Trump: Trojan Horse for the Establishment or Mighty Mouth for Mankind?
I crave the opportunity to see an anti-establishment candidate win the election. I would exult in seeing our corrupt establishment shattered. So, while I do not like Trump the man (as it would appear he has never done anything that didn’t entirely serve his own self-interest and pompous ego), I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing him upset establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats alike. (And, yes, they are “alike,” so let’s just call them “the establishment” because whether they are Republican or Democrat is not relevant; both parties exist to serve the same rich people and themselves either way.)
I’ll even acknowledge that perhaps it takes someone as brazen and blusterous as Trump in order to stand up to such a powerful assemblage of egoists as we have embedded in congress and in the president’s administration, which now rules by decree. Nearly all of them strive to make sure you have only globalist options to vote for; but their new-world odor is, I’m sure, a stench that rises all the way to heaven.
This derelict congress is a worse evil than either candidate as it continues to sink the US deeply into debt with no plan or action to right the economy since it first capsized in the waves of the Great Recession. Each party is more worried that the other party will get credit than they are concerned about saving the nation, and there is nothing less patriotic than putting your party before you country.
My desire to see the economy righted and the establishment overturned (peacefully), however, is exactly what makes me cautious about any gold-plated politician who has lived all of his life in the realm of the one percenters and who has defaulted on more grandiose debts than anyone I know. Nevertheless, while I have never liked this particular publicity whore, I’d put up with his relentless boasting and forgive his audacious past if it takes that kind of brassy, risk-taking adventurer to find someone with enough spine to stand up to the intimidations of congress. I’m willing to admit that it might take all of that, so whether or not I like him is not important unless it is leading me to see flaws that may mean Trump is not what he makes himself out to be.
Call a spade a spade even if it trumps everything
Overturning a vast global establishment is the kind of battle that will take someone with unbelievable tenacity, intelligence, and courage. The opponents are rich, and you can be sure some are willing to kill to keep the status quo that is making them immensely rich (and have killed).
Unfortunately, I have seen often in life that bellicose people are usually nowhere near as brave as they sound. People like Ike, who was strong in war and humble in attitude, are usually the ones with real courage. It is not usually the most blustery people who have the deepest strength to carry through with the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of cost to themselves.
Trump is aptly named for how often he blows his own horn in order to create his own image; but his actions show he backed out of previous presidential races when it was clear they weren’t going to be an easy win after getting lots of publicity for teasing people with the possibility that he’d run. He has also backed out of many a business deals when things got rough, rather than push forward to try to make things work.
You can do that in business through bankruptcy, but you don’t have the option when you are president and things are not going your way; and a triumphant Trump is guaranteed to have a congress that does not go his way (unless he capitulates to the Republican side … as he now appears to be doing with every decision he makes).
Is Donald Trump a Trojan Horse?
Trump looks like victory to us anti-establishment voters on the outside, but what lurks inside of this man? Is he as hollow as his mouth is big? (You could land an airliner in that thing and still have room to park the USS Nimitz.) The reservations I’m going to express about Trump in this short series this week are based solely on his political actions, not on the brassy stuff that I personally dislike. That’s why I cleared those concerns out of the way first to make it clear that I acknowledge that a huge ego could be what it takes to combat the establishment.
Much to my disappointment, Trump’s actions run completely opposite of his words every time we see him make an actual political decision. While Trump sounds so bold in his political incorrectness that I might be inclined to think as many others do that he was actually trying to throw the election by being as unlikable to the majority as he can be, I know and he knows (and you do, too) there are a lot of angry people who need someone to voice their anger.
Trump knows he can tap into a huge vault of anger; and, as a media mogul himself, he knows better than anyone how to play the media for free publicity by being outrageous — something for which he’s always had a near whacky knack. We’ve seen him do it for years, even when he was not running for office or when he ran and quit. He’s done it to keep the Trump name, as a brand, always in the media, always on the public mind, always associated with “greatness” and “wealth” because that is the kind of real estate he develops and sells. He caters to the wealthy. That’s his brand, and nothing could give it more cache than the presidency of the United States.
While those are my reservations, it’s his latest political actions that concern me. In the few places where we have seen Trump make actual political decisions so far, his choices have been 100% pro-establishment as I pointed out in a recent article titled “Whirled Politics: Would you rather be Trumped or Pillaried?” I wished very much to see something different than what I am seeing.
From Trump’s choice of a 180-proof neocon vice presidential candidate to an embedded Goldman-Sachs campaign financial manager to the Heritage Foundation’s dream team of budget advisors he assembled, Trump has selected people who wholly embody the establishment. Everything these people have ever done or said has been in support of the Wall Street one-percenters, in support of financial deregulation, and, for the most part, in support of the military-industrial complex at the cost of any debt imaginable. The team he creates says everything about where he intends to head.
To be clear, I am for a strong military and not against all wars. I believed and still do believe that going to war in Afghanistan was right and justifiable, but it was stupid later on to divert available resources from Afghanistan to Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 nor with sponsoring terror against the US nor with buy zolpidem from india developing weapons of mass destruction. We should have spent that money winning the peace in Afghanistan by building something good there in the place of what we tore down. Instead, we created a power vacuum in the now disintegrated nation or Iraq, which is rife with internal rivalries and, so, became the ideal incubator for ISIS. That is exactly the kind of result I told friends I feared when I first heard King George Bush II wanting to engage Iraq in a war.
I think neocons have taken us into ill-conceived, unjust, pre-emptive wars aimed at recreating the world in our image. We have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of unseen people who never raised a finger against us and most likely never would have in wars that have been monstrous failures. After Iraq, we backed a coup in Crimea, a civil war in Libya, and seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot in Syria because we’ve returned to the Vietnam practice of fighting wars from Washington. (That, however, is due to Obama and his ilk, not due to the neocons.) We’ve now got war everywhere.
If we think the people who remain alive in those countries are going to thank us for killing their brothers and sisters or sons and daughters or their fathers and mothers in order to save them from a single despot, we are sadly and deeply self-deluded. We may think the despot was their deepest concern; however, as with all people, it turns out family is first. We have created nations filled with people who hate us just because we think we know best what government is good for them (and, frankly, for oil and the economic gain that fighting brings us).
Politicians like Killary and Trump’s VP, Pence, backed these wars 100% and have spent a nation’s ransom trying to force change upon a world that has no intention of changing — a world that, if it did become democratic, would use its vote to declare war on us for killing their brothers and sisters. Hillary started some of these wars herself (at least, initiated our involvement in them). Pence strongly advocated for every one.
Power-drunk politicians in both parties support these missions in order to control the world and its wealth, for most of them are globalists and elitists at heart who serve Wall Street. The rest are misguided fools whose minds have been consumed by their own dogma. They vote for these wars because numerous American corporations get wealthy making equipment to replace the machinery that gets blown up; they get wealthy pumping fuel into the engines and making new tires to replace rubber that is too worn to meet the road. The more of that equipment we burn through, the more they can get the government to pay to replace it.
These politicians are owned by the corporations that make this hardware. The best of them believe that, by serving those corporations, they are serving the American economy; the worst of them are courtesans who simply love to be wined and dined and admired.
And why do I point all that out? Because these are the people Trump is assembling as his leadership team. So, if you think Trump is any threat to the establishment, you may be riding a Trojan horse. As soon as I learned that Trump chose Larry Kudlow and Steven Moore to be his senior economic advisors, I feared he was selling out to the establishment in order win Republican support (and probably because Trump is a big-idea man who always looks to others to come up with the particulars that will make a big idea work, but he’s picked the wrong others).
I have a file full or articles on Kudlow that I keep in my “Idiot Box” where I store the stupid things economists and Wall Street moguls say. Larry is soon to become (again) an article of his own.
That is the team assembled inside the Trump horse. On the outside, it is all Trump, brazen and shiny and bold. On the inside, it is entirely Wall-Street warriors and neocon combatants. In the next article in this series, I’ll dig into the Kudlow-Moore tax plan which gives us the major components of Trump’s action plan in order to show how deeply establishment Trump’s plan is in its debt-based economic expansion and its retreaded, spiffed-up, establishment ideas that got us where we are today.
Be careful that you don’t believe something just because you want to believe it so badly. That is how the citizens of Troy were conquered in the Trojan war. I’d love to have an anti-establishment candidate roll in, too. Sadly, I don’t think I do (at least, not economically). The time to hold Trump to task is now, not after the establishment makeover turns him into their Trojan Trump card, but while they are trying so that they don’t succeed.
The brazenly boisterous, blusteringly bellicose, trumpeting Trump. Who is the man behind that mighty mouth?
If there is one thing certain about Trump it is that he stirs up conversations all over the globe, but is he anything more than a grand snake-oil salesman? Has he ever stood for or served anything greater than himself? Does he exemplify integrity of leadership in the deals he makes, or does he just pursue whatever course is expedient at the time, regardless of how selfish or wrong? Does he own his failures or blame them on others? Does he play by the rules as he demands impoverished immigrants do or treat rules as inconveniences to be ignored  by the wealthy when they go against his own wealth building? Does he care at all about whom he hurts or ever even stop to think about it? Is he a man who is willing to speak out against stupid political correctness, regardless of personal cost, or just an opportunist who loves to hear himself and who knows how to tap into public rage as a potent force for his own purposes? Is he force or farce? Is he more interested in building a brand or in building a nation?
As a followup to this article, here is a list of all the articles, including this one, that laid out the entire swamp-infested plan, starting from just before Trump was elected to the days between the election and his inauguration and a followup partway through his first term:
“Trump: Trojan Horse for the Establishment or Mighty Mouth for Mankind” (Forewarns of the moves)
“Trump: Trojan, Traitor, or Tried and True?” (Pt. 1 of the main series)
“Team Trump (Pt. 2): Top of the Crop is a Mixed Bag“
“Team Trump (Pt 3): Trunk Loads of Establishment Baggage“
And the followup, half a year into his term: “Team Trump Transmogrifies into the Swamp Thing“
Sunday, October 23rd 2016 at 8:22 am |
Utterly brilliant article. You are so damn perceptive when it comes to human nature. Oh God, what a mess the West is in. Too much greed, not enough democracy. The main stream media in the US, UK and EU is nothing more than a publicity machine for the Clinton parasite elites
Sunday, October 23rd 2016 at 12:16 pm |
Thanks, Auldfriend. What a year! I knew it was going to be the craziest election we’ve ever seen, and it hasn’t failed to be that. At the same time, it’s such a crazy year with so many forces coming together that it has defied my predictions in terms of timing (to which I’ll probably write an article at the end of the year, evaluating those predictions after we know how the year turns out).
For now, I’m just saying that the clash of major forces has become so great around Trump that its not much wonder that things are less predictable. The establishment is going completely nuts about Trump, which is the one thing I really like about him; but his tax plan is such a massive sell-out to the rich that so blatantly serves his self-interest that I am certain it will finish the nation off. On the other hand, economic ruin is now certain anyway. We’ve gone so far down that road over the past eight years that worrying about his tax plan is almost like worrying that the tires are flat seconds before driving over the cliff.
However, I am equally certain Hitlary will take us into four more years of regime-change wars and hopeless conflict with Russia that will become truly dangerous. It’s ironic to me that many here in the US think Trump is the one who will start wars because of his immigration policy when I think he is the one person would handily succeed in calming things down with Russia. Wait until you read what I turned up about Hillary’s warmongering if you haven’t read it yet (no surprise but fascinating to see it laid out so clearly in her pillaged emails).
–David
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 10:36 am |
**Has he ever stood for or served anything greater than himself? **
Yes. Why do you think he’s running? Or is he the only naked, big-mouth opportunist in politics and all the rest are altruists?
Your last paragraph is a laughable concoction of insinuation and distortion and anything but a list of fair questions about an accomplished man. Trump employs thousands of people whom he treats well by all accounts. Start there.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 10:47 am |
Well, it would certainly appear that he is running because his tax plan is the biggest gift to himself and his cronies that the ward has ever seen. If he manages to ever get such a plan through congress his return on investment for what little he has contributed to his campaign that hasn’t already been paid by by contributions from others will make his campaign by far the most profitable investment of his life.
As for the last paragraph, I just asked the question. You are certainly free to answer them however you wish. If the answers that come to your mind are all positive, then he’s your man. Simple as that.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 6:38 pm |
That’s a tendentious argument. Trump running to benefit himself and his cronies financially? Laughable. A billionaire and therefore it just follows as the night the day that he wants to add to his stash. Nothing else going on upstairs there except a desire to enrich himself further.
You didn’t just come up with “questions.” I bet you didn’t think to pose those questions when Romney, McCain, W, and Bush, Senior were running. If you’d raised them about Washington at the time you would have been ridiculed. No. Your questions are a statement. You have an agenda.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 9:57 pm |
Well, let’s see. He’s going to save himself 15% annually in capital gains taxes, which at his level of income is equal to tens of millions saves each year. (Of course, billionaires never care about saving money, and it’s tendentious apparently because that IS what his tax plan will do, and that is the area in which he makes almost all of his money as a real estate developer; but that’s just tendentious to assume he’s creating the nation’s largest capital gains tax cut to benefit himself). Then, he’s going to cut corporate taxes by 20%, and all of his real estate companies and other companies are corporations, so that saves him millions more, while it doesn’t save the middle class anything. And then he’s going to completely eliminate the estate tax, which is a 50% tax that applies only to estates over a 6 million dollars. His estate, which will be handed down in another 10-20 years is worth billions, so that’s worth billions to his kids. Doesn’t help you and me one bit, but he benefits massively. I’m sure his kids are delighted with the plan. No wonder they are all stumping for him. But, I’m sure it is, as you say, “laughable” to think that Trump would benefit from any of that. That’s just biased of me to think that a billionaire would benefit from the largest capital gains cuts, corporate tax cuts, and estate tax cuts in the history of nation.
As for Romney, I slaughtered him regularly — thought he was clearly a child of the establishment to the core and not particularly bright — just born with a golden spoon in his mouth and very good and smiling and shaking hands with the right people. I would never have raised them about Washington. He was wealthy. So what. I have nothing against wealth, only against people who are blinded by their wealth to what this nation really needs and who serve nothing but their own wealth.
I do have an agenda. It’s getting at the truth. I don’t care which party I go after in trying to dislodge it or which candidate. If Trump had come up with a much different tax plan, I might be supportive of him, in spite of is supreme arrogance. As I’ve said, maybe supreme arrogance is what it takes to stand up to the slings and arrows of the establishment. Much to my dismay, his tax plan is the greatest gift the establishment has EVER seen.
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 10:36 pm |
Trump consistently punches down, scapegoating immigrants and minorities instead of punching up at the real culprits: Big Business and Wall Street money changers.
We Americans have become so accustomed to politicians bending us over to be fisted by Big Business that many of us seemingly want to cut out the middleman politician and elect a Big Business oligarch as president.
Tuesday, September 20th 2016 at 2:03 pm |
Hi Jay,
Welcome to the blog. I think many of us feel we need a strongman if he’s going to be tough enough to take on the establishment. Question is, do we have a truly strong man who is willing to take on congress for four years with the cleverness to get American support behind him and away from the establishment or just a big-mouth bully. The latter kind tend to sound really tough until the fighting starts.
I don’t know, and I’m not saying Trump is one or the other; but his actual decisions to date make me think everything will still go in the direction of the big business establishment. I think that will be more apparent once I post my next article on his tax plan.
Thursday, May 4th 2017 at 4:32 pm |
Take your minority BS and shove it up your backside. You stinking racist.
Screw the author of this simple minded article.
We need to stop the Muslim invasion of our country. At least Trump has the guts to address this issue.
Western Civilization can not stand a defeat in this battle. Dhimmitude will never be an option for President Trump.
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 11:44 am |
I really don’t know who Trump the man is. I’ve never met him. However, I find myself, again and again, nodding in agreement whenever he speaks.
Do I think he will actually change things? Do I put my life’s hope in him or any man (or woman) for that matter? No way, not a chance, I’m not THAT naive.
But yeah, it’s fun watching the corrupted establishment Bush® Family and corrupted, brain-dead, wrinkled up old Clinton® pair twist in the wind. Love that. Can’t wait for the corrupted MSM® eat their own on Nov 9th.
I can’t vote. It’s too late for me to register. I live in Oregon and should have registered months ago. However, if I were to cast a vote it would be for ANYONE but Heinous. I honestly can’t stand the woman. She looks straight at the camera and lies. And what she did to those Benghazi mothers (the lies), I just can’t. And obviously, she is not fit. Physically fit. If she makes a 15 minute showing at even one of the debates, i will be surprised.
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 1:26 pm |
You are lazy. http://elections.mytimetovote.com/dates/oregon.html
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 1:30 pm |
I would have thought it was too late to register, too. Looks like Oregon has very late registration. “Lazy” wasn’t called for, though. She probably moved from a state where registration has a much earlier deadline.
Tuesday, September 20th 2016 at 4:25 am |
Maybe apathetic is a better word. I haven’t registered to vote in over a decade (almost two). The last time I voted was for Bush the first time around (California resident) and I regretted that. Good to know tho.
Tuesday, September 20th 2016 at 2:21 pm |
You and me both, Kim. That was the last time I voted, too. After seeing Bush in action for four years with Cheney as the evil puppet master, there was no way I’d vote for Bush for a second term. He was embarrassing, and I was stunned that he did get voted in for a second term. By the end of his second term, it was clear that his tax cuts were a disaster. They not only failed entirely to stimulate the economy, but they turned a few rare years of surplus budgets into even larger deficits than we saw under his dad or under Reagan.
I decided not to inflict myself on America in the next two presidential elections because I really didn’t like any of the alternatives. The Republicans really did look like a laughable clown car. I still wonder how they consistently manage to find so many odd-ball candidates. (I mean Perry seemed so dumb I wouldn’t use him as a fence post.) All of them continue to preach the same trickle-down economics that we’ve endured for thirty-plus years and that created the great divide we have now where the middle class has caved in. All support free trade that clearly has done NOTHING to improve life for the average working-class American. As my wife says, Sarah Palin would probably be great at a barbecue, but I don’t want her deciding how we’re going to interact with Russia based on whether she can hit Putin with a stone from her front yard.
On the other hand, either Hillary of Obama looked horrible. No one knew anything about Obama because he had barely held office anywhere and never done business anywhere. Far less was known about his private life than is known about Trump, and he had no economic experience of any kind and clearly no economic plan for getting us out of the mess he would be inheriting. (Everyone was just, as far I was concerned, projecting their own best hopes on his blank slate.) Shrieking Hillary, whose name seems endlessly attached to every scandal that comes along, was a definite no vote for me. I find her almost completely unlikable and have no reason at all to trust anything she says.
Like you, rather than choose the lesser of several evils or a great unknown or the least funny clown in the car, I decided to just stay out of the voting booth until someone came along that I could stomach.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 10:53 am |
While you sainted voters scour the horizon for The Perfect Candidate who will feed your pet sacred cow and fix the pothole in front of your house, actual events take place.
You don’t vote for one man. You vote for an administration, a tendency, a direction. It’s bad that we sometimes get a choice between terrible and awful but a general, limited nudge is all any voter ever has gotten to exert in national elections.
You smug people who posture so accomplish nothing. Look at me. I’m special. I’m too special, too above the fray, to think of weighing in. I’m a snowflake who wrestles with The Imponderables of Life.
Look at what actual voters accomplished this time. The dweeb disaster of Jeb was averted. He’s back home now cutting out paper dolls thanks to people who got off their couches and weighed in, even if they had no idea how or whether their votes would register.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 11:40 am |
I knoooow…. And I already can’t stand his administration. His economic advisors — Larry Kudlow and Stephen Moore — are two of the worst people for the US economy I can possibly thing of. (Ludlow much worse so than Moore.) Both are dinosaurs, who in their economic plan, have come up with nothing but the same thing we had again and again in the past thirty years, only turned up on the highest amplification of trickle-down principles the nation has EVER seen. It’s a total self-destruct of massive spending and equally massive revenue decreases that is targeted almost entirely to make the rich vastly wealthier and the nation completely broke. If anyone falls for that after the utter bankruptcy of the previous two rounds of trickle-down economics they are a fool who deserves the economic collapse the comes.
Not saying Hillary will be good for us or that you shouldn’t vote for Trump, but just KNOW that he is certainly bringing economic destruction. His advisors have no plan whatsoever for correcting the massive flaws of an entirely debt-based economy. Instead, they are diving in deeper into debt than ever before. And for Treasurer he has strongly hinted at appointing his scandalous campaign finance director, a former head at Goldman Sachs. That’s sure a fox I want in charge of the henhouse.
I’m pretty sure you can see I’m not a “afraid of weighing in.” I weigh in publicly via this blog all the time. However, I’m not about to vote for the “lesser of two evils” just because that is the only choice I’m ever given. I’d rather not, just as you insinuate, dirty my hands by voting for any evil. By intention, I’ll let the rest of the world decide which evil it prefers because I really don’t care which evil we get, as either one is horrible. Then I’m free to resoundly criticize EITHER evil when it proves to be just as evil as I’m now certain it is.
So, I weigh in every week and get some ridicule for doing so (as in just now), but I don’t weigh in via the system. I am not going to vote for any more Republicans or Democrats just because that is what the system shoves at me. I’m going outside of the system. Can’t vote for the idiot who is running a Libertarian who has a self-admitted brain fart and can’t think of a single world leader and won’t vote for a socialist. So, the system has cut me out by presenting only options that I cannot stomach (just as much as the former Soviet system did by presenting only one candidate to vote for). Thus, I cast my vote here.
Given my druthers, I’d prefer to see Hillary win, though I dislike her more than Trump. (See my latests articles on Hillary, the war candidate.) Why? Because if the seemingly (but not really) anti-establishment candidate Trump wins, he’ll become the immediate scapegoat for the Fed and for the left who will say, when the economy immediately crashes as I’ve been saying it will this year, that it was all Trump’s fault. They’ve already prepared the way by saying over and over before Trump gets elected that, if he gets, elected, Wall Street will crash.
Wall Street is going to crash anyway, and I’d far rather see that happen while Obama is in power and after Hillary gets voted in so that it is abundantly clear that the world did not crash because an “anti-establishment” candidate was chosen and that spooked Wall St. That would say to people, “See, if you vote against the establishment, you destroy the economy just as we warned.”
If Wall Street crashes after eight years of Obama and after Hillary is elected, the establishment has to completely own the crash as a failure of its own ways that crashed under establishment Republican George Bush and completely failed to recover under establishment Democrat Barrack Obama. I think that will do far more to open the possibility for real reform than Trump will ever accomplish; but I’m glad Trump got the debate going.
The economy will still fail under Trump’s totally establishment-Wall-Street-serving economic plan — a plan that is what it is because Trump chose completely establishment-serving mouthpieces to create the plan (turned to the wrong experts). Since it is certainly going to fall anyway, I’d rather it fall under Hillary. I want to see the establishment forced to own its own failures. However, I’m not going to vote for destruction just to see that happen for the sake of clarity either.
So, yes, I’ll keep my hands clean on the vote, but I’m far from staying out of the fray. I’m in it every day … right here. I lose lots of readers because I trash their favorite candidate. Every time, I point out Trump’s hideous problems, I lose anti-establishment readers who might otherwise love this blog. And, of course, I never get much in the way of Democrat readers because I’ve been agains the incumbent administration since the inception of this blog.
I take the road less travelled, knowing full well that it makes less popular and certainly less wealthy than I’d be if I became a mouthpiece for either club where, at least, I’d have one ready group of followers. I manage to alienate both sides because both parties are equally to blame for the hideous economic mess we are in, which is about to burst open in flames.
I predicted total economic rupture would happen earlier this year, and it didn’t, though the tear started right when I said it would at the start of the year; but then it seemed to self-mend. If I’m wrong, and the economy doesn’t burst its guts by the end of the year, I may quit writing here, as I have no desire to foment needless fear. However, I think it is just being patched together with everything the Fed can do to buy markets and keep them alive, and the patches are looking pretty tightly stretched.
My prediction, after the January crash ended was that the Obama Admin and the its Fed partner would try to keep things together until the election but that things PROBABLY not hold until the election. A couple of weeks after saying that, the Fed called a couple of emergency meetings of its board and then the Fed chair had a rare emergency meeting with the president and vice president. Right after that, oil markets rose, and the tear began to mend quickly until the US stock market had completely recovered.
We are getting close enough to the election now that I don’t have much time left to be proven right on the probability that the fix wouldn’t hold until the election. I won’t be surprised at this point if it holds that long, but I will be surprised if things don’t crash after the election, especially if Trump is elected because they’ve already prepared the ground for people to believe that Wall Street will crash if Trump is elected.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 6:52 pm |
Well, let us agree to disagree on the efficacy of voting. On an individual basis it’s meaningless; in the aggregate, not so much.
Trump is right on a few issue (immigration, up to a point) but he’s not a man with any great insight. Health care, restrooms, abortion are all easily dealt with by saying they’re not federal responsibilities under Art. I, Sect. 8. End of story. But he doesn’t know to fight for a re-establishment of the Constitutional scheme and is obviously not read up on constitutional principles. He’s right on another issue, to wit, that Russia isn’t a threat, so that’s a huge point in his favor.
As to your latter point that it won’t much matter, I agree. Not the fairest rendering of your point but perhaps close enough. Yellin is keeping the interest rate low until after the election and horrific economic realities await either winner this November. The banksters would love to hang the collapse on Trump but it’s way past that. 100 years of utopian stupidity are coming to a close. No one knows what’s next although much killing is in the cards if you ask me until there is a return to sanity. Neither candidate understands how insane it’s gotten.
Sunday, October 16th 2016 at 10:05 pm |
I don’t find much there that I disagree with, so I’m not sure why you started out as if we disagree. I particularly agree on where it is going from here, regardless of which candidate wins; so I don’t see any value in backing either one since neither one really understands how much needs to happen to change the economy. Therefore, I’d rather just see the blame hang squarely on the establishment’s head, and Trump, if he wins, provides them with an out that many will brainlessly accept; but I wouldn’t vote for Hillary just to make sure the blame goes there. So, the populace will vote for who it votes for, the economy will crash, and then we go from there. I also agree that Trump’s view of Russia is much more sane than Hillary’s. She hasn’t seen a war she didn’t approve of yet, and everywhere she’s gone looks like a trail of scorched earth behind her.
Wednesday, September 21st 2016 at 9:45 am |
I don’t even live in Oregon and it took me less time to find that information than it took for her to type the comment explaining why she wasn’t voting.
And you’re lazy too since you can’t be bothered to do any more research on Trump than the current media mischaracterizations.
Wednesday, September 21st 2016 at 10:28 am |
I’m not even sure I’ll vote. The choice of candidates is so resoundingly bad on both sides, and I’m sick of being stuck with nothing but miserable choices — the world’s most blustering ego with his sell-out tax plan to the rich or the coughing banshee who has left a scorched earth trail wherever she has trekked across the globe. So, it’s nothing to do with lazy. I can’t stand either one of them. I think they’ll both be a total disaster.
Trump’s tax plan coming right up today…
Wednesday, September 21st 2016 at 3:49 pm |
Only one candidate has even broached the topic of stopping immigration. Your “great recession” plus a third-world population equals the permanent decline of America into second world status, if not worse. The replacement of its population is the one thing this country can never recover from. Get over yourself and get off your ass and vote for Trump.
Wednesday, September 21st 2016 at 7:31 pm |
My great recession? I’ve written many times here about how immigration is sucking up all the good-paying jobs and keeping wages suppressed in other jobs so that no Americans will take them because Americans are not yet willing to live in tin shacks in order to compete on that level (nor should they ever have to).
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 1:27 pm |
Yeah, the best I can do at this point is watch the Clinton and Bush dynasties twist in the wind. Am looking forward to the debates for just that reason — Trump toasting her on her corrupt history, Clinton coughing in response until she has to walk off the stage because she can’t go any further. I haven’t spent much time writing about Clinton only because I think her flaws are so many and so obvious to readers of this site that I’d just be preachin’ to the choir.
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 9:37 am |
I do not think anybody can right the economic disaster that is coming. the US Infrastructure has been devastated by both the republisocialist and democommunist sides of the one party coin. MFG, is no longer present in the industries that it was, and due to corrupt and wrongly created trade treaties, we have little chance of the corrupt congress, helping an AMERICA First candidate regain industrial might. That being said, I don’t think Trump is a conservative at all, slightly less establishment than the Faulty TED Cruz, who was at the end the Establishment candidate. I like freedom, and dislike the government that it has grown into. GO Constitution Party, in your ideals, just wish, we were on the ballot in all states. but since we are not, TRUMP would be better than clintonista, but by how much, would maybe be better than the failed bush’s but again by how much….
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 1:23 pm |
Hi Lowell,
Welcome to the blog. I agree that we are far too late to right the ship economically. We could have if we did the right things right off the bat after 2008. Instead, as even many congressional members said, they just kicked the can further down the road. (Knowing that was what they were doing didn’t stop them from doing that.) Their solutions have made everything so much worse that I don’t see any way for this to avoid catastrophe at this point. However, the further we keep trying to make this ill-conceived economic model go, the worst the catastrophe will be; so it would be best to take our pain sooner than later.
–David
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 9:00 am |
Trump v. Clinton
Snake oil salesman v. Snake
Sigh…
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 1:30 pm |
(Laughing) That sums it up perfectly.
Monday, September 19th 2016 at 4:54 pm |
Trojan Horse vs Trojan Whores
Sunday, September 18th 2016 at 6:35 pm |
Trump is going to be a disaster as president–he’ll just be a different sort of disaster than than four more years of neoliberalism-on-steroids under Hillary. He’s a joke candidate who if the system were not broken beyond all repair would never have won a primary, let alone have a good chance at actually being president.
That said, if he pulls it off he will have done two great services to America by utterly destroying both the Bush and Clinton family dynasties once and for all. Not much in the big picture, but at this point I’ll take whatever measly crumbs I can get.
Sunday, September 18th 2016 at 7:13 pm |
Hi Brian,
He certainly is no statesman, and I’d far rather have a tough person who is a true statesman, who is wise but still bold in his words than someone who seems much more like a clown.
Like you say, I think there are some good things about him that I can appreciate. Even if he is going establishment, he’s still been a lightning rod to stir people up against the establishment, and he certainly has shaken up the establishment. They no longer feel as invulnerable as they once did.
However, they are working overtime to groom him and school him to their idea of proper thinking, and all of his actual political decisions look like a capitulation in that direction.
Still, as you say, he is, at least clipping the Clinton and Bush wingtips. However, I’m not sure Hillary is even going to make it to election day, and Chelsea has a long way to go before she brings in the second generation of the Clinton dynasty. So, that one may die out on its own. Jeb Bush, on the other hand, could still make a run again if Trump mucks things up; but Trump’s mucking things up would probably mean no Republican has a chance four years from now.
It’s going to be interesting and weird, and I don’t see any hope in any of it for true recovery. Trump may pump things up awhile longer with his stimulus ideas, but the debt he builds up will break our backs … if it doesn’t do that this year, which is when I’ve said the whole thing falls apart. I’m camping on that position.
–David
Wednesday, September 21st 2016 at 3:51 pm |
You’re a complete moron. He’s actually the first Republican candidate since Reagan (who faced a very different environment) who understands how to penetrate the hostile media veil and communicate with the broader population that generally ignores politics.