aquascoot wrote on Mar 23
rd, 2018 at 8:07am:
thats not what i see.
most of those people from "real' america seem as honest as the day is long.
they seem "salt of the earth' types.
but the intellectual elite in washington dont look like they could lie straight in bed.
ans the reason Trump won is that this is the perception of the people.
they dont trust the elites.
the elites dont vibe with them
and "scalding" the trump voters is unlikely to be fruitful
We see more eye to eye sometime than I'm comfortable with.
My biggest worry is what happens when the Trump voters, those who "trust" him, realise that he has already betrayed most of the reasons they trusted him and is on the way to continuing this trend.
Yes he's extremely good at optics. Nobody can take this away from him. The quality of the products he's been producing for the last 30 years, be it real estate, education or even steaks is not up to the standards he claims, not even close. But he is able to convince people that it is. That is his true skill, bullshitting.
Why do you think most of the banks and most other business people know better than to make deals with him?
Back to the point, my biggest fear, perhaps "concern" is better, is what will happen to the people and who will they turn to once they realise they've been duped by Trump. They've been so determined and so steadfast in their support of him after feeling betrayed by those that came before him that I honestly don't know how they'll react once they see the truth.
But back to the point of this thread, I don't hold Trump in high regard when it comes to intelligence and general knowledge. As President he has access to teams of people that will research and inform him of the important topics in straight forward briefings, but he acts like he doesn't bother.
He thinks he's the smarted in the room and can bullshit and fake it until he makes it. His exchange that he foolishly bragged about with Trudeau is further evidence of that. It may have served him well in the business world where desperate people with money will believe that he can make them more and buy whatever he is selling, but he's the president now.
As many of his supporters like to remind us, The President. He has a responsibility to the people of the nation, not just himself. He doesn't act like he's figured that out yet.
If he's going into a meetings representing the people of the nation, he has the duty to be informed as he enters the room. A last minute palm card with "I hear you" written on it to remind him to be human isn't enough.
I don't know if he doesn't have the attention span to read the briefings or that he doesn't have the time to watch Fox News AND read, or have the briefings read out to him. Perhaps he doesn't have the ability to retain the information?
Whatever it is, he needs to do better, and it needs to happen now.
If he would act in some way competent and capable of the role, even those on the left wouldn't be so quick to attack him.
But he does and says such stupid things on such a regular basis, what do you expect?
Any objective analysis, not just that of his critics and certainly not that of his supporters (you know the type, those who insist he wasn't mocking a disabled reporter even after watching the video of him mocking the disabled reporter, then attack the reporter) at best shows he needs to up his game or more and more, the label of "stupid" will be justified.
We used to hold such high standards for who occupied the oval office and would hold those there to this standard. It happened with Obama, it happened with Bush, Clinton before him, going back hundreds of years.
Trump's actions would have been enough to end any former President. Hell, even things Obama had nothing to do with were attributed to him and people tried to hold him to account for them. But Trump, he is able to manipulate the optics and avoid responsibility. He's certainly not stupid when it comes to that. But this seems to be the limit of his skill set.
Trump has somehow been able to lower the bar. And this is what he always does. Rather than rise to the occasion, he brings everything down around him to his level or lower so he seems better in comparison.
Look at the attacks against Mueller now. Trump is scared of what Mueller will find so rather than Trump simply being innocent, he's trying to bring down Mueller and paint him as a criminal with a shady past so when he fires him it will be seen as a positive by his supporters.
It's been the same theme for the entire set of investigations. Rather than Trump being innocent and having nothing to fear, he is trying to sway public opinion by attacking the agencies (something he was doing the opposite of when they were investigating Hillary) and taking action to stop the investigations.
Not the actions of an innocent man, or a smart one.
The problem for Trump is that he thinks everyone is a stupid as him so what would fool him, will fool everyone. It works for a big percentage of the people, but not everyone, and not enough.
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