Time to give Trump Presidency it's own Thread.Follow

It's not. His supporters don't care about the Constitution, policy, or the economy. Their core motivation is "Does this **** off the people I hate?" They aren't angry that Trump threatened to violate people's rights. They're angry because they think it doesn't irritate liberals. The funny part is they're wrong on that.

Edited, Mar 5th 2018 6:22pm by Allegory

As a Trump supporter(most of the time), I was really irritated by him saying that, and it had nothing to do with how his opposition viewed it. I don't believe he'll DO it, because he talks out of his *** all the time. But it did irritate me that he said it. Following Neo-Con military policy(such as bombing Syria), irritates me more, though.

And while I'm sure the people you're talking about exist, I have to be honest, I haven't seen them, and a lot of the people I talk with online daily are on the Trump Train to some degree or another. Though, to be fair, I did purge a lot of the zealots, so I'm sure if I tried I could find some people like you're mentioning.

I just don't get it. The guy has been varying degrees of nightmare and punchline since like the 70s, and the past year certainly hasn't been any different. Will his lawyer pony up the check?

Which is great if the reporter writing the story wishes to use that as evidence. But when you claim that "The committee concluded X", without actually, you know, verifying that the actual committee itself came to this conclusion, you are printing a lie. I'm sure someone somewhere nearby thought that this was the case, and thought that the marks were proof of this, but that's not the same as what the NYT article actually said.

Which is a problem. They got ahead of the facts.

I think I've mentioned this in the past, but I'll say it again here. One of the things people (especially the media) haven't figured out about Trump is that he approaches things very much like it's done in business. He sits in a meeting and tosses out ideas. He's willing to suggest just about anything as a possibility, then see what the response it, then make a decision.

This is very different than the typical politician who carefully crafts every word that might reach public ears. They wait until they've decided on a policy before ever mentioning it. This leads the media to do a lot of tea reading with regards to parsing the words that come out of politicians mouths, because they are so used to this ultra-cautious way of speaking.

I think he also likes to play devils advocate. He'll intentionally toss out a suggestion that he knows is a bad idea, and is something that (in at least a couple cases) are associated with the "other side". Then he'll wait for the condemnation, decide it's not a good idea, and then go and do something else. In this particular case, if he started off presenting the negatives associated with actively working to prevent people who "red flag" in some ways from having guns, he'd be accused of dragging his feet, or being the typical pro-gun guy defending crazy people with their guns. By tossing out the whole "let's not wait for due process", he puts the outrage in the other direction (OMG! You can't take away guns without due process, that's unconstitutional!), which allows him to appear to want to do what the people want, while realistically not actually giving them that because, well... let's face it, there's just about no way to do what many people are demanding without suspending due process to some (or a great) degree.


I've noticed that he will tend to be blunt with stuff like this. Totally propose the crazy idea that the mob seems to be yelling for, knowing it'll get this kind of negative response. Allows him to shut down that train of thought without appearing to be negative on the idea. I've seen this kind of tactic in business a few times, so I've recognized it. I've seen managers who will take the nuttiest idea in the room and appear to encourage it, allowing the team to figure out that it's really a bad idea, then sit down and figure out an actual good idea. It's actually a time saver, because if you just blow off the bad idea immediately (cause it's a bad idea), at least some folks in the room will still think it's great, or at the very least be upset that their idea didn't get any consideration, and keep trying to circle the conversation process back to that bad idea. This method nips it in the bud pretty much immediately, since even those who might otherwise think it *might* be a good idea, will go with the crowd and condemn it.


Kinda like what's going on right now, right? Last week, everyone was talking about how to proactively prevent people from having guns if we (who is we?) think they might do something "bad", with every possibility that any such action resulting from that line of thinking would require some significant infringement of due process. Now? We're all wailing about how you can't violate due process. OMG! It's like the guy's a freaking genius or something. No, he's not. He's just applying some pretty basic management techniques. Interestingly enough, they're techniques that most of the public has never seen, especially with regard to public policy.


Good job falling right into that though.

I actually heard the audio recording of the event and the line he said. Did you? It was a joke. It was obviously a joke. Once again, every freaking person in the room got that it was a joke. The only people pretending it wasn't a joke are the folks in the mainstream media trying desperately to convince folks that this was not a joke.

It was.

I just watched the event on youtube. He wasn't joking.

Just to clarify where this came from, what what I was responding to:







I directly quoted and responded to Joph's post above (which you responded to immediately after with this:




If you listen to the audio when he talks about the president for life thing, the entire room erupts into riotous laughter. they know he's joking. There's no "nervous laughter" as most of the reporters in the media reported it. Everyone in the room got that he was joking, and got the joke. It was pretty darn funny really. If you're not viewing the entire thing through anti-Trump tinted glasses that is.

He's your President too.

Sometimes he amuses me. Sometimes he'll do something I like. His anti-TPP stance was more than anything his opposition offered, so I supported him. As long as he does something I'm slightly positive on every once in a while, he'll keep my support, until he goes far enough the other direction that he surpasses what I expected from his opposition.

And when you think that the last several presidents have been some varying combo of joke+monster, you have to take some solace when the latest joke is sometimes funny.

I get that we're not exactly batting a thousand for the past few decades, but leaning further into it seems like the wrong way to go. Like complaining about the likelihood of dying in Russian Roulette and then chambering more rounds.

I don't understand why an American would be anti-TPP. All the bad **** in TPP (corporations suuing countries over profits lost due to regs, etc) came from the USA and has largely been dropped since it left. Any US president could have just turned that nonsense off at the source, rather than drop out.

Edited, Mar 12th 2018 11:46am by Kavekkk