The man is a con artist. It is going to be a long four years if he lasts that long.
How do you explain a man who is in line to become the next president of our country — you know the battle is over and it is time to relax and try to act sane and not rile up your trumpeteers — coming out with the following two tweets:
Thursday night two days after the election and after meeting with a gracious President Obama:
“Just had a very open and successful presidential election. Now professional protesters, incited by the media, are protesting. Very unfair!”
Friday morning after being told that in America it is not considered unfair to demonstrate — overnight someone must have whispered in his ear “Mr. Trump, you know that is one of the basic guarantees in America” which probably caught him by surprise; and another whispered “Mr. Trump the media also has the right to express its opinions even if you don’t like it” — he posted the following tweet:
“Love the fact that the small groups of protesters last night have passion for our great country. We will all come together and be proud!”
How do you go from unfair professional protesters incited by the media to loving a small group of protesters who have passion for our country? I suppose the only way to answer that is to say the man is the consummate con man who will say anything at any time and nothing that he says can be accepted as the truth.
You cannot have two totally opposite opinions like that without being a con man. He must think the last thing he says wipes out the first. Do you think he believes the demonstrators are unfair or that they are patriots? Go back to his first tweet and ask yourself how could a man think they were unfair under any circumstance unless he was a little bit balmy and had no idea what it is to be an American.
It is clear that huge support for him came from the blue-collar workers: white men without a college degree estimated at 72% to 23% and white women without a college degree 62% to 34%. Unfortunately for them, he conned them greatly.
Proof of that comes from the reaction by the insiders in the stock market who have pushed that to record levels by piling into the sectors that they expect will most benefit under the Trump presidency.
The five sectors are pharmaceuticals/biotechs; big banks; oil and gas companies; infrastructure and defense. There will be no more fight back to the increases in prices for drugs; the banks will again run free of regulations; the restrictions on fracking, pipe lines, and oil drilling will be lifted. None of these will benefit the people who supported Trump.
The increase expenditures on the infrastructure will provide more American jobs at home which may help but those were also planned by Clinton. As for defense expenditures, yes they are going to go up and there is going to have to be a need to justify them. To my way of thinking that justification will come in the way of war.
It will be the Trump supporters who will have to fight it. It has always been the blue-collar workers who have suffered and died to make America into the bastion of freedoms which it has become. One thing that President Obama did was to keep us out of a major war and save American lives.
He did that because he stood up to War Hawk Netanyahu — remember him coming here to campaign against Obama and the Republican Congress giving him a hero’s welcome — who wants the US to attack Iran which he considers the existential threat to Israel’s existence. When Obama told him he would rather try to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons through a deal rather than bombing Netanyahu went to war against Obama.
Guess who Trump invited to come to America ASAP. You got it! Netanyahu! This article here says: “Both men have known each other for many years, . . . In addition, Trump’s inner circle is very close to the Netanyahu and to Israel.”
Don’t say I didn’t warn you electing a con man.
This comment section has gone off the rails much like our country. Sounds like a bunch of angry old grampies, “how dare those whipper snappers protest!” “Can you believe those uppity blacks and their organization?” “The biased media”. Both sides of an argument need only be displayed when both are grounded in facts and reality. The “liberal” media has been treating stupid and crazy gop ideas like they are on par with rational data based policy arguments, and then debating the merits of each as if they are equal….see climate change vs deniers for a specific reference.This planet can breathe a sigh of relief once the last of baby boomers are no longer relevant enough to produce policies to destroy and degrade our country and planet. Good riddance to youz!
To the TTTT regulars:
Please don’t feed this troll.
Thanks to Matt and all the contributors with varying viewpoints. I learn so much here. I’ll put Taylor’s “Origin of the Second World War” and Bullock’s “Study in Tyranny” on my reading list.
That said :
How does our peerless ( not pair less now) Moderator expect that he can level a critique at one party’s Star player, and that same logic does not apply to the other party’s candidate.
Every other word out of Hillary’s mouth in the Campaign was relentlessly focus grouped. It is his Upstart’s Spontaneity in speechifyin’ that won Donald John Trump the Prize.
He is not a focus group puppet. The charge of being a con man is baseless Sir. You do not bring your ” A ” game with such specious argument.
If he brings his game at all……
it’s like pulling teeth to get him to respond.
Rather :
Well then, let us cavort !!! The Eminence Grise is mantled in ermine. All cloak and no dagger post-election? … Well, he’s a scrappy bastard. He waits for his openings. En Garde! 🙂
Not sure whether President Obama can pre-emptively pardon Mr.and Mrs. Rodham Clinton . The move would seem to be to keep the ink wet on indictments until he clears the Oval.
That said : She and her consort should not be indicted. She in particular is a True Believer . I respect that she is tough and she has a rumpled Wellesley College spent a little too much barefoot time cruising for the ” Strange ” sex appeal that a lot of those hardscrabble Wellesleys … exude.
President Trumps inclination will be to let her gallop off into the rubied sunset. He is a Gentleman after all. 🙂
Surprise … Surprise… Surprise !!! … SNL show tonight was a # Black Lives Matter Nationberg Rally . Some uber politically conscious pair of Black rappers were featured. Hey Hey Ho Ho … These contemporary Bobby Seals imitators commanded their SNL audience fanboys and fangirls to rise and join them in the Black Power Salute as they schooled us all in what constitutes real suffering. Gimme a break you spoonfed hothouse revolutionaries sez’ I .
This is the thing. BLM has a legitimate … Agenda …. not however always legitimate grievances. There are and always have been trigger-happy police officers. They are a fractional percentage. BLM is being played by the Democratic Poverty Pimps who are the ideological mainstay and the arterial blood of that party. We need to parley, as the pirates say, with BLACK LIVES MATTER. Because we certainly realize that they do matter.
Hillary has made a terrible miscalculation.. The FBI runs the entire show. # BRING IT ON .
Glass House revolutionaries are a different thing, altogether. Have you ever endured the Glass House?
That’s a Mussolini ref right? I am one of a minority perhaps who know that his girlfriend’s name was Clara Petacci and that then OSS operator was standing on that hot dusty gas station apron when the communists placed the pair facing that wall and shot them in the back of their heads. This was considered the … ignominious … form of execution. They were not deserving of the honorable frontal shot. I suppose you could say I was always more of a Crystal Palace guy than a Glass House one.
Keep writing Pal. Your prose is damn punchy . Rudy G. as Nosferatu?
What has Klaus Kinsky done to offend you I wonder. It is a witty characterizatipn. All power to the wits with character . 🙂
* that then OSS operator James Jesus Angleton was standing on that hot dusty gas station apron when …… ( We are always reticent when it comes to JJA) 🙂
HILLARY BLAMES COMEY FOR ELECTION LOSS…
Ok,….. the campaign and debates were weird….but this is downright bizarre.
She’s challenging him….. she is calling him out.
This lady has balls. I thought she was gonna be arrested any day now.
MATT, This gives new meaning to the title of your book. Can you believe this?
They won’t take that lying down, will they?
Bad move Crooked Hillary.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/us/politics/hillary-clinton-james-comey.html?_r=0
All power to the didactic 🙂
Bill:
It’s a great book, but, not the most authoritative read on the subject. Bullock’s “Study in Tyranny” is better from a historian’s perspective. Bullock’s analysis of Hitler’s organizational brilliance is without par. It’s a drier read than “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” but, well worth it, if you want to understand the evolution of the Nazis.
Once Glorious Leader fails to deliver on his promises, the people will look elsewhere for salvation. They can’t go any further right, that, leaves only one political direction, left. Bernie is a moderate. What’s coming won’t be. Keith Ellison, currently fighting to get the DNC chair, is a harbinger of things to come. Unfortunately, he, too, can be thought of as a moderate. Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps, the proletariat will get angry, and, organized enough, to seize the means of production. Can you imagine all those banksters, and, hedge-fund traitors, flying out of upper-floor Wall Street windows? I can. Hot diggity won’t that be the day! The future can’t come soon enough. Onward Glorious Leader, don’t disappoint me.
William Shirer’s Rise and Fall ripped off Gibbons for the title. That was its best and most original part. Shirer was a correspondent with no credentials or aptitude for history. He parlayed his fame as a anti-Nazi scribbler in Berlin before the war to the position of a Court Historian regurgitating all the war propagandist excesses that pleased the winners in a tome thick enough to please faculty loungers. It was a winner’s tale. He was lavishly rewarded for his slavishness. Clio was not his Muse.
Still a teen when I read it and saw it for what it was: Pop History. It is pretty much like journalism today, biased and uninformed, a replication of government handouts. It is not a serious work.
Our government and other victor governments still keep many facts hidden despite laws covering the time records can be kept secret. Many things have come out. The best example is the exposure of Operation Keelhaul made public decades later. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called those mass murders the last secret. He got the ‘last’ wrong.
The year after Shirer’s cash cow was printed A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War laid bare the Rise and Fall’s fatal shortcomings. It has been all downhill since then though the Everyday is Munich crowd in the media still enable the the royalties to roll in. His heirs surely appreciate that.
Despite prodigious efforts of fact suppression eventually a rational history of the terrible civil war in Europe will be written. When that hour arrives, long after I am in a box, Shirer’s screed will will end up in a dustbin. Today’s analyses based on that flawed book to identify Trump with Hitler are Looney Tunes.
Khalid mentions “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” I remember my lifelong friend, Jack C, as a teenager, about seventeen years old, had read it. We were amazed that a young teenager plowed through that thick tome. I read it in my twenties. On a trip to Europe, I went to Dachau. It cemented the fact that the horrors told in the book were true. Jack was one of those very intelligent young men who was too impatient for high school. He left and joined the army. He want on to be a great man, husband, father; a gem. He always had a keen sense of humor. He was half Irish and half Jewish, which explained his intense interest in the Nazi era. America is filled with too many great people like Jack to ever worry about fascists or commies taking over, in my humble opinion.
Trump has not exercised political power yet. He has not kicked anyone down. In his private life he employed 10,000s.
Khalid, Matt and others say we’ll rue the day Trump was elected. I would’ve said the same of Hillary. Only time will tell with Trump. Few folks consult soothsayers or the Delphic Oracle nowadays.
I do give Obama credit for keeping us out of a full-fledged ground war in the Middle East, but there were about 2,500 American soldiers killed “on the ground” in Afghanistan and Iraq on Obama’s watch.
No one in America has to lick boots. No one that I know or I’ve read about is “kicking” people down. Thomas Sowell describes very well how Americans have historically lifted themselves out of poverty and still do today. Today, many recent immigrants flourish: those who work hard, get educated, abide by laws, avoid the “gangsta culture” and quickly wean themselves from the Welfare State. Remember, before LBJ, there was no “welfare state” to speak of, and as Sowell says, millions of folks of every imaginable background, many from the most dire straits, lifted themselves and their families out of poverty.
Trump promises a stronger economy and more jobs. We’ll know in a few years if he’ll deliver.
Khalid always calls for revolution and I’m sure he realizes how terribly bloody and brutal some revolutions have been, and what abject failures the French and Russian Revolutions were. Perhaps he has the Easter Uprising and Irish Revolution in mind that led to thousands killed, a civil war, but finally a democratic Republic. Remember Mao’s revolution and the slaughter of tens of millions? The Chinese now see some merit in capitalism and free enterprise. Not bad for a totalitarian state!
In America, and throughout the West, we’ve established more peaceful means to change leaders. It’s called elections. Trump won. Your fellow Americans voted him into office. Give him a chance to govern.
Neither Trump nor Hillary won a majority; that is true of about 15 presidents, including Bill Clinton (Remember Ross Perot got about 19% of the vote.) Four presidents won the electoral vote while losing the popular vote.
2. Khalid, if you know of anyone who is kicking someone down report them to the Police or Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We’ve got laws.
3. Trump is not a “racist”, although he’s said some stupid things. He became a “racist” when he announced for office. And I defy you to name his “racist crew”. Herman Cain, Sheriff David Clarke, Doctor Ben Carson, his female spokesperson Katrina Pierson? Or perhaps you mean VP Mike Pence and the 16 persons he’s listed for potential Supreme Court nominees. Or maybe Rudy Giuliani or General Mike Flynn or Mike Huckabee. People, black, brown and white, with a long history of “racism”? That “racism” rhetoric is thin gruel. Save it for the KKK and Black Panthers!
If Trump ever read a whole book in his life, it’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” It’s unnerving, the way he hews to Karl Lueger’s formula for political success. For all those who support fascism, and, didn’t particularly enjoy the late sixties, and, early seventies, the decade ahead will be a nightmare. Please, Glorious Leader, re-institute conscription, so, everyone has skin in the game. Make all those foolish enough to vote for you, rue that fateful day. Obama did a fine job of side-stepping a ground war in the Mideast. Trump will step right in it. All power to the dialectic!
Bill believes blacks, and, other folks of color, will be lifted out of poverty by licking the boot that kicks them. I don’t think so. I don’t know who will be the 21st Century Panthers, or, what they’ll call themselves, but, people of color will not except four years of oppression at hands of Glorious leader, and, his racist crew. I hope Latinos get on board, as well. Native Americans are already at the spear-point of struggle out in N. Dakota.
I think I’ll go down to UW, and, sift through all the bourgeois nits for some diamonds in the rough, kids with the brains, guts, and, heart, to struggle for the proletariat. I know they are out there. It’s time to organize.
Down with fascism! Death to the plutocrats! All power to the dialectic!
★ Yup, Gotcha! … SIXTY MILLIONS as my old Sicilian Landlady on West Sixth St. would have put it, cigarette professionally depending on the saliva of her lower lip as she would no doubt have further opined … ” That’s a lot of PEOPLES ” … Pardon the mis-hit on the number key.
Can’t recall name, but Atlantic Monthly writer wrote this week about some shale digging conference out West he attended where Trump, President Elect Trump, showed up to rally his base. The writer was very impressed by the ” Common Touch , ” the genuine warmth and unstudied humility he radiated as he slowly made his way through the Hotel venues kitchen and along subterranean corridors full of largely poor white, black, and Hispanic Service Staff. This is the ” Offstage Trump.” They loved the guy and clearly impressed the writer with this affectionate regard.
I loved his conclusion : That the Democratic Opposition and their
… HACKOLYTES ( I own that neologism 🙂 ) had always taken him … ” literally, but not seriously, while his loyalists’ have always taken him seriously, but not literally. ” Who’s the Clown now?
Matt: good points. Some counterpoints: Not just for the sake of argument; for the sake of a fuller understanding:
A con man would not have made the second post. Trump is not a lawyer or lifelong politician. He doesn’t think “First Amendment freedoms” first and foremost. He’s a businessman who probably thinks “unfair advertising” first. His egoism and thin skin did show through in the first post. His “brand” was being sullied. Upon counsel and reflection, he immediately corrected himself. That’s a good sign.
It’s true he has to respect the “freedom” of the press, but that does not mean he cannot vigorously and vociferously condemn what we all know is a leftist —or dramatically liberally skewed — media and press. The press has no more free speech rights than a president or you or I. To denounce biased reporting is a staple of American politics.
I do think it’s “unfair” that the left is so exorcised at Trump’s election, that tens-of-thousands take to the streets to protest an election. Remember all the gibberish about the American tradition of gracefully accepting the election’s outcome. “Mr. Trump, will you and your people accept the outcome of this election? When Trump said, “Wait and see” and then clarified he would if it’s fair, the left took a fit, the left was aghast. How dare anyone challenge an election? the Left said, just two weeks ago.
Another curiosity: 60 million voted for Trump. He won. Who does the press relentlessly cover and interview? Ten-thousand protesters. Why not interview one thousand happy Trump supporters for every one anti-Trump protester interviewed or televised? Or at least give equal time to the winners? What football team and whose fans get the bulk of interviews? The Superbowl winner or loser? The Media and Press forever forgets the silent majority and the silent plurality. Clearly the streets are occupied by Hillary supporters who lost. “Sore losers!”
Yes, Trump won the blue collar vote, the men’s vote, the white suburban woman’s vote, and surprisingly he won “college educated whites” by 2%. See Pew Research. So, please don’t ignore the intelligentsia and educated who voted for Trump. And please don’t frame those without college degrees as being uninformed. Remember the longshoreman’s philosopher, Eric Hoffer. Remember all those self-taught geniuses of the past who never graduated from college, like Abe Lincoln. Remember Bill Buckley’s quote: “I’d take the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book to run a nation over the entire Harvard faculty.” Even among all college grads Hillary got just 52% – – – just over half – – – to Trumps 43%. Plus there’s a difference between book smarts and common sense. Remember Thomas Paine? He wrote a revolutionary book called Common Sense.
You’re right that less American soldiers lost their lives under Obama than Bush II or LBJ. But more lost their lives under Pres. Obama than Presidents Reagan or Eisenhower. Thousands of American servicemen (about 2,500) lost their lives under Obama who promised to bring our soldiers home. Under Obama, America saw ISIS spread and America itself involved in more foreign entanglements in Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen (via supplying the Saudis with cluster bombs et al) and continued presence in Iraq. Etc, etc, etc: Further exacerbation of relations with Russia. Troubles in the East China Sea. The Philippines alienated. Thousands killed by drone strikes. How many civilians killed directly or indirectly by Obama’s military action or Obama’s Administration supplying arms to rigid regimes (Saudis) or rebels (ex. in Syria.) Hillary was not going to change any of these policies. I hope Trump does.
I too am concerned that Trump’s advisers (like Bolton, Flynn, et al) not lead us into more conflicts and that his close ties with Netanyahu not unleash more militarism in the Middle East. Perhaps, Donald and Bibi will see the light, and grant Palestinians statehood and defuse tensions. Nothing wrong with hope!
Trump’s promise to strengthen our military echoes Ike’s and Reagan’s position that a strong U.S. military deters wars and aggression worldwide. T.R.’s “big stick” approach. Ike left JFK a strong military that helped prevent war over Cuba.
Bill,
I agree about the second post. And about it being a good sign that he took direction.
Trump is Trump, but he is no dummy. He know that he has to work within a framework, delegate, take advice, and trust other peoples judgment now.
He knows he has to tone it down to be effective. I could tell immediately during his acceptance speech….he was different. He sounded like a man who wanted to put that campaign crap behind him (because that’s all it is…and he knows it….and he played it like a champ) and start attending to the business of Making America Great Again.
And he will.
I heard someone say the other day that if JFK were alive today he would be a Republican.
I liked that.
” Elections have consequences ” …. President Barak Obama, winning a second term in 2012 and chiding Republicans for the very same intransigence towards the Election result then, that the Democrats now display in defeat. Same old double standard that fifty million Trump loyalists rejected when they voted their candidate into the Oval Office. This hypocrisy is a marvelous thing I suppose if you are a Dem. Not everyone in the Country is, apparently. 🙂
The “nice going” is a phrase better used to describe the respective nominations of the major parties. THAT represents the true failing here.