Trump - Clown Genius

[jennypenny]

Clinton has to be careful though. A System 2 person can also appear calculating. She already gets accused of dodging questions and not being forthcoming, so I can see that working against her System 2 candidacy.

I'm not sure Clinton is the clear favorite like Sunstein implies. Granted, we have six (long!) months to go, but Trump's popularity is increasing and Clinton's isn't. I also think if too many leaders from other countries chime in against Trump, it will work in his favor.

We'll see. A lot can happen in six months.

[Dragline]

Thinking about it, the amazing thing isn't that HRC is battling a Jewish socialist and an unfiltered reality-TV and real estate mogul, but that no one in the establishment managed to come up with a passable effort to manage the reality of this chart:
http://mic.com/articles/107622/this-ter ... .U7D0f9Czx

Add to that the tremendous inflation in education and healthcare(which to add insult to injury pays the wages of the people on the right hand side of the decimal point) and you get, well, this mess...

There are of course a lot of other issues being voiced in the election, but Americas descent into oligarchy seems to be on the lips of the supporters of Sanders and Trump alike.

This would support the idea that the normal Pareto distribution of wealth for a modern society has swung too far one way and is poised to swing back. Listen starting at about 14:50 for the short version: https://youtu.be/Yy2P5XkEPIs?t=892

Last reversal swing dates from Thatcher/Reagan.

Rest of it is quite interesting too.

[Tyler9000]

We'll see. A lot can happen in six months.

[cough] criminal indictment [cough]

Actually, an indictment itself is largely irrelevant. The DOJ deciding against one or very obviously delaying until after the election may actually play into Trump's anti-establishment favor even more.

For all the talk about Hillary being invincible, I find it interesting that Trump wrapped up the nomination before she did. I'd give it time before believing any polls right now. The real election season hasn't even started.

[IlliniDave]

@IlliniDave: You could see Big Media's treatment of Trump as campaigning against him--one could argue that's how they want you to see it.

But people in show-business go by another adage: "There's no such thing as bad publicity."

Publicity is what they've given Trump in spades, and how they've starved Sanders at every turn. Who's benefited from it?

It's possible they didn't know what they were doing. IMO, it's also possible they know exactly what they're doing.

I go by Occam's razor. When I hear them twisting everything Trump says or does into the most negative interpretation while doing the opposite for Clinton, then compare that to the treatment of Romney and Obama last go-around, I don't think the media is out-clevering me.

With Sanders, they'd rather talk about whether or not to allow biological men to use the same rest rooms as biological females and vice-versa in North Carolina than talk about Sanders. So I don't disagree there.

The simple explanation is that they grossly favor Clinton, which would explain ignoring Sanders and the preemptive assination attempts on Trump. Maybe Trump can leverage it, maybe not. But the media is historically capable of destroying a candidate. We'll see if they do it this time.

[IlliniDave]

I have to retract part of what I said over the last couple days. NPR had a several minute interview with Bernie Sanders this morning. Although they were very generous with how they portrayed Clinton's position regarding points on which she and Sanders disagree, Bernie got the spotlight all to himself.

[Spartan_Warrior]

This one?

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476767525 ... ie-sanders

Admittedly, he seemed to have the spotlight to himself and his policies for the first few questions. But the entire second half was devoted to exactly the usual "When will you drop out?", "Isn't it impossible to win?" and "Aren't you hurting Shillary by still running?" stuff, along with repeated attempts to get him to utter a soundbite admitting she's a good/qualified candidate or that he will support her (gotta chase the juicy headlines after all).

Hell, I might consider these reasonable questions under the circumstances, if only the media hadn't been asking the exact same questions ad nauseam and framing the interviews in exactly this way since before the first votes were even cast.

[IlliniDave]

This one?

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476767525 ... ie-sanders

Not able to listen to the link right now, but the interview I heard had nothing about Sanders dropping out. I missed a little in the beginning but listened until the end. It was possibly a truncated version of your link since it was aired during the morning news.

[Ego]

Sometimes it is hard to tell if he is talking out of his... but this got my attention.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/07/us/po ... -less.html

...the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, said in a television interview Thursday that he might seek to reduce the national debt by persuading creditors to accept something less than full payment.

Asked whether the United States needed to pay its debts in full, or whether he could negotiate a partial repayment, Mr. Trump told the cable network CNBC, “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”

He added, “And if the economy was good, it was good. So, therefore, you can’t lose.”

[Ego]

@Ego

This bothered me a lot earlier today when I read this. To be clear, I think we as a nation are headed for a huge correction in our economy regardless of who is President, but statements like these are very troubling.

Actually I thought of you when I read it. Many of the Trumpers are people who have paid their dues and are getting ready to collect. Wouldn't it be the ultimate kick in the teeth that the person they ushered into office was the one who decided that nothing is off the table and everything is negotiable, including the debts owed to his Trumpers.

Is he playing that subset of the electorate in the same way he played the media to get free 24/7 attention?

[Ego]

If I may be honest with you, another reason I defend Trump is because of the attitude your post conveys and many, many others like it elsewhere. I think classism is alive and well in this country and it shows with this election.

Classism goes both ways. Trump's campaign fuel is reverse-classism.

He has set up a magnificent situation where he gets to have his cake, eat it too AND smash it in the face of his opponents. He'll make an Idiocracy-level statement. An anti-Trumper will say, "That statement was word-for-word from the script of Idiocracy," and then get called an elitist for pointing it out.

Trump knows that most people with "class" are hyper-vigilant about being tarred and feathered elitists so they just shut up or talk about it in whispers with their fellow classmates.

Watching his ability to manipulate is an horrifically-fascinating experience.

I could write a page about what is wrong with Hillary...

Me too. Our pages would probably look close to identical.

[DSKla]

Great post, fmj. Did you read the Recent Archdruid Report posts about the Rescue Game? If not, check them out, because the Rescue Game seems to have been the media response to Trump (and a lot of people's response to a lot of things for many decades) instead of the questions you posed, which would have been the productive response.

[BRUTE]

I'm not quite sure what a Druid is

lawful neutral spellcaster, but pretty weak unless the GM is really into it

[enigmaT120]

You forgot emphasis on nature oriented magic....

[BRUTE]

sounds familiar

[DSKla]

@ffj I mistakenly assumed his blog was well-kmown by this forum, since I've seen it mentioned, and I should have explained that he writes a thoughtful blog that started on peak oil and covers any number of topics relating to the decline of industrial civilization as he sees it. yiu need not be a Druid or know what one is to follow along, though.

[Ego]

Did you notice this was the situation for most people before Trump became a candidate? You can't disregard entire swaths of the populace and not expect push-back at some point. I'm not saying this is healthy, but is it unexpected?

The push-back is coming in an interesting format. The up-by-your-bootstraps party is being forced to act like the government-for-all party because this time the people who were least able to adapt to a fast-changing environment were their core constituents of exurbans.

Everybody around me has been hyper-viligant about discussing race, gender, homosexuality, religion, abortion, etc. for years in fear of being labeled something derogatory. When you push ANY subject off to hushed whispers then we stop progressing as a nation.

Agree 100%. About the whole Mexico brou-ha-ha too. I suspect if we were to sit down and talk about this we would agree on almost all of the peripheral issues, just not on the longterm influence of Trump. I don't know, maybe we'd agree on that too.

[Dragline]

Neil Howe on Trump running to the left of Clinton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJjwo2k5H8

[jennypenny]

Neil Howe on Trump running to the left of Clinton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BJjwo2k5H8

Within DH's social circle where many people's jobs are dependent on funding from the DoD, there are always the inevitable election-year discussions about whom one should vote for if they want to make sure the money keeps flowing to the DoD. This year, everyone agrees it's Clinton.

[IlliniDave]

Just heard Ted Cruz on the radio (the talk show show of his #1 fanboy Glenn Beck) complaining about how much more air time Trump got from the large media outlets than he did, and how it was "90% positive". Interestingly, his people actually went to the trouble to count up all the minutes across all the outlets and equated it to dollars. Added up to a lot of money!

I don't know how repeated airing of a guy sticking his foot in his mouth could be considered "positive", but then again me and Sen. Cruz don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things.

[Dragline]

Just heard Ted Cruz on the radio (the talk show show of his #1 fanboy Glenn Beck) complaining about how much more air time Trump got from the large media outlets than he did, and how it was "90% positive".

Sounds like he's just a sore loser. Or is trying to avoid coming to grips with the fact that his "be really nice to Trump early on" strategy back-fired and failed.

I keep wondering if Cruz's big-3 billionaire backers basically told him that "Indiana was it" as far as their funding was concerned and that's why he put on all the desperation moves in the run-up. If he really wanted to have some influence going forward he would not have quit, but would have gone to the convention like Reagan in 1976.