Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Trump would be a terrible president

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I’ve been paying close attention to Donald Trump since we happened to see his speech in Las Vegas that took him to the top of the polls. But politics is not about having a set of opinions. It is about working with other people to achieve collective ends. The business with Megyn Kelly is the finish of him so far as I am concerned, and I am unlikely to be alone on this.

It’s not just the disgust he creates. It’s his lack of proportion. It’s his attitude to the views of those who disagree with him that is so disturbing. He has never run for or held political office. He has only run businesses, which is precisely the wrong kind of experience for anyone in politics. A business is an organisation that does work by command and control. There are decision makers and those who put those decisions into effect. That is not the way a free society works.

Obama has much in common with Trump and has turned out to be the worst president in American history. My way or the highway, with the result that everything of any significance he has become involved with has turned out a disaster. Trump would be no worse, but he would be no better.

A presidential system is the worst form of democracy you can have. The last few years have shown how flawed a system it can be. We can only hope for a better outcome after 2017.

Insane may be just the word for them

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It is the left generally and the media in particular. They are soul sick, disgusting and deranged. This is from Why Trump Resonates & Why the left doesn’t get it in one image.

heads

Here is the exchange that those headlines refer to:

KARL: Would President Trump authorize waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques, even torture?

TRUMP: I would be inclined to be very strong. When people are chopping off other people’s heads and then we’re worried about waterboarding and we can’t, because I have no doubt that that works. I have absolutely no doubt.

KARL: You’d bring back waterboarding?

TRUMP: …you mention waterboarding, which was such a big subject. I haven’t heard that term in a year now, because when you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.

Now if you are not familiar with how things work. What both the right and the left will often do is grab something from an interview and note how radical it is, how unacceptable it is, how it shows a temperament that does not reflect well on the person in question.

So take a look at that sub headline from Crooks & Liars and let this fact sink in.

To the people at Crooks and Liars Donald Trump’s statement that: “when you see the other side chopping off heads, waterboarding doesn’t sound very severe.” is a statement so outrageous that they believe they can make political hay out if it.

However to any sane human being not only is that statement objectively true but I suspect to the American voter hearing about women being sold into sexual slavery by our ISIS foes

But the Islamic State’s “revival” of the institution of chattel slavery—sex slavery of Christian and Yizidi women and girls no less—has faded from public attention.

Over the past decade, thousands of Iraqi and Syrian Christians—including, in 2013, an entire convent of Syrian Orthodox nuns—have been taken captive for ransom. Last August, shortly after ISIS established its caliphate, it began something new. After capturing non-Sunni women and girls, ISIS began awarding and selling them as sex slaves. The vast majority were Yizidis but some, according to UN reports, were Christians.

Boasting about it and justifying it under islam:

“One should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar — the infidels — and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah, or Islamic law,” the group says in an online magazine published Sunday.

…said voters might conclude that waterboarding is much too good for them.

But apparently not to those on the left, at least not to those who read crooks and liars.

And if you would like to understand Trump’s appeal, this, I think, comes close to it:

After watching the pro-Obama mainstream media coordinate to effectively put Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)43% and Mitt Romney on defense throughout almost all of their respective presidential campaigns, Republican voters understand that if we are going to beat the Clinton Machine and the media in 2016, whoever we pick as our nominee will have to know how to dodge the media’s sucker-punches and fearlessly stay on offense.

In the face of more than a month of withering scorn and hate from the media, Trump has been everywhere hitting back, taking on all comers, ducking nobody, and turning Gawker into Wile E. Coyote.

The bottom line is that Trump is displaying something sorely lacking in the current Republican field: competence when it comes to handling a hostile, left-wing media.

Competence always translates into votes. The media knows this, which is why in 2012 and 2008 they created a dynamic that said, “Obama can do no wrong, and his Republican opponent can do nothing right.”

Without breaking the back of that media strategy, Hillary Clinton will be our next president, and right now only Trump is showing that he can break the media’s back.

“60%, 70% of the political media is really, really dishonest”

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Trump doing what no politician has done before, making the media the issue:

DONALD TRUMP, GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Let me tell you. The people don’t trust you and the people don’t trust the media. And I understand why.

COOPER: Right. And politicians.

TRUMP: You know, I have always been covered, fairly, accurately because it was usually a financial press. And you know numbers are numbers and my numbers happen to be great. So, I was always sort of treated fair.

With the media it’s, not all cases, some, some of the political media is great. And really honest. Even if they’ve don’t want to want to be, they’re really honest. But I find that 60%, 70% of the political media is really, really dishonest.

The single most important political change needed today is to reduce – you will never remove – media bias. Obama could not be dog catcher without the media. As it is, he remains almost as strong as they day he first ran for office in spite of the disasters he has not just coincided with in office, but has personally caused by the political choices he has made. I hope this catches on with others, but it has taken someone like Trump to actually start a process that needs to continue as long and as hard as it can.

Trump not surreal at all

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donald-trump-las-vegas-2

You can read my live blog here, and then there’s this news report, Donald Trump just gave an amazingly surreal speech in Las Vegas from which I will quote a bit to see how surreal the attitude of the headline writer is. The story is pretty accurate, and is worth reading through. The Drudge headline for the link is “Trump Rocks the House in Vegas”. It begins:

Donald Trump just gave one of the most bizarrely captivating speeches of his several-weeks-old campaign.

Standing in front of an animated screen in Las Vegas on Saturday, Trump spoke passionately for almost a half an hour, hitting some of his main talking points: President Barack Obama’s weakness, a ‘porous’ southern border, his business successes, and even Benghazi.

It was one of two similarly themed speeches in the day. Later, he spoke before a crowd of what his campaign said was more than 15,000 in Phoenix.

Trump made illegal immigration the primary focus of both speeches, railing against the Mexican government for supposedly sending undocumented immigrants to the US.

Although others like to compare him with Ronald Reagan, the closer comparison for me is with Dwight D. Eisenhower for whom his first elected office was also that of President. I thought it was a very effective speech, and while there are still lots of questions that must hang in the air for a while, there was nothing flaky about how he behaved or what he said. What made him different was that he was willing to take issues head on and not pussyfoot around. Hillary won’t take questions from reporters, all of whom are her friends and supporters. Trump took questions from the floor and answered every single question that the audience was willing to put up, both friendly and hostile. And while there were some vacant areas that he will have to think through more carefully, he made no mistake on the night. You would not want to write him off, at least not yet. For me he was much more impressive than Marco Rubio had been the day before.

UPDATE: Trump’s speech has had wide circulation here in the US. I am now at Stanford for the next couple of days and saw an AP story in the local press, garbled of course, and negative, but still mentioned. This, however, is the take from Breitbart: TRUMP IN VEGAS: SLAMS OBAMA, HILLARY, JEB… CROWD GOES WILD. Some of the flavour:

LAS VEGAS, Nevada – Republican candidate Donald Trump addressed the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, telling delegates of his underestimated wealth, his passion for securing America’s border, the slanted portrayal of him in the mainstream media, and how he believes that China and Mexico have “smarter leaders” than the United States.

Some libertarians, who the conference is aimed at, believed that Trump would receive a hostile reception at FreedomFest. But the crowd was generally supportive, or at least open-minded, to Trump’s run. One delegate told Breitbart London, “He doesn’t pretend to be anything. People were surprisingly supportive of him.”

The report captures the essence of the surprise in finding Trump make sense about the issues he dwelt on. But his trying to locate his support within the Tea Party movement, as discussed in the report, may be the largest surprise of all.

Donald Trump live blog

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The media man of the moment here in the US is Donald Trump, no doubt because to them he is an oddball who belongs to the Republican side of politics. They think they have invented someone utterly without mass appeal, an obnoxious billionaire entrepreneur with a negative attitude to racial minorities. He is, nevertheless, the hottest ticket in town. Here is Mark Steyn discussing Trump’s appeal:

What he said may or may not be offensive, but it happens to be true: America has more Mexicans than anybody needs, and then some. It certainly has more unskilled Mexicans than any country needs, including countries whose names begin with “Mex-” and end in “-ico”. And it has far more criminal Mexicans than anybody needs, which is why they make up 71 per cent of the foreign inmates in federal jails. Just to underline that last point, a young American woman was murdered for kicks in a supposed “sanctuary city” on the eve of the holiday weekend by an illegal immigrant from Mexico. He had flouted US immigration law for years – or, to be more precise about it, local, state and federal officials had colluded with him in the flouting of US immigration law, to the point where San Francisco’s sheriff actively demanded the return of this criminal to his “sanctuary city”, thereby facilitating the homicide of an actual citizen, taxpayer and net contributor to American society.

Be all that as it may, Trump has invited himself to Freedomfest and here he is, right there on the stage, the man himself.

Begins.

Donald Trump says he was asked to come and was very happy to. It is an honour to be here at a meeting of conservative and libertarian groups. I happen to like Ron Paul. Played a round of golf. A very nice guy. So many of us believe in the same thing.

Went to see a meeting of parents who had lost their children to illegal immigrants. An amazing thing; hardened reporters were sitting there with tears in their eyes. Others are saying that this is becoming a movement. People don’t know what is happening.

Yesterday in Phoenix. Thousands of people are calling and could not hold in the original venue. An amazing that’s happening.

Many said I wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t want to show his financials and etc, they said. I am actually much richer than people think. I am richer than they say. The reason I bring it up is because my way of thinking is the kind of thinking that we need in this country. Growth with low debt. We need this kind of thinking in this country. We have incompetent leadership. And I might mention that the Tea Party loves me – they are wrongly trivialised.

Our vets are treated like third class citizens. Must take care of our vets. We can provide a better and cheaper healthcare system than Obamacare. Knows a doctor with more accountants working for him than nurses.

Need to make America great again. But you cannot be a country great or otherwise without borders. We have exported our jobs to China. They send a car and we send corn. We think we are not dealing from strength. We aren’t but we can. We cannot get our products into China. They have a surtax on our manufactured exports.

I love China. I love Mexico. I love the Mexican people. But their negotiators are tougher than our negotiators. They send their worst people to the US.

Introduces a black man whose son was killed by an illegal immigrant. Son was walking home from the mall and as he was coming home within two minutes of his house, just shot dead in the street. The man already had three counts against him. You must, according to the Mexican mafia, commit a crime in a black neighbourhood to stay on the wrong side of the law. With Donald Trump we can see hope is coming. The thing is that Mr Trump loves America. “I trust Donald Trump.” He’s the kind of man you want to be your dad. I have a lot of black friends who are willing to vote for Donald Trump.

Trump back. The entire thing is so sad. Once it was found out that an illegal immigrant had killed his son, the story was dropped. It was true in every case. “There is something really bad out there. There is something sick out there.” People can come here. We can have immigrants.

The Mexicans send them to the US. Let the US take care of our problem citizens is the attitude in Mexico.

I talk about trade. Let me talk about NBC. We want to talk about “inclusion”. NBC has a lot of bad people. The Apprentice has been running for 14 years. [He sounds so New York!] NBC didn’t want him to run since they didn’t want to cancel his show which cannot run if he’s running for president.

I’ll make great trade deals. I want to be great on the military. All politicians do is talk. Talk about Benghazi and then nothing. Hillary’s emails, same. Hillary gets rid of her servers and the subpoenas. 48 hours of indignation and then you don’t hear about it any more. If I get the nomination, you will hear about it.

It is hard for conservative libertarian to get decent press. Nobody takes a full quote. “The American dream is dead – but I am going to make it bigger and better.” The media only quotes the first half.

Mexico sends us their problems. The political press is dishonest!!!! We have to deal with them. But I have a megaphone. Still 20% of the people who were there you wouldn’t have thought were there at all from what they said.

If I get the nomination, I will win the Hispanic vote since we will bring back those jobs from overseas. I will create jobs, which includes stopping illegals from coming in to take those jobs.

Went to Wharton. Graduated and made a fortune. Wrote the Art of the Deal. Look at the Iran deal. Persians are great negotiators. We have four prisoners over there. If I were there, I’d say fellows, you have these people. We want them back, and if they said no I’d say goodbye and end the negotiations.

I have a “tapping” – delay while thinking. I know how to negotiate.

Q&A

What I do not encourage people to come into the country illegal.

Q: Federal debt.

A: We owe 18 trillion money. We do all of this business and we owe them money. We are going to be Greece on steroids. A believer in free trade, but you must have good negotiators. I know most of them. I know the good ones. We would have the greatest smartest deals you ever saw.

Q: Bigger problem – persecution of Christians in the middle east

A: If you are from Syria and a Christian you are not permitted into this country. If Islamic you can easily do it. We must do something about it. I’m a Presbyterian. Persecuted people can come in. We should let them sort it out in the middle east and then pick up the leftovers. Trump was supposedly against going in. If you attack Iraq, I said, you will destabilise the balance in the middle east. Spent billions and have nothing. Iraq is meeting with Iran. We are led by stupid people.

Hillary would be the worst president. Hillary was the worst sec of state. Who would you rather have negotiating with China, me or Hillary.

Q: Foreign policy with the focus on Russia?

A: Everybody hates us and they make money from us. With me, the US will make the money and the rest of the world will like us. I would get along very well with Putin. We can make our country great again. I think of myself as a nice person, I am a nice person. But it doesn’t matter if I’m nice. But people are tired of incompetence. Hillary is not going to bring back jobs. Every single person who gave Hillary or Jeb money are lining up to get something back. Me, however, I don’t money. I don’t want anybody’s money.

Wraps up. Thanks everybody. Just angry that the conference was not in the Trump Hotel. And as I always end my speeches: “Make America great again!”

Bern vs the Donald 2016

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An underestimate but still closer to reality: Bernie Sanders Says ‘Real’ Unemployment Rate Is Actually 10.5 Percent, DOUBLE The Official Rate [VIDEO].

Meanwhile, over on the other side, Trump: ‘Infectious disease is pouring across the border’.

Still waiting to hear what they think of the nuclear deal with Iran, but both have been able to overcome the media blockade and have brought genuine issues into the national conversation.

And perhaps funniest of all, the NYT thinks that being opposed by the Castros is political poison in the US. As the article points out, it can only do him good except for those who vote for Hillary or Bern or work at the New York Times and Washington Post.