Élection POTUS 2016 : Donald Trump

[Tramp]

Ce serait un bon moyen de récolter des dons pour financer l'élection.

[José]

Donald Trump lost the first Presidential debate not because of a lack of preparation. He lost because of his beliefs themselves.

 

In a year of absurd, nerve-testing disconnects, Monday night’s disconnect was the biggest of all. In a moment when, in an all too real sense, the future of liberal democracy itself was on the line—when the possibility of seeing one of the hyper-nationalist demagogues and autocrats who have emerged throughout Europe and Americas in the last decade take power in the United States seemed all too near—the debate was being billed and sold as entertainment. Clinton vs. Trump, toe to toe! Come watch Hamilton and Madison’s dream end, live at 9 p.m.

 

As it happened, and has been generally reported, the rout that followed was of a kind that few anticipated—one that seemed arranged by a God operating in Vince McMahon mode, deciding that in this round the good guy, or woman, would win. The well-coached and prepared wrestler pummelled the sneering loudmouth with the cape and mask into submission while the crowd at home (in our home, anyway) cheered.

 

There have been some desperate remedial attempts to pretend that, in the early rounds, Trump did better than Hillary Clinton, but he didn’t. He was ranting incoherently from the kickoff, and it only got worse as the night wore on: “As far as the cyber, I agree to parts of what Secretary Clinton said. We should be better than anybody else, and perhaps we’re not. I don’t know if we know it was Russia who broke into the D.N.C. She’s saying Russia, Russia, Russia. Maybe it was. It could also be China. It could be someone sitting on their bed that weighs four hundred pounds. You don’t know who broke into D.N.C., but what did we learn?” Struggling to recall what Trump’s ramblings, with their telegraphic simplifications, their abrupt disconnects, and their sudden hallucinations of imaginary figures, reminded me of, I realized that they were exactly like an excerpt from the dying words of the gangster Dutch Schultz after he was shot in a mob hit in Newark, in 1935: “Please get me up, my friends. . . . No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me; I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money.”

 

Obviously there was something cheering and even comforting in the reality that Trump had “lost.” But there was something disturbing in seeing Trump once again being normalized by being made part of an ordinary contest in coherence and “presentation” and “preparation.” In truth, that was the least of it, because what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations. Talking, again, about President Obama’s birth certificate, he displayed not only the usual pathological inability to admit to an error—any error, ever—but an underlying racism so pervasive that it can’t help express itself even when trying to pass as something else. There was, after all, never any doubt or controversy about Obama’s being born an American—never any actual “controversy” about his place of birth, any more than there is about Trump’s or Clinton’s. (And Clinton never said there was.) It was a settled matter from the time Obama began running for office. What there was was a racist conspiracy theory, invented by various people on the fringe right, that Trump brought into the center of attention. By 2011, Trump had simply succeeded in making this racist conspiracy theory so prevalent that Obama, who had released his birth certificate three years earlier, concluded that it was more efficient to end it for all time by asking Hawaiian officials for special permission to let him give out the “long form,” archival version than to let it go on. What Obama may not have realized was that in Trump’s world, since he is never wrong, it couldn’t end.

 

Yet Trump continued last night his self-congratulations for compelling the President to do this, along with the grotesquely racist notion that it was “good for him” (i.e., for the President). It slowly dawned on the listener that this was all of a piece with the rest of Trump’s racial attitudes: he believes that, as a rich white man, he had a right to stop and frisk the President of the United States and demand that the uppity black man show him his papers. Stop-and-frisk isn’t just a form of policing for Trump; it’s a whole way of life. The idea that he had a right to force a black man to go through what Obama rightly saw as the demeaning business of producing his birth certificate showed his fundamental contempt for any normal idea of racial equality. It was of a line with his equally bizarre notion that owning a country club that doesn’t actively discriminate against black people is not a minimal requirement of law but a positive achievement of the owner. This isn’t the case of someone misarticulating an otherwise plausible position; it was just a case of someone repeating, once again, not only a specific racist lie but also the toxic underlying set of assumptions that produced it.

 

Pass over quickly, for the moment, Trump’s notion that contracts are to be respected depending only on the wayward autocratic impulse of the richest party to the contract. Think, instead, again, of one of the last subjects of the debate—his misogyny. By sexism, we mean something specific, not the business of appreciating beauty—if Trump wants to host beauty contests, let him—but the habit of conceiving of a woman as being a lesser species, one defined exclusively by appearance. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.

 

[Brock]

[Anton_K]

J'avoue que c'est pas du grand journalisme.

[Cthulhu]

Moui, ça ressemble à tous les articles sur Trump de la gauche médiatique US qui tourne en echo chamber vu que c'est lu uniquement par les "élites" bobos des 2 côtes.

[Brock]

Think, instead, again, of one of the last subjects of the debate—his misogyny. By sexism, we mean something specific, not the business of appreciating beauty—if Trump wants to host beauty contests, let him—but the habit of conceiving of a woman as being a lesser species, one defined exclusively by appearance. His cruelty to Alicia Machado was unleavened by any apparent respect for her as a human being in any role other than as an envelope of flesh—an attitude he only doubled down on the following morning by complaining that she presented what he saw as an obvious problem as a reigning Miss Universe: she had gained “a massive amount of weight” (by Trump standards, that is). Again, this wasn’t a problem of how he chose to present his beliefs; the problem is with the beliefs. This wasn’t a question of preparation. It was that the things he actually believes are themselves repellent even when coherently presented. This was not a bad performance. This is a bad man.

 

 

[Anton_K]

Oui c'est bien le style maniéré, complaisant et plein de circonvolutions de quelqu'un qui se parle à lui même.

[José]

Businessman, Defend Thyself

 

At Monday’s debate, Trump had many chances to correct his opponent’s misguided economic ideas and assumptions. He didn’t.

 

Much has been made of “fact checking” this election cycle. Not enough focus has been put on “idea checking.” Unfortunately for free-market conservatives and libertarians, we can’t count on the Republican nominee to articulate why progressive economic ideas are so often so wrong. There were many frustrating examples in the first debate of Donald Trump failing even to challenge Hillary Clinton’s obvious conceptual whoppers. Worse, when Trump did attempt a defense, he often cast free enterprise and business in a negative light. Trump simply can’t—or won’t, because it’s not what he truly believes—combat the falsehoods of progressivism, or honestly and skillfully defend free enterprise and business in general.

 

Let’s start with Clinton’s claim that she’s going to pay for her laundry list of Bernie-Sanders-inspired new benefits by simply, in her words, “having the wealthy pay their fair share and close the corporate loopholes.” We certainly can debate what everyone’s “fair share” really should be. But Trump missed the chance to demonstrate the multiple mendacities, direct and implied, in her statement. Most important, he didn’t point out that the countries Clinton and Sanders admire pay for the “life of Denmark” (reminiscent of the Obama administration’s famous “life of Julia”) with far more regressive taxes, looking at the relevant total share of taxes paid, not just marginal tax rates on the “rich,” than here in the U.S.A. Honest liberal pundits have pointed out that to achieve the state with the size and scope desired by progressives, they will have to tax everyone much more, particularly the middle class. No matter what you think about the “fair share” that the rich should pay, no serious person thinks taxing the wealthy alone will pay for a Scandinavian-style welfare state. Purely adding to the tax burden of the rich has never worked at this scale, mainly because there aren’t enough rich people to tax (there’s a reason we call them the 1 percent or even the 0.01 percent). The middle class, on the other hand, are legion and easily taxed.

 

To fund her goals—and I admit it can be done even if I don’t think it should be done—Clinton would need to tap the middle class in a big way through increased payroll taxes, higher marginal income-tax rates applied to median incomes, and a hefty, regressive, value-added tax or other consumption tax. In other words, the middle class must pay for its own benefits. That may in fact be what most Americans desire, but Clinton doesn’t frame the choice honestly. Rather, she perpetuates the fantasy that a far larger state with far more benefits can be obtained simply by taxing the “rich” a bit more. Trump could’ve done a great service to the American people by explaining that this free lunch (free except to the “rich”) doesn’t exist.

 

The next Clinton statement was truly bizarre. “Trickle down did not work,” she said. “It got us into the mess we were in 2008-2009.” We can all debate “trickle down” economics—including my view that it’s a good marketing line for statists but doesn’t represent what small-government advocates actually propose, or what they think happens when taxes are lowered on everyone, not just the “rich.” But, few think that a main cause of the global financial crisis was the Bush tax cuts. The Left thinks that it was Wall Street and deregulation (mostly they blame Bill Clinton’s deregulation, by the way). The Right thinks that it was too-loose monetary policy and misguided federal housing incentives warping the real-estate market. Let the debate rage on. But few, other than Clinton, seem to believe that the only cause worth citing is “trickle-down economics.” Again, Trump didn’t say a word to clarify (or make her clarify) this bizarre and intentionally divisive political accusation.

 

Trump also failed to explain or to defend business when he was accused of paying no taxes himself. He mostly conceded the point and said, “That makes me smart.” That’s not necessarily false, but he had the chance to say that most everyone in America attempts, hopefully (though not always) within the law, to minimize their taxes. And, in fact, the complex—often arbitrary—tax code we currently labor under encourages this, and is itself a large economic drain. His only nod to this was a reference to “carried interest,” a tiny symbolic side issue he’s tried to appropriate from the Left. He could’ve admitted that, just like the Clintons and everyone else in America, he looks to minimize his taxes legally. He could’ve pointed out that when Warren Buffett crusades for higher taxes on the wealthy, he usually admits that he takes full advantage of the tax code as it is now. Instead, Trump left people with a bad taste in their mouths regarding “smart” businessmen paying little or nothing in tax. As a separate matter, he failed to point out that the “rich” and business actually do pay a ton of taxes in this country, and tales of their super-low rates—while not total fiction—are the tiny exception and not the rule. But perhaps that’s asking too much from one of the possible exceptions to the rule himself.

 

When Clinton said “I think my husband did a pretty good job in the 1990s,” Trump responded only with accusations about Nafta. He didn’t ask how Bill Clinton’s record during the 1990s—a time when a famous Democrat could and did say “the era of big government is over”—applies in 2016. He didn’t ask why Hillary is running far to the left of her husband’s governing style. You can’t cite a track record you implicitly repudiate; but you wouldn’t have learned that from Trump.

 

When Trump was accused of rooting for the “collapse” that became the global financial crisis, he said, “That’s called business, by the way.” Every business person in America cringed at that moment. He might’ve pointed out that leaders who see things coming are preferable to those who are caught by surprise. He might’ve said that it’s a businessperson’s job to make the best possible forecast, and to act on it. We lionize the heroes of Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short for foreseeing and profiting from the crisis. Trump might’ve specifically said: “What’s the difference here, Mrs. Clinton? Why didn’t you see it coming while you were the senator from New York State—home of Wall Street—and act to prevent it? You didn’t even warn us about it.” He might’ve even pointed out that in “rooting” for the real-estate collapse, he was actually rooting for a normal bear market—yes, to profit, but also to bleed off speculative excess quickly and prepare the economy for the next leap forward (for instance, I proudly admit that I was “rooting” for the tech bubble to collapse in 1999-2000 when my firm was betting against some insane valuations). Trump should have clearly stated that he certainly wasn’t “rooting” for the devastating recession caused by the financial system seizing up. He might’ve pointed out that if more business people had seen what was happening and moved to profit from it earlier, the real-estate bubble would’ve been pricked, or at least caused less devastation. But, no, he left us with an even stronger version of the false narrative that Clinton intended—that what we call “business” is really just preying on regular people’s misery.

 

Throughout the debate, Clinton advanced numerous “four Pinocchio” economic stories. Trump repeatedly failed to call her on them, or to represent the free market, or even the business community, remotely well. Every time this type of chance is missed, more voters are lost to the falsehoods of ever-bigger government, anti-business hysteria, and class warfare. That we have a Democratic nominee who is overtly hostile to economic liberty is, sadly, not surprising. That we have a Republican nominee who is incapable or unwilling to argue for freedom and the prosperity it brings is something worse.

 

[José]

La vie imite l'art.

 

“The Odd Trump,” from 1875, holds some peculiar pleasures for our times. Both have a character whose finances are a point of contention.

 

I think I really began to like this Trump fellow when he tore his coat off, dived into a raging river, and saved a drowning woman after she’d been flung from a train wreck. “Save me!” she’d have cried, if only she’d been conscious. “Save me, Trump!” Oh, that Trump. Wrestling vicious mastiffs to the ground; smoothly confronting a con man on the Paris-to-Calais train with a pistol in his hand; hunting ghosts at midnight in a haunted English mansion. Rather less money on him than he’d have you believe, true, but a man of cool, levelheaded action all the same. What a character!

 

He is a character—I mean, in a Victorian novel.

 

The anonymously authored and utterly forgotten tale “The Odd Trump,” from 1875, is a ripe bit of Victorian preposterousness. Starting with the damsel saved from a train wreck, the book includes everything from a disputed will and a mysterious old servant to a cursed mansion. Also: ghostly sleepwalkers! Bloody duels! Secret sliding doors! (The latter, hidden in a conservatory, might be more accurately described as a secret sliding lemon tree.) But, most important: it has a hero named Trump.

 

And his old friend and sometimes rival? Clinton, of course.

 

[h16]

P-tain incroyable

[jubal]

Je prends toujours le pari avec n'importe qui pour n'importe quel montant que Clinton l'emporte.

 

Just do it:

 

https://www.fairlay.com/market/next-president-11/

[Neomatix]

Ah oui tiens, en BTC, je n'y ai pas pensé.

[Nigel]

 Tu voulais pas déjà parier contre le Brexit ? 

[Extremo]

Perso j'ai déjà être plus sceptique par rapport à la possible victoire de Trump...

[Neomatix]

Si. Je n'avais pas réussi d'ailleurs.

Mais là c'est pas grave parce que :

1) Soit Hillary passe et je gagne du pognon

2) Soit Trump passe et le shitstorm qui suivra vaudra tout l'or du monde

Je hedge mon amusement si tu veux

[h16]

Moi j'aimerai bien que Johnson soit élu, genre, oups, pas prévu mais hop.

Et sinon, Trump, pour le shitstorm, les têtes affolées des journaleux français et américains devant la "surprise".

[Takeshin]

Ah, ben clairement, ça serait une belle surprise qu'il parvienne à gagner vu l'effondrement qu'il se paie pour le moment. Entre son acharnement sur la Miss Monde, la révélation que sa fondation n'avait pas les droits pour récolter de l'argent et surtout la violation de l'embargo sur Cuba qui va lui coûter la Floride, il a salement piqué du nez dans les sondages. Les estimations basées sur les sondages post-débat donnent à peu près 300 EV à Bobonne, et en particulier, la Caroline du Nord et la Floride, qui lui assurent l'élection même si Trump prend le reste des swing states.

[Tramp]

Le Monde.fr - Donald Trump pourrait ne pas avoir payé d’impôt fédéral pendant dix-huit ans

Le candidat républicain a déclaré 916 millions de dollars de pertes en 1995, selon des documents obtenus par le « New York Times ». Une somme déductible des revenus à venir.

http://www.lemonde.fr/elections-americaines/article/2016/10/02/donald-trump-pourrait-ne-pas-avoir-paye-d-impot-federal-pendant-dix-huit-ans_5006799_829254.html

Fuck yeah

[Stephdumas]

Le vloggeur Styxhexenhammer666 a posté un vlogue sur les impôts de Trump.

 

[Stephdumas]

Le boomerang que le NY Times a lancé sur les impôts de trump a frappé le NY Times en plein dans la figure. Ils ont obtenu les résultats illégalement et ils pratiquent ce qu'ils dénoncent: le NY Times n'a pas payé d'impôts en 2014.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2016/10/02/new-york-times-paid-no-taxes-2014/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/10/02/the-new-york-times-risked-legal-trouble-to-publish-donald-trumps-tax-return/

http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/02/trump-campaign-new-york-times-illegally-obtained-tax-records/

[h16]

oui, lol : http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/irony-alert-guess-who-didnt-pay-15162797/

[Stephdumas]

oui, lol : http://www.hannity.com/articles/hanpr-election-493995/irony-alert-guess-who-didnt-pay-15162797/

 

On pourrait dire maintenant que ceux qui ont jamais triché le fisc, jette la première pierre...à condition de ne pas la jeter à l'intérieur d'une maison de verre.

[Eltourist]

[Brock]

j'observe sur FB et autres une grosse pression de conformite entre amis pour 'Trump Bad'.A mon avis beaucoup de pro-Trump sont silencieux.Je ne sais pas comment ca se passe dans les milieux pro-Trump, c'est probablement la meme chose dans l'autre sens.

[Nofreedom]

Mes collègues US sont majoritairement pro-trump (pour ceux avec qui j'ai parlé politique).

Pas juste anti-clinton, vraiment pro-trump, et pourtant c'est NY et New-Jersey.

 

[Rincevent]

Mes collègues US sont majoritairement pro-trump (pour ceux avec qui j'ai parlé politique).

Pas juste anti-clinton, vraiment pro-trump, et pourtant c'est NY et New-Jersey.

Dis-nous-en davantage ?

[Flashy]

Est-ce qu'il y a une honte à se déclarer pro-Trump? ou des conséquences sociales?
Pour savoir s'il pourrait exister un phénomène de sous-déclaration de nature à fausser les sondages.

[Eltourist]

Dans mon entourage j'entends "Trump ? Mais tu te rends pas compte, ce mec c'est Le Pen !"

 

du coup je discute pas

[h16]

Est-ce qu'il y a une honte à se déclarer pro-Trump? ou des conséquences sociales?

Pour savoir s'il pourrait exister un phénomène de sous-déclaration de nature à fausser les sondages.

Je crois avoir lu en effet qu'il y a bel et bien une sous-décla côté Trump (et pas côté Clinton).

[Rincevent]

Un effet Le Pen, en fait. Ca va faire bizarre aux sondeurs US, ça, tiens.