Dude, who even knows.
Question with 17 notes
Anonymous asked: So, uh, Trump lately. Should we be worried?
I DID put a lot of stock in his ability to claim the initiative, tear the media a new Overton Window, get inside liberals’ OODA loop and put them on the defensive, but even I’m a little slack-jawed lately.I’m not terribly worried though, for two reasons.
First, Trump’s made very clear for decades that he thinks of himself as a negotiator first and foremost. And that one of his go-to tactics is to open with an absurd ask, backed by an adamantine self-confidence that means he can’t be laughed or shamed out of the room.
So to the extent there’s anything here, I think it’s just a refusal to do the “negotiating with yourself” - making preemptive concessions in the mere hope that your counterpart will reciprocate - that first-term Obama caught flak for.
So if a President Trump did anything with this, I expect it would be to say “Here’s this thing I’ve got enough support to make a decent run at that you really, REALLY don’t want. Now am I married to it? No. So. What’ll you give me in exchange for ruling it out?”
Honestly I think it’s the same with immigration. When your offer is as far from the status quo as “deport everyone immediately, Mexico pays for a wall”, you’re opening a lot of space for compromises where everyone leaves satisfied, your team feeling triumphant and the other guys like they held a defensive action.
Now, if you picture yourself on the other, liberal/Democrat side of the deal you could sniff that given our traditions and institutions you shouldn’t HAVE to give anything up in return for not registering and/or deporting ethnic and religious minorities.
Fair, fair. And going into 2015 conservative/Republicans thought that given those same things they wouldn’t HAVE to spend any power upholding the principle that full civic and economic inclusion shouldn’t be conditioned on willingness to participate in blasphemous parodies of the holy rites of the nation’s traditional and still majority religion.
So learning experience for everyone.
Second, I don’t think he has a deep enough following to bend American institutions to his unimpeded will even if he got elected and tried - he has some high profile majordomos and allies that could lead initiatives, and at his rallies a ton of dedicated foot soldiers, but he doesn’t have, as far as I can tell, a corps of loyal professional (political and/or technical) middlemen of sufficient size or scalability. Assembling such a corps is a big part of why political parties (and within parties, party elites) are so powerful.
In his business dealings Trump’s offloaded that stuff on mercenary institutions like building trades unions, contractors, investment banks, New York Mafia families, and media companies, but I can’t see that working at national scale.