The “tell” is when he sits down to the table. How would you approach a poker player who brags about what a good, great, good-good poker player he is? Would it be hard to suppress smacking your lips?
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The more likely explanation for Trump’s seeming ineptness is that it’s not just an appearance. He really is inept. He’s a billionaire (we think, probably), but (we think, probably) that his current business model is founded on having picked really good tax lawyers to deal with his real estate and casino bankruptcy over a decade ago, then scaling back since to a low intensity, low yield business of mostly just licensing his name to projects using other peoples’ money that mostly these other people benefit from. That business model doesn’t seem to have required much effort from him, so ineptitude, perhaps the progressive cognitive dysfunction of one of the dementias, would have been masked, as he sat back and let his staff handle all the details of even an unambitious business model. Now he’s in the WH, and some combination of ho longer being mentally competent to find the right staff for the new business model, and there not being any way this presidency business can be run by staff, however good, means that the ineptitude is not masked any longer.
All that said, I’m not counting any of the chickens that will accrue to our side from Trump really being as inept as he seems, until we have got two things done and settled for at least the next year:
1) the annual appropriations bills passed
2) the debt ceiling safely raised
These two items are the handles that are available for any one of the three legs of the legislative trifecta to grab to force a game of legislative chicken. The conventional wisdom is way too dismissive of the power that the president could wield by forcing a game of chicken. The history of the supposed miserable failure of this strategy is widely touted, despite the fact that it actually worked for the Rs in the debt ceiling crisis that resulted in the sequester. I would argue that it only failed the Rs when they tried shutdown, holding the appropriations bills hostage, because they swerved first, they lost the game of chicken. Lose the game and of course you suffer politically. But what made them lose is that they set up the game of chicken, then failed at it by swerving first, not that they set up the game of chicken.
Trump will not swerve first, if he ever gets to the point of setting up a game of legislative chicken. The mere fact that the president is a unitary actor, and the opposing players in this game would be Congressional leaders who have to hold a coalition together through very high pressure moves, means that any president would have a huge advantage. But Trump is uniquely suited to the game of chicken. In such a game, all the things that make him inept at conventional methods are either irrelevant, or actual advantages. He doesn’t need to understand the public policy issues or the people he’s playing the game against, beyond knowing this simple truth, that they are conventional, PC-driven politicians who will surely swerve first. It’s a plus that he doesn’t much care about public policy, or, really, seem to much care about the human consequences of public policy or shutting down the govt or forcing the US into default…
Trump is clearly not far gone into dementia. He’s not to the point that people generally have to reach before anguished relatives are forced to face the reality that their parent or grandparent has this problem. He’s far from the point of thinking it’s 1987, or of not remembering he has children. He’s at a far more common but much less recognized stage of the process, still capable of considerable interaction with the outside world, but with sharp limitations on his ability to process and remember new information. He’s never going to be able to be anything but inept at being a conventional president, because that job involves painstaking, detailed, and relentless negotiation of everything. in multiple fields of knowledge where there really are no experts to delegate the negotiations to. But he does still have the ability to play chicken. That’s a simple game, terrifying in its simplicity. “Let me have my way, or the US goes into default.” Saying that is still within Trump’s diminishing circle of competence. And precisely because that circle is already so diminished, he cares much less than non-demented players about the consequences of the wreck if neither side swerves, and he is capable of convincing himself that those consequences won’t really be so bad. Trump will not swerve, he will win any game of chicken he sets up.
That’s the only thing that might save us, that he actually is so far gone that he is no longer capable of setting up a game of chicken, that he either can’t see that he has to go that way or be a failure, or he doesn’t have sufficient control over his own staff to implement a veto or threatened veto.
I am not relieved that the threat to the funding bills seems to have passed for this this week. This latest intervention of the administration, starting with Mulvaney’s subsides-for-wall threat a week or so ago, does seem to have derailed what looked like a successful effort to reach agreement in Congress for a long-term CR to be passed today. Now they’re saying it will only be a one week CR. Maybe that intervention was just random noise, but it has succeeded in keeping the shutdown hostage in play for at least another week. I’ld call it a wash on whether to see the shutdown talk from the administration as a hopeful sign of mental disorganization, or as part of a plan for shutdown, psyching other players out and preparing the public for what they will do next week when the CRs come up again.
The potentially bigger problem is the debt ceiling. It is a much more compelling hostage to take than the funding bills, because default is a much worse and fast-acting/irreversible a disaster than shutdown.
If we get the hostages safe for this year by passing long-term CRs or appropriations bills, and we get the ceiling raised for a year out, then the threat diminishes greatly. After a whole year of ineptitude at being a conventional president, Trump would have trouble forcing the other players to play a game of chicken he starts out of the blue. The longer he goes on flailing, the more he prepares everyone, the political actors plus the public, to accept the idea that he has a medical and/or psychiatric problem. At some point, enough people, even the WH staff, would react to an attempt to play chicken by getting him the care he needs, rather than by letting him set up the game of chicken. We’re just not there yet. He could still probably veto a bill, and people would have to deal with the game of chicken that sets up, rather than sending in the psych techs as their response
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These “seasoned bankers” let themselves get so scammed by President Ozymandias that they have refused to do any business with him. No American bank will lend to him, but this only came about after the “seasoned bankers” were forced to accept pennies on the dollar for what Trump owed. It took the “seasoned bankers” at Deutsche Bank (not an American bank) somewhat longer until their losses, too, forced them to shut off the spigot. And he owes them a lot more than $100,000.
I am not aware of any “assets” the banks have received that come close to covering their losses. I do know that one bank executive said one of the first lessons he was taught was “Never lend Donald Trump a dime”.
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Wouldn’t you love to play poker with him? That’s given that you know poker, unlike His Presidence.
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It is both sad and pathetically amusing - Trump is seen as all this tough bluster and Trump’s dimwitted followers would laud his cartoonish macho attitude and hold it up as rougher & tougher than the politicians from the past -
When, if you were bound by facts & reality - if you compare Trump to certain people - Oh like … George McGovern -
Trump is a sniveling spineless snarky coward - all smart mouth trash talk - but incapable of displaying tangible courage or heroics.
- and old liberal George McGovern has genuine hero chops - the likes of which precious flower Trump could never dream to display.
Fundamentally - Trump is a Fraud - all the way through to the core.
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“All Bark, No Bite: Trump Ain’t The Negotiator He Bragged About.”
Quelle surprise.
He also ain’t anything else he bragged about.
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That is a great looking dog.
And I’m a cat person.
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Scout looks like a sweet sweet boy
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So does Farley!
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Trump: all bark, no heartwood.
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It is not hard to negotiate from a position of strength. That is all Trump has ever done. Even with his negotiations with banks about his loans he knows that the banks cannot walk away from the amount of money he owes them. So, they have to work things out with him.
However, he is in a different world now where his adversaries can walk away and tell him to go pound sand. See Congress.
Truthfully and at this point, Trounce should be judged by the losses because he has no wins to speak of.
He has quite the impressive list of failures and faux pas’. His attempts at militarying have been pitiful. His personal picks are a team of embarrassments. He’s been bitch-slapped by the courts at every turn and his own Party is not with him.
And the Russia thing isn’t going away. He will face the music and do a Russian dance.
What he seems to be good at, is holding on by a thread.
He’s a barely functioning illiterate. Trump insults and threatens people/countries and then forgets who he threatened about what.
This is how the governors in the South have run their states for decades if not the last 220 years. Whatever rich slob moron can get the white rabble and plantation/corporate owners behind him rules the Conservative Cuckoo’s Nest…whether they be Democrat Dixiecrats or Far Right Republicans.
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Holing onto a thread until he has to go bankrupt…again. Trump is going to cause a World War if not a nuclear one and/or run up a huuuge deficit with his tax cut to the rich and banking deregulation which can only cause another worldwide Great Depression.
Everyone, including the white middle class and rabble in the South, sees it coming and feels hopeless to stop this maniac and his spoiled rich kids from blowing up the world.
Since the Congressional GOP are all cowards and the Supreme Court is now packed with Koch Brother corporate shills and/or Christian Wrong bigots who don’t give a shit about making the federal system spelled out in the Constitution work, the country is now dong a slow motion death dance with the devil.
The Trump administration is the most corrupt we have ever seen both domestically with NeoNazis and Wall Street fraudsters running the White House and from outside with Russian infiltrator traitors. Trump is like jelly in the hands of some of the dumbest and most vile people on this earth.
And the Republicans enthusiastically nominated and then elected the American version of Nikita Khrushchev.
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He’s a weasel’s weasel alright. I guess he is a success at being a failure is one way of putting it. He teeters and he totters but he don’t fall down.
I think his days are numbered and he’s in far too deep into things much to real and illegal to save himself this time.
The Russian thing appears to be at a standstill, so no instant gratification, but when they do come out and after him and the crew, its going to be merciless.
And yes, I do think that he is a big enough maniac that he would start a war to save his ass. Most likely though, he’d lose both, because he is also a loser’s loser.
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The border collie parent gave him his smarts. It is not a good idea to have a border collie who is smarter than its owner. I know that from experience. Mine is a genius and overthinks.
All bark, no stump.