Favorite Poster: Best of the Best

[The Mikado]

I still think Mikado is an underappreciated Atlas gem.

Really? I think he's overrated. He was one of those awful semi-ironic left-wing T***p supporters back in the day, which to me is the strongest indicator of intellectual shallowness.

I'm not sure I'd agree with the description of me as "left-wing."

[The Mikado]

He was one of those awful semi-ironic left-wing T***p supporters back in the day.

Really?  I actually don't remember that at all.  IIRC, he was posting very little during primary season, and I don't remember him commenting on Trump.

I remember an IRC chat in which he said that very explicitly (along with, sadly, Gully, whom undoubtedly should have known better). I also note he hasn't denied it.

My biggest regret of the 2016 election season was letting the debates and Trump's tape leaking in September talk me out of my long-standing belief that Trump was a strong candidate who was going to seriously challenge, if not beat, Hillary Clinton.

My proudest moment of the 2016 Presidential campaign was seeing Donald Trump in August of 2015, deciding "He's a winner," and sticking through that for months on end while everyone was saying I was trolling or being stupid for thinking that Trump could actually win. Including for that week after Iowa when everyone said he was toast. I believed in Donald Trump's ability to win the nomination wholeheartedly, and I just wish I had kept a similar belief through the general election and not let myself be talked out of it.

I still feel proud that I called that primary when so many people here were left looking like idiots for saying that there was no way that Donald Trump would win.

[The Mikado]

The Trump phenomenon is shocking and upsets the apple cart of how we understood the world for decades. Antonio, as someone who professionally studies political science, should rejoice that he does at a time when drastic changes to the way we understand politics are occurring all over the world. There's many a dissertation in 2016.

The most compelling thing about Trump, to me, and the tipoff that he was something seriously new and dangerous, was the total freshness of his game. At a time when every Republican politician had consigned their ideology to the Ted Cruz game of a laundry list of positions they were obligated to take to be sufficiently right wing (a game that if the GOP base actually cared about it would've carried Cruz to victory), Trump threw it out the window and said what people didn't know they wanted to hear rather than what they thought they wanted to hear. I was saying at the time when everyone was freaked out about Trump blaming G. W. Bush for 9/11 and Trump saying that John McCain wasn't a hero and so on that it wasn't going to hurt him at all, and I was right about it. The American voter is thicker-skinned than anyone imagined, and you can literally insult the Pope like Trump did if you do it with sufficient conviction.

Hillary Clinton, the most calculated and artificial politician in America, was the exact wrong alternative to Trump (though I don't think a naive crank geriatric from Vermont would've been a significantly better choice).

EDIT:

We are about to see vivid, real-time proof how how weak, institutionally, the United States is, and how its institutions can and have been totally subverted by a demagogue.

Even if Russia did release a video of Donald Trump masturbating to Russian hookers urinating on President Obama's bed, Donald Trump will still be our president four years from now and would almost certainly give a speech in which he remarked about how large his penis was in the video. Total shamelessness and ability to just keep trucking through any negative consequence no matter how awful it looks makes Trump formidable in a way we haven't seen in this country before, and I take this seriously. NOTHING you get on Trump will ever make him resign or make the GOP Congress, who are petrified in terror of him, impeach him. The only way to beat Donald Trump is to get far, far more votes than he does.