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If today you can't stand Trump as POTUS, was there a time when you were willing to give him a shot?

If today you can't stand Trump as POTUS, was there a time when you were willing to give him a shot?

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Xelor

Xelor

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If today you can't stand Trump as POTUS, was there a time when you were willing to give him a shot?
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In 2014, I first heard -- in what are my anecdotally "reliable" circles, aka from the folks in my "grapevine" -- that Trump would likely run for POTUS. Prior to that time, I'd heard some scuttlebutt about his reprobate character (reprobate by the standards of folks in my circles) and his disingenuousness in business dealings, but I figured a variety of things:
  • Well, he's hooligan, but surely the presidency and seeking it will inspire him to exercise temperamental discipline and refinement befitting someone who'd be POTUS that he was taught as a young person.
  • Well, he's a businessman, so he'll exercise the due rigor, soundness and cogency of thought, analysis and solutioneering concomitant with a Fortune 500 CEO.
  • Well, he runs a large global business, surely he'll effect in government the operational and communicative coherence, collaborative culture and comportmental constancy characteristic of the best run of such firms.
I thought a few other things too, but those were the main ones. Taken together, in 2014 and 2015 I was optimistic about the notion of a Trump presidency. Then he came down that escalator opened his mouth about Mexicans and I began to have my doubts. Sometime between then and the GOP convention, I realized that all I'd head about the kind of man Trump is was true and that he wasn't going to change, nor even mollify/remake his public persona.[SUP]1[/SUP] It was then that Trump scuttled the opportunity to earn my approbation of his candidacy/presidency. In short, I did give him a chance. He blew it.


Note:
  1. Mind, I don't hold against him that he didn't attenuate or alter his character. I hold against him his character, for it's incorrigible. To wit, that he has no shame is what it is. That he has no shame while having plenty to be ashamed of is the problem, and that is among the things I hold against him.
 
Trump is AWESOME!

I am going to miss him when he is gone.
 
I have to say no, only because I thought Trump was a dishonest grifter when I was about 10 years old.
 
In relation to the OP, I’ve NEVER understood why someone being a Fortune 500 CEO was considered a positive towards someone’s presidential credentials. A F500 CEO’s job is to make money and please shareholders, which is NOT THE JOB OF THE PRESIDENT.

“We should run the country like a business” is the single most moronic line ever uttered by any political pundit in the history of ever.
 
Kobie said:
Why? I don’t get why you swing off his nuts constantly.
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I don't know that I even believe Hawkeye. He likes to say provocative unspecific things for the purpose of inciting aimless argy-barby.
 
Yeah, I pretty much can’t stand him now. But here are a couple previous posts about Trump by me.

11-10-16
I have decided I am going to be cautiously optimistic. I honestly have no idea what Trump will do. Maybe he will surprise us. Maybe
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https://www.debatepolitics.com/2016...ur-country-post1066528826.html#post1066528826

11-13-16
Skeptic Bob said:
I'm not going to try and sell you on Pence. He is likely worse than the media makes him out to be.

But there are reasons to be optimistic about Trump. Trump is not a partisan and he is not an idealogue. Which means he can be swayed. Trump wants to be popular probably more than any POTUS we have ever had. That means he isn't likely to do something that will upset most Americans.
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https://www.debatepolitics.com/us-p...aking-america-great-again.html#post1066543668
 
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Even though I couldn't stand him, I still was going to give him a shot.

There were a couple of silver linings -- such as his supposed commitment to infrastructure and his supposed commitment to better, less expensive healthcare for EVERYONE.

And supposedly he was a serious businessman, with the ability to assemble a qualified, competent team.


Then I find that his idea of infrastructure is to privatize it, and I see him twisting people's arms to pass healthcare legislation which he admitted was cruel, just to chalk up a win.

And it turns out his business savvy was illusory and the carnival barker act didn't hide a serious business man but a petulant little boy who hired people because he liked their macho nicknames or how willing they were to say nice things about him.


So he blew up the silver linings I had hoped for and went downhill from there. Basically he's worse than I ever imagined possible, and every time I think he can't go lower, he does.



But yes, I was willing to give him a shot.
 
Amelia said:
Even though I couldn't stand him, I still was going to give him a shot.

There were a couple of silver linings -- such as his supposed commitment to infrastructure and his supposed commitment to less expensive healthcare for EVERYONE.

And supposedly he was a serious businessman, with the ability to assemble a qualified, competent team.


Then I find that his idea of infrastructure is to privatize it, and I see him twisting people's arms to pass healthcare legislation which he admitted was cruel, just to chalk up a win.

And it turns out his business savvy was illusory and the carnival barker act didn't hide a serious business man but a petulant little boy who hired people because he liked their macho nicknames or how willing they were to say nice things about him.


So he blew up the silver linings I had hoped for and went downhill from there. Basically he's worse than I ever imagined possible, and every time I think he can't go lower, he does.



But yes, I was willing to give him a shot.
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Well at least you gave him a shot. Not very many people do it seems.
 
Skeptic Bob said:
.... Trump wants to be popular probably more than any POTUS we have ever had. That means he isn't likely to do something that will upset most Americans. ....
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Yes, that also figured into my thoughts.

He is so covetous of good approval numbers, and at any point in his presidency he could have seen a large jump in approval numbers if he would just have controlled his tongue and twitter fingers for a whole week. But he can't do it. He digs his hole and then gets embarrassed and upset that he's in the whole and so he digs it deeper. I did not expect that from ... well, from anyone who had any sort of stature in the business world.

So, though he still stews about not getting approval from more people, he seems mostly to have given up on even making the simplest adjustments to try to earn it, and instead he has doubled down on the giant dog-whistle laden pity party he throws with his loyal supporters.


Even the media has given him a shot from time to time -- like after his first address to a joint session of Congress. Happened on a Tuesday. He was getting great press. But he couldn't even ride that triumphal train until Sunday. He had to step all over his good press on Saturday with a garbled version of a conspiracy theory about Obama. So of course that became the topic of the Sunday talk shows and Trump was outraged again about how negative the press coverage was. He could have had good coverage. He HAD good coverage. But he just couldn't shut up and enjoy it. Couldn't build on it. Couldn't let the growing economy help him broaden his appeal. He just doubles down on what it is that he thinks will fire up those loyal few who won't turn their backs on him even if his trade wars put them in the unemployment line.
 
I never liked or respected Trump. I was pretty sure he'd make a terrible President. But when he got elected I hoped I'd be proven wrong. I gave him an honest chance and hoped he'd turn out to be a better President than I feared. It took about 6 months for him to disappoint even my low expectations.
 
enderpotato00 said:
Well at least you gave him a shot. Not very many people do it seems.
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I think a lot of people did.

Back in 2009, I think a lot of people gave Obama a shot. In 2017, a lot of people gave Trump a shot.

It's what we do. Partly of course because we want our country to succeed, partly because it's how the human mind copes with things we can't change, and because, frankly, in spite of how polarized the country feels most of us really aren't very wonky politically. If Trump had shown some gravitas, most of the nation would have breathed a sigh of relief and gone back to their regularly scheduled entertainment. Most of the nation still is wanting to do that, but Trump keeps going out of his way to unsettle things.
 
Xelor said:
I don't know that I even believe Hawkeye. He likes to say provocative unspecific things for the purpose of inciting aimless argy-barby.
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He has said that he is a Leftist/Socialist. I think that he likes Trump because its good for Leftist propaganda.
 
I haven't voted in the poll yet, because I'm actually uncertain as to where I fall.

I threw my vote to a third-party, instead of voting Democrat, as I had been doing ever since I've been able, and I actually hoped that Trump would defeat Clinton. I didn't actually support him, nor did I have any faith that he would govern with anything resembling compentance, or make good on some of his occasional populist rhetoric. I've maintained the attitude that if he were to actually do something that my ilk would agree with, that he should be given credit for that by progressives, but I was never in a state of holding my breath and waiting for that to happen.

My refusal to vote for Clinton had nothing to do with any sort of confidence in Trump, and everything to do with not wanting to send the message to the Democrats that blantantly rigging an election, courting the right instead of their own base, and relying on empty platitudes and lip-service to identity politics will continue to be a winning strategy for them moving forward. Clinton's campaign was an absolute joke, and it really showed what kind of mind-set the Democratic leadership holds, and that mind-set has them beleiving that it's more important to bend a knee to monied interests and that they're simply entitled to the votes of their base. Her loss against such an extraordinarilly unqaulified candidate proves that centrist ideas about electability and election stategies do not hold water in today's world.

I saw Clinton as a nail in the coffen for the left, or at the very least, the worst PR represenative we could have in our corner. She would have probably been a two-term president via the power of incumbantcy, just competant enough that a majority of the left would defend her, but not someone who would inact any sort of real change or do anything to dispel right-wing rhetoric or perceptions of leftist policies. With Obama, we got a continuation of neocon foreign policy, a Wall St. bailout, and RomneyCare ObamaCare, the latter of which has been easily critisized by the right. With a Clinton presidency, we'd have half the left falling asleep and in eight years, we'd end up electing a Republican, anyway. Many would say that Trump is a fluke, and so unussually incompetant that we couldn't afford to reject the 'lesser evil', but I can remember a time when most of us lefties couldn't imagine a worst president than George W. Bush.

So was I willing to give Trump a shot? Sure. I was willing to give him a shot at embarrassing the Republican party and harming the credibility of the right. I never once thought that a billionaire born with a silver spoon, a guy who constantly brags about himself, was going to give two ****s about regular folks. I can't bring myself to beleive in the few things he said that I actually like when he often contradicts himself in the same sentence, and I sure as hell never bought the facade of him actually being a good businessman when virtually everything he's touched has either turned to ****, or has turned out to be an outright scam.

I was willing to give him a shot at not starting a thermonuclear war despite his alarming questions about why we don't use nukes anymore, and I was willing to give him a shot at not governing as a complete dictator despite his obvious authoritarian leanings and his having been schooled by Bill O'Reilly on the costitution. That's the full extent of any vote of confidence I've ever bestowed upon him.
 
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I sat out the last general election because of Trump and Hillary.

My conscience is clean.

Obama wasn't exactly a boy scout, but he was ok in comparison to those two morons.
 
I was of the mind that he was behaving like a defiant and offensive ass on the campaign trail because he recognized that such behavior excited his constituent base, especially as supremacists and extremists began to latch on. I figured he would abandon that nonsense after being elected:

- From encouraging the mindless mob into chants of "lock her up," Trump immediately declared that he isn't interested.
- From Trump's moronic declaration that "NATO is obsolete," he moved to a year later declaring that "NATO is no longer obsolete."

So, perhaps the guy was just savvy enough to leash up the idiocy of the country, created by years of GOP interest groups and FOX News-inspired propaganda, and skip into the White House?

Nope. He went on to prove how his outsider inexperience has left him inept in domestic and international politics; and as the criticism built from all sectors of the political spectrum, he defaulted back to being an ass for his loyalists.

We have been witnesses to his filling of his Cabinet with the swamp that he told his loyalists he would drain, taking credit for ongoing economic trends, de-legitimizing the electoral process, shamelessly and openly feeding the wealthy with ever more riches through our taxes, significantly reducing American influence in virtually every region on the planet, criticizing even our strongest allies while cozying up to dictators and autocrats for "peace," constantly attacking American legal, government, and media institutions of our democracy, the drama of his personal financial, sexual, and criminal investigation scandals. And through all of this his loyalists merely shrug as they encourage Trump to keep lowering the bar of the Office into ever more depreciating standards of acceptance. Much like they did while he was on the campaign trail inciting violence, insulting American POWs, denigrating the handicapped, and labeling political rivals as enemies.

But, considering that Donald Trump was king "birther," what did we actually expect?
 
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RetiredUSN said:
I sat out the last general election because of Trump and Hillary.

My conscience is clean.

Obama wasn't exactly a boy scout, but he was ok in comparison to those two morons.
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I feel good about it too. Though I, at the very very very last second, changed my mind from abstaining to voting for Clinton, she didn't win. So, it's win-win-win for me:

- I didn't have to see a victorious Clinton, but at the same time get to be among the "popular."
- A victorious Trump occurred without my vote.
- And I did my civic duty by choosing a turd over a crap.

USA!
 
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He's led a disgusting, odious life and he ran a disgusting, odious campaign. Nevertheless, after the election I was willing to give him a shot, on the off-chance it had all been an act and he could make some try for redemption. Maybe he wasn't really the type of guy who would praise Nazis from the presidential lectern or build concentration camps for brown toddlers or try and strip sick people of insurance coverage.

Once he started filling his Cabinet with grifters in late 2016 it became clear what the score was and what kind of president he'd be. Then his stooges started to get caught promising the Russians sanctions relief as thanks for their help in the election and the rest is history.
 
I've known about Trump for 30+ years, even heard him speak live a couple of times in NYC.

I was never willing to give him a shot to be POTUS. Not 30 years ago, not 10 years ago, not now. I, and many people in NY and NJ knew exactly what kind of person he is, and how divisive and destructive his presidency would be. You can't run a country like he ran his businesses, especially with the type of personality Trump has.

Egomaniac, narcissistic, dictatorial, self centered to the nth degree type of management doesn't work in politics.
 
You're missing a few choices on the poll.
 
Kobie said:
In relation to the OP, I’ve NEVER understood why someone being a Fortune 500 CEO was considered a positive towards someone’s presidential credentials. A F500 CEO’s job is to make money and please shareholders, which is NOT THE JOB OF THE PRESIDENT.

“We should run the country like a business” is the single most moronic line ever uttered by any political pundit in the history of ever.
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FWIW, F500 firms' (and similar organizations') CEOs and other executive-tier professionals usually have a common set of traits that augur for their being adroit managers of the country's single largest organization.
  • CEO Skills Inventory (Italics -- qualities Trump has exhibited poorly (too much or too little); Bold -- qualities Trump lacks)
    • Personal traits and skills at which top CEOs are extremely adept:
      • Integrity/ethics
      • Analytic intelligence
      • Sense of urgency
      • Willingness to ask for help
      • Decision making
      • Ability to simplify
      • Creative
      • Questioning approach
      • Leadership
      • Openness
      • Communications skills
      • People empathy
      • Potential problem identification
      • Vision/perspective
      • Ego drive
      • Non-political -- What this means is they don't make or allow to be political things that can be handled apolitically and it means they readily risk their political capital. It doesn't mean they are ignorant of the potential politics of a matter.
      • Endurance
      • Willingness to take unqualified responsibility
      • Willingness to take the lead
CEOs aren't and aren't expected to be excellent in each and everyone of those dimensions, but they're not bad, weak, poor with regard to any of them and they are excellent at about 80%+ of them. What happens is that in each instance, a combination of the above traits are then brought to bear -- having and not bringing to bear a skill, or inaptly bringing it to bear, is, at the C-level, just as germane a demerit as not having it -- in managing any given situation. Because it takes a mix of skills to adroitly handle any given matter is why being not-bad at any is essential.

To your point, however, the profit focus isn't among the CEOs qualities that would make them good POTUSes, but their analytic intelligence would inform them that they need to push profit motives to the back were they to serve as POTUS.
 
Xelor said:
In 2014, I first heard -- in what are my anecdotally "reliable" circles, aka from the folks in my "grapevine" -- that Trump would likely run for POTUS. Prior to that time, I'd heard some scuttlebutt about his reprobate character (reprobate by the standards of folks in my circles) and his disingenuousness in business dealings, but I figured a variety of things:
  • Well, he's hooligan, but surely the presidency and seeking it will inspire him to exercise temperamental discipline and refinement befitting someone who'd be POTUS that he was taught as a young person.
  • Well, he's a businessman, so he'll exercise the due rigor, soundness and cogency of thought, analysis and solutioneering concomitant with a Fortune 500 CEO.
  • Well, he runs a large global business, surely he'll effect in government the operational and communicative coherence, collaborative culture and comportmental constancy characteristic of the best run of such firms.
I thought a few other things too, but those were the main ones. Taken together, in 2014 and 2015 I was optimistic about the notion of a Trump presidency. Then he came down that escalator opened his mouth about Mexicans and I began to have my doubts. Sometime between then and the GOP convention, I realized that all I'd head about the kind of man Trump is was true and that he wasn't going to change, nor even mollify/remake his public persona.[SUP]1[/SUP] It was then that Trump scuttled the opportunity to earn my approbation of his candidacy/presidency. In short, I did give him a chance. He blew it.


Note:
  1. Mind, I don't hold against him that he didn't attenuate or alter his character. I hold against him his character, for it's incorrigible. To wit, that he has no shame is what it is. That he has no shame while having plenty to be ashamed of is the problem, and that is among the things I hold against him.
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I can't answer your poll because the first condition...If today you can't stand Trump as POTUS...doesn't apply to me.

But I wasn't always a supporter of Trump. Frankly, he wasn't really on my radar at all until he came down that escalator. But when he did, I looked at his positions. They looked okay. When he started knocking off the other GOP candidates, he got more of my attention. I began thinking that this guy could give Hillary a run for her money. That's what I wanted. Given a choice between Trump and Hillary...Trump gets my vote. That was when I was willing to give him a shot.

Looking back, I'm happy to say that I made a good choice.
 
Might not be a bad idea to give him a shot of sodium pentathol and find out just exactly what he shared with Putin in Helsinki,since he refuses to share it with the American people,and we have to rely on Russia to learn what little we know about what went down in that meeting.
 
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