CNN is headlining a story about the latest outrageous statement by Trump, in which he dismissed Carly Fiorina’s presidential prospects because “Looka that face!” during an interview with a Rolling Stone reporter. The RS interview is worth reading and provides more insight into the candidate’s appeal to the Trumpenproletariat.
According to CNN, Trump is now saying that he wasn’t referring to Fiorina’s looks but rather her “persona,” which is odd because he specifically mentioned her face. But no matter: If past performance is any indicator, it won’t stick. Personally, I found the following tidbit from the Rolling Stone interview more disturbing than the jibe about Fiorina’s face:
After I [reporter Paul Solotaroff] met Ivanka and praised her to her father, he said, “Yeah, she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, her father . . . ”
That’s at least 20 fucking shades of creepy right there. Can you imagine the Beltway media reaction if the leading candidate for his party’s nomination — particularly a Democrat — basically told a reporter “I’d hit that” in reference to his own child? But for Trump, the rules do not apply.
It’s probably got something to do with the establishment vs insurgent dynamic DougJ referred to earlier. Maybe it’s an expectations game.
We expect establishment politicians to be more circumspect and packaged. We don’t expect that of reality TV stars. But what if the Beltway media decides to apply the Honey Boo Boo rules to Trump but continues to hold everyone else to the standards of decorum that drove Howard Dean out of the race for an overenthusiastic yodel or slagged Al Gore for being insufficiently alpha to pull off a brightly colored ensemble?
Many of us have been assuming Trump will self-destruct, and that’s understandable because he’s a compulsively offensive buffoon who routinely says things that would gin up a media horde to sink another candidate. But as we’ve seen, the usual rules do not apply.
Chris
His voters never love him more than when he’s being an asshole.
schrodinger's cat
I still think he won’t win the nomination. There is almost a year to go until the Republican convention, and not a single primary vote has been cast yet.
Cervantes
More than once.
schrodinger's cat
How is Daisy Marie, the cone girl?
beltane
Imagine if Bill Clinton said that about Chelsea. The Villagers would asphyxiate themselves from all the pearl clutching.
Bill
Trump’s appeal with the Republican base lies in the fact that they agree with his offensive statements. The Fiorina statement will just be another example of that, as the base believes women exist to be objectified.
If he;s lucky enough to ride this wave to the nomination, it’s all coming back to bite him in his comb over.
flukebucket
Either Trump has Asperger Syndrome or he is just scamming the entire country including the media.
bemused
He insulted a conservative woman’s looks. I’d like to think this would turn off some conservative women Trump supporters but doubt it.
Another Holocene Human
Scott Brown tried to pimp his daughters, also, too.
Except in his case it was more sad than gross.
Another Holocene Human
@flukebucket: Hey now, autism spectrum disorders are not only NOT narcissistic personality disorder, they’re actually quite easy to disambiguate.
Important to keep in mind, simple rudeness is not a diagnostic metric for either one.
MattF
I guess it’s the opposite of ‘Clinton rules.’ And that makes sense in a way– there was an unoccupied sector in the political ‘allowable’ vs. ‘unallowable’ diagram, but that opportunity has now been taken.
Chris
@Bill:
Yes, exactly. Better put than what I said.
shell
\
Remember the nationwide gasp when then candidate Jimmy Carter said he’d committed adultery ‘in his heart.’
skerry
It’s not like he criticized her wardrobe.
Cervantes
Nor is it the first time he’s intimated it.
bemused
@shell:
Ugh. What a gross pig.
Jeffro
In Trump’s view, I’m sure he meant it as a compliment to his daughter.
/barf
benw
The Jordan rules were allowed so that defenders could basically hammer him without a foul being called when he drove to the hoop, otherwise he’d have been unstoppable. Well, more unstoppable. By analogy, maybe we should let people knock Trump on his ass anytime he gets near a mic. It’s a risk, but I’m willing for other people to take it.
JPL
@Another Holocene Human: Scott Brown tried to pimp himself.
John Revolta
Well so much for the Trump/Fiorina ticket
Cervantes
@shell:
“Many times,” he said — but here’s the context:
Amir Khalid
It’s no surprise that The Donald is an exquisitely vulgar man. This should have gotten him shunned by decent people.
@schrodinger’s cat:
You mean Patsy Marie, I think. The other girl is Daisy Mayhem.
RL Harrngton
be happy the usual rules don’t apply to Trump….yet.
No doubt once he has the nomination reality will hit hard and fast….
sharl
O.T., our loosely written and loosely enforced campaign finance laws have created great opportunities for scam artists. Here is the story of such a scamster, in this case, one who is preying on Bernie Sanders supporters. It looks like he bagged actor Daniel ‘James Bond’ Craig for almost $50K.
Be careful out there!
CONGRATULATIONS!
He’s a billionaire. He could roast a child live on TV and eat it and people would praise his exquisite table manners and the nice china pattern. That’s America.
Plus we’ve been inoculated for over thirty years with this guy on the TV, magazines, board games…we already know he’s a total sick fuck.
He will win the GOP nomination. I was hoping that the left would rediscover populism first, but as usual, too little and WAY too late.
Right-wing populism is, historically, never a good thing. I am reduced to hoping I don’t get to find that out firsthand.
@Amir Khalid: There are very few “decent people” in America, hence Trump.
Another Holocene Human
People also say that ASD and NPD don’t grasp social situations (well, the former more than the latter–most NPD people don’t suffer in an external success sort of way that you could say the disorder is hurting them, exactly). But NPD people run into social problems when they project their own venality onto others. (Trump seems to find a very receptive audience when he does it, though.) ASD people run into social problems for a variety of reasons, some having to do with comorbidities, but in a most basic sense, because their theory of mind is based on their own minds: their own sensory distortions, for example. ASD childrens’ wacky relationship to (especially) touch and sounds is an invisible disability that confounds the neurotypical adults who care for them. People have said ASD children lack empathy, but they don’t. Empathy is feeling the phantom pain when you perceive the pain in others. Well, ASD children experience touch differently from neurotypical people, so they can’t “mirror” a neurotypical person except on the most gross level.* ASD children also have trouble maintaining eye contact and usually become very adverse to it at a young age. They also are likely to have auditory processing defects–I know that’s why I gravitated to looking at mouths during a conversation and many, many other ASD people do this as well. What I discovered later in life is that I missed tons of information about the other person’s emotional state by looking away from the eyes. It’s like a blind person being unable to see how people are reacting to what they say.
Does it help to compare ASD to a more obvious disability? There’s been so much focus on the learning disability aspect but the neuro-sensory symptoms are a huge part of the learning disability!
*ETA: neurotypical babies and parents have a pleasurable touch cycle that forms the first basis for bonding between human beings. It releases hormones and the behavior, being pleasurable, is reinforced. ASD children do not perceive these light, gentle touches as pleasurable, so that cycle is disrupted from the beginning. It can be very painful for some parents who feel that their own child has rejected them, not realizing the child finds it terribly uncomfortable (and, ironically, would probably feel okay with higher pressure … Temple Grandin as a young adult put herself in a cattle squeezing device).
Roger Moore
@John Revolta:
You wish. If he offered her the second spot, she’d let bygones be bygones and jump at it. That’s how these things go.
John Revolta
@beltane: Imagine if Bill Clinton said that about Chelsea
Kid stuff. Now, imagine if HILLARY said it………………………………….
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Yeah, but he’s running for the Republican nomination and dealing with American media figures, so he doesn’t have many decent people to worry about.
redshirt
Keep it up Donald. Insult every group in this country but white men (them too, but they won’t get it). A sure path to VICTORY.
Another Holocene Human
@sharl: Didn’t SCOTUS create these “uncoordinated” PACs?
dedc79
@Amir Khalid:
Have to disagree with the premise here. If it took this line, and not any of the thousands of vulgar, hate-filled, and moronic ones that preceded it, to convince a person that Trump needed to be shunned, then the jury is still out on that person’s “decency.”
Another Holocene Human
@shell:
It’s because taking the Red Letter man’s words to heart just isn’t done in American Christendom. You say “Jaysus, Jaysus” and then go right on sinnin’ and calling yourself justified, covered in the blood, blessed, and righteous.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: Of course! I must be having an off day. I misplaced a definite article in the title of my blog post and realized it after I had hit the publish button.
srv
More nothingburgers. Have heard worse right here about iCarly. You people make Hillary’s email pundits look like rational folks.
In real news, Obama caught cooking the intelligence:
Of course, it was different when Cheney and Chimpy McHalliburton did it.
indycat32
@benw: I think you have that backwards. The Jordan Rule was any defender within 3 feet of Jordan will be called for a foul.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: She’s better every day! Stitches come out next week, and the biopsy was benign, as expected. Whew!
@Amir Khalid: That’s right. And your cat is named Bianca. One of the things I love most about the Internet is being familiar enough with people on the other side of the world to know their pet’s names.
Heliopause
I don’t know about that. I had CNN on in the background for a while this morning and Kate Bolduan and the doofus whose name I can never remember and S.E. Cupp were absolutely livid about Trump’s comments. Megyn Kelly certainly gave it her best shot. I think many in the MSM are trying to play by the old rules, but as long as Trump draws the ratings…
Another Holocene Human
@Heliopause: Sippy Cupp is not exactly a thought leader. She’s lucky to hang onto her media job by her fingernails. In about 5 years she’ll have attempted to reinvent herself.
Patricia Kayden
Hasn’t Limbaugh made nasty comments about the looks of Democratic women, including Michelle Obama (supposedly fat) and Chelsea Clinton (supposedly a dog)? Of course Trump will get away with his derogatory comments about Fiorina (just like he got away with degrading comments about Megyn Kelly). Republicans are fine with sexist comments and the media doesn’t call them out for this.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
Not exactly. Groups like that have existed for a while, but the rules about what they were and weren’t allowed to do were considerably stricter; they were only supposed to talk about issues rather than candidates. What the SCOTUS ruling did was to remove the restrictions on what they could talk about, which made them a whole lot more important.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
Isn’t that exactly what Carter was saying, though? He said he had sinned many times, but that Jesus still forgave him. The only thing he did that was out of the ordinary was to say this about a sin that existed only in his thoughts, rather than his actions, so he could never have been caught except by his own confession.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Would just add he’s already shunned by decent people. Taken a gander at his supporters?
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: Well, that’s kind of what I mean. You have those single issue PACs out there still, but now you can open up a PAC and slap a candidate’s face on it. I put “uncoordinated” in scare quotes because it seems like they’ve already institutionalized legally uncoordinated but effectively closely tied candidate PACs (Ready for Hilary? Right to Rise?) so it was an easy mark for a scamster.
burnspbesq
@srv:
Is the word “unsubstantiated” part of your vocabulary, asshole? If not, you should make an effort to learn what it means.
Brachiator
Part of the issue here is that Trump’s statement is “small cheese.” That is, it is rude, insulting, sexist, but really trivial. It is about on par with Trump’s previous insults of Bush, of the Meg Kelly, of John McCain. And it is on par with the invective hurled in blogs and tweets every freaking day.
Decorum got thrown out a long time ago.
Also, I get a sense that many Trump supporters are boorish, or hate political correctness. And here, political correctness means that only insults to white males who like Trump matter, everybody else can lump it.
And Trump has always depended on the cheap shot. His feud with Rosie O’Donnell was nothing short of despicable. He set the bar low long before he decided to get into politics.
And yeah, I guess like a character in a reality TV show, he has decided to be the disruptive bad guy. But that’s the guy that people root for, that’s the guy that guarantees high ratings. That’s the guy that viewers want to win.
This is better than bread and circuses, more fun than Xtians vs the lions. Is there a line that even Trump can’t cross with impunity? Now that’s a question.
Another Holocene Human
@Roger Moore: Yeah, I’m sort of uncomfortable with what he said on one level, on the other level I tried to live what he’s talking about and it’s extremely difficult if you’re not asexual. So in his mind, Jesus forgives him; in my mind, the religion I was raised with was brutal illogical nonsense.
That he acknowledges that this is what Jesus teaches and he doesn’t measure up is a living rebuke to the kind of Christians who think they can cherry pick Christ’s message and justify everything they do because they’re “saved”. They NEVER want to acknowledge being imperfect or doing anything wrong.
Paul in KY
@CONGRATULATIONS!: I still think he’ll flame out in some spectacular way.
The Gray Adder
Carly’s had work done. It’s obvious, and it’s unclear whether said work was worth it. I have my doubts about that. Hillary, on the other hand, has not. Can you imagine the shitstorm if she showed up at an event all botoxed up like Ms. Fiorina? We’d never, ever hear the end of it.
boatboy_srq
@Heliopause: Problem here is that the MSM, Fauxnooze and all, drank the old school GOP Kool-Aid years ago. They’re in the Chamber/ALEC/AEI camp, and they humour the FRC/FoF/Heritage/Fundie and Randian Libertine/Libertarian camps as necessary. Rank-and-file, for the groups the MSM venerates, are props and window dressing; suddenly now rank and file is calling the shots and the MSM is as bewildered as the rest. So whether the MSM “plays by the rules” or not, so long as Trump keeps pulling a Kirk’s Kobayashi Maru Solution on them those rules no longer matter.
benw
@indycat32:
You must be a Pacers fan, based on your nym! If so your feelings towards Jordan are understandable. :)
I was referring the the “Jordan rules”, per Wikipedia:
My suggestion was that the Jordan rules were allowed by the refs, to keep Jordan somewhat contained offensively. But mostly I just want to encourage people to knock Trump on his ass, Bill Lambier-style.
sharl
@Another Holocene Human: Basically what Roger Moore @41 said.
USSC didn’t create anything, they just prepared the soil to facilitate the germination of whatever shitweed seeds floated in. They’re the same folks who have shared with all of us the various manifestations of their bitter resentments (Thomas, Alito), the view that our structural racial bias problems are a thing of the past (Roberts), faux centrism (Kennedy), the opinion that torture is a feasible tool [via inspiration from the TV series ’24’ (Thomas, Scalia)], and just good ol’ fashioned hot, sweaty, reddish/purple-faced old-man rage (Scalia). And a lot of them are quite knowledgeable about American society, at least those aspects which have been discussed in Federalist Society post-dinner Power Point slide presentations.
With all of that going for us, I assure you we are in good hands. What could possibly go wrong?
boatboy_srq
@Paul in KY: The question is probably more of a when Trump flames out than whether. I’m hoping for a massive, catastrophic, supernova-grade flame-out sometime about 12-13 months from now – after he’s clinched the GOTea nomination and that party has the last fig leaf of decency ripped from it.
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator: That’s the guy that viewers want to win.
Richard Hatch won, indeed.
But then he went to prison. Karma may take time.
bystander
When you’re as handsome as Trump, you have high standards for beauty. The strawberry blond pompadour that would do a Gibson Girl proud, the cupid’s bow mouth, the suits so impeccably tailored you scarcely notice the portly waist…no wonder he finds Carly’s visage so repulsive.
Peale
@Brachiator: Yep. His insults always seemed to be aimed toward specific people, and public figures to boot, so those aren’t going to change many people’s minds. Voters tend to get more upset if candidates single out regular people for insults at their rallies (except if those people are being disruptive). Otherwise, it doesn’t matter. The number of women who will be put off by comments on Carly’s face are probably already outside the reach of Trump anyway. As far as I can tell, the only group he has targeted in general are “criminal illegal immigrants who speak Spanish and are ruining the country.” And very specifically, Mexican illegal immigrants. He can insult them all day long. They won’t vote for him. Heck, not being citizens, they won’t vote for Hillary either. They aren’t up for grabs.
BGinCHI
The Republican party is a prison where the locks are on the inside.
boatboy_srq
@shell: Spartan Ethic again: Trump isn’t guilty of adultery, child abuse, sexual assault on a minor or anything of the kind – because a) he hasn’t actually done it as far as we know and b) hasn’t been caught doing it if he has done it. IOKIYAR extends to being presumed virtuous until the videotape/YouTube/wire-transfers/hotel-receipts which prove otherwise are discovered and make above-the-fold front page news.
BGinCHI
Also, look, Trump being an asshole and the press “falling down on the job” are both features.
The American establishment press is determined to defend the status quo, which means they are Company Men. Period.
They want authority because that is how they rose to the top, by doing what they were told.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
I’m also suspicious that this is partly based around a concept of lust that is, depending on how you see it, either impossibly strict or impossibly loose. That is to say that they count it as lust if you have any sexual feeling about a person, no matter how brief or inadvertent. That’s an impossible standard to meet, because real people can’t control their every thought; the best we can do is to recognize when we’re thinking something inappropriate and try to think about something else. One of the best comments I’ve heard about this is that you should restrict the concept of lust to actively and enthusiastically thinking about someone sexually.
Paul in KY
@boatboy_srq: It would be best if this flameout occurred after he had nomination. Man, I don’t know if I would want him to have the nomination. Policywise (for as much as he has ‘policy’) he’s to the left of most of them. However, as someone up above said, rightwing populism has never been good.
What if the SOB won!!!!
redshirt
@Paul in KY:
Scarily, I think Trump would be a better president then Bush, Walker, Cruz, etc.
Terrifying to consider, but the truth.
And if Donald were to win the presidency, America deserves everything that comes after.
boatboy_srq
@Paul in KY:
Something tells me we’d get the federal version of the Governator: hardly ideal, but far less damaging than the other GOTea alternatives and quite possibly able to be far more moderate. I’m not happy with the idea, but I’m far less unhappy with it than I am with the vision of a President Huckabee or a(nother) pResident Bush.
RSA
@srv:
We’ll see how things turn out. Even assuming the worst behavior on the part of the Obama administration, until the allegedly cooked intelligence results in our invading another country, yeah, it’s different.
Chris
@Paul in KY:
Sooner or later, a Republican will get back in the White House, and the odds of it being a sane one are vanishingly small. This is a great shame, but many things are. Whether it’s Trump or another, it’ll be plenty bad enough.
bemused
@bystander:
Don’t remember right now the journalist who recently called Trump the meringue haired hotelier but that was a good fit.
ET
I assumed Trump was taking about her gender not what here faced actually looked like. Personally I don’t know if he is misogynistic – though I do assume he is to sum degree – but it is just part of a larger issue for him. He is a rich, white, male who had extreme privilege growing up and is still growing strong. He has no real respect for anyone BUT himself regardless of age, gender, race, or religion. Every, from Wall Street traders to the guys up pick up the garbage are there to serve him.
Heliopause
@Another Holocene Human:
Point being, she’s a CNN House Conservative and expressing an establishment view. There’s no shortage of talking heads and pundits decrying Trump’s antics and the “neutral” reporters aren’t obviously covering him sympathetically. The problem is that they’re covering him at all. But a quarter to a third of the country loves his schtick, and many of the rest of us have a train-wreck fascination with it.
Betty Cracker
@redshirt: I agree for a couple of reasons. 1) He can’t really do all the draconian shit he’s proposing (e.g., rounding up and deporting 11 million people), and 2) The GOP establishment would be a smoking crater after a Trump win, and whatever rises in its place would almost certainly be an improvement over the plutocracy rent-boys currently running the joint.
I’ve read comments elsewhere about how Trumpism will lead to a some flavor of nativist fascism. I’m not that pessimistic about this country…yet.
Brachiator
@boatboy_srq:
An apt analogy. Schwarzenegger got a few things done early on, with the help of Democrats, who were a majority in the California assembly, and with a political infrastructure of Republican moderates (though he later named a Democrat to be his chief of staff). But afterwards the fact that he was a political neophyte worked against him, and he could not counter the opposition to his policies, even when he tried to go directly to the voters.
And Schwarzenegger didn’t have to deal with foreign policy. Even if I allowed that Trump had good intentions, I just don’t see that he is competent or that he could be a “fast learner.”
Heliopause
@Betty Cracker:
There are various reasons he’s highly unlikely to do that, but it should be pointed out that from a purely logistical point of view the Nazis managed something quite similar.
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator: It strikes me that the Enron-engineered recall of Gray Davis should have taught the GOTea that messing with popular sentiment was a bad thing. That exercise was intended to unseat Davis and send a True Republican™ to Sacramento – and instead CA got a pleasantly-ineffective semi-moderate squish. Instead of learning the lesson there, the GOTea seems primed to make the same mistake at the national level. One hopes that it means the same near-permanent-minority status for the party after ’16, though it’ll probably take a couple cycles to wash out the dregs.
J.D. Rhoades
@Chris: @benw:
My suggestion was that the Jordan rules were allowed by the refs, to keep Jordan somewhat contained offensively.
The only man who could hold Jordan under 30 points a game was Dean Smith.
Cpl. Cam
@benw: I thought the “Jordan Rule” was that if your name was Jordan you only needed to dribble once every three, occasionally four, steps..
Shaun Appleby
@srv: Yes, cooking intelligence to start an arguably criminal, trillion-dollar war is different.
Brachiator
@boatboy_srq:
Oh hell, yes (except for the Enron role)! Talk about “be careful what you ask for.” A quick summary:
Compared to Arnold, Issa had the charisma of a wet rag. And so, the Governator kicked him out of the way and sailed through to an easy victory.
The GOP mainstream believed that Jeb! or some other approved GOP robot would be able to step in and easily beat presumptive nominee Clinton in a fury of GOP and Tea Party self-righteousness. But Trump has jumped up and stolen all the pretenders’ lunch money, and now the GOP doesn’t know what to do.
Mandalay
@Patricia Kayden: Not forgetting this “joke” from John McCain:
Trump’s vile comments serve to show that we haven’t really made any progress at all on attacking women for their appearance.
Cpl. Cam
@ET: everybody but Johnny Mac…
mai naem mobile
Not sure why Trumpy mentions other people’s looks when he’s no George Clooney, hell, he’s not even Jason Alexander. I’m waiting for the supposed Fred Trump racial stuff regarding his rental properties coming out. I don’t think he’ll be as teflonesque with that because I think his response will not be what it needs to be.
PurpleGirl
@mai naem mobile: Regarding the rental properties: Trump will heavily note that HE builds condominiums and not rental properties. He sells his units to people who can afford them. His company then becomes the managing agent for the properties. I do not know what actually happened to his father’s properties. One of Trump’s first deals was the conversion of the Hotel Commodore into the Grand Hyatt. (Which I will never forgive him for; the Commodore was a great place to hold Star Trek and science fiction conventions. The brass elevator console was often played with as if it was on the bridge of the Enterprise.) (Yes, I was a staff gopher at the ST Cons of the early 1970s.)
boatboy_srq
@Brachiator:
The recall would never have made it onto the ballot if Enron hadn’t played the CA energy market like an accordion, spiking prices and throttling supply until Davis brokered a deal for ugly-but-stable electricity rates – at which point Enron let the bottom fall out of the electricity market so the GOP could whinge that Davis brokered a bad deal. It is painfully delicious irony that the recall put Ahnuld in the CA governor’s mansion, and less than a year later Enron – one of the biggest players in the GOP campaign fundraising fold and a key support for Shrub’s 2000 campaign – filed for (fiscal) bankruptcy.
TriassicSands
It used to be IOKIYAR, but now it seems there’s a corollary: IOKIYAT. Trump has already been cut enough slack to get to the Andromeda galaxy and back, but he seems to just keep on chugging along.
The question is this: Is there any American female who is so respected that should Trump insult her, the media would have no choice but to tear him apart and the Republican Party would have to disown him? My guess is the answer is NO.
Someone should ask Trump about Mother Teresa. I can just hear him saying, “My god what a mug on that old hag. She had to become a nun, I mean, what man would be willing to schtupp that? And so on.
It’s too bad we don’t have a photo of the Virgin Mary. We might be able to get him to comment on her “do-ability.”
One good question: When Trump is gone, will his performance have permanently changed the rules of decorum for presidential candidates?
Mike G
The Trumpenproletariat dream of a world where they can live in the infantile fantasy of unlimited power and get away with spewing whatever shit pops into their head. They love assholes because they wish they could be assholes — it’s the whole basis of popularity of Rabies Radio.
Through Trump they’re vicariously living the dream.
dSmith
It occurred to me that the only thing Trump could do or say to alienate his fans would be to apologize for something.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@srv:
Ooh! A bunch of anonymous right wing spooks as reported by TDB. Thanks.
Fred
Trump complaining about anybody’s face is a clear case of pot and kettle. I think both Trump and Fiorina have the faces they have made and deserve.
As to Trump commenting on the F%#$aliciousness of his own daughter, that IS grotesque as crap on toast and not in the least bit surprising. It’s gonna be a loooooong year.
Tehanu
@Betty Cracker:
I wish I were that optimistic that they wouldn’t be replaced by brownshirts…. Sorry if I’m Godwining up the place.
Paul in KY
@redshirt: Hope you would be right. He can flip positions on a dime & just BS any pushback.
Paul in KY
@boatboy_srq: His general positions are more moderate. I’d be afraid of him riding some kind of right wing populist surge & ‘going with the flow’ for personal power enhancing.
Paul in KY
@Chris: Comforting thoughts there…
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: The uniforms will be so classy….
Paul in KY
@TriassicSands: Maybe the Queen of England, or Kate Middelton?
boatboy_srq
@Paul in KY: The biggest workable part of that populist surge would be progressive tax reform, which even the rabid Teahadi base is behind. As for the rest: deporting each and every undocumented resident would a) bust the budget, b) p!ss off every industry that has come to rely on undocumented labor and b) consume just about every law enforcement entity; it’s unlikely in the extreme to be workable. Brandishing the “big stick” internationally would almost immediately be off the table, for similar reasons.
For the record: NO, I do NOT want to see a pResident Trump, but I can think of worse things that could happen.
Matt McIrvin
@boatboy_srq:
Unfortunately, a global nuclear holocaust takes less than an hour to play through.