Populism is the position that 'the people' are presently being exploited by elites.
One possible problem is that the elites may be misidentified. Thus you get wealthy right-wingers, such as Farage and Rees-Mogg, who stand to make money off Brexit, claiming to represent the will of the people, who probably will be worse off. Trump is enacting policies that favour financial elites on the back of an attack on mainstream media, residents in wealthy cities, etc.
A second problem is that the meaning of 'the people' tend to be restricted to exclude certain groups, usually racial or religious.
The two go together: often the elites are defined as people assisting immigrants, supposedly at the expense of the 'real' people.
Aren't there different brands of populism? I think most large corporations are managed by greedy arseholes out to screw shareholders and the public alike. I reckon that view, which I cherish, is a populist view. I also think it is more or less accurate.
I think the issue is whether the views are fact-based. No view is confirmed simply because it is popular. The term populism simply infers popular support, whether or not justified.
That's what I figured. For the life of me I don't know what is wrong with something being politically popular. While popularity is not necessary for a policy to be implemented in a representative democracy, it sure helps. So bagging populism just seems like bagging a perfectly good method of getting your hands on the levers of power and doing some good.
That's what I figured. For the life of me I don't know what is wrong with something being politically popular. While popularity is not necessary for a policy to be implemented in a representative democracy, it sure helps. So bagging populism just seems like bagging a perfectly good method of getting your hands on the levers of power and doing some good.
At best, I have some time for using the 'right' method in politics, but the ALP just lost another bloody election by telling the damn electorate exactly what they wanted to do. Really good policy, shot down in flames by a desperate Government who made the election about what might happen under Labor instead of the monumental clownfest that their Govt was for the last three years. So bugger the right way to do it. Run bloody attack ads, don't talk about policy and WIN.
I don't have much time for fairness for the enemy at the moment. Stick the bastards in a pillory outside the polling places.
That's what I figured. For the life of me I don't know what is wrong with something being politically popular. While popularity is not necessary for a policy to be implemented in a representative democracy, it sure helps. So bagging populism just seems like bagging a perfectly good method of getting your hands on the levers of power and doing some good.
Or, in trump’s case, doing a great deal of evil.
Sure, but how did Obama get elected? He didn't sell policy, he sold a dream.
I've been watching the powerful HBO miniseries Chernobyl (a remarkable creation) and reminded of another issue, relevant to Trumpism. Right at the end of the final episode, Legasov asks the question, what caused the explosion of the reactor? And his answer? Lies.
The problem with bagging populism in order to get into power is that unscrupulous, uncontrolled, leadership can subsequently destroy the power of truth in favour of its own needs to control the story. As an interesting illustration, there is now talk in Russia of remaking the series to implicate the CIA in the disaster.
how did Obama get elected? He didn't sell policy, he sold a dream.
It seems to me that wannabe Presidents shouldn't get too into policy. They should be "selling a dream"" if by that you mean "offering a compelling vision for the nation". Specific policies then (hopefully) come from that vision.
This is the weakness of Warren, who seems to think that having policies coming out of your ying-yang is a substitute for vision. It is also the weakness of Biden, who seems to have no vision other than "I'm a nicer older guy than Trump".
The Democrat who beats Trump will be the one who can offer a more compelling vision than "Make America Great Again (by stroking racism and trashing environmental concerns)".
Being a stable genius he has the best ideas about where what is in the solar system.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019" https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
Being a stable genius he has the best ideas about where what is in the solar system.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019" https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
To be fair if it had been the other way round. We'd have said it was obvious that Obama meant "..including [going to] Mars (of which [going to] the Moon is a part)," and that he didn't need to fill the blanks in.
I'm inclined (until further evidence) to give him the benefit of the doubt there. We don't need to twist his words to make him out to be a fool, so why risk doing it (that said, it is Trump, so we should keep an eye for if he says something else)
Being a stable genius he has the best ideas about where what is in the solar system.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019" https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
To be fair if it had been the other way round. We'd have said it was obvious that Obama meant "..including [going to] Mars (of which [going to] the Moon is a part)," and that he didn't need to fill the blanks in.
I'm inclined (until further evidence) to give him the benefit of the doubt there. We don't need to twist his words to make him out to be a fool, so why risk doing it (that said, it is Trump, so we should keep an eye for if he says something else)
Another degradation of the Trump era: "twist his words" now means "read his words exactly as written".
It's hard to make comparisons to Obama since Obama didn't feel the need to communicate policy initiatives in chunks of no more than 280 characters.
Indeed. What does it mean to be a man of your word if you are given latitude over what you actually meant. A more straightforward analysis it that he is both a habitual liar and a habitual demonstrator of his own ignorance. Plenty of evidence to support both of those assessments.
I don't have much time for fairness for the enemy at the moment. Stick the bastards in a pillory outside the polling places.
And that is everything that is wrong with populism. It's an abandonment of democracy and a recipe for the nastier parts of history repeating themselves.
Another degradation of the Trump era: "twist his words" now means "read his words exactly as written".
I agree with @jay_emm . Trump's comment is badly phrased and does indeed look stupid if taken literally, but again, from my vantage point as someone paid to make sense of people who don't write exactly what they mean (sometimes the exact opposite...), including paralegals drafting major contracts, it is clear that he did not mean what most of the media is having fun insinuating he meant, but what @jay_emm says.
To portray Trump as dumb enough to think Mars is part of the Moon is to underestimate him. To echo this simplistic portrayal by the media is again straight out of Trump's playbook - media manipulation - and it's a playbook he uses far better than almost anybody else. It's a distraction from the actual issue, which is indeed the President's "use" of Twitter. In my estimation the only indication of dumbness in this latest instance is his obvious refusal to have his tweets vetted (opinion on this is divided amongst politicians I know). But his particular talent is to thrive even on his stupider tweets. There is no such thing as bad publicity for him.
There is plenty of evidence of trump being a habitual liar and a habitual demonstrator ...
However it is also true that I read it as I parsed it (despite appropriate preparation)*.
If nothing else, if [our] moon is a part of mars, then going to mars is not 'much bigger'. If we read it the headline way we have to hypothesize the writer knowing mars is a lot further from us than the moon and then 'forgetting' it in a few words. For anyone but Trump, this would be an irrational reading, and even for Trump I wouldn't get that analysis from the tweet (knowing that he is a habitual liar and publicly ignorant, I wouldn't rule it out) or use the tweet as evidence of him being a habitual liar and publicly ignorant (we aren't exactly short of choice).
By the same logic Croesos clearly doesn't know Obama had used Twitter "Obama didn't feel the need to communicate policy initiatives in chunks of no more than 280 characters. "
Here on the White House handle, we see him answering questions and communicating on a policy initiative (in this case a tax cut) e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/ObamaWhiteHouse/status/275677020028018688
Of course, because Obama is sensible, he didn't communicate policy initiatives first** or only by Twitter. That however is an entirely different statement. And of course I know damn well what was meant (actually there probably was a minute when I interpreted it wrongly but believed it to be true) [and agree with the point].
*Had of course the tweet begun with something about Phoebus, I would have interpreted it differently again.
**I think.
Yes, there's a risk both ways.
On the one hand Trump has said so many untrue and stupid things that anything is believable. Letting him get away with bull is obviously bad.
On the other hand if we show ourselves too keen to cry wolf when it's actually just a fox then that gives support to them not listening when it's about the Mueller report (or alternatively to make a big backstory for 57 states). Even if we only do it once.
One thing people seem to be missing is Clinton won the POPULAR vote. In other words, she had more of the populists than the person currently occupying the White House.
One thing people seem to be missing is Clinton won the POPULAR vote. In other words, she had more of the populists than the person currently occupying the White House.
Yeah but so what? she may have the moral high ground but we have an unspeakably corrupt arsehole in the White House.
There's a semantic issue here, but I think it important:
Populist - certainly is the political science sense - does not mean just popular. There are both popular policies and popular politicians who are not populist. However there is no properly agreed definition and hence it is often confusing. Wiki covers this quite well.
A working definition for our purposes might contain the following elements: 1) A narrative of The people vs others. In the case of Trump it is the American People vs The Swamp of the Washington DC 'establishment' and 'Mexican' immigrants (C.f. Brexit where it is apparently the elites who are trying to stop the people from getting the Brexit they voted for. Same shit, different country).
There is a reasonable argument to be made that far too often the Washington political machinery favours international corporations and the extremely wealthy at the expense of ordinary Americans. The notion that a very wealthy man who heads an international corporation is some how the cure to this ill is of course ludicrous. Similarly the notion that immigrants from South of the US/Mexican border are the problem does not stand up to any sort of analysis.
2) Undeliverable promises If a party ran on say 0% income tax but the same level of government services, I have no doubt that it would be a popular position but for the vast majority of nation states, totally undeliverable.
As I said above, the term in not strictly defined but for this sort of discussion (i.e. about Trump) some sort of definiton like this is necessary. The issue is not that Trump is popular (he's moderately so; not negliable but not run-away loved by all either). But that he has built his broad(ish) support on these two strands - portraying himself as on the side of 'the ordinary people' against whoever and on completely undeliverable promises.
Real politicians are able to command popular support for policies that will actually work and do so without demonising anyone.
Populism essentially assumes one can fool all of the people all of the time. Within that assumption is the attitude that the 'people' are stupid and to be despised. The aim is not to have a workable political agenda but to ride others' resentment to a position of power.
(There is an interesting split going on in France in La France Insoumise between populists and people who actually want to deliver a radical left-wing agenda).
Not being a populist doesn't mean rejecting policies that benefit the people as a whole rather than an elite, but it does mean doing one's best to explain those ideas and how they are supposed to work. It means encouraging political debate rather than violence, and thought rather than thoughtlessness.
Being a stable genius he has the best ideas about where what is in the solar system.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019" https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
To be fair if it had been the other way round. We'd have said it was obvious that Obama meant "..including [going to] Mars (of which [going to] the Moon is a part)," and that he didn't need to fill the blanks in.
I'm inclined (until further evidence) to give him the benefit of the doubt there. We don't need to twist his words to make him out to be a fool, so why risk doing it (that said, it is Trump, so we should keep an eye for if he says something else)
And let's not forget, Obama said his grandmother, born in 1922, had lived through two world wars, and also once said that there are 52 states. And Joe Biden said that FDR went on TV to address the nation right after the stock-market crash in 1929.
"Look how dumb THEIR guy is!!" can be a risky game in politics, and I always think it is best avoided. And personally, my original interpretation of Trump's astronomical theory was that he meant Mars and the moon had once been part of the same physical entity. Which I thought was an acceptable mistake coming from a layperson.
I can also believe that he meant getting to the moon was part of the process of getting to Mars. Either way, I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that Mars and the moon are currently attached.
I can also believe that he meant getting to the moon was part of the process of getting to Mars.
I assume that's what he meant, although not what he said.
What's not attracting attention is that he said, 'Defence'. Aren't there international treaties about not using space for defence purposes? (Although I suppose, Trump neither knows nor cares about international treaties, is like, Trump has bad hair, not of itself news, until there is some concrete intention to break them.)
I can also believe that he meant getting to the moon was part of the process of getting to Mars.
I assume that's what he meant, although not what he said.
That's possible, but still makes a hash out of the whole tweet. If returning to the moon is an integral part of plans for going to Mars, why berate NASA for talking about it in the previous sentence?
What's not attracting attention is that he said, 'Defence'. Aren't there international treaties about not using space for defence purposes? (Although I suppose, Trump neither knows nor cares about international treaties, is like, Trump has bad hair, not of itself news, until there is some concrete intention to break them.)
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty doesn't have an outright ban on such things, though it does say
States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;
the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;
The US and many other countries have plenty of military satellites already in orbit for navigation, surveillance, and communications, and ICBMs travel through space on their way to their targets.
Of course, this really isn't NASA's job so it's largely irrelevant to the putative topic of the tweet. But then, the mere existence of the tweet doesn't really make any sense. Trump comments on the activities of agencies under his administration as if he has nothing to do with them - as if he's tweeting his hot takes on his own policies after learning about them from something he's just seen on TV (oh wait...)
And let's not forget, Obama said his grandmother, born in 1922, had lived through two world wars, and also once said that there are 52 states. And Joe Biden said that FDR went on TV to address the nation right after the stock-market crash in 1929.
Obama did once say something about visiting 57 (Islamic) states according to Snopes, but it was apparently misreported somehow. A brief google turned up no quotes about Obama's grandmother living through 2 world wars.
Could you offer links for these flubs, perhaps? As we swim deeper into The Age of Disinformation, it behooves all of us to make sure we don't accidentally spread untruths.
Because it's not bigly enough. I think the your [Dave's] last line (and the story in the link) sums it up.
Nasa was talking about the "refocusing on the moon (with the possible* hope of getting to Mars in 2030)".
Fox went "the moon?, didn't we do that 50 years ago" (ignoring the Mars aspects, and the fact it's been 47 years since we last did it).
Trump feels upset, belittled. Something goes through his head (with at least something remembered about Moon-to-Mars), and he tweets. "Focus on Mars, Defence and Science" (whether in terms of publicity or practically)
*or at least using it as a selling point.
Dafyd mentioned some issues with Defence.
Trump hasn't exactly helped Nasa contribute to (Climate) Science, he could fix that.
Obama did once say something about visiting 57 (Islamic) states according to Snopes, but it was apparently misreported somehow. A brief google turned up no quotes about Obama's grandmother living through 2 world wars.
I recall the 57 one. The transcript Snopes gives shows he did genuinely say 57 (and his comments afterwards on it reflect that).
The Islamic interpretation is obviously rubbish. He forgot to borrow the one, while doing the maths as he was speaking. Fifty states minus one minus two is ... Fifty (pause) seven.
I don't know about Trump and the Moon and Mars being the same. I think it's quite possible he doesn't know the difference, the level of knowledge about astronomical facts is quite sad in general. I have known people I would rate as generally quite intelligent, more so than Trump, who did not know the difference between a planet and a star. Not knowing the difference between a planet and a moon seems quite small in comparison.
Being a stable genius he has the best ideas about where what is in the solar system.
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019" https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
To be fair if it had been the other way round. We'd have said it was obvious that Obama meant "..including [going to] Mars (of which [going to] the Moon is a part)," and that he didn't need to fill the blanks in.
I'm inclined (until further evidence) to give him the benefit of the doubt there. We don't need to twist his words to make him out to be a fool, so why risk doing it (that said, it is Trump, so we should keep an eye for if he says something else)
And let's not forget, Obama said his grandmother, born in 1922, had lived through two world wars, and also once said that there are 52 states. And Joe Biden said that FDR went on TV to address the nation right after the stock-market crash in 1929.
"Look how dumb THEIR guy is!!" can be a risky game in politics, and I always think it is best avoided. And personally, my original interpretation of Trump's astronomical theory was that he meant Mars and the moon had once been part of the same physical entity. Which I thought was an acceptable mistake coming from a layperson.
I can also believe that he meant getting to the moon was part of the process of getting to Mars. Either way, I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that Mars and the moon are currently attached.
I suppose that saying how dumb someone is a risky game, but the risks are diminished when the default equation is
hubris + lust + (stomp on those who correct you, including your friends)
The problem for reporting of what he says is that words that accurately describe an evil liar (who also just makes stuff up just because he's the president and can) are generally considered non-objective. There's a peculiar respect for the "office of the president" which doesn't work when the man inhabiting it is disrespectful of it himself, constantly making things up. I suppose the Moon-Mars things was newsworthy because we didn't know the stable genius was an astronomer too
I remember something about Barack Obama getting the number of states wrong when he was speaking off the cuff. When tweeting you do have the option of reading before you publish. Don't forget:
Preview Post is your friend.
But this one does feel to me like a poorly-worded tweet rather than Donald Trump not knowing the difference between the Earth's moon and Mars. If we want to bash him for something he says he has provided us with far better opportunities than this one.
The problem for reporting of what he says is that words that accurately describe an evil liar (who also just makes stuff up just because he's the president and can) are generally considered non-objective.
There is a movie called The Senator Was Indiscreet, circa 1946, with William Powell. Powell plays a befuddled Senator who decides to run for President--despite being obviously unqualified for the job. A reporter decides that she is going to torpedo his presidential run--by simply quoting him accurately. His campaign manager is aghast: "You can't go around quoting politicians accurately! That's dirty journalism and you know it!"
I remember something about Barack Obama getting the number of states wrong when he was speaking off the cuff.
I believe the comment was made in the context of the 2008 presidential primary. There are 57 jurisdictions that hold primaries or caucuses in the Democratic presidential contest: 50 states plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the catch-all of "Democrats Abroad" for those living outside the U.S.
When tweeting you do have the option of reading before you publish.
We usually grant more leeway for accidental error to extemporaneous verbal statements than we do to written documents. To remind people that these are official, written presidential statements someone has created a Twitter bot that transforms Trump's tweets into standard White House press release format. Here's the Mars/Moon one.
And let's not forget, Obama said his grandmother, born in 1922, had lived through two world wars, and also once said that there are 52 states. And Joe Biden said that FDR went on TV to address the nation right after the stock-market crash in 1929.
Obama did once say something about visiting 57 (Islamic) states according to Snopes, but it was apparently misreported somehow. A brief google turned up no quotes about Obama's grandmother living through 2 world wars.
Could you offer links for these flubs, perhaps? As we swim deeper into The Age of Disinformation, it behooves all of us to make sure we don't accidentally spread untruths.
I suppose it might seem a little harsh to hold someone accountable for a mistake they made during an obvious period of intense emotion. Still, he did evidently know what year she was born, and I don't think messing up the dates of a world-war is a mistake I would make no matter who died on the day I was speaking.
(Can't guarantee I wouldn't make other mistakes, in fact, just the other day, I discovered that the Spanish-American War was a matter of months, not years, but still, I'm not the most powerful man in the world.)
Just saw Jay-emms post. Yes, I'll concede that he could have meant to say "World War II". Though, again, I still don't think I would say one when I meant the other.
I presume this was when his American grandma died, just before the election? She was his last, close, grown-up relative, IIRC. (Other than (half-?) siblings.) AIUI, their relationship wasn't always easy: she was afraid of black men on the street. And I gather she had the substance-abuse problem that runs on both sides of the family.
So grief, a grabbag of feelings, and all the pressures of campaigns and an election, he had reason to be a wreck.
As to T having the opportunity to proof his tweets before sending them: if he proofs at all, it's probably to make sure he squeezed in all his wonderful ideas.
Don't forget Kellyanne Conway has been charged by the Office of Special Counsel for violating the Hatch Act which says as a federal employee she is not to make any political statements. Once again an impeachable offense.
When I was younger I genuinely thought that Arkansaw was pronounced arrr - kansas. It was like Kansas for pirates.
At the age of 11, relatives my family was visiting in Kansas told me that was, in fact, how they pronounced the name of the Arkansas river; decades later the internet now assures me that wasn't just an uncle joke (unless, of course, those uncles have since sneaked in to edit Wikipedia to perpetuate the hoax...)
Comments
And so anyone who is sent there is at risk. A fact which transcends fame, anonymity, wealth, poverty, the reason for being sent there,
Fixed quote code (removed final “ from link) BroJames Purg Host
One possible problem is that the elites may be misidentified. Thus you get wealthy right-wingers, such as Farage and Rees-Mogg, who stand to make money off Brexit, claiming to represent the will of the people, who probably will be worse off. Trump is enacting policies that favour financial elites on the back of an attack on mainstream media, residents in wealthy cities, etc.
A second problem is that the meaning of 'the people' tend to be restricted to exclude certain groups, usually racial or religious.
The two go together: often the elites are defined as people assisting immigrants, supposedly at the expense of the 'real' people.
Or, in trump’s case, doing a great deal of evil.
I don't have much time for fairness for the enemy at the moment. Stick the bastards in a pillory outside the polling places.
Sure, but how did Obama get elected? He didn't sell policy, he sold a dream.
The problem with bagging populism in order to get into power is that unscrupulous, uncontrolled, leadership can subsequently destroy the power of truth in favour of its own needs to control the story. As an interesting illustration, there is now talk in Russia of remaking the series to implicate the CIA in the disaster.
It seems to me that wannabe Presidents shouldn't get too into policy. They should be "selling a dream"" if by that you mean "offering a compelling vision for the nation". Specific policies then (hopefully) come from that vision.
This is the weakness of Warren, who seems to think that having policies coming out of your ying-yang is a substitute for vision. It is also the weakness of Biden, who seems to have no vision other than "I'm a nicer older guy than Trump".
The Democrat who beats Trump will be the one who can offer a more compelling vision than "Make America Great Again (by stroking racism and trashing environmental concerns)".
"For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019"
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137051097955102720
To be fair if it had been the other way round. We'd have said it was obvious that Obama meant "..including [going to] Mars (of which [going to] the Moon is a part)," and that he didn't need to fill the blanks in.
I'm inclined (until further evidence) to give him the benefit of the doubt there. We don't need to twist his words to make him out to be a fool, so why risk doing it (that said, it is Trump, so we should keep an eye for if he says something else)
Another degradation of the Trump era: "twist his words" now means "read his words exactly as written".
It's hard to make comparisons to Obama since Obama didn't feel the need to communicate policy initiatives in chunks of no more than 280 characters.
I agree with @jay_emm . Trump's comment is badly phrased and does indeed look stupid if taken literally, but again, from my vantage point as someone paid to make sense of people who don't write exactly what they mean (sometimes the exact opposite...), including paralegals drafting major contracts, it is clear that he did not mean what most of the media is having fun insinuating he meant, but what @jay_emm says.
To portray Trump as dumb enough to think Mars is part of the Moon is to underestimate him. To echo this simplistic portrayal by the media is again straight out of Trump's playbook - media manipulation - and it's a playbook he uses far better than almost anybody else. It's a distraction from the actual issue, which is indeed the President's "use" of Twitter. In my estimation the only indication of dumbness in this latest instance is his obvious refusal to have his tweets vetted (opinion on this is divided amongst politicians I know). But his particular talent is to thrive even on his stupider tweets. There is no such thing as bad publicity for him.
However it is also true that I read it as I parsed it (despite appropriate preparation)*.
If nothing else, if [our] moon is a part of mars, then going to mars is not 'much bigger'. If we read it the headline way we have to hypothesize the writer knowing mars is a lot further from us than the moon and then 'forgetting' it in a few words. For anyone but Trump, this would be an irrational reading, and even for Trump I wouldn't get that analysis from the tweet (knowing that he is a habitual liar and publicly ignorant, I wouldn't rule it out) or use the tweet as evidence of him being a habitual liar and publicly ignorant (we aren't exactly short of choice).
By the same logic Croesos clearly doesn't know Obama had used Twitter "Obama didn't feel the need to communicate policy initiatives in chunks of no more than 280 characters. "
Here on the White House handle, we see him answering questions and communicating on a policy initiative (in this case a tax cut) e.g. https://mobile.twitter.com/ObamaWhiteHouse/status/275677020028018688
Of course, because Obama is sensible, he didn't communicate policy initiatives first** or only by Twitter. That however is an entirely different statement. And of course I know damn well what was meant (actually there probably was a minute when I interpreted it wrongly but believed it to be true) [and agree with the point].
*Had of course the tweet begun with something about Phoebus, I would have interpreted it differently again.
**I think.
On the one hand Trump has said so many untrue and stupid things that anything is believable. Letting him get away with bull is obviously bad.
On the other hand if we show ourselves too keen to cry wolf when it's actually just a fox then that gives support to them not listening when it's about the Mueller report (or alternatively to make a big backstory for 57 states). Even if we only do it once.
Yeah but so what? she may have the moral high ground but we have an unspeakably corrupt arsehole in the White House.
Populist - certainly is the political science sense - does not mean just popular. There are both popular policies and popular politicians who are not populist. However there is no properly agreed definition and hence it is often confusing. Wiki covers this quite well.
A working definition for our purposes might contain the following elements:
1) A narrative of The people vs others. In the case of Trump it is the American People vs The Swamp of the Washington DC 'establishment' and 'Mexican' immigrants (C.f. Brexit where it is apparently the elites who are trying to stop the people from getting the Brexit they voted for. Same shit, different country).
There is a reasonable argument to be made that far too often the Washington political machinery favours international corporations and the extremely wealthy at the expense of ordinary Americans. The notion that a very wealthy man who heads an international corporation is some how the cure to this ill is of course ludicrous. Similarly the notion that immigrants from South of the US/Mexican border are the problem does not stand up to any sort of analysis.
2) Undeliverable promises If a party ran on say 0% income tax but the same level of government services, I have no doubt that it would be a popular position but for the vast majority of nation states, totally undeliverable.
As I said above, the term in not strictly defined but for this sort of discussion (i.e. about Trump) some sort of definiton like this is necessary. The issue is not that Trump is popular (he's moderately so; not negliable but not run-away loved by all either). But that he has built his broad(ish) support on these two strands - portraying himself as on the side of 'the ordinary people' against whoever and on completely undeliverable promises.
Real politicians are able to command popular support for policies that will actually work and do so without demonising anyone.
AFZ
Populism essentially assumes one can fool all of the people all of the time. Within that assumption is the attitude that the 'people' are stupid and to be despised. The aim is not to have a workable political agenda but to ride others' resentment to a position of power.
(There is an interesting split going on in France in La France Insoumise between populists and people who actually want to deliver a radical left-wing agenda).
Not being a populist doesn't mean rejecting policies that benefit the people as a whole rather than an elite, but it does mean doing one's best to explain those ideas and how they are supposed to work. It means encouraging political debate rather than violence, and thought rather than thoughtlessness.
And let's not forget, Obama said his grandmother, born in 1922, had lived through two world wars, and also once said that there are 52 states. And Joe Biden said that FDR went on TV to address the nation right after the stock-market crash in 1929.
"Look how dumb THEIR guy is!!" can be a risky game in politics, and I always think it is best avoided. And personally, my original interpretation of Trump's astronomical theory was that he meant Mars and the moon had once been part of the same physical entity. Which I thought was an acceptable mistake coming from a layperson.
I can also believe that he meant getting to the moon was part of the process of getting to Mars. Either way, I'm pretty sure he didn't mean that Mars and the moon are currently attached.
What's not attracting attention is that he said, 'Defence'. Aren't there international treaties about not using space for defence purposes? (Although I suppose, Trump neither knows nor cares about international treaties, is like, Trump has bad hair, not of itself news, until there is some concrete intention to break them.)
- States shall not place nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner;
- the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes;
The US and many other countries have plenty of military satellites already in orbit for navigation, surveillance, and communications, and ICBMs travel through space on their way to their targets.Of course, this really isn't NASA's job so it's largely irrelevant to the putative topic of the tweet. But then, the mere existence of the tweet doesn't really make any sense. Trump comments on the activities of agencies under his administration as if he has nothing to do with them - as if he's tweeting his hot takes on his own policies after learning about them from something he's just seen on TV (oh wait...)
The NYT substantiates the Biden goof -- https://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/say-what-joe-biden-fdr-the-tv/ --
but I can find no substantiation for either of the Obama flubs.
Obama did once say something about visiting 57 (Islamic) states according to Snopes, but it was apparently misreported somehow. A brief google turned up no quotes about Obama's grandmother living through 2 world wars.
Could you offer links for these flubs, perhaps? As we swim deeper into The Age of Disinformation, it behooves all of us to make sure we don't accidentally spread untruths.
Nasa was talking about the "refocusing on the moon (with the possible* hope of getting to Mars in 2030)".
Fox went "the moon?, didn't we do that 50 years ago" (ignoring the Mars aspects, and the fact it's been 47 years since we last did it).
Trump feels upset, belittled. Something goes through his head (with at least something remembered about Moon-to-Mars), and he tweets. "Focus on Mars, Defence and Science" (whether in terms of publicity or practically)
*or at least using it as a selling point.
Dafyd mentioned some issues with Defence.
Trump hasn't exactly helped Nasa contribute to (Climate) Science, he could fix that.
I recall the 57 one. The transcript Snopes gives shows he did genuinely say 57 (and his comments afterwards on it reflect that).
The Islamic interpretation is obviously rubbish. He forgot to borrow the one, while doing the maths as he was speaking. Fifty states minus one minus two is ... Fifty (pause) seven.
This seems to be the quote, although it doesn't seem to come up to much (another version was blocked), but superficially doesn't seem to have an agenda (although even then could course be a misquote rather than a misspeak)
I suppose that saying how dumb someone is a risky game, but the risks are diminished when the default equation is
The problem for reporting of what he says is that words that accurately describe an evil liar (who also just makes stuff up just because he's the president and can) are generally considered non-objective. There's a peculiar respect for the "office of the president" which doesn't work when the man inhabiting it is disrespectful of it himself, constantly making things up. I suppose the Moon-Mars things was newsworthy because we didn't know the stable genius was an astronomer too
But this one does feel to me like a poorly-worded tweet rather than Donald Trump not knowing the difference between the Earth's moon and Mars. If we want to bash him for something he says he has provided us with far better opportunities than this one.
I believe the comment was made in the context of the 2008 presidential primary. There are 57 jurisdictions that hold primaries or caucuses in the Democratic presidential contest: 50 states plus the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and the catch-all of "Democrats Abroad" for those living outside the U.S.
We usually grant more leeway for accidental error to extemporaneous verbal statements than we do to written documents. To remind people that these are official, written presidential statements someone has created a Twitter bot that transforms Trump's tweets into standard White House press release format. Here's the Mars/Moon one.
Seventh paragraph for the "two world wars" flub.
I suppose it might seem a little harsh to hold someone accountable for a mistake they made during an obvious period of intense emotion. Still, he did evidently know what year she was born, and I don't think messing up the dates of a world-war is a mistake I would make no matter who died on the day I was speaking.
(Can't guarantee I wouldn't make other mistakes, in fact, just the other day, I discovered that the Spanish-American War was a matter of months, not years, but still, I'm not the most powerful man in the world.)
It's the LA Times. The same quote, in fuller context, is available at the link in Jay-emm's June 10th post.
So grief, a grabbag of feelings, and all the pressures of campaigns and an election, he had reason to be a wreck.
As to T having the opportunity to proof his tweets before sending them: if he proofs at all, it's probably to make sure he squeezed in all his wonderful ideas.
The people of Arkansas, if they had any dignity, would refuse to let her back into the state.