postmodern politics

[postmodernpolitics]

Trump’s platform Trump the man

If you look at trump's platform, besides his foreign policy it's pretty centrist. But to say that he'll play by even his own platform is to ignore his history of behavior. He's worked with literal McCarthy era lawyers to fight the government on his discriminatory real estate practices. His rhetoric can ONLY be classified as blatantly racist. From the John Dickerson interview about the Mexican judge, to this moment from one of his rallies, to his talk about women he has shown his true face. We've never had a candidate who has hotwired their brain to the internet. I actually like that idea, I just wish it wasn't trump who did it. I've been watching Trump and Clinton rallies for the past year, and I can tell you that the news is not cultivating minute slip ups in his speeches. In the second debate he was interrupted more than Clinton by the judges, but he's been burying his own grave well enough on his own. This IS his rhetoric. This IS who he is. I'm not a fan of Hillary. I would vote for Johnson if he had a less sophomoric foreign policy plan. But I want my vote to be the strongest ANTI vote possible against Trump. Hillary has nearly committed treason multiple times, but never quite. I've read large portions of the email archive, I've read the Benghazi report, I've listened to the CIA hearings. They are utterly damning. And if it was anyone else running against her, I'd vote for them. But I WILL NOT stay home. I WILL NOT stand idle. America does not need a king, and I will not vote for one. “Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” - Statue of Liberty plaque

[postmodernpolitics]

Mr. Brexit

“SOON THEY WILL BE CALLING ME MR. BREXIT” -Donald Trump [1]

This tweet reveals a lot about the endgame strategy from the Trump campaign. Looking back to Brexit, it was a horribly unpopular opinion early on in the referendum. It was seen by some as associated with isolationist nationalists, racists, or the uneducated masses. But it was supported by many major party leaders of the conservative party after public opinion began to shift slightly towards sympathy with The Exit, tying them to the alt-right movement that has been growing in the past eight years in the UK. In the final weeks before the vote, there was a heavy blitz of supporters, publicity, speeches and more that generated a deafening roar of news coverage. The poling in the UK is traditionally pretty inaccurate, and this election was no different. The news had nowhere to pull from but the shotty polls or the public outcry for Exit that was going on in the final weeks. This, I believe, is what tipped the scales ever so slightly over the 50% mark at the end.

But how did Exit even get that far? And how did the protests against the EU develop and reach so many people?

This proof of concept is a hand reaching out for someone to help me research this.

The British Exit - Sovereignty and Safety

One way we can look at the behind the scenes of the Brexit movement is looking at the officials in the aftermath. Many resigned or redacted support directly after Brexit won. This is in part because people didn’t know the magnitude of the economic backlash that would occur from the decision, or the instant stalemate between the UK and the EU in regards to exit negotiations.

I think that this may point to The Appeal to Pity [citation], a logical fallacy that shows itself mostly in large public opinion shifts towards ultimately destructive ends because the issue at hand is the underdog. Exit was the underdog, but after the multitude of sexual assault statistics came out, and after the heavy language about sovereignty were pushed right at the end when the media was attempting to make sense of the noise the votes were cast in confusion. And when the mind makes decisions in confusion, it will choose the option that it has heard the most about. [2]

Now what does this have to do with the US Presidential election? As Trump pulls more and more support from the Republican party, and manages to moderate himself more and more, his underdog status may push him over the edge at the right time. The dangerous thing about The Appeal to Pity is that it cycles in opinion. If you look at the Aggregate Polls from right after the GOP Convention, Trump gets 50.1% but only a day after begins to fall rapidly in the weeks following. Trump's recent speeches are moving him closer and closer towards the middle while Hillary continues to move a bit more left. The trend in the polls is towards 50 - 50. Now, Hillary is still significantly up in the polls. But for who Trump is, She should be much much further ahead of him. I predict a continuation of this roller coaster polls world. And I would even bet for Trump to win at 1:4 odds. Even though a candidate who was ahead in the polls at this point in the race hasn’t lost since the forties, I think it’s definitely possible for Trump to root his own underdog status so firmly in the ground that he can get just ever so slightly over the finish line.

“if you ever hear of a group getting together to stop X, be sure to put your money on X.” - Richard Nixon

Christopher Birnbaum Written September 6, 2016

[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/766246213079498752?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cebFWOlx848

[postmodernpolitics]

On A Dime

On A Dime

The coming shift in tone from Donald Trump’s campaign for the general election.

If there’s anything that this election has shown the GOP elite it is that they’re out of touch with what the people of the republican party want. The Liberal wing of the GOP has essentially faded since the beginning of it’s fall in 1970, and the isolationism of the old right has only seen spurts of memory throughout the 20th century. Donald Trump has been an unusual political figure for his entire time in the eyes of the public. He’s been supportive of gay marriage, he’s publicly opposed the abolishment of the death penalty in NYC, he’s opposed governmental involvement in American lives, but recently he’s been calling back to the isolationism of the old right that lead to the Japanese Internment camps of WWII. He’s pushing for the GOP, his current ticket, to move away from it’s current adhering to the conservatives of America. He reads Guerilla, non-peer-reviewed news. He will retweet anything positive towards him, weather a bernie supporter or a neo-nazi. But most importantly, he’s a strategically nimble dancer of a candidate. There are two important lines that show Donald Trump’s plan for his campaign, and it’s not the wall, the judges, or the deportation. It’s all in the marketing. Donald Trump is aiming for the one thing in political analysis that has a one to one ratio: Headlines and polling. The more headlines a candidate has, the better they do in polls. This has everything to do with name recognition. It goes like this, Donald Trump says something crazy in a rally. It gets press coverage. People see the name and look up his campaign and find that his platform really isn’t that crazy, it’s actually pretty centrist. He doesn’t have his wall on his plan, he doesn’t have the deportation on his plan. So people reasonably conclude that the news really is skewed and biased and unfair to THe Donald. He’s really telling it like it is. And every overextension by the news gives him ammo to bite them back with. The two lines are as follows. “””””I’m going to do great with the Mexicans just wait until we get to the general election and you’ll see those numbers go up”””””

He’s not proposing his ideas as president, he’s just selling his image to the people that he needs to at the moment. During the primaries, he only focused on his closest competitors and tore them apart with branding and by outshining them in the news cycle. Now he’s moving towards saying less and less about the wall and more about his actual plans for taxes and such. And every sarcastic remark that gets covered on the news will be harped on at every subsequent really saying how evil and unfair the new is. Hillary’s trend line is continuing to weaken despite her 13 point lead. Trump seems to have hit his ceiling at 38% of the GOP, but if he can make Hillary look unelectable, and if he can gain the support of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, then he can really dig into her poorly thought out strategies in this campaign.

Every one of trump's seeming gafs are baits, simple as that. And he will continue to ridicule and punish the national media every time that they take a bite of the candy trail, and every time that happens, he will hurt Hillary’s trend line.

So what do the Never Trump people do now to fight him?

I don’t know, educate your constituency. Fight for people who oppose trump to be elected to the house/senate so they can stonewall him as they have for Obama.

Trump is soon to turn on the dime. Put on his nicest tie, and his nicest smile, and he is going to try to charm the pants off of the american people. And I think they just might fall for it.

Christopher Birnbaum Written August 11, 2016