It's impossible to know where to start with Trump, me, when I listen to Obama or Trump speak, it's so obviously self-serving bullshit, like a very bad snake oil salesman, one has to wonder how gullible are the buffoons who voted these guys into office. It was so annoying that when I was still on Twitter, I would usually select one random fool for a ritual sacrifice and blast his or her obsequious opinion (e.g., "I remember when we had a REAL President: Obama"): and I would routinely get likes or impressions by the other side. Go and read the hashtag #MAGA (i.e., Trump's copied theme, "Make America Great Again"). Of course, progressives, outnumbering conservatives on the web, do troll this hashtag. Some of the cloying tweets are more devoted than young girls are to teenage boy singers or bands. Now as for the Trump Derangement Syndrome tweets, I can't tell you how many times I've seen the footage of Trump mocking a disabled reporter, comparisons to Hitler, etc. And I can't tell you how many born-again progressive fiscal "conservatives" are worried about the tax bill is going to add a trillion dollars to the deficit over the coming decade when Obama added $10T in 8 years.
I am still perplexed how utterly STUPID the average voter in America is (I could say more, but I can readily anticipate the average Breitbart reader will come back with, how elitist and globalist you are!). Bryan Caplan wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter a decade ago. The public has very wrong opinions, e.g., anti-market, anti-trade, and/or anti-immigrant. (This is not Caplan talking). Foreign aid and welfare expenditures for immigrants are wildly exaggerated. There is no morality for increasing the taxes of your wealthier neighbor. Caplan, a decade later, wrote this of the 2016 election.
While the public perennially exhibits what I call anti-market and anti-foreign biases, 2016 is egregious. Sanders is anti-market bias personified, Trump is anti-foreign bias personified. Sadly, my claim that the median American is a "moderate national socialist - statist to the core on both economic and social policy" looks truer than ever.
As a puritan, Sanders revolts me and Trump horrifies me. Even impotent populism makes my flesh crawl. The spectacle of populism-with-a-prayer-of-a-chance has already lost me hours of sleep. Trump in particular keeps intruding on my Bubble.
Still, if voters were rational, Sanders and Trump wouldn't stand a chance. None of the candidates would survive serious scrutiny, but Sanders and Trump would be thrown out as soon as they delivered one short speech.I still recall Romney took a lot of heat in the 2008 campaign for flip-flopping on issues like abortion with ad clips from his 1994 senatorial campaign against Kennedy.Yet Trump in 2016 saw no such attack; here was a registered Democrat who funded and/or voted for Clinton and Obama in 2008, who blamed Romney's 2012 loss on his harsh anti-immigrant policy, who has slipped in and out of positions more often than a common whore? Some of his positions (e.g., pro-gun, pro-life) are little more than disingenuous concessions to win socially conservative voters
Nope. Trump's minions don't say a word when it's clear that Mexico's not about the comply with Trump's mantra that Mexico is going to pay for his wall. Then he shamelessly goes about extorting DACA participants as little more than pawns to get taxpayer money for his wall. Never mind than the number of unauthorized immigrants is still down from 2007.
When the born-again NRA supporter Trump spitballs in public with "Grab the guns first; due process later", it makes even the media conservatives (like Laura Ingraham) at a loss for words. To me, it's rather funny when co-opted conservatives like Hannity et al., who have sacrificed their integrity to ally themselves with Trump, are confronted with the fact that Trump, with the spine of a wet noodle, will abandon decades-old stands.
I'm not sure when Trump does his gaffes, whether he's like a Biden gaffe machine where he talks without his brain in year, or whether he's trying to manipulate being on both sides of an issue, bashing both sides, trying to make himself look like the "common sense middle ground"? This is a guy who frequently publicly bashes his own Cabinet members.
It amuses me when Twitter Trumpkin "conservatives" start bashing Trump critics like Sen. Sasse or Flake as "RINOs". I mean Trump is like the RINOest RINO of them all. I particularly loathe those who think restrictive immigration. If I own a business and I want to employ some talented person halfway around the world, it's nobody else's decision. If my Mom resided overseas in her senior years, and I wanted her to come over and live in my house, it's nobody else;s decision. As Tamny points out, anti-immigrants are anti-conservatives:
conservatism has historically been associated with things like private property rights, small government, free trade and markets, openness to technology, disdain for central economic control, along with dislike of affirmative action.Trump conceptually doesn't get it. He says that his wife-beater member of his staff who recently resigned didn't get "due process" while he advocates seizing people's assets, like their weapons for self-defense, first, apologize (due process) later. This is a guy who loves eminent domain and whose attorney general loves civil asset forfeiture. So much for an administration respecting private property rights or being "conservative".
Finally, there's Trump's decision to impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Do you think you've already seen this movie before. Because, yes, Bush similarly put an anti-trade steel import tariff that ended up being repealed after it was found illegal protectionism. Notice that tariffs aren't paid by foreign companies; they are anti-consumer taxes paid to the government.
Trump is as corrupt as they come (as if his nepotism policy alone with his loser son-in-law didn't already make that clear). There are allegations that Icahn, a former Trump adviser, sold off millions in stock in steel-dependent businesses shortly before Trump's announcement (higher steel costs translate to lower margins: if they respond with price increases, it may result in lower sales and profits, bad for stock prices). There may be evidence that the US currently even lacks the capacity in steel to meet demand, which means companies using steel will have to pay Trump's tariffs, and these costs will be passed along to the consumer.
There will be responses from other countries who are adversely affected by Trump's actions. Guess which country leads imports on both lists? Canada, not China. This is once again Trump stoking his anti-NAFTA madness.
The Retard-in-Chief recently tweeted "Trade wars are good, and easy to win'. No, they aren't. They however provoke responses. which is not good for the 12% of the economy that is export-related, whether we are talking Boeing, Kentucky spirits, or food. Consider the fact that the US has a current trade surplus with Canada, and Canada buys a lot of US steel.
I do want to discuss one additional point. The GOP has been the party of high/protectionist tariffs from Lincoln through Hoover, while the Democrats, especially Southern Democrats, tended to be the party of lower tariffs and free trade, at least to Grover Cleveland. So why did the parties flip their positions? I think the answer in part lies in shifting regional alliances. The GOP broke through in the solid Democrat pro-trade South.(Consider 2 of the last 3 Democrat Presidents were Southern Democrat governors.) The FDR administration gave its union supporters new protections, and the unions did not like foreign competition in the form of imports or immigration.
