Serious Donald Trump's Presidency 9 Months In

Do you approve of Donald Trump's presidency so far?

  • Yes

    Votes: 37 15.4%

  • No

    Votes: 178 73.9%

  • Not Sure

    Votes: 26 10.8%
  • Total voters
    241
DTC

DTC

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It's been 9 months since Donald Trump has been in office and he has shaken up the political systems in interesting ways. What do you guys of his presidency so far? In what ways could he be a better president? Would you consider voting for him in 2020?

So far I've not been particularly impressed. He seems to be leaving policy mostly up to the GOP Congress and I don't like the policy they have put up so far. I wish he was a bit more organized and acted more presidential. The Russian investigation findings so far are concerning but I will await to see the final verdict by Muller.
 
Overall it has been much more quiet than most feared. But there hasn't been many bright spots either.

But there's still 5 years to go so anything can happen. But most likely nothing imo.
 
"the presidency", as in the executive branch, has been nothing short of hilarious. But...for the American people, everything's been pretty uneventful. Like, have any laws actually changed? Has our foreign policy changed in any way? We're a full year in and we honestly might as well still be in 2015.

He could be a better "president" by not acting like a child on twitter. Not a great image for the rest of the world.

Hahahaha no way
 
trump is fodder for journalists and comedy skit writers. i don’t like writing abt him bc the position he holds is a tool of white supremacy regardless of how palatable a body that occupies it is.

i critique the state and its murderous actions toward us here - in colonies - and around the world.

i’ve long seen these issues ever since he stepped foot in office. don’t really care abt him - clinton would have been my preference but like, i don’t care to argue within the framework of flawed liberalism
 
Aldertz said:
To be honest, it's nothing I didn't expect. People were chanting "OMG HE'S GONNA START A WAR11!!1!111!!1" but as we saw in a lot of his moves (like how DTC intelligently pointed out that the GOP Congress has been making most of the policy), policy-wise he's honestly no different than the rest of the GOP. I'm not impressed myself - I'm pretty left-leaning - but he's definitely the same kind of all-talk, generic or no-action politician.

And to think people thought he was really gonna start another war. It was kinda obvious he wasn't anything new policy-wise - and action-wise - in the election cycle.

I've been kind of out of the loop for a little bit but yeah this is what I've found from refreshing myself a bit.
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see, this is what i don't get. what constitutes as a "war" for you? a full blown arms conflict? or is war a racial crusade which serves to legitimize white supremacy in a newfound absolutely transparent way? or is it the continued war on environment and ecology? my biggest fear wasn't "oh he is going to get us blown the fuck up," but how internally he will aggrandize conflicts and generate / perpetuate already existing ones. in a way, donald trump doesn't have to even do anything - he can literally not pass a single law in his 4 years - to be ludicrously problematic. it is his very existence inside the system which is the problem. progress in law will be halted for the next 4 years - that should be enough of a crisis for you to constitute his presidency as a "social war."


all-talk, generic of no action politician? gutting the epa, attempting to revoke visas, asking for money for the wall through congress, appointing a collective of racist, billionaire henchman, openly endorsing the kkk, endorsing rape, endorsing, well, you get the point. i really do wonder what you consider "left-leaning." is the "left" for you just rhetoric that "overt racism is bad?"

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nevermind, i understand.
 
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Everything has been pretty "uneventful," meaning what? That because no laws have been passed we are just stuck in pre-election time until such that it gets corrected? I would argue that the United States has regressed far past pre-election 2015 era United States, some people even think its starting to achieve "developing nation" status. Just on the homefront, societal tensions have increased massively, with a huge race rift appearing after the rise of the alt right and demonstrations by nationalist groups. Claims to "drain the swamp" have been met with one of the most corrupt regimes thus far with the executive office violating nepotism laws (appointment of Jared Kushner, son in law, to Presidential cabinet, appointment of daughter Ivanka to "voluntary position") as well as keeping all of his businesses resulting in conflicts of interest with the nature of the office (something that fucking Jimmy Carter had on his hands before presidency, man had to sell his peanut farm before he even accepted office). President Trump has repeatedly demonstrated a failure of respect within his own administration, citing belief in foreign, currently under investigation, powers instead of believing the words and data of his investigation bureau. His administration is currently under investigation for collusion (aka treason) with Russia, with several campaign managers being indicted / informants to the investigation; a scandal that makes Watergate look like a harmless prank.

On a global scale the United States has heightened tensions with Asia (hint Aldertz, thats where a ton of the "hes gonna get us into a war" comes from). North Korea has openly stated they now have Nuclear weapons and aren't afraid to use them, and Trump with his rhetoric has simply escalated that propaganda and given North Korea reason to actually fear the US and WANT to develop nukes. The United States is the only current country that isn't in the Paris Agreement, a meeting of every country in the world where they decide what to do about climate change simply because some mouthbreathers still think that its all a chinese hoax or a democrat conspiracy. His "America first" mentality has completely killed any sort of free trade partnerships and has caused several previous US allies to withdraw any form of support for the US. On a global platform the United States is a joke with the rest of the world leaving the US behind on any humanitarian issue. The United States has slowly started to become more isolationist in an ever expanding globalist world, something that has historically been proven to be a rubbish plan to follow for the welfare of its citizens.

I will absolutely not be voting for Trump in the 2020 election. I doubt anyone will as I foresee federal prison for this man. I think this presidency is incredibly interesting as it is a turning point for the United States. Russian interference in the election has been proven time and time again and Mueller is starting to close in on the tangled web of corruption that is this administration, but it will all depend on what the people stand for and what the executive branch does or does not do. We're slowly approaching monty python levels of logic with these criminal cases (for fucks sake people are still advocating for Hillary Clinton to be "impeached" and for her to "step down" despite her being entirely irrelevant for almost a year). I have a sneaking suspicion it will all depend on Jeff Sessions; that is, if he is forced to step down and a replacement set in they will try to fire Mueller and rid him of the investigation (lol like they did to Comey) and that should be the catalyst for whether this country will turn to its democratic roots or sink back to authoritarian rule. This presidency is thoroughly interesting in a way that morbidly resembles a flaming wreck of a car crash on a highway because this is something entirely unlike anything I or most post Reagan people have witnessed in our federal government.
 
People have touched on a lot of things so I'm just going to quickly mention things that scared me so far.
  1. He sent out a tweet early this year about bringing National Guard troops to Chicago to curb the murder rates there. Outside of the nuclear war shit this is the one time I was really afraid
  2. Eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts. Why the fuck would you do that? It's not even a percentage of our budget.
  3. Openly endorsing Duterte. Duterte is the president of the Philippines and he is killing the fuck out of his citizens on the pretext of a drug war. Ethnic cleansing and Trump is supporting this guy.
  4. And of course the EPA shit
 
Not as bad as I thought it was going to be for ME, but I'm fairly insulated from the damage his "soft" policies have caused thus far. I imagine for many other Americans it's been much much worse.

If anything, it's been the side-effects of his ascendancy that have caused me the most angst. The emboldened bigotry, the unabashed racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the violent attacks on fellow Americans who enjoyed a brief eight-year renaissance of social "security." (And I don't mean Social Security, I mean, literally feeling safe walking home or going out to clubs in the city, etc etc). The "Trump is president now, you had your time!" rallying cries as the formerly "repressed" (read: cockroaches under the fridge) climb back out into the night are truly terrifying.
 
i think my fellow posters can guess my opinion of trump's first term. his election is going to bring down america, but not to the simple, melodramatic end his critics think - no childish tantrum leading to a first strike and then atomic rockets whistling overhead, a brief period of still and then a mushroom cloud reaching towards heaven. would we ever be so lucky! no, we're doomed to a worse fate than that - impulsivity was never our hamartia. we're going to all die from stupidity, greed, cruelty, and hick equanimity. that sounds like too many fatal flaws, but they're one at once, our national beating heart. it's our cowardly war impulse. we never fight wars we might lose, besides two, and, credit where it's due, they're beauties. but we never fight wars we could win either. we fight wars to extract maximum value. that's it. that's what iraq was - is. Afghanistan is the same, a whole lot of poor kids denied lives and unhaunted dreams as we edged our way to the big Osama Bin Laden cumshot and didnt, couldnt, clean up after, here or there. Vietnam. it goes back. We're stupid enough to be convinced of their necessity, greedy enough to breed people who want to do them, cruel enough to stomach the images, and even enough to tolerate the most heinous of imperial crimes, particularly on tv - wouldn't we just give George W. Bush a chance? and after trump what will happen. he'll go, but the democrats will beat him with the most feckless, stupid plunderer who knows the vocabulary, the world's first pirate pirate doll who says "intersectionality" and "vocational training" and "fair capitalism that works for main street, not wall street" instead of "ahoy, matey" when you pull the string, who will just fuck around getting blasted for four years, waiting to lose. the idiot vulgarity of trump will make the only requirement of a GOP nom a basic notion of civility, and they'll exploit that to promote Tom Cotton, a man who really, really, is the worst person alive. He will win in 2024 and promptly start a war with iran, which he aches to do even now. Everyone is going to believe they have a secret nuke, and Halliburton will make billions on billions, and so many people will die, and the media will hem and haw and both-sides until Tehran looks like the insides of a furnace and there's terror on u.s soil every day, which will be used to retroactively justify the war, and we'll have earned - stupid, greedy, cruel, and balanced. it's a war we - the nation and the world, because it will nearly be over - will lose. Think about an iranian speedboat torpedoing a u.s destroyer and turning it into a pressure cooker. thousands of poor kids in it will heat up, boil alive almost, cook in oily water, surrounded by guns of a failed state. those are the lucky ones. the unfortunate ones will survive only to be blown to absolute fucking pieces when the ship explodes, torn by shrapnel, not even afforded the dignity of going whole. it's the worst death in the world. the nuke is beautiful and dignified, the most clean end we can hope for, and brave - it's by our own hand, the invention and the execution. Drop the bomb! exterminate us all.
 
Every day I care about the President’s personality and words less and less (he’ already proven what he says is so unreliable that it also becomes meaningless for the worse and the better), and it’s also true that he’s been ineffectual regarding legislation and may even be helping to prevent the GOP from getting big stuff done...

...but there is stuff being done that will likely have repercussions that run under the radar and run deep.

De-funding academic research, eliminating NASA’s research activity, and overall impeding the collection and publication of sources of public information society has come to rely on. These things may fly low now, but can become incredibly consequential.

What it means for the environment, science and academia, transparency... for a “populist” Trump will be pretty dam effective at removing more power from the country’s people.
 
Let's not forget the Supreme Court nomination (which is arguably a stolen seat, and also arguably more Congress's doing anyway) and a slew of Federal Judge appointments.

It's clear he's got no understanding of policy or legislation but I don't think he's actually hindering Republican progress on that front, seems like most of those divisions already existed in the party and it's truly laughable that after all their bitching for 7 years about Obama they couldn't agree on decent alternative. Trump just gets frustrated and cracks the whip and/or twists the narrative to make it seem like what they're doing is winning. On the policy front I'm most worried about general incompetence brought about in large by comically bad administrative appointments.

On a socio-cultural front, I'm worried about the movement that's risen up in the wake of this election and the attempts to implement the Travel Ban and the Transgender Military Ban. These courts have been pretty good about this so far but it's difficult to ignore the widespread support these EOs and the prospect of a border wall have had in Trump's base, and the repeated attempts to undermine the Judicial branch when they make calls he doesn't like. Thank god we lost Bannon and Sebastian Gorka so they're not part of the slew of people peddling their agendas but still that's a pretty low bar to clear.
 
When he was first running I thought it was stupid to put someone forward with no political experience whatsoever. At the time I said that was on par with trusting someone who has never held a scalpel to give you open heart surgery.

So far I have seen absolutely nothing to prove me wrong.
 
Chou Toshio said:
Every day I care about the President’s personality and words less and less (he’ already proven what he says is so unreliable that it also becomes meaningless for the worse and the better), and it’s also true that he’s been ineffectual regarding legislation and may even be helping to prevent the GOP from getting big stuff done...
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You should continue to care. He may be unreliable but his words and actions have repercussions. He has a base that believes his fat ass walking into the white house magically kickstarted the economy and began the decrease in the unemployment rate. But of course when Obama reached full employment, the BLS made up numbers and the real employment rate was something like 40%, according to Trump. It only counts now because his ego is insatiable.

He also continues to tap into a large majority of the population that feels neglected; white middle class men. Trump claims race relations are so bad because of the Obama administration, yet this fat shit is the reason some Home Depot worker is carrying around a tiki-torch to a "free speech" rally. The more we sit and become complacent with his actions and begin subscribing to this "Trump is just being Trump" attitude only indicates we're content with how shitty our president is.
 
I say that things have been "pretty uneventful" because Trump ran on a policy that he would win, win, win, and for the past year he's done nothing but lose, lose, lose. Every bit of legislation he's spearheaded has been shot down in congress because people actually don't want them. danilo you brought up the elimination of the national endowment for the arts--but has it been abolished? I can't find any evidence of it being done away with, because people don't want it abolished. The only thing he's been able to do is talk and sign plenty of executive orders. The most damaging ones (like the travel ban and lifting ozone layer regulations) have gotten neutered by the courts, because people don't want them.

I don't think America has no problems as a country, but I don't think America became a different country than it was last year. You can say that social tensions are high, but if they are then they're not exclusive to trump's time as president. We've had protests all throughout 2016, not just since the election. tcr do you think trump has caused America to become a developing nation? If America has regressed to developing nation, then it didn't happen in a year.

Being at college, I'm very insulated from changes, but I'm optimistic for the future elections. I'm looking forward to the day that the smoking gun in Russia is found and Trump is carted off to jail for one of the hundreds of corrupt business decisions he's allowed to make while in office. (Then, we can all celebrate as we return to our regularly scheduled programming of corrupt democracy ran by the highest bidder)
 
GatoDelFuego You should read up on Peter Temin's (MIT Economics professor) newest book, The Vanishing of the Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy. In it he highlights the extraordinary differences between the upper 20% of America, the FTE (finance, technology, electronics) sector, the people who have their parents pay for their college, never worry about law enforcement, typical white collar Wall Street americans, and the bottom 80% of America, the people who go into extraordinary debt to pay for college, who worry about their minimum wage job and whether they'll be able to make rent for this month, who dont form lasting familial relationships anymore because they see a dying world around them. In this novel he uses Nobel Prize of Economics winner W. Arthur Lewis' economic model for developing nations to justify his reasoning that America has been regressing from the superpower it once was.

The Lewis Model, otherwise known as the Dual-sector model is one of the most influential contributions to the field of economics. Temin's parallels to this model with respect to the United States are thus: the low wage sector has little influence over public policy (yes, as evidenced by the all too famous "he didn't win the popular vote" as well as Trump's favorability ratings thus far in his presidency and the oligarchial tones that this republic has put forth, or as you put it "corrupt democracy ran by the highest bidder"). The high income sector keeps wages low to provide cheap labor for businesses (yes, as evidenced by the ever growing movement for a sustainable living wage met with increased resistance by the upper class elite and those that cling to the "bootstraps" myth). Social control is used to keep the low wage sector from challenging policies set about by the high wage sector (Mass incarceration? Ever increasing Police Brutality? Twisting of narrative on the NFL take a knee movement?) The primary goal of the richest members of the high income sector is to lower taxes (New tax reform implemented by GOP with calls from their donors such as Murdoch / Koch Brothers to "get it passed or don't ever call me again"). Low social and economic mobility ("poverty is a cycle," once you're rich you stay rich as evidenced by Trump bankrupting 6 times and still have 600 million to his name, bootstraps myth again).

Temin observes that to transition from the "low wage" to "high wage" sectors in America a strong solid educational foundation is needed. Not just college, but developing education and transition to high school as well. This falls flat when our educational departments and public funding is gutted in order to pave the way for Betsy Devos and her private education spiel and bias. Not to mention that once college ends many people struggle to find employment without resorting to social connections and relatives, something that in an increasingly institutionalized racist America doesn't exist in technological and financial districts of America for black people. Its 2017 and women still get treated unfairly in the workplace and are socially expected to just be delegated to being teachers / social workers.

This trend towards being a developing nation has been happening since at least the 70s economists point out, starting with Nixon's War on Drugs which targeted "hippies and blacks," was accelerated with the introduction of Reaganomics (trickle down for those unaware and has been disproven many a time) and was met with backlash in the most recent 2016 election. That's why Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, while both entirely different policy and morality wise, were heavy with the low wage white worker crowd who had grown to see the increasing divide between the "elite" of this country and the "vanishing middle class." It has only accelerated under Trump rule with many a bill / attempt at a bill I would be happy to point out.

Source One
Source Two
Source Three
 
He hasn't really done anything because congress hasn't let him do anything so i have to vote not sure. The criticism i have heard the most often is that he is unpresidential and embarrassing. So far the economy is still getting better, wages are up unemployment down and stock market up. But without a big accoplishment i can't say i approve either. yes the climate change stuff sucks but policy doesn't make a difference anyway, only a carbon tax can change anything. Like look at EV's post, the side-effects are the problem and not trump. Well can i say obama was bad because his presidency coincided with the rise of SJWs? i dont think thats fair. And then EV just assumes other people have been affected without any proof. lol
 
thesecondbest said:
He hasn't really done anything because congress hasn't let him do anything so i have to vote not sure. The criticism i have heard the most often is that he is unpresidential and embarrassing. So far the economy is still getting better, wages are up unemployment down and stock market up. But without a big accoplishment i can't say i approve either. yes the climate change stuff sucks but policy doesn't make a difference anyway, only a carbon tax can change anything. Like look at EV's post, the side-effects are the problem and not trump. Well can i say obama was bad because his presidency coincided with the rise of SJWs? i dont think thats fair. And then EV just assumes other people have been affected without any proof. lol
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I mean, congress hasn't let trump put any new laws in, but that doesn't mean he hasn't DONE anything. He does plenty. Like setting up his business for his kids to manage while government employees? Appointing people in his organization that keep "forgetting" to disclose their meetings with russia? Firing comey? You can look at that and say "hmm, not sure how the administration is doing, we'll give it some time"? There's plenty of evidence to look at and say whether you think the administration is doing a good job or not at this point. Who around you is saying that the most common complaint is that he's "embarrassing"? Cause the criticisms from people go a lot deeper than that.
 
thesecondbest said:
He hasn't really done anything because congress hasn't let him do anything so i have to vote not sure. The criticism i have heard the most often is that he is unpresidential and embarrassing. So far the economy is still getting better, wages are up unemployment down and stock market up. But without a big accoplishment i can't say i approve either. yes the climate change stuff sucks but policy doesn't make a difference anyway, only a carbon tax can change anything. Like look at EV's post, the side-effects are the problem and not trump. Well can i say obama was bad because his presidency coincided with the rise of SJWs? i dont think thats fair. And then EV just assumes other people have been affected without any proof. lol
Click to expand...

So according to you we're effectively living under the Obama administration just with Trump as POTUS.

Except for the fact that Trump has reversed a substantial number of laws Obama put into place. Here's just a taste:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/08/24/what-trump-has-undone/
 
thesecondbest said:
Like look at EV's post, the side-effects are the problem and not trump. Well can i say obama was bad because his presidency coincided with the rise of SJWs? i dont think thats fair. And then EV just assumes other people have been affected without any proof. lol
Click to expand...
I assumed if you'd turned on the news in the last year you would have already heard about it, but then again it's all "fake news" right?

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...gbt-hate-crime-wave-us-election-a7410166.html

  • "Maha Abdul Gawad said she was shopping in a local Wallmart on Wednesday when another woman approached, pulled off her hijab and said: “This is not allowed anymore, so go hang yourself with it around your neck not on your head.”"
  • "A woman in Delaware described overhearing four white men near her at a petrol station discussing Mr Trump’s victory and “how they’re glad they won’t have to deal with n*****s much longer”. “One walked over to me and said ‘how scared are you, you black b****? I should just kill you right now, you’re a waste of air’,” she wrote." “Then another guy steps forward and shows me his firearm. He says: ‘You’re lucky there’s witnesses or else I’d shoot you right here.’ I have called the police.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...ism_bigotry_and_abuse_since_the_election.html

http://time.com/4569129/racist-anti-semitic-incidents-donald-trump/

  • "“Since the election, we’ve seen a big uptick in incidents of vandalism, threats, intimidation spurred by the rhetoric surrounding Mr. Trump’s election,” Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center told USA Today. “The white supremacists out there are celebrating his victory and many are feeling their oats.”"

And jesus fucking christ dude do you really think SJWs are as bad as Nazis?
 
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