1) Trump represents more of a continuation of various trends than a clear, radical break from the past.
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2) Trump Derangement Syndrome is a real thing, but it's a subset of Generalized Political Derangement Syndrome, which affects both left and right to different degrees.
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3) I buy Thiel's hypothesis that democracy relies on positive-sum games existing, and a technological/productivity slowdown means lower growth means more hyper-partisan zero-sum battles. This will get worse unless we can correct underlying dysfunction.
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4) Trump is not playing 4D chess, but he was playing a game on an orthogonal axis during the election, which gives the illusion of moves coming from outside the traditional game board.
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5) Comparisons of Trump to Hitler are totally off base. But I heard him compared to Martin Luther once though, and that analogy feels a lot more interesting.
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6) There's a theory that every new communications medium produces a new form of government. The transition process isn't usually very pretty. Martin Luther excelled at pamphleteering - Trump excels at Twitter.
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7) I do think that Trump was uniquely talented in ways that directly led to him performing better than anyone expected at elections. I also don't think these skills are at all correlated with running a government. This is a core unsolved problem of democracy.
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8) The theory that Trump is some kind of hyper-local hill-climbing machine learning algorithm seems on point. IIRC
@ESYudkowsky said the first version of that I heard.@robinhanson described Trump as a political entrepreneur, to use a different frame.Prikaži ovu nit -
9) Trump was exploring and stumbled across a fault line in the American public that didn't cleanly align with traditional R/D splits. He discovered a cluster around trade/immigration/anti-woke that pulled white working class voters from D to R, and redrew the map.
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10) Incidentally this is *exactly* what just happened with Boris Johnson and the Tories in the UK election. Maybe the Trump-Johnson comparisons are actually quite on point here.
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11) More fundamentally I think the distinction is between nationalist populism and globalist elitism, and the elites temporarily managed to gain control of both R and D leadership. This is why the Bernie-Trump comparisons also hit home.
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12) Did Trump even mean to win the election? My guess was that he didn't intend to at first, but once he realized he was close he actually went for it and wanted to win. I'm not sure we'll ever really know though.
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13) So Trump won the election. Now what? He needed to construct an actual ruling coalition. And that's where everything went straight off the rails and never came back.
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14) There was a version of this presidency that was vaguely functional. In fact, a viable transition team was being assembled - by Chris Christie. Christie got fired.
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15) Why did Trump blow off his own leg? Because Chris Christie put a man in prison. A man named Charles Kushner. The seeds for the destruction of the Trump administration were laid 15 years ago.
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16) So Trump needed to staff a government, and he had no staff. Who could Trump trust? Basically nobody... nobody except for his close family. So Jared and Ivanka, and Trump Jr to a lesser degree, suddenly became central figures. It's not typical nepotism - it's desperation.
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17) From the very beginning Trump was extremely short on political appointees, who typically execute the president's agenda at a high level, while the permanent bureaucracy passes from one president to the next and retains local knowledge to keep it all running.
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18) One thing that excited me about the idea of a Trump presidency is that we could finally see what happened when a *genuine outsider* won the presidency. For the first time ever I believed in the American dream: that literally anyone could become president of the United States.
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19) Well, sure enough, Trump almost immediately illuminated the enormous fault line between the insiders and the outsiders. The permanent bureaucracy became the
#resistance and suddenly everyone in the US could directly perceive the so-called Deep State.Prikaži ovu nit -
20) Interestingly, despite the president being the head of the executive branch, the permanent bureaucrats have various protections against being fired. It's unclear whether the presidency holds much power at all! But Trump explicitly adopted one plan that might work: attrition.
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21) So the government has devolved into a war of all against all, with Trump at the top with few loyalists, little or no Trumpian political appointees to extend his reach, and a vicious running battle between Trump/GOP and Bureaucrats/Dems/Media/Intelligence.
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22) But Trump does have *some* appointees, so aren't they carrying out his vision? Basically: no.
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23) When you have no loyalists, how do you choose your staff? You fall back on outside view metrics - qualifications like good schools and previous positions, and personal recommendations. Who are giving him those recommendations? The
#resistance! Trump is completely surrounded.Prikaži ovu nit -
24) In a stunning reversal from Trump the candidate, Trump the president *effectively* acts like he cares about what other people think and constantly bends himself to their narratives. Just wow.
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25) Trump missed a chance very early on to reconcile with the Democrats and try to be a bipartisan populist president. The first obvious thing to do is massive bipartisan infrastructure bill. Instead he got Bannon's travel ban, and outsourced the legislative agenda to Congress.
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26) Trump is strikingly moderate on many issues. People from NYC did not describe him as socially conservative before the election. I don't know many past GOP candidates who'd be caught dead doing this on stage, it's hard to square this guy with how he's viewed by media now:pic.twitter.com/K6YP4CeGYv
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27) Despite Trump's unorthodox views for a Republican candidate, he enjoys *massive* own-party popularity, higher than almost all previous GOP presidents. Trump didn't remake the GOP in his own image - he discovered the true preferences of the average GOP voter.
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28) The upshot of this is that Trumpism is bigger than Trump. He was a proof of concept that an outsider with unorthodox views and an internet-based playbook is capable of winning the presidency. He won't be the last populist social media candidate in our lifetimes.
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29) Another algorithmic behavior of Trump's is that he seems to run a type of tit-for-tat strategy, with 2 retaliations per defection. If you speak ill of him, he'll punch back twice... but if you then praise him he'll change tune quickly.
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30) The major world dictators (Putin, Erdogan, et al) have this pattern figured out, and they don't hesitate to praise Trump when given the chance. He praises them right back. Our allies then freak out, so he retaliates. This is a bad dynamic for us, and everyone plays their part
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