Concession regarding Trump

[Hermit For Peace]

We shouldn't accept or concede to a dictatorship. If he stops his authoritarian ways, then that's fine. But we should never accept the fascist takeover of America and fight back at every turn.

Of course.

[Hermit For Peace]

There are specific issues that Democrats can work with him on, but he has still shown himself to be vile, petty, unprepared, and lacking any desire to better prepare himself to be president. If he somehow manages to be a fair, just, and effective president, then of course I'll think differently, but I see no indication that he'll be anything other than incompetent.

Personally I don't believe he's incompetent in business. Sure he's had failures, but he's also had many successes. He lives in opulence compared to you and me so he must be doing something right. He might use underhanded ways to get what he wants, and that is behavior that might abhorrent to morally-minded average citizens, but he's not in jail yet so he must not be doing anything illegal, it would seem.

While I'm not singing praises of Trump, while he is not a model citizen and no one to emulate, and while he's no one we should want our kids exposed to, if he can turn our economy around, get us out of the hole and create prosperity like he enjoys, we'll just have to look past the bad stuff about him and move forward. I don't see any other way.

[Storebought]

The more I've thought about it, posts like this one are the reason why the Left, broadly defined, has been nearly completely wiped out in the US and Europe.

The OP is essentially asking people who vote Left, for whatever reasons (economic, social, personal), to put aside their fears -- put aside the very reasons why they voted Left at all -- and to "hope" and "wish" that the Right will not be as destructive to their well-being and their self-interests as the Right has all but promised they will be during the campaign. No, Left-wing lawmakers, parties, or activists won't make any attempt to stop or delay or at the very least mitigate the damage the Right will wreak of the interests of their voters. The isolated voters themselves have to make do in the face of the onslaught the best way they can manage.

As obnoxious as this call to self-induced amnesia as it is, it is in no sense a novelty. The Left (here I mean parties and action groups) has continually stiffed its very own voters and interests from the 1970s onward (the one exception being in the area of gay rights -- but the gay rights movement has always been driven by the wealthy white middle classes and the Democrats will never abandon them). Is it then any wonder why the Democrats in the US and the socialists in Europe have been abandoned, when the Democrats and the socialists have all but abandoned their own base and left them to their own self-defense?

But that doesn't explain why those abandoned voters then decide to vote for the Right. I puzzled about that for a while now, until I realized this:

The crux of OP's argument is Trump "isn't nearly as bad (to the Left) as you think it is." In other words, it is more than just a concession regarding the upcoming horror of President Trump -- it is a concession that this administration will carry out supposedly left wing reforms better than any Democratic administration can. I find that line of thinking completely magical: I could go in details about the absurdity in ignoring everything Trump has said during the debates, the campaign stops, the RNC, the ongoing spectacle of his Cabinet choices (one poster said it was like he was assembling his very own Politburo) and just hope that he and his appointments have the interests of the 54% of the population who voted against him at heart, but I won't need to. If the interests of left-wing voters are to be so well taken care of by a GOP administration -- let alone Trump's -- that we can ignore the violence in their implementation, then why vote for a Democratic Party at all?

I guess one benefit from this is that left-wing voters can finally stop relying on the federal government to resolve their issues, since it won't in any case.

[The_Doctor]

I don't think we should rush to give him credit before credit is due. I am hostile to Trump and will remain hostile until Trump demonstrates he is effective at his job. He might convince me at that point, but I doubt very much, given his campaign and transition, that he will ever be remotely a good president.

He would need to basically be someone he's not to win my approval. And so, I'm not holding my breath and looking past his "bad side." Every President has a bad and good side. With him, the bad side is kind of almost all there is.

[fhtagn]

If somehow Trump somehow got a ton of policies enacted that brought years of unbridled prosperity to our country, I'd be perfectly OK with calling his job as president terrific and successful. I won't delegitimize the good things he does (if any)

That being said, the Trump himself, as a person, is still a scumbag and if even a fraction of the things he has been accused of doing are true, he deserves to be in prison, not the White House. He has bumbled through his life making countless people miserable, and that will not be forgotten.

[Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon]

I didn't vote for Trump for a reason. I'm not going to suddenly put that aside and call him "amazing" because "He won and he might do what you want, you never know". Trump ran a campaign in which he showed himself as a dishonest, racist, incompetent, inexperienced, anti-immigrant, anti-first amendment, anti-women, sexually assaulting spine of a businessman that didn't deserve to be president any more than a five year old does.

He picked someone for VP that I not only wanted to be defeated for re-election to their current position, but is also best known for passing a RFRA that was so broadly written that it could have been used to justify not serving just about anyone, and who was also known for actions designed to make the State Superintendent a complete figurehead position because he didn't like the fact that it was held by a Democrat.

He hasn't shown good signs in his cabinet appointments either - his chief strategist is a racist, his attorney general is a racist, his EPA secretary is currently suing the EPA, his Energy Secretary is someone who is on record as wanting to abolish the department, his education secretary is rumored to be a young-earth creationist, his SOS is very pro-Putin, and his treasury secretary is a wall-street banker.

If he is somehow an amazing president, it's not that I wouldn't acknowledge that. It's not that I would never consider voting for him in 2020, although it would take something pretty extraordinary for me to actually go through with that. But he's given me every reason to believe that he'll actually be  a horrible president. And don't even try the "BUT THE DEMOCRATS ARE SO BAD!!" line with me. If both major parties nominate terrible candidates again, I'll simply vote libertarian again.

[ApatheticAustrian]

i think many people seemingly don't understand that the fact that he won alone has legitimized things like bullying and mexican-scaring and rape phantasies.

he could be a much better president (whatever "better" means) than his critics think and still be a negative influence on dozens of millions of kids looking for a role model.

long story short: the bad stuff HAS happended, everything else is just a bonus or confirmation why anyone was against him in the first place.

[Dr. Arch]

I didn't vote for Trump for a reason. I'm not going to suddenly put that aside and call him "amazing" because "He won and he might do what you want, you never know". Trump ran a campaign in which he showed himself as a dishonest, racist, incompetent, inexperienced, anti-immigrant, anti-first amendment, anti-women, sexually assaulting spine of a businessman that didn't deserve to be president any more than a five year old does.

He picked someone for VP that I not only wanted to be defeated for re-election to their current position, but is also best known for passing a RFRA that was so broadly written that it could have been used to justify not serving just about anyone, and who was also known for actions designed to make the State Superintendent a complete figurehead position because he didn't like the fact that it was held by a Democrat.

He hasn't shown good signs in his cabinet appointments either - his chief strategist is a racist, his attorney general is a racist, his EPA secretary is currently suing the EPA, his Energy Secretary is someone who is on record as wanting to abolish the department, his education secretary is rumored to be a young-earth creationist, his SOS is very pro-Putin, and his treasury secretary is a wall-street banker.

If he is somehow an amazing president, it's not that I wouldn't acknowledge that. It's not that I would never consider voting for him in 2020, although it would take something pretty extraordinary for me to actually go through with that. But he's given me every reason to believe that he'll actually be  a horrible president. And don't even try the "BUT THE DEMOCRATS ARE SO BAD!!" line with me. If both major parties nominate terrible candidates again, I'll simply vote libertarian again.

Quoted for truth