(01-11-2017, 08:17 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: The Democratic party is going down because it appears to be loaded with people and controlled by people like you. I feel bad for the regular Democrats. The only ominous resemblance that I see is the Democratic party seems to be a lot like Yugoslavia.
It is not fun to be a regular Democrat in flyover country nowadays. Although I wouldn't count them out quite yet, people were saying the same things about Republicans in 2009. Obama built the current Republican party by being alien to a lot of non-liberal white folks. Frankly Trump is just as alien to the non-conservative non-white folks in the country, and he is not all that popular with the remainder. Trump is likely to build the Democratic party as Obama did the Republicans.
Right now, Trump commands the Republican base and the GOP establishment will trend lightly. Trump is perfectly willing to throw all sort of bones to these guys: tax cuts, ending Obamacare, deregulating Wall Street, genuflecting toward Israel, unremitting hostility towards Iran. But there are a couple of things Trump ran on that they dislike. One is trade and immigration restriction. They are likely to give Trump something here because he DID run (and win) on it and they KNOW the base really wants the latter (and Trump wants the former).
But then then there is the Russia thing. Trump really seems to like Russia and wants to cut them all sorts of slack for no reason discernable to establishment Republicans. I think they will find this an irritation that will not go away.
When we eventually have a recession, Trumps popularity will fall as it always does. If it starts before the mid-terms Republicans will suffer larger losses than they expect today and so will be grumpy and unwilling to roll over for him on things like Russia. The second half of Trump's term could see the return of gridlock despite nominal Republican control of all three branches of government.
So if I were advising Trump I would tell him his power is at a maximum now, he needs to use it to get his agenda passed first, before spending political capital on theirs.