Least surprising poll ever. Racists insist they are not racists. Have you ever heard an obvious racist admit it? Even white supremacists, who are racist by definition, insist they are not.
In my senior years I am discovering that America is not the open, generous, pragmatic place I hoped and even believed it to be. I have already discovered that the group of people resistant to or incapable of rational thought is a FAR larger assembly than I had ever dreamed. I previously had thought that the ignorant, racist element of our society was insignificant, perhaps 5% of the populace.
Boy was I wrong.
It is traumatic to think you have arrived at the wisdom of maturity, only to determine that your most deeply-held and longest-held beliefs about the essential goodness of your country are just so much hogwash; and to see that so many people are incapable or unwilling to see the cruel, arrogant, and fundamentally twisted way that our current government has demeaned a country built by the wisdom and compassion of men like Lincoln and the Roosevelts.
Michael McChesney = “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
On the subject of Trump enriching himself, I didn’t say there is evidence of corruption. I said I wouldn’t put it past him. If evidence is discovered that he took bribes or in someway stole from the government, he should be impeached and removed from office. I wasn’t trying to imply there is nothing wrong with being corrupt because others have been corrupt. I was trying to say that seeking to enrich himself through his office would not be unprecedented, and in any case would not make him a dictator.
Comparing Trump to Hitler or even just accusing him of acting like a dictator is only playing into Trump’s (tiny) hands because you make it easier for him to shout “fake news” when he is criticized for things he has actually done.
Let’s leave collusion, which at the very least is disputed, and foreign emolument aside for a moment. What has Trump DONE to evidence his dictatorial powers. I don’t mean what offensive thing he has said or tweeted. What has Trump done in office that was beyond the power of the president? Trump wishing he had the powers of a dictator does not make him a dictator.
I happen to believe that General Kelly and Defense Secretary Mattis are deeply honorable men who have dedicated themselves to serving our nation. Of course they serve at the pleasure of the president and he can fire them whenever he wants. But he hasn’t. I think that if Trump gave either man an illegal or unconstitutional order, they would object and resign if he insisted. That hasn’t happened (yet). So either I am wrong about their character or Trump hasn’t given them any illegal or unconstitutional orders.
I don’t know if everything in Woodward’s book is accurate. Kelly and Mattis dispute quotes attributed to them and I am willing to take them at their word. But the quotes ring true because Trump IS an unhinged idiot with the understanding of a not overly bright 5th or 6th grader. Trump probably has proposed doing things his staff have had to inform him were illegal and/or beyond his authority. But to the best of our knowledge, in those instances he has accepted their recommendations and backed away from those proposals. That is NOT what a dictator would have done.
Since impeachment is strictly a political process, Congress would be well within its authority to impeach Trump based on his offensive tweets alone. They may just end up doing that if the Dems recapture the House. But I think, based on what we know now, impeaching Trump would be doing him a huge favor politically. That would be his chance at winning reelection. That in and of itself is a reason not to impeach him.
As for President Obama, if he had acted and talked like Trump, Republicans would have acted pretty much the way the Dems are now. Hypocritical politicians? I am shocked!!!
The problem is Trump has already done many of these things and you still keep saying ‘where is the evidence?’ I don’t know what sort of mental block you have here, but because you clearly have one, I’m not really interested in discussing this with you.
As examples of that, you wrote “impeaching Trump now would just play into his hands.” I have no idea what evidence you base that on. I think it is clearly based on your biases of how the American people would respond. The latest polling actually shows a plurality of Americans now favor impeachment and this is before any case has been presented before Congress.
I also find your view of what Republicans would have done to be laughable. If Obama was President and did what Trump had done, and the Republicans had the majority in the House they would have long ago impeached Obama and they and Fox ‘News’ and the other right wing media outlets would have demonized any Democratic House member who didn’t vote for impeachment in the House or conviction in the U.S Senate.
Since I’m not interested in engaging in this conversation with you, and since I know this website makes it difficult to post links, just google Amy Siskind and ‘the list.’ Of course, she has her biases and I disagree with some of her interpretations as well, but over all it makes a convincing case of Trump’s Kleptocracy and the way that he has steadily normalized his actions. I like to think even in your case, that had Trump illegally (based on international law that the U.S has signed on to) taken children from their parents at the start of his Presidency that even you would have demanded his impeachment and conviction at the time.
And if you want to argue here stuff like “Obama did that too!” I’m familiar with that argument and I’m also familiar with why it’s (mostly) nonsense.
Trump is not a dictator so by Adam’s definition he can’t be a kleptocrat. I certainly don’t think Trump is honest and wouldn’t put it past him to enrich himself via his office, but if he does he would hardly be the first. But no matter how much Trump might wish he had dictatorial power, he doesn’t have it. There are Constitutional safeguards that would prevent him from seizing power. There are good and honorable men and women in his administration such as General Kelly and Attorney General Sessions that would not stand for a seizure of power. Considering the character assassination leveled against Jeff Sessions prior to his confirmation, I feel a number of people owe him an apology considering the way he is refusing to be a Trump puppet.
Uncle Scoopy said that conservatives should be eager to see Trump removed from office considering Mike Pence would replace him. I truly wish Trump wasn’t president, but I don’t want to see him impeached unless real evidence surfaces that he did reach some corrupt agreement with Russia prior to the election or of some other serious crime. I just think that an impeachment would make American politics even more poisonous as too many of Trump’s supporters would believe it was the “deep state” or the “swamp” reaching out to stop Trump. If Trump is impeached it should be a bipartisan process and that would only happen if real evidence of serious wrongdoing is exposed.
In 2 months one of those Constitutional safeguards is almost certainly going to put the Democrats in charge of the House of Representatives and President Trump is going to be even further from having the powers of a dictator. Then we’ll only be 2 years from being able to elect a new president. 2021 here we come.
Constitutional safeguards are only as effective as the people who are intended to enforce them. If those people are Republicans, the past year or more has shown us we can expect little or nothing from them.
And putting deep reliance on John Kelly? “It is to laugh.”
Jeff Sessions? Yes, Trump may have been stupid enough to provoke Sessions into defying him, but (just as with Kelly) Trump can fire him at any moment.
Every day the United States goes without impeaching Trump is a disgrace to the United States as a whole, and to the Republican Party in particular. If you think this is harsh and extreme language, please give me an example of what you think the Republicans would have said if Obama had done exactly the same things Trump is doing.
If you haven’t noticed that Trump has blown through all (or nearly all anyway) of the Constitutional safeguards, then you haven’t been paying attention.
I think there is a mountain of evidence already of impeachable offenses (including, as the Woodward book make clear, Trump’s appalling ignorance.)
Of course, you moved the goalposts on these things when I point out his violations of the Emoluments Clause and you pointed out that ‘he wouldn’t be the first person who enriched himself via office’ as if something can’t be a crime if it’s been done by others. Of course, the Supreme Court has ruled in the Governor Gilmore case, that accepting bribes is essentially not a crime, and further has so far ruled that only Congress via the impeachment process has standing on the emoluments clause. So, there go two of your supposed Constitutional safeguards right there.
That a bunch of stupid Trump supporters would get triggered by his removal from office is no concern of mine. Stupid people being stupid, we can’t have that! Well, why not?
Thanks for these posts, Uncle Scoopy. I wish I was as clear-thinking.
Jonah Goldberg has written extensively about politics and tribalism. Particularly as religion has become less important to many Americans, politics has become more and more important to many people’s self identity. More and more people get much if not all of their news from social media echo chambers. I think a fairly large percentage of Trump supporters support him because he is “on their team” so to speak. Or perhaps more importantly because he is being attacked by the other team. The more aggressively he is attacked the stronger they support him.
Clearly some of the people that support Trump are racists. I mean was David Duke ever going to vote for Hillary? But I don’t believe most of his supporters are. I don’t know if a single poll is enough to convince me 18% of Trump supporters don’t see anything wrong with using the N-Word. But even if they did, that would not make the United States Nazi Germany. It wouldn’t even make us the Weimar Republic. I think Trump is despicable but on his worst day he’s not a tenth as bad as Hitler, but when so many people compare Trump to Hitler the less awful Hitler comes across in comparison.
America has never been perfect, but it was a great nation before Trump was elected and it will remain so despite him.
It took Hitler nearly two years before he could erase all the vestiges of the Weimer Republic after he took over as German Chancellor. So, even Hitler wasn’t Hitler right away. It took him until 1938 before he had fully politicized the public service (appointing Nazis as head of the Rail Commission) and before he ordered Kristallnacht (and that length of time had nothing to do with any alleged confiscation of guns in Germany.)
I don’t think Trump is a genocidal maniac who wants to take over the world, but it is simply false to say that Trump is as bad as he wants to be at this point. For instance, he has already mused about staying on as President for more than two terms. I suspect that, other than using the Presidency for his own and his families personal gain, that he actually has no idea what he wants to do with the power.
The term that I think that is accurately used to describe Trump is a kleptocrat: A corrupt dictator who is undermined by his own incompetence.
I am tired of the bullshit “polls” showing this or that is how “America” is thinking.
Everyone got it wrong on who would be elected and it just got worse after that.
The media makes a couple of dozen white supremacist the voice of Trump and the liberal actors the voice of reason.
There are pockets of racism everywhere but not as bad as other nations. America is a large place and if you do not like the politics of where you are, move or get involved and make a change. If you do get involved, you will see the real issues with making change.
I suggest reading a great book It’s OK to Leave the Plantation : The New Underground Railroad by C. Mason Weaver. He was a black panther turned conservative! He gives great insite on what it is like to be on both sides of the minority fence.
I hate to keep repeating this point because it seems so self-evident, but the national polls did not get the election wrong. The national polling companies do not predict electoral college results. As a group, they predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote by 3.3%, and she actually won by 2.1%. And the reason they missed by that small amount is that many voters who said they would vote for Johnson or Stein did not do so when they reached the actual voting booth. It is very difficult to predict how many third-party supporters will switch to a major candidate on election day, or whom they will vote for if they do get cold feet about casting a meaningless ballot. 6.6% of Americans said they would vote for Stein or Johnson, but only 4.4% actually did so. The actions of that 2.2% of the electorate were enough to move Trump’s share of the popular vote slightly closer to Hillary than expected.
https://realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton_vs_johnson_vs_stein-5952.html
Except the ‘couple of dozen’ white supremacists are Trump and many of his staffers in the White House,.
I think I am your age and feel the same, part of the problem is that we think that social change is linear once it gets going in one direction. I grew up white in St. Louis and thought things were gradually changing for the better in race relations. Now every time I open the paper there is some new scandal in St. Louis and Missouri in general
It makes you really wonder how in this incredibly prejudiced nation where everyone who didn’t vote for the hunk of crap that was Hillary Clinton (Even us independents who didn’t vote for Trump either) are deemed racists, and with an African American population being just 14%, how this country elected Barack Obama for 2 terms? Don’t let numbers get in the way of a good narrative
Most of America isn’t racist. That’s how Obama got elected.
The question is how big is “most”?
Is it 51%? Is it 95%? Trump’s consistent favourability ratings would probably indicate that maybe 1/3 of those polled are in the racist as fuck camp. They might be polite about it but that doesn’t change who they are.
It’s not a “narrative.” The facts speak for themselves, without any narrator required.
The problem is that you have confused two things: Trump voters and Trump supporters. If you voted for Trump, you may have been casting an anti-Hillary vote, and that’s kinda understandable. But if you still support him now, the possible reasons are really narrowing down, as it becomes obvious that he’s not only racist, but also both corrupt and incompetent – a deadly combination. Now I figure that not many people support him because he’s incompetent, and not that many support him because he’s dishonest, given that incompetence and dishonesty don’t have many fans, so that leaves … what?
Not all Trump supporters are racist, of course, but:
(1) Only 18% of them think it’s racist to use the N word, which is not really a debatable point. So it’s getting to the point where the racists are NEARLY all, like 4/5, of his remaining supporters.
(2) The fact that so many of his existing supporters are racist is sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The percentage of Trump SUPPORTERS who are racist is greater than the percentage of Trump VOTERS who are racist simply because of math. The number of racists supporting him has stayed the same, but they have increased as a percentage of his supporters as the moderates have dropped out of the group and reverted to “undecided” or “independent” status.
(3) Remember that Trump built his entire political career on racism. He’s the guy who was leading the “Obama was born in Africa” charge when there was not a shred of evidence to support it. At that point he had no political positions at all, so the only reason to support him was pure racism. He was, right from the start, establishing that he was the guy to vote for if you are a racist. And that base has never abandoned him.
(4) Remember that 31% of Americans said “if Trump told Cohen to commit a crime, it’s not a crime.” It appears that those people are willing to go to the wall for Trump, no matter how criminal he is. It’s getting difficult to come up with any other reason why that should be so.
(5) If you are a conservative and a non-racist, you should be in favor of getting Trump out of office, because he would not be replaced by a liberal, but by a non-racist conservative. As far as I can see, there’s really only one reason to prefer Trump to Pence, and that’s because Trump is your racist go-to.
(6) I don’t think most of white America is racist, but Obama’s victory doesn’t prove that. Romney beat Obama by a WIDE margin among white voters: a 59-39 landslide. (Obama did only four points better against McCain, with 43% of the white vote). B.O. won his elections because of America’s changing demographics. In 2012, 28% of the electorate was non-white, and Obama got about 85% of their votes. In 2008, 27% of the electorate was non-white, and he got about 80% of their votes. Those massive tidal waves of minority support enabled him to overcome large deficits from the white voters.)
I feel just as you do, Uncle Scoopy. I guess the American people, despite all the advantages of being isolated from the devastation of war on their own continent (which is amply endowed with natural resources), and having 30 years of unrivaled prosperity after World War 2, turned out to be just…people. And you know what SOBs they can be.
And somehow Christianity has made quite of a number of them meaner, instead of kinder. That’s not how that was supposed to work, was it?
And conservatism has turned out to mean corporate welfare and rule by corporate oligarchy. That worked out backward too.
I hope going down this road does not cost us and the world as much as it did when Germany did it under the Nazis. And I hope getting America back on the right road does not cost us as much as the American Civil War, the last time a thoroughly institutionalized, legally established evil had to be uprooted. But hopes are a feeble reed to pit against Fox News and the Koch Brothers.
I used to teach in a South Bronx high school with an almost all minority student body and the “N” word was thrown around pretty liberally by the students. So liberally in fact that I was called the “N” word on more than one occasion. One of my friends said after I was called it first time (by an Arab kid no less) “Mike, I didn’t know you were Black Irish.”
I’ve heard some white people complain over the years that it’s not right that black people can say that word, but white people can’t. I agree with that to a point. But most of the time when I hear that complaint it sounds like they are jealous they can’t have fun saying it too. I would be happy if that word was never used by anybody (outside of Quentin Tarantino movies anyway). I don’t want to use it, but I don’t like that the color of a person’s skin determines what words they can use. Still I understand the reasons things are the way they are.
I had one (African-American) student complain when I used the word negro in class. I taught social studies and constitutional law and we were discussing some of the Supreme Court cases leading up to Brown v. Board of Education. I talked about Sweat v. Painter which held that a negro law school was not equal to the University of Texas law school. The Supreme Court referred to it as a negro law school in the decision which of course was the polite way to refer to such things in 1950. I tried to get him to discuss why he was offended but he declined. My position was that when discussing history some terms which are no longer politically correct come up. After all I have never heard anyone talk about the French and Native American War.
or buying an Asian Rug.
“Oriental” used to be a good word as well.