Topic: Trump

[Pugnate]

So what's going on with this guy? I mean he seems incredibly stupid. I don't even know how he made so much money. He openly talks about taking advantage of American laws to dupe others into making a successful business.

He also doesn't have any good answers to political questions. He evades with silly manipulative sentences which sometimes aren't even true. I mean, you can tell he's a complete idiot.

Yet here we are. He seems to be popular. On YouTube you have a lot of morons commenting about how much they support him. They are eating his manipulative act up.

So please don't tell me he has a real shot at The White House. Novelty aside, that would be disastrous.

[Cobra951]

He's appealing to a lot of people who are alarmed and disgusted with the direction of the country (mostly down) for too long.  He's completely ignoring the political traps set for conservatives by the liberals.  He's saying what many angry Americans not invested in all the leftist agendas want to hear, but despair from ever hearing it because of the limited dialogue deemed acceptable.  Speech in this country is now limited by an effectively enforced leftist sensibility.  (Example:  If you don't want foreigners pouring into the country from the South illegally, then you must be a racist.  Better not speak up about it.) 

Trump is an outsider.  People are disgusted with Washington insiders.  He comes across as strong in an age of institutionalized weakness.  He doesn't need to snuggle into the pockets of lobbyists because he's rich enough to pay his own way.  He's promising a return to Reagan-era greatness for the country.  Strong in business.  Strong in defense.  Rejecting the disastrous NAFTA.  Reversing the bleeding out of jobs and bleeding in of foreigners.

He appeals not only to conservatives, but also to a lot of downtrodden blue-collar people who think all their jobs and prosperity went to China. 

I'm not saying I believe him.  I'm only answering your question. 

[Pugnate]

haha I know. He is singing the song everyone wants to hear. Trouble is that people want to hear the song so badly, they don't realize he doesn't know the lyrics.

It happened in Pakistan too with Imran Khan.

[Quemaqua]

Cobra says it all well. There's a reason people are looking to an idiot like Trump, because ... well, he's not an idiot. I mean he may well be, but he knows what to say, and he's a businessman who's made a lot of money. He's proven himself in that regard, so people naturally trust him, especially conservatives who look at business success as the mark of someone who's got it together enough to take charge of a failing country.

But yeah, it freaks me out thinking we might have that moron in charge. The Republican party is a joke. I'm independent, and not at all pro-liberal, but the Republican party is murdering itself, and I really hope it succeeds. There isn't a single candidate I could support in good conscience. Not that I feel strongly about the other side of the aisle. I think Hilary Clinton is an incredibly evil human being with a long track record of being an openly self-serving political leech. Bernie Sanders I don't have strong feelings about, as I don't know enough about him yet ... but at this point he's looking like the only potential candidate I could even vote for, as far as the big 2.

[scottws]

He's appealing to a lot of people who are alarmed and disgusted with the direction of the country (mostly down) for too long.  He's completely ignoring the political traps set for conservatives by the liberals.  He's saying what many angry Americans not invested in all the leftist agendas want to hear, but despair from ever hearing it because of the limited dialogue deemed acceptable.  Speech in this country is now limited by an effectively enforced leftist sensibility.  (Example:  If you don't want foreigners pouring into the country from the South illegally, then you must be a racist.  Better not speak up about it.) 

Trump is an outsider.  People are disgusted with Washington insiders.  He comes across as strong in an age of institutionalized weakness.  He doesn't need to snuggle into the pockets of lobbyists because he's rich enough to pay his own way.  He's promising a return to Reagan-era greatness for the country.  Strong in business.  Strong in defense.  Rejecting the disastrous NAFTA.  Reversing the bleeding out of jobs and bleeding in of foreigners.

He appeals not only to conservatives, but also to a lot of downtrodden blue-collar people who think all their jobs and prosperity went to China. 

I'm not saying I believe him.  I'm only answering your question. 

Please, no Reagan era.  Trickle-down economics does not work.  Just look at today with the massive wealth gap, yet the top 1% just keep amassing more and more wealth.

[Cobra951]

Please, no Reagan era.  Trickle-down economics does not work.  Just look at today with the massive wealth gap, yet the top 1% just keep amassing more and more wealth.

I don't want that either, nor do I want a flat tax, nor do I want healthcare to continue to bankrupt the middle class, nor do I want all jobs that can possibly be outsourced to continue being outsourced.  But the democrat party is no longer the party of the people, but the party of the fringe and the party of leftist social agendas.  They are doing nothing about the erosion of jobs and the middle class, and Obamacare is worse than a simple failure--it's a big loss for us and a big win for insurance companies.  Democrats are also the party of foreign-affairs weakness in an age of incessant war.  Right now, I am more than willing to take being subjected to the party of business as long as they also remain the party of kicking ass where it needs to be kicked.  We need to have a country in order to have discussions about how it should be run internally.  The illegal influx of aliens needs to be addressed decisively, and the likes of ISIS, all the way to whoever is funding them, need to be addressed in whatever way makes them go away.  We need to come back from being a laughing stock to our enemies and a worry to our allies.  We need to stop dismantling the military at a time we need it the most since the last world war.

[scottws]

"The party of business".  Yep, that's about right.  I can't get on board with that at all.  The Republican party represents the rich and no one else.  They don't even pretend to try represent even a single one of my ideals or the ideals of virtually anyone else in my socioeconomic bracket.  At least some of what the Democratic party represents includes me.

Regarding the military, really the government and the military need to be smarter with the budget.  First of all, our military budget dwarfs the entire CDP of a huge number of countries, so I totally disagree with you that some downsizing isn't in order and dwarfs the military budgets of every remaining country in the world by a large margin.  It most certainly dwarfs the ISIS budget.

I believe it is better to support the countries that are fighting terrorism on their home front, because unless we nuke the entire Middle East and make it a smoldering wasteland entirely devoid of life, there are going to be violent Islamic extremists.  And even if we destroy the Middle East, there are still extremists in sleeper cells all over the world, not to mention troubled youths that are violent extremests-in-waiting all over the world too.  The "war on terror" doesn't work. 

Also, the F-35 is an abject failure.  It was designed to be a cheaper, lower-performance alternative to the expensive F-22.  So far all that they've achieved is making it lower-performance.  Can that shit now, it's a massive waste of resources.  Then use that massive reclaimed money in some other way in the military.  More boots, better training programs, more drones, whatever.

[Quemaqua]

I'm pretty much in the same boat as scott here. I don't know what we do about extremists. You don't want to leave them alone, but clearly you can't just fight them traditionally and win. You can't fight ideology with guns. Or nukes. Or giant space lasers. I don't know how you fight the fact that the world is filled with angry and dissatisfied people who hate the US and others like us. Especially since I honestly don't like us all that much either. I'm not pissed off about it, but I do wish we weren't living out this hypercapitalist nightmare.

[Pugnate]

Here is an interesting take:

[idolminds]

[Quemaqua]

Wish everybody in the world could watch that.