One thing I have noticed, as I have looked through posts and topics here, is that many seem to be pessimistic about Donald Trump's chances as President. Now, I know that Trump is a repulsive character for many people, and I can understand that. Yet at the same time, it seems that all the election scenarios and all the maps are pointed in the direction of a Trump failure? Would people here be making the same prediction about Hillary Clinton, had she won the election?
Had the election gone the other way, then we would have a Democratic President and almost certainly a Democratic majority in the House -- and more of the same gridlock that we have had since 2011. We might solve nothing, but we would have no looming disaster.
Instead we have a cruel, vindictive, bossy man whose ideology suggests an admiration for Gilded-Age plutocrats and perhaps agrarian racists of the Jim-Crow South, someone who has won on a slogan that means whatever he wants it to mean... and a Congress willing to do his bidding. No human suffering is in excess (short of chattel slavery, but debt bondage might be acceptable) so long as it enriches elites and allows their unlimited indulgence.
Donald Trump can force change in America, but I see none of the change as an unqualified good. Like Dubya he is a big-government right-winger, a socialist for the rich, but he has far more severe vices than Dubya had. Can you imagine Dubya talking about personal violence or grabbing women by their crotches? Just imagine what happens to some non-white street thug who grabs an attractive, middle-class white woman by her crotch without her consent and is convicted in a court of law. Ten years for sexual assault? That might be harsh, and less for a frat boy who does such with a pretty white girl, or some member of a minority group who does such with one of 'his kind'. Decent people don't even talk about doing something of the sort.
His foreign policy is a mess. He has a sick admiration of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. A real conservative would admire Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher -- not Moammar Qaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Satan Hussein, or any of the absolute-monarchs in all but name in North Korea. About the only wisdom that he showed was to not praise Fidel Castro.
Speaking of Fidel Castro... he is (and in philosophical language one uses the present tense to describe anyone deceased as a repository of ideas and a list of behaviors because the reputation outlasts the body) a dictator. His rigid rhetoric is on an elementary level, is full of populist resentment. The difference between Donald Trump (who will likely be as militaristic as Castro and has a tendency to bark out orders like a tyrant) is not how Donald Trump sees capitalism, but rather that Castro excoriates what Trump exults.
I am already sick of his rhetoric, and I can imagine myself getting similarly sick of Castro propaganda.
I do not expect politicians to entertain me. Politics is too important to become a way of entertaining people. Barack Obama not entertain us much. The most derided of Roman Emperors, Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, were adept at ensuring that everyone had a good time watching as Christians were offered to "lions and tigers and bears -- oh my!", except of course for the Christians, not to mention gladiatorial games. I thought "No Drama Obama" fully adequate. Want drama? Watch episodes of
Downton Abbey or
Breaking Bad, dammit! Want sports? Get cable TV and you can get plenty of baseball, football, hockey, and basketball. Maybe track and field and ice skating. Tough luck if you want to see religious pariahs cast into a tank full of great white sharks or leopard seals.
For Donald Trump there is no precedent in American history. Precedents elsewhere are horrible. He's practically a foreign agent. His idea of how to get prosperity is to have a corrupt speculative boom... which usually ends in a financial panic as in 1893, 1907, 1929, or 2008.
"Make America Great Again" -- sure. Only if you are super-rich, so far as I can tell, in view of his cabinet selections.
I expect to hate life. I wish that I had dual citizenship.