Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
apparently Nick Griffin has turned down being a special advisor to the Trump presidency..
apparently, it was too right-wing for his sensibilities
apparently, it was too right-wing for his sensibilities
D
Departed
Guest
Absolutely crazy. Political ADHD.
Green Tea
Vital Youth Team
Think he will be a breath of fresh air myself.
Ok, he isn't polished or scripted like Obama or Clinton(who got fed their lines pre interviews) but I think he will help working class America and businesses(to create more jobs)... I don't think he will get involved in all these regime changes that have unsettled the middle East and Africa causing a huge world humanitarian crisis.
He will put America first and rebuild the country creating jobs in the process. The Immigration policy is no different to what the people are voting for all over Europe, tighter controls and borders. Unfortunately we live in a world where we have a lot of extreme terrorism, open borders and a free for all is no longer an option.
Chances are that we ourselves will also have a far better relationship with USA than that of under the last administration of Obama, who couldn't stand us. This is important as we enter into negotiations to leave the European Union.
Its a new style of politics as we enter into an age of uncertainty, exploitation of the immigrant(zero hour contracts), terrorist threats, huge division between rich/poor...
Change is needed and Donald Trump is certainly change..So I am willing to give him a chance as I sit back with my box of popcorn!
:35:
Ok, he isn't polished or scripted like Obama or Clinton(who got fed their lines pre interviews) but I think he will help working class America and businesses(to create more jobs)... I don't think he will get involved in all these regime changes that have unsettled the middle East and Africa causing a huge world humanitarian crisis.
He will put America first and rebuild the country creating jobs in the process. The Immigration policy is no different to what the people are voting for all over Europe, tighter controls and borders. Unfortunately we live in a world where we have a lot of extreme terrorism, open borders and a free for all is no longer an option.
Chances are that we ourselves will also have a far better relationship with USA than that of under the last administration of Obama, who couldn't stand us. This is important as we enter into negotiations to leave the European Union.
Its a new style of politics as we enter into an age of uncertainty, exploitation of the immigrant(zero hour contracts), terrorist threats, huge division between rich/poor...
Change is needed and Donald Trump is certainly change..So I am willing to give him a chance as I sit back with my box of popcorn!
:35:
Sir Dick Caan
Vital Reserves Team
Green Tea
no good usually comes when the politics of fear wins over that of hope.... appealing to the lowest common denominator in people will score you short-term tactical gain..
then comes the inevitable pay-back.
no good usually comes when the politics of fear wins over that of hope.... appealing to the lowest common denominator in people will score you short-term tactical gain..
then comes the inevitable pay-back.
Welshtel
Vital Football Hero
Since he was elected, Trump has shown unique character to sit down with all sorts of people and not only spend time with the possible leaders in the various departments of government but he has sought advice from the best he can find and is obviously prepared to listen to advice. In making it obvious that he intends to pick the best for the jobs that need doing in the USA to bring the country back to a high economic base, it's obvious that he wants to provide the capital in the country to drive them forwards to do the things that are vital. He's no fool, as some are desperately trying to make him out to be, he didn't get to where he is by idiocy. I'm sure that he will take sound advice from others and won't take the 'popular' route just to placate those who are the scroungers, the illegals immigrants, the criminals and those who just want to divide society for the sake of it.
I DO think he has already put the brake on many bad policies and ideas and will continue to do so. I think at the end of this he will have a stronger society (at least in US terms if not in British terms). All will know where they stand with Trump unlike the weak president they have had to endure for the last 8 years who only blows his own trumpet after ruining their economy and was driving it into the sea and to my mind was deluded.
I DO think he has already put the brake on many bad policies and ideas and will continue to do so. I think at the end of this he will have a stronger society (at least in US terms if not in British terms). All will know where they stand with Trump unlike the weak president they have had to endure for the last 8 years who only blows his own trumpet after ruining their economy and was driving it into the sea and to my mind was deluded.
Tino
Vital Reserves Team
I wish Trump would stop using social media, especially Twitter as a tool to bitch and make silly remarks. It may well be his undoing.
His business interests and being the President will always be an 'ongoing' concern. I'm talking about trade deals and ITK ways of making even more money from his position of being President etc.
His business interests and being the President will always be an 'ongoing' concern. I'm talking about trade deals and ITK ways of making even more money from his position of being President etc.
D
Departed
Guest
Interesting perspective:
Rex Murphy: Trump delivered a plain, serious and monumental promise to give Washington back to the people
Rex Murphy | January 20, 2017 9:22 PM ET
President Trump: Restore Promise of America
Donald Trump is not an orator. Rather he’s a man with a plain message, which he delivers plainly.
Donald John Trump delivered the starkest Inaugural Address of modern times. It was so far out of the mode as to be unique: unembroidered, direct, with little flourish, one message and brief. The government belongs to the citizens was the message.
It works for the citizens. It does not exist, is not for the benefit of, nor is it owned by those who practice politics, or who live off the administration, practices or management of politics.
He is in Washington, the dew-fresh president said, to serve Americans first. And most particularly those Americans who have not shared, to a just extent, in the benefits and wealth of 20th– and 21st-century technological and communicational advances. He calls them, rightly, the forgotten Americans. And pledges they will not be forgotten again.
Now it is a large question whether a pledge of this magnitude and emotional depth can really be fulfilled. In a very real way it is a larger promise, a larger summons than was ever made by Barack Obama, ringing so perfectly, as the orator he was, the chimes of Hope and Change. Trump’s promise is visceral not rhetorical; it is particular — it is reaching down to the jobless, to the gang- and murder-torn inner cities, to those in economic torment, and saying this is really going to change for all of you.
This is a steel yardstick he has set for himself.
For to the people listening for just that message, and by virtue of the emphatic, convicted tone he adopted in making it a fundamental pledge, he has made what I will call a real promise. Either the anxieties, the disenchantments, the woes of the many left behind and forgotten are, to some extent, dispelled in the next four years, or they will not be. His success will register unfailingly, or not.
Trump has no cloud of semantics or rhetorical overflight to hide behind. He has given himself no cover. This is not the famous blank slate of Barack Obama. Trump, in his bare 15 minutes or so made a commitment that reaches to the particular lives and welfare of individual Americans, and the measurement of that commitment is thereby in the hands and hearts of every American to whom he made it. Their lives will either be better in four years or not, and there is no pillar behind which Mr. Trump can hide, nor I suspect will he seek to hide, if he cannot keep it.
The brevity of the speech had one unintended obscurity, or rather acted to obscure how momentous the Trump ascendancy threatens or promises to be. Just how much of a radical shift, a convulsion, that the moment of its occasion represented. Trump has virtually cleared the table of politics as it has been practiced and played for over a generation. He has bulldozed the old verities of political practice. He has shattered the codes of party politics, routed the tired mages of the political panels, the think tanks and NGOs. And he has utterly bypassed the hollow practices of virtue signalling and the insidious tribalism of identity politics. And as for the claustrophobic thought-amputations of political correctness, he has, correctly, shown nothing but scorn and dismissal. This is a wholesale reworking of the mode and understanding of modern American politics.
Related
Kelly McParland: President Trump offers a vision of greatness. He has yet to offer a vision to achieve it
The speech, the protests and the ‘carnage’: What happened at Trump’s inauguration
‘Trump revolutionary wear’: What the big players wore to presidential inauguration — including cat buttons
Most heretically, he has fervently embraced that most basic and condign of civic emotions: patriotism. It has been the style of enervated liberalism to decry, even to shame, the principal virtue of any serious polity: faith and pride in one’s own country and fellow citizens. Trump is not ashamed to be American. He glories in it. For a whole great swath of American opinion, certainly for the enlightened swamis of Hollywood and academia, for all the stale, tired and wearisome activists and professional grievance farmers, this is a radical perspective. His address amounted to a noble, though forgotten, truism. The purpose of a government is to serve the people of that country whose government it is.
I should remark the incidental serendipity that — were you to subtract from Bernie Sanders his conspiracy theories of business and capitalism, and his Soviet honeymoons — Sanders could have given Trump’s speech. The emphasis on the ordinary citizen, on work, on the forgotten middle and lower class — these would have rolled with different rhythm but much the same emphasis from Hillary’s upstart socialist rival, as easily as they fell from the newly presidential tycoon. Bernie and the Donald have more in common than either might have guessed.
Donald Trump’s address was, finally, as I’ve said, less a speech in the grand vein, aiming for the quotation books, ripe with balanced antithesis and clever formulations, than a distilled declaration of serious intent. The slogan of a campaign, Make America Great Again, has become the guiding theme of the new administration. The new president will have the very fight of his life to bring into governance what he brought to his campaign. All the forces of condescension, comfort and high place are against him. But he has a connection to all those others who are not in that cocoon.
This will be a turbulent time, but it has its promise.
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-trump-delivered-a-plain-serious-and-monumental-promise-to-give-washington-back-to-the-people
Rex Murphy: Trump delivered a plain, serious and monumental promise to give Washington back to the people
Rex Murphy | January 20, 2017 9:22 PM ET
President Trump: Restore Promise of America
Donald Trump is not an orator. Rather he’s a man with a plain message, which he delivers plainly.
Donald John Trump delivered the starkest Inaugural Address of modern times. It was so far out of the mode as to be unique: unembroidered, direct, with little flourish, one message and brief. The government belongs to the citizens was the message.
It works for the citizens. It does not exist, is not for the benefit of, nor is it owned by those who practice politics, or who live off the administration, practices or management of politics.
He is in Washington, the dew-fresh president said, to serve Americans first. And most particularly those Americans who have not shared, to a just extent, in the benefits and wealth of 20th– and 21st-century technological and communicational advances. He calls them, rightly, the forgotten Americans. And pledges they will not be forgotten again.
Now it is a large question whether a pledge of this magnitude and emotional depth can really be fulfilled. In a very real way it is a larger promise, a larger summons than was ever made by Barack Obama, ringing so perfectly, as the orator he was, the chimes of Hope and Change. Trump’s promise is visceral not rhetorical; it is particular — it is reaching down to the jobless, to the gang- and murder-torn inner cities, to those in economic torment, and saying this is really going to change for all of you.
This is a steel yardstick he has set for himself.
For to the people listening for just that message, and by virtue of the emphatic, convicted tone he adopted in making it a fundamental pledge, he has made what I will call a real promise. Either the anxieties, the disenchantments, the woes of the many left behind and forgotten are, to some extent, dispelled in the next four years, or they will not be. His success will register unfailingly, or not.
Trump has no cloud of semantics or rhetorical overflight to hide behind. He has given himself no cover. This is not the famous blank slate of Barack Obama. Trump, in his bare 15 minutes or so made a commitment that reaches to the particular lives and welfare of individual Americans, and the measurement of that commitment is thereby in the hands and hearts of every American to whom he made it. Their lives will either be better in four years or not, and there is no pillar behind which Mr. Trump can hide, nor I suspect will he seek to hide, if he cannot keep it.
The brevity of the speech had one unintended obscurity, or rather acted to obscure how momentous the Trump ascendancy threatens or promises to be. Just how much of a radical shift, a convulsion, that the moment of its occasion represented. Trump has virtually cleared the table of politics as it has been practiced and played for over a generation. He has bulldozed the old verities of political practice. He has shattered the codes of party politics, routed the tired mages of the political panels, the think tanks and NGOs. And he has utterly bypassed the hollow practices of virtue signalling and the insidious tribalism of identity politics. And as for the claustrophobic thought-amputations of political correctness, he has, correctly, shown nothing but scorn and dismissal. This is a wholesale reworking of the mode and understanding of modern American politics.
Related
Kelly McParland: President Trump offers a vision of greatness. He has yet to offer a vision to achieve it
The speech, the protests and the ‘carnage’: What happened at Trump’s inauguration
‘Trump revolutionary wear’: What the big players wore to presidential inauguration — including cat buttons
Most heretically, he has fervently embraced that most basic and condign of civic emotions: patriotism. It has been the style of enervated liberalism to decry, even to shame, the principal virtue of any serious polity: faith and pride in one’s own country and fellow citizens. Trump is not ashamed to be American. He glories in it. For a whole great swath of American opinion, certainly for the enlightened swamis of Hollywood and academia, for all the stale, tired and wearisome activists and professional grievance farmers, this is a radical perspective. His address amounted to a noble, though forgotten, truism. The purpose of a government is to serve the people of that country whose government it is.
I should remark the incidental serendipity that — were you to subtract from Bernie Sanders his conspiracy theories of business and capitalism, and his Soviet honeymoons — Sanders could have given Trump’s speech. The emphasis on the ordinary citizen, on work, on the forgotten middle and lower class — these would have rolled with different rhythm but much the same emphasis from Hillary’s upstart socialist rival, as easily as they fell from the newly presidential tycoon. Bernie and the Donald have more in common than either might have guessed.
Donald Trump’s address was, finally, as I’ve said, less a speech in the grand vein, aiming for the quotation books, ripe with balanced antithesis and clever formulations, than a distilled declaration of serious intent. The slogan of a campaign, Make America Great Again, has become the guiding theme of the new administration. The new president will have the very fight of his life to bring into governance what he brought to his campaign. All the forces of condescension, comfort and high place are against him. But he has a connection to all those others who are not in that cocoon.
This will be a turbulent time, but it has its promise.
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/rex-murphy-trump-delivered-a-plain-serious-and-monumental-promise-to-give-washington-back-to-the-people
Welshtel
Vital Football Hero
I WAS AMAZED AT TRUMPS SPEECH, I have NEVER heard a leaders speech as forthright and openly honest as that. I think the way he spoke about government was AMAZING. He's dead right, Governments all over the world let down their people, they are there to give the people all that they can but most spend the people's money on anything they like. They chalk up millions in debt and think they've done a good thing. They let anyone and everyone into their countries and don't give a thought to which one of those immigrants might be a terrorist, drug dealer, thief, murderer etc.
Governments are there to look after the economy and to make it grow, to provide jobs, healthcare, get people into work and to re enforce the idea that you have to provide for yourself and your family and not expect someone else to have to do it for you. Trump knows how to run a business, how to cut out unnecessary expenditure, to make it lean and efficient. GREAT. We all need that, whether we're socialist or conservative voters. You can't spend money on your pet projects if you don't make the money in the first place. You have nothing to spend. To go into debt is just criminal. If you have a social agenda, the money has to come from somewhere and all those that want to spend their lives on welfare are not contributing to the economy and someone has to pick up the tab. Letting the rich or wealth makers do it, is unfair when they have provided jobs etc etc already with their industry.
Trump stated clearly that he is for all of the people and that he wants the States to succeed and become a great nation again. That has to start with the wealth of the nation. Claw back the jobs and the industries from abroad and keep them in-house is his vision, which I totally agree with. Get your people working and your economy growing. A working population is far healthier that a stagnating, 'do nothing all day' population that is bored and grabbing. We have them here, and I wish we had a strong government to STOP immigration, put everyone back to work, stop imports and start making stuff ourselves. We talk about a FAIR SOCIETY and then we let people carry other people who are too lazy to work and expect everyone to look after them. I have no problem at all with those who genuinely can't work and it's good to look after them but there are many good people who are invalids that like working and go to their jobs in wheelchairs, those that can, of course.
I think Trump has it right, at least in his vision of what the USA needs. A lot will be modified by reality but the resolve to head in the right direction is good.
The world was challenged by his inauguration speech. All governments need to listen to that and think again about what they're doing for their people. They need to stop being self seeking, power crazy and domineering and look to see how they can actually help the man/woman in the street.
JUST FOR ONCE, I would LOVE to see a head of government DO the right thing and SERVE the people.
Governments are there to look after the economy and to make it grow, to provide jobs, healthcare, get people into work and to re enforce the idea that you have to provide for yourself and your family and not expect someone else to have to do it for you. Trump knows how to run a business, how to cut out unnecessary expenditure, to make it lean and efficient. GREAT. We all need that, whether we're socialist or conservative voters. You can't spend money on your pet projects if you don't make the money in the first place. You have nothing to spend. To go into debt is just criminal. If you have a social agenda, the money has to come from somewhere and all those that want to spend their lives on welfare are not contributing to the economy and someone has to pick up the tab. Letting the rich or wealth makers do it, is unfair when they have provided jobs etc etc already with their industry.
Trump stated clearly that he is for all of the people and that he wants the States to succeed and become a great nation again. That has to start with the wealth of the nation. Claw back the jobs and the industries from abroad and keep them in-house is his vision, which I totally agree with. Get your people working and your economy growing. A working population is far healthier that a stagnating, 'do nothing all day' population that is bored and grabbing. We have them here, and I wish we had a strong government to STOP immigration, put everyone back to work, stop imports and start making stuff ourselves. We talk about a FAIR SOCIETY and then we let people carry other people who are too lazy to work and expect everyone to look after them. I have no problem at all with those who genuinely can't work and it's good to look after them but there are many good people who are invalids that like working and go to their jobs in wheelchairs, those that can, of course.
I think Trump has it right, at least in his vision of what the USA needs. A lot will be modified by reality but the resolve to head in the right direction is good.
The world was challenged by his inauguration speech. All governments need to listen to that and think again about what they're doing for their people. They need to stop being self seeking, power crazy and domineering and look to see how they can actually help the man/woman in the street.
JUST FOR ONCE, I would LOVE to see a head of government DO the right thing and SERVE the people.
D
Departed
Guest
That's a great post 'Tel and I am not a fan of Trump.
Spursex
Alert Team
I don't like Trump, he strikes me as too much show and not enough substance, he comes across as probably being the least intelligent President of the US in living memory.
I don't believe in protectionism, although there are elements of his philosophy that strike a cord with me e.g. China have got away with murder with it's currency and it's economy that should have been confronted and dealt with long before now.
The same is true of the shameful lack of meeting the minimum spend that members of NATO have consistently failed to achieve.
It's also odd to me that people simply don't realise that the 2006 fence act was enacted by Bush, but one of it's chief architects and the man that implemented almost all of it was none other than Obama: the issue(s) that Trump has highlighted is that it hasn't been seen through and didn't go far enough...that wasn't 'just' his view, but also most of the democrats.
I also think that the Iran deal was probably one of the worst foreign policy mistakes I've ever seen, I worked in Iran on and off for nearly 3 years, their leaders cannot be trusted with anything, ever.
Trumps really lifted expectations for his administration, my betting is he won't succeed where it matters most i.e. 'bringing back jobs on the scale he thinks he can'...
But most of all his success or failure may well be how/with what he replaces Obamacare.
I'm optimistic that he'll bring about a change in relations with Russia, and he'll do it pragmatically, without weakening Nato, but we will see...
I don't believe in protectionism, although there are elements of his philosophy that strike a cord with me e.g. China have got away with murder with it's currency and it's economy that should have been confronted and dealt with long before now.
The same is true of the shameful lack of meeting the minimum spend that members of NATO have consistently failed to achieve.
It's also odd to me that people simply don't realise that the 2006 fence act was enacted by Bush, but one of it's chief architects and the man that implemented almost all of it was none other than Obama: the issue(s) that Trump has highlighted is that it hasn't been seen through and didn't go far enough...that wasn't 'just' his view, but also most of the democrats.
I also think that the Iran deal was probably one of the worst foreign policy mistakes I've ever seen, I worked in Iran on and off for nearly 3 years, their leaders cannot be trusted with anything, ever.
Trumps really lifted expectations for his administration, my betting is he won't succeed where it matters most i.e. 'bringing back jobs on the scale he thinks he can'...
But most of all his success or failure may well be how/with what he replaces Obamacare.
I'm optimistic that he'll bring about a change in relations with Russia, and he'll do it pragmatically, without weakening Nato, but we will see...
Spursex
Alert Team
I'm optimistic that he'll lift relations with Russia because he'll make it clear that the US won't simply allow them to get away with what they have (whereas Obama did) and that he will find away out of the current impasse with Russia, by giving them a way out.
As for the rest, whilst he does make my skin creep (I'm unsure why) he has to be given the benefit of the doubt, because whilst his own personal standards of morality and honestly may well be 'flexible' I think the administration he's put together gives reason for some optimism.
But, as always, only time will tell.
The administration he's put together is predominantly lunatics and people whose views are diametrically opposed to the office they've been put in...
Plus, Linda (WWE) Mc-*******-Mahon in charge of small business. Literally the part owner of one of the shadiest companies in the US in terms of monopolies and employee standards.
As for Russia... well... there's links all over the place in his administration. I'm sure he'll do very well with Russia, but will it be to the benefit of the US?
Plus, Linda (WWE) Mc-*******-Mahon in charge of small business. Literally the part owner of one of the shadiest companies in the US in terms of monopolies and employee standards.
As for Russia... well... there's links all over the place in his administration. I'm sure he'll do very well with Russia, but will it be to the benefit of the US?
Spursex
Alert Team
I'm more interested in it defusing the situation in Europe than benefiting the US some other way.
I like some of the people in his administration, that doesn't mean some aren't as shady in their business history/dealings as he is.
I have to admit, I hear "President Donald Trump" and it still stuns me...
Anyway, it's no good pre-judging, let's see what he does or doesn't achieve.
D
Departed
Guest
And that differs how from most politicians?
Bill Murray: So let me get this straight, I lie to the government and it's a felony. The government lies to me and it's politics.
D
Departed
Guest
The election is over.
It is time for everyone to stop beating their chest and get back to work building and bettering their communities, looking after the people around them and doing their best to make this world a better place.
Protest is good. Fighting for what you believe is outstanding. Trying to overturn a democratic vote is childish in the extreme. And dangerous in that it undermines all social and cultural standards and the rule of law.
Look around. What is the alternative to democracy? If you find something you like better then emigrate to it.
It is time for everyone to stop beating their chest and get back to work building and bettering their communities, looking after the people around them and doing their best to make this world a better place.
Protest is good. Fighting for what you believe is outstanding. Trying to overturn a democratic vote is childish in the extreme. And dangerous in that it undermines all social and cultural standards and the rule of law.
Look around. What is the alternative to democracy? If you find something you like better then emigrate to it.
