Does Donald Trump have single redeeming human quality?

[Rogar]

In the end, a very good thing will come out of all this. During the obama years, the pendulum swung pretty far to the left. The idea of sanctuary cities, illegals being able to attend university in California for free while my children would have had to pay out of state tuition, rise in food stamps and Medicaid expansion daca protection humming along with no real resolution and so on set up a simmering kettle that was bound to boil and overflow. Now we have many legislators saying loudly the opposite and gaining robust support

by having someone like Trump tweeting and saying the things he does, it has made many people who would sit back and assume someone else would fight the necessary fights take notice

Although the country is very very polarized right now, an equilibrium will be restored and we will end up somewhere in the middle.

So the thing many people hate the most about Trump, the tweets and name calling type behavior, is sparking a revolution, especially among young people. They are watching their peers being slaughtered, their future being polluted, women speaking up while a bunch of rich white “Christian” men spread their outdated ideas of what women should do, and see the income gap between the rich and poor widen and they will rise up and awaken and become better citizens for it.

I see much of that too. I've discussed it with friends and they tend to think I'm delusional, but I can see the possibility that we come out of this for the better sometime down the road. An example i think of is Obamacare repeal, something that had been an imagined thorn in the side of one party faction for years. When the repeal vote finally became reality, people realized the issue was more political than practical and Obamacare was maybe not such a bad thing.

i have heard that the environment and global warming can probably tolerate one Trump term without a major setback, but not two terms. I'm not so sure and tend to think some of the environmental policy will make a permanent mark.

I also tend to think that any bureaucracy becomes bloated over time. In my corporate world we had lay-offs, hiring freezes, belt tightening, and severance packages routinely. Trump seems to be going about this with a shotgun rather than a surgical knife, but some of it has been been a long time coming.

I think Trump's economic policies are dangerous, but I have actively tried to avoid goods from China in the past until it became nearly impossible. They have an authoritarian government with a poor human rights record and their products are often of questionable quality. I'd rather have tariffs on cheap plastic goods sold to Walmart, but I really do not have a problem with tariffs on Chinese goods.

[LDAHL]

You missed my main point which is he connects with his audiences. That you are not his audience makes that fact easy to ignore, I suppose.

I think that's very true. To a certain segment of the population, the call-out culture, hashtag activists and self-styled elites whose primary argument is appealing to their own authority, I could see how his appeal would be completely incomprehensible. He refuses to be shamed. He seems to enjoy violating the "norms" they set for him. He in many ways fits the monstrous image they have tried to apply to his predecessors. Of course that segment will be driven to a visceral hatred. It's not enough that he's an obnoxious buffoon. He has a purity of evil with not a single redemptive quality. He is not human.

To another segment of the population, weary of being sneered at as bitter clingers and irredeemable deplorables, he provides a means of sneering back. Is that positive or healthy? Almost certainly not. Is it understandable? Yes.

Me, I think he's a lowlife opportunist who will do the country much harm in the long run. But I view him more as a political hack to be voted out rather than a demon to be exorcised. I don't see much point in nurturing a personal hatred.

[CathyA]

Isn't "nurturing a personal hatred" just a normal reaction to someone in such a high position who is so selfish and ruining the country? It's not like he's here for a day or a week or a month or a year..........

[LDAHL]

Isn't "nurturing a personal hatred" just a normal reaction to someone in such a high position who is so selfish and ruining the country?

I don't believe it is normal or particularly healthy. I think making the political personal is an indicator of cultural poverty and political immaturity. You can oppose a politician without weighing yourself down with a burden of hate.

[ApatheticNoMore]

I see much of that too. I've discussed it with friends and they tend to think I'm delusional, but I can see the possibility that we come out of this for the better sometime down the road. An example i think of is Obamacare repeal, something that had been an imagined thorn in the side of one party faction for years. When the repeal vote finally became reality, people realized the issue was more political than practical and Obamacare was maybe not such a bad thing.

maybe R's will stop running on it's repeal, but the repeal of the individual mandate likely means that the already flawed Obamacare is going to start failing even more in many ways. So if one's concern is the people that depend on the already very flawed Obamacare, well I don't think it's looking up for them at all.

i have heard that the environment and global warming can probably tolerate one Trump term without a major setback, but not two terms. I'm not so sure and tend to think some of the environmental policy will make a permanent mark.

I don't think that this is here nor there, ok Trump is not the president we need for the environment or for even planning any sort of way to deal with not prevention but the fallout that is going to come (even building levies). He's a prefect example of a failure of leadership writ large for all to see. However to even imagine that Trump's 2 terms are the factor in *global* warming (yes the U.S. is a major emitter of greenhouse gasses but it's not the only one) much of which we are seeing is effects built in globally by past decades rather than present policies - well no. To blame him for local issues like not protecting local ecosystems due to decisions by his EPA is fine, but global warming dwarfs (or is that trumps) Trump. The feedbacks of global warming are likely much bigger at this point than any feedbacks trump can add or detract from so to say (arctic methane, dying trees etc.).

I think Trump's economic policies are dangerous, but I have actively tried to avoid goods from China in the past until it became nearly impossible. They have an authoritarian government with a poor human rights record and their products are often of questionable quality. I'd rather have tariffs on cheap plastic goods sold to Walmart, but I really do not have a problem with tariffs on Chinese goods.

trade with China has to be a contributor to global warming, a lot of things are going on that don't make sense, cases where we ship the raw materials to China, they manufacture something, and the finished good gets shipped back. In what world is that environmentally sane? So Trump shoots from the hip in maybe not that well thought out trade policy, but prior policy also was written by lunatics as far as I am concerned (because again in what sane world does shipping goods that can instead be made locally around the world make sense?)

[oldhat]

Just to be clear, I don't hate Trump. Like several others here, I mostly pity him. He's clearly pathological and thus powerless to control his own behavior. Hating him would be like hating a rattlesnake. I just find his evident absence of human decency remarkable. I don't think I've ever met anyone like him in real life.

[Teacher Terry]

I don't hate Trump either. Not wasting my life energy on that. I have not always agreed with other Republican presidents but I did not dislike them as people. I have always respected our President but it is impossible to do with this moron.

[KayLR]

Well, one good thing you could say about him is he takes after chimpanzees. I was just reading an article about Jane Goodall, and this is what she says:

“In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals," she told The Atlantic during the 2016 election. "In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position."

OMG Catherine! That's awesome!

[oldhat]

I don't hate Trump either. Not wasting my life energy on that. I have not always agreed with other Republican presidents but I did not dislike them as people. I have always respected our President but it is impossible to do with this moron.

Interestingly, I'd have to say I disliked most recent Repub presidents more than I dislike Trump, who, as I say, is in a class by himself. I thought Dubya was a spoiled, arrogant frat boy who had everything in life handed to him on a plate. A classic case of someone who was born on third base and grew up thinking he hit a triple.

Reagan did have to work for what he had, but his view of life was obviously that since he, born with charm and good looks, could make it, why couldn't everybody else? They must just be lazy.

I had no opinion about Poppy Bush one way or the other. He did preserve some of that old money sense of noblesse oblige, which is something, I suppose. And he wasn't a draft dodger like his son.

[CathyA]

I hate Trump. And it feels good.