leave trump to his own devices for a few weeks horse, he has you slightly unhinged
Funny, because a lot of Trump supporters have today come around to the view that they were unhinged to give their support to him.
Who could have predicted that.
Uncomfortably close to bone 
honestly mate, if it wasnât so sad itâd be funny. Itâs tragic stuff, should be an easy tap in, but you clearly take it so seriously its absolutely cringeworthy. But sure if it makes you feel better, a good outlet.
Again, Iâm neither rural nor rightwing. When you canât fit your preconceived stereotypes into a neat little box, you get upset. Have a browse of salon.com there, and calm down 
You fit every preconceived stereotype going, mate. Particularly the dull one.
1 Like
Fair play to a newbie for realizing what RRW was, I had no idea.
1 Like
Me neither.
I donât agree with everything in this article but I certainly agree with the broad thrust of it.
TOP DEMOCRATS ARE WRONG: TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE MORE MOTIVATED BY RACISM THAN ECONOMIC ISSUES
Mehdi Hasan
April 6 2017, 12:12 p.m.
IT ISNâT ONLY Republicans, it seems, who traffic in alternative facts. Since Donald Trumpâs shock election victory, leading Democrats have worked hard to convince themselves, and the rest of us, that his triumph had less to do with racism and much more to do with economic anxiety â despite almost all of the available evidence suggesting otherwise.
Consider Bernie Sanders, de facto leader of the #Resistance. âSome people think that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and deplorable folks,â he said at a rally in Boston on Friday, alongside fellow progressive senator Elizabeth Warren. âI donât agree.â Writing in the New York Times three days after the election last November, the senator from Vermont claimed Trump voters were âexpressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their ownâ.
Warren agrees with him. âThere were millions of people across this country who voted for [Trump] not because of his bigotry, but in spite of that bigotryâ because the system is ânot working for them economically,â the Massachusetts senator told MSNBC last year.
Both Sanders and Warren seem much keener to lay the blame at the door of the dysfunctional Democratic Party and an ailing economy than at the feet of racist Republican voters. Their deflection isnât surprising. Nor is their coddling of those who happily embraced an openly xenophobic candidate. Look, I get it. Itâs difficult to accept that millions of your fellow citizens harbor what political scientists have identified as âracial resentment.â The reluctance to acknowledge that bigotry, and tolerance of bigotry, is still so widespread in society is understandable. From an electoral perspective too, why would senior members of the Democratic leadership want to alienate millions of voters by dismissing them as racist bigots?
Facts, however, as a rather more illustrious predecessor of President Trump once remarked, âare stubborn things.â Interestingly, on the very same day that Sanders offered his evidence-free defense of Trump voters in Boston, the latest data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) was released.
Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College and an expert on race relations, has pored over this ANES data and tells me that âwhether itâs good politics to say so or not, the evidence from the 2016 election is very clear that attitudes about blacks, immigrants, and Muslims were a key component of Trumpâs appeal.â For example, he says, âin 2016 Trump did worse than Mitt Romney among voters with low and moderate levels of racial resentment, but much better among those with high levels of resentment.â
The new ANES data only confirms what a plethora of studies have told us since the start of the presidential campaign: the race was about race. Klinkner himself grabbed headlines last summer when he revealed that the best way to identify a Trump supporter in the U.S. was to ask âjust one simple question: is Barack Obama a Muslim?â Because, he said, âif they are white and the answer is yes, 89 percent of the time that person will have a higher opinion of Trump than Clinton.â This is economic anxiety? Really?
Other surveys and polls of Trump voters found âa strong relationship between anti-black attitudes and support for Trumpâ; Trump supporters being âmore likely to describe African Americans as âcriminal,â âunintelligent,â âlazyâ and âviolentââ; more likely to believe âpeople of color are taking white jobsâ; and a âmajorityâ of them rating blacks âas less evolved than whites.â Sorry, but how can any of these prejudices be blamed on free trade or low wages?
For Sanders, Warren and others on the left, the economy is what matters most and class is everything. Yet the empirical evidence just isnât there to support them. Yes Trump won a (big) majority of non-college-educated whites, but he also won a majority of college-educated whites, too. He won more young white voters than Clinton did and also a majority of white women; he managed to win white votes regardless of age, gender, income or education. Class wasnât everything in 2016. In a recent essay in The Nation, analysts Sean McElwee and Jason McDaniel point out that âincome predicted support for McCain and Romney, but not Trump.â Their conclusion? âRacial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.â
Their view is backed by a detailed Gallup analysis of interviews with a whopping 125,000 Americans, which found that Trump supporters, far from being the âleft behindâ or the losers of globalization, âearn relatively high household incomes and are no less likely to be unemployed or exposed to competition through trade or immigration.â The âbottom lineâ for Gallupâs senior economist Jonathan Rothwell? âTrumpâs popularity cannot be neatly linked to economic hardship.â
Look, if you still believe that Trumpâs appeal was rooted in economic, and not racial, anxiety, ask yourself the following questions: Why did a majority of Americans earning less than $50,000 a year vote for Clinton, not Trump, according to the exit polls? Why, in the key Rust Belt swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, did most voters who cited the economy as âthe most important issue facing the countryâ opt for Hillary over the Donald? And why didnât black or Latino working class voters flock to Trump with the same fervor as white working class voters? Or does their economic insecurity not count?
To be clear, no one is saying there werenât any legitimate economic grievances in Trumpland, nor is anyone claiming that the economy played no role whatsoever. The point, however, is that it wasnât the major motivating factor for most Trump voters â or, at least, thatâs what we learn when we bother to study those voters. Race trumped economics.
Defenders of the economy narrative have a âgotchaâ question of their own: how can racial resentment have motivated Trump supporters when so many of them voted for Barack Obama, across the Rust Belt, in 2008 and 2012? âTheyâre not racists,â filmmaker Michael Moore passionately argued last November. âThey twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein.â
Klinkner, though, gives short shrift to this argument. First, he tells me, âmost of them didnât vote for Obama. There werenât many vote switchers between 2012 and 2016.â Second, âworking class whites shifted to Trump less because they were working class than because they were white.â Klinkner points out that in 2016, Clinton, unlike Obama, faced a Republican candidate who âpushed the buttons of race and nativism in open and explicit ways that John McCain and Mitt Romney were unwilling or unable to do.â
Hey, look over there - Syria, Syria, Syria! Deflect, deflect, deflect!
Amazing how all these Trump staffers keep forgetting meeting with the Russians.
Nunes stepped down from chairing the House inquiry into the Russia scandal. His position was utterly untenable. He should really step aside from politics altogether. Heâs disgraced himself.
Trump has sold away US INTERNET usersâ privacy for corporate gain.
Explaining = Losing around here.
Sitting with your cans of Tubourg in Galway having never been to the place.
Why did he omit to tell us what percentage of people said yes to the first question. Very selective with his facts.
i) I think youâre confusing Tuborg with Kronenbourg.
ii) You say Iâm in Galway, which I am. Yet you then say Iâve never been to Galway. This is a bit of a contradiction.
I rather suspect itâs yourself who has been on the beer this morning, Timmy.
Thank the stars that warmonger Hilary didnât get into the White House
Some people here always said Trumpâs so-called âisolationismâ as regards foreign policy was a crock, some didnât.
And some said it would change from week to week.
Cracker privilege at its finest.
Whatâs a cracker?
They are mentally ill mass murderers that we all need to sympathise with.