Sound The TRUMPets! A Thread for Presidential Pondering 2016-2020(?)

[Todd]

Pelosi mocks Trump: Ice cream in my freezer better than Lysol in your lungs

So much awesomeness.

[71 dB]

Pelosi mocks Trump: Ice cream in my freezer better than Lysol in your lungs

So much awesomeness.

Pelosi's excuse: "I'm stupid, but not as stupid as Trump." 

[JBS]

You clearly ignored the Bernie Sanders campaign. 

From what I've read 70% of the economy has contracted due to the essential/nonessential government mandated shutdown. Don't you think those assets may seriously lose value if the economy remains tethered indefinitely? I know the various stimulus plans have been aimed at keeping the supply side afloat and governments operating but how many more dollars can be pumped into a stalled economy with millions of unemployed until people realize that the dollar is becoming worthless with ever shrinking asset values supporting it? Our share of global GDP was already declining, now add another glut of dollars while our latest and greatest trade and debt provider, China, also experiences stagnation and cannot provide the role it did in 2008, selling cheap goods (preventing inflation) while buying US treasuries and assets.

You are much too flippant.

Drogulus adheres to MMT, so his premises are not quite what you think they are.
I don't, so I'll link this in case you are not familiar with it....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory

[drogulus]

You clearly ignored the Bernie Sanders campaign. 

     Bernie has been advised on how money works, but there's not much evidence he grasps it. Still, he's not going to tax the national money out of existence any more than Rand Paul would. All he'd do is raise taxes on much more money spent into the economy, not my cuppa because I hate the "money comes from rich people" framework he uses. Money goes to rich people.

From what I've read 70% of the economy has contracted due to the essential/nonessential government mandated shutdown. Don't you think those assets may seriously lose value if the economy remains tethered indefinitely? I know the various stimulus plans have been aimed at keeping the supply side afloat and governments operating but how many more dollars can be pumped into a stalled economy with millions of unemployed until people realize that the dollar is becoming worthless with ever shrinking asset values supporting it?

     I see, we'll deflate our way to inflation. I thinks not. Filling a vast money hole with money doesn't make a money mountain until you fill the hole and keep adding. We won't do it.

[drogulus]

He'd be adding to the deficit with all the increased spending for something like Medicare for all, which I assume you would approve of. Deficits do matter, and are mostly beneficial according to MMT, right? I read about the federal job guarantees, something else Bernie supported. Were you feeling the Bern?

     Oh yes, deficits matter positively if they are on the public side, with the private side having the surplus. Deficit phobes don't look at both sides, so they can't figure out what deficits are for.

     The job guarantee comes from the realization that using unemployment to control inflation is too destructive. I would call it barbaric.  The JG is a good tool because it fill the demand gap and employed persons are more attractive to the private sector than the long term unemployed. What would recessions be like if the worst feature of them was removed? I suppose we'd still have them but they's be shorter and shallower without the demand collapse. Though it's obviously more humane, what recommends the measure to me is efficiency in resource utilization. Doing well is a better way of doing good.

     

[Karl Henning]

Trump erupts at campaign team as his poll numbers slide

[Herman]

Trump erupts at campaign team as his poll numbers slide

according to some reports, threatening to sue the campaign manager for showing him bad poll numbers.
Couldn't be more stable.

[Karl Henning]

If Trump, McConnell, Attorney General William P. Barr (who is advising right-wing groups on how to attack stay-at-home orders that are in sync with federal public health standards) would just look at the polls (here is the one time they seem to ignore them), they would see that much of what they've been saying and pushing for — a quick reopening, a pollyanna-ish view of the crisis, quack remedies, blaming others, engaging in partisan attacks, bullying and insulting responsible governors — is wildly unpopular. While there is a gap between Republicans and Democrats on some of these issues, Republican voters are much more in line with responsible governors of both parties (e.g., Republicans Larry Hogan of Maryland and Mike DeWine of Ohio, and Democrats Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois) than the Trump Republicans when it comes to reopening, testing and the role of the federal government.

Republican politicians in Washington, by and large, are neither following nor leading the people. With a few exceptions, they are following Trump over a political cliff. The Trump cult is so intense that it has lost the ability to act in its own political self-interest.

[Todd]

Yep, GMG offers world leading political analysis.  As always.  Things should be clear for folks by now, but perhaps not on this forum.  Let me try to clear things up.  The new electoral equation is as follows:

Covid + Depression = President Biden + Democrat House (>240) + Democrat Senate (<60)

One must always caveat this with the fact that Dems are so incompetent that they could still lose.  See 2016.

Trump's gonna be Trump.  But Trump Derangement Syndrome is so potent, and so real, that virtue signaling continues unabated and tens or hundreds of hours will be furiously spent reading, writing, and "analyzing" Trump. 

As always, it's entertaining.

[Todd]

Presidents don't get reelected with high and rising or unstable unemployment. 

Biden is a shit candidate, but it doesn't matter.  Biden doesn't need Harris or Abrams.  They bring him what he already has.  He needs someone to guarantee national victory.  Mrs Obama doesn't do that.

Republicans need to begin planning for the post-Trump era.  As long as Dems stay under 60 seats in the Senate, things will be OK, even if Dems manage to Daschle McConnell, which I doubt. 

[Todd]

Wishful thinking doesn't win elections.

[Todd]

Wishful thinking married to laziness lost the election in 2016.  Presidential candidate tip: the Great Lakes region is beautiful in fall and is worth a visit.

[Todd]

Biden only needs to be able to read a teleprompter to get the state name correct.  He also needs to reduce the number of racist and sexist statements he makes to a bare minimum, though he doesn't have to get it down to zero.  The Covid pandemic will assist in preventing him from groping women and sniffing their hair in front of cameras.

[Karl Henning]

Parental Advisory: this is a left-ish Op-Ed:

Trump shocked to learn he might not win reelection

By Paul Waldman
Opinion writer
April 30, 2020 at 10:20 a.m. EDT

President Trump does not like to hear bad news. By all accounts, in private the people who work for him are required to deliver to him a version of the rhetoric he offers to the public: Everything is great; you're setting records; nobody's ever seen anything so amazing. When they don't, he becomes extremely unhappy, as he did recently after aides presented him with "grim polling data ... to encourage him to reduce the frequency of coronavirus briefings or to stop taking questions, after seeing his numbers slip for several weeks," according to reporting by The Post and other news organizations.

Worst of all, internal polls from the RNC and his reelection campaign showed him trailing former vice president Joe Biden, the likely Democratic nominee, in swing states:

Aides described Trump as in a particularly foul mood last week because of the polling data and news coverage of his administration's response to the pandemic, according to two of the people familiar with the discussions. In one call, he berated [campaign manager Brad] Parscale over the polling data, the two people said.

Other reports describe Trump "shouting" or "erupt[ing]" at Parscale and blaming the campaign manager for his poor standing, because it couldn't possibly be Trump's own fault. "I am not f---ing losing to Joe Biden," he reportedly said. Yet the reality is that he will probably trail Biden in polls from here to November, though that doesn't mean he's going to lose.

There's something unusual in the story of Trump reacting so strongly to this "grim" polling data from his advisers. For the entirety of the primary campaign, in trail heats Trump has run behind not only Biden but the other Democrats who ran for president as well. Him trailing Biden would not be news to his campaign, or even to Trump himself, despite his ample powers of denial. Which means that those polls must have been really bad for Trump.

The most hilarious part of the story is that in order to make amends, Parscale later came to the White House with "polling numbers that were more positive for Trump, and the president seemed in a far better mood." The most powerful person on earth is essentially a toddler whose volatile moods need to be carefully managed by those around him. Perhaps Parscale also brought him a lollipop to soothe his tender feelings.

Thus placated, Trump was soon back to his old self. "I don't believe the polls," he told Reuters on Wednesday. "I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don't think that they will put a man in who's incompetent." That's certainly an interesting way to think about it.

So this seems to be the pattern: Trump learns of bad polling data, yells at his aides and blames them for his poor standing, then convinces himself that the bad polls are all invented as part of a scheme to undermine him — "FAKE POLLING, just like 2016 (but worse)!" he tweeted Thursday morning — and goes back to being sure his victory is all but certain.

He's likely to repeat that cycle many times between now and November, since the essential shape of the race — a Biden lead in the mid-single digits — has been unchanged since the beginning of the year.

Of course, there are things we can't anticipate that might alter the race: a shocking revelation, a campaign meltdown, a foreign crisis, a second wave of covid-19 infections. But in the end, nearly all Democrats will stick with Biden and nearly all Republicans will come home to Trump. Even if the economy fails to recover significantly by November, the race will still be close, which means that no outcome is assured. It took an extraordinary confluence of factors to enable Trump's electoral college victory in 2016, but it's entirely possible something similar will happen this year.

In our polarized era, there will be no blowouts on the order of Ronald Reagan's 18-point margin in 1984 or Richard Nixon's 23-point win in 1972. A blowout would be more like the 7-point win Barack Obama managed in 2008 — and that required a hugely unpopular departing Republican president, a disastrous war, and a collapsing economy.

Right now we're in the midst of a pandemic being grossly mismanaged by the president and an economic crisis even worse than what was in progress in 2008. The fact that Trump isn't trailing by 15 or 20 points shows how resilient partisan attachments are; while there are certainly Republicans who could abandon Trump, as a proportion of the entire electorate their numbers are relatively small. And I'd remind you that Hillary Clinton led Trump in polls for almost the entirety of the 2016 campaign (and, of course, she did end up winning the popular vote by 2 points — very close to what polls had predicted).

Trump may take reassurance from that — but he can't be reassured for long. It's clear that he exists in a state of agitation and anxiety, flipping back and forth between terror at the prospect of losing and absurd overconfidence at his certainty of victory.

But if Trump has done any angry shouting at aides over his administration's disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic — which has killed 60,000 Americans and counting — we have not heard about it. Some low poll numbers, on the other hand? That's worth a tantrum.

[Todd]

Perhaps Oliver Stone can direct Trump, like he did with Nixon.  Who could he miscast in the lead?  Maybe Ryan Gosling.

[SimonNZ]

Some of that might be more "Brechtian" than "woke".

And anyway: "meh" - the Brits already do this with Shakespeare etc: if the best actress auditioning for Ophelia is white and the best actor auditioning for her brother Laertes is black then they now just go ahead and use those actors.

Or should we check the blood type of actors to ensure that, say, Julie Christie and Brian Blessed could really have had Kenneth Branagh as their son? Or that no one with brown eyes is allowed to play JFK?

Also: re your saying "a gay": I'm pretty sure you'll find there's a long history in the acting world of gays playing straights. Probably many of your favorite films and favorite performances.

[SimonNZ]

Why is it the only people I hear talk about "woke" and its supposed values are right wingers? I never hear this term from the left except ironically.

Where do you get your information about "woke culture" and the caricature portrait you painted above? Is it from Fox and the like?

[SimonNZ]

Not directly Trump, but I'm putting it here anyway:

Alaska school board removes 'The Great Gatsby,' other famous books from curriculum for 'controversial' content

"An Alaska school board removed five famous — but allegedly "controversial" — books from district classrooms, inadvertently renewing local interest in the excluded works.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison were all taken off an approved list of works that teachers in the Mat-Su Borough School District may use for instruction.

The school board voted 5-2 on Wednesday to yank the works out of teachers' hands starting this fall. The removed books contain content that could potentially harm students, school board Vice President Jim Hart told NBC News on Tuesday.

"If I were to read these in a corporate environment, in an office environment, I would be dragged into EO," an equal opportunity complaint proceeding, Hart said. "The question is why this is acceptable in one environment and not another."

"Caged Bird" was derided for "anti-white' messaging," "Gatsby" and "Things" are loaded with "sexual references," "Invisible Man" has bad language and "Catch-22" includes violence, according to the school district.

Dianne K. Shibe, president of the Mat-Su Education Association teachers union, said parents and her members were stunned by the board action.

Even though the school board had listed an agenda item to discuss "controversial book descriptions," Shibe said, no one believed those works were under serious threat.

"Most of the community didn't respond, because these books had been used forever," Shibe told NBC News. "Now in retrospect, it's like, 'duh.' I could have seen this coming."[...]

[SimonNZ]

If it was "all over" I'd occasionally hear it from someone other than a right winger.

Are you sure this isn't a disparaging caricature you're accepting as fact?

[JBS]

Here's Wikipedia's take in the term and its history
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

There are people who take it to an extreme,  Fox and other right wing  media then pretend that those people are typical, not extreme.