I agree Trump is the most “left wing” Repub in several decades.
Thank you for the reply Ridge, I appreciate your thoughts as ever…
-He doesn’t advocate protectionism. he advocates better negotiation of trade deals.
I’ll concede that he claims “in public” to be in favour of ‘free trade’ (and he certainly benefitted from cheap foreign labour as a businessmen, that being a cardinal irony if you will given what he says now to appeal to white blue-collar workers fearful of losing their jobs to the very people who once enriched Trump himself) but his stated policies belie any claims to the contrary.
Levying exorbitant tariffs on any country that is deemed to be unfairly or “unilaterally” benefitting from US trade policy might very well be attractive to people who want to stick two-fingers up to the outside world. But when these blue-collar Americans start having to pay huge inflated sums for frequently used products and manufacturing production (name removed by moderator)uts go up in price, as a result of the punitive retaliation the US will receive from other countries in response, they might live to regret jumping on board with the Donald. It will be revealed as a big ‘populist’ con of the working man. That’s on top of the slowdown in international growth that will likely accrue, as happened with Smoot-Hawley under Hoover (and I
do side with the orthodox historiography on that front).
Trump’s trade “policies” make excellent
'bread and circuses’ theatre shows for the masses. But translate them into realpolitik and they are likely to be disastrous in the international arena.
If a global recession occurs from Trump’s trade wars, we may resume discussion on this point regarding his ‘protectionism’ and the merits thereof…Watch this space…
-There is no reason to accuse him of xenophobia just because he wants to control the borders. One should find better reasons for accusing him of that.
That isn’t the primary reason I accuse him of xenophobia. It is the way he characterizes entire ethno-cultural groups of people and demonises them as the “threatening other”. I cannot think of anything more xenophobic than depicting Mexicans
carte blanche as “murderers, criminals, rapists and drug dealers” and demanding the construction of a wall to keep them out which their own government will have to pay for. It is hateful speech designed to stir up the umbrage of the masses. And it works.
If he merely said, “we need tighter border controls for security purposes at a sensitive time like this”, I’m OK with that but of course he didn’t.
Europe (and to some degree our own country) might now regret its open borders, but it’s too late for them. It’s not too late here.
I never supported Angela Merkel’s decision to endorse an open door policy for migrants fleeing the Syrian crisis. I do understand why she did it and we were obligated for humanitarian reasons to take in those we could - but not the unprecedented influx that ultimately came in. The external border of the EU should have been better secured. After all, while we have free trade and a customs union within the EU - we also have an external tariff. Our trade policy should probably have better reflected our response to immigration as well but our genuine concern for the plight of refugees overrode our rationality, I have to say, in this case. Britain, at least, is not a party to the Schengen agreement, so we do have border controls.
The truth is that if the US and her allies had been more involved in bringing a speedy end to the Syrian Civil War and had not permitted Russia to ‘weaponise’ the migrant crisis as a tool to destabilise European institutions, we wouldn’t be facing the humanitarian disaster that we are facing. But that’s a different story.
Towards every women he has ever encountered, practically. He is continually boasting about how much “*****” (
p-ssy) he gets compared with other men, this apparently being the signal mark of his superiority and natural right to govern. I’m sorry to be so frank about it but you only have to listen to the sheer vulgarity and chauvinism of his speech to see that he is a women-hating prig with an inflated sense of his own masculine virility and sexual prowess. I find him utterly repugnant in this respect, very much like a Putin or Mussolini caricature.
He continually derides women based upon their looks, rather than characters. Carly Fiorina. Meghan Kelly. Angelina Jolie. Hillary Clinton.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more outwardly sexist public figure, not at least since the heyday of Berlusconi and his prostitutes in the presidential mansion over here in Europe.
Is this really the example we want to set for impressionable young men? Should they aspire to be women-hating lotharios?
He refused, at first, to disassociate himself from David Duke and the KKK. There have been racist taunting from elements among his supporters towards black protestors at rallies. His Mexican rants are tainted with racial bias.
I’m afraid too many of us have been so intimidated by the name-calling the “politically correct” left uses to shut our mouths that we accept their misjudgments and accede in being forced into silence.
Not so in my case, I merely abhor the expressed views and persona of Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton and Obama can blame everything from out-of-control budgets to the weather on Republicans and nobody calls it “hate speech”.
That is vastly different. Political parties always blame the opposition for things that go wrong. This happens in every two-party political system and cannot possibly be compared to stigmatizing entire groups among one’s own electorate, neighbouring countries and abroad.
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