US General Election 2016

Mrs Figg wrote:Mussolini didn't have nukes.

Don't worry. Trump doesn't even know what the Nuclear Triad is, so he probably won't be able to figure out how to use the "football".

^

David H wrote:How about Berlusconi?

I don't know a ton about Berlusconi but from what I know/recall I can see a number of valid similarities there.

{{Except Berlescuni was in charge of a tiny army that goes in retreat, whereas Trump is in charge of the largest armed forces and weapons cache on the planet including nukes and chemical weapons. That thought does not seem much safer than the thought of any other nutty dictator type round the world having them (Trump might not be a dictator but he shares most of the hallmarks personality wise of one right down to a liking for living in gold places with gold taps and putting his family members in charge of important government departments (if speculation proves true on his cabinet appointees))}}}

Eldorion wrote:Do you guys think that nukes get launched by an app that'll be installed on Trump's smartphone so he can press it whenever he gets mad?

And even if you do think that Trump launching a nuclear attack is likely, it's a very different situation than European fascism in the 1930s, so there's still no reason to keep bringing up Mussolini and Hitler except as a cheap way to try to score points.

yes I do think nukes get launched by an app on a smartphone that he can press whenever he gets mad. He will definitely do that. it will be called Instageddon.

I love scoring cheap points. they are the most satisfying

I think if you can find so much to take the piss out of then that person really is capable of anything.
I wouldn't trust Trump with an empty paper bag. I think he believes he is "The chosen One" & those that are chosen have nothing to fear & shall never be hurt................( until the Diazepam wears off ).....Actually, NO, he's high on his own self gratification.

The defining characteristic of a dictator is not narcissism or even nepotism (though they're both worrying), but a lack of constitutional checks on their power. While the continuing concentration of authority in the executive and Congress' abdication of responsibility when it comes to declaring war are real issues, the US political system is still very far from giving dictatorial power to any one person. I've talked before about how the US executive (despite trends in recent decades) is in many ways less powerful than what you get in parliamentary systems, as can be seen in the many obstacles that Obama has faced since the Democrats lost the House in 2010.

The biggest concern I have going forward is that we now seen a unified Republican government but that is by definition bigger than Trump and not a dictatorship.

If I recall correctly the last time we had a unified Republican government was back in the salad days of Dubya when he didn't think a president should do anything anyway domestically. Then 9/11 happened and all focus was international.

The Dems held onto the Senate until 2002, when the Republicans (largely due to 9/11 and the War on Terror) bucked the normal trend of incumbent parties suffering during midterm elections and took control of both houses of Congress. We then had a unified government until after the 2006 midterms when the Democrats retook both houses (albeit having to caucus with Bernie and one other Independent in the Senate in order to get a majority).

Ironically though some of the most controversial Bush era legislation including the Patriot Act and the first round of the Bush tax cuts were passed before the GOP took the Senate.

Edit: it's worth noting though that Bill Clinton was much more conciliatory to the post-1994 Congressional GOP than Obama was post-2010, so I think there's more now that might be changed/rolled back than there was in 2001.

I normally don't bother reading the NY post, which is full of right-wing hyperbole. But one article in the midst of the normal blather had a gem in it that rang true:

"Donald Trump’s remarkable victory is a necessary tonic, a populist corrective to the arrogant misrule of the liberal establishment. The forgotten, left-behind and betrayed Americans did the political equivalent of using a 2-by-4 to get a mule’s attention: Sorry for the pain, but you weren’t listening."

I wouldn't call it liberal misrule, but the aloofness was real.

this brings to mind Back to the Future when Marty goes into the future and the world has become rather like how I imagine it will be like now. spooky.

And they were only a year off!

That's freaked me out !!!!!

Well, the electors of the college can still chose to vote for someone else. Never happened, but they clearly have the right. We can even look them up and petition them to vote their conscience rather than the general vote.

I wonder how the public would react if that did happen halfy.

And what pool of people can they elect from?

The electors can technically vote for whoever they want. This is a constitutional relic from the original conception of the electoral college as a body that would choose the President based on its own judgment(s). The electoral college has literally never done this since for the first two elections nobody challenged Washington and the third time (1796) set the precedent of parties nominating slates of electors who pledged in advance to vote for a specific candidate, which is still how we do it today. Some states have laws penalizing faithless electors but the punishment in most (maybe all) is just a fine and the constitutionality of such laws is questionable. I am opposed to the continued existence of the electoral college but faithless electors changing the outcome of an election is unprecedented and would provoke a constitutional crisis as well as deeply damaging the validity of American democracy.

One argument/excuse some people are putting forward is that because Clinton received a plurality of all votes cast she deserves to be President, but in truth we have no idea who would have won the national popular vote if voters went to the polls knowing that this mattered. Many people who live in safe states choose to vote third party as a protest, or don't vote at all, because they know that the outcome in their state is not really in question. Since the national result this year was extremely close (Clinton finished two-tenths of a percentage point higher than Trump), even a small increase in the number of people voting tactically might have tipped the election. We have no way of knowing so I think the argument that electors should break their pledges based on what amounts to a retroactive rule change is highly disingenuous. Alternatively, a few people have argued that electors should break their pledges because they think Trump himself is an existential threat to American democracy, but I think I've made my thoughts on that idea known already.

Edit: to be clear, I think that the winner of the popular and electoral votes being different is an argument against the electoral college in general, and I'd love to see it done away with in the future (very unlikely to happen though), but you have to set the ground rules for any election in advance and then stick with them or you rob the election of its legitimacy.

"Ignoring and mocking the experts, as people are doing around Brexit and Trump’s campaign, is no different to ignoring a doctor who tells you to stop smoking, and then finding later you’ve developed incurable cancer. A little thing leads to an unstoppable destruction that could have been prevented if you’d listened and thought a bit. But people smoke, and people die from it. That is the way of the human."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-stone/history-tells-us-what-will-brexit-trump_b_11179774.html?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/america-tyranny-donald-trump.html

http://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37889032

Always the old people ruinin' it for everyone!

the claim that the media was setting it's own agenda rather than reporting the facts is borne out by this former New York Times reporter:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/stunned-trump-york-times-finds-205904328.html

Trump just told his 3 top priorities were health care, jobs, and the border.

If he can provide for the same people currently insured under obamacare yet use a unified congress to unjumble it, that would be good. But from what he said in the past it's not at all clear the same people will be able to maintain insurance.

But from what he said in the past it's not at all clear the same people will be able to maintain insurance.- Halfy


{{actually the only clear definitive statement on health care I can recall Trump making was way back in the very first of the Republican debates when he advocated the Scottish health care system on the basis 'that works pretty well' and that's of course NHS Universal Health Care- Trump problem around healthcare is he seems to be quite left wing on it but his party fought tooth and nail against Obamacare which isnt even close to an NHS style system and they went nuts over that. }}}

It would be a lovely irony if the only person who can install a NHS is someone the Republicans put in office but nobody in congress likes.

Mr. Trump said he favors keeping the prohibition against insurers denying coverage because of patients’ existing conditions, and a provision that allows parents to provide years of additional coverage for children on their insurance policies.
“I like those very much,” Mr. Trump said in the interview.- Fox News

{{{Made particularly funny by reading some of the comments on that story- two favourites of mine -

"I hope Trump keeps his promises or I swear I'll hunt him down..."

"He won't. He can't. He already hired tons of lobbysts to help him deal with DC. Drain the what??? Ugh. He's folding like a lawn chair."

}}}}