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Trump Part 11

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maxflinn said:
Tones are you seriously suggesting that the WP and NYT are anti-establishment ?

If so I can only assume that by establishment you mean the Trump regime.

I don't, I mean the establishment, which runs the country via Republican or Democratic regimes.
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Trump is the establishment at the moment - he has essentially mounted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party, which, it has to be said, has placed itself in such a position over the last 40 years or so, ever since it made a very unholy alliance with the religious wing of the Party.

So, by the "establishment" you mean the entire governing apparatus of the country, Constitution, Bill of Rights, Congress, Senate, Supreme Court? Well, they're Americans, so naturally they're for it. After all, that's what America is all about, a particular system of government, consciously and deliberately different from the monarchical governments of Europe at the time of the War of Independence. The papers may disagree with the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the current occupiers of the Capitol, but they do not disagree with the fundamental system. Are you really expecting them to be replicas of Steve Bannon, who has admitted that he wants to pull down the whole system à la Vladimir Illych Ulanov in That Other Large Country a century ago? Sorry, but that makes precisely zero sense.
 
No, I think by 'establishment' Max means activist leaders of the owning class, who control what matters to them from behind the scenes, and regard the elected government as more or less their puppets.

Possibly replace 'what matters to them' with 'just about everything,' and delete 'more or less.'
 
DonQuixote99 said:
No, I think by 'establishment' Max means activist leaders of the owning class, who control what matters to them from behind the scenes, and regard the elected government as more or less their puppets.

Possibly replace 'what matters to them' with 'just about everything,' and delete 'more or less.'
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Thank you. I personally am a believer in the cock-up theory of history, as opposed to the conspiratorial theory. No doubt there are those who seek to have their way (and certainly the Citizens United Supreme Court decision seems to have allowed enormous amounts of money into the system, distorting things considerably). However, it seems to me that such beliefs can be pushed too far. That powerful and wealthy people want to become even more powerful and wealthy without getting their hands dirty with the actual mechanics is undisputable, but whether it is actually possible in a country like the USA seems to me unlikely - as P.T. Barnum said, you can't fool all of the people all of the time, and eventually such things will explode in the face of the would-be controllers. The big problem is the damage caused before this happens.
 
DonQuixote99 said:
No, I think by 'establishment' Max means activist leaders of the owning class, who control what matters to them from behind the scenes, and regard the elected government as more or less their puppets.
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But it you take that line - and I'm guessing Max does - then it really doesn't matter who is president since they'll still be pulling the strings. So why all the anti-Clinton venom from Max during the campaign? Did he _really_ think that Trump would be knight in shinning armour who would guide the USA towards the path of 'pure' socialism?
 
DonQuixote99 said:
No, I think by 'establishment' Max means activist leaders of the owning class, who control what matters to them from behind the scenes, and regard the elected government as more or less their puppets.

Possibly replace 'what matters to them' with 'just about everything,' and delete 'more or less.'
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Yes, more or less correct, Don.

The WP and NYT are part of the establishment media.

They might be anti-Trump (until he starts bombing) but they're not anti-establishment.

I can't think of any mainstream US newspapers or news channels that could be described as anti-establishment.
 
tones.

over the past week or so wealthy donors have been threatening politicians in the open (some interviewed on news shows) to make sure the tax cuts for the rich budget is passed. they don;t need to conspire with one another, they simply have shared objectives and similar coercive power.
 
Obvs if the establishment controls everything they must have been behind Trump, otherwise he wouldn't have won the election.
 
Joe Hutch said:
Obvs if the establishment controls everything they must have been behind Trump, otherwise he wouldn't have won the election.
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I don’t understand how anyone could be any more ‘establishment’ than Trump in America. He was born into the nearest the country has to a royal family and has led the life of a millionaire playboy since birth including regularly being bailed out by the tax-payer for his excesses as his extraordinary level of debt is viewed by the financial establishment as ‘too big to fail’. Even so he managed to hoodwink millions of MaxFlinns that he was somehow a voice of the people! The whole thing is simply absurd. A con of even larger than Brexit proportions.

PS The four part Trump documentary on C4 is very good, part three was last night. I’d advise anyone with any real interest in where this elitist buffoon came from to watch it. A zero talent zero credibility Citizen Cane from birth!
 
The "establishment" has many facets: intellectual, financial, political...

I haven't seen the Trump documentary (I can't bear to listen to him - it feels like I become more stupid when I hear his voice) but I don't doubt he fits comfortably into the wealthy elite world of real estate, bankers and financiers. One only has to look at how many people like that rapidly found a place in his team to see that (Swamp? What swamp?!).

However, it's impossible to see him ever fitting in to the intellectually elite world of the Ivy League universities, or into the new Technorati of Silicon Valley. Likewise, I expect he's still viewed as a political outsider by many in Washington DC, albeit one that currently serves the interests of the Republican Party.

But however you look at it, he's no man of the people.
 
droodzilla said:
However, it's impossible to see him ever fitting in to the intellectually elite world of the Ivy League universities, or into the new Technorati of Silicon Valley. Likewise, I expect he's still viewed as a political outsider by many in Washington DC, albeit one that currently serves the interests of the Republican Party.

But however you look at it, he's no man of the people.
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Except he studied at Wharton, which is Ivy League (business school end of the University of Pennsylvania). I have no doubt he got in there more on the basis of contributions by his millionaire father than because of pure academic merit, but he has attended an Ivy League school. Whether he fit in there intellectually is another question (OTOH most business schools are not hotbeds of high academic thinking).
 
droodzilla said:
However, it's impossible to see him ever fitting in to the intellectually elite world of the Ivy League universities, or into the new Technorati of Silicon Valley. Likewise, I expect he's still viewed as a political outsider by many in Washington DC, albeit one that currently serves the interests of the Republican Party.
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He is very much a Republican/conservative in all the worst senses of the words. I don’t see Silicon Valley, the scientific community or education establishment as part of that at all. Trump is part of the new age of ignorance along with all his climate deniers, religious cranks, racists, homophobes etc. No one in Silicon Valley believes in that shite, the average IQ there is at least 70 points too high!

In the UK we are slightly different in that our educational establishment is so routed in the archaic class system some intellectually obsolete views and attitudes remain at the very top, but again move to the heights of technology and research and there will be little room for the dumb backward religion or anti-science of the political right.
 
Not only a child of ‘the swamp’ but one who has avoided tax and been bailed out by financial institutions, i.e. he is the very worst kind of scrounger imaginable. A huge net loss of a man.
 
As quoted on C4 yesterday, the greatest con artist ever. That is how history will remember Trump. If he doesn't blow up the world first.

 
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