The Trump Presidency

[JayUtah]

A fair point. Honestly, the way you colonials mangle the mother tongue...

That's freedom for ya!

All seriousness aside, my penance as an actor is often having to perform English stage literature using the proper vocabulary and pronunciation.  Pygmalion doesn't really work with an American accent.  Conversely I have friends and acquaintances who are notable actors in or from England, who have also at times done American characters quite well in film and television.  According to them, the hardest word to say in properly rhotic English is "rural."  I proposed also "juror," and got no disagreement.  I'm told that prior to Received Pronunciation, the present Cornish accent is closer to what English used to sound like.  This may explain American.

this is why 'Brahms and Liszt' is the cockney rhyming slang phrase for drunk, Liszt rhyming with pissed...

Ah, Cockney rhyming slang: the last bastion of utter incomprehensibility to anyone who's not from London.  Or Fred Dibnah to anyone not from Yorkshire.

We say 'pissed off' to mean what I gather from TV shows most Americans mean when they say 'pissed'.

We use both interchangeably to mean angry.  In American in never means drunken.

'Fanny' is another one to be very careful with....

Yes.  Most Americans have no idea why a fanny pack is worn in the front.

[JayUtah]

However, I don't think he has the capacity to see past his own narcissism to recognize the hypocrisy.

I don't think he has the capacity to judge anything from an non-autocentric perspective.  If it favors him, it's trustworthy.  If it opposes him, it's fraudulent.  That's the sole criterion.  He isn't concerned with whether objective fact agrees with him.  He doesn't believe in objective fact.  So the concept of hypocrisy doesn't even arise in this case.  From a deeply narcissistic point of view, it's perfectly rational to do what he does.

I also noted that almost to a person, every Republican in Congress that was approached for reaction about the tweet ran away from giving comment or gave some lame excuse if they did reply. Even with such a softball question as that one, they couldn't show any kind of moral backbone.

Agreed.  The excuse that it's just Trump being Trump doesn't fly anymore because the President has so clearly gone off the deep end.  They can't credibly tell us to just ignore him, because he's now taking extreme and dangerous measures to insure he is not ignored.

[Peter B]

Not having followed it, why do you say she ran an awful campaign?

There are many opinions on this.  Unlike engineering, this is something that may not have a distinct right or wrong answer, and it's not my area of expertise.  Those disclaimers in place, here's my take.

Too much rainbow, not enough mainstream.  The Clinton campaign wrongly believed that they could assemble a coalition of demographically dissimilar liberals that could outvote a homogeneous conservative base.  They failed.  It's a bit tone-deaf for me to say so under prevailing circumstances, but you simply cannot win a national election in the United States without broad appeal to white, working-class males who don't have college degrees.  The campaign's decision to court one group over the other produced an image of Hillary Clinton as a coastal elitist.  That doesn't play in Peoria.  Promising to stand up for minority rights, and even having a history of doing it, are always things America likes to see and hear.  Especially this month, where the long-standing problems are once again boiling over.  But it simply doesn't produce voters in sufficient numbers by itself.  It's amazingly difficult to craft a credible message of equality and the breaking down of barriers that resounds well enough with both the BLM types and the Peoria types to result in an American majority.  I'm not sure I could do it.  The problem with the Clinton campaign is that they didn't even try.

This was something which happened in our Federal election last year. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) tried to appeal to both urban progressives and blue-collar coal workers in regional areas. In retrospect it was a noticeable problem for well over a year as ALP leader Bill Shorten was caught between mixed messages or upsetting one of these two demographics. What made it worse for the ALP was that it had been losing the urban progressives to the Greens for close to a decade.

Too much science and not enough campaigning.  The 2016 Clinton campaign relied on very sophisticated data-mining and analytics models.  Now -- with expertise -- I can tell you that this is a giant growth sector and it will revolutionize the way we make decisions.  The problem was that the Clinton campaign's model was wrong.  Just because you are taking a scientific approach to focusing efforts doesn't mean your science is valid.  The analytics model badly mispredicted the outcomes of the GOP primary in several states.  Rather than accept that their approach didn't work, and return to proven-but-intuitive campaign strategies, they assured themselves that they would be able to refine the analytics to assure victory.  This did not happen.  Again the model failed to accurately predict the outcomes of the battleground states that fell to Donald Trump.  It was telling them one thing, and seasoned campaigners were telling them aother thing, and the seasoned campaigners turned out to be right.  Had Hillary Clinton simply campaigned the way her husband had, I believe she'd have had a better chance of winning.

This was also something which happened to some extent in Australia. Or at least, independent pollsters missed the mark by a few percentage points. The most (typically Australian) miss was by an online betting agency which offers to Pay It Out Early: two days before the election they allowed ALP backers to claim their money, then had to pay out to Liberal Party backers (apparently at odds of 6-to-1).

But my understanding is that professional pollsters also made a hash of the 2016 Presidential election result, so presumably any problems with the Democrats' modelling also apply to those pollsters?

[Peter B]

Someone put up a picture of empty supermarket shelves and said this is how life would be in a Corbyn-led Labour government. Never mind that it was in fact the current reality under a Johnson-led Conservative government....

Ditto.  I mentioned my Fox-News-addled father-in-law.  On the first, worst night of BLM protests, we got a text message saying, "Welcome to Bernie Sanders' America."  Except, of course, that it was literally America under Donald Trump and largely his fault.

Again, reminds me of things I see over at UM.

Some Trump supporter makes a speculative comment about what some Prog (how they love to use that term, as though they're convinced it triggers progressives) might do. Then another Trump supporter treats the first comment as something that Prog has done, and then criticises the Prog's morality on the basis of that entirely fictional action.

The other behaviour which irks me is the way some Trump supporters demand polite treatment but indulge in name-calling themselves. Then, when they're called out for their name-calling, demean or sneer at their critics as being cry-babies.

Now to be fair, there are probably Progs who indulge in these sorts of behaviours with regard to Trump supporters too. But in their defence, as has been pointed out, Trump's behaviour is real while the progressive alternative's behaviour is entirely speculative.

[Jason Thompson]

Some Trump supporter makes a speculative comment about what some Prog (how they love to use that term, as though they're convinced it triggers progressives) might do. Then another Trump supporter treats the first comment as something that Prog has done, and then criticises the Prog's morality on the basis of that entirely fictional action.

This is a common thing among humans in general, it seems: the tendency to create a straw man argument, whether that be an entirely made up situation or else, more commonly, the creation of an entirely fictitious meaning to an event or statement. Most prevalent at the moment, of course, is the statement 'black lives matter'. That should not, in itself, be a controversial statement. Without fail, every single person I have seen arguing against the motion is responding as if it has the word 'only' appended to the front. JK Rowling is getting a lot of stick currently for her transphobic views, and all of her arguments seem to stem from the absurd conclusion that acknowledging the existence of trans people somehow means sex (gender) is 'not real.' Of course it's real, it's just not as binary as she imagines. Just for myself, I am a heterosexual male, genetically, physilogically, psychologically. I have been so since birth. Because a number of people in the world don't fit into the binary XX=female, XY=male bins doesn't in any way affect my 'maleness', for want of a better word. Not that long ago on this very board we had a conpiracist arguing about the words on Wernher von Braun's gravestone, and talking about the intepretation of the verse in Psalms cited thereon, and he could not understand that the flaw in his entire argument stemmed simply from the fact that von Brauns' gravestone literally says on it: "Psalms 19.1". That's it. The wording he was arguing about wasn't even on the stone itself.

The problem is, for most if not all cases, that getting these people to acknowledge that their flawed reasoning is the basis of why they are wrong, and so in fact the argument falls apart before we get into things like evidence, is incredibly difficult or actually impossible.

[jfb]

But yeah, regardless of just the general Clinton-ness and all that entails, she was an awful campaigner.  Awful.  Yes, she won the popular vote, but it's the electoral votes that matter, and her being an awful campaigner cost her states that Obama had won.  Twice.

Not having followed it, why do you say she ran an awful campaign?

Jay answered it beautifully, but I'll add that the major mistakes as I saw it were 1) spending too much time trying to placate the progressive wing of the party (a quantum impossibility IMO) and 2) actively alienating the people she needed to win in the EC.  The "basket of deplorables" statement, while cathartic and not inaccurate, was a major tactical blunder (in hindsight - full disclosure, I didn't see it as such at the time). 

And the campaign simply did not read the mood of the country correctly.  The fact that Trump was the Republican nominee should have been a wake-up call (for all of us), and all these well-connected and well-paid consultants simply ignored it. 

[gillianren]

I will say it's been interesting seeing the protests work on my older Facebook friends.  Almost all my friends my age or younger are progressive to a greater or lesser extent, but I do have a few friends' parents and things among my Facebook friends.  The wife of a BAUT member (I don't care; I still call it that) went from responding to my post about talking to Simon about racism with "I hope you're teaching him the difference between protesting and rioting" to "the police have no right to act the way they're acting."  In no small part because one of her own parents died of a brain bleed from falling down, and seeing what the police did to that man in Buffalo was extremely painful to her.

[gillianren]

AOC's tweet praising K-pop stans was taken by a pundit as support for North Korea because that's the world we live in.

Now, I don't actually believe the people requesting tickets are why that rally had terrible attendance; the number of tickets supposedly issued was several times the size of the venue, after all.  But it is interesting to see where alliances are forming.

[LunarOrbit]

Now, I don't actually believe the people requesting tickets are why that rally had terrible attendance; the number of tickets supposedly issued was several times the size of the venue, after all.  But it is interesting to see where alliances are forming.

I believe that it could have discouraged people from attending if they heard the indoor venue had reached capacity. Even without the pandemic being a factor, I suspect a lot of people wouldn't want to go if it meant they'd be outside and only see Trump on a monitor, especially since a lot of Trump's supporters are older.

But I also do believe Trump just can't attract the crowds he used to.

John Oliver had an interesting segment on "Last Week Tonight" last night about how the K-Pop fans / TikTok users have been flooding Twitter hashtags started by right-wing groups with K-Pop videos. It makes those hashtags useless for their intended purpose (organizing rallies, spreading misinformation and hate, etc.). It's basically negating the right's use of social media to influence the election, and I love it.

[jfb]

I firmly believe that the small crowd was due almost solely to COVID-19 concerns.  That may have been amplified by the expected crowd size, but in a non-pandemic world I don't think crowd size on its own would be that much of a turn-off (I'd expect it to have the opposite effect, in fact). 

The bigger thing the kids did was wreck the Trump campaign's voter database.  Parscale kinda gave the game away when he bragged about the "biggest data haul" ever.  This was about getting contact info for targeting GOTV efforts in November, and now their database is full of garbage - fake names, fake email accounts, fake phone numbers, etc.  Whether it was envisioned that way or not, this was a strategic blow as much as a tactical one. 

So everybody's been putting soundtracks over Trump's dejected walk from Marine 1 back to the WH (of which "Everybody Hurts" is still the best), but my wife noticed something and I see it too - that's the most normal he's looked doing, well, anything.  He's not tottering or otherwise acting enfeebled, he's standing up normally, his gait's fairly natural, hopped down the stairs from the chopper like a champ. 

My wife's theory is that he has a real phobia about falling, and without a handrail or someone to hold on to his brain just goes into overdrive so even a slight 3 degree grade is like looking at a cliff. 

We already know Trump is a giant ball of neuroses and phobias already, so it kinda fits.  That, and we're reasonably certain he has lifts in his shoes which explains the way he stands like a centaur, and you know that has to play hell with his balance as well. 

[gillianren]

John Oliver had an interesting segment on "Last Week Tonight" last night about how the K-Pop fans / TikTok users have been flooding Twitter hashtags started by right-wing groups with K-Pop videos. It makes those hashtags useless for their intended purpose (organizing rallies, spreading misinformation and hate, etc.). It's basically negating the right's use of social media to influence the election, and I love it.

I'm very proud of them.  Turns out the campaign isn't tech savvy, to the surprise of . . . no one, I expect.  It never occurred to them that you can fake those things, I guess.  The campaign's going to be sending fake e-mails to Oliver Clothesoff for months.

The way he drank water was pretty unsettled, though.

[LunarOrbit]

Turns out the campaign isn't tech savvy, to the surprise of . . . no one, I expect.  It never occurred to them that you can fake those things, I guess.

In 2016 they had the help of Russia, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. Now CA is gone, Facebook is under more scrutiny, and people like the K-Pop stans are using social media more powerfully than the Trump supporters ever could. I still worry about what Russia is up to though.

[jfb]

John Oliver had an interesting segment on "Last Week Tonight" last night about how the K-Pop fans / TikTok users have been flooding Twitter hashtags started by right-wing groups with K-Pop videos. It makes those hashtags useless for their intended purpose (organizing rallies, spreading misinformation and hate, etc.). It's basically negating the right's use of social media to influence the election, and I love it.

I'm very proud of them.  Turns out the campaign isn't tech savvy, to the surprise of . . . no one, I expect.  It never occurred to them that you can fake those things, I guess.  The campaign's going to be sending fake e-mails to Oliver Clothesoff for months.

This is why you have an army of volunteers to gather and verify contact information through callbacks or emails.  Nothing goes into your database until it's confirmed as valid.  Even though we live in the future, you need bodies to properly manage a campaign, and a lot of them. 

[LunarOrbit]

I've heard they could be facing a huge fine for not having a "I am over 18" confirmation box on their ticket form.

[gillianren]

They're facing a cease and desist letter from the Petty family, and they used "You Can't Always Get What You Want," which I thought they already had a cease and desist letter about.  Surely, regardless of their feelings aside from that, Mick Jagger's economics education would be enough to shy him away from Trump!