To ask if Donald Trump could actually be president again?

[tinkertee]

I've just seen a headline about him now being the front runner for the Republican nomination. Which I assume means it's entirely a possibility that he could then win.

I'm British (English) so I know our current government is a complete embarrassment. But I will never get my head around DT having been president once never mind possibly twice.

How could this happen??

That’s fine it’s only my opinion. I believe that people are inherently selfish and are only interested in themselves as that is what my experience has told me. I absolutely accept that isn’t everyone’s belief and that huge swathes of society have a different opinion.

The Pfizer vaxx was designed in Germany by BioNtech

Germany is paying more into NATO because of Ukraine and that happened under Biden in any case.

Trump presided under an awful CV response, along with Brazil, one of the worst.

Trump failed to build a wall, failed to reduce illegal migration BUT did reduce, dramatically, legal migration.... which then hurt US companies.

His threats to on shore didn't really happen because of him directly but because CV showed up how fragile supply chains are.

I’m not sure it does hold anyway. eg people might vote to increase state pay which can be self motivated.

mmmmm maybe, in 1945 people voted for a fairer Britain, they did again in 1997... but its true if you vote Tory (or Republican) for Tax cuts, then you probably are not too interested in the poor, public services or anyone else.

Bear in mind, even in the USA only around 46% voted for Trump, Hilary Clinton got 48%.

What’s your explanation for anyone above the lowest strata of society voting left leaning then?

Nobody is saying nobody votes for their own interests, left or right. Just that it’s nonsense to say nobody votes for anything else.

I’m just saying that’s what I believe I’m not saying anyone else has to believe it or agree with me. I don’t need to justify my beliefs to you or anyone else. But I stand by the fact that people will act in their own best interest first and foremost.

If you’ve spent any time in the US you will quickly realise that they are vastly different to brits in terms of their political and religious attitudes we tend towards apathy while in the US fervency is very much the order of the day

From the standpoint of someone who spends half her life there I agree completely. Obviously it's not everyone, but overall I find the engagement/interest in the process far greater than the UK's

The anti American bias on Mumsnet's notorious, but it's always sad to read the endless "What are they like!!" comments from those who know little about the place, and if they've been at all have probably limited their exposure to Orlando and the plastic pals

I think this is a bit of the issue with politics particularly in the US.

The entitlement to your own beliefs does not entitle you to your own facts. Unfortunately it appears that many people believe that it does.

People vote for parties and individual politicians for a wide range of reasons some of which are motivated solely by self-interest and others not. This is demonstrably a fact and I'm sure we could find much polling that would support that fact. People regularly vote for parties and individuals that are actually against their own self-interest (such as low income people voting for parties that promise tax cuts for the rich and reduced investment in public services), the evidence of this kind of voting is everywhere.

Wrong.

Poppysmom22
he also took popular ideas and tried to make them work - huge boarder wall.

As you say, perception is important.

That he built (his administration's contractors built) lots of wall is one common perception, but the fact is that by October 2020 he had actually built very little new border wall (BBC says 15 miles, Politifact says 52 miles; there was already 654 miles of primary wall in place when he became president, and the border is 1,954 miles long), though he had done a fair amount of replacement work on wall that already existed, or what might probably have been called "routine maintenance" if one were not trying to big it up. Admitted, the bits that his admin hired in his associates to build were really tall in places where they got built at all, so yes, "huge" in that sense.

He now claims (at a rally on 29th July 2023) that his administration “built nearly 500 miles of border wall.” Well, they did if you count renovating wall that was already there.

Incidentally, "boarder" wall is a good typo; the stunning new wall was shown to be fairly difficult to get over, but much of the rest is a piece of cake using a rope ladder or a $5 dollar ladder from the DIY store. But the border wall can also be sawed through using a cordless saw, apparently, for those not fit enough to scale the thing. Indeed, cutting through one of the uprights right at the base where it goes into the concrete, pushing it aside to get through, and then pushing it back into place until a gap is wanted again seems to be quite a usual method: "Smugglers are easily able to saw through the posts and swing them open, then continue using the same breach until the damage is detected by the border patrol." as the Guardian puts it.

That's really not what Thatcher said. She pointed out that when society provides benefits, the resources it provides is are created by the real work of real people, they don't come out of think air from some kind of abstract thing called society, or the government. This at a time when the state had provided so many benefits to individuals that they had to get a loan from the IMF.

As for voting, I agree that everyone votes only for their own benefit, both people on the left and right tend to be a mix of voting for what they believe are good principles, and also for a good life for themselves.

But it is true that many wc people felt they were better off economically under Trump.

I think what's more significant about the Wall is really the optics.

As you say, there was already a wall, and yet when he talked about it even when on campaign it was ridiculed, as if the idea of a border wall was completely silly.

And of course the Democrats in general, and Biden in particular, treated it as not only silly, but immoral.

And yet Biden now is also working on improving the wall.

Add to that, a lot of the greatest support for bettering border control has been people along the states at the border - those people already knew there were walls along parts of the border.

So you have what look to be norther "elites" mocking something that locals know already exists, and then later when in power carrying on the same policy. It just makes them look out of touch and bad.

It's similar to the sanctuary cities - berating people along the border for not being welcoming, but when those states start actually bussing people to those cities, their tune changed. They look like they are prepared to be altruistic so long as other people are the ones feeling the pinch from it.

"And yet Biden now is also working on improving the wall."

Biden's administration has not managed to prevent money which was already allocated for a particular purpose from being spent on that purpose. That's a little different from Biden setting out to do it.

Bear in mind that every dime Biden could stop from being spent on the wall, he did, right at the start of his presidency.

Working class Americans may have the perception that they were better off under Trump, but it really wasn't so, unless they were billionaires (which very few working class people are) and got tax-breaks. Inflation was higher under Trump, and employment was lower. And because Obamacare was not his idea and named after a person who had made fun of him, he tried very hard to get rid of it, which would have made life a lot nastier for a very large number of people at a stroke. (Or at a diabetes; he did nothing to try to rein in the price of insulin being prohibitive for people with a low income. One of Biden's better ideas, controlling that price.)

Unfortunately inflation is built on what was already happening; it's like compound interest, so even when inflation is halved the price of any given item remains higher than it was before the inflation started. The price of most things never goes down again once it has risen. Well, very occasionally a "seasonal item" does, like say kale when there has been a glut, but mostly your torch batteries never go back down to where they were under the president before last. Prices which went up under Trump are not going to come down under Biden; they will just go up more slowly.

"it is true that many wc people felt they were better off economically under Trump."
https://www.ft.com/content/ce7e9f7c-fc13-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6
Americans were just as unhappy about being worse off under Trump as they are now about being worse off under Biden, and in 2019 two thirds of them thought they were either worse off or no better off than before he took office.
Seems to have been the college educated males who predominately felt they were better off in 2019, not the working class ones. Though I expect there is some overlap: college-educated working class must be a thing.

The vast majority of the border will never have walls. The Border Patrol uses them to funnel foot traffic to specific areas to make monitoring easier, and uses electronic sensors and surveillance systems to monitor the rest. They are not intended to be an impenetrable barrier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico%E2%80%93United_States_border_wall

Did Trump take that in? He was very consistent in his claims that his wall (presumably as opposed to the rest) was impossible to climb; his reason was because it got so hot you could fry an egg on it, I seem to remember.

Trump never cared about the reality of the wall. The Border Patrol did want more funding, but they wanted more sensors and surveillance systems mostly, not physical barriers.

And they definitely didn't want Texas National Guard preventing them from doing their job.

He speaks in a preacher type way, the way he pauses and lowers and raises his voice, it's almost hypnotic. He keeps his messages very simple and I think it's this that's hooking people in.
He makes life seem simple and easily solved and I think for some reason they are a society vulnerable to preachers so yes I think there is a huge danger he could become a president again.

The parallels between Trump and Johnson are unreal. Almost everything that's been written about Trump and his methods and how people think of him could have been written about BJ. People love him.
If he hadn't screwed up quite so badly he could've been in power for a long time, I think.

I totally agree - and in the case of the UK where the current government only benefits a tiny number of people, the level of support they have received doesn’t make any sense if people were voting selfishly - the vast majority have been voting for a government who have stripped away so much.

Trump definitely could win again. If you weigh up his first term versus Biden's first term to date, Trump's seems better or at least less bad. The reason Trump got elected the first time round was because he was up against Clinton, the reason Biden got elected was because he was up against Trump, and whichever wins (assuming Trump gets on the ballot) it will be because they were not the other.

Clearly the Republicans will pick Trump because he's their best chance - he could win, whereas his GOP opponents definitely won't.

Just before COVID. The US unemployment rate was at a record low

I'm aware of the contents of the speech in question and could pick holes in it, line by line - starting with the fact that many of those on benefits to whom she referred were on benefits as a direct consequence of actions and policies instigated and implemented by the UK government. To disassociate the government as a causal factor in the makeup of what we generally regard as a society is disingenuous at best. Policies affect lives which affect policies. It's a virtuous circle.