Barack Obama ran for president fundamentally disagreeing with Bush on the Iraq war. Trump has similarly disagreed with Obama on the US Russia relations. He now is an election victor. If this means finally an end to the Russia US Cold War, that would be a good thing.
Sunday, November 13, 2016
Irresponsible, Bigly
Trump looking at fast ways to quit global climate deal: source
I can't think of a faster way for America to relinquish its leadership position in the world than by walking away from the dire science of climate change.
Is America The New Ukraine?
Massive protests following a presidential election, are those things not supposed to happen in Ukraine? What has become of America?
The Reason For The Gridlock In DC
The narrative that gets pushed is, if only the politicians in DC had better manners they would get along and then get things done. It is kind of like saying people are lazy when the truth is there really are no jobs to go around.
A big chunk of the budget in DC goes into sustaining NATO. Another big chunk goes into interest payments for the 20 trillion dollar debt. And another massive big chunk goes into paying for the entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
All that leaves little to no wiggle room for anyone to do anything. America finds itself boxed in.
Trump touched upon two of the three big elephants in the room. He touched upon NATO. He hinted at a fundamental rethink on NATO. Making the political moves to turn Russia into a Germany in terms of geofriendliness would go a long way. He has also floated the idea of a one time 15% tax on the wealth of the super rich to pay off the national debt. His wanting a rethink on NATO is gutsy. His one time tax idea is gutsy and smart. Done right the two together could create a 200 to 300 billion dollar wiggle room in the federal budget. And then the wheels would start spinning again. There would be no more gridlock.
The military industrial complex in America is its own planet hurtling through empty space with a momentum all its own. India should be wary of a country that wants to do joint naval exercises but will not pour a trillion dollars into India's infrastructure and another trillion into solar power generation in Rajasthan. In 2008 America and Europe wiped out tens of trillions of dollars in wealth after having spent decades lecturing the Global South that it is not creditworthy. That was A to Z racism, beginning to end.
Russia also, by the way, has a planet, its military industrial complex. The planets often act like hammers looking for nails. Sometimes they find each other instead of nails.
While there are a billion in want of basic food and water.
Saturday, November 12, 2016
Abolish The Electoral College
Ms Clinton is on track to win the votes of 63.4 million people, compared with 61.2 million for Mr Trump.
Trump And The Media
the ability of the Bush administration to use its power to compel the press to adopt its alternate reality led to the greatest foreign-policy blunder since Vietnam, and the deaths of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the rise of ISIS. The consequences are, arguably, immeasurable, and the stats I have mentioned simply cannot do them justice
Warren Harris 2020
There has to be a merciless postmortem of the sorry state the Democrats are in right now. It has become a municipal party of big city mayors. The Republicans have the White House, the Senate, the House and most state governments.
Barack Obama did not fight back birtherism hard enough. And it had real consequences like him not fulfilling his constitutional obligation to fill a Supreme Court slot. That is a signal to his supporters. I can't deliver on that one even though the constitution says I can.
Hillary Clinton’s disappearances and disengagements in August and October poured water on a winning convention and three won debates.
Bernie Sanders has made basic gutsy moves but his ideology feels like a throwback to another era. Health care for all through dramatic reductions in health expenses by better nutrition and exercise and saving a trillion dollars per year by taking obesity in America to 1980 levels is a more holistic approach. Education costs are supposed to go down like computer prices have gone down. The best way to empower women and minority groups is by opening access to credit for them so more of them can get into entrepreneurship.
Elizabeth Warren is a superior presence to Sanders and was the original choice of the crowd that swarmed to Sanders. Besides Sanders lost before Hillary did. He had a shot. Now make way.
And I really do like the idea of a woman president.
One thing I have noted about Warren is she has out loud worried that the tech giants Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple have become monopolies that might get in the way of the next wave of innovation. She is coming to the present from the future.
She has to take that approach to all policy issues including her signature issue of banking. She has to talk about the Age Of Abundance and she has to talk about Universal Basic Income. She has to talk about steam physics.
And she has to have the guts to put another woman on the ticket. My top choice would be Kamala Harris. She is Indian African American. India is the new Britain. That counts for something. Also you maybe don't want California to secede.
Warren has to talk the Blockchain when she talks banking. Warren has to talk the fourth industrial revolution. Warren has to talk nanotechnology, biotechnology, clean energy, robotics and artificial intelligence.
She has to talk about both America and the planet. Because America is on a planet.
She has to talk about banks like someone who knows the Internet is coming might talk about the paper newspapers of 1990, for that is precisely what the Blockchain is.
And if Warren is to run, as she should, she has about one year to decide. Just like Barack Obama in 2006 Warren has to crisscross the country through 2018 all year from the beginning of the year and take the House and the Senate. Then, early in 2019, in Boston harbor, she has to announce she is running, or the West Coast might secede.
She has to marry 2008 grassroots organizing to the 2020 technologies. 10 times more has become possible.
Gender is specific to the flesh body. It is not a feature of the soul. All human beings have been created equal and special by the Creator. Mother Mary desires gender equality on earth, even as she wears a non gendered perfect spirit body in heaven.
Warren Harris 2020 is unstoppable.
Trump: A Few Good Things
Looks like Trump might finally end the Cold War. George HW Bush didn't do it. Bill Clinton didn't do it. George W Bush didn't do it. Barack Obama didn't do it. Finally Trump might do it.
Making peace with the Crimea annexation in exchange for a foolproof guarantee on no further adventures in eastern Ukraine, lifting of all sanctions on Russia, an initiation of new summit talks, Gorbachev Reagan style, for dramatic reductions in nuclear weapons, and a full engagement with Russia, people to people, in terms of trade, collaboration on fighting extremist violence, I believe these are some of the things Trump hinted at on the campaign trail.
In the early 2000s Russia actually sought to join NATO. Much water has flown down the East River since.
This might be one early score for Trump. It would give him a good start.
I saw he wants term limits for members of Congress. A 10 year term limit would be a good thing. Or five terms for House members and two terms for Senators. The founders were not thinking in terms of career politicians. Term limits would be one good way to make Washington stink less. Drain the swamp.
A one time 15% tax on the wealth of all rich people to pay down the debt would be a boon to the economy. The interest payments live little wiggle room for bold moves. This is another of his ideas I like.
One bold thing Trump said on the campaign trail is that NATO is expensive. It is indeed tribal thinking. An attack on all is an attack on all is not rule of law thinking. The world has to move towards rule of law in international affairs. 600 billion dollars is indeed a lot of money.
Friday, November 11, 2016
The Impossible Situation
The day before the election Bill Clinton bemoaned "a great president who has been term limited."
Barack Obama said on the same stage, "The sun will shine tomorrow no matter what happens."
That is not a fighting spirit.
The Comey strike was quite a blow. Here were white men saying, it is not about collecting votes, it is about acceptance, and we simply will not accept you.
The FBI is a white male bastion, obviously.
Prominent liberal newspapers wrote Hillary Clinton saw this coming. She was expecting an October surprise.
The liberal media had its own October surprise. It talked about a Latino surge in early voting to create a white surge on Election Day.
White women across the board voted against the idea of a woman president.
The chosen liberated people harassed Moses in the desert. Why did you bring us here? We were better off in Egypt.
Hillary Clinton herself did not give a single gender speech. It was as if she was trying to become the first female president without anyone noticing she was female.
She won the convention and the aftermath and completely lost August by disengaging and disappearing. She won three debates and earned double digit leads and again disengaged and squandered it. Comey would not have attacked if he had not seen an opening.
Hillary Clinton has that Jeb Bush quality like she does not really want to be there.
Not picking Elizabeth Warren for running mate was such a waste. This would have been a 55% victory for Clinton.
But those are mechanics. The people have spoken. Americans just got themselves an Aexit. The post World War II and the post Cold War world order is now over. America has now exited the world stage by popular opinion. NATO and the dollar will go under a fundamental rethink.
Glass Ceiling: 60 Million Cracks
Why So Many Women Abandoned Hillary Clinton
60 million cracks in a still unbroken glass ceiling.
Warren Harris 2020?
Are Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris a ticket?
“This wasn’t a pretty election. In fact, it was ugly, and we should not sugarcoat the reason why,” Warren said toward the beginning of her address. “Donald Trump ran a campaign that started with racial attacks and then rode the escalator down. He encouraged a toxic stew of hatred and fear. He attacked millions of Americans. And he regularly made statements that undermined core values of our democracy."
Democrats, meanwhile, are desperately in search of a leader for their own party, now that President Barack Obama is on his way out and Clinton appears poised to disappear. And on Wednesday night, droves of young Democrats took to the streets in major cities to protest Trump’s election.
Warren promised to be a leading force in resisting Republican efforts to decrease regulation of financial institutions, gut Obamacare or “force through massive tax breaks” on the wealthy.
“We will stand up to bigotry. No compromises on this one, ever. In all its forms, we will fight back against attacks on Latinos, African-Americans, women, Muslims, immigrants, disabled Americans — on anyone. Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this,” she said. "Not now, not ever."
There Is To Be A World Government
Brexit and Aexit are concrete steps in that direction. These developments were prophecied 2,000 years ago. The Lord God, the one true Living God, all seeing, all knowing, eternally just, all powerful, steers the plates of geopolitics as deftly as he defeated the armies that you read about in the Old Testament. God is the God of all peoples. God is the God of the entire cosmos.
America has become a modern day Roman Empire. It will go to the outer edges of the solar system but not to Africa. Those are not the ways of the just.
A world government of one person one vote from the local, to the state, to the national, to the global levels, that is what is in the offing. Brexit and Aexit are Britain and America stepping back to make way for that.
The American establishment is under siege because it will not reason its way to that world government but it will move if its hand is forced by a popular mandate, like now.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Grand White Coalition (2)
but i had breakfast with my dad at a denny’s this summer that concerned me. he is a deeply principled man. a very good person with strong values. he is rust belt middle class. he went to the seminary for years to be a priest but ultimately felt it wasn’t for him. he cares deeply about people, is the kindest person i know, and doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. he coached me and my 3 siblings in basketball and soccer and more. he’s that dad. at that breakfast he told me was voting for trump and he was certain trump would win. this was weeks before the conventions.
it was about bringing down the establishment.
he said there were millions like him who were so angry at the path we were on that they would put anyone in the office to blow it all up.
trump only won because he struck a chord with the mainstream. he got people like my dad to vote for him — good people who believed they did the right thing by voting for him.
my wife was crying tonight over this election. it felt like the biggest failure of america we’ve ever experienced.
Grand White Coalition
One of the biggest upsets in American political history was built on a coalition of white voters unlike that of any other previous Republican candidate, according to election results and interviews with voters and demographic experts.
Mr. Trump’s coalition comprised not just staunchly conservative Republicans in the South and West. They were joined by millions of voters in the onetime heartlands of 20th-century liberal populism — the Upper and Lower Midwest — where white Americans without a college degree voted decisively to reject the more diverse, educated and cosmopolitan Democratic Party of the 21st century, making Republicans the country’s dominant political party at every level of government.
Magnified by the constitutional design of the Electoral College, and aided by Republican-led efforts to dampen black and Latino voting in states like North Carolina, Mr. Trump’s America proved the larger on Election Day. It smashed through the Democrats’ supposed electoral “blue wall” — the 18 states carried by Democrats in every election since 1992, such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, plus the diverse and well-educated parts of the country that Mr. Obama attracted in his two races, like New Mexico, Nevada, Virginia and Colorado.
Starting Wednesday, you could walk from the Vermont border through Appalachian coal country to the outskirts of St. Louis without crossing a county Mr. Trump did not win decisively. You could head south through rural and suburban Georgia all the way to South Florida, or northwest through the Upper Midwest, or make a beeline for the West Coast, skirting only the rising Democratic communities of Colorado and the booming multicultural sprawl of Las Vegas before finally reaching Mrs. Clinton’s part of the country.
“I feel our country is on the verge of becoming a third world country,” he said. “Our children are not going to have a future. We are not going to have a future.”
Indian Origin Muslim Woman: Trump Voter
What worried me the most were my concerns about the influence of theocratic Muslim dictatorships, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, in a Hillary Clinton America. These dictatorships are no shining examples of progressive society with their failure to offer fundamental human rights and pathways to citizenship to immigrants from India, refugees from Syria and the entire class of de facto slaves that live in those dictatorships.
Trump Innovated
You could say the victory was narrow or you could call it a landslide. The Democratic presence has been reduced to the municipal levels. Trump has all branches of government.
Hillary Clinton built a tremendous lead through an excellent convention and squandered it all in August. Then she built a double digit lead by winning three debates and still squandered it by disengaging during the final weeks: "I am simply not going to respond to him any more."
That is on mechanics.
On the mandate now that is with Trump and not reading it is not an option. In business they say the customer is always right. In electoral politics the voters are the customers.
Both NATO and the dollar are about to see a fundamental rethink. 11/9 has been tectonic. The world order that emerged at the end of World War II and the Cold War is now over and a new order will have to be shaped.
Brexit and now an Aexit, got to read the unmistakable pattern.
You might disagree with many things he said, you might even find them abhorrent but he did connect with the voters in numbers sufficient.
Trump innovated. He used Facebook.
He just fulfilled a 2,000 year old prophecy. China and India now are the largest and third largest economies in the world, adjusted for purchasing power.
It is written, the king of the north and the king of the south will have become regional powers.
The plates of geopolitics grind on.
Trump Victory Demolishes Old World Order
The fact of Mr Trump’s victory and the way it came about are hammer blows both to the norms that underpin politics in the United States and also to America’s role as the world’s pre-eminent power.
Americans have not shared in their country’s prosperity. In real terms median male earnings are still lower than they were in the 1970s. In the past 50 years, barring the expansion of the 1990s, middle-ranking households have taken longer to claw back lost income with each recession. Social mobility is too low to hold out the promise of something better. The resulting loss of self-respect is not neutralised by a few quarters of rising wages.
his voters took Mr Trump seriously but not literally, even as his critics took him literally but not seriously.
might even model himself on Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero who was mocked and underestimated, too.
whereas Reagan was an optimist, Mr Trump rails against the loss of an imagined past. We are deeply sceptical that he will make a good president—because of his policies, his temperament and the demands of political office.
After the sugar rush, populist policies eventually collapse under their own contradictions. Mr Trump has pledged to scrap the hated Obamacare. But that threatens to deprive over 20m hard-up Americans of health insurance. His tax cuts would chiefly benefit the rich and they would be financed by deficits that would increase debt-to-GDP by 25 percentage points by 2026. Even if he does not actually deport illegal immigrants, he will foment the divisive politics of race. Mr Trump has demanded trade concessions from China, Mexico and Canada on threat of tariffs and the scrapping of the North American Free Trade Agreement. His protectionism would further impoverish poor Americans, who gain more as consumers from cheap imports than they would as producers from suppressed competition. If he caused a trade war, the fragile global economy could tip into a recession. With interest rates near zero, policymakers would struggle to respond.
Trump says he hates the deal freezing Iran’s nuclear programme. If it fails, he would have to choose between attacking Iran’s nuclear sites and seeing nuclear proliferation in the Middle East (see article). He wants to reverse the Paris agreement on climate change; apart from harming the planet, that would undermine America as a negotiating partner. Above all, he would erode America’s alliances—its greatest strength. Mr Trump has demanded that other countries pay more towards their security or he will walk away. His bargaining would weaken NATO, leaving front-line eastern European states vulnerable to Russia. It would encourage Chinese expansion in the South China Sea. Japan and South Korea may be tempted to arm themselves with nuclear weapons.
Trump was narcissistic, thin-skinned and ill-disciplined. Yet the job of the most powerful man in the world constantly entails daily humiliations at home and abroad. When congressmen mock him, insult him and twist his words, his effectiveness will depend on his willingness to turn the other cheek and work for a deal. When a judge hears a case for fraud against Trump University in the coming weeks, or rules against his administration’s policies when he is in office, he must stand back (self-restraint that proved beyond him when he was a candidate). When journalists ridiculed him in the campaign he threatened to open up libel laws. In office he must ignore them or try to talk them round. When sovereign governments snub him he must calculate his response according to America’s interests, not his own wounded pride. If Mr Trump fails to master his resentments, his presidency will soon become bogged down in a morass of petty conflicts.
No problem comes to the president unless it is fiendishly complicated. Yet Mr Trump has shown no evidence that he has the mastery of detail or sustained concentration that the Oval Office demands.
The danger with popular anger, though, is that disillusion with Mr Trump will only add to the discontent that put him there in the first place. If so, his failure would pave the way for someone even more bent on breaking the system.
The open markets and classically liberal democracy that we defend, and which had seemed to be affirmed in 1989, have been rejected by the electorate first in Britain and now in America.
Liberals Actually Dislike Power
We liberal elitists are now completely in the clear. The government is in Republican hands. Let them deal with him. Democrats can spend four years raising heirloom tomatoes, meditating, reading Jane Austen, traveling around the country, tasting artisan beers, and let the Republicans build the wall and carry on the trade war with China and deport the undocumented and deal with opioids, and we Democrats can go for a long , brisk walk and smell the roses.
A Facebook Election?
If you thought radio changed politics, just wait till television. And if you thought television changed politics, just wait until Facebook really hits its stride. Or. Well. I guess it just did.
Wednesday, November 09, 2016
The Trump Recession Can't Be More Than Two Years Away
Trump's trade and immigration policies lead straight to recession. That can't be more than two years away.
A whole bunch of people would be crying hoarse next year when they lose their health care. But most of them did not even bother to vote. And many of them voted for Trump. They are white and poor.
Ah, democracy.
A whole bunch of people would be crying hoarse next year when they lose their health care. But most of them did not even bother to vote. And many of them voted for Trump. They are white and poor.
Ah, democracy.
It Is Not Easy To Lead The Powerless
Lord God led the chosen people away from slavery in Egypt through many signs and wonders. But many a time the people told Moses, why did you bring us here, we were better off in Egypt.
It is not easy to lead the powerless.
And to think a majority of white women voted for Trump, one third of Asians and Hispanics voted for Trump.
It is not easy to lead the powerless.
It is not easy to lead the powerless.
And to think a majority of white women voted for Trump, one third of Asians and Hispanics voted for Trump.
It is not easy to lead the powerless.
Autopsy
American sexism runs deep. White women lost it for her. Internalized sexism is a problem.
Hillary herself did not make one gender speech.
If she had picked Elizabeth Warren she would have won with 55% of the vote. She would have also taken the House.
But the number one problem is the sexism and the racism. This was founded a racist, sexist country. It has not grown up still.
This Was A Stolen Election
Vote suppression in North Carolina was thorough and supported by the courts even.
Threats of violence at a Trump loss, threats to not accept the results should he lose by Trump himself are further signs this was not a democratic but a stolen election.
Hillary got gored.
Brexit, Now An Aexit
America has exited the world stage by popular opinion. The plates of geopolitics grind on.
Aexit, or American Exit.
This is the American electorate admitting loud and clear America is no longer number one. America can't afford to be number one no more. There is no money.
NATO and the dollar itself will come under question. A new world order is not in place yet, but the old world order in place since the end of World War II has now collapsed.
China and India will play leading roles in the shaping of the new world order. The king of the north, the king of the south, those would be China and India respectively. Those prophecies are 2,000 years old. God can read time like weather scientists try to read weather, only God does not have computer power issues.
Global security and not just American and European security can be forged along a fully democratic framework in which every human being is a vote. The dollar is in short supply everywhere because America can't afford to print more dollars without negative domestic consequences but the global economy does not have as much currency as it needs to keep the wheels greased.
Europe and America are just two among the continents and neither are the largest.
God created the human being in His own image, every human being, that includes Asians and Africans and, yes, Mexicans.
The American Brexit
I slept in my bed in the days after 911 and I was scared but don't remember a sense of foreboding that I feel now. If someone is familiar with the Fall of the Roman Empire please fill me in on where we diverge.
- Marty Monaco
If Trump’s stated policies are his gameplan, as it would be in a democracy, this stunning victory is the American brexit. This is the end of the world order in place since the end of World War II and the Cold War. This is a new world now. The map will be reconfigured.
White women made this happen. Obviously they care more about race than gender, race in a white supremacist way.
The clear message to the Global South is, build your own countries, don't come a knocking.
This election outcome has coincided with the rise of China and India as the largest and third largest economies.
A new world order is on the way. The global powerscape will now be realigned.
Sarkozy Says Trump Win, Brexit Show Popular Desire for Change - Bloomberg
The U.S. vote “is a rejection of conformist thinking” on trade and immigration
French President Francois Hollande also weighed in on Trump's victory, adding that he expected "a period of uncertainty."
Donald Trump Is Elected President in Stunning Repudiation of the Establishment
Markets plunge worldwide as Trump surges to the White House - The Washington Post
on Tuesday night, investors began to grapple with the possibility that Trump's controversial proposals to rip up long-standing trade agreements, deport millions of immigrants and radically re-engineer the tax code could become reality.
Among Trump's chief campaign promises has been to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement and slap double-digit tariffs on goods from Mexico and China, moves that experts fear could spark a trade war. He also has proposed massive tax cuts for both individuals and corporations that could cost as much as $6 trillion, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Though Trump’s message of isolationism has resonated with voters who feel left behind by globalization, many experts have warned his proposals could wreck havoc on the U.S. recovery.
Moody’s Analytics forecast Trump’s policies could lower employment by 3.5 million jobs and raise the unemployment rate to 7 percent by the end of his term. The firm also predicted the nation would enter a recession in 2018.
The head of Mexico’s central bank has compared a President Trump to a “hurricane” that could damage the country’s economy. In addition to hiking tariffs on its exports to the United States, Trump has made building a wall along the Mexican border a hallmark of his campaign.
The Democratic Party establishment is finished after Trump.
The Democrats will now control next to nothing above the municipal level.
Inside the Loss Clinton Saw Coming - POLITICO Magazine
the crisis is sharpest in Clinton campaign headquarters: not only do they feel like everything is about to go deeply, collapse-of-America wrong
The polling drop since the third debate was worse than they’d been counting on
Bill Clinton complained throughout that Mook was too focused on the ground game and not enough on driving a message-based campaign. Without a chief strategist in the mold of Penn or David Axelrod, the campaign was run by a committee of strong-willed aides struggling to assert themselves in the same space.
Paul Krugman: The Economic Fallout - NYTimes.com
The big real estate developer families in New York had long sneered at Trump as a brash, nasty, nouveau riche intruder on a business that took pride in doing things quietly and diplomatically. The banks treated him like an out-of-control adolescent who needed to be reined in and taught a lesson. The politicians humored him, then scrambled to be by his side to catch some of his reflected fame.
Trump relished the idea of running against Hillary Clinton, who he saw as a feisty and strong figure who was incapable of connecting with middle-class voters and who was beholden to exactly the power bases he planned to run against. He successfully took Clinton’s decades-long reputation as a shape-shifting politician whose excessively legalistic language and guarded public persona and twisted it into a searing, angry portrait of an outright criminal, “Crooked Hillary.”
And Clinton, in Trump’s view, ran exactly the campaign he had hoped she would, focused mainly on attacking him rather than offering an alternative vision to the nation’s middle class.
Trump, according to exit poll data, earned the votes of 60 percent of white men and 52 percent of white women.
Bannon saw Trump as the American equivalent of Britain’s vote earlier this year to leave the European Union — another unexpected popular uprising against the elites. Bannon believed that a Trump victory would not be the upset that the media and the political parties thought it would be, but rather as part of a worldwide revolt against globalization, the hegemony of the technology utopianists, and the arrogance of the overeducated.
a worldwide movement against elites in finance, media and politics.
Donald Trump took his father’s total commitment to work, his mother’s love of showmanship, and his mentor, New York lawyer Roy Cohn’s hyperaggressive approach to making deals and settling scores, and combined them into a public persona that celebrated money and ego.
An American Tragedy - The New Yorker
The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.
That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.
Trump began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies.
the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television
she was less trusted than Trump, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.
The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Trump used as the oxygen of his campaign.
The US has elected its most dangerous leader. We all have plenty to fear | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian
Today the United States stands not as a source of inspiration to the rest of the world but as a source of fear.
Republicans did not just defy almost every projection, prediction and data-rich computer model to win the presidency. They also won the House of Representatives and much of the Senate. Trump will face few checks on his whims. A man with no control of his impulses will be unrestrained, the might of a superpower at the service of his ego and his id.
He seemed to see Nato as a mafia protection racket: unless the little guys paid up, they should be left undefended.
A trade war looms with China, the imposition of tariffs that could imperil the entire global trading system. America is about to turn inward, towards protectionism. The markets have already delivered their verdict on that. They plunged.
He won 63% of white men and 52% of white women. Not all of those were the left behind. A lot of them were people drawn to a message that was, in part and however thinly coded, about reinstating white privilege.
The most powerful country in the world is to be led by its most dangerous ever leader, a figure who could have walked out of a school textbook narrating the darkest history of the 20th century.
Watch out, world: Donald Trump wins the presidential election | The Economist
But then Mr Trump changed the script by taking an early lead in a trio of important swing states, Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, which he never lost.
Mr Trump tore through the Rust Belt states, such as Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin, turning red a swath of states that had not voted for a Republican presidential nominee in decades—including Pennsylvania, which last voted Republican in 1988, and Wisconsin, which had been blue since 1984. Mrs Clinton had hardly bothered to campaign in Wisconsin, where almost every poll gave her a solid lead.
Hate Mr Trump as they did, many of Mr Obama’s voters, it seems, just could not bring themselves to vote for the unexciting and reviled alternative that Mrs Clinton presented them with.
The repercussions of Mr Trump’s victory will be enormous—they seem to grow bigger with every passing second of contemplation. Mrs Clinton ran a lavishly funded and highly professional campaign, using the sophisticated voter identification and mobilisation methods perfected by Mr Obama. Mr Trump raised less money, had little organisation to speak of in many states, and relied largely on social media and an outsized reality-television persona to push his authoritarian and protectionist agenda. He was endorsed by only a tiny handful of newspapers and tipped for success by almost no serious pundit. Barely anyone gave him a chance. Yet, soon after the results started flooding in, his eventual victory hardly looked in doubt.
America’s next president will be a man who led a racist campaign to discredit the incumbent, Mr Obama. While campaigning, he abused women, the disabled, Hispanics and foreigners. He advocated using torture, and nuclear bombs, said his opponent was corrupt and possibly a murderer, and swore that, if elected, he would lock her up. Almost half of American voters have now given Mr Trump an opportunity to follow through on that threat. Who knows; perhaps he will.
Michelle Obama is the popular choice to run for president in 2020 after the Donald Trump win
Donald Trump's election as US President opens 'period of uncertainty' in Europe, leaders warn | The Independent
Trump ran for president as a nationalist fighter for white America. He promised to deport Hispanic immigrants. He promised to ban Muslims from the United States. He refused to acknowledge Barack Obama’s legitimacy, casting him—until the end—as a kind of usurper of rightful authority. When faced with the fetid swamps of white reaction—of white supremacists and white nationalists and anti-Semites—he winked, and they cheered in response. And for good reason.
More than anything, Trump promises a restoration of white authority. After eight years of a black president—after eight years in which cosmopolitan America asserted its power and its influence, eight years in which women leaned in and blacks declared that their lives mattered—millions of white Americans said enough. They had their fill of this world and wanted the old one back. And although it’s tempting to treat this as a function of some colorblind anti-elitism, that cannot explain the unity of white voters in this election. Trump didn’t just win working-class whites—he won the college-educated and the affluent. He even won young whites.
And they did so as a white herrenvolk, racialized and radicalized by Trump.
Trump forged a politics of white tribalism, and white people embraced it.
I see a man who empowered white nationalists and won. I see a man who demanded the removal of nonwhite immigrants and won. I see a man who pledged war crimes against foreign enemies and won. I see a man who empowers the likes of Rudy Giuliani and others who see blacks as potential criminals to control, not citizens to respect.
I Am a Gay Jew in Trump’s America. And I Am Afraid for My Life.
When Germany invaded, my great-grandmother insisted, we stay. Her Jewish friends panicked, fled, but she said, no, it won’t happen here. Then the soldiers moved them to the ghetto. A wealthy friend offered my family safe passage out, but my great-grandmother said: No. We stay.
I am a gay Jewish journalist who loathes Trump with a very public passion. Every week, I receive the emails, the tweets, the private messages: Kike. Faggot. Fucking Jew. Their leader deploys anti-Semitism as a dog whistle, but they hear it as loud as can be. I get death threats. They want to kill me, they explain; they have a plan. And not just me, but people like me. The Jews who want to ruin this country. The gays who defiled it. The journalists who committed treason. All of us will soon get what we deserve, they tell me. They have guns. They have a plan.
Every week, the threats roll in. They know where I live, they say. Trump wants people like me gone. Dead. They tell me how they’ll do it. It’s always with a gun. Liberal gay Jews don’t have a place in the new order, they explain. Sometimes it’s almost nonchalant. People like me, they say, just don’t have a place in Trump’s America. Faggot, kike—I’d never heard those words directed at me before this election. Now I see them all the time. They have a place in Trump’s America.
I am scared. I have never been scared like this before. What do we do? This is not like anything we’ve lived through before. We are being pulled out farther and farther to sea by the riptide of history. The shore is receding. Do we fight the current? Or do we let it draw us out to sea, recognizing that there’s no use in fighting something beyond our control?
A Lament for Hillary Clinton, the Woman
After Tuesday night, it becomes much harder to believe that America is even trying to express its highest and simplest ideals. We are not one nation, we are not indivisible, and we do not offer liberty and justice for all. The days to come will offer plenty of time for fear and pain on a grand scale. But as the results rolled in on Tuesday night, I was struck by a smaller and surprising sorrow: I mourned for Hillary Clinton herself, the woman who dreamed so big and worked so hard and fell so short.
This was her chance, and it looked like a clean shot at last. Instead, she lost Ohio, then Florida, then North Carolina. Her big Manhattan party looked like a funeral.
The Trump Campaign Is Ending as It Began: Bigoted as Hell
From birtherism and the wall to Jewish conspiracies and Somali terrorists in Minneapolis.
With his latest ad, Trump leaned into those tropes, interspersing this slam on “global special interests” with photos of George Soros, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, all Jewish. The message is clear—Jewish elites threaten American sovereignty—and blatantly anti-Semitic, with a lineage that includes Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the even more infamous The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Trump’s last line was a reference to Minnesota’s substantial Somali population, which includes many refugees. “Here in Minnesota,” he said, “you’ve seen firsthand the problems caused with faulty refugee vetting, with large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state with your knowledge, without your support or approval. … And with some of them then joining ISIS and spreading their extremist views all over our country and all over the world.
The problem with Trump’s rhetoric—the problem with almost all of his rhetoric—is that this isn’t true. The United States has strict procedures for vetting refugees, with a process that can last up to two years. As for Somali Americans, the vast majority are ordinary, law-abiding citizens and residents. While there is a problem with radicalization among some younger members of the community, they represent a distinct minority. And joint efforts between local groups and the federal government have had some success in combating the factors that foster extremism. Trump undermines those efforts with his message of fear and hostility. Worse, he stokes the kind of atmosphere that turns refugees into targets for domestic terrorists, such as the three men in Garden City, Kansas, who were recently arrested for an alleged plot to bomb an apartment complex with a number of Somali American residents.
Trump kicked off his political career with birtherism. He inaugurated his presidential campaign with xenophobia. He grew his base with the promise of a ban on Muslims and a wall with Mexico. Yes, he brought a kind of free-form economic populism to the Republican Party. But his passion has always been this vision of a whites-only America, defined in opposition to racial enemies. Now, with the end of the campaign in sight, his promise is simple. If elected, he will redeem the country from the illegitimate presidency of Barack Obama and restore the pride and dominance of white Americans.
Daily chart: How Donald Trump won the election | The Economist
it appeared self-evident that Mr Trump, a man who has called Mexican immigrants “killers and rapists”, would have been doomed to fail in a general election. Mr Trump proved his doubters wrong—and, if exit polls are to believed, appears to have done just as well as Mr Romney with black and Hispanic voters. It is possible that the prospect of voting Mr Trump was not as repulsive to racial minorities as was expected; though it is also possible that Mrs Clinton's guarded demeanour failed to inspire would-be voters.
Trade unions seemed to prefer him to Mrs Clinton despite his claims that wages in America were “too high”.
5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win | MICHAEL MOORE
Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president.
Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy
Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun.
It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”
Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut.
And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.
But that is not how it works in America. People have to leave the house and get in line to vote. And if they live in poor, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they not only have a longer line to wait in, everything is being done to literally stop them from casting a ballot.
the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done.
and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!
Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her.
when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones.
picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.
like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing
Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system.
a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.
Hillary Clinton Surpasses Donald Trump In Popular Vote Tally: Shades Of 2000? : The Two-Way : NPR
As of 12:33 p.m. ET, Clinton had amassed 59,583,144 votes nationally, to Trump's 59,344,988 — a margin of 238,156 that puts Clinton on track to become the fifth U.S. presidential candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election.
the second time in the past 16 years that a Democrat has lost a national election while winning the popular vote.
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