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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The Trump Presidency after 200 days and the ratings slump continues
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I cannot see Trump as anything other than a Zombie president. Everything he tries to do will get filtered - rightly or wrongly - through his alleged misdeeds. He will not be able to achieve much.
At least, I hope so ...
I don't see how they might think that would salvage their electoral prospects.
When it comes down to it, I can't see imoeachmet happening unless and until Mueller uncovers incontrovertibly damning evidence.
But presumably Pence making the choice would also be fine for Republicans.
I agree with the zombie comment. But that could itself be fascinating. Will a country languish or thrive with minimal central government?
But it is also why I see impeachment as unlikely. I can't see the bulk of the Republican party getting beyond, "well, he may be a useless pillock, but he is our useless pillock".
The US public had a very poor choice but they made the wrong one.
But what to do? Recanting now would make them look individually ridiculous. So for now they cling on to the hope that things will perk up. But the rack will tighten inexorably. Will they break?
We got the benign zombies instead.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanmac/peter-thiel-and-donald-trump?utm_term=.mpp71bMdW#.fo7yYO6aX
How far away are we from a time where military action is needed in North Korea?
There will also probably be another debt ceiling crisis - they normally manage to resolve these, but this time?
Zombie president who achieves nothing looks like a best case.
Again, we could mention a parallel with Corbyn and the IRA, Eisen, Venezuela...
Too many political leaders at the moment have gone beyond popularity and developed cult status. Hugo Chavez was probably the most disastrous example, but Corbyn, Trump, and to a lesser extent the likes of Tsipras and Macron could be added.
Which would be OK if they were any actual use - but none of them are.
At least we have the left wing populism of PM Corbyn to look forward to!
Aren't most presidents simply trying to manage the status quo with one or two marquee policies enacted on the rare occasions that the planets align?
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/
Basically he is similar (a bit lower) to Ford and Clinton.
Those stressing the difficulty of impeachment are right, but Trump is unpredictable and I can see him just walking suddenly and without warning, which is why I wanted my money on early. The consensus amongst punters on an earlier thread was that he's ok until he starts to lose the Republican base. The yardstick is indeed his poll rating. The 38% quoted above is one of the better estimates I have seen. Those who are interested must be aware of Nate Silver's daily update which currently gives an all-time low of 36.6%
https://fivethirtyeight.com/politics/
Nate and his pals have always said that anything below 40% is dangerous, and 35% would be critical. Getting close.
No doubt the Tories are working on a way to fight back on the goodies for all strategy. They have at best four and a bit years to come up with something...
The alternative was a government that is still supporting a catastrophic fascist junta in Venezuela because they approve of its social policies.
All things are relative.
Yet it leaves a massive amount unsaid, and in particular ignores the reality of what is going on over there. Many people won't bother with the details and will just think: "Oh, he's being so much nicer than those awful people calling for sanctions!"
It'd be nice if leftists confronted him over it; instead the likes of Williamson just brainlessly blame the US.
Very different from Corbyn's support for a vile regime that evidently can, in his eyes at least, do no wrong.
Maybe we're judging a fish by the criteria of a bird and being surprised he's survived after not surfacing for air.
[I attribute F1 results to luck or judgement, but I do wonder how much of 'luck' I can and ought to anticipate. Some things are random but most factors can be guessed at, to some extent at least].
The government of the day works with some decidedly unpleasant regimes - Saudi, China, Russia - because if we didn't it wouldn't make much difference to them but would do considerable damage to us.
Corbyn has supported Venezuela - which even under Chavez was by any reasonable measure a dictatorship, albeit one that was probably possessed of widespread popular support - because he happens to like it, its principles, policies, even perhaps its methods although that is more ambiguous.
To put it another way, when the Tories jumped into bed (apologies for the image) with the DUP, the left bleated that the DUP supported terrorism. Not true. The DUP had been supported by terrorists. They had no choice in that. Admittedly, they never disowned that backing so far as I know, which makes them morally culpable to an extent, but it is still the reverse of what was claimed.*
Corbyn, meanwhile, made a deliberate choice to support the IRA. He did not have to do that. If as he claims he was trying to promote peace it was the worst possible decision to make. Yet not only did he blame the British government for the acts of the IRA, and meet members of it - something he later lied about, of course - he was even arrested for protesting in support of Patrick Magee. His behaviour extended the troubles and cost lives, totally unnecessarily.
Can you not see how the two are different? And can you also not see how they raise questions not so much about his judgement - we all know how stupid he is - but about his character?
*This was doubly stupid of the left because the really unanswerable point against working with the DUP - that they are demonstrably corrupt and untrustworthy - got pushed to one side.
My feeling with The Donald is that he has been defying the laws of gravity for so long that a sudden crash to earth cannot be discounted. I don't want to wake up one morning and find I have missed out.
(This is not a problem you have with F1.)
Of course, Maduro is making this somewhat more difficult by locking the opposition leaders in prison and putting armed soldiers around his own attorney general, but dear old Jeremy may not know this of course.
That doesn't make him a good person - but it does mean he wasn't a dictator.
Off to work....
Being lucky when online and something happens works for both markets. That's how both the Verstappen 250/1 shot and making money on the Lib Dem leadership worked out for me. No skill, just lucky timing.
Corbyn's line on Venezuela is the same as is it was on Ulster - the condemnation of violence combined with a call to respect the law of the land (not our land, the land where it's happening) and the independence of the judiciary (that's an interesting one - the separation of powers is something Corbyn has often talked about).
The view from other areas of the political spectrum is that the violence perpetrated by one side is always worse than that perpetrated by the other but Corbyn is pacifistic and sees all violence in those terms.
His support for Macron's diplomatic overtures to Caracas is noteworthy either - are we simply going to condemn Maduro and his goons out of hand because they are "nasty lefties" because that won't help or are we going to get our hands dirty and consider a diplomatic process which might end with some form of transitional arrangement which "could" put Venezuela on a wholly different and better path for its people ?
South American politics is always fraught - no one should assume the only alternative to Maduro is a slavishly pro-capitalist pro-Washington Government.
That Chavez and Maduro could be accused of running a dictatorship is not the issue. The issue is that they own the economic mess that they have presided over. And Jezza has backed them 100%.
One interesting point about Chavez is despite - or perhaps because of - these things, coupled with his social policies, he was and remains genuinely popular. He could allow the elections to be free and fair in a way for example Pinochet could not as he knew he would win. I have sometimes wondered how he would act if he were in Maduro's shoes now (and I think we all agree he's a dictator). My guess is that he would have acted in much the same way.
But you don't have to look very far to find people lauding populism in terms of 'the democratic will of the people'. Plenty of that sort of nonsense on PB.
I have to do some work too. Have a good morning everyone.
Anyway gotta go now. The dog is getting fed up. Been nice talking.
No. We condemn them because they are increasingly undemocratic, they are leading the country into ruin, and because they are going against fundamental human rights.
Whether they are of the left or right is irrelevant.
"... consider a diplomatic process which might end with some form of transitional arrangement which "could" put Venezuela on a wholly different and better path for its people ?"
I'm unsure what sort of diplomatic process could restrain a man who, after elections, replaces judges and installs a whole new assembly to replace the one the voters had so inconveniently elected. His path is fairly clear.
Such a man is likely to use any diplomatic process to shore up his regime, not to help his people. Yes, we should try diplomacy, but we do it from a position of stating *why* we think he's wrong, not from excusing him, as Corbyn does.
For example, where one side is throwing stones, and the other is using live ammunition; or where a government is blatantly breaking its own laws, murdering and arresting its opponents, some of whom start shooting back; or where a terrorist organisation is letting off car bombs in its fight against a democratic government, whose security forces use force against the terrorists.
The pacifist approach in those cases is one of spurious impartiality, when in reality, one side is being favoured.
I imagine the bookies haven't given that as an option to avoid confusion, but even if Trump were to lose re-election in November 2020, he would still remain President until the next President is inaugurated in January 2021.
No, it isn't. The situations are very different, as were the men.
Pinochet should always be seen as an evil man, and the coup a self-serving over-reaction to the internal situation in Chile.
However the instinctive reaction of some on the left to say: "Ah, but look at Thatcher and Pinochet!" just drags them down into the gutter from the moral high ground they pretend to hold. It also ignores the inconvenient fact that Pinochet helped us at a time of extreme need.
https://twitter.com/jeremycorbyn/status/825410025803878401
As far as diplomacy is concerned, supping with the Devil may require a long spoon but it means you have to sit at the same table. I'm not convinced sanctions will achieve anything other than to make Maduro retreat further into the bunker.
Macron is trying to raise France's profile possibly either a) because he sees America withdrawing and thinks there is an opportunity or b) he is trying to divert domestic attention from his struggling internal agenda. As with Libya, Macron sees a negotiated solution which has to involve Maduro as the only option and that's something with which Corbyn will be entirely comfortable.
It's a change from how western policy has been conducted in the past 20 years and given the wholesale success of that policy (!), perhaps it's time to try a different approach.
If you're going to condemn, you condemn loudly and vocally. All Corbyn is doing is excusing Maduro.
https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/the-end-of-the-world-according-to-isis
I thought I was fairly well versed in this subject, but I learned a lot from this podcast on the subject.
EU's infamous food standards. " Germany, meanwhile warned on August 5 that it had distributed eggs to France and the U.K."
http://www.politico.eu/article/brussels-warns-egg-scandal-could-now-involve-seven-countries/
"Reuters reported today that a spokesman for Dutch farmers’ lobby LTO said that the fipronil scandal could force authorities to cull millions of chickens."
The thing that surprised me about Trump is that previous iterations of “populism” within the party, from Buchanan through the Tea party, still held rather strict socially conservative views. What Trump exposed is that these voters weren’t necessarily looking for a pure “truecon” but instead they were using those social issues as proxies for their disdain for liberal, urban, elite culture. Trump offered them a candidate who channeled their anger but through anger and mockery of the media and elites, validation of their view that America is not as great as it once was, and a dash of white grievance politics rather than purity.
Trump is not a “movement conservative” in the philosophical sense so no, he doesn’t reflect that in any real way. But he is a reflection of where the conservative base of the party is right now and I think he exposes the wide gap between conservative intellectuals and conservative voters.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/08/the-conservatives-turning-against-donald-trump
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/531-955-per-week-map-care-costs-across-england/
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/08/just-not-cricket-english-clubs-cry-foul-over-new-ruling-on-amateur-status
He then went on to lose the House of Representatives at the mid-terms, get embroiled in potential impeachment, but still get re-elected handsomely (albeit with help from a mad Texan).
The irony is, of course, that Gerald Ford was actually quite a good President. An interesting counter factual would be if he had managed to hang on against Carter in '76.
"President Donald Trump has dropped hints that he might stop the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing reduction payments, through which federal funds flow to insurance companies to keep down coverage costs for low-income people."
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/07/trump-obamacare-congress-tax-reform-241340
https://twitter.com/jstaplesbutler/status/894596491146391552
Clinton triangulated well from a position of weakness - not sure Trump is capable, and he certainly has more partisan opposition from Democrats.
https://twitter.com/ThamesPics/status/894825724275765248
Wohever he is he did this;
https://twitter.com/PA/status/894814987474137088
"Jeremy Corbyn's talking about Venezuela? What the **** has that got to do with him?"