He appears to have the knowledge involved in managing a personal checkbook, and that is all. In other words, he is like 80% of us.
Kinda feel like Trump’s current argument that drags in and holds parochial Republicans who essentially are rooting for laundry rather than a worldview, doctrine or ethos is a feeling along the lines of “Maybe today he’ll stop saying profoundly stupid things.”
Well, to be fair, he has experience with corporate finance. It’s more complex than personal finance… but it’s still way different from finance at the governmental level.
It’s no quite AS different as some folks on the far left try to pretend, where borrowing money has literally no impact on anything ever… but it’s different to the extent that Trump’s experience with corporate finance doesn’t really apply. You can’t just put the country into bankruptcy and make a profit on it.
I guess I should have said that what he SAYS sounds like personal checkbook level, but what he KNOWS is, like you said, also something unhelpful.
It’s a reminder that Trump’s primary adviser is Trump. He watches Cable News, he reads the National Enquirer, and he probably googles his own name a whole lot. Then, he decides the best plan based on his experience in real estate development and television.
He doesn’t need to know any more than that, as none of his supporters do. “Common sense” and bluster suffices.
Worth noting. Trump soon starts getting classified CIA briefings. His campaign chief works for pro-Putin Russian oligarchs. Should go fine.
And then there’s also that pesky 14th Amendment. Oops.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
Honestly, just when I think he couldn’t say anything stupider he floats this idea. Even ignoring the unconstitional nature of the idea. From a financial prespective it makes no sense, it is the type of short-term thinking that is roundly critized in corporate America. The US government is able to borrow money at ridiculous low rates 1.75% for a ten year bond and 2.6% for 30 years, because the US is among a small number of countries. (most commonwealth countries, Switzerland) that have never defaulted on our soveriegn debt. In contrast a country which is serial defaulter like Russia, their ten year bonds are 8%. Even if the brilliant negotiator was able to get say Saudi and China to accept 70% on the dollar, after 5 year we’d owe more because of higher interest rates.
I keep coming back to to the fact that these sorts of distinctions may not matter, as they are completely lost on most voters. When the subset is “Trump Voters,” we may be talking about literally hundreds of people who understand the problem.
Well, no. Big picture, it doesn’t matter at the micro-level of attracting in voters.
At the macro level, though, I think it does. Donald Trump’s previous words and continued espousing of them closes off avenues to certain voting demographics for him. He needs to be opening doors, even a crack, to bring new folks in. A big part of that happening will be rank and file Republicans who will hold their noses and vote for the guy in hopes that he’ll at least come up with palatable choices for SCOTUS in the next four years. But statements like this one confirm biases against Trump and close off doors and pathways to coming into support for him.
CNN’s poll last week was their first big national poll of a Trump v HRC fight, and the one area where Trump got favorable marks of 50%+ over Clinton was handling the economy. If you’re a Trump strategist, you think “There, that’s a vector to grabbing some wavering conservatives and a few independents. That’s a start.” And then Trump says stuff like this. You don’t even need to understand the full implications of it, just understand “He wants to imperil your retirement savings by defaulting on the national debt.” And vectors like “Better on the economy” start to lose potency.
Certainly on most voters. But a lot of otherwise intelligent people have voted for Trump. Trump got 58% of the Republican vote in Connecticut, now maybe I’m just buying into stereotypes, but if there is any pocket of Wall St. Republican you’d think it would be in CT. A lot of those foks have to understand this stuff.
My most prominent and vocal FB friend that is backing Trump is a guy I worked with on my 2nd job out of school. He has a EE Master from MIT, and he wasn’t just book smart, but smart about everything. I’ve not seen him in decades and found it odd as Vietnamese American he changed his FB name from Ngai to Smith. He post some borderline racist stuff, and lacks empathy, but he is smarter than I am on anything involving technology and certainly my equal in economic and business knowledge.
All true. But the Trump supporters I hear (ok, it’s in the gym locker room, because where I work there aren’t any) aren’t concerned by any of this. Literally, you can point out every single idiotic thing Trump says, and they’ll agree in principle that yes, that is stupid, but it doesn’t matter. Their hatred of Clinton, of the Democrats, of anything smacking of mainstream politics is so deep, so profound that they again quite literally would support anyone who appeared to be thumbing his nose at the establishment. It’s a level of irrational feeling I’ve never seen before in an election, even when Ted Kennedy was in play, And that was a pretty high level of irrationality on the right. This is an order of magnitude worse.
The only saving grace is that, so far, there are far fewer Trump supporters than previous blocks of scared, irrational, panicky voters it seems.
Yes, acknowledged. The point being, that core group of Trump supporters who think that’s awesome is extremely unlikely to be enough for him to win in November. And so at some point between now and then, for Trump to win, he’s got to create bridges to help folks who aren’t already voting for whomever wears the elephant costume. And stuff like this forecloses those avenues.
I guess when you are a Billionaire, you just sort of stop giving a shit? It’s like what is the worst that can happen to you (other than losing all your money)?
‘Why don’t i run for President? sure why not! I bet i’d be great at it.’
I don’t know his background (other than property) but i assume he went to some decent college and got a proper education? So his ‘act’ is very much for the punters?
Trump has begun his nuanced assault on Hillary Clinton by saying that she “enabled” Bill’s affairs… possibly by destroying the women’s lives?
“She’s been the total enabler. She would go after these women and destroy their lives,” Trump said, adding, “She was an unbelievably nasty, mean enabler, and what she did to a lot of those women is disgraceful.”
I’m not sure that he knows what an “enabler” means in this context, but let’s put that aside for the moment.
Predicting that the Clinton campaign would respond by citing his many offensive statements about women in the past, he waved those aside:
Don’t forget, I was never going to run for office.
If only.
Ayup, hence the “saving grace” part. I’m hoping the disease doesn’t spread. Please, Hillary, keep your feet from your mouth and your campaign in high gear!
It’s not an act. He really doesn’t know anything. It’s like some bottom of the barrel YouTube commenter got the nomination of a major party for President.
If there is any thought behind his economic statements, it’s the thought that introducing enough uncertainty to crash the economy before November can only enhance his election prospects.
Just came here to say “I love the poorly educated.”
That’s an awesome plan. Bomb the shit out of there and destroy the infrastructure… and then just magically rebuild it. Because we saw in Iraq how easy that was, right?
Trump is right … we should have destroyed the oil infrastructure, and we should have done it a year ago. Oil was the linchpin of the ISIS economy, an economy that collapsed as soon as the Russians started bombing the convoys. Funds dried up instantly and ISIS was forced to slash salaries and even forgo payments. Morale tanked and the desertion rate shot up. ISIS was also the single largest oil supplier to rebel forces in Syria and so the strikes created an immediate fuel shortage all across the country hampering their ability to wage war.
This is the problem with our concept of limited or humane war. We didn’t want to hit the tanker trucks because the men behind the wheel weren’t soldiers. We didn’t want to hit the wells, because we were worried about damaging the environment.
If this war matters, if we actually want to win, then we have to do ugly things. War is cruelty, and you can not refine it.
As to rebuilding it… we made many mistakes in Iraq, one which was building power plants and water stations to western spec, and using high tech western solutions at that. The Iraqis didn’t understand how to operate these facilities, or how to repair them. Making matters worse, spare parts had to be shipped in from Europe, or the states. So that that point, I have every confidence in the ability of the Syrian government to rebuild their infrastructure on terms that work for them. They know what they need, and they know how to operate it. We just need to get out of the way and let them do it.
But this should be a secondary conversation, what matters now, what matters most, is the destruction of the Islamic State.
Everything else is secondary.
Intentionally murdering civilian families of enemy combatants.
Precision weapons have created this fiction in Washington. We believe that we can fight these clean wars, wars where we do not inflict civilian casualties, and wars where we do not suffer any casualties of our own. That’s madness. We don’t need to recreate Dresden, but we do need to be willing to accept the realities of war. That innocent people must die in order for us to achieve our goals.
Clinton called off a strike in Afghanistan before 9/11. And he did so because he was worried about civilian casualties. That was a mistake, and it’s a decision that he still regrets.
You are being willfully ignorant, and ignoring clearly absurd and wrong things that trump has said.
To take the most obvious error/lie you just made, is your absurd attempt to suggest that Trump’s absolutely horrific suggestion that we intentionally murder women and children, was merely some reference to collateral damage.
It was not. Clearly.
Trump suggested the use of terrorist actions, to intentionally murder the families of our enemies. A clearly illegal, not to mention immoral order. If you recall, this was pointed out to trump, and hey, that gives us another awesomely stupid thing he said!
Specifically troubling for Hayden was Trump saying he would want to do “worse” than torture and would want soldiers to kill terrorists’ families.
Baier told Trump the latter is explicitly illegal, but Trump insisted, “They won’t refuse. They’re not gonna refuse me. Believe me.”
Baier said, “But they’re illegal.” Trump brushed it off.
The Donald insisted, “I’m a leader, I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”
Your attempt to handwave it away with some argument about the necessity of collateral damage is immaterial to Trump’s statements, because he was talking about INTENTIONAL murder of civilians.