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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 8/22/15

Trump, Sadly, Will Bomb, But Even If He Doesn't....

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I'm rooting for Trump. I'm hoping he'll continue leading in the Republican primary polls and eventually win the primaries. It's possible. There are a lot of haters on the right and he has enough of his own money to sustain a tough fight.

But it's not likely he'll make it that far. That's too bad. The longer he stays in the race, the longer he forces his opponents to embrace his anti-immigration stance and all it stands for, the worse he will set up failure for the GOP for the general elections with the millions of Latinos who will be voting. George Will has even titled an article, Trump's immigration plan could spell doom for the GOP.
But I must confess, of all the seventeen GOP candidates, I lean towards wanting Trump to win. My reasons for wanting him to win are the same reasons he's not going to win the primaries. George Will points out, in the same article that bemoans the effect Trump is having on Latino voters-- increasing their aversion to the GOP-- how Democrat-like Trump is. He calls for single payer. He's been pro-choice. But most important, in his draconian calls to deport not only "illegal immigrants" but also their legal, citizen children, he would have to make government much bigger. George will says, "He would vastly enlarge the federal government's enforcement apparatus." Will goes on to say,
"Today's big government finds running Amtrak too large a challenge, and Trump's roundup would be about 94 times larger than the wartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent. But Trump wants America to think big. The big costs, in decades and dollars (hundreds of billions), of Trump's project could be reduced if, say, the targets were required to sew yellow patches on their clothing to advertise their coming expulsion. There is precedent."
There's the rub. The bigots and haters who are anti-immigrant who are embracing Trump's policies are actually calling for humungous expansion of government powers. This won't sit well with the millions of Republicans who embrace small government (small enough to drown in a bathtub, as Grover Norquist famously fantasized.)
The truth, (something Trump uses when convenient,) is that Trump is a negotiator. He's putting out a lot of smoke and offers, but who knows what he'll end up doing. His history shows he's an obnoxious narcissistic jerk, but also a pragmatic one, and also more liberal on most issues than the rest of the declared GOP candidates. If he were to win, I would expect him to continue with the same pattern-- bellicose, bullying, ugly American. He'd destroy much of the good will and soft power the US has built up internationally. But he might actually push through single payer. And he would probably leave women's rights alone. As far as immigration went, he might actually build that wall-- he likes to build things. That's something he knows about.
But this is all speculation. The reality is Trump is going to follow the trail of Rudy Giuliani, as Tom McCarthy describes in The Guardian, using two graphs from RealClearPolitics:

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McCarthy concludes, "Next to Giuliani's lead, Trump's lead looks like " a joke. Trump is having trouble cracking 25%, while for months at a stretch in 2007, Giuliani swanned around in the 30s. And yet Giuliani ended up winning not a single primary or caucus. He ultimately focused all his efforts in Florida, where he came in third."
McCarthy explains that Giuliani had good name recognition, but during the primaries, other candidates built their name recognition, but ultimately, McCarthy says,
"When voters started to pay attention, as Iowa neared, they discovered that Giuliani was a thrice-married, formerly pro-choice, kind of rude person from New York. "Rudy didn't even care enough about conservatives to lie to us," one Republican consultant reflected afterwards.
Donald Trump also happens to be a thrice-married, formerly pro-choice, kind of rude person from New York."

Ironically, or perhaps predictably, Before the big Republican debate, Giuliani was supportive of Trump, as RealClearPolitics reported:

""First of all, he's not a Roman candle," Giuliani told host Chris Matthews. "This is a very smart guy. This is a person who is media savvy in ways that some of the other candidates aren't. And he's a lot more substantive than you realize. I've know Donald 25 years. Meaning, he understands a lot of the world issues with a lot more depth than you probably realize."
"So we might have a little of a Ronald Reagan here, a guy they underestimate," Giuliani observed.'

Trump is known as a loose cannon, unpredictable-- and that scares the powers that be in the GOP. But that makes him more interesting as an alternative to the other members of the GOP presidential primary pack. He could end up doing things that drive conservatives up the wall and please progressives, even more so than Hillary.

Most likely, he'll fizzle out, just like Giuliani did. If he makes it through the primaries, and Sanders wins the Democratic primary, I think Sanders will crush Trump. If Hillary wins the primary, I couldn't vote for either of them, but I'm not sure which would be worse as president. We know what we'd get with Hillary.

To be clear, I don't want to see a president Trump-- my overall reaction to him includes a gag reflex. But it could be worse-- a lot worse, with Scott Walker, Jeb Bush or just about all of the sixteen other GOP primary competitors. And meanwhile, Trump's participation in the race is strengthening the odds for someone left of the GOP winning. (Does that include Hillary? Meh.)

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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