It’s been one fraud after another from the Democratic Party and the NeverTrump residue pretends it isn’t happening or tries to make lame arguments justifying the fraud. That pretty much eliminates the value of their contribution to public discussion.

But after seeing 2-scoops-of-ice-cream-gate, the dossier, and so forth – all the lies and hatred… I’ve seen the enemy unmasked. They hate him, but they REALLY hate me.

I could never support any of them. So in that vein, I can’t imagine what Trump could do to make me turn against him. It saddens me to say that, since I don’t think that’s a good position, but I see so many of the Left to be evil, thus utterly unacceptable.

t’s his completely amoral nature. There is nothing aspirational in him, no sense, even, that he knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s the first president who doesn’t even pretend to be a good man.

mizpants: Thanks for the response!

I know what you mean and it bothers me too. Except at this point he’s done so much good (by my standards) and been so consistent at it that I wonder if there isn’t a decent core beneath all the blather.

By their WORKS you shall know them…
all the stuff that says he is amoral are not amoral
grabbing a crotch of a woman who doesnt mind, is not amoral
offering a woman 7 million for a property worth only 2 million and she holds out till she dies is not amoral

being a target of what is the largest slander campaign across nations not just this one, is not amoral, but wants him to appear that way.. mostly because the people doing it ARE amoral, and find that their bs bounces off an actual decent person stuck in this machine…

the truth is that he is making his mark in history, and saving us from a venezuela future, and has more billionaires angry at him that are dirty than clean people helping… steyer? bloomberg? Soros? if he was so dirty, he would be easy to co-opt and play the public just like the others do, and then not have them on his back as he would be part of that amoral machine…

nothing crooks dislike more is an honest person with a big mouth in their den

your quite insane given how everyone is on him to catch him actually being a bad man, and instead he has kept his election promises (a good man), his nefarious deals are twisted to look that way by the ‘good’ opposition (good man), he has several agencies trying to find out if he has spit gum on the sidewalk and are coming up empty (good man), and they even created a dossier with all fake information and put that out to catch him (good man)

but what you do is judge him from a moral suprior mizpants position in which his personal life, of which you will never know details, and in which his wife is his friend despite others being upset, and on and on… is the bad man

well.. what about bad woman nancy and her son in another company
how about polished kerry being part of a laundering scheme
bidens son taking millions and being part of a money laundering scheme
then there is clintons… with blow job bubba, and the lady macbeth of what does it matter, want some uranium
and on and on

your delusional and you focus on false image over substance
you deserve everything that such people get
like the people who voted in Venezuela, they do the same

perfection is the enemy of the good
and your one screwed up enemy of your own good

all those tanned people who couldnt get jobs for 20 years, now have them
the retirement accounts forced to be anemic, now are getting pumped up so they dont take YOUR money to skim and give some to the elderly
and by the time your really old, they are going to ration your health care cause old people are expensive, and dont give much to society..

and on and on..

Two things:
Trump’s pop culture persona was a huge plus. I feel sure, for example, that the MSM could have beaten Ted Cruz. Enough low info voters would have been tricked by media lies. That didn’t happen to Trump because so many had an already fully formed picture of him. It was not possible for the media to successfully build their desired false image.

Secondly, I post the article which convinced me to take PDJT seriously. It’s from Jan 2016 and I think it has held up well over time. Do please consider reading it and while reading keep in mind the shenanigans of Paul Ryan, John McCain and others who worked overtime to subvert the power we voters gave to Repubs to turn the ship around.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/01/a_plea_to_conservative_voices.html
* * *
Agree with points 1 and 2.
This from the AT post bears remembering — because it didn’t just hold up, it was prescient (as observed by carl in atlanta) in describing so clearly “This is how you got Trump” before the election, or even the primaries.

Instead, most negative energy now emanates from the right. This is because conservatives, and I include myself, are wedded to what we could call a conservative victory script – i.e., elect a strict constitutionalist president, Tea Party majorities in both houses, the right Supreme Court appointees, and so on down our flower-strewn imaginary road back to the former Republic.

And Trump doesn’t fit into that scenario.

Well, so what? Isn’t that cherished victory script only an illusion? As proof, we might look at what has happened with our state governments – in a word, nothing. Because despite all the hoopla about how many governorships and state legislatures Republicans now firmly control, those victories are essentially meaningless. None of these Republican governments has moved against the extreme left-wing taxpayer-funded mental health establishment or welfare establishment; curbed the absurd explosion of damaging zoning laws, tree commissions, and ridiculous environmental regulation at the local government level; dug out the Democrat endemic voter fraud in their big cities; or squashed taxpayer funded sexual propaganda – a list of conservative reforms that goes on and on, un-attempted, even unmentioned in our Republican-controlled state deliberative bodies.

Let’s make this point with a hammer. In every Republican-controlled state I know something about, there is a state university sometimes absorbing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars that has a significant plurality of professors doing their best to teach our young to despise America, its history, and the majority of its people. We all know this, yet the Republican state governments still provide them with an unbelievable level of job security, generous salaries, ridiculously brief working hours, enviable pensions, gold-plated medical plans, and paid travel both domestically and overseas so that they can conference with the like-minded.

Do Republican leaders come down on the side of the angels from time to time? Yes. Do they throw up the occasional great local like Scott Walker? Yes. <b But overall, the Republican Party at any and every level has shown it does not provide fertile soil for any return to republican values as much as it does a steady harvest of go-along-to-get-along Paul Ryans, John Kasichs, and Jeb Bushes.

And it’s this template for governing imposed at the federal level that conservatives expect to lead us back to the promised land?

Wishful thinking, folks.

Enter Trump. I do not know if he is going to be the Republican nominee. I do not even know if I want such a thing. But what is evident is that a lot of voters are sensing, as I do, that there has to be some other path back home to America. Therefore they’re willing, even eager to take a roll of the dice with Trump, bust things up, get some new thinking going, some fresh juice.

They’re the loyal opposition to the progressives. They maintain their sinecures by those means. They simply mean to feed the rest of us to the socialist crocodile, hoping to be eaten last.

They don’t actually want to put conservative principles into action. That’s an awful lot like work. And responsibility.

* * *
Great conversation, but I saw an article today directly addressing this comment.
https://thenationalsentinel.com/2019/11/21/tucker-carlson-backhands-lindsey-graham-for-failing-to-press-fbi-over-who-tipped-off-cnn-before-roger-stone-raid/

The headline tells the story.
I confess that Graham has me baffled by his bi-polar positions and policies, but he seems to have more gung-ho conservative statements than actions.
Like McCain and others, Graham is big on promises and small on follow-through.

As mentioned above, the number of campaign promises Trump has kept (or at least tried to) beggars all other presidents except possibly Reagan.

“He’s too full of himself, and how HE’s doing so much for the little guys, for the great people of X (wherever it is), and how “we” are WINNING.” – Tom Grey

He is like that at rallies because he’s selling himself, and people want to know what he is going to do for them, but I’ve read articles about how his formal speeches are nearly devoid of “I” statemnts — unlike Obama’s monotous ego-burnishing efforts — and have personally observed (at both rallies and official events) how often he credits other people’s achievements and yields stage-time to (essentially) nobodies, which is unprecedented AFAIK.

Every politician wears the two hats of self-interest and moral justification in action, because anything that a large number of voters approve of increases his likelihood of retaining office.

Some things that were the right thing to do (IMO) but don’t seem to have any personal payoff for Trump other than winning electoral support:
moving our embassy to Jerusalem & recognizing de facto Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights; pardoning etc the three military men with questionable prosecutions; supporting Cabinet departments moving offices out of DC; donating his salary to charity.

The true test of morality is doing the right thing (by whatever definition you choose) when doing so guarantees a LOSS of electoral support, or some other valued good.

hoodathunkit: Are you talking about Washington? As I recall, he kept a self-improvement journal:

Tips from George Washington’s Self-Help Manual

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/18063/tips-george-washingtons-self-help-manual

I knew a person who always voted Republican but refused to vote for Goldwater because he said ‘damn’ in a speech, and instead cast their ballot for the single most corrupt President (beat Clinton by miles) we’d ever had.

William Buckley Jr said “I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.” National Review today sure doesn’t reflect its founder. Class, etiquette, demeanor, and hierarchy were thrown out by our first President —and arguably the best— who was criticized as rude, crude, and socially unacceptable.

Figure out what laws and policies you want, then vote wholeheartedly for the candidate that will most likely fulfill them.