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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
On a moral level, I’m totally with Fred, but the thing I would immediately quibble with when reading the preceding comment were the words “effective elements.” But I guess that’s subjective? ;)
“Different forms of lying” concedes that what is being engaged in is not truth vs fiction but merely different species of falsehood.
When Donald Trump said that he was going to “win so much that we’d be sick of winning” because “it will be so easy” due to the fact that Washington was populated by “stupid people” and that he was “so smart” by comparison, I concede that all of these things are hyperbolic exaggerations. They’re also wildly misleading in terms of what people’s expectations of what Trump would accomplish were. So ironically, his opening position (as if this were a negotiation) for the people whom he was attempting to sell his candidacy to was to offer them the moon and now he’s in the business of limiting expectations.
This is not merely one little fib – it’s the entire edifice that is a vast series of misleading statements.
Now, can you pick out pieces where he was absolutely telling the truth? Yup. It turns out he was telling the truth about Gorsuch and about many of his cabinet picks, which are all great. But the casual unfamiliarity he displays with basic facts is pretty bothersome.
That’s an excellent way of putting it.
I didn’t say it’s okay, just as you didn’t say Trump lies and the other Washington politicians don’t!
This is correct and it applies across the political spectrum. There we must make a choice or bow out if we demand purity. One interesting thing that amused me in recent years was the flak Cruz had to endure for calling out McConnell for lying. So all can lie but only certain people can be called out.
I kind of expected more of you Fred.
I tend to think people’s actions speak louder than their words. As for data points, oh, must be hundreds. About 90% of all upper middle class people I have ever met, I’d say.
I’ve never been able to stand this. A lot of upper middle class people have this entitlement mentality, whereby their good faith must never, ever be criticized. It’s like they feel entitled to being considered good people, no matter how they behave.
Think of the environmental wackjobs, with their opposition to GMOs, nuclear power and housing development. Plenty of people suffer because of green policies, but the greens all think of themselves as good people, don’t they?
That was meant as a genuine suggestion.
I don’t think its called good faith. Its called being just. Accuse those of doing wrong when you have evidence of them doing wrong. You are simply condemning people because of their income. You have not actually named anyone or disclosed the evidence you have of them doing said things. Just because you politically disagree with someone does not give you the license to speculate and label them as terrible people. You have no methodology by which to claim all people making x or more dollars have a certain mindset or are bad people. Its quite #Sad really.
As to the greens how do you know they are all upper middle class or higher? You have a terrible record on this thread of simply blaming wealthy people with little to no evidence show for it. I would advise that you actually get some data before you start making your claims.
Well, technically I’m condemning people because of their social class (there are people with modest incomes that are still a part of upper-middle-class society), not income, though income is a useful proxy.
Okay, so you want evidence that the UMC is mostly made up of terrible people. How about the college education racket? Who enforces the rule that everyone must get a college degree, regardless of whether that degree bestows any skills at all?
Or perhaps a better example is immigration. If you want open borders for poor people, but immigration protectionism for the UMC (and yes, I have met people who took that position), then I’m sorry, you are a bad person.
You are referring to income. If you were actually referring to some kind of cultural values you would actually cite polls indicating such (cross referencing values to income or geographic area) rather than pasting values you dislike onto them.
Asking questions does not answer a question. As to the inflation of higher education that blame falls on many Americans regardless of income or “social class” because I have personally known many people, who earn different sets of income (and who have different values, and in some cases from different sub cultures), that have spoken in favor of attaining a college education. Federal policy has supported loans to college education because a majority of voters elected politicians that fought for that or had it on their platform/planks.
What immigration protectionism (what is it?) for the upper middle class are you talking about? Who are these people who say they want no borders? If you are talking about the green party they are a minority party of little to no importance (who are diverse in their social status). A number of Democrats are no doubt quite lenient on immigration but the Democrat Party has people of every social class so again that is not something restricted to the allegedly bad upper middle class.
Not to mention the fact that you again are speculating without any data on the matter.
People don’t answer poll questions honestly if they think doing so would make them look bad, especially when it comes to topics that are socially taboo. I don’t see why you think public polling is appropriate here.
Right, the upper middle class is completely innocent here, they just get all the benefits.
Surely you’ve noticed that immigration laws are more strictly enforced for the professions? And, well, if you haven’t met anyone who wants open borders, you must not get out a lot. This might apply to the second bolded statement; the Obama-style “progressive centrism” coalition is made up of upper-middle-class white professionals and poor & middle class minorities, held together by their mutual loathing of middle and lower-middle class white men.
I don’t think it’s meaningful to say the Democrats have “people of every social class” given those facts.
Um. I’m not going to try and reason with a lot written here, but I just can’t help myself when I point out that Donald Trump went to Wharton.
His children have all gone to the University of Pennsylvania, which is one of the most prestigious universities in the country despite the fact that none of them needed to jump through even one credential hoop to join their father’s billion dollar business. That wasn’t done on the cheap either. (I could certainly not have been able to swing the $70,000+ required per year to attend there as an undergraduate, and I consider myself a part of that dastardly middle class you hate.)
The president also started a “university” that settled a massive lawsuit with students who were far less privileged than his own kids because the education that “university” provided had no value.
So. Since he participated in the whole education “racket”–both the “legitimate” one you scorn and an illegitimate one that truly had no payoff for students–are we saying Donald Trump is a horrible person?
The reason they’re called “professions” is because they’re peopled by “professionals.” That means those people have specific skills and specialized training (frequently in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) which means that they frequently work in positions where the public’s health, safety and welfare are at stake.
A brief story. In 2007, the company I was working for was involved in a contract with the Military for Iraq reconstruction. As a result of this contract we were obligated to accept a number of Iraqi translators who had assisted the Coalition as our employees because their lives were literally in danger in their home country.
While all decent and nice people, they were purported to be engineers – indeed, many of them were graduates of whatever engineering college existed in Baghdad at the time. Trouble is: they didn’t know a thing about engineering. Of the dozen or so who arrived in the Denver office, only about 3 actually had any experience in engineering or had ever opened AutoCad in their lives. Those ones were incredibly useful and productive people. The others… not so much. So the standard for what constitutes a “professional” in other places simply doesn’t translate to the American context and it makes perfect sense to me that we would strongly control the influx of people with such credentials on the basis that we don’t actually know what they have done and we don’t want to turn them loose in this country where they could start doing work that could get people hurt or killed.
An influx of Pakistani or Iraqi doctors, lawyers and engineers does not give me fright in the sense of “wage competition,” it makes me worry about things like “bridges collapsing” or “public health crises.”
Unless something has changed, Joeseph currently has gainful employment. His struggle with unemployment was in the past.
I was under the impression that the easiest way to immigrate legally was to be a high skilled/highly educated person. Is that not true? Most immigration restrictionists on this site seem to say we should want these people and only these people to immigrate, and I thought this was mostly the status quo to begin with.
I can imagine that certain professions have carved out protections for them against immigration like they carve out licensing laws to protect them against domestic competition, but I haven’t heard anything about this before.
My husband works for a company with international reach, and H1Bs do not really translate into “easy.” Highly skilled people go into lotteries just like everyone else. We’ve watched some immigration decisions from the sidelines that were absolutely nonsensical. In general, our entire immigration system needs an overhaul because it’s stupid and does not serve us as well as it could.
“Easiest” is a relative term. Least hard?
Fair enough, but let’s just say there aren’t really any “easy” routes except, perhaps, getting married to an American citizen. This creates some instability in business, and it’s stupid.
Oh, I misunderstood.
But seriously, Joseph, you know how to hold a pen. You should figure out how to make money off of it.
I am actually going through a bit of an unemployment spell. I’m trying to start a business based around some research I did two years ago, but I have to deal with some IP issues. It’s kind of a pain.
Right. I think we might have been getting our temporal tenses wrong here a bit. From 2007-2013 or so, there wasn’t anything I could do to earn money, and I did lots of things to try. I think a lot of people were doing unpaid work, but in my case it was especially painful given how many people benefited from my work, including many of the employers I applied too. It seemed extremely ungrateful, to say the least.
Rob Long mentioned my age cohort on a podcast once; we had to start our careers during the recession, and as a result we’re a lot closer to people born during the Depression than our predecessors or successors within the Millennial generation, especially when it comes to saving behavior. I like to analogize it to France: young French people (according to polls) think economic success is purely random, and has nothing to do with hard work, and in a bifurcated labor market that’s depressed (as it perpetually is in France) that is actually true.
Our economy eventually did recover, but it took a really, really long time. And for much of it I, and other people in that situation, had absolutely no control over our lives, zilch, nada. There was nothing we could do. That’s clear to me now, though it wasn’t then.
You don’t know the despair of being treated as worthless slave labor, of people loving the stuff you produce but being totally unwilling to pay you for producing it. Of having that situation go on for year. . .after. . .year. I mean, there were times I secretly envied the guys who went into the porn industry, or became high class prostitutes. I almost fell to the temptation to go that route on several occasions, but I could never quite do it.
By itself that might not make Trump a horrible person. Added to several behaviors from his past, it does add up to “Trump is a horrible person.”
Nevertheless, he is our champion. So far, he has exceeded the expectations of even his most ardent fans.
Go, Trump, go!
When the bar is rock bottom there is only one way to go and that is up. But then again he has kind of stalled for the past several months.
You have been paying too much attention to the Nevers.
There has been a significant string of small but worthwhile conservative victories.
Learn some patience.
http://ricochet.com/442791/impatience/
The last I checked some people, I will not name names, were arguing that it was the end of the world if trump was not elected President over clinton. Perhaps those people, again I will not name names, should learn patience. A few good nominations (Gorsuch was a big nomination by himself) and changes in executive policy is quite little for even the first six months of his term. I would expect a few minor reform bills to be passed by now at least. Heck he has failed to live up to his most major campaign promise, of dealing with a lack of law enforcement on immigration, by eliminating DACA.
Having perspective helps a lot in judging success.
He said it’s more strictly enforced, not that the law is more restrictive. It’s true in a way. It’s not that the border patrol is checking illegals for professional credentials and only letting the uneducated in. It’s just that those coming illegally are usually uneducated. There are probably a few useful correlations there, but the end effect is that illegal immigration puts downward pressure on lower skill wages.
It’s kind of irrelevant to someone wanting to work in programming, though. It’s the H1bs that provide direct competition for that sort of work. Also, if these health problems mean your limited to working from home or a an office environment, then outsourcing directly to lower cost countries is much easier.
I question the reasonableness of your perspective.
The patience I am asking for is to give conservative leadership in Team Trump a few months to accomplish conservative victories against the Deep State, and to give Team Trump some slack when finding faults with legislation that also involves Congress.
I believe there is a dramatic difference in kind between the sort of patience I am requesting and the foolish patience that the Nevers recommended in 2016. They wanted us to stand aside and let the Progressives put Hillary in the presidency. They wanted us to patiently wait four years while another Leftist administration strangled our economy with regulations, rewarded America’s enemies, betrayed America’s friends, expanded the federal bureaucracies, crushed individual liberties, stoked race hatreds and opened our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants.
On this last point in particular, there was a real chance that added immigrants plus Democrat voter fraud would have meant that our side would be locked out in subsequent years, hastening the day that you will describe as “the end of the world.” And, there was also the real possibility that, if we let Trump fail, then the only sort of candidates we could expect in the future would be more like Jeb, a nice guy with real smarts who could not be expected to succeed against the media and the Deep State.
I am a real patient person, but I had no patience for that.
Its so funny that whenever trump is doing poorly it is always rationalized as a result of some conspiracy. Either establishment Republicans during the primaries and general election or the deep state or news media while he is President. It surely cannot ever be a result of trump’s own flaws.
The arguments about trump were being made during even the primaries so trump vs hillary was not the circumstance that brought forth that argument. But even if we assume so that does not mean that they wanted clinton to win. The question was over how much damage trump would do vs clinton and how it would affect the long run political game.
Unless Congress, which is the legislative branch, fought against said moves (which they can and succeeded in doing when they stopped the nomination of Garland). No doubt though that clinton would have attempted to do said things in most areas. Then again trump has done some of those things, like praising putin even though is an obvious enemy of American ideals.
Illegal immigration has been declining and current data indicates that the vast majority of immigrants assimilate and as they climb the social ladder vote more conservative. As to voter fraud, which I do believe happens, why was it not happening under obama?
After all he instituted DACA, which trump has kept, and it allows for roughly 1 million illegals to live in the nation and work? On the issue of a conspiracy to get more votes it would already be happening on a considerable scale (at least tens of thousands) if it was going to occur. Why wait till after clinton was elected? Unless you have evidence of this happening you are creating a straw man to beat up.
How do you know this? You are speculating in the mindset of at least 100 million Americans. Where is your crystal ball for this? The dichotomy you are trying to paint does not add up. Especially since trump during the election espoused more left wing policies than even Bush did (Bush was not pushing for health care insurance for everyone).
Given your rationalizations for trump’s failures its far more safe to conclude that you are patient for things that justify you than things which do not justify you.
trump will not fail because of a “deep state” or “media conspiracy”. He will fail or succeed on his own merits and currently he is a failing.
I ran out of patience.