The Trump presidency

[CrabbedOne]

On Politico Mega-donor urged Bannon not to resign

...
The tension between the two is indicative of a larger power struggle in the White House as Kushner’s prominence and responsibility have ballooned. He has helped to expand the authority of two senior West Wing officials who, like him, are less ideological in nature: former Goldman Sachs executives Gary Cohn, who is now chairman of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser for strategy. The national security directive removing Bannon from the NSC explicitly authorized Powell to attend the National Security Council's Principals' and Deputies' Committee meetings.

The “big fight is between nationalists and the West Wing Democrats,” said a person familiar with Bannon’s thinking.

“You have these New York interlocutors who are just not political and who want to think that they’re above the way Washington thinks, but if anybody is allied on delivering on things that Trump ran on, it’s Bannon and Reince and the vice president,” said the Republican who has spoken to Bannon recently.

Kushner has also told people that he thinks Mercer as well as her father, the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer – who poured $13 million into a super PAC that supported Ted Cruz’s campaign in the Republican primary, and came around to Trump after he won the nomination – have taken too much credit for their role in his victory, and has expressed misgivings about their go-it-alone approach to outside spending boosting Trump’s agenda.

“If Bannon leaves the White House, Bekah’s access and influence shrinks dramatically,” said the GOP operative who talks to Mercer.

 

[CrabbedOne]

On Panoply Trumpcast: Gorka, Bannon, and the View from Hungary

A podcast on Trump's favourite Britisher and the latter's long affair with the Hungarian far right.

 

[Yossarian]

Tuesday was the deadline for contractors to submit border wall proposals - it sounds like it must have come from the Onion, but one company has submitted an apparently serious proposal to store nuclear waste in trenches along the wall.



Trump's Wall Proposals Include Solar Panels and... Nuclear Waste?

 

[CrabbedOne]

Tuesday was the deadline for contractors to submit border wall proposals - it sounds like it must have come from the Onion, but one company has submitted an apparently serious proposal to store nuclear waste in trenches along the wall.

View attachment 103700

Trump's Wall Proposals Include Solar Panels and... Nuclear Waste?

No mutant piranha???

 

[CrabbedOne]

On TSG IntelBrief: Trump’s Revisions Human Rights Policy

Trump's whole attitude to the refugee question is basically a refutation of inalienable Human Rights in favour of the primacy of the nation state. It's also a depressingly popular act of cowardice denying folk fleeing war zones that Trump often intends to "bomb the shit out of" on the off chance some might be undetectable terrorists. After that warmly embracing Sisi's nasty little regime in the name of the GWOT is a small step.

 

[Septimus Rufiji]

No mutant piranha???

or sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads?

 

[CrabbedOne]

On War On The Rocks ONCE MORE OVER THERE: EUROPEAN SECURITY AT THE END OF AMERICAN CENTURY

...
Today, though, memories of that history are fading on both sides of the Atlantic. Facing new challenges at home, the U.S. public and the new administration appear less committed to underwriting European security, as indicated by the Donald Trump’s view of NATO as a service provided by the United States for which the Europeans should pay. Meanwhile, the specters of nationalism and authoritarianism are again stalking Europe. Russia has reverted to the role of spoiler, seeking through a mixture of disinformation, illicit financial flows and intimidation to fracture European unity and drive a wedge between Europe and the United States. Most Americans continue to support U.S. global leadership, but support is lowest among young adults with no memory of Europe’s dark history. Trump’s ambivalence about NATO and the European Union, meanwhile, is causing questions about both friends and foes about U.S. commitments.

In many ways, European geopolitics is reverting to its pre-1945 form, with a weak and divided Europe facing an aggressively revisionist power in Russia. That prospect is worrying for a host of reasons. If European states lose faith in U.S. security guarantees, they will take matters into their own hands, recreating earlier security dilemmas. German rearmament (particularly its development of nuclear weapons) would be only marginally more comforting to some other states — in this case Russia — than it was in the early 1930s. Questions about U.S. commitments could also spark Russian efforts to test them, creating a recipe for miscalculation analogous to the crisis of July 1914. And while Vladimir Putin may not be seeking hegemony in Europe the way Wilhelm II, Hitler or Stalin did, Russia’s ambitions are incompatible with the idea of a Europe whole, free, and at peace, and with U.S. security interests, and they can only be checked by a strong U.S. commitment to maintaining European security.

Reluctance to bear the costs of Europe’s security are one indicator that the curtain may be coming down on the American century. They are also in keeping with attitudes both before the U.S. entered World War I, and after the November 1918 armistice. Yet the past 100 years have vindicated the worries of both Roosevelts: Europe’s insecurity is a danger to the United States, and in times of crisis only the United States can save Europe from its demons.

Trump as the blot messily terminating the interventionist American Century is looking a bit less likely.

With Trump's reset with Russia collapsing in just a couple of months I do suspect his daring dinner party banter stance on the genius of Trump making NATO into a transactional US business opportunity is going to get stubbed out by boringly earnest Washington Consensus folk like Gen Mattis and McMasters.

 

[brogdale]

Time Until Trump Leaves Office - Countdown

From Perry Anderson's Jan/Feb NLR piece "Passing the Baton"...

There is a further, obvious obstacle to reconfiguring the Democrats with even the weakest ‘social’ and hyphen before their name. Standing in the way of that is not only the whole history of the party since the inception of the Cold War, and its contemporary machinery of billionaire donors and fixers, but its principal icon. Obama, still resident in Washington, will be active—behind the scenes or from a cloud above them—in lending the party he neglected in office suitable guidance and energy to ensure the Democrats remain a congenial, avowedly middle-of-the-road vehicle for capital in 2020. He, not Trump, is likely to be the leading impediment to any expansion of a Sanders-plus insurgency uniting downwardly mobile millennials, hard-pressed workers and restive minorities on any more radical and genuinely internationalist platform of a sort that would merit the term left. Without keeping him steadily in its sights, there is small chance of that. Not only because of the position he will continue to enjoy within the party, but the legend that has accrued around him. The panegyrics of his departure, combined with the execration of his successor, risk a political padlock on anything better than what he supplied. The traditional reason always given for left accommodation to the DP was that it was a lesser evil. With Trump converted into evil of an unimaginable magnitude—fascism round the corner, if not already in charge—the halo around Obama annuls the argument: this is good against evil, pure and simple. How far this ideological effect reaches, and how long it persists, are beyond current calculation. But certainly, penitent nostalgia for a ruler criticized in power, now rued out of it, is liable to afflict much of the left for some time.

​

The challenge for the left will be as much bound up with a 'deified' notion of what preceded it, as much as the Trump Presidency.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

There is in fact not much wrong with the economy in most of America he was left by Obama. I've noticed Republicans are now talking much more positively about it and credit Trump with what are still the downstream effects of Obama policies. There's no quick fix for the low output areas that voted heavily for Trump. His voters probably won't blame Trump for not changing much at least not till his second term. Trump may even be able to pump up the speculative bubble that's forming by deregulating. The suckers who bought his voodoo economics pitch mostly won't admit to themselves they've been duped until its too late.

There's a lot those "low output" areas could do instead of pursuing dying industries. They have consistently voted for people who have their priorities out of order. People like Sam Brownback of Kansas who gutted education to give billionaires tax cuts, in the hope that it'll "trickle down." They have voted against everything that would help them in the long run, such as education and infrastructure, in favor of living in a past that is already gone. You can manage change, or be managed by it. You certainly can't forestall it.

 

[Idris2002]

An American brezhnev

be careful what you wish for

 

[CrabbedOne]

There's a lot those "low output" areas could do for themselves instead of pursuing dying industries that aren't coming back. They have consistently voted for people who have their priorities out of order. People like Sam Brownback of Kansas who gutted education to give billionaires tax cuts. They have voted against everything that would help them in the long run such as education and infrastructure in favor of living in a past that is already gone. You can manage change, or be managed by it. You certainly can't forestall it.

Trouble is at back of this is cultural issues and that's all about traditional male identity being about brawn not brains. Male pride being linked to being the hard working main provider in a steady blue collar job. These folks often appear to distrust book learning. Trump supporters polled really high on disliking teachers, academics and other experts. The men are often are so poorly educated they're not even functionally literate. You've got a rapidly changing labour market that actually requires more schooling years and less time in High School hitting the books rather than fixating on sporting prowess. How are they going to cope as automation moves in? And what brains there are are being drained out to thriving "high output" areas.

The Dem education focus may be a rational response but it's not what they want to hear. It's like asking them to transform into something more like the often Asian swots that provide the intellectual muscle in silicon valley. It's how the Clintons sold handling the downsides of NAFTA. If you are a middle aged bloke who sees his production line job disappear the futures more likely flipping burgers on minimum wage than being expensively retrained. They're 20th century conservatives being managed by accelerating 21st century changes. Trump promising to magically roll the future back rather than them undergo a painful cultural change. It's as delusional as building a wall to keep the Mexicans out that the Mexicans will pay for but Trump's snake oil pitch resonates.

This is only going to get worse as AI starts winnowing procedural white collar jobs as well.

It'll shock class warriors on here but a lot off lower middle class Republicans and have bought into the idea well rewarded "Wealth Creators" will raise all boats. The rise of Trump is a tribute to decades of such Club For Growth propaganda.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Obama also lost the popular vote to Romney.

Say what?

List of United States presidential elections by popular vote margin - Wikipedia

 

[camouflage]

be careful what you wish for

Eurgh! How horrible, a fat white old man, disgusting. I dare you to kiss your screen right now, yuk!

It really does require this sort of image to drive the point home, ugly old white men are self-evidently evil because... well, just look at this one. Good thing we have body-shaming as a means to know who is good or bad.

 

[8den]

Devin Nunes steps aside from House intelligence committee's Russia inquiry

Nunes has apparently recused himself from the House investigation because of "leftwing activists".

 

[Teaboy]

Tuesday was the deadline for contractors to submit border wall proposals - it sounds like it must have come from the Onion, but one company has submitted an apparently serious proposal to store nuclear waste in trenches along the wall.

View attachment 103700

Trump's Wall Proposals Include Solar Panels and... Nuclear Waste?

Looks like they knocked that up on an old Amiga. Certainly trust a company with a multi-billion dollar contract and nuclear waste that had graphics skills like this.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Devin Nunes steps aside from House intelligence committee's Russia inquiry

Nunes has apparently recused himself from the House investigation because of "leftwing activists".

The damage is already done.

He was like a virtual suicide bomber, sent in to blow up the committee.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

IT ISN’T ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trump’s shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety — despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.

Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isn’t surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. It’s difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as “racial resentment.” The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?

Facts, however, as a rather more illustrious predecessor of President Trump once remarked, “are stubborn things.” Interestingly, on the very same day that Sanders offered his evidence-free defense of Trump voters in Boston, the latest data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) was released.

Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that “whether it’s good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trump’s appeal.” For example, he says, “in 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.”

The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask “just one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?” Because, he said, “if they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.” This is economic anxiety? Really?

Other surveys and polls of Trump voters found “a strong relationship between anti-black attitudes and support for Trump”; Trump supporters being “more likely to describe African Americans as ‘criminal,’ ‘unintelligent,’ ‘lazy’ and ‘violent’”; more likely to believe “people of color are taking white jobs”; and a “majority” of them rating blacks “as less evolved than whites.” Sorry, but how can any of these prejudices be blamed on free trade or low wages?

Top Democrats Are Wrong: Trump Supporters Were More Motivated by Racism Than Economic Issues

 

[J Ed]

This Syria thing puts pro-war Clintonites and Never Trumpers in an odd position, doesn't it?

 

[DotCommunist]

It'll shock class warriors on here

yes you are really blowing minds here

 

[DotCommunist]

it may shock some bourgeois arch commenters to know that some of us live down here and are well aware of the diversity of opinions and votes, including self defeating ones, short sighted ones and so on. Glib handwaving analysis will of course solve all this. Wry chuckles all round.

 

[8den]

Well I do expect a second term is obsessing folk in the West Wing even more than immiserating out groups. The incumbent President usually has an advantage. Looking at the pro-Trump media he is still being hailed as the Messiah. Trump appears to be uniquely incapable but that's not so bad if you lead a mostly Dixie orientated party that hates the Federal government. Being an utterly ineffectual pussy may even be a plus. He'll appoint right leaning judges to the Supreme Court and probably aided by bluedog Dems will pass some elite tax cuts. That can get him over the bar. Getting slapped down by Putin, Xi or Khamenei could also have a rallying effect.

You've been perpetually wrong on so many things on this thread, so no harm in keeping the trend going.

 

[butchersapron]

You've been perpetually wrong on so many things on this thread, so no harm in keeping the trend going.

Landslide!!!

 

[camouflage]

I think Trump is getting ready to do something really stupid in Syria.

 

[CrabbedOne]

it may shock some bourgeois arch commenters to know that some of us live down here and are well aware of the diversity of opinions and votes, including self defeating ones, short sighted ones and so on. Glib handwaving analysis will of course solve all this. Wry chuckles all round.

In which of the many Rust Belt anarcho-Marxist communes are you located?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Yeah; play right into the hand of the Russians, who want the US re-confirmed as their enemy.

 

[J Ed]

In which of the many Rust Belt anarcho-Marxist communes are you located?

Who was it who won most of the rustbelt states in the Dem primaries again?

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I think Trump is getting ready to do something really stupid in Syria.

If it isn't Syria, it'll be North Korea where he really fucks up.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

If it isn't Syria, it'll be North Korea where he really fucks up.

I agree; I don't think Trump has a clue about Kim: he wants to 'solve' North Korea.

 

[bimble]

If it isn't Syria, it'll be North Korea where he really fucks up.

Not Iran? I dunno, I think he has options.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I agree; I don't think Trump has a clue about Kim: he wants to 'solve' North Korea.

It's not really Kim he needs to worry about. It's Xi.