Trump could win presidency: Yes or No?

[jimbob]

PartSkeptic does seem to have his own unusual view of reality.

To be fair, this is quite widespread and extends to their posts in the Religion and Philosophy forum. I find such political views often do, from my experience in real life as well. Including actual Biblical literalists in the UK - a fair bit more rare than in the US...

As an aside, I am struggling to see the problem with any hypothetical problems with Clinton's health. Leonid Brezhnev today would be a better president than Trump, and his health won't have deteriorated since his last May Day Parade.

 

[CapelDodger]

I just saw Hillary give her opinion of people who would vote for Trump. Which half am I in?

You're the best placed to judge.

The military industrial complex that is the USA wants to project the IMAGE of US power everywhere. They make money with all those arms sales.

That's not because of the US's image. It's because the weapons are good value for money. People who buy weapons wholesale are all about quality and price, not image. Well, the ones you get repeat business from are.

What does Trump or the US gain from the territorial disputes around China?

Minor point : there'll be no "Trump or the US" under President Trump. There'll just be the Trump US. And about Trump Rushmore ...

More substantial point : what the US can lose is equal access to the West Pacific market. The last power to threaten that was Japan, and it meant war.

China will not back down, even to Trump.

That's one to treasure.

Not totally committed to Trump, I see. Real Trumpets think he'd face down Gallifrey.

He is a businessman. Don't waste time and money on impossible ventures.

Have you heard the one where Trump buys three casinos in Atlantic City to compete against each other, and they all go tits-up? Some more than once (you gotta turn a lotta tricks in Atlantic City to make anything like decent scratch).

A wise man picks his battles, and then makes sure he wins.

Sounds profound, is vacuous. Did you attend Trump U?

Trump knows the enemy, and either demolishes them (Rubio and Cruz) or gets their support (Carson and Christie).

If that's your entourage you need out of this business. Badly.

What have the sanctions on Russia achieved? Russia stopped working with the US and began open support of Assad.

They supported his father's rise to power in the 60's, so this is not news, and no sanctions are now or have ever been about Syria. Sanctions are about Crimea.

They're pretty useless, agreed, but sometimes you just have to show willing.

 

[CapelDodger]

Same.

I dunno whether something has been put in the water, or maybe all the chemtrails, but western society seems to have lost its rudder over the past decade.

At least you knew where you were in the Cold War. The world had such inertia in those days. A chap could go for years without a new country emerging, then come the 90's and they're popping up like mushrooms while the potential for conflict naturally increased factorially.

After which things have really spiralled away into la-la-land. I've given up pretending to myself it's just flashbacks : this is real.

I've thrown the towel in - bring 'em on; what's the worst that could happen?

I was born in 1954. I have ridden the sweet-spot of the Boomer wave for sixty years, so whatever happens now I really can't complain.

 

[Tero]

Hillary could really piss off the 47%. Remember Romney?

 

[The Atheist]

At least you knew where you were in the Cold War. The world had such inertia in those days. A chap could go for years without a new country emerging, then come the 90's and they're popping up like mushrooms while the potential for conflict naturally increased factorially.

After which things have really spiralled away into la-la-land. I've given up pretending to myself it's just flashbacks : this is real.

I was born in 1954. I have ridden the sweet-spot of the Boomer wave for sixty years, so whatever happens now I really can't complain.

Amen to all of that!

 

[thaiboxerken]

Hillary could really piss off the 47%. Remember Romney?

No, she's just pissing off the racists, homophobes and other bigots.

 

[Foolmewunz]

Hillary could really piss off the 47%. Remember Romney?

"Half of..." Trump's supporters represents about 15% of the country, at most. She's already pissed those people off. The other "half of..." Trump's supporters, e.g. people who support Trump, is another 15%.... ("half" connoting 50%, and all). I believe they're also already pissed off.... that would be one of the things that define Trump Supporters.... "pissed off".

OMG, she just alienated the entire demographic that wasn't going to vote for her!!! She's done.

 

[PartSkeptic]

Yes, a wise man does. The question is when will Trump learn to be wise? He never picks his battles wisely because he fights every single battle.

That how he ends up saying things as stupid as, "I have made sacrifices, too. I built tall buildings" He spent 8 ******* years following the Kenya story: another battle poorly chosen.

Did you watch the CNN "The Essential Trump". I was only able to watch the first half. Here was a young man who did things that others said could not be done. A brilliant restoration of a building in Manhattan. He negotiated deals and financing and got it done.

He expanded too fast, too much debt, and nearly lost all. But he was able to franchise his name rather than build. He made much more money that way. He learned to take on partners on his terms. If a venture of his does not do well, he moves on. And gets better at deciding what will work and why.

The best test of his business acumen is that he eliminated a bunch of Republican hopefuls without massive amounts of money to do it. That means he has political acumen as well. It was not a fluke.

His worth is estimated by others as at least $3.5 billion. Since his name is his brand, he has learned to guard it against any and all attacks. He has settled lawsuits when he cannot win them, although he will not promote the idea that one can settle.

Instead of taking his kids to the park or the ball game, he worked. They nevertheless think he is the greatest.

As for bankruptcy and people getting cents on the dollar, that is a risk business people take. If you give credit to get the business, then you should factor the invoices if you cannot afford a default.

Instead of baling out big business, the US government should have bailed out home-owners by giving them money to pay their home bonds. After all it was government who promoted the business of risky loans. So much for screwing the average worker.

 

[PartSkeptic]

McCain, GHWB, and GWB do not appear destroyed to me.

Speaking of which I just saw one of Clinton's latest ads. It consists only of Republicans describing how unfit Trump is. I think it says a lot when prominent Members of a political party will not publicly support their party's nominee

The Republican party has been gutted from within. Those who do not see and embrace the change will not survive politically. Trump is a reformist. That was his first venture in politics in 2000.

 

[PartSkeptic]

"Half of..." Trump's supporters represents about 15% of the country, at most. She's already pissed those people off. The other "half of..." Trump's supporters, e.g. people who support Trump, is another 15%.... ("half" connoting 50%, and all). I believe they're also already pissed off.... that would be one of the things that define Trump Supporters.... "pissed off".

OMG, she just alienated the entire demographic that wasn't going to vote for her!!! She's done.

Hillary just admitted she made a mistake. Apparently the "deplorables" are not half of his supporters but somewhat less.

The rest of Trumps supporters are therefore racist, homophobes etc, by association. After all, they should prove they are not by disavowing Trump without hesitation.

Her statement divides the US. Trump rightly said he will represent ALL Americans.

My feeling when watching her make the statement was that she was stressed, and not aware she was making a miscalculation. Is she losing it?

Talking about tightening of the sphincter, I know the feeling. As a teenager, I walked into an alley to fight two guys and found six really nasty thugs. I knew that I was in serious trouble. I took a beating with knuckledusters.

 

[jimbob]

Somewhere upthread a person linked to a blog pointinong out that the press seems to have got a narrative that Clinton is corrupt/dishonest and Trump is crazy, and just skating over Trump's more serious examples of corruption and dishonesty.

I wonder whether the Clinton campaign should try to focus on Trump's corruption for a bit, and see if they can get that to stick.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Talking about tightening of the sphincter, I know the feeling. As a teenager, I walked into an alley to fight two guys and found six really nasty thugs. I knew that I was in serious trouble. I took a beating with knuckledusters.

To the head?

 

[Dog Town]

I wonder whether the Clinton campaign should try to focus on Trump's corruption for a bit, and see if they can get that to stick.

Too much of a "pot, meet kettle" issue!

 

[Regnad Kcin]

Hillary just admitted she made a mistake. Apparently the "deplorables" are not half of his supporters but somewhat less.

The rest of Trumps supporters are therefore racist, homophobes etc, by association. After all, they should prove they are not by disavowing Trump without hesitation.

Her statement divides the US. Trump rightly said he will represent ALL Americans.

My feeling when watching her make the statement was that she was stressed, and not aware she was making a miscalculation. Is she losing it?

And that is why you fail.

 

[jimbob]

Too much of a "pot, meet kettle" issue!

More like kettle meet pot.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...so-why-is-clinton-supposedly-the-corrupt-one/

In the heat of a presidential campaign, you’d think that a story about one party’s nominee giving a large contribution to a state attorney general who promptly shut down an inquiry into that nominee’s scam “university” would be enormous news. But we continue to hear almost nothing about what happened between Donald Trump and Florida attorney general Pam Bondi.

The blog then mentions that these stories get brief coverage, and then move onto the crazy stuff that Trump says, probably because that fits the narrative better. The author also points out that even when Clinton is exonerated, the incident still is in the news.

The author does give evidence:

But the truth is that you’d have to work incredibly hard to find a politician who has the kind of history of corruption, double-dealing, and fraud that Donald Trump has. The number of stories which could potentially deserve hundreds and hundreds of articles is absolutely staggering. Here’s a partial list:

• Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money
• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses
• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed.
• The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money
• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins
• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did
• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work
• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work
• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination
• Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction
• The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
• The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.

And that last one is happening right now. To repeat, the point is not that these stories have never been covered, because they have. The point is that they get covered briefly, then everyone in the media moves on. If any of these kinds of stories involved Clinton, news organizations would rush to assign multiple reporters to them, those reporters would start asking questions, and we’d learn more about all of them.

 

[jimbob]

Too much of a "pot, meet kettle" issue!

I'll quote from one of the links that I posted in my previous post:



Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?

I've spent years investigating, and here's what's known.
( http://www.politico.com/magazine/st...016-mob-organized-crime-213910?paginate=false )

No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.

This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.

From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.

 

[Dog Town]

So nice...did it twice? LOL!

 

[jimbob]

So nice...did it twice? LOL!

If you notice, the second post expanded on the first with details specifically about Trump's connections with organised crime, as this is directly related to corruption.

Most of whilst the rest of the links in my first post were to do with general dishonesty and what seems like fraudulent trading rather than corruption. There is a difference, but both are worthy of investigation.

 

[Dog Town]

If you notice,

LOL, it was quoting me twice, that I applauded.

Couldn't quite get it right the FIRST time? LOL!

 

[Andy_Ross]

Diversion noted.