Donald Trump Is Also an Outlier in Political Science

Trump represents the rejection of the party establishment by the new, angry, mostly white, republican base. He is the anti-candidate who would as soon annihilate his own party as any other. His followers like that because they don't trust the party and don't really care what the old establishment bosses want. Trump may signify the beginning of the end of the GOP.

Professor Karol fails to credit the most salient — and poetically just — ingredient in Trump's rise: The GOP's chickens are coming home to roost.

Two or three generations of party elites drummed up fear and loathing among white working class voters for "welfare queens," gays, immigrants, Muslims and climate scientists — for that matter, for the last two Democratic presidents. But their party used the power it subsequently acquired to serve special interests and to enrich the super wealthy "elites" who paid for those scorched-earth campaigns.

As that fear-and-loathing distraction takes over its host, a GOP establishment donor frets in another Times story that “it’s all really hard to believe that decades of Republican ideas are at risk." Thank God. Those precious "ideas" were in many ways worse than the dirty tricks and ignorant claptrap Republicans have peddled for so many years to get themselves into office.

Serious men and women who are knowledgeable, competent, experienced and relevant for the needs of our Nation have avoided this crazy melee for good reason. They would be ignored. The American public prefers circus as do children who believe magic actually works and that a whimsical immature braggart can fix what he defines as this Nation's problems. Sophisticated candidates whose discerning appraisal and competence are relevant to essential reforms are ignored. Trump's rise exposes how cynical campaign funders unrestrained by laws that would otherwise restrict their impact have purchased puppets who have no other function than to pursue the bidding of their contributors. Fix campaign funding so that individual donors can give something to reflect their preferences but not enough that would transform a candidate into a puppet for their benefit.

Hopefully, Bernie will win it all and lead the reforms that are needed. If he does not our decline into dysfunction will become catastrophic.

Trump is a bully, braggart, boastful, bombastic, brazen, SOB who cares not one wit about anything other than winning for his own self admiration. He is the triumphant expression of the power of the media to create 'heroes'. Soft spoken, reflective women and men have no chance in this media circus. Were Trump to be elected we would face the end of democracy and the rise of autocratic even dictatorial rule. He is the most dangerous candidate this country has had in its history.

The whole election process has become an assortment of insanity with a lot of psychopaths and sociopaths parading around as "people lovers and social givers". But there is something going on. I cannot put my finger on it.

It is hard to believe that Trump is as stupid or as crazy as he is sounding. He is making things easy for Hillary. Is he? Or, somebody else?

Somebody's mask has to come off....sometime. Who is the real guy or gal inside and outside. That is a million dollar question.

Something is going on...and I cannot put my finger on it.

Trump appeals primarily to the less educated, lower income demographic. An electorate filled with high school dropouts, angry because they can't find a job, lack the critical thinking skills necessary to intelligent participation in the political selection process. They are easily led to destruction by pols who tell them the lies they want to hear. President Obama rightly championed affordable higher education but Republicans refused to comply. They don't want an educated electorate, for obvious reasons, so they did nothing to lessen the burden of college tuition and refused to even moderately reduce the interest charged on college loans. Federal student loans average 4.66%, a rate set by Congress. Yet until last month, banks could borrow money at 0%.

An educated, informed electorate is crucial to a healthy Democracy. Enlightened people more readily understand and embrace the necessity of focusing on the common good rather than creating and fostering wealth for a select few. Perhaps more importantly, they have the intellectual skills to discern the lies and false promises of modern day sophists.

To summarize; American valuation of style (or lack thereof) over substance continues to rapidly increase. There was a time, in my lifetime, when Trump and his classless companions would have been ignored, but more importantly they would have been denounced as an embarrassment to the country and their fellow citizens. There would be many more people ashamed of the "Trump phenomena" than captivated by it. There would be large scale outrage and we would question how it came to be that these people were ever thought Presidential material, by anyone.

Now? Well, the answer is on full display.

Like most political analysis these days, this article's discussion is akin to talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It completely misses the bigger picture - the American political system is corrupt and, consequently, most voters have opted out of the system. America is an oligarchy disguised (and only minimally) as a democracy. The NY Times frequently points out how, as Bernie Sanders reminds us, the system is rigged toward the wealthiest families and corporations. Unfortunately nothing short of a significant economic collapse will wake the electorate from hibernation and change the status quo. It's only a matter of time until that occurs, and, need I remind everyone, this country has a very heavily armed population of malcontents. It should be an interesting ride.

More speculation without coming to grips with the fundamental problem of American politics: an outmoded reliance on the interpretation of the constitution. We have a court system based on personal interpretation of the constitution, and a totally dysfunctional system. We need to junk the current constitution and construct one made entirely of specific laws that do not depend upon interpretation for implementation. What we are left with now that gives rise not only to Trump, but total idiots such as Cruz, Carson, Rand and the whole pathetic Republican field. The only way to ever reform the system to get rid or the real crazies depends on electing one of the crazies, having them then lead us into the depression we will have if a Republican is elected, and only then will the crazies in the population that believes in stupid comments about religion, guns, the economy and other myths. Until we change the constitution to cope with modern times, we are going to continue to be plagued by the know nothings!

Sanders supporters are extremely vexed at the coverage Trump gets, and I do understand why: Trump gets coverage because he's always man-bites-dog news. Crazy leads, even more so if it is angry-crazy.

So Trump leads; the goofy YallQueda idiots begging for mailed care packages lead.

Sanders, who is actually trying to talk about rational things, largely gets ignored ... because he's not crazy enough. Where I do part with with the Sanders enthusiasts is in blaming Hillary for it ... the reality is that Hillary's policy proposals are not given much coverage either. And nobody seems to be looking at the Republican candidates' proposals and asking "Tell me you guys don't know how to add?"

(On that score though, there isn't any Sanders budget that I'm aware of. And for a guy who is campaigning on major changes to the budget, that's an issue.)

All we hear in the press is the cray-cray and the dissing. Who said what about whom. Trump is a master of this, and that's why he's in the news.

Politifact rated Trump as "Liar of the Year" for very good reason. I am disappointed in the New York Times and other reputable news organizations for spending so much prose on Trump, and starving all rational discussion of the column inches it deserves.

Social media and news aggregators with a nominal politically prominent bias have led people to think they know about particular issues when they only know the headlines or the dumb downed version they have had thrust in front of them. Much of this information is intended to play on a reader's frustrations and prejudices. The purveyors have no real true beliefs. The do believe in agitating the irritable. I am 65 and my children started me on Facebook. It is saturated with false information and when I have provided information to the contrary and cite multiple sources I get no acknowledgement it is given much if any consideration. Donald Trump is a perfect personality for this era. He is about "The Art of The Deal". He is trying to work his way to maximum benefit from this race. Maximum means he "Wins" and the rest of us are losers somehow. If he has a guiding set of moral values I cannot see it. I learned as a child to avoid people like him when I can and to be very wary when I cannot. Where are the "values" voters if there ever was such a thing? It seems they have attached themselves to a candidate without much of a moral compass. It is not that hard to recognize a charlatan. He is playing a con game and we are all the victims.

I sometimes wonder how much of a wealthy man Donald Trump could have become if he hadn't inherited a fortune from his real-estate father. I suspect the most he might have hoped for was to be a bar owner in Queens.

The name of the place, of course, would be Archie Bunker's Bar & Grill

Why are you surprised? Trump puts on a very good show. He's like the right wing talk radio host-in-chief. He voices the frustration that people have with other people. He has a comedian's timing and vocabulary. He's right – the other Republican candidates ARE stiffs.

He calls out Hillary for her corporate contributions in language that everyone can understand, in a monologue constructed in the same fashion as a skilled stand-up - complaining about industry sending factories out of the country.

Wonderful. The New York Times just keeps flooding us with more and more Daily Trumps. Seasoned with morsels of election horserace stuff.

Fills the Times, and our heads, with political antics, crazy statements, and fluff. Leaves no space, in the Times or in our heads, for substance about Bernie Sanders and the real issues he is focused on: reducing economic inequality, and avoiding counterproductive adventures in the Middle East.

So it seems that Professor Kroll has no explanation for the phenomenon of Donald Trump, except that he is "unique." Furthermore, the title of the professor's book seems particularly inapt: The Party Decides.

I wonder what Reince Priebus and the republican party are going to find caused them to lose yet another presidential election in 2016? Do they simply need to repackage their message? It seems to me that party elites have lost total control of their party.

Here in Trump-land (where I live), this article is rather embarrassing, but not surprising, in that it has missed TWO of Mr T's major appeals
(1) Stop illegal immigration
(2) We voted 2010 2012 2014, for people to stop Obama, and the people we elected, did not, so we are trying again
-
The issues of rules and changes, are secondary, we want our views expressed by our people we elect, and they are not

Karol refers to the leaders of the GOP as "elites." Another word hits the garbage pail. What is elite about Reince Priebus or any of the GOP in Congress?

Indeed.
He is such an out and out lier.
He out-lies anyone.

"Donald Trump Is Also an Outlier in Political Science"....And I thought he was just an out right liar.

Trump will rescind every executive order that Obama has ever passed, and return sanity to our society. As these Democrat, Liberal and GOP syndicate pen driven orders to import into our nation more voting Democrats--illegal or legal, or Republican establishment politicians all financial puppets of big business, for swathes of cheap working hands.

How crafty these politicians are reeking of corruption, when the executive order was released on New Years Eve, thinking that it would be overlooked by Conservatives or the Tea Party?

This is why we need a top business magnet as Donald Trump, who will build the wall and enforce immigration laws as never before. The wealthy campaign contributors may have the Hillary Clintons, Jeb Bushes under the seedy thumb, but they will not inherit one slim nickel for Trump, as he owes no allegiance to the powerful controllers of the special interests.

Remember these reasons when you vote in the Iowa Caucuses, the primaries and all the way to the 2016 election. I am doing my part, so get the vote out. Let's have a President that knows his duty to the American people. Not foreign countries to donate to underhand foundations as Bill and Madam Clinton. Not to the Hierarchy of the GOP syndicate, who do the bidding of corporate and the industrial complex, which are there to influence their votes in Congress.

New Obama Executive Action to Shred Immigration Caps, authored by Senator Sessions of Alabama.

President Barack Obama has announced another brazen, illegal executive action.

As Americans gathered with loved ones to wish each other a more prosperous new year, the president issued an edict to put that longed-for prosperity farther out of reach.

President Barack Obama has announced another brazen, illegal executive action.

In a proposed federal rule published on New Year’s Eve, the president decreed that hundreds of thousands of additional foreign workers will be licensed to replace American workers at lower pay.

Congress must act with urgency to stop him.

The president’s nearly 200-page rule bypasses federal immigration caps, increasing significantly the number of foreign nationals authorized to work in the country above the limits set by Congress. These lower-paid foreign workers will be able to take jobs in technology firms, neighborhood pharmacies, energy companies, local schools, public administration, civil engineering, and innumerable other professions both sought and filled by millions of Americans. Whether young American graduates who are seeking that first job or longtime workers seeking that well-earned promotion, countless Americans will now find their chosen careers in jeopardy to foreign workers.

The number of aliens authorized to work in the United States each year is limited by law, according to the number of foreign work visas and green cards that are statutorily available. Under this breathtaking executive action, those limits set by Congress are waived.

Here is how the scheme works: Under current law, there is a statutory cap on the number of aliens who can receive green cards based on sponsorship from their employers, and thus a cap on the number who can receive the all-purpose work authorization those green cards provide. Under this new rule, the administration can bypass those caps with two easy steps.
First, it would simply approve as many aliens as it wishes to seek green cards in excess of the cap. Then, it would give those workers—and their spouses and children—a renewable all-purpose work permit while they wait for their green cards to become available, nullifying Americans’ statutory protections against job-threatening flows of excess foreign labor. Adding further to the pool of workers, it expands the number of H-1B visas exempt from the annual cap.

What Trump shares with most of the other candidates is financial backing from the 200 wealthiest individuals and families. A potential candidate does not need a block of voters to support him or her in the early rounds if he has a big donor. Trump is his own big donor. He is not the first. Ross Perot was a self-funded candidate who was also known for pithy sayings.

The closer we get to any real vote, the closer the race becomes. Trump is not gaining additional support, nor is Carson. Cruz and Rubio are picking up the support from the less well known, less well funded, and less effective candidates. Every election cycle has its unique features, but in the end the Trump and Carson phenomena will wash away and it will be a more conventional battle among more conventional candidates.

I would ask Prof. Karol: If something fundamental had changed, what types of currently discoverable data would lead you to recognize it?

I suspect something fundamental has indeed changed, and the trail of evidence begins with the dramatic, quantifiable declines in trust regarding American institutions, American elites, and even face-to-face interactions among Americans.

To paraphrase Fitzgerald, polities fail slowly and imperceptibly to experts; then suddenly, all at once.

This disposition to admire, and almost worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition...is...the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiment."
--Adam Smith, "Theory of Moral Sentiments, " Book 3, Section 3, Chapter 3

Trump needs to "lean in" a little bit.

Donald Trump cannot be "controlled" and that drives the Media crazy because they cannot get their way. My how things have changed since the early 70's when journalists were not to be "biased." If he does not get the nomination it is no loss for him as he will continue building. He is not dependent on his candidacy and that also drives the media crazy. He will continue to build whatever. It is the most interesting show on all accounts.

"Trump could have run the same campaign he is running today decades ago". WIthout Fox TV, Twitter, and constantly updating news websites, it seems unlikely that Trump could have run the same campaign and been as successful. I click on every article with Trump in it (including this one), even though I know I am adding to the problem .

Trump told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/23/us/politics/on-the-economy-republicans...

Trump tells it like it is, so I'll be voting for the Democrats this cycle.

Thanks Donald.

At this time in our history so much depends on increasing the number of individuals willing to think carefully about social and political issues. Both parties, but Trump especially, are actively promoting less thought, less reflection, more mindless emotional response. Unthinking reaction only helps those who already hold all of the power and wealth and serves to cloak the mechanism of their rule.

I thought about closest parallel to Donald Trump in recent history, and I settled on Dwight Eisenhower. My take is:

1. Like Trump, Eisenhower had plenty of high level managerial experience, but not in elected office.

2. Like Trump, Eisenhower was very mushy in party affiliation, and had a working relationship with Truman; like Trump, his later switch to Republicans seem to be driven more by seeking alternative to Democratic platform rather than the passion for Republican position.

3. Like Trump, Eisenhower redrew the election issues for the upcoming campaign. And, like Trump, these lines were created by obviously failing political issues of Truman administration rather than by strictly ideological platform.

In the end, Eisenhower turned out to be an a-OK president, even though the amount of fear mongering stemming from communism - anti-communism debate was not smaller than right now. As it turned out, both sides were somewhat right: most of the rights movement didn't turn out to be "communist agents", but USSR did turn out to be the evil empire far worse than what was known in US at a time, and the contribution of US agents turned out to be significant.

I also would say that if one can block out all the "racism/nativism" rhetoric aimed at Trump, his platform is actually pretty open to compromise, far more so than Obama's. He's not running on replacing Medicare with vouchers, or flat tax, or something equally divisive.

Trump's only goal for over 15 years has been to eliminate the Estate Tax. What would you do to increase your wealth by $5 billion? In 2000 he seriously proposed a one-time net wealth tax of 14.25% to pay off the national debt in exchange for eliminating the Estate Tax. Now his tax plan will add $10 trillion to the national debt AND eliminate the Estate Tax. His maniacal ego and greed no longer requires a quid pro quo.

We know the scam he pulled with Trump University (see Times magazine cover story, Nov. 2015) just to earn $5 million. Ten thousand students were harmed and hundreds of lies and deceptions were part of Trump's plan from the beginning of the real estate scam. He stands to gain a thousand fold with his presidential scam.

Trump owns gambling casinos and is a master at deception. Only the house wins and when it doesn’t he declares bankruptcy to make sure his partners suffer all the loss. He may be entertaining but his public policy is explosive and inhumane. He is a scoundrel that operates like Kim Jong-un on a more flamboyant scale.

Everything needed to explain Trump's rise can be found in the 2006 film spoof of American culture, Idiocracy.

The GOP party culture has undergone a great shift which presented mr. Trump a big opportunity. Culture is really a set of shared ideas, and the now prevailing shared idea of the GOP is that anything and everything that president Obama does is wrong, even if those actions actually include policies that the GOP once favored. So mr. Trump has effectively presented himself as the most anti-Obama of the GOP candidate slate, expanding upon his birther base from the previous elections. Since the current GOP culture doesn't include any content on how to govern better, the accomplishments of the former and current governors fall flat among their voters, and megelomaniacs with their thin veneer of public interest are leading the polls.

Trumps popularity stems from one factor: his willingness to openly voice the vile opinions only alluded to by the rest of his party. Though his positions are in no way original, his embrace of the most vulgar sort of racism is embraced by a hate-filled and under-educated populace as refreshingly honest. You reap what you sow, Republicans.