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Why I Will Never Abandon Trump
Lately there’s been a lot of talk among pundits on what it would take for Trump’s base to abandon him. For me, the answer is: nothing. I feel I must support Trump, regardless of what he does, because I fear what would happen if he got impeached. That’s not to say I don’t criticize Trump from time to time. But said criticism has no bearing on my generic support for him.
Ever since World War II, American elites have tried to build this narrative that democracy is about impersonal public policy, not power/status competition between groups. If you believe that policy is all that matters, than of course there won’t be any consequences to impeaching Trump, certainly not for his base. He’ll just be replaced by Pence, and things will go on mostly as they have before.
This is completely absurd. Trump’s base is socially vulnerable, much more so than I think any of us want to admit. Impeaching Trump would be a complete disaster. At the very least we would see a rash of suicides. The discrimination working-class white people face could intensify, especially in employment. The nihilism that’s been growing in the middle and upper middle classes for 50 years could start to spiral out of control. And that’s before we get to the rioting which, let’s be honest, would be intense.
If you don’t believe me, just look at what happened to Christians after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. Liberals went on a judicial jihad to persecute them. The status of Christians fell so low that the courts actually ruled that Trump’s travel ban’s prioritization of religious minorities was unconstitutional. Yes, Christians are dying en masse in Middle Eastern countries, but apparently we can’t do anything about it because, well, the First Amendment prohibits it. Go figure.
Elite coups have consequences. Politics is not a dispassionate fight over public policy, but a struggle between groups. The consequences of impeaching Trump would be just too dire for me to abandon my generic support for the man, and I don’t think there’s anything Trump could that would change that.
Published in General
Well, there are two extremes here: 1) impeaching Trump has no ill effect 2) impeaching Trump leads to mass ethnic cleansing. So whether I’d abandon Trump would depend on where we were between those two points.
Oh come on. Those institutions started to die the moment the left began using these tactics. They will die of their own accord given enough time. It’s far better to do a controlled collapse than drag things out. Otherwise you end up with the absurd situation we’re in today, where in some parts of the country saying you don’t care if half a million poor white people die is socially acceptable, but just looking at liberals the wrong way is not (I’m thinking of microaggressions).
There are more, but they’re on YouTube.
The point is that a person like Manafort who was at the damn meeting lied about it at 0:45 –
Now, you can point out that he was fired, but by the time he was Kushner, DT Jr and Manafort had already had the meeting in question 6 weeks before this interview.
Maybe his memory is faulty? Doubt it.
There are others as well.
They didn’t come by men trying to insult, dominate, or degrade one another, but rather out of a desire to protect man’s rights and to specifically limit the power of the state which had impeded on said rights (the monarch, or Cromwell as dictator, being the state at the time leading up to Glorious Revolution). But to point to the English as the progenitors of the idea of limiting the state to protect man’s rights is to miss much of human history.
Your lack of historical knowledge explains why you think wrong will produce right. But wrong will never produce right. The rules were written as such.
Do you know how many witches the trials in Salem hanged? How many witches were incinerated in the history of the Inquisition in Europe?
Zero.
That doesn’t mean nobody died. When you burn people up, they’re certainly dead. But the point remains that there never were any witches, and people who were perfectly innocent of the charges for which they were immolated went to their very painful deaths. Because witches aren’t real.
This is in stark comparison to the situation in front of us, where, although there are no witches, there are certainly liars. We’re plagued with them, apparently.
It’s arguable that lying is the most toxic thing that we do to one another because it has the effect of undermining every other aspect of human interaction, which relies inherently on trust. Lying is corrosive to trust, which is why the allegations that the Bush Administration lied were so irresponsible and just plain wrong.
This. As soon as the commenter used the term LIE I knew I had a problem with it. I thought, wait, did something happen overnight that I missed? At some point when do they all go into a state of public dementia? Remember nothing until someone has the exact words and situation, names and dates. Then say, Oh yea, I remember that now, thanks for helping me trigger that memory. Trying with even the highest of good intentions to remember all contacts, things said, context…then getting called a liar for having gotten something even a little off, that is a position I wouldn’t want, nor probably anyone else either.
There’s a lot to try to follow here about liars and lies. An earlier comment noted that some of the Trump team comments to media had been ‘incomplete’ or ‘misleading’. Manafort said they had no relationship with the Russians. You seem to be saying that a meeting with a Russian attorney where adoption of Russian children and U.S. sanctions preventing that were discussed and which Manafort attended makes his statement a ‘lie’. Is this what you are saying?
Your answer is correct, of course, but here’s a minor historical correction. No one at all was burned for witchcraft in Massachusetts. The convicted unfortunates were hanged.
Accurate.
I appreciate the videos. Manafort should never have been associated with any campaign, and the fact that he was able to worm his way in does not speak well of the Trump campaign.
I may have a narrow notion of what constitutes a “lie,” but I was looking for something along the lines of “We’ve never met with representatives (or alleged representatives) of the Russian government.” Unfortunately, Jr’s rant wasn’t coherent enough for me to figure out what was in there.
The point is that when directly asked if there was a relationship – when the Trump team had in their hands the email stating that Keselnitskaya was tied in to the Russian government – the answer was always “no.”
Not only “no,” but “Hell, no! And how dare you ask?” The truth of the matter is considerably more complicated than “no.” It speaks to the fact that they both actively lied about it (The meeting occurred and should have been disclosed) and lied by omission by failing to disclose on official forms.
Either one of these in my opinion constitutes what could ordinarily be considered “a lie.”
If you wife asks you “did you go to lunch with a strange woman?” and your response is “no” while possessing the knowledge that you did indeed go to lunch with said woman and it later comes out that you did… you lied. Your Wife is not going to give you the benefit of the doubt, and nor should she.
Does that mean you slept with her? No. If it was totally innocent, why deny it happened in the first place?
Active misrepresentation of facts and attempts to deceive constitute lies.
I think that the Trump campaign’s repeated insistence that there was no contact and no involvement with any foreign sources constitutes just that.
Now, what were they lying to to cover up? As it turns out, it’s a stupid thing to lie about because it was nothing.
But the content of the meeting was not what was being lied about: the fact that the meeting took place at all, signaling the Trump campaign’s willingness to deal is what was being lied about.
Yes to the former, but the latter moves in to the realm of the subjective. It did, however, put Scooter Libby in jail.
Any knowing insistence that there was no contact would, in fact, be a lie because it’s a fact that there was contact. Words like “relationship” or “involvement” start moving us into the realm of subjectivity and what those words mean to different people.
That depends upon what the meaning of “is” is.
I have trouble with your approach mainly because of who was being addressed. You use someone’s spouse as an example, but that’s a case where there is usually trust. The Trump people here are being interviewed by adversaries, not even-handed media, and certainly not someone they can trust but people who have already demonstrated that they lie easily to the public and are experts at misleading and incomplete reporting.
This is a fascinating response.
Whom do you consider these “affluent white people” to be? Are they merely progressives, or am I among them?
The relationship that is attempting to be forged here is not between the media and the Trumps, but between the Trumps and the public.
If you disagree with the premise of a question, simply say “I think your premise is wrong” and then explain why. But this wasn’t what happened: what happened was, the Trumps were asked fair questions that have a direct bearing on public policy – note that it doesn’t matter that the field is slanted – and they lied about it.
Yes, the Democrats did bad things too. Yes, the media doesn’t waste their time asking Democrats awkward questions.
That. Doesn’t. Matter.
Just tell the truth and act in an honest and upright fashion, and then the media can ask whatever questions they want and you can answer them honestly because you never have to lie about bad stuff you didn’t do.
In addition to what I already said, I don’t see that meeting as constituting anything resembling a relationship or dealing with the Russian government, so I don’t see a lie.
I have no trouble accepting the actual June meeting as inconsequential to these interviews and likely so far out of memory and unrelated to the notion of Russia trying to affect the election that I would not even think there was here an ongoing effort to misrepresent facts or deceive. Just think about how much has been going on for six weeks in these people’s lives and the meeting that did occur did not involve what is under discussion. We don’t even know that anyone beyond Trump, Jr. had seen the email he released last week before the meeting.
I get the impression that if the cast of characters were reversed, and it was Robbie Mook and Hillary Clinton in place of Manafort and Donald Trump in this drama, you might have a different opinion.
Here’s the email:
Emphasis mine.
Now, whether or not this offer is genuine, the Trump campaign received this email purporting support from Russian Government officials in defeating HRC. It could have been from some kook – but they took it seriously enough that they scheduled and had a meeting to discuss the possibility of obtaining the information.
The status of Selesnitskaya as the broker of this information is in doubt – but it is obvious that she got into the country under special circumstances, which indicates that she might have some ties at relatively high levels of the government in order to obtain such treatment.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to admit that they lied about this when they obviously did.
They sought to cover up the fact that this meeting took place and only admitted it when the NYTimes was about to publish the emails. Otherwise, I think they’d still be on version A, which was “nothing happened.”
Kushner did and so did Manafort, obviously.
Incidentally, I think the meeting itself turned out to be a total waste of their time. However, in this particular case it’s not the content that matters. Things would be much worse if the meeting had involved the exchange of intelligence for promises.
Actually they did. There’s a lot of political violence in British history.
I understand that this email came from a British publicity promoter of some kind who was personally acquainted with Donald Trump, Jr. from past business dealings maybe even with Russians and sent the email to him in that light. To say the ‘Trump campaign received this email’ might be considered misleading here. Do you know that Manafort or Kushner saw this email at the time of the meeting?
Where do I find this that is obvious?
Political violence has occurred as long as man has. But the great documents created to defend the rights of men were not created to wage war, they were created to establish a just peace. The principles of said documents are based upon truth and cooperation, not violence and deceit. Those principles prevent said political violence by weakening the individuals in power (who most of the time enact said violence). The English Constitution was founded on reason and not violence.
Did you read the rest of the email chain where they’re all discussing when and where to have the meeting? Do you also believe that DT Jr just told Kushner and Manafort “Hey guys, show up at such and such time and such and such date for a random meeting” without discussing the contents of that meeting and its genesis?
Given how (understandably) busy they all were, it strikes me is incredible that they didn’t know the intent of this meetup.
Correct, partially. Goldstone helped Trump set up a pageant in Russia and has ties to that state, which means it isn’t incredible to think that contact was established via plausibly deniable sources.
The upper middle class. The UMC has grown a lot over the past quarter-century (IIRC, some of the increase in inequality was from middle-income people joining the UMC).
Upper middle class people are defined by:
Upper middle class people are like the doctor I saw during a minor medical emergency, or the family member who accompanied me. The doctor tried to deny the care I needed, which I protested, while the family member’s biggest concern was not looking bad in front of a fellow UMC member.
When I was younger I couldn’t understand why my religion didn’t think highly of upper middle class culture. I’ve since come to understand.
I realize that questioning whether taking a meeting establishes that there was a “relationship” can appear to be nit-picking. However, I don’t personally believe that it is, and, based on the knowledge you’ve shown here, the old Clinton canard seems misplaced.
And some like @mramy didn’t sit on his bum complaining that no one was interested in a white male EE and so got a job washing dishes. Seven years later, he’s been a fast-casual restaurant manager and is on track to be a kitchen manager at an upscale restaurant chain. There are jobs and even well paying careers out there for even the non-educated and non-credentialed lower middle class if they’re willing to show up to work on time and sober. Admittedly, you have to be in good health to do most of them, and I’m sorry you have health issues that keep you from doing anything but desk work. But as someone who still hasn’t started her legal career seven years after graduating from law school, let me say that there’s still plenty of opportunity out there for folks willing to hustle and not whine about “I don’t know what capicola is, and so my ignorance and failures are the fault of those evil David Brooks types who are keeping me down!”
It is nitpicking, I think. We wouldn’t (and shouldn’t) accept these sorts of answers from our political rivals.