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Donald Trump Presidency discussion thread II

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This thread is for discussing Donald Trumps's presidency in the US and any related matters.

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Blowfish

Larbre34 wrote: »

Bannon already getting it in the neck from senior RNC figures. The stinking hypocrisy.

However, this is a watershed moment, there is no more scope for ambivilance from the RNC and moderate Republican seat holders, they are now either with the Trump agenda or against it, for decency and a return to governing for all the people or against it. The blood of a good many previously safe seaters must be running cold today. A good thing.

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

Trent Houseboat

Blowfish wrote: »

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

Those running in "safe" Republican seats have to fear being primaried by Bannonites. Last night probably energise the traditional base to come out to defeat whatever Bannon unearths from below Isengard in the primaries to prevent a blue wave in 2018.

[Deleted User]

Blowfish wrote: »

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

From the smallest acorns...

How long is it til the next election now? If Jones can keep clean for a few years then who knows where it will lead? Name recognition is stupidly important.

ECO_Mental

Blowfish wrote: »

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

Yes there is that, but they mobilized the black vote which up to now with all the voter suppression and gerrymandering gives optimism to these voters that their vote can count...IF they come out and vote. Gives a boost to black vote will get them more involved hopefully.

Hande hoche!

everlast75 wrote: »

I think his account has been hacked...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/940795587733151744

That's impressively restrained. Imagine this is a considerable blow to the Bannonite wing.

UsedToWait

Hande hoche! wrote: »

That's impressively restrained. Imagine this is a considerable blow to the Bannonite wing.

I'd be surprised if that tweet wasn't from the iPhone, rather than Trump's own phone..

(It was linked to earlier in the thread that the 'Presidential' tweets, as opposed to the narcissistic, bile-filled ones, are coming from someone else in the White House)

Billy86

Hande hoche! wrote: »

That's impressively restrained. Imagine this is a considerable blow to the Bannonite wing.

Yeah that staffer really earned his wage yesterday with that Tweet.

Very surprised by the outcome - not at all in a bad way and it was my a sliver of 1.5% but I absolutely did not see Jones winning.

Christy42

Blowfish wrote: »

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

Sure but this is an incredibly red state. I think Moore wins if Trump loses last year (well there is no election in that case but you know what I mean).

All elections so far have gone more democratic than the presidential one last year (unless I missed one) and this continues that trend. Sure some of it was due to Moore himself but I feel it is still significant. Any Republicans in any sort of competitive state should be worried.

Plus it shows that at least people were not voting thinking Moore was innocent. That is a big deal for the metoo campaign which also involves Trump remember.

wonderfullife

dudara wrote: »

The scary thing is that there was only 1.5% of a margin IIRC. Moore still nearly won. A man with a record of homophobia and attraction to underage girls was still nearly deemed suitable and was supported in nearly equal numbers to the winner. It’s a sad inditement on the state of Alabama and the US

I've made this point on a number of threads on various topics but it's worth repeating:

America has one of the worst child marriage problems in the world. It's something we rarely consider but according to statistics over 200,000 children aged between 10-15 were married in the USA since 2001. The true number is likely far higher as they are just the ones uncovered by FOIA requests.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/200000-children-married-us-15-years-child-marriage-child-brides-new-jersey-chris-christie-a7830266.html

10-year-old girls married men in their 30's. A 14-year-old girl married a man in his 70's. An 11-year-old boy married a 34-year-old woman.

Most of these marriages took place in the Bible Belt but also literally across the country, because almost every state has/had legal loopholes to allow children to marry adults in the event of pregnancy and/or with the consent of a) parents and/or b) a local Judge.

Given the above, it's not all that surprising that so many still voted for him. There's still huge numbers of parents in the bible belt who would gladly give permission for their 14-year-old girl to marry a rich District Attorney or, conversely, their 14-year-old boy to marry a female one.

When you have close to 15,000 children marrying adults annually, and in many cases marrying their statutory rapists, it's not surprising we witnessed the same backward views reciprocated at the ballot box.

It boggles my mind that any parent of a pregnant 12-year-old girl would give permission for her to marry the 35-year-old who got her pregnant but this is exactly the scenario happening in America on a regular basis.

The basic support for Moore mirrored these viewpoints. The reason he lost may not have had all that much to do with the allegations and more to do with how much Trump stumped for him.

Trump = toxic.

Blowfish wrote: »

I wouldn't be overly confident on that given how close the vote was. A non pedophilic republican would have easily won, the others running in safe republican seats will just put it down to that.

A pro-life (/anti-abortion) Democrat would just as likely have beaten any GOP candidate. There's a wave of people in every state, particularly among the black community, who were eligible to vote last year and didn't bother because they thought it was a foregone conclusion.

The easiest way to mobilize a lot of people is to try take things away from them. Rightly or wrongly, aided by the CBO scores on healthcare and other bills, the general perception of Trump isn't merely that he's a senile incompetent fool with the potential to launch nukes on North Korea if he's having a bad day. It isn't the Russia stuff either that's mobilizing people. It's the very real sense Trump is trying to take things from them (healthcare) and give things to the rich and big business (tax cuts).

The reality might be a lot more nuanced than the above but perception trumps reality these days. Things are only going to get worse for the GOP and Trump. It's bog-standard in almost every democracy for the incumbent powers to gradually lose support but Trump being so toxic has simply accelerated matters.

The funniest thing of it all is nobody in their right mind believes Trump even wants to do the job. He'd gladly have lost to Hillary while winning the popular vote and gone back to his normal life - tv shows, Trump Tower, hookers, cheating on his missus, doing dodgy business deals and being friends with the Hollywood types whose validation he seems to need.

Even with the job, he seems to spend most of his time trying to get back to his old life - watching truckloads of TV and playing golf every other day.

His personality won't allow him to quit or ever admit to failure, so his best hope of getting out of the job is Mueller.

Ted Cruz's seat is now a viable target too, which would have sounded crazy a year ago.

everlast75

wonderfullife wrote: »

Ted Cruz's seat is now a viable target too, which would have sounded crazy a year ago.

That would make my f&^%ing year*

*(please excuse my unparliamentary language)

Tell me how

dudara wrote:

The scary thing is that there was only 1.5% of a margin IIRC. Moore still nearly won. A man with a record of homophobia and attraction to underage girls was still nearly deemed suitable and was supported in nearly equal numbers to the winner. Itâ€™s a sad inditement on the state of Alabama and the US

Not really. He has not been convicted in a court of law of improper behaviour even though to most, it seems there is significant circumstantial evidence out there. That's enough for a lot to say that they are not bowing to mob rule.
Homophobia is still more common in Alabama than in other places.
The practice of ultra-conservative media outlets to counter said claims by saying it's Fake News (backed up by examples of so-calles MSM issuing suspensions and apologies for incorrect stories) is also very strong in Alabama.
These points plus the entrenched republicanism which understandably is going to react when they feel threatened by as they see it, liberals from outside the state telling them how to vote actually, in my mind, makes it surprising Jones won.

The Democrats will have their work cut out in holding the seat because it is historically a very red state.

Will be interesting to see if Luther Strange comes back to try again.

david75

Has Donald tweeted yet saying Moore is a loser and he never supported him anyways?

Cos you know he will at some point

Billy86

Apparently Moore won about 65% of white votes, 79% of non college educated white men and 73% of non college educated white women. I guess it's somewhat to be expected given it's Alabama, but backs up an awful lot of what has been said... also makes you wonder how much it might motivate those who don't always vote to go out and do so more often in future.

So that's only a 51-49 majority in the Senate for the Republicans once Jones takes office in a few weeks time which is going to make getting legislation passed tougher again. Apparently the Democrat odds of winning the Senate next year weren't falling kindly to them because of the seats that are up, but estimates have gone from about a 25% chance to about 50%, and with how this Republican congress and they're president have been such a shambles it's going to be hard to see that percentage going any way but up.

On the other hand, expect the push for war to increase significantly in the next 12 months, largely because of this.

Akrasia

Deleted User wrote: »

From the smallest acorns...

How long is it til the next election now? If Jones can keep clean for a few years then who knows where it will lead? Name recognition is stupidly important.

The reason Moore lost was partially because he's a filthy sexual predator, but also, there was a very high turnout among African Americans who voted 95% against him

Moore was about as racist and bigoted as they come, and if the African American population in the south can get energised, and vote in large numbers in the 2018 Primaries, supported by liberal and educated white voters, there could be some culling of the most racist and bigoted elements in the GOP, which is only a good thing

Billy86

david75 wrote: »

Has Donald tweeted yet saying Moore is a loser and he never supported him anyways?

Cos you know he will at some point

Not yet, he's just had a staffer tweet a congratulations to Jones which was a good touch but as per usual always it won't last. You can expect his tweets supporting Moore to quietly get deleted soon enough though, just as he did with Luther Strange in the primary.

Buer

Akrasia wrote: »

The reason Moore lost was partially because he's a filthy sexual predator, but also, there was a very high turnout among African Americans who voted 95% against him

The reason Moore lost is because GOP support abstained. Jones actually received significantly less votes than the last Democrat candidate who ran and lost.

Professor Moriarty

Buer wrote: »

The reason Moore lost is because GOP support abstained. Jones actually received significantly less votes than the last Democrat candidate who ran and lost.

That's interesting. Was overall turnout down or up?

Akrasia

Buer wrote: »

The reason Moore lost is because GOP support abstained. Jones actually received significantly less votes than the last Democrat candidate who ran and lost.

Turnout for this election was about 40% which is way higher than special elections typically attract, which can be as low as 10% turnout.

Buer

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

That's interesting. Was overall turnout down or up?

Hugely down. There was slightly over 1.3m votes cast.

Nobody ran against Sessions in 2014. In 2008, however, over 2m votes were cast.

Billy86

Buer wrote: »

The reason Moore lost is because GOP support abstained. Jones actually received significantly less votes than the last Democrat candidate who ran and lost.

They actually got back on board in the last week or two and officially re-endorsed him as Moore slipped into the background - the thought process being to get voters to vote for the letter (R) and not any candidate. As expected from a cult, many of the followers unquestioningly did as they were told but a high turnout is what killed them, both the kiddie fiddling stuff and the 'America was great when he had slavery' type stuff maybe even more so, which has to be seriously worrying in your live there - black voters made the difference here.

Turnout at 38% may look low, but was well and beyond the expected 20-25%, 1.3mn voted yesterday compared to 820,000 in 2014 and 1.45mn in 2010 (looking at Senate election where there wasn't a presidential election on the same day e.g. 2014 and 2016 and those significantly obviously drive up voter turnout).

Professor Moriarty

Buer wrote: »

Hugely down. There was slightly over 1.3m votes cast.

Nobody ran against Sessions in 2014. In 2008, however, over 2m votes were cast.

So, proportionately, was the Dem vote up or down do you know?

Buer

Akrasia wrote: »

Turnout for this election was about 40% which is way higher than special elections typically attract, which can be as low as 10% turnout.

I don't think you can apply normal rules to this election; it was far more publicised than a normal senate election would have been. It received a huge amount of coverage locally, nationally and internationally as well as having a massive lead in and publicity around the candidates.

Akrasia

Buer wrote: »

Hugely down. There was slightly over 1.3m votes cast.

Nobody ran against Sessions in 2014. In 2008, however, over 2m votes were cast.

In presidential election years turnout is way higher than in special elections or even mid term election years.

In 2016 Alabama had 66% turnout.

In 2014 the mid terms got 41% turnout. But special elections usually get much lower turnouts than this

Blowfish

Akrasia wrote: »

In presidential election years turnout is way higher than in special elections or even mid term election years.

In 2016 Alabama had 66% turnout.

Of that 66%, Jones got approximately ~93% of the number of votes that Hillary got where as Moore got ~49% of the number of votes that Trump got.

The Democrats were motivated to turn up, the GOP weren't.

Billy86

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

So, proportionately, was the Dem vote up or down do you know?

2017 - 671,000 (of 1.3mn)
2016 - 748,000 (but a total of 2mn voting due to presidential election)
2014 - no Dem runner
2012 - no election
2010 - 515,000 (of 1.5mn)
2008 - 752,000 (again over 2mn voters due to presidential election)
2006 - 595,000 (of 1.8mn)
2002 - 538,000 (of 1.3mn)

Certainly looks to be up - it may be down on 2016 and 2008 but that's to be expected for presidential elections and it's actually closer to those numbers than it is to the non-presidential turnout in previous elections

Water John

Great to see Bannon get a kick in the goolies.
Sweet Home Alabama.

Buer

Fair enough, I'll bow to the superior knowledge and evidence of historical turn outs. I'd still believe there was a certain level of abstention from the Republican support which was the difference given the fine margin.

Regardless, I don't think this really is going to have a significant impact in a wider sense for control of congress. It reduces the defecit to a single seat in the senate but next year's mid-terms have a huge level of exposure for the Democrats relative to the Republicans. Of the 33 seats up for election, only 8 belong to sitting Republican senators and 7 of those 8 were won comfortably in the last election and are located in states that are generally secure Republican strongholds. The landscape has shifted significantly since then but it will need the Democrats to retain all of their existing seats and steal 2 of 8 from the GOP to gain control of the house.

Billy86

Akrasia wrote: »

In presidential election years turnout is way higher than in special elections or even mid term election years.

In 2016 Alabama had 66% turnout.

In 2014 the mid terms got 41% turnout. But special elections usually get much lower turnouts than this

You might be thinking of 2010? In 2014 Sessions ran basically unopposed at 795,000 votes to 22,000 for a write-in candidate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Alabama,_2014
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_election_in_Alabama,_2010

Akrasia

Buer wrote: »

I don't think you can apply normal rules to this election; it was far more publicised than a normal senate election would have been. It received a huge amount of coverage locally, nationally and internationally as well as having a massive lead in and publicity around the candidates.

It works both ways though, If this had been a normal special election chances are it would have had a very low turnout of mostly republican voters

The democratic turnout was way bigger than it otherwise would have been, so was the republican turnout, but the democrats were more motivated to vote than the republicans were, so they won (just about)

In the presidential election, it was won by Trump by a 3 to 2 margin.

In the special election turnout by both parties was down, but turnout by the republicans was down by way more than the Democrats.

C14N

Itssoeasy wrote: »

https://twitter.com/TheLeadCNN/status/940704581742419969

The Silence at the end is funny.

It's funny that they had not once considered that you don't need a Bible to be sworn in. How did they think Jewish politicians like Chuck Schumer or Bernie Sanders got in?

Rjd2 wrote: »

I don't know how anyone can see this as a bad thing, Moore is a disgusting person, and its a timely reminder to the Republican establishment and money men that Steve Bannon is nowhere near as talented politically as he believes. His presence is absolute toxic to the party and cat nip for the left. I know he still brags about winning Trump the white house, but I still feel Trump would have won without him.

Even if Moore had won, he'd have been a fantastic scapegoat for the Dems until he quit politics, and its a nice **** you to the republicans who done sweet **** all to get Moore out of this seemingly impossible election to lose. A generic Republican would likely have won this by 20 or so points, that's how repugnant Moore was.

I think Mitch McConnell will be breathing a sigh of relief over this result. Whether he had Roy Moore as a full member of the party, or whether he moved to have Roy Moore expelled from the Senate, he was going to be in a very bad place. This lets him off that disastrous PR and he still has his Senate majority.

everlast75 wrote: »

I think his account has been hacked...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/940795587733151744

This isn't all that unusual. He was initially pretty normal when he beat Clinton too and briefly got along with Obama before going back to blaming all his problems on Hillary and saying Obama wiretapped his microwave. Even in that tweet he blamed write-ins and I'd bet this isn't the last we'll hear of him talking about those.

dudara wrote: »

The scary thing is that there was only 1.5% of a margin IIRC. Moore still nearly won. A man with a record of homophobia and attraction to underage girls was still nearly deemed suitable and was supported in nearly equal numbers to the winner. It’s a sad inditement on the state of Alabama and the US

I really don't get why people are acting like this. If Roy Moore had won by 1.5% that would still be a phenomenal result for a Democrat in Alabama, especially when you consider that Trump had very similar accusations against him just last year and still won the state with over 60% of the vote.

As for the homophobia, we should all know that that is not much of an albatross in Alabama. Roy Moore did not keep his dislike of gay people quiet, he ran openly on that. When you consider how recent it was that presidential candidates (like Bush Jr) could do that on a national level, it's not that surprising that one of the most conservative states in America is still not on board with LGBT.