For months now I have felt, like others here, as a voice crying in the wilderness. The Indiana primary results last night only confirm what many of us have feared all along. With the suspension of the Cruz campaign, Hillary Clinton is now the only VIABLE candidate that can stop the rise of neo-Fascist Trumpism in the free world.
Be warned, America !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Please share widely!
n/t
Not chaos per se. But a completely Republican government, which is alarming.
Donald Trump has accomplished a hostile takeover over of the GOP, as a leveraged buyout. When if you want a REAL Fender, you need to find a pre-CBS instrument — the instruments carrying the “Fender” brand after that are cheap imitations.
The reason the GOP has been in such chaos during this campaign is that the adults in the party all know this, even if the voters and public don’t.
I am not nearly as alarmed by the claimed affiliation with the GOP of Donald Trump as I am by his complete contempt of sanity or facts.
His proposed 45 percent tariff on Chinese exports is, according to many or most experts, likely to backfire:
Donald Trump says he doesn’t care who he angers. He appeals to voters who say the same. When we hand the keys to the most powerful arsenal and military force in human history to this man, we invite calamity.
Domestically, he demonstrates contempt for virtually ALL our values. He promises to attack journalists and the First Amendment. He scourges women and minorities. He shows flagrant disregard for truth and facts. He panders to voters who LIKE and applaud such behavior.
He is the leader of a mob, brandishing pitch-forks, whom he thinks he can control.
That, to me, IS chaos. It is far more alarming to me than just a completely Republican government (which has proven itself to be a disaster every time it’s been tried in my lifetime).
1) Running for Stability against Choas
I still say this is a bad tactic. I’m aware the polling hasn’t kept pace with my theories of this election, and it looks like a Clinton cakewalk. But people feel the system itself is broken and want someone to come in and smash it. If Hillary runs as the sane candidate keeping order and stability intact, I don’t see it as a winning strategy this year. We underestimate the sheer frustration and anger voters have with the system at our own peril.
2) Running Against an All Republican Government
Trump can credibly tell independent voters he is running against Clinton and Paul Ryan. I actually am confident the Democratic Senate and Republican House led by Ryan would likely check most of the agenda of a President Trump if that possibility actually occurs. The walls and Chinese tariffs have as much chance of passing Congress as the Sanders agenda did, probably less so.
3) Fitness to Lead the Military
This is an area where Trump will hit Hillary hard and Hillary needs to make it the centerpiece of her campaign. There is gender bias and bias of those in uniform against her. But he’s a draft dodging, Putin and Assad coddling, hazy on Israel loose canon who would severely undermine American foreign policy and military credibility.
I am confident President Hillary Clinton would’ve enforced the red lines Obama refused to, and I am confident she will check Russian aggression, destroy ISIL, and stabilize the Middle East. BMGers may be uncomfortable with her hawkishness on many fronts, and in many cases rightfully so, but read his America First speech and you’ll see a retreat from American world leadership far greater than anything Glen Beck fantasizes about Obama doing. It’s a full scale surrender. Economic leadership to China, Europe to Russia, and the Middle East to kleptocrats. No “deal making” can avert that disaster.
Mr. Trump most certainly is a “loose canon”. 🙂
I’m pretty sure that’s not what you meant, though — what a totally awesome concept, nevertheless.
“Tight canon” versus “Loose canon”. That’s more fun than “high church” versus “low church” (the dichotomy that has characterized Episcopal parishes for generations).
I worked very briefly at a Catholic Shrine and my boss was a certainly a tight canon, except when his beloved Pens won the Stanley Cup and he loosened up a bit (even whipped out the sherry indicating his Anglican roots).
I was responding to the comment from jimc about chaos.
I think a Trump presidency WOULD mean chaos, and worse. I DO think it is an existential threat to the US — from the inside as well as from offshore. In my view, Donald Trump is pandering to INTERNAL forces and passions that will destroy us from within.
I think Mr. Trump needs to be defeated at all costs, doing whatever is necessary to ensure that Ms. Clinton is elected.
discredit and minimize him. It would just make him crazier and crazier and you would be creating the image of him being the buffoon that he really is. Obama did a great job of this during the correspondence dinner. While you need a little different approach as a presidential candidate, it’s doesn’t work if you come across as attacking him, but Clinton needs to get under is skin. Quotes from this year:
When he said ‘Fire Busey or Meatloaf, I know that would keep me up at night”. And it was the same night he ordered the Bin Laden raid. I felt like that aborted Trump’s 2012 candidacy, and I am shocked not a single Republican was smart enough to try that this cycle.
And he was phenomenal at the 2016 dinner, a true mic drop.
1. In many people’s minds stability = status quo and they want change.
2. Trump will run against Washington.
3. Clinton was Obama’s Sec of State and therefore in people’s minds bears some responsibility for the current situation. People like simple answers (wrongly) and Trump is quick with them.
It will be interesting to see how the polling shifts over time. It looks right now like a big Clinton electoral win, but we all know things change.
He’s a joke and has been a joke for his entire life. Publicity was the only thing he has sought. Horrible business person, it will be highlighted as well. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy taking people’s money, he’s been a failure, a failure to the extent that he be 10 billion richer if he did nothing and not squander his father’s fortune over and over.
He lies, talking about pulling rubble from the world trade center, it’s bizarre.
In the general it’s a whole new ball game. No one is paying that much attention now, you can still create an image of a person. They should start early and often with Trump painting him as the buffoon that he is. Trump will lose and lose badly, but they can’t just let him spew moronic things like the GOP did.
I think that Sec Clinton would follow that path at her peril.
However if that’s the case in your mind, no sense talking about it any further. You believe it’s a done deal.
Reality check #1. I believe most people would exchange their life for Trump’s in a heartbeat.
Reality check #2. Are you dishing on people who file for bankruptcy? Regardless of the scale, if you file for bankruptcy at any level, you took someone else’s money (even those that had medical problems). Most rank & file Republicans don’t like the kind of people that file for bankruptcy (the poor, etc.). Note that Trump personally has not filed, businesses that he was involved with filed, and that’s something else. If you were a Trump Casino bondholder, you probably had some idea of the risk.
Charlie Baker announced today that he won’t vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton (emphasis mine):
I guess that the current popularity of Governor Baker doesn’t extend to the Massachusetts GOP. Based on your commentary and your “reality checks”. Governor Baker joins me and people like me in rejecting Donald Trump’s “temperament” and utter absence of a “collaborative nature”.
Apparently you and our other-winged friends here on BMG know more about Massachusetts Republicans than Mr. Baker, the Massachusetts Republican whose election you collectively hailed so recently.
On the contrary, they all tried to play him by going into high-dudgeon.
I think Clinton is well positioned to bait him into making an utter ass of himself. November voters are different from the GOP primary crowd. But she has to be careful with the outrage, which has not been effective (at least with GOP base voters) I am kind of hoping that they opt instead to laugh at him.
I think he’s already been pretty ass-like.
So if you form a corporation that borrows tons of money from the bank and that goes bankrupt, thats ok because the “investors” should have known better. But if you personally borrow money from the bank, then you are a bad person?
The main point about those bankruptcies is that it taints the image Trump would like to paint of himself as a successful businessman who is a “sure bet”.
First, Tom was criticizing Trump for filing bankruptcy. While not personally true, if you’re taking that tack you have to then criticize all people who file bankruptcy, because they probably spent too much, and then couldn’t pay it back- not a virtue.
Business bankruptcy IS different. People loan you money to get you started. They know it’s a big risk. Suppliers extend you credit because they are hoping you’ll survive and they’ll have future business. If you’re bigger the same concept applies to bond holders, bank. and stock market investors. The US economy relies on all these risk takers.
Individual bankruptcy happens when what you owe is greater than what you pay. Is the system pointing you in this direction? Are you encouraged to buy the bigger car, bigger house, more stuff, all on low payments? Yes, of course. The problem is that most Americans aren’t smart enough to see through that, and many get into trouble.
It is never anything other than a business decision, regardless of who the borrower is. The lender makes the loan for the bigger car because the increased risk means higher interest. The only difference is that the law is structured to give the corporate debtor more leverage against lenders than the individual consumer borrower does.
As are things like renting an apartment to someone.
My point is that typically in our culture we expect that individuals will pay debts owed, while there is a cultural expectation that some (many?) businesses will crash owing other businesses money, and typically (assuming fraud, crime or recklessness weren’t involved) the people owning those businesses are not shamed for doing so. In technology it’s pretty much a given for success will be preceded by failure. Many will say that this was why the US has had better growth than Europe, where people are hesitant to start businesses because of the resulting personal liability in the event of failure.
In both cases an entity borrows money in the expectation that they will be able to pay it back with interest but then fail to do so. What’ s really the difference? Some personal bankruptcies are due to irresponsible spending, but so do some corporate bankruptcies.
Of course, it makes absolutely no sense to talk about corporate bankruptcy in general when the issue will be the facts of Trump’s bankruptcies in particular, which in fact did include a very large personal liability on his part. His bankruptcies were directly due to stupid business decisions on his part and the assumption of a ridiculous amount of debt at high rates of interest. There is little question that this will be a negative campaign issue for Trump.
but there’s an old saying “If you owe a bank $1000, they own you. If you owe a bank $1 million, you own them.” In the 90’s Trump’s creditor needed him and he recovered.
So the tag line is “Trump almost went belly-up in the early 90’s and a couple businesses he owned in the 00’s had to be restructured, so he can’t be president” I’m not sure “stupid” is the right word. Unanticipated business downturns maybe, unanticipated over saturation of the casino market. Overoptimism, sure, but that’s not exactly a problem. I still can’t believe Facebook’s or Apple’s valuation, so clearly there’s some over optimism there.
I don’t see that sticking.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/21/carly-fiorina/trumps-four-bankruptcies/
These three bankruptcies do not, in my view, demonstrate “business expertise”. The first, in particular, suggests that he bilked his investors to the tune of nearly a billion dollars that he diverted for his “personal use”.
However we want to characterize that behavior, it does NOT exemplify the style of a man or woman I want to see sitting in the Oval Office.
casino demand in AT ten years ago and NYC twenty years ago. Had he actually (as in according to law) bilked investors unlikely he would be where he is today.
So other than that you would be voting for him?
I don’t think Bill Belichick demonstrates “good coaching expertise” because those three lost Super Bowls (I’m counting the lost to Indy in the AFC championship game, which would have led to a SB win).
I think that if reliable sources showed that Mr. Belichick had staffed the team with children of friends, insisted that they use a playboook that he copied from the internet, and spent much of the preparatory time before each Super Bowl partying, his claims that even good coaches occasionally lose might fall on less receptive ears.
Feel free to choose a different word from “bilked” to describe the transfer of nearly a BILLION dollars into yachts and jets acquired for personal use from a company that’s three billion dollars under water.
Spending a billion dollars on yachts and jets has NOTHING to do with casino demand, then or now.
It requires neither expertise nor prescience to know that profligate diversion of other people’s money for personal use is not the “expertise” that I want in my President.
but whatever. As usual you have exhausted me and there’s really no point in trying to debate this.
Most of those bankruptcies indeed involved incredibly stupid business decisions and massive debt without a realistic expectation of success. I don’t see how the above quote refutes that in any way. The TaJ Mahal bankruptcy was particularly egregious. And of course, these bankruptcies are only one of many points of attack against Trump’s record as a businessman.
In any case, whether or not bankruptcy is an acceptable legacy for a businessperson, it is an extremely bad metaphor for how to run a government. You can’t just bankrupt the Federal Government and just walk away and start a new one. If you really want to run for President on your business experience, you would like to show that your primary ability is something more than conning banks and investors out of billions of dollars while shielding your personal wealth (and he has only mixed results on the latter).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a Trump fan. I just don’t think that slamming him for this loses him any votes. Can you see this?
Person A: I like Trump
Person B: Atlantic City….blah blah blah.
Person A: Really? I didn’t know! I’m going to vote for Hillary instead.
I agree that the scenario you describe is unlikely.
I think we’re talking about a different one:
Person A: I don’t really like either candidate. I do think that maybe we need a president who has succeeded in the business world.
Person B: Atlantic City….blah blah blah.
Person A: Really? I didn’t know! I’m going to vote for Hillary instead.
Let me ask a another question. While Ms. Clinton was First Lady, a number of GOP sources attacked her for Whitewater, claiming that she must have had improper access to inside information to do so well with her investment. She said, at the time, in essence “I made an investment and it did well”.
Why do you think the GOP at the time was so reluctant to accept her answer? Are you sure you’re applying the same benchmark to Mr. Trump regarding his business failures that was applied to Ms. Clinton regarding her business success?
If this comes down to whitewater v
Atlantic city we all lose.
It’s this one, and it’s straight up transfer of cash into her pocket, not profiting on insider information. Whitewater was a whole other scandal.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/02/02/Why-37-Year-Old-Clinton-Financial-Scandal-Still-Relevant
I’m not stipulating that this or any other allegation against Ms. Clinton is true — the “story” is older than my grown children and is as empty as substance now as it was then.
I challenge the apparent double standard at play. Mr. Trump puts nearly a billion dollars of other people’s money into his own yachts and jets, and that’s ok — it’s “just business”. Ms. Clinton was alleged to have gained less than $0.001B improperly nearly forty years ago (an allegation that was never substantiated), and you characterize that as a “straight up transfer of cash into her pocket”.
Mr. Trump squanders a THOUSAND TIMES MORE money on his yachts and jets, but he’s OK. Sounds like a double-standard to me.
I invite you to cite my comments where I’ve criticized Mr. Trump for filing for bankruptcy. I don’t attack him for filing for bankruptcy, I instead attack him for claiming business expertise after his history of not just one but several bankruptcies.
The business investors I’ve worked with (venture capitalists, angel investors, and individual wannabes) do not look kindly on executives who take their money and run the resulting enterprise into the ground in the style of Mr. Trump. Yes, there is risk and everybody knows it. There are also many ways of managing that risk. Trumpian-style bankruptcies are, in my experience, much less frequent than more traditional exits.
In the investment circles I’ve known, Mr. Trump’s combination of high publicity, deceit, showmanship, and utter incompetence where the rubber meets the road have destroyed the credibility of every prospective executive I’ve known who’s tried it.
The target of my attacks is his claim of business expertise given his multiple bankruptcies. The US is NOT a waterfront resort casino that the executive can just dissolve and walk away from. I do not attack those who’ve been divorced, I’ve been through two. I instead reject claims of personal morality offered by someone who has multiple divorces.
Donald Trump panders to the ignorance of fans of “The Apprentice” who think that the show reflects the business world. Successful executives in the real world do NOT relish firing people. Successful executives in real life — and their prospective investors — know that such firings are most often a symptom of bad management and reflect more negatively on the person doing the firing than the person being terminated.
depending on responses these threads get confusing when looked at on small screens. Regardless, you’re not voting for him anyway and even if he didn’t have the bankruptcies you wouldn’t. I just don’t think in 2016 it’s that big of a deal. If these types of in-the-weeds stuff mattered, neither Clinton or Trump would be the nominee.
n/m
Hillary offers no change. In fact, she is fighting change. She is Washington. She is Wall Street.
My hunch is that Trump wins by a small margin and only serves one term filled with a lot of sizzle but no steak. Then finally, maybe, Democrats will run a pro-labor progressive and win the White House in 2020.
If you win a state 50%+1, or 100%, except in NE and ME, it’s all the same.
Right now the Dems historical vote is over 240 and the GOP’s around 170.
We’ll have to see how the polls look after the Democratic convention.
I just think outside the bubble things look different and Trump will do better than it looks today.
CNN’s latest poll shows Trump trailing by double digits and voters overwhelmingly trusting Hillary in every major issue save for 1, the economy, which they rank higher than any other issue in terms of priority. I think that indicates an area she must prioritize.
Yikes.
Here is the breakdown from NYT via a site that after the conventions will update the map daily based on state by state polls. It has been my go-to site for the last couple of cycles because it knows that national polls are meaningless.
Electoral-vote and 270towin have lousy maps right now, though the latter is fun to play with for scenarios.
This has been Hillary Clinton’s main argument since day one. Quite frankly, it isn’t a very compelling reason to vote for her: “vote for me because I’m a Democrat and I’m not a Republican” – especially when many of her points are conservative in nature.
To piggyback on what jconway said above, much the country is not happy. Sure, if you live in certain areas of the country – DC, NYC for example, and/or you work in certain sectors – high tech or finance – you may think things are *fantastic* in this country. Everyone else is not doing so well.
What is Hillary Clinton and mainstream Democrats telling the people who aren’t doing so well? “Well, you should have gotten a better education.” In other words, it’s your own damn fault.
What is their prescription for helping those people? Telling them to go back to school to get an education or gaining some other kind of skill. That’s about it. Manufacturing went overseas? Sorry, that’s dead, and there is no room for debate – it isn’t coming back, so STFU, you backwards protectionist. We shouldn’t even try.
This is why Donald Trump, and to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders, are doing so well. They’re speaking to the people about the economy. They know that people want to work. They know that the American public has gotten a raw deal over the past 30 or so years, as factory after factory closed, as union after union got busted. Both Trump and Sanders are orbiting the same big problem – massive corporations and the people behind them are controlling not only our economy, but the global economy. They are the ones who have primarily benefited from the globalization path we have been on.
Even a guy like Jared Bernstein is now starting to partially get this. He wrote:
What do I think Hillary Clinton would say about that? “Nice philosophy, but it just isn’t going to happen”.
It needs to happen! We need to stop tinkering around the edges here because the US has most certainly not recovered since the 2008 crash – at least not everywhere.
Bernie Sanders has exposed an unpleasant truth about the Democratic Party: as much as we like to criticize Republicans for focusing on social issues such as guns, gays, and God, Democrats have done the same thing – they have simply focused on the opposite side of things. Sure, Democrats will tell you that they are about income inequality, they are about helping the poor, they are committed to social justice, but in practice they do little on those fronts, choosing instead to focus on the social issues that don’t involve poverty.
More of the same is not compelling, even when the people offering it are threatening “or you’re going to get Trump”.
HRC has not been telling people it’s their fault they didn’t get an education.
By offering up primarily “more education” as the way to help people address unemployment and job loss, she is affirming that position without affirmatively stating it.
When so many Democrats do not try and change the system which results in so many poor people, and instead just try to “help people out of poverty”, the implication is very strong there that people are there by their own means.
…but then I tend to be in the “more education” camp as at least a long term remedy myself. She HAS been promoting debt-free college ed for those who wish to pursue, which is certainly a worthy goal.
More here.
Many of the same arguments I’ve been making. If all she has to hit him is bigotry and his bad business deals she’s got nothing. He can counter the latter screaming about whitewater and the Clinton foundation and counter the former by saying he did it to win a primary. And most people will shrug both charges off.
And she has locked herself into defending a status quo that most Americans aren’t feeling benefits them, a vast majority of them in fact. And responding to that feeling with pie charts showing a real recovery won’t alleviate the pain. I remember one Democrat once spending a lot of time talking about feeling working peoples pain, I wonder where he’s gone…
…at closing off every realistic tack open to her, and always assuming such exchanges will work better for him than her. Why do you keep doing that? Also, there’s no doubt in my mind she’s better at fighting for the down and out than he is.
You take your opponent’s supposed greatest strength and turn it into a weakness, and it has been shown to work.
It worked pretty well against Romney, and you can bet there are a lot more bad business stories about Trump than Romney. Of course, the way for Clinton to attack Trump is not to do it directly but to let others do it for her.
I also don’t think that most people will really “shrug off” the many offensive and bigoted statements he has made in the last year (and continues to make). When those get repeated back over and over again, I find it highly unlikely that women, and most minority groups are going to be flocking to to Trump’s side. Maybe overt bigotry isn’t something you personally care about, but I can assure you that many people do.
Because although both Trump and Romney are rich, Romney acts like an a**hole towards the non-rich, while Trump acts like an a**hole to people who are his equals.
Romney punches down at people – that’s what makes him such a jerk. Romney wasn’t afraid to tell you that you’re overpaid and underworked. Get back to work!
Trump tells people that the system is screwing them, and he’s right. He’s also not nearly as intertwined with the system as Romney. Romney was the guy coming into your company and firing you. Trump is the guy coming into your company and firing your boss.
If you think you only is a jerk to other rich people you have not been paying attention. The problem for him is that there are going to be stories coming out of various people who Trump has screwed over and their will be plenty of non-rich people in the list.
When you write “[Donald Trump is] also not nearly as intertwined with the system as Romney”, it sounds like you need to learn more about Donald Trump. It’s hard to get much more “intertwined” with “the system” than Mr. Trump.
Donald Trump is NOT “the guy coming into your company and firing your boss”. Donald Trump is the guy shilling his brand on TV, while running his own company into the ground. Donald Trump is the guy who doesn’t give a shit what happens to him when shuts down the hotel that is your livelihood, because he’s already got layer upon layer of insulation protecting him from such stuff. He’s the guy who happily locks the door and walks away in the dark of night.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is the guy who while all that is going down stands proud on television telling the world more lies about what he’s actually DONE.
I’m not defending Mitt Romney. I’m saying that you seem to be disconnected from the reality of who Donald Trump the businessman actually IS.
…there was a Never Trump spokesperson who I believe was also identified as having been on the Romney campaign. She said Trump’s business practices would make Bain Capital look like Catholic Charities (and odd slap at her former candidate, I thought). Plus, Trump is the guy best known in recent years for saying, “You’re fired!” – just sayin’.
I’m not saying that either are savory characters, but Mitt Romney’s primary goal is to “extract efficiency” from companies, primarily by making people work harder for less money, and also by taking away their benefits (like pensions).
Donald Trump’s way of doing business has been to buy and sell properties, sometimes relying on snake-oil salesmen techniques (Trump U), and running for the hills via bankruptcy when necessary. I’m sure a lot of his deals were dirty, probably taking advantage of situations involving real estate and local laws, but Donald Trump is not viewed as a leveraged buyout king that looks to simply financially strip companies of their wealth and leave them for dead. His reputation for making money is by building things, and that makes a difference to people.
I still disagree with your assertion that “his reputation for making money is by building things”.
This great nation, and Massachusetts, is filled with building contractors who form one shell company after another. Each one exists just long enough to suck promises from unwitting buyers, throw together some houses (paying off local authorities as needed), take the cash at closing, dissolve the companies, and run for the hills.
It’s a venerable tradition and many contractors are able to live comfortable lifestyles in such a way. Few of them have the sheer audacity to turn around and run for public office, claiming that this history demonstrates that they know how to run a business.
Donald Trump’s way of doing business is the same as the downtown hustler scamming his marks in a three-card monte game.
In the primary she has done well and in the general Trump risks treating her in such a way that will make Rick Lazio’s shoving that pledge in her face for her to sign look tame. Trump can’t help himself when it comes to women, and Clinton would just have to maintain her dignity to come out the winner. Also, I propose that if the Trump camp insists that Fox News hosts one of the debates that Clinton say fine, as long as Megyn Kelley is the moderator!