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Originally Posted by BlackBellamy [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Thank you and no offense taken from that second part.

I've been interested in Trump's management style and digging around I found a curious thing. You see, the President's day is extremely structured. Every minute, every meeting, every call, everything planned and directed and he's just hustled from one thing to the other. It's always been like that. When Trump came in, he added blocks of unstructured time to the calendar. Chief of staff John Kelly instituted "executive time" after Trump complained that he didn't have enough time to think. Think about that. Trump has been a top executive and manager all his life and he came in and the first thing he realized is the President didn't have time to think. He couldn't just kick back for three hours and think about what was going on, to let the mind wander, to associate.

Executive time is for people who are in charge of the system, the other way the system is in charge of you. The last President who had executive time was Reagan and now he has an airport and an aircraft carrier named after him. Maybe if the other Presidents had time to think they wouldn't be digging so many fresh graves in Arlington every past administration.

How is this going to look to the rest of the world? Trump is showing real leadership on containing China and Russia, he motivated NATO, he's got good relations with Turkey again, Iran is shut down, no US soldiers are dying in numbers anywhere, Afghanistan is quiet, maybe for good this time. We're super solid with the UK. All of Trump's foes have been disgraced; Macron let pension negotiations devolve into two years of riots, Canadian blackface guy is toast and that German broad lost all credibility for Germany failing to lead the EU and just lost tons of US troops and money to Poland. I would like to point out absolutely zero peeps from North Korea since Trump went down there and choked that fat bastard in private (Trump got 55 soldiers remains back to be buried here with their families after 65 years of waiting simply because no previous administration would even hold talks with the Norks).

Internally, illegal immigration down. Children separation down. Until the Chinese Virus hit the economy was super duper solid. Crime down in every category until the Democrats lost their minds and stopped telling the police to arrest people. If you think the Democrats would have done better with Covid just a reminder that they were united in condemning his travel ban, which as everyone understands is the single most effective method of containing transmission.

What's not to like? Forget the hypocrisy and the lies and nepotism. I'm not going to accept any arguments like that considering the last three Presidents before him were corrupt lying fucks as bad or worse than him.

I understand a lot of people are personally offended by Trump. It's not on me they can't separate the job from the man. It's not on me that vast swathes of idiots ascribe some sort of Messiah status to the position, that the man has to be some sort of guiding light for a population obviously reared without any proper father figures so they need some Golden Father to make things right in their lives. The man is an executive, a manager, and a war leader. I'm very happy with the last one obviously and I don't see him doing worse on the first two than anyone I can remember. So far not a single embassy worker has been gunned down by terrorists while we frantically made lots and lots of phone calls. No one has waved around a glass vial full of sugar as an excuse to murder a quarter million Iraqis. Not a single airliner has been shot down by our trigger-happy missile frigate captains. Not a single Crimea has been invaded by Russia (thanks weak-ass bitch Obama). Speaking of whom, not a single government official has been caught on a hot mike telling Putin that they will be free to ignore US voter's wishes after the election because fuck them let's do some business.

I voted for Trump in 2016 because I hated Hilary more than I didn't want a fat affable liar television personality in charge. I'm voting for Trump this year because I approve of the job he did. And this in spite that the mindless partisan opposition that was way more fervent than anything Obama ever faced.

Trump has very little to do with the stock market. Most Presidents have very little to do with the stock market. The economy is generally cyclical over a range of decades and Trump just happened to be elected when the economy was good. In fact, as someone who works on Wall Street it's funny to watch people here groan when Trump opens his mouth because you never know when it might cause the market to tank for a couple days (e.g., the Christmas crash a couple years ago). The economy was going to go down regardless from COVID, you're right, but Trump has greatly exacerbated that as a result of his complete and total failure to admit that he messed up and start trying to get this under control. He thinks if he just pretends like the virus doesn't exist and tells everyone to just go back to normal during a pandemic that everything will be fine. That's not the way it works. To me, the COVID situation is the most critical point, because politics aside I think the most important trait for a President to have is to be able to be a strong and confident leader during times of major crises (regardless of what party they are in). Trump has proven he is not that (and continues to prove it multiple times a week with the things he says and a complete unwillingness to really seriously listen to science). I mean, he has Jared Kushner of all fucking people leading the COVID taskforce lmao.

The Democrats panned the travel ban because he just limited it to China when he first instituted it despite the fact that it was spreading like wildfire in Europe.

China and Russia are contained? Lol what? And North Korea? What positives did we get out of that? We legitimized them on the world stage and they said they'd do X, Y, and Z and then did none of that and we were like "oh alright then well if you don't want to that's fine."

Okay, other Presidents have been bad in the past. And? What does that have to do with anything? Saying you can't criticize Trump for all the fucked up stuff he's done because someone else was bad in the past is like saying I can't criticize a pizza place for bad pizza because I've had bad pizza someplace else at some point in my life. Sorry, but speaking here as a Republican I can absolutely say with confidence that I do not think anyone has come even close to the level of outright corruption Trump has displayed. Pardoning his friends who were going to jail for obstructing investigations into him, making the DOJ fire prosecutors who are investigating him, removing IGs and replacing them with cronies so that there is significantly reduced oversight over anything, refusing to fund the US Postal Service because to try and prevent mail in voting (which is actually pretty ironic considering a recent poll showed more Republicans (especially older ones, which make up a big portion of his base) are planning on mail in voting than Democrats), the list goes on and on.

I was hopeful when Trump was elected in 2016. And I think he has done some good things here and there, but the vast majority has been bad and he has proven that he is unfit to lead during a severe crisis. Not to mention the fact that due to his tax reforms I know pay 5 figures more in taxes per year than I did under Obama...like lol what? Obama taxed me less than a Republican President? Repealing Trump's tax reforms alone would be enough to get me to vote against him.