Donald Trump

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Trevor Morley's Tache said:
Unfortunately for him, he is no longer an unknown quantity as President. His 2016 tactics won't have the same impact this time round. All those people who voted for him in 2016 who gambled on the fact that they believed he would 'drain the swamp', and 'grow into the role' of President won't be voting for him this time round, as he simply hasn't lived up to the sales pitch.

In the last three and a half years he has basically proved what many on here have been saying about him; that he is essentially the living version of the 7 deadly sins.
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Like Boris Johnson he's trying to act as though all the BS hasn't been perpetrated by his government.
 
mat said:
Makes me wonder if they were thinking they might have a legal battle come November and clarification might help with any electoral arguments.
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On the face of it, it appears to be favourable to Trump, certainly in States such as Texas. However, in states N.Carolina, it could have the opposite effect.

Like you say, it could be the Supreme court pre-empting and legal wrangling's over the distribution of the popular vote come November.
 
Trevor Morley's Tache said:
No surprise really.

My take on it is that it will come out, but there are still some pretty big NatSeC issues to be ironed out before they drop the bombshell that the USA elected a compromised President.

I can say with a 100% certainty that if Trump were a UK citizen, he would not pass the highest level of security check (enhanced Developed Vetting). In all honesty, he would likely fail baseline personal security standards due to his business interests and shady financial dealings.
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I am not sure it will come out if Trump is not ousted (whether he will allow that to happen is a different discussion, of course), as the national security concerns would (should) have already been reviewed in part prior to his taking office and many times since (and were ignored at every phase), meaning it is just a way for the executive—controlled Pentagon leadership, and Nat Sec apparatus in the executive branch, in delaying ultimate judgement or communication of judgement. This means they will attempt to delay it until such time as they can use ‘new found’ powers to bar release entirely (and suspend the Deutsche Bank investigations), such as after Trump is elected to a second term and undoubtedly signs a slew of legally/constitutionally dubious EOs or goes full dictator and suspends elections or refuses to honour the outcome of the elections and assumes emergency powers. Barr and the DOJ is already working to shutdown the DB investigations now, even before the election.

Perhaps one of the few ways it could get out — however unlikely, given the person or person(s) would undoubtedly be charged with treason (if not silenced via other means) — would be the leaking of the documents by primary or secondary investigative sources in an act of patriotic whistleblowing. But I don’t think Americans should hold their breath for that (pardon the pun).

And, regarding UK security requirements, we have a few in government that really shouldn’t have passed many levels of security checks, so I am personally not 100% convinced Trump would have failed either, especially in the case of assuming a similarly powerful role (in the counterfactual that he was a UK citizens, of course).

But I agree that is no real surprise to any of us in this thread... even Dax. ;-)
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
It's a small sample size in a circle of rarified air, but I was having a proper socially-distanced BBQ dinner with two conservative friends of mine last night and they are absolutely done with Trump. One voted for him and the other for Gary Johnson. "The best thing about Joe Biden is that he's harmless, and he's a decent man" one said. The other chimed in with "I'll be glad to going back to arguing about taxes and the economy instead of listening to this stupid asshole trying to get the KKK voter count up."

"We fucked up", said the guy who voted for Trump. "I thought being President would change him. He's right about a lot of things, especially China. But no policy is worth this. He's stupid and morally bankrupt. I should have seen it. You warned me. I didn't listen." The guy who voted for Johnson said, "I still don't think I could ever have voted for Hillary but seeing what happened, I wish she had won. I'm fine with Biden."

The discussion then turned to who will run in 2024 since we all assume if Biden wins he'll only serve one term. They both liked Yang and Mayor Pete among the Democrats. I brought up the GOP enablers who I think of as so feckless and such cowards they're nearly as bad as Trump and one said, "They really probably should be punished for that. But Democrats need to run people fed-up Republicans will vote for, not AOC clones."

So whatever you think of all this, I think the takeaway is a longing for a return to normalcy and calm in politics. These are very smart, self-made, suburban guys just this side of 50 -- guys who are great dads and good husbands. They are exactly the voters the GOP could always count on. No more.
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It gets harder and harder by the day to see how normal, decent, people who maybe aren't super into politics but follow it and vote in presidential elections are going to turn out for Trump in November. He'll get the base of course, but as we've been saying a million times, elections are still decided by the group in the middle.

I'm also finding it somewhat interesting that everyone is talking about when, not if, Biden's lead is going to shrink, and there is exactly nobody talking about the possibility that it actually just keeps getting wider. The election is going to be held at a time of 10%+ unemployment and 175k dead from a preventable disease. Meanwhile Trump has shown absolutely zero capacity to moderate his message, reach out to people outside his base, or lead competently at all. Why are we so sure he's going to come back again?
 
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Trevor Morley's Tache said:
Seems significant....
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mat said:
Makes me wonder if they were thinking they might have a legal battle come November and clarification might help with any electoral arguments.
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SWP's back said:
I hadn’t even worried that was going to be a thing? Might it be a thing?
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This was more due to several states passing legislation in the wake of the 2016 election based on concerns that there were few *legal* provisions for holding electors to Electoral College norms. Quite a bit of it was more paranoia than actual threat.

The fact that it was a 9-0 decision (all of the justices supporting the ‘elector accountability provisions‘ as constitutional) is not surprising, as most legal and constitutional scholars agree that not requiring Electoral College delegates to vote for their pledged candidates could lead to chaos (from both sides), and that if people want change they need to pressure Congress to either heavily modify or abolish the Electoral College. Otherwise the current presidential election system *could* be a shambles in 2020.
 
cjn said:
It gets harder and harder by the day to see how normal, decent, people who maybe aren't super into politics but follow it and vote are going to turn out for Trump in November. He'll get the base of course, but as we've been saying a million times, elections are still decided by the group in the middle.

I'm also finding it somewhat interesting that everyone is talking about when, not if, Biden's lead is going to shrink, and there is exactly nobody talking about the possibility that it actually just keeps getting wider. The election is going to be held at a time of 10%+ unemployment and 175k dead from a preventable disease. Meanwhile Trump has shown absolutely zero capacity to moderate his message, reach out to people outside his base, or lead competently at all. Why are we so sure he's going to come back again?
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The frightening bit of the bolded sentence is that it is an *optimistic* projection — current trends lend to much worse unemployment (do to a second wave of lockdowns, deaths/hospitalisations, and better data collection/reporting reflecting actual functional unemployment) and higher death/hospitalisations.

And you are absolutely right about his campaign no longer even pretending to be courting new supporters — which is interesting given his base is less than a third of the voting population by most assessments. He is running as George Wallace, if anyone gets that American political reference: a racist, white supremacist, fascist, conspiratorial ‘populist’. In many ways Trump is just retreading his 2016 campaign, only now with added division and new villains to be portrayed: “leftists”, BLM, Antifa (whoever he and Barr decides they are in this case), progressives, anti-racists, anti-Confederates, and “anti-Americans” (which include all of the ones before mentioned).

It is one of the things that makes many people — including many of us in this thread — very nervous, as it is something dictators (or soon to be dictators) tend to do before popular elections in order to indirectly ‘deputise’ their supporters as voter suppression, intimidation, and retaliation officers. If you can get 30% of the population to act aggressively (even violently) against even a portion of the other 70% leading up to and on Election Day, you can potentially shift things just enough to allow for a woefully problematic Electoral College to give you a narrow (optically “legitimate”) victory. Or, more likely in this case, get the “legitimate” vote count close enough to a victory to allow for less-obvious manipulation and tampering to get you the rest of the way.
 
FogBlueInSanFran said:
It's a small sample size in a circle of rarified air, but I was having a proper socially-distanced BBQ dinner with two conservative friends of mine last night and they are absolutely done with Trump. One voted for him and the other for Gary Johnson. "The best thing about Joe Biden is that he's harmless, and he's a decent man" one said. The other chimed in with "I'll be glad to going back to arguing about taxes and the economy instead of listening to this stupid asshole trying to get the KKK voter count up."

"We fucked up", said the guy who voted for Trump. "I thought being President would change him. He's right about a lot of things, especially China. But no policy is worth this. He's stupid and morally bankrupt. I should have seen it. You warned me. I didn't listen." The guy who voted for Johnson said, "I still don't think I could ever have voted for Hillary but seeing what happened, I wish she had won. I'm fine with Biden."

The discussion then turned to who will run in 2024 since we all assume if Biden wins he'll only serve one term. They both liked Yang and Mayor Pete among the Democrats. I brought up the GOP enablers who I think of as so feckless and such cowards they're nearly as bad as Trump and one said, "They really probably should be punished for that. But Democrats need to run people fed-up Republicans will vote for, not AOC clones."

So whatever you think of all this, I think the takeaway is a longing for a return to normalcy and calm in politics. These are very smart, self-made, suburban guys just this side of 50 -- guys who are great dads and good husbands. They are exactly the voters the GOP could always count on. No more.
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You know, if you sent this to the RNC along with those guys' phone numbers you might just convince them that Trump is leading the party to disaster.

So don't.
 
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