Donald J Trump is president of the United States of America. Even if you don’t like it, even if you are horrified, it is still true. What is also true, is that marches like The Woman’s March don’t change that and they won’t change Trump either. Bitching whether it is facebook, Twitter, a blog, or standing on a street corner, doesn’t do anything but, temporarily, make the bitcher feel better.
I worked on the Obama campaign and went to a couple of Bernie Rallies plus I’ve complained a lot so I figured I had done all that was necessary but I was wrong. I am just beginning to understand what the Tea Party figured out years ago, that getting people in power, whose values match mine, is the only way to get the political result I want. Get involved. The easiest and fastest way to get people we want into power is in the swing districts of the House of Representatives. That is where this Trump insanity started and, if Progressives want to take back the house and end the insanity, we have to get involved. Here is a good place to start.
We want our politicians transparent, yet we want them powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker some time ago.
“I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.” Trump at CIA Headquarters.
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” Kellyanne Conway, senior Campaign Manager and now counselor to President Donald Trump, to NBC’s Chuck Todd.
What most irks me right now is when my fellow Liberal dismiss Trump as stupid or deranged. The problem is that when one thinks of him as stupid and he does something like the crowd size press briefing, the natural reaction is to say Look how stupid he is, doing something so stupid and counter-productive? But Trump is not delusional – he just believes what he wants to believe which, BTW, will be much easier now that he is in the Presidential Bubble – he is very smart and he is nasty and cunning; the question should be Why would he do something that seems so stupid and counter-productive, what does he have up his sleeve?
I have been relatively sanguine about Trump, mostly because I think he is more of a Populist than a Conservative. For me, the worst case scenario would be for Trump to be impeached and Pence takeover. But, while Trump says “[we] are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the people,” he keeps surrounding himself with the Conservative Establishment. That is very worrying.
I keep looking at Trump’s daughter and son-in-law who were formerly Democrats and part of the New York Liberal Elite and are now trusted advisors, and I think They sound so sane, they will keep him from going off therails, and then I watch the first thing that comes out of the White House. The first Official press briefing wasn’t about building a wall or saving a factory or, even, canceling Obamacare, no, the first press briefing, the most important thing on the agenda, was about the size of the crowd during Trump’s speech. It was just a sad little man lying, trying to make us believe that this inaugural crowd was the largest in history.
This guy is out of control; the sane ones don’t tone him down. It is impossible to change Donald Trump because this is a family operation and President Donald John Trump is the family patriarch. He sets the tone. He is the boss. That is more than a little disquieting.
President Barack Obama did not do all I had hoped but there is no doubt that he is an exemplary human being, probably the last decent human being we will have for a while. His last speech, given to an adoring crowd in Chicago, is personal and touching. If you haven’t heard it, it is worth watching.
By way of a background aside, a couple of years ago, Michele’s stepfather, Jim, gave us a subscription to Forbes. I am an avid magazine reader, almost any magazine, like People in a dentist’s office for example, but Forbes is probably the one magazine that doesn’t resonate with me, even in the slightest. It is a celebration of rich people only because they are rich and we often take it from the mailbox and throw it directly into the recycling. But, because we were getting Forbes, I think, we got a complimentary issue of Bloomberg Business, which is a different and, to my sensibilities, much better magazine. End aside.
If you read the same papers that I do – the New York Times, The Atlantic, or The New Yorker, for example – it is hard to think of Trump as a rational player. It seems like it will be a win for us all if he just doesn’t get in a pissing match with Putin and start WWIIl. But after reading this fascinating article, Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go, in the aforementioned Bloomberg Business, Trump seems very rational. The article was obviously written before the election and takes the general attitude that Trump is going to lose – for lack of a better word – but it still makes the case that Trump’s campaign was not just randomly different, but different in a calculated way.
Like Obama and his team eight years ago, Trump and his team changed the game. Before the article, I had sort of held the position that Hillary lost because she ran a lousy campaign – I had joked that, in a year of change, Hillary’s campaign was Vote for me for more of the same – but, with new information, I’ve changed my mind. Now I think Trump won because he ran a brilliant campaign. The article is well worth reading, here is a sample:
Parscale was building his own list of Trump supporters, beyond the RNC’s reach. Cambridge Analytica’s statistical models isolated likely supporters whom Parscale bombarded with ads on Facebook, while the campaign bought up e-mail lists from the likes of Gingrich and Tea Party groups to prospect for others. Some of the ads linked directly to a payment page, others—with buttons marked “Stand with Trump” or “Support Trump”—to a sign-up page that asked for a name, address, and online contact information. While his team at Giles-Parscale designed the ads, Parscale invited a variety of companies to set up shop in San Antonio to help determine which social media ads were most effective. Those companies test ad variations against one another—the campaign has ultimately generated 100,000 distinct pieces of creative content—and then roll out the strongest performers to broader audiences. At the same time, Parscale made the vendors, tech companies with names such as Sprinklr and Kenshoo, compete Apprentice-style; those whose algorithms fared worst in drumming up donors lost their contracts.
