Trump Says—

Does a Clintonite shit in the woods?

No, Trump saying something makes it ambiguous.

Trump saying something makes that something benefit Trump’s bottom line, and as a distraction so that you don’t realize it. Not that he doesn’t have good company. He’s just the latest iteration.

— Neoliberal Shock Doctrine Episode #872 “The Orange Oligarch.”

In politics (construed broadly), who utters a truth when actually matters to the outcome.

It doesn’t matter because he’ll say anything.

Libertarians are against the Fed, for privacy, against the War on Drugs, and supposedly against foreign wars and involvements. A lot of the philosophy behind their positions is batshit but not entirely.

I think the same applies to Trump. The Democrats are in full on blame anyone but themselves mode. Most of their criticisms of Trump reflect this and can be discounted. The Democrats can’t come up with a solid case against Trump without abandoning their own failed policies and rich donors. So they don’t make it.

What Trump is good at is legitimizing tropes. Most of the country has known for a while that the war in Iraq was a disaster. But when Trump says it, it is the first time that someone in the overclass does it, and so legitimizes it. Trump did not kill the TPP. That had been done by many others. But when Trump came out against it, the elite consensus on it was broken, and the perception that it was dead became officially acceptable. Of course, Clinton also came out against the TPP. The difference was that nobody believed her. They did believe Trump.

Re Europe, I think that a US presence in Europe remains important. I do not like what Bush/Obama have done to the NATO mission, but looking at the slow motion train wreck that is the EU and EZ, it’s clear that 70 years after the end of the Second World War, Europe still does not have its act together. So as flawed, even malign, as US policy toward Europe currently is, it still plays a significant stabilizing role.

A serious flaw that I already see in Trump is that he has no apparent ability to prioritize, as his recent Tweeter rants against Meryl Streep, Carl Lewis, and SNL illustrate. Much the same can be seen in his foreign policy. Europe is of huge interest to the US. At the same time, Israel is at best extremely marginal to US interests and at worst a decent sized negative. Yet Trump is blowing the Europeans off while being an unabashed suck up to the Israelis. It makes no sense and is a recipe for failure. This is likely to be the story with Trump, that he fails just in different ways than his predecessors.

Tom: “When someone is right, even if for the wrong reasons, they are right period.”

Wrong. Libertarians are against the Fed because they want to go back to a gold standard. They support privacy rights not just for drug use but to discriminate against gays or pretty much any other minority.

A moment’s googling says: Trump

a) avoided being drafted via student and health deferments
b) made fun of John McCain
c) promises to take care of veterans

I can find no reference to his opinions on the value or purpose behind the Vietnam War.

Like all things Trump: cypher.

@ Billikin

“No, Trump saying something makes it ambiguous.”

I think that may actually be the best answer, although others have also made some good points above.

I think it’s too cheap and easy to start reasoning from the premise that Trump is a stupid man. I think he probably does have the IQ he claims. And, allowing this to be part of my starting premise, I see that his SOP seems to be to say things that are essentially ambiguous from the POV of many or all of the interested parties on any given issue.

It then occurs to me that since such ambiguity creates uncertainty in the minds of players who have grown so accustomed to the comforts of certainty in their elite bubble worlds, that he is creating, over and over, the ideal mindset that I would want to instill in those whom I intended to be negotiating with.

And, it seems to be working for hiim so far.

It doesn’t matter because he’ll say anything. as did obummer & co. which is why the demo’s are moving in this weekend. and why the repuggers will be moving out whenever. samo samo over and over endlessly…

He said it was the largest mistake, which objectively speaking is true.

Just because Trump says something partially right does not mean it is right.

Just because Trump says something right, does not mean he is going to do anything about it – otherwise we would have millions of people able to do the job of president.

Otherwise I would have gone in A in calculus class, because I always knew the answer was wrong – but that does not mean I knew what the right answer was.

( https://symbalitics.blogspot.com/2017/01/fon-dparikulur-07.html )

Iraq: huge mistake because of what? Why?

Faulty intelligence seems to be the his theme, but that doesn’t talk about whether a proclivity toward regime change is-or-is not a mistake in the scheme of things. That is why I asked about his view on Vietnam, but you could pick other countries to explore his world-view.

I don’t think he has a coherent world-view, but I am concerned about how he is trying to construct one through twits-and-tweets. Where is he really going with his critique of Iraq?

I submit: he doesn’t even know.

For a number of years I’ve seen first hand how the Clintonites/liberals suffered a communications breakdown and lost the ability to understand what people, not of their tribe, were trying to say to them. Most of these voices were from the radical left but not all and slurs such as sparkle ponies and purists along with nasty reinterpretations of what people wrote became common.

Then along came the Donald who everyone in the tribe knew couldn’t vanquish their photoshopped Queen. Trump spoke truth to the parasite class of politicians without ambiguity that they were failures, both parties. He also kept it simple describing the Red Queen accurately as a thirty year long string of failure and crookedness and this sent the true believers over the edge to a Tower of Babel like break with reality and much of the rest of humanity.

Now anything Trump says or does must be rephrases, reinterpreted and rejected as evil foreign language. As Ian has learned anyone who even accepts some of Trump’s plans or moves as possibly positive is to be targeted with threats and rejection to protect the tribe. The Carrier deal Trump made is a telling example and even here and on other so called progressive sites it was mostly translated as bullying or bribery with little or no empathy for working class people. The latest announcement of more US jobs from GM is being translated as business as usual but along with Ford, Chrysler and possibly the foreign manufactures this is Trump’s BAU.

I question whether what is called “coherent world view” is important or even beneficial for a President. Lacking such is one of the things that FDR was criticized for. He struck a contrast to the old order represented by Coolidge and especially Hoover, men who had a strong world view which was in the end too rigid, so that they were broken by events.

What we need instead is judgement, vision, integrity, courage. From that standpoint Trump seems to compare favorably to the past several presidents (admittedly a low bar).

I am pressed for time and cannot do the copy-pasting needed to support a case. So for now let me just expand forward from what Peter said up above.

Riverdaughter’s blog The Confluence has become a perfect storm of Klintonite Koolaid Kult tribalism. She has recently written that she intends to make changes to her blog roll. In practice, that means she will disfellowship those blogs which were not pro-Clinton enough.

I predict! The following three blogs will CERTAINLY be disfellowshipped . . .
Ian Welsh.
Naked Capitalism.
Sic Semper Tyrannis.

Riverdaughter’s blog The Confluence has become a stagnant sump of Klinton Kult Koolaid tribalism. She has recently written that she will adjust her blogroll. I take that to mean that she will disfellowship those blogs which were not pro-Clinton enough.

I predict! She will disfellowship the following three blogs:
1. Ian Welsh
2. Naked Capitalism
3. Sic Semper Tyrannis.

@ Bill H

I agree with the first part of your above comment, but when you turn to addressing me, I must tell you that you completely missed my point, which was about Trump’s negotiating strategy/tactic, not definitional as to the meaning of “ambiguity.” I’m sure if you will re-read with this clarification in mind, you will get what I was saying.

After Trump is inaugurated, the tires will hit the asphalt and we will see just how much is real and how much is bluster, how much is good and how much is awful. I am not optimistic. I see Trump as a phenomenon of late stage kleptocracy, part of the problem, not part of the solution. And I remain seriously concerned that we are running out time to deal with the effects of global warming and overpopulation that are already locked in. I see Trump as yet more wasting time we do not have.

Interestingly, John Brennan was Obama’s transition chief for intelligence and chief of staff to former CIA Director George Tenet (under Bush). He was Obama’s original choice to head the CIA back in 2009 but had to withdraw after he came under fire for supporting domestic spying, rendition for torture, and enhanced interrogation techniques, i.e. torture, although not waterboarding. Obama made him his counter-terrorism adviser and finally got him in at the CIA in 2013. Another example of Obama never giving up on a bad idea.

@WD

Monsanto is not my favorite company but their current workforce of 25,000 is at least partially threatened by their huge financial problems/loses. If Papa Bayer is promising to save and add to those high paying professional jobs that is an unusual and promising reason to allow the buyout. The last corporate buyout Warren Buffett did was followed by 7,000 worker firings to make the profit level he demanded possible. I don’t know if anti-trust has much meaning today and we still keep sufficient troops in Germany to make them behave.

Have you noticed that many food products are listing that they contain GMO components without any labeling laws? It seems they are using it almost like a product promotion.

@ Peonista: To the extent Trump offers value, it is not just because he says things that most people agree with, but he says things that most people recognize as true, but are not permitted to say in public.

If you think Trump isn’t a master persuader you are a complete idiot. There is no way in hell Trump becomes President if he is not a master persuader. He is a lesser evil than Hillary too, and all you nitwits who are obsessed with outdated utilitarian ethics and voted Obama in twice based on that moral theory, can suck on that long and hard. He is not even president and he exposed the feckless Dumbcraps to be the corporatist fascist loving whores that they are- vis a vis Nato, CIA, and trade deals. NOT ONCE did the fucking Dems say shit about changing trade policy or Nato policy, let alone criticize the CIA for overstepping their functional role. I’m glad that the Dems are dying, they are completely worthless spineless cowards and addicted to power and wealth.

@WD

I don’t think someone using the word evil to describe a greedy capitalist company does much good unless they plan to lead the mobs of the righteous to burn the whitecoats at the stake. Just as I’ll never learn to love the Bomb neither will I love GMO but I have learned to live with them. Bayer is offering to buy Monsanto outright for about $130 per share, Germans don’t merge they conquer so the Monsanto name may disappear possibly replaced by that cute Bayer aspirin baby.

I’ve read the warnings and projections about soil depletion and problems with GM crops and our industrialized farming before that but since the ’70s corn yields have tripled reaching about 13 billion bushels produced last year and yields are projected to continue increasing. Iowa produces three times more corn than all of Mexico.

Another factoid I didn’t know is that 95% of our corn farms are family owned and 30% are operated by women. These men and women have been handling and using poisons their whole adult life because it is an integral part of farming and even the organic pesticides we used in the ’50s were poisons. Low-till or no-till farming practices have improved soil erosion loses dramatically and soil fertility but they require more herbicide use so there is a tradeoff between GMO use and CO2 production and costs.

The countries who are rejecting GMO crops now have various reasons and the right to do that. Russia is one of them and their capitalist farmers see it as a market opportunity where they would be the prime supplier of organics to the wealthy European market while their government continues its research in GMO’s for possible future uses.

From 2014,

Most farms in Illinois have grown over the years. Of the state’s 75,000 farms, nearly 8,000 (~10 percent) are 1,000 acres or larger. However, those 8,000 farms maintain over half of all of the state’s farmland. The idea that these big, “corporate” farms are industrializing the agricultural landscape is yarn easily spun to the uninformed, but one that is blatantly incorrect. In 2012 Illinois had 3,716 corporate farms. This seems impressive, especially when the prototypical “family farm” continues to disappear, but 90 percent of these so-called “corporate” farms were, in fact, what the U.S. Department of Agriculture refers to as “family corporations”. In other words, they were still family farms. The land was not owned by Cargill, Monsanto, or any of the other large, multinational corporations often blamed for the demise of farming (although such corporations do have considerable influence in modern U.S. agribusiness), but for tax purposes the family had decided to create a business. In reality, only 0.5 percent of Illinois farms are non-family, corporately-owned entities. These non-family, corporate-owned farms work an equally small percentage of the state’s total agricultural land – 0.7 percent. The Illinois “corporate” agricultural landscape mirrors exactly that of the entire United States: 0.5 percent of farms, 0.7 percent of farmland…numbers that have changed little over the past four decades.

However,

In Illinois, and across much of the rest of the Corn Belt, well over 50 percent of all farmland in most counties is rented.

http://news.aag.org/2014/08/illinois-agriculture/

Also about 40% of the corn crop goes to biofuels, chiefly ethanol.

@ Peter
oh, my. i’ll call monsanto (and cargill, syngenta, bayer, etc) . evil at my pleasure, but there’s so much to unpack here that it will have to wait until another day. there’s so much news breaking right now, esp. but please tell me in the meantime which ‘organic’ pesticides in the 50s were poisons?

funny seeing you call out capitalist farmers, though. in the end, when time allows, i may do an op-ed about all this. we’ll see. india is ground zero re: monsanto evil. i don’t have the time to read this, but i hope he addresses the fact that monsanto has claimed patents on even Wild and Sacred plants in india.

BlizofOz, Trump won the election but lost the popular vote. He also had high negatives throughout the Presidential campaign. So a 40% approval rating is unsurprising. Unless Trump starts delivering measurable improvements to those who voted for him, fast, that 40% could be a peak, not a trough.

Of course polls are suspect. So is the vote count. We don’t know and we can’t know what is correct. That’s built in and purposeful.

It allows our rulers to manipulate the beliefs and actions of the ruled to the advantage of the rulers.

That’s true regardless of who sits in the big chair in the West Wing — or in Trump Tower as the case may be.

But there are definite if anecdotal signs that Mr. Trump’s popularity was never high to begin with and it’s not getting higher. It may well be falling — as the polls indicate. The propaganda against him and his cronies appears to be having some effect among the public, but in this sort of contest for dominance and rule, the public is at best a prop.

The contest is between factions of the ruling clique, and it is obviously serious. I doubt it’s really over Mr. Trump’s likely policies — because most of the ones we’ve heard about are pretty standard right-wing Republican/Christianist/White Supremacist boilerplate that serve and reinforce the ruling neoLibCon consensus. Their focus is different than policies of the recent past, but their premise is pretty much the same.

There are so many things he could do to upend the ruling paradigm if he really wanted to, but there is no sign he will do any of those  things, he will simply accelerate the ongoing rightist-reactionary trend we’ve been living with for many years.

That will be disastrous for many, many people, but just as is the case now, those who come out on top won’t care. I doubt the losers will even get a “too bad, so sad” from the winners.

The best the Rabble can hope for under the circumstances is that things won’t go completely to hell immediately. That was also the hope when Bush 2 was lawlessly installed in the White House those many years ago. Well, we had almost 9 months of relative serenity before all hell broke loose (three months longer than I predicted at the time.) We’re living with the consequences of those crises now.

Those consequences aren’t going away, nor will those crises be resolved because Trump is in the White House. Instead, there will be a whole set of new crises and consequences, some of them the direct result of the conflict among the ruling clique over whether or not Mr. Trump should be allowed to rule on behalf of the oligarchy and kleptocracy he is a member of and he so clearly represents, or should there be some kind of intervention.

We’ll see.

Noted “Clintonite” Jeremy Scahill explained it all for us at the NoFascistUSA gathering last December.

https://youtu.be/rwLXeACMYMU

@ Ché Pasa: i didn’t have time to listen to all of it, but the part i heard reminded me of john pilger’s: ‘THIS WEEK THE ISSUE IS NOT TRUMP. IT IS OURSELVES.’

http://johnpilger.com/articles/this-week-the-issue-is-not-trump-it-is-ourselves-

i wasn’t familiar with revcom. this must be it, then? http://revcom.us/