What Trump wants to talk about:
1. Black sports professionals who won’t stand during the national anthem.
What Trump doesn’t want to talk about:
1. Bob Mueller asking his staff for all kinds of documents.
2. His failure to get funding for his border wall.
3. His failure to repeal Obamacare.
4. His preferred candidate in the Alabama special election losing on Tuesday.
5. The fact that Puerto Rico has no power and may have no power for months and months.
I’d also like to point out that Trump doesn’t want to talk about why some black athletes aren’t standing for the national anthem. He’s says it’s lack of gratitude. He says it’s disrespect. He doesn’t say it’s because a lot of police officers have gotten away with murder.
And, now, as of today, athletes of all colors aren’t standing because they’re protesting Trump and his racism and his disrespect.
He’s a sick person, but his calculation isn’t irrational. He’s forcing a conversation on us where he unfortunately has the opportunity to benefit politically.
Trump thinks this is a win for him and so do some of his most influential supporters:
Yes that's part of the plan. https://t.co/ULE87wdyEF
— Mike Cernovich 🇺🇸 (@Cernovich) September 23, 2017
It could be that he’s taken things too far now and miscalculated. That remains to be seen. But he can’t distract Bob Mueller. He can’t fake legislative victories that aren’t forthcoming. Puerto Rico isn’t going to fix itself. If Luther Strange loses on Tuesday, he’s still going to look weak and stupid.
So, it’s pretty clear that his plan is to continue to racially polarize the electorate while hiding behind the flag. It won’t work forever. Hopefully, it has already stopped working.
I don’t think it’s strategic, and I don’t think it helps Trump. Trump isn’t capable of strategy. What he’s capable of – and quite good at – is finding places and people to attack. He smells weakness and opportunity the way a shark smells blood.
But Trump isn’t so much a president as he is a show – and the show is getting old. He’s repeating himself. He lacks a third act, he doesn’t know how to create an entire narrative, he can only throw bombs. It’s the same old angry blah blah blah week after week. His cultists will never disagree with him, but his behavior makes it impossible to grow his cult. That which isn’t growing is dying.
You have what amounts to a devoted fan base for a TV show that is losing viewers and shedding sponsors. The star of the show doesn’t have another move, another performance, so he just keeps repeating the same show over and over. This will work on evangelicals who’ve been taught from birth to passively accept a weekly reiteration of nonsense, but it has about as much outreach potential as a Jehovah’s Witness coming round your door at 7 AM on hangover Sunday.
He’s stuck at 40% despite a strong economy. Record stock market, dropping unemployment, rising wages and he’s stuck at 40. That’s not winning. Trump is the political equivalent of the Battle of the Bulge from the Nazi side: great surprise, great advance, looks like it’ll roll right on into Antwerp. . . and no, because the defense hangs strong, the advance is stopped, and now comes the counterattack.
My hope from the start has been that Trump would be rejected by the broad American culture like a bad kidney transplant. I believe we’re seeing that.
this idea that Trump turned 60-40 Romney counties into 85-15 Trump counties without a strategy is getting a little old.
Booman, It was a strategy in the same way that hitting your kid to shut him/her up is a strategy. It works, for a while. Then you have to hit a little harder to get the same results. Eventually it might not work at all. There are a lot of similar analogies I could mention. The comment above suggests that the strategy (shtick) is getting old, has its limits, and eventually will fail.
And, in the long run, we don’t know who it quite was that turned those counties that you mentioned. Bernie? Russians? Hillary’s mistakes? Facebook? All of the above?
The reason people anthropomorphize animals is that instinct looks very like intention at times.
If Trump were capable of strategy he’d not have allowed himself to be owned by Vladimir Putin. He would not have kept Flynn. He would not have issued conflicting statements on the Russia thing. He would not have attacked McConnell and Ryan, the only two people with the power to remove him. He would not keep setting bars he cannot clear – the wall, Obamacare. We could go on and on.
When dogs defecate they tend to align on a north-south axis. This does not prove that dogs read compasses. The wasp who lays her eggs in the body of a caterpillar is not gaming out the reproductive cycle. Trump is a bully not a strategist.
OK, that thing about dogs is really a thing.
You got me curious, which got me looking…
Thanks!
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I learned that fabulously irrelevant yet fascinating fact either:
a) From long years of study in a broad range of subjects, a study that has made me the gold standard of genius.
Or,
b) From watching a British game show called Duck Quacks Don’t Echo which I watched in a bootleg I found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxFt8HmZznriTTZWcHhCeVVzQzg/view
Clearly the answer is a).
He thrives because of his instincts.
During the campaign he got rid of his pollsters. He had no need for them. Instead, he threw out chunks of red meat to see which ones would be devoured. Next rally he dropped the ones that didn’t get a good enough response and kept those that were enthusiastically received. This is how his message evolved.
He’s doing the same thing by dissing black athletes who show “disrespect” by kneeling while the national anthem is sung or played. His calling out of the black athletes appeals to racists, “patriots,” and the macho types who approve of force and have no problems with violence. If he doesn’t get too much negative blow back, it will become part of his repertoire.
More and more I have come to believe that the strategy was race. That is what still depresses me about the 2016 election. Trump exploited white identity politics to win.
I agree that white identity distractions will not have any impact on his many problems or his ability to be President. To me the issue is the impact on American politics. Trump may be sent away in disgrace, but the strategy will not go away. Republicans have always disguised the racist streak in their party. If Trump has taught them anything, it is that explicit appeals to the whiteness of whites is a winner at the polls.
We have no choice on our side. We have to follow this distraction every time. We – especially whites among us – have to stand in explicit opposition to explicit racist appeals. If Trump grew to 85-15 because people were voting their skin colour, Democrats will never win them back with explicit opposition, but that can’t be helped. There are some issues without a middle ground.
I get depressed whenever I think Steve Bannon might be right. Every time Trump pushes this button, we must react, and it redounds to Trump’s benefit because most white Americans wanted a racist in the White House. Calling him out as a racist won him votes. It isn’t just that we are forced into this fight – it is that we are forced into a losing fight.
I guess I need more factual evidence that “most” white Americans are blatant racists and will always vote for the candidate that makes open or disguised racist appeals. I think that’s wrong and not based on any evidence. On the contrary, all you had to do was look at voting in mostly white states that weren’t in the Old Confederacy. I don’t even think it’s true of all rural, white Southerners (though it might be 90:10). Time to stop castigating all white Americans as racists.
Most white Americans wanted Donald Trump in the White House even though he made an explicitly racist appeal to the electorate. I did not call his voters blatant racists; I merely said they wanted a racist in the White House. I did not say they would always respond that way – I expressed the fear that they will always respond to explicit racist appeals that way. Finally, I did not castigate all white Americans as racist.
Not all white Americans are racists, but all white Americans benefit from systemic discrimination against minorities.
he did get 58% of the white vote, that’s seems like most to me
It may well be historians will look back on the election of 1988 and conclude it offered a glimpse into the politics that would be.
Trump seems to instinctively want to find the next Willie Horton.
It’s not dumb. It’s not ineffective.
And his approval ratings among likely voters are in the low 40’s. It is far from a foregone conclusion he will lose in 2020.
. . . evil.
And therefore decent folks are obligated to oppose it.
You’re assuming that Mueller’s investigation will not result in any major criminal indictment against Trump or that, even if it does, that a GOP Congress will simply ignore it. (Assuming there’s a GOP Congress after 2018.)
Yes, I am.
Taking the House would take a minor miracle – though it might happen. But getting 67 votes in the Senate?
Not going to happen.
The 1968 election is the watershed. Nixon and Wallace got 56% of the vote and Nixon moved onto the Silent Majority and Southern strategy straight away. He won 1872 in a landslide.
1976 was an exception due to Watergate.
1980 gave us Reagan in Philadelphia and all through the 80’s/90’s pilgrimages to Bob Jones University for Racists, bigots, and misogynists.
1984 – the economy was improving no need to blame minorities for non-existent problems.
1988 – Willie Horton was part of the pattern that Lee Atwater so accurately laid out
1992 – Clinton like Wallace said ‘I won’t be out n****red but in a more subtle way – we got Sista Soljuh
1996 – the Democratic mirror of 1984
2000 – times are still good – what will we do with the surplus?
2004 – it’s the war bigots not the race bigots driving the agenda
2008 – the Bush II debacle is so epic a bi-racial man with a funny sounding Islamic name gets elected. But the racists don’t go gently into the night. Birtherism is born
2012 – The bi-racial man with a white grandfather who is a WWII veteran wins re-election because he sounds infinitely more intelligent than any Republican since Abe Lincoln, he’s not scary and the economy is much better than when the Republicans drove it over the cliff.
2016 – ok – we gave the blacks the presidency for 8 years to prove we aren’t racist (of course most of us are still very racist and didn’t vote for Obama) and we let them gay marry (even though we still hate gays who will spend eternity in Hell) but instead of being grateful they want to shove a probably lesbian, definitely corrupt freaking woman who’s married to that guy we should have summarily executed 20 years ago when he was using the Oval Office as a bordello right, down our throats??!?!?
So, we’re definitely hitting the reset on that shit: build the fucking wall, shoot every black who threatens your idea of white entitlement, kick all those poor and sick people disfavored by the Republican god of money right off of the free ride medical care insurance, and make those sluts have their babies!
It’s just another lesson that 45% of the country thinks the system is no longer rigged for the white middle class and that it should be. It never went away, it just went underground for awhile.
In other words, the zombie apocalypse never really ends. We just keep getting sequels.
Actually the solid South broke in ’64. But I would argue ’68 was over real things.
’88 was lost over a bunch of nonsense. A minor local issue blown up.
’88 showed that arguments over trivial things could be used to destroy your opposition.
Trump and his team may have had a strategy for the Primaries and General Election (although without Comey and Russia’s help we don’t know if his strategy was actually successful), but this administration does not seem to be playing the kind of 12-dimensional chess that we saw from Obama, concerted attempts at triangulation with Clinton, or with the same kind of laser-like focus on Tax cuts and Iraq that we saw with W.
Instead what we have is a president who cannot see beyond the current news cycle. Part of that is because he is lazy and policy bores him, but mostly because the guy is impulsive and reactionary so his team spends all of their time spinning/cleaning up his latest mess until the next time he says/tweets something provocative.
The comments from the Strange Rally (and it really was a strange rally) were intended for the bloodthirsty folks in that room. The guy is so addicted to their cheering/applause/chants, etc… that he will quite literally say or do anything to get that reaction from them. Its his heroin and he’s constantly chasing that dragon.
I find it very hard to believe that Trump went into that rally saying to himself, “You know, this whole Russiar thing is a big distraction from my administration, if I say something inflammatory then everyone will forget about it. Buhlieve me.”
What most likely happened was the guy made some impromptu, unscripted racist remarks that both he and the room full of white supremacists agree with, was shocked to find out that 65% of the country disagreed with him, and then he spends 48+ hours trying to spin it to make himself look good as a result.
There is no premeditation, there are no calculations. It’s all impulse/reaction. The guy just wants to make money off of the position of President and wants everyone to love/adore him.
Good analysis. Thanks.
Trump has failed to repeal Obamacare, build a wall, deport 11 million “illegals” or pass tax cuts, and his chances of doing any of those things is remote. So, he needs distractions.
This is a distraction. The NFL is black. The base hates black people standing up and criticizing police. This is a huge winner for him – with the base.
But, it’s not a long-term issue. The NFL is not going to kneel all season, it’s going to be a short term issue. So, then what? This will fire up the base and enrage the opposition for about 2 weeks, maybe a month. Only this isn’t an election year.
By next year this will be irrelevant and the media will have moved on. What else have you got? Hillary’s emails. Do they even know how utterly pathetic they look still going on about Hillary’s emails? NO, but the rest of the Country does. It’s beyond boring at this point. She lost. So, her emails no longer matter because SHE no longer matters. Out of power.
The fact they are still going on and on about it just makes them look stupid. What else have you got?
Nothing. And Zero accomplishments. It’s going to be a long year for them.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/24/cruz-opposes-latest-obamacare-repeal-243067
Interesting news, as long as we realize that the zombie is not dead until we destroy the head. And the apocalypse is not over until all the zombies are dealt with. At the moment I feel a bit like Shaun in this scene:
Speaking of zombies, Rand Paul is looking for G-C concessions. So this is not over by a long shot.
What Trump is doing is appealing to the only base he has…and finally showing that his base is not driven by economic anxiety. It’s race that got him elected (his announcement speech was about Mexican rapists, let’s not forget), and its race that he hopes will keep him in office.
Kaep is just the excuse, if he had never taken a knee, Trumps voters would have found another excuse for voting for him, and Trump would now be finding another person of color to kick. Once again a reminder….Kaep has not taken a knee, nor spoken about taking a knee, for about 8-9 months.
It’s always been about race. He’s a white supremacist and he has surrounded himself with white supremacists.
Expect an exodus from the White House. Not right away, but some time after the new year.
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Is getting us into a nuclear war with North Korea also part of the plan? That one seems to be even more of a sure bet than the race war he is trying to start at home.
Sure, you can say that it is all strategic. But somehow, Trump’s “strategy” never involves doing anything that is good or productive. At some point you just gotta realize: there are people in the world who enjoy chaos and suffering. And one of those people is President of the United States.
God help us all.
Once Trump realizes that he is posing the race argument (yes, I believe he is losing), then war is all that is left. It’s the last card to be played.
God help the South Koreans, because Trump IS going to bomb the North.
.
God help us all.
Do you think he will use nuclear bombs and commit genocide on the NK or conventional weapons and sort of rough them up a bit?
He’s going to try to provoke them into attacking us or our allies. We saw it today with our air force incursions. If the NKs take the bait the US response will be anyone’s guess, but I doubt it will be diplomatic.
The whole affair is like dipping your toe in a pool of insanity. How far will either go into that sauce to prove their manlihood? It seems to be one of those unknown unknowns.
If I lived in Seoul I’d be packing my bags and bugging out.
If I could.
The Rocket Men say now they can shoot down planes near their borders. Ok then. What next from the Doetard?
What’s next?
He gets them to shoot down a plane near their border.
.
Yes, nice neat progression to war. Will it be nuclear?
Actually do you think Kim will shoot down a plane not inside the border? I doubt it, but being crazy ……
‘even if they are not in our airspace’
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He wouldn’t dare! Would he?
I don’t think he’s crazy, he’s been fairly rational if you start with the premise of his only goal being to stay in power and NK seeing the US as a hostile power (aren’t we at this point?)
Criticizing black sports pros is a perfect red meat issue for his base because it hits all the issues near and dear — wealthy, inferior blacks who are “undeserving” because they “hate America” and “our” culture as represented by the flag.
For Trump, there is no calculation or strategy; the hatred is genuine and heartfelt. If strategy were involved there would be some realization that while this may animate his base, its going to harden the opposition. And judging by the response, it has. But Trump doesn’t care about growing his base. And he doesn’t care about keeping in good stead with McConnell and Ryan. He sees his salvation and redemption in that deeply bigoted third of the country who he feels will ultimately save him from retribution, including that which is sure to be visited upon him by Mueller.
Everything Trump does is to appeal to his base, which is why his approval ceiling is at 40%. As he is that’s the best he can achieve, and on his worst moments, when his actions are sometimes too ridiculous even for his base, or when he crosses them attempting to be “presidential,” his approval drops. But it will never be above 40% because Trump does nothing to appeal to anyone else.
People are on fire with their comments today. Great stuff.
Trump has a very sophisticated, multi-layered strategy that closely mirrors Faux News/Rush Limbaugh:
Trump has a proven game plan that has yielded overachieving results to the point he was elected. He keeps executing it with predictable results with his base. I don’t think he will change it or stop it because he doesn’t really have any vision of what to do with the power he’s acquired beyond gritting for his businesses.
He won’t run in 2020 and declare he’s been the greatest president ever. And if his legacy is a 7-2 conservative Supreme Court majority, the Republican base will absolutely agree with him.
Remember the USFL. the donald was owner of the NJ team. He tried to bully the NFL into a merger and failed. Then the USFL failed. Don’t you sense the donald trying to get his revenge?
What Trump wants to talk about:
1. Black sports professionals who won’t stand during the national anthem.
Trump isn’t the only one embarrassing themselves on that matter. Corn should know better why athletes originally took a knee. It started before Cheeto became President.
Is that what he is saying here? I’m not so sure. My concern for a while has been that what Corn says is actually going to come to pass. Trump wants it to be seen as opposition to him, and he might well get a helping hand from the media, who have memories shorter than Trump’s stubby little fingers. Yes, there is a reason for the kneel, which everyone seems to be slowly starting to forget. The danger is that the focus of it actually becomes opposition to Trump. And look for Trump to do everything he can to make that a reality. Along with a kneel, people need to continue to talk about WHY they are kneeling. If they don’t, then Trump and his cadre of fellow racists will do it for them. And it won’t be the narrative those doing the kneeling will desire.
Is that what he is saying here?
Given his past? I’d say so. He obviously didn’t qualify or explain it there.
You may be right. I don’t really follow David Corn much.
He used to enjoy hippie-punching in his previous job, before he worked for MoJo.
Corn has been “off” for a while.
Kap established the symbolism of “the kneel” before Trump was a big thing. Those that in their hearts are pro-equality were with Kap from day one. Sadly, that was hardly a majority, even here.
Trump is the one that tried to make it about Trump and he’s losing and losing it.
“Those that in their hearts are pro-equality were with Kap from day one. Sadly, that was hardly a majority, even here.”
Oh. Is that based on all the vicious racist commentary you’ve been reading here?
Don’t you ever tire of concocting erroneous crap to ascribe to me?
Sure didn’t see you or more than a couple of others here standing with Kap on Aug 29, 2016. Supporting equality — opposing racism, homophobia, etc. — means immediately standing with those who have the courage to protest inequality. Not silently taking months, years, decades to come around to agreeing with with them.
. . . “ascribe” anything to you.
It did imply (to me, anyway, perhaps because I had the same reaction) that your rather slanderous statement lacked any evidentiary support. (And what you supplied in “response” was . . . well . . . ridiculous.)
Slanderous would have been interpreting silence as racism. Which I most definitely didn’t do. Nor thought. In part because racist/non-racist isn’t binary as the IAT project demonstrates. Being formed and living in a culture where racism exists in strong to weak forms means that none of us escapes that predisposition. It why I chose to use the principle of equality that when held can go a long way to over-riding that predisposition.
Gets called out for ascribing erroneous crap to people in the community:
o.O
Do you never tire of flinging troll ratings on those that don’t share your conventional, strictly centrist Democratic Party viewpoint? Like a little martinet.
Oh, I didn’t realize responding to your insulting misrepresentations with a troll rating with was the Centrist Democratic Veiwpoint™.
Amazing how many behaviors seem to fall under that rubric.
Hiding your trolling behavior behind the skirts of your tendentious ideological labels fools nobody.
If you didn’t respond to Marie’s diary, it means you didn’t support Kaep.
Bullshit. It was a sample — the only one that appeared here back then — and that’s how I read it. And read it conservatively as not much support for Kap at that time. Read nothing more into the overwhelming silence on this issue at that time.
Not the least bit surprising that once Trump weighed in, that silence would disappear.
The committed rightwingers (faux patriots, racists, misogynists, etc.) — approximately 20% — always weigh in early and noisily on a new issue. The lonely lefties — approximately 10% — also weigh in early but due to the disparity in media access, their noise isn’t much heard. It’s as if the others wait for authority figures to tell them which way to go and if it’s safe to go at all. On issues of principle, some on the left are able to state where they stand before Trump defines it for them; although I’m not sure there are any on the right would know bupkis if Rush, etc. weren’t out there spoonfeeding the answer to them.
The most analogous precedent for Kap’s protest was Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Peter Norman Mexico City 1968 with Olympic Project for Human Rights. Way before your time. In the court of public opinion, it was a small blip; only rising to that 20% v. 10% ratio. But that 20% had bigger megaphones and was sufficient for Smith and Carlos to be subjected to death threats and to destroy Newman’s athletic career.
MLK, Jr. and M. Ali instructed and demonstrated how to cognitively and quickly get at the principle involved in a protest. Thus, and even though I was still young, it didn’t take much effort to determine where I stood wrt Mexico City ’68. (While not viewed as a protest, principles were also at stake in The Battle of the Sexes. And it was fun as I happily collected my winnings from a bet with my tennis teacher.)
Yes, I doubt if any major US reporter gave Smith and Carlos more than highly negative coverage. And Howard Cosell, who was there for ABC Sports in Mexico City and might have been expected to give the two athletes at least a fair shake, was presumably busy covering boxing not track and field.
For those of you too young to have seen it, the extremely eventful ’68 Mexico Olympics were covered (mostly) live back to the US, and in terms of covering the athletic competition, ABC did rather well. The most controversial Games at the time since Berlin ’36, with Avery Brundage the head of the IOC (in ’36 he headed the USOC, coming under criticism for being soft on the Nazi govt) coming down hard on Smith and Carlos.
Those games started on a very negative note, when a day or two before the opening, Mexican police gunned down hundreds of protesting university students, which fact I don’t recall our broadcast media adequately exploring, as the Mexican govt sought mightily to cover it up and severely downplay the number of dead. The US media and ABC did far better covering live the tragic events at Munich in ’72.
Cronkite moment?
And right on schedule we have the return of the Dixie Chicks record smashing, French wine dumping, and freedom fries eating nincumpoops. Burning the crap the NFL suckered them into buying and vowing to boycott one of their life’s major pleasures.
Have a song guys:
that’s why the tweet includes the word “now.”
Trump feels like the Charles I of our age
Hope I’m wrong
The Stuarts haunted the British body politic for nearly a century after Charles I was beheaded.
Even today Charles I is regarded in some quarters as a martyr to the unwelcome forces of change. The Society of Charles, King and Martyr (SCKM for short — honestly, I’m not making this up), has adherents in the U.S., particularly, I believe, in Green Bay, WI and Western Michigan. I can imagine #45 becoming the focus of a similar cult.
I think this mentally ill individual is only capable of seeing his presidency as a reality show and capable of measuring it by its “ratings”, i.e., if everyone is talking about him – even if they see him as the villain – he’s on top of the ratings. By that metric, and no other, he’s been a tremendous success ever since he went down that silly escalator and started talking about rapists and murderers. It never ends – he dominates every news cycle (usually in a negative way) and if anyone or any event threatens to take attention away, he does something like this. It’s like rock stars who get so much adulation on stage that it’s depressing to go back to their lives so they have to OD on drugs and sex and trashing hotel rooms.
Most of Trump’s motives stem from a constant desire for revenge. He wants to shit on the NFL for his own failure as a franchise owner back in the 80’s. Remember this sad sordid tale via Wikipedia?
United States Football League[edit]
United States Football League rules (unlike the NFL) allowed athletes to turn professional after their junior seasons rather than wait for their collegiate class to graduate a year later. Further, the rules allowed him to choose where to play, allowing him to maximize his endorsement income. He stated, “I don’t know if I would want to play in the NFL unless it was for the two New York teams or the Dallas Cowboys.” Walker signed with the New Jersey Generals in 1983, owned by Oklahoma oil tycoon J. Walter Duncan, who after the 1983 season sold the team to real-estate mogul Donald Trump. Walker attracted only one major promotional offer, a joint project of McDonald’s and Adidas.
The ignoramus retweets:
Tillman would have stood with Kap (but that didn’t stop McCain and Bush from cynically holding Tillman up as a man that was with them):
The one very predictable thing about Scalia was that he was a 1st Amendment fundamentalist, possibly his only redeeming quality wrt the US Constitution. (Not so much so on several other constitutional amendments.)