BBO Discussion Forums: Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped? - BBO Discussion Forums

And it sure does grind your a**, doesn't it?

Which is, of course, the entire point of trolling.

Don't be too harsh. As a Trump supporter, all he has going for him is his bitterness.

From Newsweek:

Al Bundy Speaks!

See what I mean?

Ha ha ha ha. Nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Why can’t Germans do cool politics? There are the clichéd explanations, all of them true to some extent. Is it because of our Nazi past? Is it because after decades of working their way up through the German party system, candidates have lost their sense of daring? Is it because we are a nation in doubt, a nation of permanently self-reflecting ditherers?

Coolness is not a democratic necessity, of course, and we have no right to expect that our policy makers entertain us. You could even argue that the sort of maverick quality that we marvel at in Mr. Macron is inappropriate, because democracy is not about lone decision-making but about seeking broad compromise. But coolness can serve as a means to engage people in politics, to create a sense of belonging. Coolness has the power to create cohesion.

So we keep trying. Lacking a figure to rally around, Germans have found one to rally against: Donald Trump. If we can’t be inspired by the positive, we have decided to embrace the negative, to join the “resistance” as a way of unifying, motivating and aestheticizing our politics.

After all, sometimes all you need is a good evildoer to make a story work. And Mr. Trump is the perfect villain, particularly to the German left. The political coolness everyone can agree on is to be anti-Trump.

A “cool” political culture needs a code that insiders can quickly recognize to create social cohesion. The more people you’d like to be involved, the simpler the code needs to be. And so we’ve reduced Mr. Trump to a caricature — his yellowish hair, his ill-fitting suits, his figure rendered into various comic-book-villain tropes (the Joker is a favorite among Germans). During the G-20 summit meeting, such depictions were everywhere. An uninformed visitor might assume that Mr. Trump is a candidate in the coming election.

Predictably, Mr. Schulz has tried to harness the anti-Trump cool for his own campaign. He embraces the resistance, telling supporters, “It is our duty to step into this man’s way with everything we stand for.” He personalizes the fight, trying to make himself the star of the anti-Trump show, even going after him on Twitter.

When Mr. Trump tweeted that his son’s meeting with a Russian lobbyist was business as usual — “most politicians would have gone” — Mr. Schulz replied: “I wouldn’t have gone there. This is not politics.”

This might be good for politicians, but it’s bad for our politics. In the same way that the public often swoons over charismatic candidates, losing sight of their flaws and nuances, turning Mr. Trump into a cartoon bad guy renders him unreal. If he’s too bad to be true, we may forget that he actually exists.

It also distorts what voters should really worry about. Of course it’s relevant to Germany what happens in the United States, our closest ally. But Mr. Trump is not running for chancellor. Mr. Trump is nothing but a strange surrogate for the lack of catchy slogans and German political coolness.

Eventually, he’ll go away. In the meantime, German politics needs to find a more positive, sustainable way of engaging with the public, speaking to the issues that matter to them, not just tossing up politicians to love — or love to hate.

To ask a somewhat speculative question, suppose that Mueller uncovers a smoking gun. Suppose the Trump campaign provided Russia with voter targeting data which they used to remove democratic voters from the registration rolls in key states, sufficient to swing the election. Suppose Trump has been laundering Russian money for decades, and has promised to end sanctions in exchange for the electoral help...

In this (perhaps far fetched) scenario -- do we think Trump will be impeached? Surely most Republicans won't believe the above story no matter how many mainstream news orgs report it. The Democrats are unlikely to control the Senate before 2020 and it only takes 35 senators to block removal from office (so even some moderate Republicans defecting won't be enough to remove).

I predict Trump stays in office through 2020 unless health issues happen or he voluntarily resigns (which seems not in his nature).

Obama had 8 years where the only thing that changed was more prosecutions of whistle-blowers and less transparency.

Question: Did the Democratic National Committee election meddle when its leaders gave the Clinton campaign questions to debates in advance of the actual televised debate to the detriment of Bernie Sanders? Or is that just plain old graft and corruption which is unethical but not unlawful and a testament to "how dirty the political game is played" in D.C.?

The basic problem is that most families used to receive something approaching their fair share of economic growth, and they don’t anymore.

It’s true that the country can’t magically return to the 1950s and 1960s (nor would we want to, all things considered). Economic growth was faster in those decades than we can reasonably expect today. Yet there is nothing natural about the distribution of today’s growth — the fact that our economic bounty flows overwhelmingly to a small share of the population.

Different policies could produce a different outcome. My list would start with a tax code that does less to favor the affluent, a better-functioning education system, more bargaining power for workers and less tolerance for corporate consolidation.

Remarkably, President Trump and the Republican leaders in Congress are trying to go in the other direction. They spent months trying to take away health insurance from millions of middle-class and poor families. Their initial tax-reform plans would reduce taxes for the rich much more than for everyone else. And they want to cut spending on schools, even though education is the single best way to improve middle-class living standards over the long term.

From Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart by David Leonhardt:

Better batten down the hatches, boys.... if this analysis is correct, you have not yet begun to Trump

from CNN

"
Trump is coming off the worst week of his presidency, a disastrous seven days in which the infighting he stokes broke into public, the Senate's attempt to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act foundered, and Trump himself attacked his own attorney general, delivered a series of heavily political speeches that made clear his growing frustration with his current position and ousted his chief of staff Reince Priebus.
The decision to part ways with Priebus and bring on Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly as chief of staff, all which Trump announced via Twitter late Friday, was cast by allies of the President as a much-needed reset for a White House that had lost its direction.
RELATED: Republicans try to move forward
"To the extent that we can do more and do it more quickly in the disruptive fashion in which we're accustomed to with Donald J. Trump, I think that having the tools in place is very important," Kellyanne Conway, counselor to President Trump, said on "Fox News Sunday."
Maybe.
Kelly is, by all accounts, a highly disciplined and organized leader. The Trump White House needs that. He is also a highly decorated military man and someone Trump regards as an equal; Priebus was neither of those things. Kelly is the man Trump wanted. Priebus was the guy he accepted as, in his mind, a sop to a Republican establishment fretting over what sort of President he might be.
The problem with all of the talk of a "reset" in the White House led by Kelly is that Donald Trump is still the President. Priebus proved ineffective at managing Trump's erraticness -- leaping from issue to issue within a single day, tweeting out things that directly contradicted his White House's official line, fomenting competition among top staffers into a sort of blood sport.
RELATED: Who is John Kelly, Trump's new chief of staff?
This is, quite literally, who Trump is. He has lived his entire adult life a certain way. At 71, the idea that anyone -- Kelly included -- can fundamentally alter who Trump is -- or who Trump is willing to be for political purposes -- seems very far-fetched.
No one, ever, has wrangled Trump for any extended period of time. Sure, for a day or even a week during his first six months in office, Trump would avoid sending an inflammatory tweet or straying way, way off the teleprompter when delivering a speech. But it never lasted. He always returned to what he knows: the brash, unapologetic provocateur who is as interested in making a stir as he is in getting things done.
Trump didn't bring in Kelly to hamstring his natural instincts. Ditto Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director who spent his first week on the job savaging Priebus (and chief strategist Steve Bannon) to The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza. Trump brought both men in because he sees them as equals, as men who understand who he is and will work to implement his wishes as opposed to trying to fit him into a traditional political frame.
"The thing that General Kelly should do is not try to change Donald Trump," Corey Lewandowski, who managed Trump's 2016 primary campaign, told NBC's Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "I say you have to let Trump be Trump. That is what has made him successful over the last 30 years. That is what the American people voted for. And anybody who thinks they're going to change Donald Trump doesn't know Donald Trump."
RELATED: Donald Trump's DC swamp purge is really picking up speed
That last line from Lewandowski is the most important one: "Anybody who thinks they're going to change Donald Trump doesn't know Donald Trump."
That's 100% right. It's also why the chances of the next 193 days being any different than the past 193 days are very, very small.
Trump doesn't look back on the past six months as a failure on his part. He views it as a failure of the experiment he undertook to play nice with the Washington establishment. He put Priebus and Priebus' allies (Sean Spicer, Katie Walsh) in senior roles -- right alongside the likes of his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner -- and they failed to deliver. Their attempts to manage Trump made him angry; their inability to grind the gears of official Washington to work for him infuriated him.
The lesson Trump learned from these first six months office wasn't that he needs to change. It was that trying to change him into a Washington figure or anything close to a traditional politician wouldn't work. And that even if it had worked, he didn't want to do it anyway.
To the extent Trump is "starting over" then, it is really, in his mind, a return to his roots -- to who he should always have been from the start. He has put in place a team -- from Kelly to Scaramucci and on down -- that is much more likely to affirm and amplify his gut instincts to "let Trump be Trump" than to block them.
That is the only reset anyone watching this White House should expect. Trump isn't going to change. Instead, he's going to double down on being exactly who he's always been.

1. This does not matter, because Clinton didn't win.
2. This is a matter of party operatives helping a long time party loyalist over an "independent." There is no possibility of collision with a foreign power, no indication that data was stolen nor that votes or registrations were changed. So the bias here is nowhere near the same level of severity as what may have happened with Trump.
3. Clinton won the primary by a lot. So even some irregularities would not impact the result.
4. I'm all for the DNC cleaning up their act. Some investigation and reform is merited!
5... but this whole thing is like a bridge player arguing that "you failed to alert, so who cares that I had my Russian buddy hack the computers to get me the hand records in advance? It is false equivalency to the extreme.

The graft or corruption with the debate questions is not dependent on the outcome of the election. If her campaign received the assistance without whistleblowing, then the Clinton campaign is a witting or unwitting accomplice regardless of if she won or lost. The campaign cannot receive and accept the assistance and then act like it wasn't a benefactor of such coaching and unfair practices. Has the Clinton campaign even apologized to Bernie Sanders for this lapse of character and judgment? It is a character issue, plain and simple. It is demonstrative of a "winning by any means necessary mentality". My review shows the Clinton campaign issued no apology. No surprise as people who game systems typically don't make apologies for their behavior especially when it is implicitly sanctioned by a National Committee at the time.

We don't know how Clinton would have performed during the debates had she not been given a heads up on those questions. THAT'S the point. We don't know how a "live" performance of her at the debates would have swayed public sentiment. The DNC corrupted voter's ability to see her as she really is and funneled questions to her campaign to help windrow dress how THEY wanted her constituents to perceive her.

In addition, with the DNC server, we have received absolutely no verifiable proof of who hacked the DNC server since it was never claimed to be a national security matter when it was hacked. We have military intelligence, but they haven't supplied any hard core data but plenty of innuendo and mudslinging. Our government failed to secure the alleged crime scene and evidence, downplayed the incident's impact on the federal election when it occurred, and then subsequently hyped it up with a McCarthyism fevered-pitch after Trump won the election.

You don't find that a bit odd?