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‘Everything Trump Touches Dies’
ETTD. You’ve seen it here and undoubtedly encountered it elsewhere. Everything Trump Touches Dies.
The great thing about slogans is that they’re catchy, memorable, and spare you the heavy lifting of actually thinking critically about things. “Bush Lied, People Died” is a classic. “No Blood for Oil” is another, as are “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Repeat them often enough and the ideas for which they’re lazy shorthand seem self-evidently true, and such simplicity is comforting in a disturbingly complicated and nuanced world.
“Everything Trump Touches Dies” obviously isn’t intended to be taken literally. There’s a darkly humorous idea out there that this might have been literally true of one of the candidates in 2016, but it wasn’t Trump. No, what it is intended to suggest is that everything Trump involves himself with becomes tainted, corrupted, diminished, broken — fails, in some way.
Trump has touched a lot of things (ahem), most of which don’t interest me much. He’s a serial entrepreneur, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he might not have been a particularly honest one. Risk-takers often have a string of failures behind them; self-promoting risk-takers who talk fast and paint rosy pictures often lose other people’s money.
Since becoming president, however, Trump has had what I think is a very positive influence on several things. He’s curbed regulations, removed us from silly climate pacts, improved relations with our closest allies, effectively responded to (rather than appeased) our adversaries, drawn attention to the looming challenge of China, strengthened our military, reduced our taxes, improved border security, made strides toward removing corruption from our federal law enforcement agencies, transformed the judiciary in a pro-Constitutional way, exposed the press as the biased and petty institution it appears to be, ended preposterous gender-identity diktats, and encouraged a pro-business climate in America with, I think, impressive results.
So, whatever Trump has figuratively-speaking killed, a lot of things I care about aren’t among them. Quite the contrary, he seems to be contributing to a lot of healing and renewal in places where I think we needed it.
Spouting this particular slogan strikes me as about as vacuous as all the other stupid and dishonest activist ditties. Anyone who thinks Trump is either an unalloyed success or an unalloyed failure is, I think, expressing a silly and indefensible view. We can debate whether the preponderance of Trump’s activities in any particular domain has led to positive or negative consequences. I think, when the domain is his role as President of the United States, we have more positive than negative. There are probably other domains in which I wouldn’t make that case, but his role as President is really the only one that I consider critical in my evaluation of the man and in deciding to vote for him (again) in 2020.
Published in Politics
Trump seems about that way on the debt. Way better than that on the judges. And on fighting back against double leftist standards.
He has said that debt is “on the list”, but other priorities were higher. He could be blowing smoke, but let’s face it: the public doesn’t believe, understand, or care. If he tackled debt and deficits now, he’d lose for certain in November. We’ll find out if he meant it when he is re-elected. He won’t owe anyone or anything then but his own conscience.
Well, I’m all for giving some blame to the public. And it’s not like Trump is worse than most politicians. Better than many, in that his optimistic Kudlow approach to handling debt by growing the economy does help at least a little.
I think that calling NTs losers is pretty mild given that you spent months saying that you wanted Trump supporters driven out of your party. What exactly did you expect Trump supporters’ responses to be?
And if the GOP is in fact Trump’s party now, you are on the losing end. I personally would not go so far as to say “pathetic”, but “losers” might be accurate. We’ll know for certain in November.
And here I thought congress controls the purse, not POTUS.
Trump made some noise about signing off on the budget a while back, saying he’d never do so again. I admit I got confused about the process when I heard people referring to the “president’s budget”. Does he have a veto option?
EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_budget_process
Key sentence: “The United States budget process begins when the President of the United States submits a budget request to Congress.”
My understanding is starts in house goes through senate their is a reconciliation process the POTUS can sigh or veto, Congress can override. White House is involved to a degree but House has control.
wrt to the debt: it’s not his or any president’s job. The debt is solidly the province of the House and Senate. The only thing a president can do is spend less money under his control, but that money is, while large to us, minuscule to what the legislature burns though.
Primarily it’s under Congress’ control. But the President can ask Congress to do a better bill, sign a better bill, at least not propose a bad bill, or deregulate. Trump’s done well on that last one!
I edited #66 to include a link to wikipedia. If one trusts that wikipedia entry, the process when the president submits a budget “request”. I don’t trust my memory completely, but it tells me that early in his term Trump requested a lot of money for the military. Of course, the House regarded this as a chance to play politics and tell Trump that if he wanted his money for the military, he’d have to accept a bus-load of money for their pet projects. He said he would never sign such a budget again, but would accept that one to get his own budget items approved. We’ll find out soon enough if he was bluffing, or even if he has the power and political capital he thinks he has.
Depends on which one is Republican and which is Democrat. Democrats control the purse. Doesn’t matter who is in office.
Unless you address entitlements, none of the rest matters. The “discretionary”budget (i.e. everything that isn’t Medicare, Social Security and interest on the debt) is a tiny portion. Medicare, Social Security and Interest on the debt makes up well over half of the spending.
Edit: D’oh! Corrected. Phrased it backwards originally.
Good point, and that will get addressed, if at all, only after Trump is re-elected, if and only if, he’s willing to take the heat himself. No senator or representative will go first.
Just replying to point out my stupid editing error. Corrected in the original comment and here:
The “discretionary”budget (i.e. everything that isn’t Medicare, Social Security and interest on the debt) is a tiny portion. Medicare, Social Security and Interest on the debt makes up well over half of the spending.
Trump brought out record numbers of real Republicans to counteract his fans in the primaries, in vastly larger numbers than he had, but won due to winner take all primaries with 22% to 36% of the vote. He hired corrupt hustler Paul Manafort to game the convention system and keep delegates from voting their conscience on the first ballot, where he had a real chance of being rejected.
And if corporate welfare isn’t tackled, you might as well forget about tackling the entitlements. (Seems to me I’ve explained that once or twice already.)
I’d say it is pretty generous…especially for those that spent hundreds, if not thousands, of words pushing the Charlottesville hoax well past its expiration date. (And some continue to play “footsie” with that delusion.)
So when a delegate elected by Trump votes decides to cast his/her ballot for your candidate, it’s a good thing. But if they cast their vote for the candidate whose votes made them delegates, then they are misguided, unconscionable, and led by a corrupt hustler. This might be one more reason why I am disgusted by NT’s. I didn’t know there were any reasons remaining.
There is a time and a purpose for every season under heaven.
Hitler was a committed environmentalist. A visionary road builder and car designer. He loved his mum so much he paid her enormous medical bills in full even when he was a homeless vagrant. But I don’t think the middle of D-Day would have been the right time to point that out.
Trump and the Republican brand were already plausibly charged with accommodating the alt-right before Charlottesville. After a woman was murdered for protesting those marching and chanting “Jews will not replace us” it was time for some straight forward condemnation of their actions – not pointing out there were swell folks on both sides. Reagan didn’t tell Peter Robinson to write a speech pointing out all the good things that came from building the Berlin Wall to be evenhanded.
I wanted them to have the opportunity to vote their conscience. We used to be the party of personal responsibility and individual conscience. Now you’re either a Trumpkin or you’re out.
Trump is an inconsistent communicator: he works a crowd well, can hit a popular nerve, but sometimes speaks without thinking and misses the mark. I will defend his Charlottesville comment as entirely innocent, but politically unwise because it was so easily misrepresented by those who wanted to make him look like he was condoning bigotry.
I think the whole “alt-right” thing is wildly overblown. As I’ve said elsewhere, Republicans kick the nuts to the fringe, Democrats elect them into the House. In a party with tens of millions of members there will always be some crazies, but the GOP neither encourages nor embraces them. They’re just there.
I think this is an interesting interpretation of “personal responsibility.” Delegates are elected to represent the views of the people who elected them. It’s one thing to be a Congressman who occasionally takes positions that his electorate doesn’t like. It’s another thing to be chosen specifically to represent a specific candidate and then reject that duty because you don’t like the guy. Electors so inclined should step down and ask to be replaced by people willing to do the job for which they were elected.
I really wish I could agree with you, but I think it reflects a deeper problem for Trump than just being inarticulate. He sincerely believes he can’t win without appealing to racists because he has so much contempt for his own base. I watched his interaction with Jake Tapper about David Duke in real time – you could see Trump deliberately avoiding denouncing Duke to accommodate what he thought were “his people.” That’s why he appointed Steve Bannon, the publisher of “the home of the alt-right” to be his chief political adviser.
In most instances I’d agree with you, but unique circumstances require unique responses. The solid majority of primary voters in the early states told exit pollsters that they were coming out not only to vote for a different candidate, but specifically to vote against Trump. The system of winner take all [or winner take two thirds] primaries was a corrupt innovation to keep Jeb! from dealing with ankle biters like Santorum or Cain. It turned out to have a more pernicious result. I think destroying the Republican brand was enough of a reason to make this convention an exception – the procedures for allowing a vote of conscience were in place for exactly this kind of circumstance.
People always justify breaking the rules by citing the exceptional nature of the moment. I don’t think the Republican brand was destroyed. I don’t think Trump’s election represented a crisis either for the country or for the Republican Party.
Inertia and weariness have brought all but a remnant of the conservative movement to your position. At the time of the convention it was still a jump ball.
Getting ready to go to work now, I’ll check back in a day or two.
I always interpreted the “good on both sides” remark to be about those people for and those people against removing the statues. Both sides may have valid points.
I never thought the both sides he was referring to were the Alt-Right and Antifa goons. If he’s saying the Alt-Right are good people, then he’s saying the Antifa yin to their yang are good as well. Antifa praise is not consistent with any of Trump’s behavior.
One of the major concerns about Trump in the early going was that if he elected he wouldn’t govern as a Conservative.
That concern has been pretty decisively put to rest.
How about dividing up the task. You and Trump can condemn the alt-right, and the leftDemocrats can decide who all is included under the heading, “alt-right”? Many hands make light work, as the saying goes.
There’s a presumptuousness to the use of the word “remnant” in this context that I find irritating. (Not saying you’re using it that way, of course. I’m actually thinking of Jonah.)