Donald Trump, the road that might not lead to the White House!

[Idris2002]

Yeah, well you see bimble, I don't think those people have friends, at least not as you or I would understand the term.

 

[bimble]

Yeah, well you see bimble, I don't think those people have friends, at least not as you or I would understand the term.

That's true, I've never had anyone to play golf with, to come to my 3rd wedding, or to donate to my private foundation.
The skulduggery hypothesis stems mainly from this phonecall between the two men I think;
Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid

 

[Idris2002]

That's true, I've never had anyone to play golf with, to come to my 3rd wedding, or to donate to my private foundation.
The skulduggery hypothesis stems mainly from this phonecall between the two men I think;
Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid

Yeah, they talked "politics". That must be it. Yeah.

 

[bimble]

I'm not saying I think it's true!
Quite like it though, as a way of making the world seem a bit less chaotic, which is kind of what conspiracy theories are for.

 

[Kaka Tim]

billionaire businessmen maintains close connections with powerful politician/politician maintains close connections with powerful billionaire businessmen. Sort of the way of the world since forever. As is the scenario where they turn on each other.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'm not saying I think it's true!
Quite like it though, as a way of making the world seem a bit less chaotic, which is kind of what conspiracy theories are for.

Surely the idea that this is all one big fuck-up that nobody is in control of is far more reassuring.

 

[hash tag]

I am totally insignificant as I do not appear to have made the New York Times list of things that Trump has insulted

 

[Yossarian]

I am totally insignificant as I do not appear to have made the New York Times list of things that Trump has insulted

Even a stopped clock. etc...

Karl Rove
Former deputy White House chief of staff
“a failed Jeb Bushy”
“Never says anything good & never will”
“Shouldn't be on the air!”
“should be fired!”
“sick”
“loser”
“so biased”
“still thinks Romney won”
“unfair”
“dummy”
“no credibility”
“FoxNews should can him”
“dopey”
“pushing Republicans down the same old path of defeat”
“a loser”
“shouldn't be allowed to do [his] bias commentary”
“establishment flunky”
“dummy”
“should get a life”
“just totally bombed”
“a loser”
“has ZERO credibility”
“an establishment dope”
“has made so many mistakes”
“loser”
“dope”
“total fool”
“an all talk, no action dummy!”
“part of the Republican Establishment problem”
“purposely mischaracterized my statement”
“dopey”
“dummy”
“biased dope”
“moron”
“easy to beat!”
“dopey”
“spent $430 million and lost ALL races”
“dope”
“wasted $400 million”
“didn't win one race”
“total loser”
“a clown with zero credibility”
“irrelevant clown, sweats and shakes nervously”
“has zero cred”
“made fool of himself in '12”
“has no credibility”
“a bush plant who called all races wrong”
“clown”

 

[bimble]

“sick”

showing his age there.

 

[bimble]

 

[butchersapron]

It's wenger. I knew it.

 

[butchersapron]

20 years and he ends up shaking the hand of that cunt.

 

[butchersapron]

The idea that americannews is a 'news website' is a a bit shit as well.

 

[Idris2002]

Trump says Hillary is a 'nice person':



(NB, this is from 2008).

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

the idea most or all criticism of Clinton is sexism.

The articles I've cited don't say that. If you disagree, post quotes from them, like you've done from the Economist, showing that they do.

As you've said: maybe I've missed something in them.

 

[J Ed]

Just Plain Nasty | Sam Kriss

t wasn’t just Hillary Clinton you insulted,” they say, “it was me. I’m a nasty woman too.”

This was inevitable. As soon as Donald Trump interrupted Clinton in Vegas, in the middle of a deeply boring section on “entitlement reform,” the T-shirts were born. “Such a nasty woman,” he said—and then he gagged, his throat bulged, his chin receded into a quivering mess of pale flesh, and a mucus-coated sac of “Nasty Woman” T-shirts disgorged itself from his mouth, to slap wetly on the stage floor. As soon as he said it, everything had already happened: the flurry of Twitter identification, the shocked disapproval from Hollywood celebrities, the feeble Voxexplainers, the T-shirts, and nobody could possibly stop it.

The first “Nasty Woman” T-shirts came out hours after the last presidential debate. You can buy one at $20 that features the slogan as a campaign bumper sticker—“Nasty Woman 2016.” Another, more feminine option has the words in looping, curlicued script above the printed hashtag #ImWithHer. The pricier $25 option, with 50 percent of the proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, has a modern, high impact font in all caps over a heart in Rose Quartz, Pantone’s 2016 color of the year, and quickly received some free advertising in Teen Vogue. As I write this, scores more “Nasty Woman” shirts have been designed—dozens, hundreds maybe; it’s becoming impossible to tell.


American politics is one vast crisis of semiotic overproduction: too much meaning is produced in any one moment for anyone to possibly consume, too many talking points, too many sober interpretations of outbursts and body language. The exchange-value of scandals and slogans is continually worn down; the rate of profit falls. It doesn’t matter who the candidates are: the process is sovereign, the churning transformation of useful meaning into garbage. And the T-shirts will see the same fate. You buy your “Nasty Woman” shirt, you wear it once, and then the media cycle spins off somewhere else, and you’re left with an object from which all signification has evaporated. Throw it away; add it to America’s vast reserves of rejectamenta, buried underground where nobody will ever see it again.

The point of this process is to make you think that your new T-shirt is standing up to Donald Trump and his sexism, but really it’s the process that overdetermines everything: you, me, he, she and it are all complicit. Far from ruining electoral politics, Trump’s misogyny might be the only thing keeping it afloat. Of course, the candidates aren’t the same; of course, one of them is clearly worse than the other, but as any dialectician knows, an antithetical opposition between elements doesn’t mean that they’re not spinning together in the same spiral. It’s a ballet. Trump is the perfect foil for Clinton: he could recklessly tear through the Republican primaries with its parade of fanatics and non-entities—Ted Cruz, the queasily libidinal deep-sea creature; Jeb Bush, the last inbred flapping scion to the American Hapsburgs; Marco Rubio, the depthless hologram that still manages to leave a trail of slime in its wake—but he’s in the jaws of something much bigger now.

The Clinton campaign actively abetted Trump at every stage of the primaries, even though it meant unleashing dangerous reactionary forces across the country, because he was the enemy they wanted. Whether he knows it or not, his function was to be so vulgar that an impotent public would unite around Clinton, to make America congratulate itself on the morning after Election Day for not having chosen the worst candidate imaginable. He’s there to make it look like everything is at stake, when the worst has already happened, and nothing is at stake whatsoever.

Trump isn’t able to articulate his occasionally accurate critique of Clinton’s foreign policy without meshing in his racist nonsense and in doing so neutering it. Trump’s confused stance on abortion (he doesn’t seem to be entirely aware of where babies actually come from) allowed Clinton to talk about it entirely in terms of medical conditions and fetal abnormalities, as an awful, painful, terrible choice that will haunt a woman for the rest of her life—and thenbe lauded as a feminist hero. In the town hall debate, a voter asked the candidates about the rising atmosphere of racism and violence American Muslims are drowning in. Trump talked about ISIS and terrorism, and said that Muslims are valuable when they report on each other to the police. Clinton talked about inclusivity and tolerance, and said that Muslims are valuable when they report on each other to the police.

 

[TomUS]

The main driving force behind Trump has been the neo-liberalism pursued by both parties for the last 30 years.

Noe-liberalism pretty much defines the economic policies of most western advanced countries yet they didn't produce a Trump. The Republican party's increasingly extreme conservatism from Reagan to the present...government IS the problem, gun-nut ism, militarism, evangelical christianity, white bigotry, extreme nationalism....& the Democrats failure to resist these produced Trump.

 

[J Ed]

Noe-liberalism pretty much defines the economic policies of most western advanced countries yet they didn't produce a Trump. The Republican party's increasingly extreme conservatism from Reagan to the present...government IS the problem, gun-nut ism, militarism, evangelical christianity, white bigotry, extreme nationalism....& the Democrats failure to resist these produced Trump.

France has Le Pen.
Britain has Farage. We also have a PM who appears at least rhetorically to want to emulate Le Pen.
The Netherlands have Wilders.
Hungary has Orban, in fact he is their leader, and the main opposition is Jobbik who are even further right.
Greece has the Golden Dawn.

There are Trumps everywhere, in fact many of Europe's Trumps are far worse than Trump.

 

[krtek a houby]

France has Le Pen.
Britain has Farage. We also have a PM who appears at least rhetorically to want to emulate Le Pen.
The Netherlands have Wilders.
Hungary has Orban, in fact he is their leader, and the main opposition is Jobbik who are even further right.
Greece has the Golden Dawn.

There are Trumps everywhere, in fact many of Europe's Trumps are far worse than Trump.

Indeed they are. Regarding Farage; he's not about to (posssibly) become the next PM

 

[J Ed]

Indeed they are. Regarding Farage; he's not about to (posssibly) become the next PM

The idea that the situation which has given rise to the far-right is unique to America does not make any sense at all, in fact in many ways polling there gives me more hope about the future than I have about the political future of Europe.

 

[krtek a houby]

The idea that the situation which has given rise to the far-right is unique to America does not make any sense at all, in fact in many ways polling there gives me more hope about the future than I have about the political future of Europe.

In what way?

 

[J Ed]

In what way?

Generally they indicate that the American youth are ready to start a full programme of space communism while in Europe young people are in some ways to the right of previous generations.

 

[TomUS]

France has Le Pen.
Britain has Farage. We also have a PM who appears at least rhetorically to want to emulate Le Pen.
The Netherlands have Wilders.
Hungary has Orban, in fact he is their leader, and the main opposition is Jobbik who are even further right.
Greece has the Golden Dawn.

There are Trumps everywhere, in fact many of Europe's Trumps are far worse than Trump.

With the exception of Orban, none have come as close to leading the government as Trump have they? May doesn't strike me as Trump like.

 

[J Ed]

With the exception of Orban, none have come as close to leading the government as Trump have they? May doesn't strike me as Trump like.

If France had the same electoral system as the US then Le Pen would win the next election, and easily. Same with the Netherlands and Wilders.

 

[bimble]

If France had the same electoral system as the US then Le Pen would win the next election, and easily. Same with the Netherlands and Wilders.

Is that true? Jesus. Do you think there's a simple way to explain why this is so popular at the moment ?

 

[Crispy]

The same social forces that birthed Farage also birthed Trump. It's just that the Republican party have spent the last 30 years doubling, quadrupling down on their insane core, so that Trump could manifest within the structure of a mainstream party rather than on the fringe.

 

[J Ed]

Is that true? Jesus. Do you think there's a simple way to explain why this is so popular at the moment ?

Not really a simple way. I think the causes are down to a confluence of factors, not all of which are present to the same degree in every country in which the rise of the populist right.

I think it has a lot to do with the break down of organised labour and the institutions associated with organised labour which has meant that it has been impossible for these forces to make the lives of ordinary people better, this has coincided in the Western world with increases in immigration and demographic shifts, meanwhile significant percentages of the media in most Western countries are telling people that the decline in their living standards is due to that dramatic demographic change.

Centre-left parties throughout the Western world, which is what a lot of people today think of when they think of the left, are incredibly weak and a result of that is that it relegates politics to essentially that of centre-right neoliberals vs far-right economic populists. This means that for a lot of people their view of politics is that it is between that of the haves on the centre-right and the far-right populists who will at least stick it to the centre-right and horrify the people whose politics consists mostly of sneering at you and people like you.

 

[frogwoman]

Went to a great talk about duterte this evening, parallels are striking yet duterte seems to be a lot more savvy than trump and less self sabotaging, he's also reached out to the left and doesn't show much sign of overt racism or even misogyny beyond well targeted remarks at political opponents, nothing on trumps level anyway - just extreme classism (most of the people he's targetted are extremely poor).

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Went to a great talk about duterte this evening, parallels are striking yet duterte seems to be a lot more savvy than trump and less self sabotaging, he's also reached out to the left and doesn't show much sign of overt racism or even misogyny beyond well targeted remarks at political opponents, nothing on trumps level anyway - just extreme classism (most of the people he's targetted are extremely poor).

I think he's pretty much over Trump on the misogyny score. The very public rape joke has been followed up with a whole load of other "politically incorrect" stuff (e.g.).

Tbh pretty much everything he says is worse than Trump, though I don't think that's because he's somehow a worse person. The fact is that he could do all that and still end up in power.

 

[frogwoman]

I think he's pretty much over Trump on the misogyny score. The very public rape joke has been followed up with a whole load of other "politically incorrect" stuff (e.g.).

Tbh pretty much everything he says is worse than Trump, though I don't think that's because he's somehow a worse person. The fact is that he could do all that and still end up in power.

I agree but the point that was made was that he was somehow attacking political opponents rather than random beauty queens etc. The guy giving the talk said he basically wasnt an idiot and knew how to play the game which trump doesnt.