I'm not giving them credit, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. FPTP causes strategic voting and vote splitting so you can't use a 45% popular win to say anything about what the majority actually believes about Trump. All you can say for sure is that a majority of registered Republicans preferred a non-Trump candidate.

Maybe. But an overwhelming majority of Republicans who voted in 2016 (79%) approve of his presidency.

Pretty much every president sits at ~80% approval from his party.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/01/12/presidential-job-approval-ratings-from-ike-to-obama/ft_16-01-06_presapproval/

80% of Republican voters would approve of the box of snuff films Eric Trump keeps under his bed, as long as it promised to cut the estate tax.

Do you think that is because power structures select for personality types that are prone to doing stupid **** and insisting that they have a magical mandate to do that ****?

Edit: (Referencing Reid's last post) Because based on my experience in the US military and even dealing with local level politicians, these are the personalities who are incentivized to succeed in these realms, and indeed, the world at large. And it's pretty awful and will certainly be our downfall as an industrialized civilization.

In fact, Hannah Arendt discusses this in her works. Imperialistic ambition is nearly always associated with repressing people at home. As long as you're able to continuously keep a global threat alive, then you can continue offending the rights of your populace, because they're afraid of the outside world. You can see, in the late 80's, as the Soviet Union appeared to be in a bit of trouble, they began searching for new global threats to spook the population. That's why terrorism as a concept was invented, the war on drugs was declared, and so forth. And they have the Bill O'Reillys in the world who prophecy coming destruction and instill in people a deep fear of the outside world, which makes them more obedient and permissive. We basically have an entire generation of insane old white people thanks to this.

So, anyone care to predict what will come of the Mueller special counsel?

I would assume absolutely nothing. What could come of it?

Hopefully it ends with someone punching Jason Chaffetz in his smug face before he becomes governor of my state.

Otherwise probably impeachment that will probably not result in resignation, but instead with the president also impeaching himself just to prove it was his plan all along.

What do you think is the next generation boogeyman? Or have they finally found an inexhaustible source of paranoia in the form of Islamic Extremism? What if Islam is able to recalibrate itself to pre-Wahhabbist dominated eras? Will it continue to be mischaracterized or will they have to start picking on queers again?

What if Islam is able to recalibrate itself to pre-Wahhabbist dominated eras? Will it continue to be mischaracterized or will they have to start picking on queers again?

I would assume absolutely nothing. What could come of it?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/18/u-s-could-get-first-paid-family-leave-benefit-under-trump-plan/

Huh. If it happens, it will be one of the few good things he does.

I suppose I could say more here. If these countries were allowed to stabilize and develop, then Wahhabism would most likely vanish on its own terms. Christian churches no longer teach now that the curse of Ham is actually just black skin. Which is to say, Christianity stopped trying to justify slavery once the people who demanded the justifications to treat blacks badly lost mainstream control. It will be the same for them, analogously with violence.

As for how it's characterized in Western media? That will probably die the same day western countries stop trying to own Middle East resources. As long as they have self-determination against western nations through Islam, it will be portrayed in a negative light in western media. They're two hands of the same puppeteer.

can anyone really beat the four words of wit he left us with

How does this end?

I left D.C. Wednesday for a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, for a talk. The previous night I’d watched slack-jawed as the latest Trump saga unfolded on cable news, switching back from Fox to MSNBC and CNN. As has happened so often in the last few months, it was becoming a blur. What did we now know? The president had kept Mike Flynn on staff many days after learning he was a security risk. Trump had asked FBI Director Comey to give him his personal loyalty, then fired him because he was frustrated that the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government was continuing. Trump then lied repeatedly about this — and sent senior staffers out there to lie as well. He threatened the FBI director with alleged “tapes” of their conversations. We also discovered that Trump had carelessly betrayed a critical ISIS source while bragging to foreign minister Lavrov and Russian ambassador Kislyak in the Oval Office. We were entering, it seemed to me, the Caligula phase of the collapse of the American republic. Pretty soon Trump would be announcing that the new FBI director would be a horse.

And then, on the little shuttle bus on the tarmac to the plane at Reagan National, I found myself sitting next to a recently retired pilot, who struck up a very pleasant conversation. He told me about a recent career change, retirement, his family, and his new neighbors who had left England to escape “the Muslims.” Okay, I thought. No need to make a scene. Just listen for a while. At one point, I gingerly indicated that I didn’t exactly share the views of his neighbors. “Oh I understand,” he said. “My wife is always telling me never to talk about religion or politics with strangers, but I can’t help myself.” No problem, I told him. I do it all the time too. Then he leaned in, pushed his wire eyeglasses up his nose, and looked straight into my eyes. “Let me tell you something,” he said. “This president will be the greatest president we have ever had in our entire history.”

Once in Mississippi, I did my daily scanning of the conservative media. The alternative story was now well-established. Trump had fired Comey because he had a right to (just like he had an “absolute” right to tell Moscow top-secret intel), and because Comey was incompetent and had screwed up the Clinton-email case. The intel gaffe was just a slip-up that wouldn’t matter much at all. There was no evidence of any connection between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — and so the investigation was hooey anyway. Comey’s memo couldn’t be talked about without the full context — so lets just wait and see. Comey was just interested in revenge anyway. The mainstream media and the “deep state” were busy trying to undermine a president who was accomplishing more than any president this early into his term.

These are, it seems to me, the two unstoppable narratives grinding our politics to a halt. The status quo in Washington — an unhinged, unfit, mentally disturbed narcissist as POTUS fast losing any faint credibility with even his own staffers — is utterly unsustainable. In a serious crisis, more than half the country won’t believe a word the president says. The White House is barely functioning; legislation is completely stalled; next week’s trip abroad will have everyone watching from behind a couch; the FBI and CIA are reeling; there’s almost no one in the State Department; no presidential due diligence is applied to military actions; the president only reads memos when his name is mentioned in them; a not-too-smart and apparently mute 35-year-old son-in-law is supposed to solve every problem in the country and world; and the press secretary is hiding in the bushes. No one has any confidence that the president couldn’t throw us into a war or a constitutional crisis at a moment’s notice. Nothing this scary has happened in my lifetime.

And yet around 35 percent of the country still somehow views every single catastrophe Trump perpetrates on America and the world as either a roaring triumph or a huge middle finger to the elites, and therefore fine. For them, everything is sustainable. When Republicans can shrug off giving top-secret Israeli intelligence to the Russians, there is nothing they cannot shrug off. We are not talking about support for various policies here. We are talking about the kind of following a cult leader has. In poll after poll, around 80 percent of Republicans still approve of the job Trump is doing. Still. That’s why the GOP leadership, even as their agenda evaporates, are leery of taking Trump on. His hold on their own voters is tighter than theirs is. It’s tighter than Nixon’s because Trump has built a reactionary movement from the ground up and taken over an entire party. He can communicate with them in ways no other Republican can. And there is no way on earth he is ever going to go quietly, if he agrees to go at all.

That’s why I have a hard time figuring out how this ends, even though it must end. Even if the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation hits some pay dirt, I can see Trump surviving if he cannot be proven to be directly implicated. He’s already setting up the case: He’s being subjected to an historically unprecedented witch hunt, remember? And there’s no institution or person he won’t blame or destroy in his bid to save himself. Just ask his former creditors. If he’s up against the wall, he will treat the Constitution the way he treated his banks. Or say the Dems manage to regain the House next year, and hold impeachment hearings. Wouldn’t that simply galvanize support for Trump as he fights back against the “deep state,” the “swamp,” the GOP, and what Hannity calls the propaganda media circus — and render 66 votes in the Senate to convict him a pipe dream? Part of me wonders if he’d quit even if he’s beaten in the next presidential election? Isn’t it always rigged when he loses?

In some ways, I think the best analogy for Trump is O.J. Simpson. Even if we all know he’s guilty as sin, even if his own supporters see the flimflam behind the claptrap, even if the evidence is staring us in the face, he’ll never lose his core support. For 35 percent of the country, he’ll never be guiltier than the system he’s challenging. The best we can hope for is a Democratic House in 2018 and a grinding, grueling attempt to minimize the already enormous harm Trump has done in the meantime. We can pursue that outcome while hoping our cold civil war doesn’t get hot — because this is beginning to feel like the 1850s.