Ed Brayton doesn’t believe that Trump, as the presumptive Republican nominee, is going to move to the center. I’ve got a lot of respect for Ed, and he knows politics way better than I do, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and disagree.
Ed writes:
I’ve heard a lot of Democrats worry that he’s now going to “move to the center” and start acting presidential and pick up lots of moderate votes. If you think that, I don’t think you understand his campaign or its appeal at all.
He goes on to say that he doesn’t think moderate/independent voters are going to fall for Trump’s vapid “Make America Great Again” schtick. And that much I agree with. But I don’t think that means Trump isn’t going to try anyway. Just as he sees himself as loved by Hispanics and Asians and women and everybody, he’s going to see himself as the darling and savior of the center and the left.
He’s already won the right and, as he so famously boasted, he could just about walk out into the street and shoot somebody, and his followers would still support him. So that battle’s essentially over, and there’s nothing to stop him now from making a sharp left turn. He won’t have any more substance to his claims than he ever has, but he can still start talking about some of the concerns of the left (without any more conviction than he has had for the concerns of the right).
Trump is a panderer, as he’s shown time and again. He’ll say whatever his audience wants to hear. So far, he’s been a pretty good judge of what right-wing audiences want to hear. Let’s see what he says now that he wants to impress the rest of us.
Because moderate/indepent voters are so very much more intelligent and savvy than those dumbass republicans who’ve been voting for it in bigger and bigger numbers since he started?
Are moderate/independent voters immune, somehow, to the techniques Trump used to dismantle the Republican opposition, in the teeth of all the predictions that he had no chance? I don’t think so.
Just how successful does he need to get before people take him seriously?
It’s getting to the point that I think there are many on the left AND right who will be loudly trashing Trump’s chances of staying President after he’s won the election. He just seems to have a way of short-circuiting pundit brains.
There is little doubt that Trump wants to win. He seems to need to win, and to be seen winning. Bringing it into high relief, it help to remember that loser is one of his go-to insults.
Of course it also helps to keep it in context that Trump sees winning not as a means to an end, or a step along the way to a higher goal. Winning is an end in itself. It is a lifestyle, a brand, his public persona.
He is going to win so much ‘we will get tired of winning’.
Conclusion: America has become self parody with a serious presidential candidate working out his inner conflict by living out, and potentially about to have the nation live out, a Twilight Zone episode.
Please watch the videos, if you are like me, even if you disagree with the premise, who can resist one of the better episodes of TZ:
The eternal conflict between wanting to be a winner and the emptiness of winning as an end in itself.
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/watch-donald-trumps-philosophy-success-was-inspired-twilight-zone-episode
I think that anyone who doesn’t see Trump as a serious threat, perhaps up among the most serious threats this country has faced, has rocks in their heads.
Which raises the question — are you still planning on writing in Sanders in November? If you live in a non-battleground state, knock yourself out. But if you live in a state that’s close, or you encourage people living in a close state to vote for Bernie, and Trump wins, then at least as far as I, personally, am concerned, it will be YOUR FAULT, just like the Bush years were the fault of the Nader voters in Florida.
And I say this as someone who donated to Bernie and already voted for him in the primary.
I’m going to see how things go. I have to say, there’s a meme floating around with Batman slapping Robin across the face and saying “Three Supreme Court Justices!” and that one’s giving me some pause.
I’m no real happy with any of the other options besides Bernie, though. If Trump wins, America turns fascist; if it’s Hillary, America turns feudal, because the wealthy elite and the dark money will just consolidate their stranglehold on the political process and loot the middle and lower classes.
I figure, worst case scenario, if Hillary turns out to be like her husband, we get a couple more years like the 90s. Yeah, it wasn’t a great time for everybody, but it was mostly a time of peace and prosperity — especially compared to the ruin on every level that Trump is promising.
It was also a time when Glass-Steagall was repealed, which is arguably a significant factor in the events leading up to the near collapse of the economy under Dubya. I don’t know if we’ll survive another crisis like that one, but I know the banks want to substantially decrease the few remaining consumer protections we have left, and I don’t trust Hillary to do it.
Oh, and I also confess that my first vote ever, back in 1980, was for John Anderson. Because obviously there was no difference between Carter and Reagan, right? Because I was young and stupid. So I have to share some of the blame for Reagan’s disasters.
brucegee1962 @4:
“Oh, and I also confess that my first vote ever, back in 1980, was for John Anderson. ”
My first vote in a presidential contest, primary, was in 1979 when I thought RR was dangerous and had to be stopped in the primary. Although I lived in a mainly Democratic state I registered as a Republican just so I could vote for Anderson in the Republican primary. I voted for Carter in the election. I always liked Carter and thought he never got the credit he deserved for the good, but much, maligned, job he had done.
It didn’t work but for the remainder of RR’s terms I always felt I had done everything I could to stop the doddering maniac. With rare exception I vote a straight Democratic ticket even though I’m still registered as a Republican. In the Florida primary I voted for Carson even though he was already out of the race.