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The Trump presidency

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Hes caining it changing the government whole floors in trump tower while his wife maintains her distance from the orange ones bed ....every round of golf on his properties..just eating out in his hotels in Washington.....etc ....and.... you can be sure its not mates rates....the $78.k is derisable
 
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On The Cipher Brief Trump Administration Emulating Putin’s ‘Active Measures’ Domestically

Pincus going over Watt's testimony on Russian Info Ops and Trumps porky spreading antics often connected with themes pushed by Russian state media.

This doesn't imply direct collaboration of course. The likes of Sputnik and RT are pushing stuff that often supports Trump's worldview which he'll then amplify bigly. Breitbart is often echoing Russian sources as well.

This isn't just about Putin Trump's been a giddy fan of authoritarian leaders going back thirty years. He's a bully that likes bullies especially wealthy bullies. He's far from alone in that. Part of his appeal is that he's an overgrown middle school thug who delights in acts of petty cruelty. That his dotty Muslim Ban getting 75% support among GOP voters is something of a indicator of this.

During Trump's Presidential run Putin's favourability with Republicans soared from 12% to 32% and this was densely concentrated in younger voters. This is a pretty impressive shift and shows Trump's talent as a marketer of crappy product. Voters who embraced Trump for whatever reason would often come to buy much of his snake oil range and sometimes the whole American Carnage crock.

Trump's voters polled as pretty authoritarian though still behind Cruz's Evangelical base which would finally vote for Trump anyway.
Authoritarians_Trump_support.0.png

Interestingly the most authoritarian voters greatly feared foreign threats and that included Russia so Putin hugging Trump was swimming upstream on that one with part of his base. They are probably still mostly older Cold War era folk of course.
 
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And Ivanka Trump has the brass neck to tweet about Equal Pay Day today. :mad:

Trump Pulls Back Obama-Era Protections For Women Workers

With little notice, President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order that advocates say rolls back hard-fought victories for women in the workplace.

Tuesday's "Equal Pay Day" — which highlights the wage disparity between men and women — is the perfect time to draw more attention to the president's action, activists say.

On March 27, Trump revoked the 2014 Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces order then-President Barack Obama put in place to ensure that companies with federal contracts comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws. The Fair Pay order was put in place after a 2010 Government Accountability Officeinvestigation showed that companies with rampant violations were being awarded millions in federal contracts.
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Childish or me to laugh, I know.


Trump supporters in Texas are coming to the realization that their vote for the president may force some out them of their homes for less than they are worth, with others finding out that — if they stay — they’ll be living in Mexico if his wall is built.

As part of a CNN special report on the impact the wall between the U.S. and Mexico will have on border dwellers in the state that went overwhelmingly for President Donald Trump, the network found there is already an extensive history of government lawsuits filed to take property from homeowners. With Trump’s wall planned for the entire border, some of his supporters are now saying they will fight his administration in the courts.
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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/if-...order-wall-will-put-her-house-on-mexico-side/
 
On LAT Trump’s Authoritarian Vision
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He swooped into politics, he declared, to subvert the powerful and rescue those who cannot defend themselves. “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

To Trump’s faithful, those words were a rallying cry. But his critics heard something far more menacing in them: a dangerously authoritarian vision of the presidency — one that would crop up time and again as he talked about overruling generals, disregarding international law, ordering soldiers to commit war crimes, jailing his opponent.

Trump has no experience in politics; he’s never previously run for office or held a government position. So perhaps he was unaware that one of the hallmarks of the American system of government is that the president’s power to “fix” things unilaterally is constrained by an array of strong institutions — including the courts, the media, the permanent federal bureaucracy and Congress. Combined, they provide an essential defense against an imperial presidency.
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Trump did seem to think he was auditioning for a Kingly job much like Assad's where decrees issued from the palace must be acted on. Previous incumbents simply failed to grab America by the pussy rather than having circumscribed powers.

This combination of openly stated authoritarian ambitions, the ethics of a weasel and technocratic naivety has hobbled his administration. The expectation seems to have been many things could be changed with the stoke of a pen. In fact most things require careful political consent building and interagency work. The badly botched Muslim ban and his pitch on Trumpcare were both hasty. The latter even though Ryan had been punting ideas around for years could have been expected to take months. Obamacare took somewhere around a year to formulate. Trump's ill advised attempt to railroad the Freedom Caucus cost him political capital. The one thing you don't want to play with those guys is a bullying dictator.

Trump's controversial budget also was pretty much dead on arrival not having a background of solid policy basis as a justification that can be sold to Congress. And then there's The Wall that the hated Mexicans were going to pay for. The fact that this greatly excited Trump's rally crowd's isn't going to persuade Congress that they should spaff away 25 billion tax dollars on what's a pretty impractical idea much disliked by many Southern lobbyists. The Muslim Ban suffers from a similar flaw as Judges do point out security people see almost no merit in it and a good few risks it'll make terrorist threats worse. They reach back to how it was sold on the campaign trail and doubt if it's actually in the spirt of the Constitution. It's just an expensive but crowd pleasing act of authoritarian persecution.

Consider another how another far better qualified authoritarian Ted Cruz might have handled this. Ted's genuinely a very clever lawyer who as a kid memorised a Constitution that in all likely hood Trump has never read. He's a junior Senator but he's been round The Hill a long time. Ted would know how to play the President's powers to greatest effect. He has a similar weaknesses to Trump in antagonising GOP colleagues and being about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake but these sort of childlike procedural errors he'd be unlikely to make.
 
On Politico For Trump, NAFTA Could Be the Next Obamacare
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Now that the GOP health care bill has cratered, the Trump administration has two basic options for how to proceed. One would be to accept that Obamacare is here to stay and push for tweaks to help stabilize the exchanges and minimize the disruptions to families. The other option would be to sabotage the exchanges, let Obamacare implode, and blame Democrats for the resulting chaos, which Trump keeps saying would be much smarter politics. That’s not necessarily true at a time when Republicans control Washington; if millions of Americans suddenly lost their coverage, they might wonder why the president seemed so eager for that to happen. But regardless of who gets blamed, it could happen, and a lot of Americans could get hurt.

If Trump fails to bully the Mexicans into massive NAFTA concessions, or even a face-saving NAFTA update reinstating the TPP concessions, he will face a similar choice: Muddle through with the status quo, or walk away and blame others for the chaos. Getting a divided Congress to approve a revised NAFTA would be a daunting legislative challenge, but abandoning NAFTA would be quite simple; Trump would just need to give six months’ notice. He would be risking the demolition of North American supply chains, fury from farmers and consumers, a potential trade war, and a potential recession. To add insult to self-inflicted injury, tariffs would revert to their pre-NAFTA levels, which were much higher in Mexico and Canada than in the U.S. So in a sense, threatening to withdraw from the deal would be like pointing a gun at his own head and threatening to shoot.

Again, though, Trump could do it if he were willing to face the consequences. Jeb Bush famously derided him as a “chaos candidate,” and there are certainly signs that he might be a chaos president. At the same time, even though the public keeps voting for political change, it tends to get skittish about policy change, and especially policy chaos. It’s not clear yet how willing Trump will be to risk a backlash.

What is clear is that Trump’s frequent promises to help Americans lose weight by eating ice cream will eventually crash into reality. It’s easy to promise that the next NAFTA will include major Mexican concessions and no Mexican retaliation before the negotiations begin, just as it was easy to promise that Republicans were preparing a wonderful replacement to Obamacare before the plan became public. But just as Trump recently discovered that health care was more complex than he realized, he’ll soon discover that trade deals can be complex, too. Not even superpowers get to dictate the outcomes.
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Donald Trump: agent of chaos.
 
In The New Yorker TRUMP KLEPTOCRACY WATCH: AN UPDATE
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On Thursday and Friday, Trump will host Xi Jinping, the President of China, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. After a strained start, relations between the Administration and Beijing appear to have improved in recent weeks. That may be partly because, in late February, China granted preliminary approval for thirty-eight trademarks that the Trump business empire had applied for in the country, opening the way for the company to develop a range of Trump-branded businesses, including hotels and condominiums.

Chinese foreign-ministry officials insisted that the granting of all these trademarks was routine. But intellectual-property lawyers who know China saidthat it was unusual, and noted that it came just a couple of weeks after Trump, in a telephone conversation with Xi, said he would honor Beijing’s “One China” policy regarding Taiwan—a key demand of the Chinese.

Doubtless, this was all a coincidence. Just as it is a coincidence that Trump has sold a lot of property to wealthy Russians, and that his revised trust places virtually no restrictions on his ability to take out money from his businesses. In kleptocratic regimes, coincidences of this sort tend to be common.
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Swampy, swampy catchee Trumpy.
 
On War On The Rocks TIPS FOR MATTIS ON NAVIGATING SWAMPLAND
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I was concerned, for instance, to read in Politico that members of Congress and their staffs believe that Mattis is “burning through political capital,” and that they are “running out of patience.” The story essentially describes a well-intentioned defense secretary desiring to fill his ranks with the best folks possible — their politics notwithstanding — and running into a firewall of resistance at the White House and on Capitol Hill. This, coupled with a front office staff that has reportedly been quick to alienate key senators and their staffers, makes for a perilous political situation. My own conversations with Pentagon and Hill staffers convince me that these dynamics are more accurate than not.

Let’s be clear: Mattis has been given terribly limiting boundaries in his search to fill out his team. We have a White House that refuses to seriously consider any of the nearly 200 Republican national security figures who signed the so-called “Never Trump” letters during the GOP primary campaign. The White House even went so far as to reportedly pressure the Pentagon to rescind an offer to long-time Republican and Asia-hand Patrick Cronin, who was slated to take a non-political civil servant position, because he signed one of the letters (full disclosure: Cronin is a colleague of mine at the Center for a New American Security). Mattis has reportedly considered several well-respected Democrats like Rudy DeLeon and Michele Flournoy, for senior positions. These potential appointments have also (predictably) encountered serious resistance and went nowhere.

Compare this kind of behavior to former President Barack Obama, who nominated his main political rival to be his Secretary of State! While the 2008 Democratic primary campaign is now ancient history, it wasn’t exactly a civil and well-mannered affair. Beyond looking magnanimous and truly presidential, Obama’s move helped heal some serious rifts between key factions of the Democratic Party that could have proven problematic in the run-up to the re-election campaign in 2012. Obama also retained Robert Gates, a Republican, as his first Secretary of Defense. Hiring even a half-dozen so-called “Never Trump-ers” into the administration could go a long way toward shoring up rifts in the GOP and bringing in serious conservative talent to help lead the country. Seeking out the best and brightest regardless of their politics is a sign of strength.
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The very partisan Bush before Obama also was quite capable of working with talented critics. For the posts Mattis is trying to fill there's a very limited pool of people who can be trusted not to fuck things up. They will be just the sort of people who might have been nasty about Candidate Trump as he was (and is) clearly unqualified. Trump's extremely thin skin is actually very odd in a US politician. It's surprising that even a long sheltered life as the feudal head of a privately owned family firm can produce such a delicate ego.
 
In TAC Trumping the Yellow Brick Road
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Douthat is perfectly correct that Trump has no idea what his policies should be, neither in the sense of what will be efficacious nor in the sense of what is politically doable nor even in the broadest sense of what his goals should be. His profound ignorance and incuriosity is one reason why nobody will seriously negotiate with him: they don’t think he knows what he wants nor why he could trade for it.

But it’s far from the only reason. Trump also lacks a heart, and by that I don’t just mean that he has no compassion, an accusation often leveled at right-wing politicians, sometimes quite fairly and sometimes very much not so. So far as I can tell, Trump doesn’t care about anybody with the exception of his elder daughter, and so far as I can tell everybody around him knows it. If he cares about nothing and nobody, then what amorphous goals are the brain trust supposed to elaborate into policy?

Trump also lacks courage. He folds quickly in the face of serious opposition, cannot bear criticism, takes no responsibility for anything, and desperately wants the feeling of being loved without daring to take the slightest emotional risk to get it. What kind of brain trust would actually work for a man so lacking in character? If Trump asked Douthat himself to run an in-house think tank, would he take the gig? If he asked a friend of his, would he recommend he take the job?
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The original House Of Cards phrase "no bottom" comes to mind. Sad!
 
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redsquirrel said:
Then you might as well argue fascism and liberalism are closely related cousins.

The aims of communism are utterly opposed to those of liberalism - one proposes that (free) markets are essential the other proposes that such markets should be done away with altogether, one proposes that the class conflicts is the fundamental driving force of change in the world the other virtually removes it completely. They are theoretically opposed to claim otherwise is nonsense, and that's before even considering the historical opposition between the two. Did liberal governments try to block the Russian revolution? Have liberal governments not attacked striking workers, are liberal governments not at this moment devolving further powers to unelected bodies or to free trade agreements.
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Yes but the term "liberal" is being applied so loosely as to include social democrats. I don't think conservative advocates of neo-liberal economics should be tarred with the same brush as moderate social-democrats. And especially in the US where liberal is a synonym for leftist, there needs to be some clear lines drawn. McCain is a liberal, I guess. Trump could be said to be a liberal too. So is Clinton. The anti-Trump protestors are liberals. In the US context, Sanders is seen as more liberal than Clinton. In this context, raging against liberals as one group is a sloppy and inaccurate use of language, aside from anything else.
 
seventh bullet said:
Is that what redsquirrel has been doing?
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Maybe not, I haven't been paying close attention to who has posted what, but my original gripe wasn't directed at him specifically. Nevertheless, I think the word liberal is applied too generously. I don't think it is fair to attack CRI, someone probably pretty far to the left in relative terms, as a liberal and then defend the tone of venom directed against liberals by conflating them with Thatcher-type liberals.

Oh and incidentally, liberal governments have came down on striking workers, but so have plenty of Marxist governments! Marxist Leninist governments are in fact stricter about striking than liberal governments. I know redsquirrel is not a Marxist-Leninist, but my point is that theoretical and ideological allegiances is no guarantee of actual behaviour. Being nominally Marxist is no guarantee of being on the side of the working class, and having liberal tendencies is also no guarantee that you are going to side with the bourgeoisie. Thinking in these kinds of rigid theoretical terms is also something that is holding back the development of a socialist movement at a moment when the conditions should be ripe.

I'm just bothered by the dismissal of people who deviate slightly from rigid anarcho-Marxist orthodoxy as liberals. I don't think claiming that support for Trump is motivated by racial and ethnic identity means that he or she is denying that economic discontent and class is also a factor and is therefore an elitist liberal. Economic factors are of course significant, but they are not the only factors which shape someone's worldview.
 
CRI said:
Does this mean this is, well "it?" :eek:

North Korean Missile Launch

C8m1qbEXUAM99Le.jpg
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With Trump's current status as a weak leader struggling to achieve anything and with historically low approval ratings, a war with North Korea may be quite likely. It will allow him to portray himself as the strong leader he wants people go see him as.

But I cannot see China being happy about this at all. Could be very dangerous.
 
Rimbaud said:
Maybe not, I haven't been paying close attention to who has posted what, but my original gripe wasn't directed at him specifically. Nevertheless, I think the word liberal is applied too generously. I don't think it is fair to attack CRI, someone probably pretty far to the left in relative terms, as a liberal and then defend the tone of venom directed against liberals by conflating them with Thatcher-type liberals.

Oh and incidentally, liberal governments have came down on striking workers, but so have plenty of Marxist governments! Marxist Leninist governments are in fact stricter about striking than liberal governments. I know redsquirrel is not a Marxist-Leninist, but my point is that theoretical and ideological allegiances is no guarantee of actual behaviour. Being nominally Marxist is no guarantee of being on the side of the working class, and having liberal tendencies is also no guarantee that you are going to side with the bourgeoisie. Thinking in these kinds of rigid theoretical terms is also something that is holding back the development of a socialist movement at a moment when the conditions should be ripe.

I'm just bothered by the dismissal of people who deviate slightly from rigid anarcho-Marxist orthodoxy as liberals. I don't think claiming that support for Trump is motivated by racial and ethnic identity means that he or she is denying that economic discontent and class is also a factor and is therefore an elitist liberal. Economic factors are of course significant, but they are not the only factors which shape someone's worldview.
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What is an anarcho-Marxist orthodoxy? Which orthodoxies of Marxism? M-L is regularly used to dismiss socialists and communists with diverse positions both reformist and radical. You get it on here.

We need to lay definitions and understandings on the table and then move from there. From what I have gleaned from CRI's posts she is very much into the latest iteration of middle class-dominated liberal identity politics that has emerged in recent years. Her refusal to engage with me earlier on any argument about her pigeonhole essentialisation of my own supposedly privileged 'identity' with a childish 'Whatever. ' It suggests to me a dogmatic approach. I think her head nearly exploded when she found out my partner is an immigrant poc and I suggested she shouldn't speak for her.
 
AmeliaE said:
I agree with you. It's scary here these days. I don't know why anyone would want to visit.
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*Waves to a fellow Midwesterner*

I'm originally from Illinois, Southern Illinois. (spoken like James Bond.) about an hour North of the Mississippi/Kentucky River delta. You'll know what that means, even if most here don't. ;)

My late uncle lived in Racine. Was fond of big furry hats. :)
 
Rimbaud said:
Yes but the term "liberal" is being applied so loosely as to include social democrats. I don't think conservative advocates of neo-liberal economics should be tarred with the same brush as moderate social-democrats. And especially in the US where liberal is a synonym for leftist, there needs to be some clear lines drawn.
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I agree, that there's a difference between social democrats and liberals. I disagree that people are applying liberal to social democrats or liberalism to social democracy (though the two blur into one another at the edges).

Rimbaud said:
McCain is a liberal, I guess. Trump could be said to be a liberal too. So is Clinton. The anti-Trump protestors are liberals. In the US context, Sanders is seen as more liberal than Clinton. In this context, raging against liberals as one group is a sloppy and inaccurate use of language, aside from anything else.
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Have posters described Sanders as a liberal? I've not seen anybody do that. Clinton certainly is a liberal, to call her such is neither sloppy not inaccurate. To me the people that use the word inaccurately are those that complain about it's use.

Rimbaud said:
I'm just bothered by the dismissal of people who deviate slightly from rigid anarcho-Marxist orthodoxy as liberals.
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Where has this happened? Who has done this? Come on you if you're going to make claims like this you have to back them up.

CRI has specifically claimed that class is an identity (1, 2, 3) if that's not a liberal position I don't know what is. And she has (1, 2) denied class as a factor.
 
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Rimbaud said:
Maybe not, I haven't been paying close attention to who has posted what, but my original gripe wasn't directed at him specifically. Nevertheless, I think the word liberal is applied too generously. I don't think it is fair to attack CRI, someone probably pretty far to the left in relative terms, as a liberal and then defend the tone of venom directed against liberals by conflating them with Thatcher-type liberals.

Oh and incidentally, liberal governments have came down on striking workers, but so have plenty of Marxist governments! Marxist Leninist governments are in fact stricter about striking than liberal governments. I know redsquirrel is not a Marxist-Leninist, but my point is that theoretical and ideological allegiances is no guarantee of actual behaviour. Being nominally Marxist is no guarantee of being on the side of the working class, and having liberal tendencies is also no guarantee that you are going to side with the bourgeoisie. Thinking in these kinds of rigid theoretical terms is also something that is holding back the development of a socialist movement at a moment when the conditions should be ripe.

I'm just bothered by the dismissal of people who deviate slightly from rigid anarcho-Marxist orthodoxy as liberals. I don't think claiming that support for Trump is motivated by racial and ethnic identity means that he or she is denying that economic discontent and class is also a factor and is therefore an elitist liberal. Economic factors are of course significant, but they are not the only factors which shape someone's worldview.
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I'm not an academic and don't have the in depth knowledge of political ideologies that some here seem to have, and I don't get hung up on labels.

I do come from a long line of rural working class political activists and members of the Democratic Party. In the context of the very socially and politically conservative community where I grew up (Majority Republican, very high church attendance, 98% white, Median household income $38k while US average $51k), my family were considered very left wing. I was and remain off the scale to people there. :)

84% voted Trump. They have backed the Republican candidate in each election since 1964 when Johnson got a slim majority. In communities like this throughout the US, most white working class folk have been happily Republican for generations. They aren't going to change. I don't think people in the UK nor the mostly urban, often better educated supporters of Sanders in the US understand that.
 
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