I hadn’t realized that there are now twenty woman on the record using their real names who have accused Donald Trump of one form or another of unwanted sexual contact, until I saw that Mother Jones had updated their list. Some of these accusations are more egregious and serious than others, but if I imagine what the woman in my life would do if she heard I’d done any of them, it’s pretty clear that they’d all be relationship enders. Even the act of repeatedly barging into women’s dressing rooms while people are changing would earn me deserved contempt and a swift boot. And deservedly so, in my opinion.
That Trump does these things routinely while supposedly in a monogamous marriage is another indication of how he uses his wealth as a weapon. A relationship with a woman who had the financial wherewithal to walk at the first sign of disrespect would not only not interest him, it wouldn’t be of any use to him.
And that’s what I think of when I see cabinet members and senators making obsequious remarks about Trump’s greatness. They are acting like kept women, which is the precise kind of relationship that Trump seeks out or tries to arrange.
It doesn’t work very well on the international stage, though, which is why it didn’t go over well when he told the members of the United Nations last week that they needed to vote with him or he’d retaliate against both the offending countries and the U.N. itself.
I think our challenge as a nation right now is to figure out a way that Trump can be held accountable for his actions without the brunt of the punishment coming down on the rest of us. We’re in an abusive relationship and we need the wherewithal to walk away and the self-respect to break things off.
You’ve frequently made this comparison but I just don’t think it fits or is appropriate given the context of the moment and the guy we are talking about. Further, if we want to actually make the comparison, it’s not that that we need the wherewithal to walk away or even self-respect. It’s ending it and getting away in a way where we don’t end up dead.
So… like a kept woman in an abusive relationship with a hostile and dangerous man. Seems to fit.
Yes, the country is in an abusive relationship. Yes, the Rep leadership and Trump followers are enabling and encouraging him to continue his abuse.
And while that abuse is happening the world stage is adjusting. Haley’s UN announcement opened doors for China to position herself for a larger role in global power by taking up the slack we just left.
Russia may look to disrupt our institutions but China calculates to grab power as we weaken. The current infrastructure objectives of China are something this globe has never seen and they’re leaving the US in the dust https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/business/china-railway-one-belt-one-road-1-trillion-plan.html
A fitting analogy, and just as in an abusive relationship, a very important consideration is the same as it is for the abused partner: how to end it and break free without the equivalent of burning the house down.
As for Trump’s wealth, its been a double-edged sword. Lacking common decency and any apparent positive personal characteristics, he uses it to hold hostage the “love” of his wife and children, and the “admiration” of those lusting after it. On the other hand it fuels his delusion of greatness, that he owes it all to his own personal accomplishment and superiority.
As for accountability, our institutions in the hand of Trump’s enablers, the GOP, has been completely neutered at this point. Mueller could turn up solid evidence of Trump felonies, the kind that would put a democratic president under the damned jail, but count on the GOP to ignore it.
The ONLY solution right now is the vote, and the republicans are hard at work trying to undermine that as well. We have to overwhelm them at the polls in sheer numbers to great for their voter fraud schemes to overcome. Every effort, every last resource has to be put into getting out the vote in all 50 states.
Trump poisons everything, he corrupts everything.
He surrounds himself with greedy, corrupt individuals for a simple reason……you cannot con an honest person, and Trump is above all else, a conman.
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The analogy seems misplaced. We are not victims. We are a nation that’s not particularly educated and that doesn’t know enough to pay attention to politics. That more than anything is what opened the door to a faker like Trump. I don’t think this is driven by deep childhood trauma in the way that fucked up relationships so often are. We’re victims of our own apathy. In other words, we did this to ourselves.
The abuser for over 20 years is the Republican Party. Trump is just their current messenger. Before him it was Cheney/Addington/Rove/Delay and before them it was Reagan. And even before that it was Nixon/Buchanan/Buckley.
These people have never had the basic respect for the fundamentals of American democracy. Never.
But starting with Gingrich the lack of respect by Buckley has evolved to outright public contempt.Trump is just the latest vehicle the Republican base has chosen to amplify their contempt and broaden their targets while fulfilling their insecure, ignorant bullying nature.
It’s been a cult for a long time and the truly S&M relationship is between the 1% and the ignorant white base that submits to them.
Actually, we’re more like the Mom’s kids with an abusive boyfriend.
During a Christmas gathering I ran into a very nice acquaintance — a woman of a certain age who works in the healthcare industry — and was taken aback to discover (from her relatives) that she’s still a stalwart Trump supporter.
I knew she was conservative (I remember her as the sole Bush voter in this particular gang of friends), but I was genuinely surprised by her continuing Trump support. I never got into a discussion with her — and her friends and family tended to warn everyone away from getting into politics, which we were happy to do; it was yet another social gathering at which, by mutual tacit consent, the word “Trump” was never spoken — but I kind of wish we had.
Because I don’t get it. This isn’t an idiot; not an “economically distressed white male rural voter” or however we’re supposed to understand Trump’s victory (in that framework that Digby and others have argued against so insistently). This is a well-educated, mild-mannered, professional woman from Upstate New York, erudite and cultured, and fully capable of having any non-political discussion you want to have (opera; science; movies; literature; what have you)…but she gets up every day glad that Trump is president.
There are lots and lots of people like this. And we need to understand where they’re coming from and how they think. They aren’t the ignorant, sheltered, “brainwashed” FOX viewers we generally discuss here; it’s a different phenomenon entirely. They see the tweets; they watched the ACA repeal attempt and the Comey firing and all of it; and they still think this is just a great set of affairs. A year later, I don’t feel any closer to understanding it (and, I’m not interested in any facile explanations about “tax cuts” or whatever; it’s just not that simple).
Steer the conversation toward football players taking a knee or crime in the “inner city” and you’ll understand it just fine.
I thought of that, and you’re probably right, but I just can’t get past the way that so many utterly-disqualifying factors get overlooked.
I had the same problem with Reagan and with Bush II, but they look like Roosevelt or Churchill compared to Trump. Losing every debate; having no understanding of the government; screwing up every legislative negotiation; stripping away all traces of dignity and competence from the office…I just can’t understand overlooking these things; it makes no sense to me. It’s like recommending a surgeon who never went to medical school, just because he vocally supports certain controversial approaches to invasive medicine.
It makes no sense to you because it’s pure ingroup/outgroup tribal identity politics and you don’t think that way.
You saw the exact same behavior on the left side of the political spectrum from the so-called-progressive folk who campaigned for Trump against Hillary because their primary identity wasn’t ideological (I am left/liberal), but tribal (I must enforce ingroup/outgroup boundaries).
It’s all four-legs good, two legs bad.
What are you talking about? Liberals/Democrats who campaigned for Trump? I never saw that or read about it, anywhere, ever.
Anyway the “tribal identity” concept doesn’t work to explain what I’m describing.
I’m sure you’ve been here on Booman long enough to remember several self-proclaimed “progressives” campaigning for Trump. Not, of course “Democrats”, because Democrats are outgroup.
And yes, tribal identity does explain why Trump’s flaws are ignored by his supporters, erstwhile erudition be damned. The so-called flaws are seen as fake, slander, or overstated by the hostile outgroup. Or they actually become virtues thanks to the cognitive dissonance that comes from his status as an ingroup member.
First, no, I’ve never encountered any progressives campaigning for Trump, anywhere, ever.
Second, what you’re saying has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I’ve been very careful to describe, in detail, a specific sort of Trump supporter, snd you’re ignoring all that to make your point about “tribal identity.”
The Trump supporter you described precisely fits the type of person I’m talking about. I have several acquaintances who fit your description to a T. Educated, cultured, rational, and when you scratch the surface of their political views it’s pure racially motivated tribal identity. Us vs Them where Them is Democrats but, you know, not YOU, you’re an OK type of Democrat, but THOSE Democrats, with their welfare and their food stamps and their young bucks buying T-Bone steaks.
There is too much intermingling of ‘Trump’ with ‘Republican’.
Trump was the biproduct, the goal was Republicans. Any Republican would do.
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Just to make this a separate thread, of course you saw self-described progressives campaigning to elect Trump. They’re mostly hiding in the diaries now but they were plenty active during the election when they had the chance to campaign.
At bare bones minimum, there was a subset here that was extremely active in the run-up to the election and during the immediate aftermath who spent enormous effort to dampen support for HRC. Many did couch their rhetoric in ways that came across as “progressive” of a sort, but buzzwords like “deep state” and “WWC” along with healthy doses of both-siderism were part of the conversation. Enormously frustrating to say the least. We had a few vocal Stein advocates as well. One of the nadirs here was in the diaries though – when HRC was dealing with pneumonia on the campaign trail and several of our so-called progressive “betters” were calling for her replacement immediately as she allegedly showed signs of neurological damage. We had folks posting links to articles that in hindsight likely were based on Russian-bot-fed propaganda. Another loved to use articles from Jared Kushner’s New York Observer to dampen HRC support (as a form of propaganda – articles from such places can be quite educational in their own right, but that was not the poster’s intent).
I suppose we could split hairs about whether these folks were actively campaigning for Trump, but I think we can at least minimally agree that they did our candidate and our party no favors, especially at a time when we needed all hands on deck. Marduk is on point especially with regard to most of the remaining culprits largely congregating in a handful of the diaries these days. Perhaps they do less damage that way.
More importantly, they get far less visibility that way.
Our Progressive Betters are, like the Greens, always doing what’s best, electorally, for the GOP.
This is an enormous distinction that you’re both trying to gloss over as “hair-splitting.”
To say that even the most fervent anti-Hillary types here on BooMan tribune, who complained about her, and/or supported Sanders, were “actively campaigning for Trump” goes beyond hyperbole or exaggeration; it’s just totally wrong in every way. I stand by what I said: nobody on this site — and certainly no “progressives” — wanted Trump to win or supported him in any way.
That’s “self-described progressive”. Actual ideology has nothing to do with it. Trump’s victory was a necessary validation of their tribal identity. They campaigned for it, they celebrated it, and they defended and continue to defend its legitimacy.
My guess is we’ll have to agree to disagree here. I doubt either one of us is going to budge from our particular perspective based on the conversation thread as it’s developed so far. So it goes.
You’re telling me there are people on BooMan tribune who wanted Trump to win?
What I am saying is that it sure looked that way to me at the time, and I have seen scant evidence to convince me to the contrary. People can actively want a terrible candidate like Trump to win without just saying “I want Trump to win.” Some may find it “necessary” to bring about a more perfect Democratic party (whatever that is supposed to end up meaning). Some may think that the US is entirely bankrupt as a system and needs to be burned down and replaced. Others might view Trump’s rise to power as “penance” for our military misdeeds as a nation. Others simply had “hurt fee fees” because Sanders didn’t get nominated. And we did actually have some apparent Russian bots as I recall, who also did what they could to sabotage (remember Adelbrand, for example?). Whatever the motivation, the actions over the last year and a half spoke volumes at least to me, and apparently a subset of other regulars. It is quite possible – and perhaps at this point even probable – that we could each go back, comb through all the old archives, read the same text, and still draw different conclusions and given this particular thread so far, I would not be terribly surprised. We’re coming at this quite possible from such different angles, and I really am concerned we’ll only talk past each other at this point. I do know what I saw, I do know who I was arguing against at the time, and I did form an impression of what those words implied. That set of experiences will live with me for a very long time.
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No. He’s telling you there were people who didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win. If that meant Trump won, oh well. I saw no evidence they actively supported Trump tho.
IIRC, there was another Democratic candidate, at least for a while. Maybe some of you can remember. Many of us here supported that candidate, and perhaps some of you are confusing him with Trump — after all, they both campaigned against Hillary.
There were a number of community members who slagged Clinton and the Democrats from August to November 2016. I don’t recall those criticisms as being constructive, at all. A few of those same community members actually complained to BooMan that he was putting up too many anti-Trump posts during that time. A couple of those community members are still around. Good riddance to those who have drifted away.
People who came to a progressive blog to discourage support for Trump’s only viable opponent were organizing to bring about Trump’s victory. None said “I like Trump and want him to win,” but browbeating progressives and attempting to fill their heads with garbage about Clinton when the only alternative was Trump had the effect of supporting the campaign of the openly racist, sexist goon.
This may be true, but do you seriously think that explains why Trump won?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m talking about during the general. I don’t give a shit what was said/done during the primary. That’s what primaries are for.
I have a relative with whom I was once very close and who was also very progressive. He spent four years in the navy much of it around Vietnam –not combat but close. Anyway he went totally bananas over the players taking the knee. he saw that as extreme disrespect. And I soon discovered he was full on Trump and supported the deportation of Mexicans and the wall. Five years ago he voted Obama or at least he says so. Now he is captured by Trump. He is certainly not a stupid man and was very successful. So people do change, like it or not. I think something like this happened in Brexit. There are triggers, things that cause people to make extreme changes.
I always come back to this. I agree that there’s not necessarily one single thing that will never change a Popular Vote Loser supporter’s mind (well, outside of the 27% Crazification Factor) but whenever I see them drive into Cognitive Dissonance Lane, I cast about for something that always brings em home and that always seems to be race.
Sure, plenty of single-issue ghetto types on the right (Gundamentalists, Forced Birthers, etc) will rally around any federal-level candidate with an (R) after their name but after that, it can get murky…unless you bring it back to race.
I’m not talking about the rural, whites that the Villagers focus on as never-failing Twitler supporters (or Booman’s focus on them), I’m talking about well educated suburban and exurban whites.
I know plenty in the STL area that are nice people but are staunch supporters of the man. You steer their conversation around certain issues, let’s use science as an example, and they’re about as anti-Trump when talking about those things as you can get. They’re not necessarily anti-tax glibertarians (IGMFY) either. The only thing I can see is that they are scared to death of the coloreds and anything they can do politically to keep them down/segregated/deported drives how they vote (and suburban/exurban STL is a case study of white flight and bigotry).
And those feelings die hard, if ever. I have one friend who I call a “recovering gliberatarian”. He was a single-issue, gundamentalist until the Bushies and his own economic collapse finally brought him around to voting Dem. As he puts it “Obama helped me keep my house”. And yet, he’s scared to drive thru “certain neighborhoods” in STL because, yunno, coloreds. He was that way when he lived in Chicago. Nothing’s changed about his hidden but well developed sense of bigotry. He had to go thru the usual “empathy awakening” you see on so many former right wingers when they see the light when something bad happens to them only to be saved by some Democratic/librul program.
Again, I don’t think there’s a single bullet in much of this discussion but when it looks muddled, I move away the surface scum and there’s always the bigoted sludge underneath supporting everything else.
If it’s the bigoted sludge underneath that supports everything else, then the obvious tack is to gig that frog. The de-Confederacizing of America is one way of gigging that frog although it doesn’t seem like it.
Putting pressure on local government to stop the discriminatory local policies are another way to gig the frog.
If it’s preservation of discrimination that is the nubbin, taking away the power to discriminate is the task. The bigoted sludge is a Catch-22 form of conversation intending to keep discrimination permanent and white folks comfortable. He’s uncomfortable because he’s coming up against his own prejudices and irrational fears and bad decisions.
What you must keep in mind with Trump that was not true of previous Republican presidents is that Trump is a classical populist tyrant, which Nixon was flirting with but which Reagan and the Bushes could never be from their aristocratic bones.
Trump is not about policy or policy principles; Trump is about the effects that he as a leader personally creates in the society. Populist tyranny–doing what attracts popular personal acclaim.
That is the danger; there is not counterweight that is obvious now except inertia that slows Trump’s direction as the Daddy Party’s abusive step-daddy. Mom McConnell and the kids are co-dependenting their heads off. There is not an ounce of Republican prudence in Congress left at all.
And for the moment all of the other players are still operating as if the Trump Presidency is business as usual.
Formally, the self-respect to break things off and the wherewithal to walk away depends on more than a united opposition coalition. It depends on clarity about what to report about the Trump administration and what to report about some of the easy business-as-usual illusions that keep presenting themselves as making opposition appear easier than it is going to be.
The Congressional drama is going to have to be about real policy and not trying to gain bipartisanship (as if that illusion was even around in Congress any more.
And there will have to be some strict accountability for the truth of what is said and done about legislation. It is easy to see that the regulations that implement the tax scam can defer the impact until after the 2018 election so that taxpayers might possibly pay less taxes than they will pay on a withhollding table and then have to repay the difference if there is even a moderate shift in party affiliation. That is, the scam will continue; watch for it.
Seems digby is worried about the Dems participating in some bi partisan scam about infrastructure. I’m sure it will have a nice sounding ring to it. More jobs and fix roads, bridges and the like but likely with a give away to corporations. Walking away will not be easy. Even the U.N. has to worry what he will do next about Haley’s threat. The man is a wrecking crew all by hissself.