DWill wrote:
Overjoyed, more than likely. Yes, you were wrong about Trump just as I was, but at least you did say he needed to be taken seriously.
But (I can hear the objectors saying to me), you're not even giving Trump a chance to succeed! You're just doing to him what you objected to when, in 2012, the Republicans said they'd block anything Obama tried to accomplish. The point is that most of the plans he has put forth should be rejected out of hand, should not ever see the light of day. But as DB has said, the hope--if that is the word--here is Trump's own scattershot and ad hoc approach to governing, at which he is more inexperienced than a small-town mayor. He simply will now let pragmatism take over in many cases, dropping many ambitions that were just poses anyway, although he'll select a few pet causes with harmful potential.
I'm guessing the banks and brokerage houses will run wild and there will be hell to pay for that. I'm super worried that he is going to destroy all advances we've made in alternative energy sources and give free reign to the coal industry. But maybe not since he's now hedging on climate change. I think he's stacking the deck--he wants to bring back jobs via the coal industry but if that doesn't work then he'll say he couldn't do it because the atmosphere is too fragile to handle all the waste. But it's potentially catastrophic. I expect a lot of scandals.
A pundit description of Trump during the campaign that I like compares him to a second-rate jazz musician, improvising according to the stimulus in front of him. He has even said that he focused on keeping the light on the cameras glowing red, indicating that his words were going right to the cable news feed. All publicity is good publicity. Now that he is pres-elect, even his supporters, I think, will demand more coherence and consistency from him. Can he deliver?
Trump has no real base. He has a hodge-podge of support--racists, Christians, xenophobes, conservatives who'll believe anything as long as it comes out of the mouth of another conservative, old guard America-firsters, Hillary-haters, the unemployed, people who can't ever bring themselves to vote for democrats no matter how bad the republican candidate is, etc. They are loosely allied but focused differently and want different things from Trump. So part of this base expects him to build the wall but part of it doesn't believe he really meant it. Similarly, many expect him to jail Hillary Clinton but many don't. It's great for getting yourself elected but it's hell trying to satisfy them all once you get elected as Trump is already finding out. While the racists really want that wall built, they don't really care about Hillary as much as they hate her. The unemployed just want him to bring them jobs as he promised but don't care about promoting Christianity. Trump became many things to these many people but he can't possibly maintain that facade because now he has to prove it. He bit off WAY more than he can chew. It's hard to say what will happen once the majority of his support accepts that he duped them.
I find it puzzling and exasperating that Trump has so little respect for the office of the presidency that he would not think it necessary to divest himself as much as possible of conflicts of interest. Already he has done very disturbing things that presage a deluge of crony capitalism. It is that corruption that many writers are warning could cost him his office in relatively short order. He seems blithely unaware of the dangers to himself and the country.
Sure. That will be his downfall. He's a greedy man and he just can't let go of those sources of wealth. He's using his children to smokescreen what he's doing and he'll be lucky if one of them doesn't end up in jail because of it. Already, some of his supporters are angry that his children are involved in his policy-making saying, "We elected you not them." But, as you say, he's just up there winging it and he's going to keep winging it until someone tells him he has to stop. By then, who knows what damage will have been done.