The Trump Presidency | Biden Inaugurated

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Kentonio said:
The Trump version would have read:

"To all the fans of Americas favourite president: you know a winner when you see one! I've been the biggest gift you've ever had, and you're lucky to have me. I've achieved so much, some say more than any other president in history, and you know you want four more years of winning! http://Vote.DonaldJTrump.com"
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No grammar errors, no capitalization. Fail!
 
Looking back at Trump presidency, what ever happened to the allegedly pee pee tapes. Real or #resistance fanfiction?
 
TheGame said:
Just love this:

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Trump said he was "joking" after the flak he took so was obviously talking about bleach and trying to backtrack after being laughed at by the world. Farage is really reaching trying to make it out like Trump was talking about a medical drug and saying Scientists said it was a viable proposition.
 


And here are the issues. How much more of this has gone on? I think it could take years to find out the true extent of the corruption and damage.
 
Brwned said:
He's been a failure by most measures, regardless of political leaning. Very few of his big policy plans were ever enacted, and he did very little to make a difference to the wider population.

His biggest successes from the Republican perspective have just required him to exist: adding 3 Supreme Court justices and hundreds of lower court judges. That is a huge change but one he had almost no influence on, post-election. For his supporters, he didn't build the wall, he didn't destroy Obamacare, he didn't bring jobs back to the rust belt. He did bring in the tax cuts, although I think his supporters found out not long after that it didn't help them as much as they'd expected, it didn't radically change the tax code, and it definitely helped his wealthy donors and a lot of "the swamp". His biggest active success was in rolling back regulations, particularly in climate policy with the Paris agreement being the big one.

From a wider national perspective, one of the few things he had bipartisan support on was infrastructure, and somehow he couldn't find the time to do it. He chipped away at the institutional norms, which few people appreciated and most people hated. Likewise with his approach to race relations. He was pretty irrelevant in international affairs, only really succeeding in making the US seem less important and more incompetent, and pissing off most of the population and experts on both sides with brainless trade policy. The economy did well but few would attribute that success to him either.

At the end of the day, the majority of the population didn't want most of his policies, and he wasn't able to enact most of them. The ones he did enact help very few people, and his general presence has only hurt America's international standing and taken the gloss of the presidency domestically. Some people would have accepted that if he was able to stimulate dying parts of the US economy, like the coal mines, but it was never really a possibility. One of the defining features of his presidency is how few people he appealed to.

To a larger degree than most of his predecessors, his words were more important than his actions in large part because he was relatively inactive. He honestly spent so much time playing golf and watching TV that he spent far less time on normal presidential things, and because he's not an actual politician, he found it incredibly difficult to get other people to do things he wanted them to do. The only thing he was really good at getting other people to do was to fire staff for him, and that relentless change only made him even more impotent.
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This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
 
hmchan said:
This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
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Very few presidents have failed to attract a second term. Secondly, he was still well supported in the Republican party. Outside of Trump, they have literally nobody of worth to go up against Biden and it would have been a massacre. If anything this is a great opportunity for the GOP to reset. They measured up to the Dems, but make no mistake, at the current rate Biden has whipped him in every battle ground and even potentially taken 3 previous republican strong holds.
 
hmchan said:
This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
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There's the simple, practical answer you can fall back to: incumbent presidents historically have always had a significant advantage, and his core voting base was rock-solid. So you could argue that terrible performance as a president weighed up against simply being the president can cancel each other out, it gets you back to even, and then it's his own supporter base which he can claim to be distinctive from the core Republican voter base that gives him an edge. You might be able to find Republican nominees that can prevent a policy and vision that is more aligned with the Republican voter, but he's not the president, he's a challenger, so it feels like something of a gamble. If Trump can keep delivering those supreme court nominees then why would I risk that for these other things I want?

The other simple answer you can fall back to is the economy. Regardless of whether a president was responsible for the economic growth, if he's been able to provide it, he's off to a great head start. That's been true of Republicans and Democrats. It seems a lot of people were happy to discount the last 9 months as just exceptional times and revert back to the previous economic assessment, which is unusual but not entirely unreasonable given unlike past economic crises, it wasn't one you could plausibly blame on the current president.

Although I think most people would agree neither simple answer provides a very satisfying or complete answer. The biggest omission to that assessment is why he's getting so many non-white votes, presumably record numbers for a Republican. Those basic principles can answer part of the question for them too but it leaves a lot unanswered. Presumably we'll have a clearer idea in a few days once the final profile of the voter comes in, with some loose evidence about what informed those votes.

There's obviously a big divide about how to deal with the pandemic too, which given the severity and the immediacy of it could easily be an important single-issue vote, with Trump clearly offering more hope for re-opening the economy while millions of jobs have been lost. That disproportionately has affected non-whites so could be the cause of his growth among them?

Aside from the economy, it would seem that millions and millions thought he did very well on some things. The tax cuts are obvious, and just getting Republicans that advantage in the courts counts for a lot. Beyond that I really struggle to see what that he's succeeded at, aside from the value judgments. And it seems kind of wild that someone like Donald Trump can persuade more votes than a typical presidential nominee on the basis of value judgments. He exists in a political climate where political polarisation makes it easier, but even excluding that there's reason to believe he's just better at making those points stick. If that is true it does go some way to redefining the model of what a candidate could be, and perhaps what a Republican candidate should be.

But then again he's also likely to lose so I'd be interested to see how Republicans reflect on him being one of the 1 in 10 presidents to fail to get re-elected. Presumably they'll see it as an unacceptable loss rather than a surprisingly strong vote turnout, especially against a not particularly strong candidate.
 
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hmchan said:
This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
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Staunch Republicans don't see Trump as a failure, and the GOP has become the party of Trump for a significant portion of their voters. If they'd ditched Trump due to his incompetence there's a chance they would have lost the support of his base, effectively ending Republican chances of winning the Presidency for potentially decades.
 
hmchan said:
This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
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Have you not paid attention? The republican party is a death cult. He's their talisman at this point.
 
Furious Trump called Rupert Murdoch and screamed about Fox News calling Arizona

Sources are telling Vanity Fair that President Donald Trump is continuing to rage in private about Fox News calling Arizona for former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday night.

Fox’s numbers crunchers calculated the total votes cast and the division between the two candidates and determined Tuesday night that it wasn’t possible for Trump to eke out a win.

Reporter Gabriel Sherman characterized it as “a civil war” between Trump and the network, though civility isn’t exactly Trump’s tactic.

“According to a source, Trump phoned Fox owner Rupert Murdoch to scream about the call and demand a retraction,” said Vanity Fair. “Murdoch refused, and the call stood. Trump and Murdoch have been at odds for months over election coverage. In September, I reported that Trump complained to Murdoch about Fox’s polling. Murdoch has been telling associates for months that Trump would lose the election.”

Tensions between Trump and the network have been increasing over the past several months as Fox News polling showed President Donald Trump losing the White House.
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langster said:
You watch Trump turn like the victim bitch he is (if and) when he loses.

He's the Presidential equivalent of a scouser.
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Possibly not the most amazing prediction (sure we all thought it) but hoping he has a meltdown in the coming days.

I wonder if they take any nuclear weapon abilities away from a President who's lost an election?
 
Watched the 2 parts of the Comey Rule last night. Came off as a gangster.
 
hmchan said:
This brings another question. If Trump has been such a failure, why would he be nominated for this election? And why would he still bag so many votes?
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I wouldn't have voted Trump if I were an American, but I felt the non-stop riots in states mainly governed by democrats fed into his law and order narrative.
 
Shamana said:


I wouldn't have voted Trump if I were an American, but I felt the non-stop riots in states mainly governed by democrats fed into his law and order narrative.
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Yeah people should have kept their mouths shut and let the systematic abuse continue. Shocking that they finally said enough is enough. It’s not like it’s lead to any police reforms or anything like that.

For what it’s worth, there’s been plenty of vox pop evidence that the majority of people backed the protestors and were horrified by Trump‘s handling of it.
 
Shamana said:


I wouldn't have voted Trump if I were an American, but I felt the non-stop riots in states mainly governed by democrats fed into his law and order narrative.
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If we rewind this comment a few hundred years, this is like saying "well if you slaves didn't misbehave more people might have voted for Lincoln who would have freed you. So it's partly or wholly your own fault". :wenger:
 
Dumbstar said:
If we rewind this comment a few hundred years, this is like saying "well if you slaves didn't misbehave more people might have voted for Lincoln who would have freed you. So it's partly or wholly your own fault". :wenger:
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I don't think it was/is the honest actors of BLM & Antifa that some voters had problems with, but the dishonest ones. I don't doubt there has been doucebag republicans though just being doucebag republicans. I don't know how reliable this Exit poll is(things will probably change with the mail-in ballots) but it seems that the black and latino vote for Trump was higher in this election than the last election.

 
Penny under 100k. She's becoming affordable. :drool:

Pennsylvania lead for Trump at 97900. Loads of ballots to still be counted. This is it I reckon.

Edit: Wrong thread.
 
Brwned said:
There's the simple, practical answer you can fall back to: incumbent presidents historically have always had a significant advantage, and his core voting base was rock-solid. So you could argue that terrible performance as a president weighed up against simply being the president can cancel each other out, it gets you back to even, and then it's his own supporter base which he can claim to be distinctive from the core Republican voter base that gives him an edge. You might be able to find Republican nominees that can prevent a policy and vision that is more aligned with the Republican voter, but he's not the president, he's a challenger, so it feels like something of a gamble. If Trump can keep delivering those supreme court nominees then why would I risk that for these other things I want?

The other simple answer you can fall back to is the economy. Regardless of whether a president was responsible for the economic growth, if he's been able to provide it, he's off to a great head start. That's been true of Republicans and Democrats. It seems a lot of people were happy to discount the last 9 months as just exceptional times and revert back to the previous economic assessment, which is unusual but not entirely unreasonable given unlike past economic crises, it wasn't one you could plausibly blame on the current president.

Although I think most people would agree neither simple answer provides a very satisfying or complete answer. The biggest omission to that assessment is why he's getting so many non-white votes, presumably record numbers for a Republican. Those basic principles can answer part of the question for them too but it leaves a lot unanswered. Presumably we'll have a clearer idea in a few days once the final profile of the voter comes in, with some loose evidence about what informed those votes.

There's obviously a big divide about how to deal with the pandemic too, which given the severity and the immediacy of it could easily be an important single-issue vote, with Trump clearly offering more hope for re-opening the economy while millions of jobs have been lost. That disproportionately has affected non-whites so could be the cause of his growth among them?

Aside from the economy, it would seem that millions and millions thought he did very well on some things. The tax cuts are obvious, and just getting Republicans that advantage in the courts counts for a lot. Beyond that I really struggle to see what that he's succeeded at, aside from the value judgments. And it seems kind of wild that someone like Donald Trump can persuade more votes than a typical presidential nominee on the basis of value judgments. He exists in a political climate where political polarisation makes it easier, but even excluding that there's reason to believe he's just better at making those points stick. If that is true it does go some way to redefining the model of what a candidate could be, and perhaps what a Republican candidate should be.

But then again he's also likely to lose so I'd be interested to see how Republicans reflect on him being one of the 1 in 10 presidents to fail to get re-elected. Presumably they'll see it as an unacceptable loss rather than a surprisingly strong vote turnout, especially against a not particularly strong candidate.
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I agree that there is not one simple answer. There are various simple ones, some more complex ones, and then for many there is a combination of reasons. I think trying to catch Trump's attraction under one banner is one issue Democrats had fighting him. (Just like you can't see Blacks or Latinos as one group.)

I would say, though, that I think Trump's personally issues and general craziness are just a distraction for most of his voters. It's something his detractors love to focus on since it's so obvious and juicy, but a lot of people care about one or more policy - and then usually not so much Trump's policy, but what the GOP more generally stands for (low taxes, small government, focus on religion - that sort of thing).

There is also the post-truth society aspect, where reality is what you say it is within the echo chamber. Biden is not a socialist; BLM protests have not predominantly been riots that torched cities; QAnon stuff is not real; and so on - but you'll find large groups of people who believe one or more of those stories and will vote accordingly.

Finally, kinda with @Abizzz, I do also think simple partisanship plays a role. Both parties have emphasized relatively small things, turning into identity-defining issues (like abortion or guns), and using those as a tool to really lock in a significant portion of voters. They'll vote for anyone running under the GOP banner.
 
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Shamana said:


I wouldn't have voted Trump if I were an American, but I felt the non-stop riots in states mainly governed by democrats fed into his law and order narrative.
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I was on the fence up until the summer and even warmed up to the possibility of a good Democratic candidate, however the dems' hypocrisy, the worst candidate in history (after Hillary) and the reasons you mentioned above swayed me to vote for Trump.
 
Giggs86 said:
I was on the fence up until the summer and even warmed up to the possibility of a good Democratic candidate, however the dems' hypocrisy, the worst candidate in history (after Hillary) and the reasons you mentioned above swayed me to vote for Trump.
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I hope you’re enjoying your evening.
 
Giggs86 said:
I was on the fence up until the summer and even warmed up to the possibility of a good Democratic candidate, however the dems' hypocrisy, the worst candidate in history (after Hillary) and the reasons you mentioned above swayed me to vote for Trump.
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Erm, are you really suggesting the Dems are more hypocritical than the GOP, that Trump is a strong candidate, and that there really has been constant BLM rioting? ('torching cities'!) Cause then I'd have to question your post about your news sources in the Elections thread...
 
Giggs86 said:
I was on the fence up until the summer and even warmed up to the possibility of a good Democratic candidate, however the dems' hypocrisy, the worst candidate in history (after Hillary) and the reasons you mentioned above swayed me to vote for Trump.
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So should blacks just accept their place? And in your opinion is their place enough right now? Are you more brutality or are you more slavery? Also for the laughs who was the Dem candidate you would have supported?
 
Calling it now...

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