The Many Faces of US Politics...

[sid waddell]

Trump is just gagging for a serious terrorist attack to happen.

That would be the signal for him to attempt to invest sweeping draconian powers in himself, and probably to wage war, and to hell with the restraint of politics and law, which he's already tried to ride roughshod over.

Exactly what Bush and the neo-cons did after September 11th, except worse.

Shock doctrine, the tactic beloved of fascists and authoritarians everywhere.

[J70]

A lot of Trump supporters are morons.....a lot aren't

Trump has become the voice of the white working class....as Bill Clinton described them "the people humping it 60 hours a week who's health care premiums have doubled and their coverage cut in half"

This "Muslim" ban is ingenious by Trump.....it does absolutely nothing for the Democrats in terms of winning back any of the voters they need in 2018 to keep the Senate seats that are up in Trump states.

Secondly, god forbid there is some type of terrorist attack Trump has a very long list of Democrats who can be painted as caring more about terrorists than about the safety of American citizens.  He has them completely painted into a corner

So its all about "optics" whitey? Let's paint a massive group as the enemy, just in case. Its a no-lose strategy.

Integrity and facts and morals be damned.

Exactly....it's a master stroke!  My go to political show is Morning Joe.  Joe called 15 Trump supporters he knows personally last weekend and they are estatic with the ban and Trumps overall performance



I said during the election that you would  have "brass knuckle" Republicans in charge if Trump Won....as opposed to Country Club Republicans. These motherfvckers will destroy anyone and anything who gets in the way of their agenda

So while the Democrats were focusing on the faux war against women and transgender bathrooms, Trump and his team pulled off an incredible end run.

Hillarys 3M popular vote victory means zero when it comes to 2018 which will be fought on a state by state basis.....and yet I still have FB and Twitter friends posting this $hite

So are you saying the only way forward in US politics is demagoguery? Hype and scaremongering and distraction and demonization?

[whitey]

I'm saying that if the Democrats had focused on the the issues that mattered to the swing voters in the swing states they would have won the Presidential Election...instead they mainly focussed (imo) on the issues that mattered most to the progressive wing.......who's votes were already in the bag.

The Democrats also underestimated the level of anger among the electorate

They tried to spin Obamacare as a resounding success.....when in reality it has been a resounding failure for the swing voters in the swing states.  Most of these people already had healthcare....all Obamacare did was double their premiums  and cut their coverage in half

Here in Boston....the very popular and commonsensical Democratic Mayor, Marty Walsh is going to get primaried by an African American candidate backed and funded by DeBlasio people.....just fvcking incredible

[J70]

I'm saying that if the Democrats had focused on the the issues that mattered to the swing voters in the swing states they would have won the Presidential Election...instead they mainly focussed (imo) on the issues that mattered most to the progressive wing.......who's votes were already in the bag.

The Democrats also underestimated the level of anger among the electorate

They tried to spin Obamacare as a resounding success.....when in reality it has been a resounding failure for the swing voters in the swing states.  Most of these people already had healthcare....all Obamacare did was double their premiums  and cut their coverage in half

Here in Boston....the very popular and commonsensical Democratic Mayor, Marty Walsh is going to get primaried by an African American candidate backed and funded by DeBlasio people.....just fvcking incredible

So Hillary should have run on the Obama years, of which she was part, being a failure?

[whitey]

Well the reality is that they were a failure for the swing voters in the swing states but we know she can't come out and say that (even though Bill and Chelsea did unwittingly)

She has hundreds of millions of dollars to hire the brightest and best consultants and pollsters  to craft a message that would resonate with these swing voters.  It doesnt need to resonate with ALL of them....just an extra 1 or 2 percent swing in her direction and she has it in the bag

[stew]

"Educate yourself"

I get it now, fox is an Irish MMA fan. That explains the stupidity and somewhat prickly nature whilst still, dumbfoundingly, maintaining a smug self assurance.

Trump supporters on the internet often remind me of the way WWF wrestlers would act in those promo segments to camera in the early 1990s, where they would "call out" an opponent.

It's like they're trying desperately to put on a front and convince themselves that what they're saying is true while really knowing that the whole thing is an act, and complete bullshit.

You're dead right....Republicans are so stupid, they're going to get wiped out in 2018

Democrats are so much smarter....they're going to sweep the decks

You heard it here first

While nobody claims that all the Trump voters were idiots, there's evidence that nearly all the idiots voted for Trump.

In a PPP poll released on 26 January:

-          While only 18% of voters overall think Trump's inauguration had the biggest crowd of, 34% of Trump voters do think he had the biggest crowd ever.

-          Only 29% of voters overall think that Trump's inauguration had a bigger crowd than the women's march. 59% of Trump voters believe that his inauguration had a bigger crowd than the women's march.

In a previous poll, released on 9 December:

-          67% of Trump voters say that unemployment increased during the Obama administration. (Reality - unemployment fell from 7.8% to 4.7% under Obama.)

-          Only 41% of Trump voters say that the stock market went up during the Obama administration. 39% say it went down. (Reality - the DJIA multiplied by 2.5 while Obama was in office.)

-          40% of Trump voters insist that he won the national popular vote. (Reality – Clinton's vote was almost 3 million more than Trump's.)

-          Only 54% of Trump voters expressly say they don't think Pizzagate is real. (Reality – well, what can one say?)

-          Only 53% of Trump voters think that California's votes should be allowed to count in the national popular vote. 29% don't think they should be allowed to count, and another 18% are unsure.

-          60% of Trump voters think that Hillary Clinton received millions of illegal votes to only 18% who disagree.

And my very favourite - 73% (that is not a misprint) of Trump voters think that George Soros is paying protesters against Trump to only 6% (yes, that's correct too) who think that's not true, and 21% who aren't sure one way or the other. And 48% of Trump voters think MOST of the people who protested at airports across the country last weekend were paid to do so by Soros.

Really, who gives a shite about inauguration numbers, Obama kicked his ass on that score, move on.

As for what people think on silly issues, it does not matter, Trump won and now Ryan and the GOP have to make sure they keep the President in check, and they can.

[seafoid]

Stew, Priebus is supposed to keep smacht on Trump and he is like Armagh playing Tyrone. Out of his depth

[omochain]

Seafoid... a more appropriate analogy would be greatly appreciated. We are feeling a bit raw about the abuse we are taking from Offeeessials today

[Imposerous]

 
[/quote]

Really, who gives a shite about inauguration numbers, Obama kicked his ass on that score, move on.

As for what people think on silly issues, it does not matter, Trump won and now Ryan and the GOP have to make sure they keep the President in check, and they can.
[/quote]

Er, the POTUS seems pretty preoccupied by it. 

[bennydorano]

Twitter has been consistently funnier since Trump came to office. Wealth of material tbf.

[stew]

Stew, Priebus is supposed to keep smacht on Trump and he is like Armagh playing Tyrone. Out of his depth

Did we not just beat that durt with 13 men?

[seafoid]

Noah Rothman

‏@NoahCRothman



Trump's day began with attacking a federal judge's allegiance to the country and ended by morally equating America with revanchist Russia.

[heganboy]

There have been may articles on why Trump won, or why Clinton lost, some of them complete and utter nonsense. This is as strong a piece as I have read. All politics is local, and understanding the sense of being failed by the system in America's heartland is key to understanding the "why" of the latest election result. You may characterize those who voted in many different ways, (I know I did) but hope springs eternal, and the short version is that many American voters felt that Donald Trump was their only hope.

Amid the ongoing protests against President Trump, calls for "resistance" among Democratic politicians and activists, and the overheated rhetoric casting Trump and his supporters as fascists and xenophobes, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking that America has been taken over by a small faction of rightwing nationalists.

America is deeply divided, but it's not divided between fascists and Democrats. It's more accurate to say that America is divided between the elites and everybody else, and Trump's election was a rejection of the elites.

That's not to say plenty of Democrats and progressives don't vehemently oppose Trump. But the crowds of demonstrators share something in common with our political and media elites: they still don't understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support Trump's executive order on immigration than oppose it, but you wouldn't know it based on the media coverage.

Support for Trump's travel ban, indeed his entire agenda for immigration reform, is precisely the sort of thing mainstream media, concentrated in urban enclaves along our coasts, has trouble comprehending. The fact is, many Americans who voted for Trump, especially those in suburban and rural areas across the heartland and the south, have long felt disconnected from the institutions that govern them. On immigration and trade, the issues that propelled Trump to the White House, they want the status quo to change.

During his first two weeks in office, whenever Trump has done something that leaves political and media elites aghast, his supporters cheer. They like that he told Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto he might have to send troops across the border to stop "bad hombres down there". They like that he threatened to pull out of an Obama-era deal to accept thousands of refugees Australia refuses to admit. They want him to dismantle Dodd-Frank financial regulations for Wall Street and rethink US trade deals. This is why they voted for him.

The failure to understand why these measures are popular with millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in American society that didn't begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.

Nowhere is this disconnection more palpable than in the American midwest, in places such as Akron, a small city in northeast Ohio nestled along a bend in the Little Cuyahoga river. Its downtown boasts clean and pleasant streets, a minor league baseball park, bustling cafes and a lively university. The people are friendly and open, as midwesterners tend to be. In many ways, it's an idyllic American town.

Except for the heroin. Like many suburban and rural communities across the country, Akron is in the grip of a deadly heroin epidemic. Last summer, a batch of heroin cut with a synthetic painkiller called carfentanil, an elephant tranquilliser, turned up in the city. Twenty-one people overdosed in a single day. Over the ensuing weeks, 300 more would overdose. Dozens would die.

The heroin epidemic is playing out against a backdrop of industrial decline. At one time, Akron was a manufacturing hub, home to four major tyre companies and a rising middle class. Today, most of that is gone. The tyre factories have long since moved overseas and the city's population has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. This is what Trump was talking about when he spoke of "American carnage" in his inaugural address.

Akron is not unique. Cities and towns across America's rust belt, Appalachia and the deep south are in a state of gradual decline. Many of these places have long been Democratic strongholds, undergirded by once-robust unions.

On election day, millions of Democrats who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 cast their votes for Trump. In those earlier elections, these blue-collar Democrats were voting for change, hoping Obama would prioritise the needs of working Americans over the elites and special interests concentrated in Washington DC and Wall Street.

For many Americans, Hillary Clinton personified the corruption and self-dealing of the elites. But Trump's election wasn't just a rejection of Clinton, it was a rejection of politics as usual. If the media and political establishment see Trump's first couple of weeks in office as a whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider taking on a sclerotic system that needs to be dismantled. That's precisely what many Americans thought they were doing eight years ago, when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama promised a new way of governing – he would be a "post-partisan" president, he would "fundamentally transform" the country, he would look out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the American people wanted someone to fix it.

After all, the Tea Party didn't begin as a reaction against Obama's presidency but that of George W Bush. As far as most Americans were concerned, the financial crisis was brought on by the excesses of Wall Street bankers and the incompetency of our political leaders. Before the Tea Party coalesced into a political movement, the protesters weren't just traditional conservatives who cared about limited government and the constitution. They were, for the most part, ordinary Americans who felt the system was rigged against them and they wanted change.

Trump voters didn't care if he said offensive things or spoke off-the-cuff. In fact, they liked that about him
But change didn't come. What they got was more of the same. Obama offered a series of massive government programmes, from an $830bn financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to Dodd-Frank, none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks, then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food stamps and welfare programmes just to get by. Americans asked themselves: "Where's my bailout?"

At the same time, they saw the world becoming more unstable. Part of Obama's appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America's standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama's White House insisted that everything was going well.

Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.

In many ways, Trump's agenda isn't partisan in a recognisable way – especially on trade. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump made good on a promise that Sanders also made, pulling the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and proclaiming an end to multilateral trade deals. He also threatened US companies with a "border tax" if they move jobs overseas. These are not traditional Republican positions but they do appeal to American workers who have watched employers pull out of their communities and ship jobs overseas.

Many traditional Republicans have always been uncomfortable with Trump. They fundamentally disagree with his positions on trade and immigration. Even now, congressional Republicans are revolting over Trump's proposed border wall, promising to block any new expenditures for it. They're also uncomfortable with Trump personally. For some Republicans, it was only Trump's promise to nominate a conservative supreme court justice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia that won their votes in the end – a promise Trump honoured last week by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch, a judge very much in Scalia's mould.

Once Trump won the nomination at the Republican national convention, most Republican voters got on board, reasoning that whatever uncertainty they had about Trump, the alternative – Clinton – was worse.

In many ways, the 2016 election wasn't just a referendum on Obama's eight years in the White House, it was a rejection of the entire political system that gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, a botched healthcare law and shocking income inequality during a slow economic recovery. From Akron to Alaska, millions of Americans had simply lost confidence in their leaders and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. In their desperation, they turned to a man who had no regard for the elites – and no use for them.

In his inaugural address, Trump said: "Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people." To be sure, populism of this kind can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn't arise from nowhere. Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump's rise on racism or xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don't understand why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.

from
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions

[seafoid]

There have been may articles on why Trump won, or why Clinton lost, some of them complete and utter nonsense. This is as strong a piece as I have read. All politics is local, and understanding the sense of being failed by the system in America's heartland is key to understanding the "why" of the latest election result. You may characterize those who voted in many different ways, (I know I did) but hope springs eternal, and the short version is that many American voters felt that Donald Trump was their only hope.

Amid the ongoing protests against President Trump, calls for "resistance" among Democratic politicians and activists, and the overheated rhetoric casting Trump and his supporters as fascists and xenophobes, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking that America has been taken over by a small faction of rightwing nationalists.

America is deeply divided, but it's not divided between fascists and Democrats. It's more accurate to say that America is divided between the elites and everybody else, and Trump's election was a rejection of the elites.

That's not to say plenty of Democrats and progressives don't vehemently oppose Trump. But the crowds of demonstrators share something in common with our political and media elites: they still don't understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support Trump's executive order on immigration than oppose it, but you wouldn't know it based on the media coverage.

Support for Trump's travel ban, indeed his entire agenda for immigration reform, is precisely the sort of thing mainstream media, concentrated in urban enclaves along our coasts, has trouble comprehending. The fact is, many Americans who voted for Trump, especially those in suburban and rural areas across the heartland and the south, have long felt disconnected from the institutions that govern them. On immigration and trade, the issues that propelled Trump to the White House, they want the status quo to change.

During his first two weeks in office, whenever Trump has done something that leaves political and media elites aghast, his supporters cheer. They like that he told Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto he might have to send troops across the border to stop "bad hombres down there". They like that he threatened to pull out of an Obama-era deal to accept thousands of refugees Australia refuses to admit. They want him to dismantle Dodd-Frank financial regulations for Wall Street and rethink US trade deals. This is why they voted for him.

The failure to understand why these measures are popular with millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in American society that didn't begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.

Nowhere is this disconnection more palpable than in the American midwest, in places such as Akron, a small city in northeast Ohio nestled along a bend in the Little Cuyahoga river. Its downtown boasts clean and pleasant streets, a minor league baseball park, bustling cafes and a lively university. The people are friendly and open, as midwesterners tend to be. In many ways, it's an idyllic American town.

Except for the heroin. Like many suburban and rural communities across the country, Akron is in the grip of a deadly heroin epidemic. Last summer, a batch of heroin cut with a synthetic painkiller called carfentanil, an elephant tranquilliser, turned up in the city. Twenty-one people overdosed in a single day. Over the ensuing weeks, 300 more would overdose. Dozens would die.

The heroin epidemic is playing out against a backdrop of industrial decline. At one time, Akron was a manufacturing hub, home to four major tyre companies and a rising middle class. Today, most of that is gone. The tyre factories have long since moved overseas and the city's population has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. This is what Trump was talking about when he spoke of "American carnage" in his inaugural address.

Akron is not unique. Cities and towns across America's rust belt, Appalachia and the deep south are in a state of gradual decline. Many of these places have long been Democratic strongholds, undergirded by once-robust unions.

On election day, millions of Democrats who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 cast their votes for Trump. In those earlier elections, these blue-collar Democrats were voting for change, hoping Obama would prioritise the needs of working Americans over the elites and special interests concentrated in Washington DC and Wall Street.

For many Americans, Hillary Clinton personified the corruption and self-dealing of the elites. But Trump's election wasn't just a rejection of Clinton, it was a rejection of politics as usual. If the media and political establishment see Trump's first couple of weeks in office as a whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider taking on a sclerotic system that needs to be dismantled. That's precisely what many Americans thought they were doing eight years ago, when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama promised a new way of governing – he would be a "post-partisan" president, he would "fundamentally transform" the country, he would look out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the American people wanted someone to fix it.

After all, the Tea Party didn't begin as a reaction against Obama's presidency but that of George W Bush. As far as most Americans were concerned, the financial crisis was brought on by the excesses of Wall Street bankers and the incompetency of our political leaders. Before the Tea Party coalesced into a political movement, the protesters weren't just traditional conservatives who cared about limited government and the constitution. They were, for the most part, ordinary Americans who felt the system was rigged against them and they wanted change.

Trump voters didn't care if he said offensive things or spoke off-the-cuff. In fact, they liked that about him
But change didn't come. What they got was more of the same. Obama offered a series of massive government programmes, from an $830bn financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to Dodd-Frank, none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks, then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food stamps and welfare programmes just to get by. Americans asked themselves: "Where's my bailout?"

At the same time, they saw the world becoming more unstable. Part of Obama's appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America's standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama's White House insisted that everything was going well.

Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.

In many ways, Trump's agenda isn't partisan in a recognisable way – especially on trade. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump made good on a promise that Sanders also made, pulling the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and proclaiming an end to multilateral trade deals. He also threatened US companies with a "border tax" if they move jobs overseas. These are not traditional Republican positions but they do appeal to American workers who have watched employers pull out of their communities and ship jobs overseas.

Many traditional Republicans have always been uncomfortable with Trump. They fundamentally disagree with his positions on trade and immigration. Even now, congressional Republicans are revolting over Trump's proposed border wall, promising to block any new expenditures for it. They're also uncomfortable with Trump personally. For some Republicans, it was only Trump's promise to nominate a conservative supreme court justice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia that won their votes in the end – a promise Trump honoured last week by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch, a judge very much in Scalia's mould.

Once Trump won the nomination at the Republican national convention, most Republican voters got on board, reasoning that whatever uncertainty they had about Trump, the alternative – Clinton – was worse.

In many ways, the 2016 election wasn't just a referendum on Obama's eight years in the White House, it was a rejection of the entire political system that gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, a botched healthcare law and shocking income inequality during a slow economic recovery. From Akron to Alaska, millions of Americans had simply lost confidence in their leaders and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. In their desperation, they turned to a man who had no regard for the elites – and no use for them.

In his inaugural address, Trump said: "Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people." To be sure, populism of this kind can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn't arise from nowhere. Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump's rise on racism or xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don't understand why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.

from
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions

The key issue is payrises. How many immigrants do the typical Trump voter see on a typical day ? Immigration was the fear glue used to get the coalition together. Trump focuses on that rather than payrises

"In his inaugural address, Trump said: "Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people."

So he has 3 Goldman Sachs people in his cabinet. Yeah, it's for the people.

[J70]

There have been may articles on why Trump won, or why Clinton lost, some of them complete and utter nonsense. This is as strong a piece as I have read. All politics is local, and understanding the sense of being failed by the system in America's heartland is key to understanding the "why" of the latest election result. You may characterize those who voted in many different ways, (I know I did) but hope springs eternal, and the short version is that many American voters felt that Donald Trump was their only hope.

Amid the ongoing protests against President Trump, calls for "resistance" among Democratic politicians and activists, and the overheated rhetoric casting Trump and his supporters as fascists and xenophobes, an outsider might be forgiven for thinking that America has been taken over by a small faction of rightwing nationalists.

America is deeply divided, but it's not divided between fascists and Democrats. It's more accurate to say that America is divided between the elites and everybody else, and Trump's election was a rejection of the elites.

That's not to say plenty of Democrats and progressives don't vehemently oppose Trump. But the crowds of demonstrators share something in common with our political and media elites: they still don't understand how Trump got elected, or why millions of Americans continue to support him. Even now, recent polls show that more Americans support Trump's executive order on immigration than oppose it, but you wouldn't know it based on the media coverage.

Support for Trump's travel ban, indeed his entire agenda for immigration reform, is precisely the sort of thing mainstream media, concentrated in urban enclaves along our coasts, has trouble comprehending. The fact is, many Americans who voted for Trump, especially those in suburban and rural areas across the heartland and the south, have long felt disconnected from the institutions that govern them. On immigration and trade, the issues that propelled Trump to the White House, they want the status quo to change.

During his first two weeks in office, whenever Trump has done something that leaves political and media elites aghast, his supporters cheer. They like that he told Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto he might have to send troops across the border to stop "bad hombres down there". They like that he threatened to pull out of an Obama-era deal to accept thousands of refugees Australia refuses to admit. They want him to dismantle Dodd-Frank financial regulations for Wall Street and rethink US trade deals. This is why they voted for him.

The failure to understand why these measures are popular with millions of Americans stems from a deep sense of disconnection in American society that didn't begin with Trump or the 2016 election. For years, millions of voters have felt left behind by an economic recovery that largely excluded them, a culture that scoffed at their beliefs and a government that promised change but failed to deliver.

Nowhere is this disconnection more palpable than in the American midwest, in places such as Akron, a small city in northeast Ohio nestled along a bend in the Little Cuyahoga river. Its downtown boasts clean and pleasant streets, a minor league baseball park, bustling cafes and a lively university. The people are friendly and open, as midwesterners tend to be. In many ways, it's an idyllic American town.

Except for the heroin. Like many suburban and rural communities across the country, Akron is in the grip of a deadly heroin epidemic. Last summer, a batch of heroin cut with a synthetic painkiller called carfentanil, an elephant tranquilliser, turned up in the city. Twenty-one people overdosed in a single day. Over the ensuing weeks, 300 more would overdose. Dozens would die.

The heroin epidemic is playing out against a backdrop of industrial decline. At one time, Akron was a manufacturing hub, home to four major tyre companies and a rising middle class. Today, most of that is gone. The tyre factories have long since moved overseas and the city's population has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s. This is what Trump was talking about when he spoke of "American carnage" in his inaugural address.

Akron is not unique. Cities and towns across America's rust belt, Appalachia and the deep south are in a state of gradual decline. Many of these places have long been Democratic strongholds, undergirded by once-robust unions.

On election day, millions of Democrats who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 cast their votes for Trump. In those earlier elections, these blue-collar Democrats were voting for change, hoping Obama would prioritise the needs of working Americans over the elites and special interests concentrated in Washington DC and Wall Street.

For many Americans, Hillary Clinton personified the corruption and self-dealing of the elites. But Trump's election wasn't just a rejection of Clinton, it was a rejection of politics as usual. If the media and political establishment see Trump's first couple of weeks in office as a whirlwind of chaos and incompetence, his supporters see an outsider taking on a sclerotic system that needs to be dismantled. That's precisely what many Americans thought they were doing eight years ago, when they put a freshman senator from Illinois in the White House. Obama promised a new way of governing – he would be a "post-partisan" president, he would "fundamentally transform" the country, he would look out for the middle class. In the throes of the great recession, that resonated. Something was clearly wrong with our political system and the American people wanted someone to fix it.

After all, the Tea Party didn't begin as a reaction against Obama's presidency but that of George W Bush. As far as most Americans were concerned, the financial crisis was brought on by the excesses of Wall Street bankers and the incompetency of our political leaders. Before the Tea Party coalesced into a political movement, the protesters weren't just traditional conservatives who cared about limited government and the constitution. They were, for the most part, ordinary Americans who felt the system was rigged against them and they wanted change.

Trump voters didn't care if he said offensive things or spoke off-the-cuff. In fact, they liked that about him
But change didn't come. What they got was more of the same. Obama offered a series of massive government programmes, from an $830bn financial stimulus, to the Affordable Care Act, to Dodd-Frank, none of which did much to assuage the economic anxieties of the middle class. Americans watched as the federal government bailed out the banks, then the auto industry and then passed healthcare reform that transferred billions of taxpayer dollars to major health insurance companies. Meanwhile, premiums went up, economic recovery remained sluggish and millions dropped out of the workforce and turned to food stamps and welfare programmes just to get by. Americans asked themselves: "Where's my bailout?"

At the same time, they saw the world becoming more unstable. Part of Obama's appeal was that he promised to end the unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, restore America's standing in the international community and pursue multilateral agreements that would bring stability. Instead, Americans watched Isis step into the vacuum created by the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011. They watched the Syrian civil war trigger a migrant crisis in Europe that many Americans now view as a cautionary tale. At home, Isis-inspired terrorist attacks took their toll, as they did in Europe. And all the while Obama's White House insisted that everything was going well.

Amid all this, along came Trump. Here was a rough character, a boisterous celebrity billionaire with an axe to grind. He had palpable disdain for both political parties, which he said had failed the American people. He showed contempt for political correctness that was strangling public debate over contentious issues such as terrorism. He struck many of the same populist notes, both in his campaign and in his recent inaugural address, that Senator Bernie Sanders did among his young socialist acolytes, sometimes word for word.

In many ways, Trump's agenda isn't partisan in a recognisable way – especially on trade. Almost immediately after taking office, Trump made good on a promise that Sanders also made, pulling the US out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and proclaiming an end to multilateral trade deals. He also threatened US companies with a "border tax" if they move jobs overseas. These are not traditional Republican positions but they do appeal to American workers who have watched employers pull out of their communities and ship jobs overseas.

Many traditional Republicans have always been uncomfortable with Trump. They fundamentally disagree with his positions on trade and immigration. Even now, congressional Republicans are revolting over Trump's proposed border wall, promising to block any new expenditures for it. They're also uncomfortable with Trump personally. For some Republicans, it was only Trump's promise to nominate a conservative supreme court justice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia that won their votes in the end – a promise Trump honoured last week by nominating Judge Neil Gorsuch, a judge very much in Scalia's mould.

Once Trump won the nomination at the Republican national convention, most Republican voters got on board, reasoning that whatever uncertainty they had about Trump, the alternative – Clinton – was worse.

In many ways, the 2016 election wasn't just a referendum on Obama's eight years in the White House, it was a rejection of the entire political system that gave us Iraq, the financial crisis, a botched healthcare law and shocking income inequality during a slow economic recovery. From Akron to Alaska, millions of Americans had simply lost confidence in their leaders and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. In their desperation, they turned to a man who had no regard for the elites – and no use for them.

In his inaugural address, Trump said: "Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, DC, and giving it back to you, the people." To be sure, populism of this kind can be dangerous and unpredictable, But it doesn't arise from nowhere. Only a corrupt political establishment could have provoked a political revolt of this scale. Instead of blaming Trump's rise on racism or xenophobia, blame it on those who never saw this coming and still don't understand why so many Americans would rather have Donald Trump in the White House than suffer the rule of their elites.

from
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/05/trump-not-fascist-champion-for-forgotten-millions

I think we get the whole "f**k you", two-fingers-to-the-"establishment" element of Trump's appeal.

Unfortunately for these people, not much is going to change.

Factories are not coming back and those that get tax breaks to stay are going to double-down on automation. Hispanic immigrants are still going to be doing roofing and asbestos abatement, picking the oranges and spuds, and delivering your Seamless order. Everything is still going to be made in China. Mobile phone videos are still going to publicize the killing of unarmed black men.

But at least coal companies will now be able to dump their spoil heaps and run-off into rivers and whatever element of protection Dodd-Frank and so tried to offer consumers from the predators of Wall St will be stripped away. And Obamacare will be gone, whatever the hell THAT will mean for health insurance (and methadone treatment and overdose shots).