Trump is for America what Arnold Schwarzenegger was for California.
This discussion thread was locked as off-topic by TexasTowelie (a host of the 2016 Postmortem forum).
For all the hand-wringing by the GOP establishment over the "crazy outsider," it's hard not to see something oddly familiar in Trump's campaign.
In the early 2000's, California had our first Democratic governor after nearly two decades.
Deregulated electricity allowed energy traders to blackmail the state for billions. When Davis asked federal regulators to do their job, President Bush came out to personally tell him to fuck off.
Republicans then blamed Davis for the resulting deficit and the public believed them.
When they demanded a recall, the GOP had just one problem: voters were unlikely to replace him with a far right yahoo since the last Republican governor had demonized Latinos.
The solution? A celebrity who ran not so much as a Republican but as "post-partisan," Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Many of my community college students voted for him because they thought it would be a hoot to have their financial aid checks signed by the Terminator, and the local media was saying he was inevitable in any case.
Once elected, he screwed CC's so badly that faculty and students turned their back on him when he came to speak at graduation at Santa Monica College.
The GOP has used different methods to throw a monkey wrench into Obama's presidency, but they have wisely foregone the national equivalent of a recall (impeachment) since it failed so utterly when they tried it on Bill Clinton.
But they know decades of race-baiting and feeding the rich and starving the rest make it unlikely they'll retake the White House on the issues.
So what do they do? Reach for another celebrity whose bombast and personality eclipse the fact that he's spewing the same crap Republicans have for decades, with some random exceptions that are unlikely result in action if he is elected.
Trump might not only get a lot of angry white male votes in the general election but low information apathetic voters who think it would be a hoot to have a celebrity in the White House instead of a dull politician and those who sense we need radical change but don't have the time or intellect to figure out exactly which change we need.
Democrats need to take Trump seriously, or they will get their ass handed to them by a Terminator with a comb-over.
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