Its sort of a self checking cycle. In order to gain the support he needed to win the election, he needed to be overtly racist. If he had attempted to code or conceal his intentions, he would not have brought out the unhinged wing nuts that very well made up his thin margin of victory.
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[quote]a judge in Hawaii[/quote]Has he already started ranting about “That’s where Obama is from!” ?
Of course, that would directly contradict his insistence that Obama is from Kenya, but maybe that just, y’know, “played well”.
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The Republican party has made an entire party platform out of doing this for the past twenty years. The only difference now is they have a moron at the top who can’t seem to understand you have to use dog whistles and code words or things gets struck down legally.
This also is why he won the party nomination - because the dog whistle terms and ‘codes’ have been brewing a large base of voters who buy into this message and feel like they can’t say what they mean because of “PC culture”.
What they don’t understand is that “PC culture” was formed by the very same dog whistle terms that they loved so much. “PC” = Politically Correct - the very definition of a politician dancing on the head of a pin saying the ‘right words’ that won’t offend people, but still say what they want.
“PC” culture is not - and never will be - the public demanding people be polite and not dicks - that’s what makes our society ‘civil’.
This of course - goes right over the heads of the same people who are howling - because at the end of the day they just want permission to be racist fucktards in public again.
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Well, thank goodness that attempts to stealthily enact unconstitutional executive orders by disguising one’s true intent don’t work very well when one has previously explicitly stated one’s unconstitutional goals. It turns out that the smart bigots in the White House (er, well, Bannon, anyways) are held back by throwing their lot in with an idiot.
If you look at how he ran and what he promised to do, “dictator” is exactly the job he was running for.
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I’m not sure, I think he would have done better if he hadn’t been racist (The racist vote surely came out against Barack Obama, a black man). I think the people who loved his overt racism and sexist were firm Republican voters to begin with and were largely energized to vote against Clinton who they saw as the devil. To some extent it might have been an important way for him to signal himself as not-a-normal-politican, but I think he could have done that in other ways (“Our leaders are stupid!” was a pretty strong indicator).
I just think it’s a very unlikely combination. The sort of person who is totally unencumbered by a need to show off is not the sort of person who become president to implement an anti-Muslim policy. In speculating that the Republicans may re-wreck American health care and that subsequent Democrats might feel pressured into moving to single payer, someone on these forums noted, regarding Obama, that you can accomplish a lot if you don’t care who gets the credit. I think someone who is perfectly charming, driven, intelligent, humble, manipulative and racist could get a lot of seriously terrible racist shit done. I just don’t know how well those characteristics merge.
I take issue with the mythologizing of Bannon as intelligent. I think he’s probably a big fucking idiot.
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Fascist dictators just don’t have the patience to build grass roots support these days. Trump really should have played it cool this term and laid the ground work for the concentration camps he could have introduced in his second term.
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You forgot the NEA, the NEH, public broadcasting…
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Have you seen this article?
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/03/steve-bannon-thinks-youre-stupid.html
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Not him, but at least one proxy says:
(The proxy being who John Darnielle is responding to, not John himself. Just to be clear.)
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So what you are saying is, I should stay out of politics.
(Ducks)
In all seriousness, you describe someone quite similar to Nixon. Humble might be a stretch, but he did consider himself a public servant. Albeit a paranoid one. And it takes a certain level of humility to resign from POTUS.
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I agree.
It was made obvious to me just how fucking stupid the guy is when he got up at CPAC and literally said his goal is the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Its obviously a line he’s used before, a catch-phrase he’s proud of because it sounds cool. Except deconstruction does not mean what he thinks it means. He thinks it means dismantle. Its not even close.
Q: How much of an idiot do you have to be to adopt a catch-phrase using big words that you don’t understand, even go on stage and repeat it without at least double-checking yourself first?
A: A big fucking idiot.
Even more revealing is that nobody else has ever corrected him. Not only is he an idiot, but everybody he surrounds himself with are also idiots - or secretly laughing at him behind his pompous back.
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Every orifice of his body is doing that simultaneously.
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Nailed it!
Trump’s unhinged tweeting got him elected, and it’s costing him in court, bigly
This.
This is why I never want Drumpf to cease tweeting while he’s the President.^ I think all the calls and pleas for his staff to take his phone off him are misguided. As revolting and offensive as his tweets are, they are pure gold for people like Judge Watson.
^ after that he can GTFO
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And yet he only talks out of one of them. 
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That’s been my sense. However, reportedly, those who have known him claim he’s intelligent. That may just be relative to everyone else in the White House though, which is damning with faint praise. Certainly he’s out of his depth, trying to navigate a world he’s totally unprepared for, so he’s not competent in his role.
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That describes all of them. The change I’ve seen in the business and financial worlds – which were much more dictionary-definition ‘conservative’ when I was growing up – is that now they think they’re at the pinnacle of expertise and intelligence, and so can easily take on any ‘lesser’ job, which would be work in any other industry. There’s no understanding that there are different skill sets for different occupations, or even that there is at least as much work/effort involved as in what they do.
They underestimate the work of being in the government, because they do not respect it. And obviously, when I say “it”, I mean “us”.
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I can’t stop laughing at the story title!
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I was watching some news show on youtube where a guy who spent a lot of time around Bannon was talking about him and saying, “He’s not a white supremacist, he’s not a white nationalist,” and then he was trying to figure out how to say that Bannon thinks America ought to be a nation for white people without making it sound like he is a white nationalist. He couldn’t do it, and let the word “white” slip out, like “America was founded as a white nation” or somesuch.
People will claim rich white men are [good quality] even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are not, so I don’t put much stock in claims of his intelligence.
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