Ask A Genius 563 – The Current Political Context
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/02
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How bad is Trump?
Rick Rosner: The people on Twitter have been asking each other a lot, “Would Trump be this bad?” Some were saying, “Yes, he would get us into nuclear war.” Others said, “Yes, we didn’t know the form.” I am and others are saying, “No, this is worse than we imagined, though we imagined Trump was bad.”
One of the surprising things about Trump is how he manages to consistently outdo himself in new and worse ways on how to be terrible with the complicity of the Republicans in Congress. He is, by far, the worst president in history.
The latest horrible thing that has come out and has been verified by a number of sources, including the U.S. intelligence agencies. He has denied it, but the White House hasn’t denied it. It has been known since 2016 that Putin has been paying a bounty of up to $100,000 per dead American for Taliban fighters to kill Americans.
Even while the Taliban is supposed to be fighting a peace treaty with the U.S., Putin is paying the Taliban for a bounty on U.S. fighters. He has issued a number of excuses, even though he’s gotten a debriefing as early as more than a year ago. He seeks excuses.
Like, he got the debriefing and said that he got it on paper, but he doesn’t read paper. So, his Press Secretary had to say that he does read. It is bad. The Republicans in Congress had dozens of hearings on Bengazi, where four Americans were killed in Libya.
They were trying to hang it on Hillary Clinton. Even with all the hearings, they could find no direct culpability. With Trump doing nothing about Russia paying for the death of our soldiers, they aren’t doing anything about that.
It looks bad for Trump. It looks bad for the Republicans. America hit 50,000 new Covid cases for the first time ever today. The number of cases are going up every day rather than declining in 45 out of 50 states.
Trump said he expects it to go away. He said he might wear a mask. He’s okay with wearing a mask; it makes him ‘look like the Lone Ranger.’ He is doing nothing to stop the virus. The most people unemployed in U.S. history.
There’s no area of the U.S. presidency where you could say Trump has done even an adequate job at. His poll numbers are slowly dropping. He peaked at 45.8% approval, which was the highest approval he’d ever had since the ever first week of his presidency in April when he was having daily press briefings about Covid.
Since then, he has lost 12% of his approval. He’s down to 40.3%/40.5%, which puts him squarely in the range of the fairly rare group of presidents who were not re-elected out of 20 presidents since the beginning of the century, only five ran for a second term and were not re-elected.
He’s clearly shitty. People still don’t know whether he is demented or just some kind of psychopath who has had his bluff called too many times. We have 124 days until election day. He is falling into a hole versus Biden, which is very statistically unlikely that he can get out of to win the election.
Unless, there is cheating in the election. Which there may still be, because the Republicans have not instituted measures to prevent cheating or allow nationwide vote-by-mail, it is up to individual states.
I think people who hate Trump, which is a majority, hope that the worse he gets, then the more incompetent he shows himself to be. That’s pretty much where we stand. People like to call him a cult. But that doesn’t tell you anything.
Other people take stabs at their support as the sunk cost fallacy. That they’ve invested so much in him. That they just can’t let go, even as it becomes apparent that he is awful. Some people stick by him thinking that he was appointed as a warrior for God. That he was chosen by God.
Some people stick by him because he in combination with Mitch McConnell are very effective at getting very rightwing and often unqualified judges confirmed, which will fuck up the courts for decades to come.
It’s as inexplicable as what happened in Germany, where so many people went along with an increasingly atrocious regime. Although, he is losing support. You hope, normally, his support resorts to its usual levels of approval, which are in the 40s.
He’s not recovering as much. You’d think the different between 40% approval and 42% approval isn’t that big a deal, but it is because of the Electoral College and because each state is winner take all.
Those couple percent can determine the outcome of the election. That’s about it.
Jacobsen: Do you think America is finished?
Rosner: No, I think Trump will get beaten and it is possible the Republicans lose the Senate. The last time the Democrats had control of all three legislative and executive bodies was after the election of 2008 when Obama came in.
They have the Senate, the House, and the presidency. It was kind of a terrible time because the world was recovering from the crash of 2007/08. It took a while to recover, years, but the Democrats presided over that.
For a little while, once Al Franken joined the Senate, it took an extra six months, maybe 8 months, because – his election – it was so close. They kept challenging the results of the election. When he was finally seated, the Democrats had 60 senators, which gave them a supermajority to be able to do a bunch of stuff.
People say Obama squandered the majority, except in passing ObamaCare. People liked to rethink or second guess stuff say that he, maybe, could have achieved a greater number of things if he hadn’t put all his eggs in the ObamaCare basket.
But if the Democrats take back the Senate, keep the House, and take the presidency, they could do a lot towards fixing some of the stuff that has gotten all fucked up. Although, the Democrats tend to be conciliatory and tend to make a point like they are governing for all Americans. They are not as ruthless as the Republicans.
If they do that, then it is bad for America now. It has always been bad to have one political party more ruthless than the other in America. But it would be particularly bad. For instance, it is possible to imagine the Democrats being conciliatory and not prosecuting any of his people.
Even though, they have been guilty of serious crimes. In the past, after WaterGate, Nixon’s Republican replacement pardoned Nixon. Nixon could have been prosecuted, but his successor pardoned him. It was Ford. It pissed off much of the country and was a major reason for Ford not being re-elected in the country.
You’d hope to see some people prosecuted and investigations of Trump and his people to continue after he is out of office. That’s all. Unless, you have more questions.
[End of recorded material]
License
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
Copyright
© Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. All interviewees and authors co-copyright their material and may disseminate for their independent purposes.
In-Sight Publishing 