, and permanently unmoored millions of people from the social safety net. No, Trump didn’t start any of it, Paul Begala and Karl Rove, representing both parties, and the elite interests they represent, poisoned the discourse.

So why support Trump if the Democrats nominate Hillary? Screw unto others as they have screwed unto you; this is my first commandment.

Elites on both sides insisted on not addressing the root causes of economic dissatisfaction, hence the long-foreseen rise of Trump. Paul Krugman, a Hillary acolyte, is nothing more than a neoliberal, whose prescriptions always stay strictly within orthodox parameters. Yet he was construed as some sort of a liberal lion during the Bush and Obama years. Not for him any of Bernie’s “radical” measures to ensure economic justice and fairness. Oh no, we have to stay within the orthodoxies of the economics profession. Now he’s all offended about Trump!

The worst offenders of all are the American left’s cultural warriors, who daily wage some new battle over some imagined cultural offense, which has nothing to do with the lives of normal people but only the highly tuned sensibilities of those in the academic, publishing, and media ecospheres.

The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure.

To manipulate them, the Democratic and Republican elites have both played a double game for forty years and have gotten away with it. They have incrementally yet quite comprehensively seized all economic and political power for themselves. They have perverted free media and even such basics of the democratic process as voting and accountability in elections. Elites on both sides have collaborated to engineer a revolution of economic decline for the working person, until the situation has reached unbearable proportions. The stock market may be doing well, and unemployment may theoretically be low, but people can’t afford housing and food, they can’t pay back student loans and other debts, their lives, wherever they live in this transformed country, are full of such misery that there is not a single word that an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush says that makes sense to them.

This time, I truly believe, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them. When they did have a difference to choose from—i.e., the clear progressive choice, Bernie over Hillary, who consistently demonstrates beating Trump by double the margins Hillary does—the elites went for Hillary, even though she poses the greater risk of inaugurating Trump as president. And now you want us to listen to your panic alarms?

I won't listen to it or to another word from the Very Smartest People on why it would be so very dumb to support Sanders or Trump. It's a pleasure to watch them squirm, to see the GOP implode under the weight of its own obstinate hypocrisy, to see the incompetence of the elite media laid bare, and to know the Democratic Party is a walking dead zombie soon to crumble as its remains turn to dust.

The game, for the elites, is over. This is true no matter what happens with the Sanders campaign. The Republican party as we have known it since the Reagan consensus (dating back to 1976) is over. The Democratic party doesn’t know it yet, but Bill Clinton’s neoliberalism (and what followed in his wake with complicity with Bush junior, and the continuation of Bush junior’s imperialist policies with Barack Obama) is also over, or well on its way to being over. The elites are in a cataclysmic state of panic, they don’t know whether to look right or left, they have no idea what to do with Trump, they don’t know what to do with the Bernie diehards, they have no idea how to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

And these same elites, both liberal and conservative, these same journalists and celebrities, became quite comfortable with Bush once the war on terror was on. They’ll get used to Trump too, his level of fascist escalation will soon be presented byThe Times and other institutions as something our democracy can handle, just as they continually assured us during those eight years of gloom that our democracy could easily take care of Bush. We, the citizens, don’t need to get our hands dirty with implementing checks and balances, the elites will do it on our behalf. Soon, once he starts talking to the elites, you won’t even be that afraid of Trump. Wait, he’s the one who wants to make America great again, and what’s so wrong with that?

The election of Trump would end the Republican party as we know it, but more refreshingly it would also end the Democratic party as we know it. The limits of the academic left’s distracting cultural discourse in keeping economic dissatisfaction in check would be fully exposed. Trump threatens the stability of the fearmongering discourse of Sullivan and his like. The threat to their monopoly of discourse is the real reason for the panic.

Oh, and Hillary, good luck fighting Trump with your poll-tested reactions. Your calculated “offenses” against his offensiveness against women or minorities or Muslims are going to be as successful as the sixteen Republicans who’ve already tried it. You won’t be able to take on Trump because you do not speak the truth, you speak only elite mumbo-jumbo. Trump doesn’t speak the truth either, but he’s responding to something in the air that has an element of truth, and you don’t even go that far, you speak to a state of affairs—a meritocratic, democratic, pluralist America—that doesn’t even exist.

Our Awful Elites Gutted America. Now They Dare Ring Alarms About Trump, Sanders—And Cast Themselves as Saviors

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

i can't believe the part of the table below that i was most interested in got cut off somehow.

bottom line, the average kasich supporter had a household income of $91k, the trump supporter $72k, virtually the same as cruz and significantly higher than the democratic voting population. you can go to the link for the details.

this data doesn't support anis shivani's assertion that "The Hillary supporters have the authoritarian mentality of small property owners. They are the mirror image of the “realist” Trump supporters, the difference being that the Trump supporters fall below the median income level, and are distressed and insecure, while the Hillary supporters stand above the median income level, and are prosperous but still insecure." perhaps "supporters" here means those who speak to the media.

i think the racial makeup of the hillary vote, the large number of african american votes hillary garnered in the south, and the skew of african-americans to lower incomes may explain this discrepancy. i don't have the impression that those african americans [and hispanics, too] can accurately be described as "prosperous but still insecure."

however, i mostly agree with anis shivani's critique of the political parties in the piece excerpted above by woodsman, but it doesn't address the racial factors, which can hardly be ignored in any american general election.

both parties are controlled by elites- the republicans by the business owning, rentier and financier class, the democrats by the meritocratic professional class. imo neither group has much concern about working people. i quoted Larry Summers, meritocrat par excellence, in some post [i don't recall which thread] saying that people earned what they deserved! the republicans tend more toward a social darwinist language when they address the same phenomena, but there's hardly a difference. the exception is that some dem's amour propre is bolstered by their noblesse oblige.

Maryland	$79k	$92k	$77k	$92k	$119k	$95k
New Hampshire	76	84	69	77	99	78
Connecticut	73	102	75	101	119	99
Virginia	69	83	71	79	114	82
Massachusetts	65	87	68	84	107	93
Vermont	63	80	61	62	85	70
Wisconsin	60	63	63	80	76	69
Missouri	59	58	53	64	80	62
Illinois	57	61	66	74	99	79
Pennsylvania	57	59	57	64	83	71
New York	56	64	65	56	83	85
Texas	56	63	62	82	98	78
Michigan	54	56	51	62	75	61
Georgia	51	59	55	88	89	70
Ohio	51	59	62	62	92	64
Oklahoma	49	57	54	71	102	69
Florida	48	51	50	64	87	70
North Carolina	48	59	56	74	92	62
Arkansas	47	47	49	67	67	63
South Carolina	47	39	47	64	108	72
Tennessee	45	61	52	73	82	64
Alabama	44	44	53	63	75	58
Mississippi	37	38	39	64	97	62
All states**	56	61	61	73	91	72

* The state median includes all households, not just those that voted in the primaries.
** The aggregate estimate is weighted based on the number of votes a candidate received in each state.
SOURCE: EDISON RESEARCH EXIT POLLS, CENSUS BUREAU

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/...class-support/

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Trump to win?

Has Bernie Sanders stated his intent if(when) he loses the Democrat nomination?

Would he go for an independent run?

If he does, wouldn't that be a mirror opposite of the 1992 campaign where Ross Perot's run disrupted what would have likely been a Bush I 2nd term?

Doesn't an independent Bernie guarantee a Clinton loss thus a Trump victory?

[loweyecue]

Re: Trump to win?

Well, there's one that hardly sucks at all and doesn't even really blow. Only the Very Smartest People tell me he can't win no matter how many votes he gets or primaries he beats Hillary.



Now the Very Smartest People tell me the unmitigated disasters a Trump presidency will bring. Now the shit is real, they tell us. Now it's time to panic, the smart set say. But to get the future they believe in, the rest of us have to give up our futures and pretend the past never happened. That's the smart and responsible thing to do, they tell me.

Well that's never going to happen. Not ever.



Why? Because the "Bernie Bros" and the Trump rabble just won't get it - there's just too much democracy! And unless we accommodate ourselves quickly to a most undemocratic moment, well the bad man will build a wall, keep Muslims out, and make it much more expensive to hire people to maintain lawns and golf courses. Well, I'm thinking that's too damn bad and also that there's someone else who might deserve credit for the rise of Trump.



So why support Trump if the Democrats nominate Hillary? Screw unto others as they have screwed unto you; this is my first commandment.



I won't listen to it or to another word from the Very Smartest People on why it would be so very dumb to support Sanders or Trump. It's a pleasure to watch them squirm, to see the GOP implode under the weight of its own obstinate hypocrisy, to see the incompetence of the elite media laid bare, and to know the Democratic Party is a walking dead zombie soon to crumble as its remains turn to dust.

AMEN to all of that. Only caveat to the above is that it isn't the elites by themselves that's nominating Billary for their third term at the House. Why are so many states still coming out in favor of this eternal BS propaganda churning machine? I get it that they fixed the elections in NY probably other places too, but what has kept the democrats in the south from waking up and smelling the coffee (or in this case, the pile of hot smoking turd) they've been served by the establishment on both sides for the last 30 years?

I voted for Sanders and would give anything to see him pull this one out, but I can't deny the reality of the math. Only a Billary indictment by the FBI may save us now. If that doesn't happen, I may have to convince myself to vote for this racist, misogynist, facist douchebag because I too want to see Napolean and Snowball go screw themselves.