Donald Trump

[AngryOfTuebrook]

The ever-brilliant John Oliver takes the cunt down.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGc2nN9OguQ

 

#MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain

[Bob]

The ever-brilliant John Oliver takes the cunt down.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGc2nN9OguQ

 

#MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain

I think Obama's gonna win a second term. Nailed on in fact.

[KopOut]

This.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

[General Dryness]

Be his third, won't it Bob?

[Section_31]

This.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

Good article, and explains a lot about what's happening here too.

[3 Stacks]

I think Obama's gonna win a second term. Nailed on in fact.

 

He's already done two terms.

[TheHowieLama]

#spunkmouseforpresident

[Dougie Do'ins]

He's already done two terms.

I thought there was a hidden joke in BSs post.

[Hades]

I hope Trump wins and starts a nuclear war.

[Biscao]

Seems to be falling apart a bit at the moment, thankfully. Rubio has caught up with him in Florida and getting a majority of delegates seems less likely suddenly. He's certainly lost a lot of momentum in the last week.

[Bjornebye]

Type loser.com into google

 

Then look at lemontree.org

[Bob]

I was merely suggesting that the Jon Oliver video was a bit late in being broadcast by AoT, that was all.

 

Rep to Dougie.

[lifetime fan]

Batshit fucking crazy.

 

 

And then there's Richard Nixon, who was president when the Supreme Court decision legalising abortion across the US, Roe vs Wade, was handed down. He largely kept silent on the subsequent controversy, but recently released tapes recorded the day after the court announcement show the president saying that abortion was sometimes "necessary" - such as in the case of mixed-race children.

[magicrat]

This.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

 

 

Thanks for posting. Interesting in parts, especially the insight into the likely continuing gridlock in US politics where the GOP fails to win the White House but can control Congress . On its central theme of the rise of Trump not that insightful imo. People who feel threatened by outside forces and fear change turn to charismatic outspoken leaders that promise brush away the problems usually by force. Many more people that don't actually subscribe to such extreme polices feel pressured by their peers to join the cause. Hitler showed  how it can happen 

[Anubis]

Cruz looking to buy significant air time in Florida with what appears to be a view to taking Rubio out of the race on his home turf, leaving a satanic head-to-head between himself and the Trumpster.

 

 

Ted Cruz is threatening to make one of the biggest gambles of the 2016 season: diving into Florida to knock off Marco Rubio.

 

Cruz has little chance of winning the March 15 Florida primary, but he’s showing signs he might compete by opening field offices and sending surrogates to stump in the state while his super PAC prepares to strafe Marco Rubio with a seven-figure ad buy.

 

The aim: pull enough voters away from Rubio to ensure Donald Trump wins the state’s 99 delegates and deny the Florida senator any pick-up opportunity elsewhere by forcing him to defend his turf. Doing that gives Trump a bigger lead in delegates, but it means Cruz has calculated he can catch up.

 

“Cruz thinks he can do well against Trump in a head-to-head race. And he needs to kill Rubio to do it,” said Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, whose survey released showed Trump leading Rubio 38 percent to 30 among Florida Republicans.

 

Whether it’s an elaborate headfake or expert play to kill off a rival 2016 contender, the Texan aims to force Rubio to spend more time and money defending his home turf, freeing up Cruz to more easily compete for delegates in eight states and U.S. territories that hold contests between Tuesday and Saturday.

 

But the strategy is risky. Cruz doesn’t want Trump to get too strong, and he needs to pad his delegate count on March 15 too. Attention paid to Florida cuts into resources available in places where Cruz could have more clear-cut opportunities to win delegates, including in conservative North Carolina, which awards delegates proportionally, and Missouri, which employs a hybrid method.

 

And at this point, every delegate counts.

 

Cruz goes to North Carolina on Tuesday while his wife is scheduled to attend a Miami fundraiser on Wednesday, a day before the GOP debate.

 

Meanwhile, a pro-Cruz super PAC, Keep the Promise I, which released three new attack ads hitting Rubio on Sunday, was readying a seven-figure ad buy across the state on late Monday, according to a person familiar with the discussions. So far the super PAC has only inquired about rates, not purchased any ads. It is still debating internally over what media — talk radio, cable and broadcast — to hit and, more crucially, which of Florida’s vastly different media markets to play in, the source said.

 

If Cruz’s super PAC goes aggressively against Rubio in South Florida, it is clearly going for the kill. But any pro-Cruz ads that would air in more conservative regions, such as the Panhandle, could take more votes from Trump than Rubio.

 

Saul Anuzis, the former chair of the Michigan GOP who has advised the Cruz campaign on delegate strategy, said Rubio already looks weakened after Super Tuesday and Super Saturday. Cruz wants to be ready to pounce should the Florida senator stumble badly in his home state.

 

“Rubio doesn’t really have a path to victory,” Anuzis said. “At some point he has to make the decision about dropping out. We’re setting up shop, we’ve got our people there, we’re getting people to go down there, I think we’re prepared to play in Florida. If Rubio drops out, then we have a shot. Then it’s very real.”

 

Rubio won’t drop out before Florida votes March 15. While he’s trailing Trump in Monmouth’s most recent poll of likely Florida voters, Cruz is a distant third at 17 percent. The poll’s results generally jibe with other surveys that account for Florida’s closed-primary system, where only Republicans can vote in the GOP contest.

 

But critically for Rubio – and for Cruz’s calculations -- the poll found that the Florida senator was crushing Trump five-to-one among voters who had cast early votes in person or by mail. If the percentages hold, that means Rubio could be leading Trump by as many as 150,000 votes heading into primary day. However, the number of early voters surveyed was small, so Rubio’s lead could be more narrow.

 

The poll numbers indicate Rubio’s campaign is making good on its promise to bank early votes. It also suggests that Trump, who has invested in little infrastructure in many states, hasn’t spent the time or money organizing in Florida, where a ground-game can be a must because of the month’s worth of early voting.

 

Trump last week reserved $1 million in Florida TV airtime and on Monday unveiled a one-minute ad that attacks Rubio for missing votes and for being “corrupt” over his use of a Republican Party of Florida credit card for personal expenses years ago and for a real-estate deal that benefitted the mother of a chiropractor who had business before the Legislature when Rubio was House speaker. The real-estate attack, first used by Gov. Charlie Crist in 2010, was ruled “mostly false” by PolitiFact.

 

“It’s almost identical to the attack Charlie Crist used against me in 2010,” Rubio told reporters in Tampa.

 

So far, Trump has 391 delegates, followed closed by Cruz with 303. Rubio has 152 and Kasich, 37. And on March 15, another 367 delegates are up for grabs en route to the 1,237 needed to win the nomination at the GOP convention.

 

Cruz needs the Republican field to quickly whittle down to two for his math to work. Otherwise he faces the potential of a contested convention, where his unpopularity among party elites could doom him if there are multiple candidates.

 

Cruz’s strong showing in Saturday’s state contests not only showcased the candidate’s strength, it exposed weakness in Rubio and Trump, argued Florida state Rep. Neil Combee, the chair of Cruz’s campaign in Florida.

 

“We always had a plan to be competitive in Florida,” Combee said. “People are getting down to hard decisions and Republicans see who the real conservative is in the race.”

 

One of the political committees backing Cruz, Make DC Listen, went a step further -- tying Rubio and Trump’s fates in Florida. “One of the single biggest ways to stop Trump at this point in the race is for Cruz to win Florida,” the group said in an email. “It's now clear that Marco Rubio has no chance of winning the nomination so a vote for Rubio is a vote for Trump.”

 

While none of the polling indicates Cruz has a serious shot at winning Florida, to some Republicans, his big push here shows he’s looking not only at 2016 but 2020.

 

“Cruz knows he does not have a great chance to beat Trump this year, but he is already playing for the next race,” said Curt Anderson, a Trump critic who’s also a top adviser to Florida Gov. Rick Scott. “This kind of gamesmanship rarely works out. Much will happen in the meantime.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/03/florida-ted-cruz-marco-rubio-220409#ixzz42JB1cIkW

Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

[ZonkoVille77]

KopOut, on 06 Mar 2016 - 9:28 PM, said:

 

This.

 

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

Interesting read, that.

Just proves that scaremongering is really effective when it comes to politics.

For a country that prides itself on being innovative and forward thinking, it really is quite scarily backwards.

 

These points taken from the article about the 'authoritarians' views are almost, dare I say, nazi like.

• Using military force over diplomacy against countries that threaten the United States
• Changing the Constitution to bar citizenship for children of illegal immigrants
• Imposing extra airport checks on passengers who appear to be of Middle Eastern descent in order to curb terrorism
• Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism
• Allowing the federal government to scan all phone calls for calls to any number linked to terrorism

[SasaS]

Hmm, it would appear they are describing right wing populism, which has been going from strength to strength in many European countries over the past years as an American phenomenon and calling it authoritarianism.

 

Also, regarding your list, I think

4.Requiring all citizens to carry a national ID card at all times to show to a police officer on request, to curb terrorism

 

is a bit of an Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American obsession, many countries require citizens to  have ID cards and show them to the police upon request and not many people see this as particularly Nazi like, as they are used to it. Pledging allegiance to the flag, ubiquitous anthem singing and obligation to always aggree  your country is the greatest in the workd would strike me as much more Nazi like.

[Kevin D]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

 

 

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

 

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

 

 

When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through a cluster of McMansions.

 

Trump himself provides rather excellent evidence for this finding. The man is an insult clown who has systematically gone down the list of American ethnic groups and offended them each in turn. He wants to deport millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants. He wants to bar Muslims from visiting the United States. He admires various foreign strongmen and dictators, and has even retweeted a quote from Mussolini. This gold-plated buffoon has in turn drawn the enthusiastic endorsement of leading racists from across the spectrum of intolerance, a gorgeous mosaic of haters, each of them quivering excitedly at the prospect of getting a real, honest-to-god bigot in the White House.

 

 

All this stuff is so insane, so wildly outrageous, that the commentariat has deemed it to be the entirety of the Trump campaign. Trump appears to be a racist, so racism must be what motivates his armies of followers. And so, on Saturday, New York Times columnist Timothy Egan blamed none other than “the people” for Trump’s racism: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

 

Stories marveling at the stupidity of Trump voters are published nearly every day. Articles that accuse Trump’s followers of being bigots have appeared by the hundreds, if not the thousands. Conservatives have written them; liberals have written them; impartial professionals have written them. The headline of a recent Huffington Post column announced, bluntly, that “Trump Won Super Tuesday Because America is Racist.” A New York Times reporter proved that Trump’s followers were bigots by coordinating a map of Trump support with a map of racist Google searches. Everyone knows it: Trump’s followers’ passions are nothing more than the ignorant blurtings of the white American id, driven to madness by the presence of a black man in the White House. The Trump movement is a one-note phenomenon, a vast surge of race-hate. Its partisans are not only incomprehensible, they are not really worth comprehending.

 

* * *

Or so we’re told. Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

 

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Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern – not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

 

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

 

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled – another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

 

Thus did he hint at his curious selling proposition: because he is personally so wealthy, a fact about which he loves to boast, Trump himself is unaffected by business lobbyists and donations. And because he is free from the corrupting power of modern campaign finance, famous deal-maker Trump can make deals on our behalf that are “good” instead of “bad”. The chance that he will actually do so, of course, is small. He appears to be a hypocrite on this issue as well as so many other things. But at least Trump is saying this stuff.

 

All this surprised me because, for all the articles about Trump I had read in recent months, I didn’t recall trade coming up very often. Trump is supposed to be on a one-note crusade for whiteness. Could it be that all this trade stuff is a key to understanding the Trump phenomenon?

 

* * *

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Trade is an issue that polarizes Americans by socio-economic status. To the professional class, which encompasses the vast majority of our media figures, economists, Washington officials and Democratic powerbrokers, what they call “free trade” is something so obviously good and noble it doesn’t require explanation or inquiry or even thought. Republican and Democratic leaders alike agree on this, and no amount of facts can move them from their Econ 101 dream.

 

To the remaining 80 or 90% of America, trade means something very different. There’s a video going around on the internet these days that shows a room full of workers at a Carrier air conditioning plant in Indiana being told by an officer of the company that the factory is being moved to Monterrey, Mexico, and that they’re all going to lose their jobs.

 

As I watched it, I thought of all the arguments over trade that we’ve had in this country since the early 1990s, all the sweet words from our economists about the scientifically proven benevolence of free trade, all the ways in which our newspapers mock people who say that treaties like the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement allow companies to move jobs to Mexico.

 

Well, here is a video of a company moving its jobs to Mexico, courtesy of Nafta. This is what it looks like. The Carrier executive talks in that familiar and highly professional HR language about the need to “stay competitive” and “the extremely price-sensitive marketplace”. A worker shouts “Fuck you!” at the executive. The executive asks people to please be quiet so he can “share” his “information”. His information about all of them losing their jobs.

 

* * *

Now, I have no special reason to doubt the suspicion that Donald Trump is a racist. Either he is one, or (as the comedian John Oliver puts it) he is pretending to be one, which amounts to the same thing.

 

But there is another way to interpret the Trump phenomenon. A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America.

 

It is worth noting that Trump is making a point of assailing that Indiana air conditioning company from the video in his speeches. What this suggests is that he’s telling a tale as much about economic outrage as it is tale of racism on the march. Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

 

Here is the most salient supporting fact: when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it. I am referring to a study just published by Working America, a political-action auxiliary of the AFL-CIO, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January.

 

Support for Donald Trump, the group found, ran strong among these people, even among self-identified Democrats, but not because they are all pining for a racist in the White House. Their favorite aspect of Trump was his “attitude”, the blunt and forthright way he talks. As far as issues are concerned, “immigration” placed third among the matters such voters care about, far behind their number one concern: “good jobs / the economy”.

 

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”

 

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Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council in Fort Wayne, puts it even more bluntly when I asked him about working-class Trump fans. “These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

 

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

 

Now, let us stop and smell the perversity. Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured, had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

 

What Lewandowski and Nussbaum are saying, then, should be obvious to anyone who’s dipped a toe outside the prosperous enclaves on the two coasts. Ill-considered trade deals and generous bank bailouts and guaranteed profits for insurance companies but no recovery for average people, ever – these policies have taken their toll. As Trump says, “we have rebuilt China and yet our country is falling apart. Our infrastructure is falling apart … Our airports are, like, Third World.”

 

Trump’s words articulate the populist backlash against liberalism that has been building slowly for decades and may very well occupy the White House itself, whereupon the entire world will be required to take seriously its demented ideas.

 

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed.

 

 

[G Richards]

That was a good article, repped for sharing. Obviously there is a lot to bash Trump with, but kudos for an article that tries to go beyond the bombast and racism. The trade thing resonates. There are obviously lots of Republican elites who hate Trump, but in some ways the Democrat elites are similar to the Republican ones, inasmuch as they are not trying to get by in the real world with all the riffraff (I don't put Bernie Sanders in this category, but I would put Hilary in this category as an elite - ideologically different to Republicans, but similar in other ways, such as being bought and paid for by big business, and so on). 

 

Anyhow, while Trump is an embarrassment or worse, in so many ways, the truth beyond that is he is connecting with people. It's too simplistic to dismiss them as a racist fringe element. Perhaps they are hard working people with limited prospects, fed up by what they've been served by the political classes over the years, and in Trump they see someone who might just help them to keep their jobs and so on. 

 

It is ironic, as the left has traditionally been the party to protect the average working man, but there is a lot of disillusionment. Trump is benefitting from that, but I'm not sure how far it will take him. 

 

It's easy to see how Hillary would eat him alive in any debate, should they go head to head. But then again, this is a strange election cycle.

[Dr Nowt]

[Dr Nowt]

[Dougie Do'ins]

Ben Carson confirms backing for Trump

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world/us_and_canada

[SasaS]

Wow, Trump is now unstoppable, with the army of all three remaining Carson supporters voting for him.

[Hand Shandy]

Donald Trump rally called off in Chicago amid protests, violence and chaos

 

http://gu.com/p/4hg64?

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Donald Trump rally called off in Chicago amid protests, violence and chaos

 

http://gu.com/p/4hg64?

 

Love it! "Fuck Donald Trump!"

 

“If he can’t even handle Chicago, what makes him think he could handle Isis?”