Replies to post #323329 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[DrHarleyboy]

What an absolute load of gobbledygook, what a waste of of someones life writing that drivel.

[rooster]

I see no one on the left really gets trump or his supporters. They ramble on with those incoherent thoughts.

[blackhawks]

Donald Trump's Campaign Is Becoming an Exercise in Public Insanity

If it doesn't work out in his favor, someone is always conspiring against him.

Unless somebody finds the strawberries soon, this campaign is going to be an exercise in public insanity.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28747966/donald-trump-economy-federal-reserve-chairman-conspiracy/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_esq&utm_medium=email&date=081919&src=nl&utm_campaign=17816410

By Charles P. Pierce
Aug 19, 2019

If the economy goes south, as a lot of people are warning us it will, then it's comforting to know that the president* already is only a baby step away from blaming the Gnomes Of Zurich.

From The New York Times:

He has insisted that his own handpicked Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, is intentionally acting against him. He has said other countries, including allies, are working to hurt American economic interests. And he has accused the news media of trying to create a recession.

“The Fake News Media is doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election,” Mr. Trump tweeted last week. “The problem they have is that the economy is way too strong and we will soon be winning big on Trade, and everyone knows that, including China!”

Mr. Trump has repeated the claims in private discussions with aides and allies, insisting that his critics are trying to take away what he sees as his calling card for re-election.

Mr. Trump has been agitated in discussions of the economy, and by the news media’s reporting of warnings of a possible recession. He has said forces that do not want him to win have been overstating the damage his trade war has caused, according to people who have spoken with him.

And several aides agree with him that the news media is overplaying the economic fears, adding to his feeling of being justified, people close to the president said.

Oh, lovely.

Weaponized paranoia always has been at the heart of El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago's political identity. In the tangles of his mind, he is always standing strong and alone against a vast array of enemies, including the minions of The Deep State and certain Guatemalan toddlers.

If he feels like his presidency* is in serious peril, he's liable to go off the deep end. He's already setting up the members of the cult to refuse to accept the result of any election he doesn't win. (He's recently gone off again about those busloads of Massachusetts voters who drove to New Hampshire to deprive him of his win there in 2016.)

If a recession hits, he's already blamed his own Fed chair and the evil media. Who would be left?

The president’s broadsides follow a long pattern of conspiratorial thinking. He has claimed, without evidence, that undocumented immigrants cast millions of ballots, costing him the popular vote in the 2016 election.

During the campaign, he predicted that the system might prove to be “rigged” if he did not win. He conjured up a “deep state” conspiracy within the government to thwart his election and, more recently, his agenda. And he has said reporters are trying to harm him with pictures of empty seats at his rallies.

Unless somebody finds the strawberries soon, this campaign is going to be an exercise in public insanity.

[fuagf]

Trump has turned the racial dog whistle into a steam whistle

"A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump's Support"

DrHarleyboy's and rooster's replies to you stand as proof of the accuracy of your article, and of this one.

By Michael A. CohenJuly 19, 2019, 6:26 p.m.

IMAGE - President Donald Trump spoke at rally in Greenville, N.C.(Gerry Broome/AP)

‘SEND HER BACK, send her back.”

These incendiary words, at a Trump rally on Wednesday night in North Carolina, are still reverberating. They come only days after the president told four Democratic congresswomen of color, including Somali-American representative Ilhan Omar, to “go back ..

....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 14, 2019

” to the countries from which they originally came.

This moment of unambiguous bigotry, emanating straight from the president and echoed by his most fervent supporters, is not your garden-variety Trumpian outrage. It is a turning point in American politics: when the racial dog whistle becomes a racial steam whistle.

For more than five decades, ever since the civil rights era, white politicians — mainly, though not always, Republicans — have played on racial fears. But they did so subtly, developing language that nodded toward racial bigotry while eschewing the sort of naked racism that turned off moderates.

They talked about “states’ rights” or the desire for a “color-blind society.” They spoke of “economic anxiety.” When Republicans railed against “big government” and welfare or labeled Democrats as “tax-and-spend liberals,” there was an insidious, but deniable, subtext: “taxing the middle class to spend money on government programs for poor black Americans.” Racial animus and white fears about integration had become euphemized.

The “send it back” chant ends this charade. It’s the logical culmination of four years of Trump’s racist appeals and the unwillingness of congressional Republicans to speak out against them. Indeed, once again, few Republicans were willing to unambiguously condemn the president’s words as racist.

Some complained that Trump’s words were politically unwise. “That does not need to be our campaign call,” said Representative Mark Walker .. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/us/politics/ilhan-omar-donald-trump.html .. of North Carolina, who previously had taken to Twitter ... https://twitter.com/RepMarkWalker/status/1151688382428393472?s=20 .. to express similar concern (tossing in a dig at Omar’s “great disdain for both America & Israel”).

For Walker and other Republicans, the attacks on a dark-skinned, Muslim member of Congress are problematic because the president — and his supporters — have said the quiet part out loud.

“Send her back” turns what was once subtext into text. It makes explicit the GOP’s disdain for non-white Americans. It demonstrates that opposition to Omar’s words is, at its core, opposition to her very presence in the country. And Trump’s demands that congresswomen of color profess their love for America — or leave the country — make clear that one’s status as an American is dependent on one’s skin color. The modern Republican Party, it’s now clear, is defined by a platform of racism and white identity.

And the 2020 election has become a referendum on whether America will be a country that privileges the rights, and caters to the cultural fears, of whites, or is a diverse, multicultural nation that treats all its citizens equally.

Of course, some version of this question has hung over American politics since the 1960s, when the Republican Party began defining itself as a political party devoted to the interests of white America, and the Democratic Party adopted the mantle of the melting pot.

Now we don’t need to pretend anymore that politics is about something fundamentally different.

While polling shows that Trump’s racist views are opposed by a majority of Americans, among base Republican voters his bigotry is a feature, not a bug. It’s what motivated his supporters in 2016, and it may do so again in crucial battleground states in 2020. It’s part of the reason why many Democrats don’t want to talk about race, because as much as they may believe they are on the right side of the issue, they know that bigotry resonates among all too many white voters.

To acknowledge as much is to concede that America is a far more intolerant country than any of us want to recognize. And that’s a painful realization for many. But Democrats will not get the luxury of fighting the next election on the terrain of their choosing. Race, culture, and white identity are the issues on which Trump and the GOP want to engage — and Democrats must be willing to have that fight.

Race is the greatest fault line in American politics. It’s been true for more than 50 years, and as vile and vicious as the “send it back” chants were, at least we can say they’ve clarified what’s at stake in 2020.

Michael A. Cohen’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @speechboy71.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/07/19/trump-has-turned-racial-dog-whistle-into-steam-whistle/oxjaxnNaShQmLg71sHCsSK/story.html

[fuagf]

Fear and Loyalty: How Donald Trump Took Over the Republican Party

"A Complete Psychological Analysis of Trump's Support"

Yours covers the voters still with Trump voters. This one covers politicians still subjugated by him.

The president demands complete fealty, and as the impeachment hearings showed, he has largely attained it. To cross him is to risk a future in the Republican party.


President Trump has kept Republicans members of Congress in line throughout the impeachment process.
Pete Marovich for The New York Times

Jonathan Martin Maggie Haberman

By Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman

Dec. 21, 2019
Updated 10:38 p.m. ET

BIRMINGHAM, Mich. — By the summer of 2017, Dave Trott, a two-term Republican congressman, was worried enough about President Trump’s erratic behavior and his flailing attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act that he criticized the president in a closed-door meeting with fellow G.O.P. lawmakers.

The response was instantaneous — but had nothing to do with the substance of Mr. Trott’s concerns. “Dave, you need to know somebody has already told the White House what you said,” he recalled a colleague telling him. “Be ready for a barrage of tweets.”

Mr. Trott got the message: To defy Mr. Trump is to invite the president’s wrath, ostracism within the party and a premature end to a career in Republican politics. Mr. Trott decided not to seek re-election in his suburban Detroit district, concluding that running as anti-Trump Republican was untenable, and joining a wave of Republican departures from Congress that has left those who remain more devoted to the president than ever.

“If I was still there and speaking out against the president, what would happen to me?” Mr. Trott said before answering his own question: Mr. Trump would have lashed out and pressured House G.O.P. leaders to punish him.

Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.

But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P. activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.

His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment.

Perhaps more revealing, some G.O.P. lawmakers who initially said Mr. Trump’s phone call with the president of Ukraine was inappropriate later dropped their criticism. People close to Mr. Trump attributed the shift both to his public defense of the call as “perfect’’ and to private discussions he and his allies had with concerned lawmakers.

This fealty hardly guarantees Mr. Trump re-election: He has never garnered a 50 percent approval rating as president and over half of voters tell pollsters they will oppose him no matter who the Democrats nominate.

But the shoulder-to-shoulder unity stands in contrast to Democrats at the moment, with their contentious moderate-versus-liberal primary that was on full display in Thursday night’s debate. And it is all the more striking given Mr. Trump’s deviations from longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs.

“He has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him political power here,” said Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North Carolina, adding: “Trump has touched the nerve of my conservative base like no person in my lifetime.”


Representative Dave Trott of Michigan decided not to seek re-election in 2018 after determining it was untenable to run as an anti-Trump
Republican. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press

Interviews with current and former Republican lawmakers as well as party strategists, many of whom requested anonymity so as not to publicly cross the president, suggest that many elected officials are effectively faced with two choices. They can vote with their feet by retiring — and a remarkable 40 percent of Republican members of Congress have done so or have been defeated at the ballot box since Mr. Trump took office.

Or they can mute their criticism of him. All the incentives that shape political behavior — with voters, donors and the news media — compel Republicans to bow to Mr. Trump if they want to survive.

Sitting in a garland-bedecked hotel restaurant in his former district, Mr. Trott said that he did not want to seek re-election “as a Trumper” — and that he knew he had little future in the party as an opponent of the president.

There is no market, he said, for independence. Divergence from Trumpism will never be good enough for Democrats; Mr. Trump will target you among Republicans, Mr. Trott added, and the vanishing voters from the political middle will never have a chance to reward you because you would not make it through a primary. That will be ensured in part by the megaphone the president wields with the conservative news media.

“Trump is emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unfit for office, and I’m sure a lot of Republicans feel the same way,” Mr. Trott said. “But if they say that, the social media barrage will be overwhelming.” He added that he would be open to the presidential candidacy of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.

On the other hand, Mr. Trump dangles rewards to those who show loyalty — a favorable tweet, or a presidential visit to their state — and his heavy hand has assured victory for a number of Republican candidates in their primaries. That includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who did as many Fox News appearances .. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/us/politics/florida-governor-election.html?searchResultPosition=1 .. as possible to draw the president’s attention.

“The greatest fear any member of Congress has these days is losing a primary,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who lost his general election last year in a heavily Hispanic Miami-area district. “That’s the foremost motivator.”

The larger challenge with Mr. Trump is that all politics is personal with him, and he carefully tracks who on television is praising him or denouncing his latest rhetorical excess. “He is the White House political director,” Scott Reed, a longtime Republican consultant, said.

More conventional presidents may be more understanding of lawmakers who are pulled in a different direction by the political demands of their districts — but Mr. Trump has shown little tolerance for such dissent. Mr. Curbelo, for instance, occasionally spoke out against Mr. Trump, particularly over immigration policy, and the president took notice.

Riding with Mr. Trump in his limousine on Key West last year, Mr. Curbelo recalled in an interview that the president had noted that people were lining the streets to show their support for him, and asked Mr. Curbelo if they were in his district.

He said they were, prompting the president to turn to others in the car and say: “Maybe Carlos will stop saying such nasty things about me,” Mr. Curbelo recalled.

He said they all laughed but the “passive aggressive” comment, as he put it, was not lost on him.

Increasingly, though, Mr. Trump does not even have to make implied threats within his party — Republicans can ascertain the benefit of sticking with him.

Representative Elise Stefanik hails from an upstate New York district that the president carried by 14 points yet she had not previously hesitated to go her own way.


Representative Carlos Curbelo occasionally spoke out against Mr. Trump over immigration policy. He lost re-election in 2018.
Pedro Portal/Miami Herald, via Associated Press

“I have one of the most independent records in the House,” Ms. Stefanik said. “And I have critiqued the president, have voted differently than the president.”

Yet after she vehemently criticized the impeachment hearings and found herself under attack by George Conway, the anti-Trump husband of the White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, she welcomed the embrace of the president, his family and news media allies such as the Fox News host Sean Hannity — and the campaign donations that poured in.

Ms. Stefanik said she opposed impeachment because Democrats failed to make a convincing case. But she said that she would not have even voted to censure the president, and that she was chiefly driven by wanting to “stand up for my district.”

And, Ms. Stefanik noted, since her “no” vote she had received “the most positive calls since I was sworn into office.”

The incentive to show fealty to Mr. Trump has become evident to the Club for Growth, a fiscal conservative group that was made famous for its willingness to tangle with Republican leaders and was hostile to Mr. Trump in 2016.

The group’s president, David McIntosh, said conservative voters had lost interest in punishing ideological heresies and were motivated by one overarching factor unrelated to policy.

“Poll after poll showed us that Republican primary voters wanted their nominees to support President Trump,” he said, “so in order to make sure they were viable and would get re-elected, they ended up being supporters of his.”

Mr. McIntosh and Republican lawmakers said Mr. Trump’s largely conservative record had made it easier to remain loyal, noting his tax cuts, deregulation and judicial appointments.

Lawmakers not seeking re-election are often the most candid about the slavish devotion Mr. Trump engenders with voters — and the pressure it puts on them.

“Public officials need to be held accountable, and I don’t think any governmental system works well with blind loyalty without reason,” said Representative Francis Rooney of Florida, who announced his intention to retire earlier this year after criticizing Mr. Trump for his conduct with Ukraine and suffering an immediate backlash.

Mr. Rooney ultimately voted against impeachment, but told colleagues he felt uneasy about it. Recalling an appearance on a Florida television station afterward, Mr. Rooney said: “They interviewed me after the vote and then they interviewed one of these Cape Coral Republican ladies and she said, ‘Well, it’s about time they came around to realize it’s a big media hoax.’ How do you argue with that? How do you reason with that?”

Many of the Republicans who may have considered impeaching Mr. Trump are gone. They were part of a 40-seat loss the party had in the House last year, which deprived the caucus of many of its most independent figures and left it more supportive of the president than ever.

So why was there no introspection within the party after the midterms about the damage Mr. Trump did to Republican candidates, particularly in the suburbs?

“If you go to any Republican event, you’re going to find more people at that event than ever before,” Mr. Trott said, “and every single one of them to a person will be all in for President Trump. They’ll all have ‘Make America Great Again’ hats on and they’ll be saying what a tremendous president he is.”


Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump during impeachment hearings.
Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Mr. Trott recounted one of his most vivid memories of his time serving with Mr. Trump. It was the day in 2017 when House Republicans voted to repeal the A.C.A. and celebrated afterward at the White House.

Mr. Trott was one of the first lawmakers to enter the Oval Office after the Rose Garden celebration and he stood behind the president’s desk when Mr. Trump pulled out a sheet of paper.

“He already had a list of 20 people who had voted against him two hours earlier,” he recalled.

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting from Washington.

More Coverage of President Trump and the G.O.P.

Trump’s Takeover of the Republican Party Is Almost Complete April 3, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/politics/trump-republican-party.html

Republicans Argue Impeachment Case Falls Short of Proving Trump Misconduct Nov. 9, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/us/politics/republican-strategy-impeachment-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/us/politics/trump-impeachment-republicans.html