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Trump’s Failures, According to Trump Supporters
This is a thread for those of us who generally support Donald Trump and his presidency to discuss his failings. I would ask that Trump opponents please do not post here, since we already know what you dislike about the man.
I think it is important to document what we see as his mistakes so we can avoid them in the future.
One of the bigger failures in his COVID campaign was not letting scientists/physicians discuss scientific findings for him, since they can be precise and technical, while he is relaxed and acting as the everyman leader. This could have prevented a number of scandals. Also, have Fauci and company explain themselves better. The mask-or-not-to-mask flip-flop, excessive social regulations, and the excusing of protests destroyed public trust in public health.
He also missed the chance to push for long-lasting reforms, like destroying “certificate of need” rules.
Trump also massively failed in underestimating just how deep the swamp went. He ended up cycling through a lot of people needlessly – get the mass firing out of the way on day one.
Published in Politics
Excellent post.
It’s been like this for 20 years. It’s very difficult to do anything about it, because everything is based on asset bubbles.
I don’t think this is true. I think Trump won the independents by four points in 2016, but he lost these same voters 54-41 in 2020. I think you are correct that the GOP did not do a good enough job challenging the mail-in ballot rules, but even under these unfair rules the election was close. I think the independents wanted a break from Trump in 2020.
I don’t see the evidence that Trump made huge gains among independents. Trump might have won more total independent votes in 2020 than 2016 since 2020 turnout was so high, but I think his share of the independent vote shrunk dramatically, even with lots of monkey business.
I think the Democrats won the election based on Zuckerberg’s election ballot harvesting and engineering and the Democrat lawfair. The ballot controls were terrible and the ballot harvesting was out of control. Zuckerberg doubled the election budget in select areas and he clearly put those ballot boxes in a way to skew towards Democrats. I realized local never trump thinks that’s wonderful but it’s terrible.
My best source for this was interviews with Breitbart reporters and the Amidais Project.
One more and to me it’s a big one.
Not getting the Border Wall finished. That should have been priority # 1 from the start.
He should have just done every single thing Ann Coulter told him to do. One term. It’s depressing as hell to hear her explain things these days.
His inability to have a movement and his inability to proper staff
I think we would have avoided most of his problems if Chris Christie or Rudy had been Chief of Staff and AG for just the first year. Those two would have been able to prevent Russia gate and the problems with Mueller. They just would have been able to crush these swamp creatures and let Trump figure things out, while he got started.
That’s just odd. Why would anyone do that?
It also doesn’t account for the nonstop and pervasive propaganda. Others have faced bias, but 2015-2020 were far different than anything I’ve ever seen.
This type of thing isn’t really my bag, but I find her pretty persuasive these days. I am mostly talking about personnel. She’s not saying anything about policy that people aren’t seeing in this thread already.
And this is what allowed Fauci to exercise so much influence. He should have made it publicly clear that Fauci is paid to give medical advice, and that the politicians take that into account as merely one input into the decision making process. Instead, he acted as if Fauci was a law unto himself that needed to be fought against. This just increased Fauci’s power. This is just one example of Trump’s ego problem. He turns a winnable issue into an issue about himself or his opponent and undermines support for it in the process.
Many have mentioned this, but let’s be honest with ourselves. There’s no appetite among the people for entitlement reform, cutting spending, etc. Yes, one expects POTUS to lead, but he has to have a decent proportion of the voters behind him. And having the “Republican base” would not be enough. Trump would be asking his party to commit political suicide to get this done, and it would be immediately undone by the incoming “blue wave” this would have triggered.
But that is the point. These high level bureaucrats are political players that are powers unto themselves. Trump learned that the hard way and he was impeached twice and lost an election learning those lessons.
I can’t get anybody to talk about this, but conservatism and libertarianism cannot work or sell when you have a discretionary central bank policy. It’s really sort of pointless to worry about politics until they wipe that out.
I don’t think that failing to get others to feel, think, or do something is the same kind of failure that we’re talking about. Even the genie in the bottle granting wishes can’t make someone love me. And the genie doesn’t even have to compete with the propaganda and censorship we’ve seen.
If you don’t want populism and Socialism to destroy everything, you should probably do everything Steve Bannon recommends.
The other thing is, and I can never get anybody to do this, but spend the dollar and watch the long interview of David Stockman on real vision. The GOP is not what Gary thinks it is and it never has been since at least 1988.
I don’t see it the same. The propaganda machine had already whipped up the hysteria and built the pedestal for Fauci. President Trump had to acknowledge that that reality or risk major hysterical backlash. Maybe if this had been the first major propaganda attack on him, but it was one of the last so his options for handling were constrained by the prior three years. I really dont see how this was about Trump’s ego.
I am pretty certain that, with my late arrival to this thread, others have made this same point. But just in case, this is my vote for the worst decision by President Trump…well he made a lot of decisions in four years, but right now I would say that putting Anthony Fauci out front as the face and spokesperson for this country’s battle against the Chinese Virus was the worst and is proving to have continuing negative ramifications. Fauci is a weasel both in actions and appearance. And naturally, Biden has decided to keep him in place to torment us for years to come. One can be certain any decision that Trump made, or person he appointed, was a good decision or appointee if Biden negates the decision or fires the appointee.
I’m not going to get in a big argument about this, but I never saw “public health” being so bad in a pandemic. They had decades to get ready for this and from what I can tell most of them just made grief on net for the political executives they were working with. Seriously, this is an actual function of public goods and government.
Trump’s issues stemmed from 2 sides of the same coin. He was an outsider from the get-go. He was a new face who called things as he saw them. Pussy footing was not his style. The people he faced on the trail could not respond in kind without alienating their base. He gave voice to the things that fly-over America had been saying for a long time, and they loved him for it. People loved him for what he said/did, while the Dem’s base voted because they were given things/$$. They were only loyal as long the Dem’s produced. Buying votes on a grand scale.
The other side of the coin is that he was at heart a capitalist and as a CEO was used to running his operation as he saw fit. A bit autocratic but he was able to cut through the regulations that delayed every project the gov’t is involved in. (i.e. The NYC ice rinks) Canceling 2 regs for every one voted in makes a lot of sense but threatens every bureaucrat (def- “one who is more concerned w/ procedural correctness at the expense of people’s needs”) and the ‘power’ that they wield.
Then there is the subject of his use of his Twitter account. While he did use it to reach into America, I believe that he overdid it. I think many people cringed at some of his diatribes, I know I did. Sometimes I wish that he had just shut up! He couldn’t keep a COS because they couldn’t control him. Truly think that Trump Jr should have had that job. That is one smart dude.
Trump’s thinking is right on! He needs to understand that he needs to control himself. He gives the opposition plenty of ammo, and their hate is very real. 2020 was a vote against Trump, not a vote for Biden/Dems.
Exactly. I recently learned that he went to Norman Vincent Peale’s church. I think as a child and he was married there. The power of positive thinking. Speak the reality you want to exist into existence. By extension, bluster and browbeat your way through life. Trump’s ego isn’t just bigger than the average person’s. It’s qualitatively different. In the back of his mind I think there’s a tape playing on an endless loop: Yes yes yes, win win win, me me me.
This was one of my big concerns. He didn’t know enough about civics and government to have that high of an executive position. It was going to be a problem.
He let the disease close the economy.
A disease can’t close the economy, the government did.
President Trump’s biggest mistake was ever allowing Nancy Pelosi the honor of entering his White House. (I believe he did put a stop to it after she treated it like just another part of the Failure Theater back drop she is so used to over in the Capitol Building.)
Trump has a creative and intuitive mind; he sees things that others don’t (or at least, sees them earlier than others do.) He is not very good at translating his thoughts into a form which will be understood and appreciated by those who have strictly linear, deductive thought processes. And this is a problem, because most media and academic types of of that sort.
An example would be the discussion of Covid response during the debate. It would have been easy to put his administration’s responses to the pandemic into one-two-three, bang, bang, bang form….’first, we stopped travel from China and then from Europe, second, we initiated the most accelerated vaccine development program in history, third, we increased hospital capacity via the hospital ship and the Javits Center project, fourth, we initiated industrial mobilization to produce ventilators and other needed supplies’….but he got hung up on one point and rambled.
But he still won the election.
Fair enough. I put it out there to solicit other opinions.
Actually in truth it is not. I thought so at the time he did it. As I noted elsewhere I don’t object that he did it just that he did it then. And you may remember that it was not well done – as I recall mistakes were made and it was immediately blocked by the courts and he had to do it again. It struck me then as hurried and not in response to a pressing need. As someone else noted, I may not have been aware of that need and I will concede that.