All I can go by are the popular vote count totals:
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/2000/popular_vote.html
http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/electoral-college/2004/popular_vote.html
Voter fraud and suppression can only have so much of an effect on the overall total. GWB was selected the first time, but elected the second, and more’s the pity.
Can it?
He managed to look less like a deranged used-car salesman (DUCS) than the average Republican candidate, and it was enough. Reagan managed it even better. Cruz and Rubio scored high on the DUCS.
Of course DUCS tend to vote for fellow DUCS, which is how they occasionally come to power. But my belief is that on the whole DUCS do badly in national elections.
Trump is difficult for my system because he isn’t really on the DUCS scale - he’s on the deranged real estate developer (DRED) scale. Perhaps this election will enable me to calibrate a DRED/DUCS conversion.
You’re either a helpful resource, an enemy, or a prop.
“He suddenly took me by the hand, and he started to show me around the mansion. He asked me if I had a swimsuit with me. I said no. I hadn’t intended to swim. He took me into a room and opened drawers and asked me to put on a swimsuit.”
Ms. Brewer Lane, at the time a 26-year-old model, did as Mr. Trump asked. “I went into the bathroom and tried one on,” she recalled. It was a bikini. “I came out, and he said, ‘Wow.’ ”
Mr. Trump, then 44 and in the midst of his first divorce, decided to show her off to the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
“He brought me out to the pool and said, ‘That is a stunning Trump girl, isn’t it?’ ” Ms. Brewer Lane said.
I’m not so sure about that:
And:
Until now, the architectural maps and contracts from the Ohio 2004 election were never made public, which may indicate that the entire system was designed for fraud. In a previous sworn affidavit to the court, [IT security expert Stephen] Spoonamore declared: “The SmarTech system was set up precisely as a King Pin computer used in criminal acts against banking or credit card processes and had the needed level of access to both county tabulators and Secretary of State computers to allow whoever was running SmarTech computers to decide the output of the county tabulators under its control.”
Spoonamore also swore that “…the architecture further confirms how this election was stolen. The computer system and SmarTech had the correct placement, connectivity, and computer experts necessary to change the election in any manner desired by the controllers of the SmarTech computers.”
Not connected specifically to a discussion on Trump and race, but on Trump and the use of history:
Anway, here’s my idea:
A series of web ads about Trump. Each one is just one or two terrible quotes of his [e.g., Japan should get nukes, advocating U.S. default on debt, bumbling about “the nuclear” when asked about the nuclear triad, I have the best words, Mexican judges, etc…]
… With the framing device of the old game show “Match Game.”
Start with a clip from the show:
Gene Rayburn saying: "Dumb Donald is really dumb…"
Audience response: "How dumb is he?"
Play clip.
Clip ends with sound of audience laughter and “Match Game” theme music.
Post a bunch of them online, and then:
FLOOD TWITTER with the links, tagging every media figure and Trump himself.
As much as @RealDonaldTrump is addicted to Twitter, it’s a reasonable bet that he’ll see them.
And if that’s the case, it’s a reasonable bet that he just couldn’t refrain from making a reply.
And then use his reply to make more clips! Forever!
It’s totally juvenile! It’s childish and inane! It’s speaking to him in his own language!
How can we make this happen?
So is it finally okay to go Godwin when discussing Drumpf, now that the NY Times has done it?
I dunno… The article isn’t really on comparing Trump to Hitler, but on what it means to do so and on the “weaponization” of history that we see in what Trump is doing…
Personally I still think Mussolini is a more apt comparison.
Seeing them next to each other, they even kind of look alike…
I read an article, comparing Trump to his contemporaries - Putin, Erdogan, Modi, that guy that just got elected in the Philippines, the current right wing Israeli government and even parties not in power like UKiP in the UK. I don’t know if these are throwbacks or something new in the air… I kind of want to resurrect Hannah Arendt and see what she has to say about what’s going on. I read On Totalitarianism not too long ago and while it was useful in thinking about authoritarian states in the 20th century, I don’t know if it can apply to now in the same way. It seems and feels a bit like a different phenomenon from what she describes.
It’s no secret Trump is a fan of Mussolini.
I honestly wonder if Trump even realized most Americans think of Mussolini as “a very bad person” when he posted that.
Maybe he realizes few Americans these days know anything at all about Mussolini (and were probably thinking about something else on the day they heard about him in some high school history class).
“Mussolini? You mean that like, shellfish pasta thing?”
I’m trying to remember anything either said or done by the Delta guys to offend anyone in that bar…other then just being there! Really, they were all shitting their pants too badly to be offensive. Also, I always thought calling someone “my man” was to say they had “your back” OR/also it’s the okay-for-a-white-guy-to-say-version of “My Nigga”, a greeting between black dudes.
Calling someone “my man”, when you don’t even really know them is not necessarily racially offensive, it’s just very assumptive and possibility indicative of the cognitive dissonance that people of privilege often afford themselves.
Ie, the frat hired Otis & his band to perform at their toga party, but some of them just assumed that such a small familiarity somehow equated to an actual friendship.
It didn’t, as they quickly found out.
From things my dear grandmother used to say (born in Maryland in 1890), I got the impression this kind of condescending usage was racially tinged. At least as I grew older I cringed a bit to hear it (especially in retrospect). Up there with calling someone by only their last name. As far as I knew, she was always personally nice to people, but she had the unfortunate viewpoint of the times.
On the other hand, her aunt (my great-great-aunt) was a medical doctor (!), who treated the poor in DC regardless of race, even if they couldn’t pay. I don’t know if the karma evens out or not.
The quote I’ve usually seen attributed to Freud is “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.
Also, George Carlin had a follow-on thought to that. 
We can’t help who we share genetics with.
