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

[andysays]

I'm capable of both.

 

[bimble]

You think the guy who's ties are made in china gives a flying fuck about US manufacturing jobs?

His 'economic policy' on his website had bullet points on it, about half of them were to do with putting China in its place, taking it to court and so on.

 

[weltweit]

It isn't just China though, the US is losing a lot of manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

 

[J Ed]

I think the voters who came out for trump were white elderly and disenfranchised, Clinton was never going to appeal to them, neither was Bernie.

Then why did Trump win the same Midwestern states as Obama? There is clearly a demographic of some size that was willing to vote for Obama, Trump and undoubtedly Bernie Sanders but not Clinton. You can see that in Sanders' defeat of Clinton in the Michigan primary.

 

[8den]

His 'economic policy' on his website had bullet points on it, about half of them were to do with putting China in its place, taking it to court and so on.

I'm sure Trump's Whitehouse will engage in a host of tokenist trade wars, but seeing as his own companies are invested around the world and we still don't know how they'll be managed, it'll be a YUGE conflict of interest.

 

[hash tag]

I wonder what will happen to his empire while he is running the country? Just a thought like.
Is there no escaping this today? Sing-a-long-a Donald: Six songs Trump doubters might be humming today

 

[8den]

Then why did Trump win the same Midwestern states as Obama? There is clearly a demographic of some size that was willing to vote for Obama, Trump and undoubtedly Bernie Sanders but not Clinton. You can see that in Sanders' defeat of Clinton in the Michigan primary.

The fallacy in your argument is you assume those Obama voters moved to Trump. Most likely the Trump voters are people who weren't excited for Romeny and didn't come out then.

The fact is "socialism" is a dirty word in the American heartland, if you don't think Trump and Bannon would have been running as ugly a campaign decrying Sanders as some kind of Jewish Bolshevism that would probably have sunk him just as fast

 

[8den]

I wonder what will happen to his empire while he is running the country? Just a thought like.
Is there no escaping this today? Sing-a-long-a Donald: Six songs Trump doubters might be humming today

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/30/donald-trump-blind-trust-foreign-business-deals-500398.html

Apparently his sons are going to run it in a "blind trust", so those are two new words we can add to the "big book of words the Donald doesn't understand".

 

[J Ed]

The fallacy in your argument is you assume those Obama voters moved to Trump. Most likely the Trump voters are people who weren't excited for Romeny and didn't come out then.

The fact is "socialism" is a dirty word in the American heartland, if you don't think Trump and Bannon would have been running as ugly a campaign decrying Sanders as some kind of Jewish Bolshevism that would probably have sunk him just as fast

I think that both of those factors are at play. People who didn't turn out would have turned out, people who turned out for Trump as a protest against Clinton would have turned out for Sanders instead.

In these times I think being called a socialist by a billionaire would be a lot easier for a candidate running on an antagonistic class-inflected platform. It could have played a lot better than HRC's 'he isn't even a proper billionaire unlike my mates!'. If the response to a platform running on class interest and economic justice (as well as things like actual racial justice rather than nice words and hot sauce) is open anti-Semitism then even better, that would have coalesced opposition to Trump in a way that was a lot more effective.

Frankly though, it wouldn't take a Sanders. Biden, Warren, O'Malley would have crushed him. It took Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump. Blame her and her people.

 

[bimble]

If the response to that is open anti-Semitism then even better, that would have coalesced opposition to Trump in a way that was a lot more effective.

You think? Don't share your optimism there at all, why would antisemitism be a problem when a rabidly racist pussy-grabber with David Duke and Alex Jones cheering him on is apparently fine.

 

[J Ed]

You think? Don't share your optimism there at all, why would people oppose antisemitism when a rabidly racist pussy-grabber with David Duke and Alex Jones cheering him on is apparently fine.

Trump pulled back from the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel stuff very early on in the campaign.

and while we are at it let's not forget the Clinton campaign's Jew-baiting during the primaries.

 

[8den]

I think that both of those factors are at play. People who didn't turn out would have turned out, people who turned out for Trump as a protest against Clinton would have turned out for Sanders instead.

In these times I think being called a socialist by a billionaire would be a lot easier for a candidate running on an antagonistic class-inflected platform would have played a lot better than HRC's 'he isn't even a proper billionaire unlike my mates!'. If the response to that is open anti-Semitism then even better, that would have coalesced opposition to Trump in a way that was a lot more effective.

Frankly though, it wouldn't take a Sanders. Biden, Warren, O'Malley would have crushed him. It took Hillary Clinton to lose to Donald Trump. Blame her and her people.

I always find your overview so overly simplistic it sounds like a Socialist Worker editorial.

 

[bimble]

Trump pulled back from the anti-Jewish, anti-Israel stuff very early on in the campaign.

and while we are at it let's not forget the Clinton campaign's Jew-baiting during the primaries.

Jews always overwhelmingly vote democrat don't they, so unlikely they were very important as a target to appeal to for either side.

 

[Sprocket.]

It isn't just China though, the US is losing a lot of manufacturing jobs to Mexico.

China and Mexico are two of the biggest importers of American goods.
The biggest US export to China is aircraft followed by soy beans. The biggest imports from China are electrical machinery, machinery, furniture and bedding.
If Trump wants to recreate US manufacturing they will need to import a lot more machinery to start building their own. The US like much of Europe has let the manufacturing infrastructure decline to such a level that stopping imports or increasing tax tariffs will achieve little.

 

[J Ed]

I always find your overview so overly simplistic it sounds like a Socialist Worker editorial.

Yes, that is not a surprise to me. I suspect that you feel that way because you think that sophisticated analysis is whatever the day's liberal establishment party line is.

 

[J Ed]

Look at the polls, look at the popularity ratings. Clinton was the second least popular major presidential candidate in US history.

The DNC knew this.

They could have run anyone else. Anyone. Didn't have to be Sanders.

They didn't.

 

[8den]

Look at the polls, look at the popularity ratings. Clinton was the second least popular major presidential candidate in US history.

The DNC knew this.

They could have run anyone else. Anyone. Didn't have to be Sanders.

They didn't.

You do understand she won the popular vote in the primary by several million, removing the DNCs fixing would have reduced her lead but she still would have comfortably won.

 

[J Ed]

You do understand she won the popular vote in the primary by several million, removing the DNCs fixing would have reduced her lead but she still would have comfortably won.

Yes, there are plenty of structures affiliated with the DNC in one way or another which are also to blame. Trade unions which backed Clinton over Sanders without even consulting their members are a good example.

 

[redsquirrel]

I always find your overview so overly simplistic it sounds like a Socialist Worker editorial.

Someone who smeared anyone who was even slightly critical of Clinton or voted for a third party as a Trump apologist calling others simplistic is pretty laughable.

 

[8den]

Yes, there are plenty of structures affiliated with the DNC in one way or another which are also to blame. Trade unions which backed Clinton over Sanders without even consulting their members are a good example.

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and keep on blaming the people who y'know voted for Trump. If theres one thing we can take from Brexit the "left" will spend more time tearing itself apart, while the right get on with dismantling anything approximating a socialist state.

 

[J Ed]

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and keep on blaming the people who y'know voted for Trump. If theres one thing we can take from Brexit the "left" will spend more time tearing itself apart, while the right get on with dismantling anything approximating a socialist state.

They just didn't check their privilege enough

 

[8den]

They just didn't check their privilege enough

I dunno man, I just don't think Bernie would have won, Obamacare was seen as evil because it was "socialist medicine" or as the rest of the civilised world calls it "healthcare" , I think Trump's base would have been as hostile to Bernie.

Lets not forget the average mean income that voted for Trump was above average wealthy, those people hate the concept of socialism (mainly because I suspect they don't know what it means).

I do thing that Biden would have wiped the floor with Trump, but thats neither here nor there, spending so much time ranting about how "bernie would have won this" is an exercise in futility.

 

[JimW]

Yeah I'm going to go ahead and keep on blaming the people who y'know voted for Trump. If theres one thing we can take from Brexit the "left" will spend more time tearing itself apart, while the right get on with dismantling anything approximating a socialist state.

What we can take from Brexit is people like yourself will stick with childish "the bad people did it" explanations that get you nowhere rather than even considering any deeper analysis.

 

[pogofish]

I see the local paper - whose "Executive" editor is married to one of Trump's "directors" is now banging-on about our airport runway being too short to land Air Force One on!

 

[8den]

What we can take from Brexit is people like yourself will stick with childish "the bad people did it" explanations that get you nowhere rather than even considering any deeper analysis.

So you think that the racist violence that's exploded since Brexit is proof that it was in fact a crushing victory for the anti capitalist left?

 

[JimW]

So you think that racist violence that's exploded since Brexit is proof that it was in fact a crushing victory for the anti capitalist left?

Oh yeah, that follows completely from what I said.

 

[hot air baboon]

ive never seen anything like it. Id put it down to a bullying, grabbing nature. Whatever else - its strange

I heard John Sergeant tell an anecdote saying the same about shaking hands with Mrs Thatcher

The US like much of Europe has let the manufacturing infrastructure decline to such a level that stopping imports or increasing tax tariffs will achieve little.

.....its certainly true that cola & steel are sectors suffering from serious decline and colossal over-capacity on the world market. Other areas less so as shown below.

More generally though I can't see why tariffs can't be a hugely powerful source of leverage against multi-national comapnies - we know from the whole bro-ha-ha over the single market & TTIP that tariffs and barriers are one of the most senstive spots by which to grab them and start squeezing & that they absolutely love steam-rollering over any national controls on profit-making and trying to subordinate governments to trade dispute courts

if Trump followed through on slapping 35% import tariffs on companies that export jobs off shore then I don't see why that wouldn't impact their decison-making the same as any other cost - such as rising wage levels, shipping costs etc do re China - it might increase a trend towards automation althouhg its easier to automate low skilled repetitve manual tasks that are prety cheap to employ people to do anyway

Why Donald Trump Is Wrong About Manufacturing Jobs and China - The New Yorker

Since March, 2010, when manufacturing employment in the U.S. hit a trough of 11.45 million jobs, nearly a million new factory positions have been created, most of them in the Southern states, particularly North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Better still, the jobs are typically good ones: across that same five-year period, average hourly manufacturing wages have increased over ten per cent, to more than twenty dollars. On the whole, U.S. manufacturing, as measured by the Purchasing Managers’ Index, has steadily expanded.

Perhaps the biggest stimulant to American manufacturing is the move toward reshoring. In recent years, companies have increasingly been bringing manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from China and other countries. The practice received its most public boost in 2012, when General Electric announced plans to invest a billion dollars in an appliance plant in Louisville, Kentucky, reshoring four thousand jobs that had been in China and Mexico, and adding, over time, nearly twenty thousand factory positions at the plant’s regional suppliers.

 

[redsquirrel]

What we can take from Brexit is people like yourself will stick with childish "the bad people did it" explanations that get you nowhere rather than even considering any deeper analysis.

Yes even if you think Trump won because of all the racists, just repeating that doesn't actually say anything meaningful. Why did racism give the election to Trump in 2016 when Obama won in 2008 and 2012? Are there more racists now than four/eight years ago? If so where have they come from?

 

[8den]

Oh yeah, that follows completely from what I said.

Just pointing out that you couldn't drown a caterpillar in your "deeper analysis"

 

[8den]

Yes even if you think the racist vote delivered it for Trump, simply saying Trump won because of all those racists doesn't get you anywhere. Why did racism give the election to Trump in 2016 when Obama won in 2008 and 2012? Are there more racists now than four/eight years ago? If so where have they come from?

Cause they didn't come out for Romney or McCain, because neither Romney or McCain, for all their massive fucking flaws, aren't racist pumpkins. Why don't you get that? Trump tapped into a racist heartland of america who hadn't voted for decades.