I seriously question that.
All Obama tried to do with his signature legislation was give people who work for a living but don’t make enough to afford healthcare some insurance.
All they saw was a black man trying to take their guns away.
There’s a deeply ingrained fear at work here and its blinding people to reality.
Not really. The Constitutional requirements for somebody to be elected president include an age limit and a citizenship/residency condition, but the Constitution says nothing whatsoever about a criminal record. In fact people have run for president – albeit unsuccessfully – while in prison. It is reasonable to assume that being a convicted felon will do nothing to particularly endear you to the voting public, although, the voting public having recently put an industry-grade sleazebag onto the track to the Oval Office, the bar for the presidency seems to be really, really low these days. A jailbird as POTUS may be a step up from where we are now.
The Constitution does say that as President you can be impeached and fired for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”, but that’s presumably for the ones you commit while in office, not ones you have been convicted of earlier. Also, if you get elected as president while you are doing time for a federal crime it is probably bad form for you to pardon yourself after assuming office.
I’d like to think that fucking up the presidency has more consequences, but I like to think I’m not that naive. He’s not bringing back squat and hopefully, when the people who voted for him based on the marginal hope that he could revive the rust belt, they’ll not vote for him in four years. But the damage might already be done by then.
This is the American legal system we’re talking about. Wealth = impunity.
The only way for a rich person to suffer legal consequences is if they annoy an even richer person.
LOL , he’d never do that, he has so much class.
It’s not a hard and fast rule, but the NYT standard has always been that the rightmost column of the front page is the lead story.
It was a little more insidious than that. Hair Trump told them that they’d been unfair to him and that they were dishonest (classic projection). He is setting the stage so that he can totally dismiss all media reporting, ditch the press pool, and never hold briefings.
Part of me really hopes the reply was “You ain’t seen nothing yet, Mr. President-Elect”
Chris Hedges on his time at the NYT. Towards the bottom of the page:
Compare and contrast:
The new Prez: Boasts about getting away with fraud.
The old Prez: Wins Nobel Peace Prize.
For the legal system, this is a feature not a bug. Rich people have the money to pay lawyers, therefore an awful lot of lawyers prefer to look afrer the interests of the rich.
I was pleased that Obama was elected, I think he did quite a good job in very bad circumstances, but he did not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize at the time.
A feature he shares with pretty much every other Peace Prize winner. It’s a joke of an award.
Trump supporters are racists, bigots, cannibalistic face eating Floridian murderers, in the middle of psychological problems manifesting as extreme support for utterly crazy shit Kanye West hospitalized "for his own health and safety" and some, I assume, are just normally deluded.
and around and around we go. Democratic presidents inherit frat-partied-out economy, spend 4-8 years cleaning up, grinding the economy back into shape, all the while being blamed for it not being more robust. Just when they get it back into fighting shape (by making compromises they wouldn’t normally make, given the dire conditions they received it in) the electorate votes them out because they are “sick of policies that aren’t making the economy better” so invite the frat boys back in to blow the surplus on their buddies again…
This is my fear. He’s a fascist, he’ll do what fascists do best. He’s already scapegoating, and his followers are all-too-willing to blame immigrants for job losses. Of course, he’s put himself into a corner with that, too - having promised to instantly deport all the illegal immigrants. I suppose the next step is to blame legal immigrants, etc. This could get very ugly, very fast.
Sure, they won’t be abe to see what’s going on with the economy as a whole, because we only experience that through a media filter, but Trump got key support from communities where economic shifts are causing jobs to go away - coal mining and manufacturing. Trump has promised to preserve those jobs, even though there’s nothing he can do about it. People in those communities will notice when they’re directly rendered unemployed, or when the local economy continues to collapse.
My own formulation is Trump supporters are stupid, ignorant, racist/sexist assholes. (Pick at least two.) The best you can say is that they’re both totally ignorant and not smart enough to see through tRump just based on his own words (which should be sufficient).
You would have thought that the timing of the Bush economic slump at least would have tipped people off to that. Although I can kind of see how ignorant people are falling for tRump in this regard, since he promised to be unlike the usual republicans in his policies, so it’s not so much the usual dynamic. The irony being, of course, that it’s the usual suspects anyways.
At least Hubbard is dead, less damage that way…
If your vitriol isn’t quite explodey, keep in mind two things: 1) Congress withheld an available, open SCOTUS seat from a sitting president, and 2) that seat, and potentially others, are awaiting appointments from trump.
sigh
The norms. The poor, trod-upon political norms. Candidates release their tax returns. They don’t openly let their family members slash business partners sit in on state-level meetings. They don’t offer high level political appointments to family members slash business partners. Their philanthropic “Foundations” do not engage in self-dealing, and they are not simple laundromats for cash. They place their financial holdings into some kind of blind trust or third party management to avoid conflicts of interest. They sleep in the White House. They meet foreign dignitaries at the White House. They don’t put their presidential transition on hold to engage in dealmaking with foreign (Indian, in this case) businessmen. They don’t encourage foreign heads of state to accept their prior business proposals now that they’ve won an election (Argentina).
It’s a long list, and getting longer day by day. Those little things Americans could somewhat depend upon to help maintain transparency in the highest political office in the land…are becoming themselves transparent.
Yeah, he can do a lot of hideous damage to a whole bunch of things that will please his reactionary fans, but I suspect that most people who voted for him - or at least some of his key voters - don’t care about that. It’s all about their jerbs jobs, and his failure to make good on any of his many, many absurd, facile promises in that regard won’t do him any favors. Although with congress and the supreme court behind him, the fact that he’s alienated his support base won’t necessarily force him to leave power after four years…
