What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/trump-tower-russia-meeting-chuck-grassley

President promises federal support for ethanol to industry backer Chuck Grassley a day after reports that Trump Jr will meet with Grassley's committee

[Valmy]

Erric Trump suggested that his father doesn't take criticism seriously because doing so would lead to depression and suicidal thoughts.

Well maybe he will think a bit of all the things he said about Obama now. Nah self reflection really isn't Trump's thing.

[Valmy]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/trump-tower-russia-meeting-chuck-grassley

President promises federal support for ethanol to industry backer Chuck Grassley a day after reports that Trump Jr will meet with Grassley's committee

Oh God not this shit again.

[Valmy]

I can write my name in French!  Pretty sure it's spelled the same

you're hired!  I'll need a foreman.

Full disclosure: my grandfather was a unionized carpenter

I thought you said you were cool with private industry unions.

[Razgovory]

I can write my name in French!  Pretty sure it's spelled the same

you're hired!  I'll need a foreman.

Full disclosure: my grandfather was a unionized carpenter

My dad was a union rep in the Rubber workers union. Back before they merged with the steelworkers.

TOP THAT

My grandfather was a gangster who was affiliated with the trolley car union in some way (I'm not actually clear what they were doing).

[Monoriu]

My dad crossed the picket lines during the 8-month long Calgary Herald strike that ultimately broke the union.



My wife, on the other hand, was President of her local as part of the Yukon Employees Union.

More power to your dad 

I won't worry about the wife.  As long as you leave each other alone, you'll be fine

[derspiess]

I thought you said you were cool with private industry unions.

I said (or meant to say) they should be allowed to exist and at least at some point had a purpose.  Never said I liked them.

[Valmy]

I thought you said you were cool with private industry unions.

I said (or meant to say) they should be allowed to exist and at least at some point had a purpose.  Never said I liked them.

Ah. I guess I just figure they are basically an employee owned company that sells labor.

[derspiess]

Ah. I guess I just figure they are basically an employee owned company that sells labor.

That's fairly valid-- like I said I don't dispute their right to exist.  But we don't have to like all private companies, do we? 

[viper37]

President Trump clearly and unmistakably exaggerated the "horror and devastation" he witnessed in Texas. The White House's response? To pretend words don't mean what they mean.

Trump tweeted Wednesday morning that he had seen this horror and devastation "first hand."

    After witnessing first hand the horror & devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey,my heart goes out even more so to the great people of Texas!

    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2017

But reporters quickly took issue with that. This is from the Dallas Morning News:

    Our reporting does not match claim that @POTUS witnessed any horror or devastation first hand. #harvey [url="https://t.co/KP4ejyLVpF"]https://t.co/KP4ejyLVpF[/url] @dallasnews [url="https://t.co/HBObIh9Tgt"]https://t.co/HBObIh9Tgt[/url]

    — Todd J. Gillman (@toddgillman) August 30, 2017

And this is from Agence France-Presse's Andrew Beatty, who traveled with Trump:

    I traveled with the President yesterday. Personally, I would not claim to have seen Harvey's horror and devastation first hand. [url="https://t.co/Zb7bsF5CW5"]https://t.co/Zb7bsF5CW5[/url]

    — Andrew Beatty (@AndrewBeatty) August 30, 2017
[...]
He met with a number of state and local officials who are eating, sleeping, breathing the Harvey disaster. He talked extensively with the governor, who certainly is right in the midst of every bit of this, as well as the mayors from several of the local towns that were hit hardest. And detailed briefing information throughout the day yesterday talking to a lot of the people on the ground. That certainly is a firsthand account.

[Valmy]

Man people need to criticize Trump for his incompetence and laziness not for this weak sauce shit. Ah well.

[garbon]

Man people need to criticize Trump for his incompetence and laziness not for this weak sauce shit. Ah well.

Yeah, just feeds into his victimization narrative.

[The Brain]

Are those people Trump supporters?

[CountDeMoney]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/trump-tower-russia-meeting-chuck-grassley

President promises federal support for ethanol to industry backer Chuck Grassley a day after reports that Trump Jr will meet with Grassley's committee

Oh God not this shit again.

  He's like the guy that doesn't pull over for the cops for 12 miles because he can't possibly be in trouble, yet is infuriated when his tires are spiked and he's face down on the pavement. 
UNLOCK ME I PAY YOUR SALARY

[garbon]

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/sep/01/he-gets-verse-the-poetry-of-donald-trump

He gets verse: the poetry of Donald Trump

The US president's almost primal language is a source of widespread amusement and horror. But some have begun exploring its aesthetic power

I know words ... I have the best words," Donald Trump once declared with his usual, braggadocious aplomb. For once, he may be right. Dreaded by transcribers and translators worldwide, Trump wields his lively, if limited, vocabulary like a rubber hammer; this is a man who uses "schlong" as a verb and whose babbling is too frequently leapt upon by pundits and despairing lexicographers: bigly, covfefe, the aforementioned braggadocious.

But like his fellow wordsmith Shakespeare, Trump has produced a remarkable burst of something like poetry. There is Hart Seely's Bard of the Deal, a 2015 book of poetry compiled from interviews, speeches, and tweets; at least two different collections called Make Poetry Great Again (one in Norwegian); and the forthcoming Bigly: Donald Trump in Verse by Cheers writer Rob Long. He has also inspired others to verse: A Hundred Limericks for a Hundred Days of Trump, Trumpetry, and the self-published Shit My President Says Poetry.

The latest collection of Trumpian verse is The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, by McSweeney's writer Rob Sears. Consider:

I am the best1

I predicted Apple's stock would fall2

I will build a great, great wall3

I build buildings that are 94 stories tall4

My hands – are they small?5

Sears is far from the first to notice potential in Trump's voice: after all, elevating a man who struggles bigly to articulate himself to poetry is inherently funny. "He does speak in very compact, distilled phrases that tell you a lot about who he is, in a small number of words. So it's not that far away from poetry," says Sears. "Lots of declarative sentences, a staccato rhythm. There is no complexity to anything he says. People have said he writes like a third grader with a limited vocabulary. I've read so many of his words and there really are no exceptions."

Working with the Trump Twitter Archive, the Trump Archive and American Presidency Project to collect long-deleted tweets and forgotten quotes from the pre-internet era, Sears describes "a weird process, more like being a data scientist than writer". More than 30 years of Trump's misogyny, xenophobia and taste for vengeance are on display – all fastidiously footnoted. And as Sears says: "I am certain there are tons of good quotes that have never been written down."

The president may still wish that many of these quotes were never written down, such as his now startling call for coordinated global action on climate change in 2009 (in Sear's poem "We'll be fine with the environment"); or the grotesque pass he dribbled at a female Celebrity Apprentice candidate, in the third line of following poem:

Hot little girl in highschool6

I'm a very compassionate person (With a very high IQ)7

Just think, in a couple of years, I'll be dating you8

It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees9

Come here, I'll show you how life works10. Please11

For all the fun with his buffoonery, Trump's language still holds power, because of a style of speech that might be described as demagogic water-cooler banter: constant references to us versus them, and "winners" and "losers", the latter being possibly the most frequent word in Sears's collection, which includes several blistering haiku dismissing John McCain ("Doesn't know how to win"), Rosie O'Donnell ("Sad sack") and Ted Cruz ("Dyin' Ted").

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"I thought maybe he was, on some weird level, a kind of strategic genius," says Sears of Trump's ability to convince average Americans. "But now I know there's nothing clever or pre-planned about what he says. It is just lucky for him that he communicates this way, and that he has such simple ideas."

But there was one speech that convinced Sears that there was more to the president than met the eye. "I came across a speech on the White House website, addressed to the people of Flint, Michigan, about the water scandal. It was quite reassuring and had a lot of figurative turns of phrase. It really surprised me, and I thought, 'He's not so simple, there is another side to Trump,'" he says. "And then I got to the bottom and realised I'd got my dates wrong. It was Obama."

1. Tweet, 8 August 2013

2. Tweet, 28 January 2014

3. Presidential bid announcement at Trump Tower, 16 June 2015

4. Campaign rally in Plymouth, New Hampshire, CSPAN, 7 February 2016

5. Hannity, Fox News, 29 February 2016

6. Discussing losing his virginity, on The Howard Stern Show, 1997

7. Tweet, 21 April 2013

8. Quoted as saying this to two 14-year-old girls in the Chicago Tribune, December 1992

9. To Brande Roderick on The Celebrity Apprentice, 2013 season

10. The New Yorker, 19 May 1997

11. Speech after winning Florida, Illinois and North Carolina primaries, 15 March 2016