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How much can I dislike Trump without it being TDS?
I don't care or expect you to agree with my criticisms of him, but if anyone who thinks he's a con, a huckster, and yes, corrupt enough to become dictator if handed the opportunity has irrational TDS, fine- I can only ask if you have BDS or ODS or CLDS?
I've actually believed in America my entire life. Not without cynicism and skepticism, and I'm not going to give you my credentials to prove myself to an Internet rando (and get doxxed), but I've taken an oath more than once and meant it, and much of my disgust over the Discourse today is that I don't think you guys (and by that I mean partisans on the right and left) do.
Dude, I'm sure you really believe that and having read your posts over the last few months, there isn't much else I can say that would be charitable, but I will say that if Trump becomes president I will genuinely wish for him to prove you right and me wrong.
Maybe not. And what is your glory? Chanting "MAGA" at doubters?
What do you dislike about the man that is original to your person? Your specific and personal preference, informed to the best of your ability from neutral sources? And what do you dislike about the man that actually or effectually originates in those with TDS?
Take my brother. He doesn't have TDS but he has beliefs that come from it via journalists with TDS. He likes Trump-as-the-comedian, but hates the effect he views Trump as having on the degradation and divisiveness in political rhetoric. Degradation maybe, I can't be partial as I'm on record so often talking about my contempt for WASP decorum. Divisiveness no, that causation is backward. They could have taken the constituent concerns behind Trump's success, chiefly economics. "Doesn't matter how outsourcing benefits the wealthy, it hurts domestic jobs." Done. "Racism and xenophobia are bad but it's not racist to understand the basic economic impacts of minimally restricted immigration on the labor pool." Done. Legitimize those concerns, Trump loses issue-level success. Acknowledge voter concerns, Trump loses structural-critical-level success. A pivot, a good economy, they win easily, if not in 2020 then 2024 and beyond. They didn't. They screamed racist and ran hoaxes and every time one failed instead of pausing for contemplation they doubled down. Again and again. We are in Year 8 of them doubling down on Trump. We are in Year 12 of ever-intensifying racial rhetoric.
I could go to other issues but I won't save this. Some of my friends often talk about whatever latest bad story of Elon Musk. I think when I listen to them, how pleasant it must be to live in such a world; that everyone who disagrees with you is incompetent and evil.
There's nothing aligning about acknowledging a person's strengths. I'm a fan of Dropout and especially Brennan Lee Mulligan, and I'm amused, probably in some way like the father is at his four year old being petulant but in a fundamentally innocent and harmless way, when the guy rants about capitalism. His life is the hyper-niche product of the absolutely relentless process of profit-finding in capitalism. He would be nothing without it, or in a communist paradigm, a scarily effective apparatchik. Still, he's brilliant, funny, earnest and full of love, however misguided, and he is just terrifically naive. (As many but not all good artists are.) Liking the guy doesn't mean I agree with him, and that I disagree with him isn't an indict for the many things he's good at. Trump is the living embodiment of "being good at things," that's just first-principle truth as extrapolated from language. To be "effective" is to be described in terms that categorically apply to Trump, so for him to be "not" those things, not competent, not effective, not intelligent, a conman, a huckster, those indict the language rather than the man. You would need to invent new words, and the etymology of those words would just be "Yeah he's competent, but he's an asshole."
Doesn't mean you have to like him, doesn't mean you have to agree with him. The world is as it is and has always been because the groups of people who disagree with each other in and over making the biggest decisions are each very good at what they do. History's decided on the narrow margin between competing competents.
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I feel bad about piling-on here because i feel like this is a legitimate question that deserves a proper long form answer, but i want to contrast it with your statement that
Because to me this is one of the core TDS "tells". Much like some of the arguments about Trump being senile in the comments about his JRE appearance upthread, I find myself wondering if we watched the same podcast. I genuinely have trouble placing myself in the mindset of somone who would believe this.
Rather, while I can see how somone might have believed this back in 2016, I don't understand how someone who has been paying attention to the last 15-20 years of US foreign policy could reasonably conclude that given how Trump's first term went, a second term would be likely to do more damage to the US's standing and long-term interests than say, 4 more years of having somone like Clinton or Blinken as Secretary of State, or a hypothetical second Biden term where he isn't forced out of the race.
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Say you are open borders or some other core policy disagreement with him. Then just leave it at that.
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Yes, thinking that Donald Trump is going to become a dictator is TDS. Likewise, in the fields of construction reality TV politics business and marketing he's probably one of the most successful Americans ever. The guy redefined construction in Manhattan and turned his properties into a billion-dollar empire, spending a life constructing properties and projects all around the world, synonymous with luxury, just the ones in the public consciousness, then he got bored and did reality TV and dated supermodels and became President of the United States in his 70s -- sure, he's a conman because he did Steaks or whatever. Yeah, Trump really didn't do anything all that interesting really, and you're perceptive to see right through his little deception game.
We have rockets that can land on towers in the air now. We are going to build a spirit of building things again, we are going to make America great again, greater than ever before. We have the capacity, we have the smartest people in the world, we have factories lying empty ready to turn on, we have so much potential, nobody has ever had potential like we have. America is the New World, the Classical era and the Renaissance have nothing on what we can do.
My friends and I are some of the smartest people in the world, and some of those people are even here on this forum, and I believe we can all move forward onto great and glorious things.
Fun question: in the hypothetical situation in which it turns out that Trump accomplishes none of the American renaissance you expect, please explain why you were gullible enough to believe this.
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I don't think he's going to become dictator. I think he wouldn't turn it down. I don't think he has a plan to become dictator, because that would be too much planning.
I could possibly be wrong about him, but it's based on what I have seen him do and how he acts. This is not "derangement" or irrational fear or hatred of the man. I don't think he's Hitler. I don't think he's a fascist, and I don't think he wants to kill Group X. I think several other presidents would have been willing to become a dictator if given the opportunity.
Honestly, if there is any Trump-related derangement going on, your hagiographic description of him as if he's one of the greatest Americans to ever live strikes me as far more detached from the reality of the man.
I mean, that's all great, but the "we" that did that is not you, and it's not Trump. I'd love to see Trump bring about this new Golden Age you're smoking, but it's certainly not here. Right now it's words.
Maybe you are the genius you say you are, but bold words are not accomplishments, or glory. It's nice to believe things.
To add on to this for @SlowBoy's benefit: lots of people would take kingship if it were offered. I would, if I were immortal and had some method of avoiding the incentive traps.
Most of them never try to take over a country.
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Go listen to the Joe Rogan interview or something, the career Donald Trump has had requires oodles of planning, the man is simply smart enough that he can plan and improvise on the plans and execute faster than most of the people around him. The idea that Trump can't plan or won't plan out of some personal foible is TDS. The man is one of the most successful people on the planet, that doesn't just happen.
The man took his father's modest real estate business in Queens and turned it into a premire luxury empire in New York. He convinced dozens of successful men to back his moonshot Trump Tower project, which he turned into a symbol of strength that revitalized the entire city. He built a tower at the city at the center of the world and put his name on it. Celebrities lined up to live there. The Trump name became synonymous with luxury all over the world. How many people could do that? There is not a single person having this discussion, here, twitter, TV, cable news, blogging -- capable of doing any of that, and Trump had a big enough vision to see it all from the beginning.
Trump turned that into an incredibly lucrative real estate empire, doing constant deals, being involved in projects all over the world, synonymous with luxury. He dated supermodels, consecutively, raised a family with them. Did business all over the world, went bankrupt a few times, reinvented himself in reality TV, casinos. The man is involved in hundreds of projects that don't reach
Fine, none of that means anything, he's just a businessman at this point, and we have lots of those. But within that world he's been incredibly, exceptionally successful, one of the richest men in the world, objectively loaded with one of the most interesting biographies in American history. His uncle had the Tesla patents and was a professor at MIT. His third wife was a Slovenian supermodel.
Then he gives all that up to run for President, and he runs on the message that the American dream is dead, and nobody believes in it anymore, but that's wrong, we're the greatest country on earth, and we're going to be greater than ever before, we have the people and the factories and the talent and the work, and that's what America is, and it's so easy, I've done it myself and I will teach you.
I don't think this is being hagiographic: The man is so ludicrously competent and successful that few people are even capable of judging it. Nobody wants to believe it, everyone has to be cynical and above-it-all. The man is just constantly working on hundreds of projects that nobody hears about, and so we just hear about Trump steaks or the University or some other silly throwaway remark he didn't consider important at all, and we talk about these trivial nothings. It's so much easier to believe that he's a conman, or that cynicism is warranted and valid and always good -- and it sounds ridiculous to say: Actually, Trump is good, and that doesn't come with qualifications or criticism, because he's right. He's right about everything, we have the capacity to be great and he's done it before and he's going to show us.
Donald Trump is literally rewriting history, this is how people are going to think about it in the future. In 2015 he started the primary with 1%, and he took that and grew it into one of the most successful political movements in American history, he reignited the imagionations of millions of people. Nobody fifty years from now is going to remember Trump Steaks, or Stormy Daniels, or whatever the controversy du jour that cynics are talking about in the corner. People are going to remember that this man saved his country, he got shot in the head and chanted "Fight, fight, fight!," you don't know how to win but I will teach you, we can be greater than ever before, you're not ordinary, we are the greatest people on Earth. We talk like he talks now, we think about him constantly, some of his worst enemies have become his greatest allies. If Naruto Uzumaki was real and in the world, I woudln't sit around saying, gee, this Naruto guy has a lot of flaws, I need to be rationally critical of him, maybe he's done some cool things but he's not that great, really. I would say, wow, amazing, how can I be more like this guy? And this is what Trump is, this is what he does, he's the main character. That's the world he's creating, and instead of sitting on the sidelines scoffing at how at least I'm not a sycophant, I'm rational, look at me, I can say something negative about Trump -- I'm going to admire everything the man is capable of and figure out how to be more and more like him. That's actually the only way to Make America Great Again, to dream bigger than ever before because we are the greatest people of all time, ever, in the whole history of the human race, and it's our task to build the new world.
What are the investments to make if one believes that Trumpworld will arrive in 50 years? Given that few seem to really believe it, it should make bank if true.
Probably some of the tech visionaries, if Elon comes anywhere close to Mars then his companies, some of the most valuable anywhere in the world, would be currently dramatically undervalued. Trump wants to dramatically expand energy and construction and those are good bets. Tariffs are intended as a policy to increase American manufacturing, which could imply a genre of good investments. If RFK is able to effectuate change at FDA it'd be good to bet on the health of the average person, and maybe against the worst excesses of big pharma.
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If he sold said business and put the money into the market, or indeed just handed it to any of the major other family owned real estate companies in that region (the Dursts, the Kushners, whatever) he’d have made more money (so much more that he could build the Trump tower and not have to lease out a single floor), I don’t know that that reflects well on him.
I think this was a made-up attack line from cynics right when Trump ran, it's very obviously not true, very silly, and reflects badly on the people who believe it. It doesn't work like that, you can't just liquidate your whole net worth and invest in stocks and sit around earning money.
https://fortune.com/2015/08/20/donald-trump-index-funds/
Here's one estimate from 2015. They claim that Trump would have made money if he'd invested everything after 1988 -- yeah no, that's silly, he'd already turned his father's business into a major real-estate empire by then. You can't just play this game by picking any arbitrary year. Now that you've been massively, phenomonally, unbelievably successful, you're really a failure because the stock market beats you after this arbitrary date.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2021/10/11/its-official-trump-would-be-richer-if-he-had-just-invested-his-inheritance-into-the-sp500/
Here's one where Forbes concludes that Trump had beaten the market significantly, up until corona. Which means, at this point, we get to point and laugh at the failure of Donald Trump: haha, you lost valuation while you were president of the United States. You shluld have cashed it all in and bet on black Donald.
Since 2015 the market has 3x’d though, so you can likely push the 1988 date back significantly. In addition, Trump was in NYC real estate, which from the nadir in the 1970s has seen valuation growth far exceed equities. The fact remains that his business performance is pretty poor, everyone in NYC real estate made huge money because valuations have in many cases risen 40x or more since the trough.
Yes you can, especially in a relatively liquid market like NYC real estate. Investments are always judged against the broader market, what’s your point?
The market dived at the very end of 1987. Black Monday was 10/19/1987, and the market lost about 20% of its value on that day alone. Overall the S&P500 went from about 330 before Black Monday to about 230 in the weeks after. It took two years to get back to the previous peak.
I'm also guessing Trump took a hit from Black Monday, and that the Forbes estimate is both lagging and imprecise.
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Trump created some of the most valuable property in the world, and the construction of Trump Tower inspired a renaissance in New York City architecture at a time when the city was considered to be dying and gone. Were these broader trends that would have happened without Trump? Maybe, but he's a huge part of it. Judging the success of NY real estate independent of Trump is like saying Coke should have closed up shop and just bought Pepsi.
Trump is one of the richest men in the world. There are only something like 3,000 billionaires. If what he did wasn't all that impressive, there should be a lot more out there, an order of magnitude more. Why doesn't every guy with a reasonable fortune invest it all in the S&P 500, they're all underperforming the market.
This is silly. You can't just liquidate tens of millions of dollars and sit on your ass for forty years. You have to live on something, you have to do something, you don't just throw money at the market. It's a full time job, managing money, and then you end up doing deals and making investments anyways. "Instead of spending years lifting weights, you would have performed better if you'd spent that time working out instead." Now imagine saying that to Arnold.
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The returns of S&P 500 over decades have been huge and are based on owning some of the best businesses and also some business with deep state and goverment connections. You can't use this argument to argue against people who manage to be very successful because they did not perform to the level of S&P 500.
Also, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Maybe it will be more impressive than the market over 40 years.
I dunno how successful Trump has been, but the skill set to grew successful business is one that can't be so easily dismissed by the alternative of just putting your money towards an index. You actually need people who do the work to benefit from owning a small slice of the top 500 businesses.
Handing out his money to the Kushners if by these you mean the family that includes Jared Kushner whose father was a con man, wouldn't have made Trump much money, because he would have just given them his money. And dealing with them otherwise from a weaker spot and giving them money expecting a return, if that is what you mean, might have ended with them conning Trump or giving him a bad deal.
And as per the quote, they have been already successful apparently while Trump build more generational wealth from a lower base if indeed he is as successful as Slowboy portrays.
You can't just be the son of Kushner dynasty by being Trump. Just like Trump's own rise isn't the same as more self made men who started from a lower spot. It is good for people outside the biggest dynasties to also work to build bigger generational wealth. Just like you can't just dismiss success by pointing at putting the money at S&P 500.
Although they did join together eventually. Plus, you haven't provided any evidence that the Kushners could use the same money by Trump, from the same point (modest real estate business claimed by Slowboy), to be more successful.
I doubt you have really investigated the issue in the depth it requires and made the calculations.
And of course Charles Kushner tried to screw over his brother in law. https://eu.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2020/12/23/prosecuted-chris-christie-charles-kushner-pardoned-donald-trump/4034767001/
However, since the Kushner family and Trump family joined together and he pardoned Charles maybe this episode does reveal something negative about Trump too.
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Naruto? Really?
Why don't you just compare him to Superman and ask if I'd dare to be skeptical of the Man of Steel?
This much apple-polishing would make the scriptwriters of The Apprentice blush. But hey, I hope you're right and Trump proves to be the God-King we need and not the God-King we deserve.
You're too jaded to see what's right in front of you. The billionaire rocket space man sees it. A Kennedy sees it. Vivek, JD Vance, Tulsi, etc. The Trump coalition is made up of many of Trump's worst former enemies, because he's a literal anime hero. This is why America is the greatest country on earth, because we believe in the power of friendship, we're going to fix the entire world, it's cringe all the way down. Trump started a movement and this is how the future will remember us: the Trump Era. The Trump Era was when we had Michael Jackson and Muhammed Ali and the internet and Trump. The Trump Era was either the era where Elon Musk brought mankind to Mars, or the last era where people dreamed big enough to believe it was possible. They had coca-cola, and big macs, and monster trucks, and guns. They were the fattest, loudest, dumbest, sickest, most foolish, most gullible, most annoying people on Earth. They did the most important things that have ever been done. They were the greatest people on Earth.
I agree with this Trump as embodiment of America thing, but it’s too early to say for sure that that’s how he’ll be remembered.
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