Why the pessimism about Donald Trump here?

[pbrower2a]

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.  

[pbrower2a]

1. America is polarized into two different political universes, mutually exclusive and believing nearly-diametric opposites of what each other believe in. We have some honest-to-Mussolini fascists in the GOP and sober liberals in the Democratic Party...and that is as opposite as one can get. (Were it Commies in the Democratic Party and sober conservatives in the GOP, that observation would hold),

People are not moving away from their beliefs.

2. Donald Trump has chosen to go with extremism, going to a position in which wealth and corporate power are the real measures of political legitimacy.If 95% of the American people suffer greatly for only 2% who matter -- that's how he wants it.

3. We have questions of outside influence in the elections -- influence from outside the USA, from a firmly-authoritarian regime. Foreigners are not allowed even to make campaign contributions to Presidential and Congressional campaigns.  It would be bad enough if some State governor suppressed the vote -- but if foreigners got involved... we had a sham of an election.

4. We have an incoming President unlike any other in American history -- one who barks orders like a dictator, one who has promoted ethnic and religious bigotry, one who has admitted to grabbing women by their crotches... He has claimed to know more than the generals about war despite having never served in combat.  He has a stormy relationship with the CIA and the FBI.

He is no gentleman. He is no expert. He has a shady record as a businessman. Why should we expect him to grow into the Presidency?

5. He has a shaky mandate. He got about as much of a share of the popular vote as two Presidential nominees who are generally understood to have been trounced. -- less than 46% of the vote. He did better than Mike Dukakis in 1988 and John McCain in 2008 and got less than the winner of the popular vote.

6. He has shown contempt for science and education in favor of his personal intuition and the values of special interests.

MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN? -- sure. Only for the upper 2%. The rest of us can work longer and harder under more brutal management for far less. All for Pharaoh.

How bad is Donald Trump? I expect big growth in the Communist Party (by its standards). I expect more people to emigrate. High-tech companies will find it harder to recruit and maintain highly-trained people in America. Secession movements will pop up where they have not existed before.

There can be only one good result for four years of the Trump Administration -- that people have learned  to stay clear of demagogues who show signs of sociopathy.