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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>calling him a systems thinker is a hard sell

You have a man who was not part of the elite establishment and yet has managed to get wealthy by breaking the law and avoid getting caught, then managed to become president against all odds, twice.

Sure, he came from wealth, but plenty of other people came from even more wealth and had way more political connections and failed to become presidents.

Hate him all you want, but if achieving all that is not a form of intelligence and system knowledge, I don't know what is.

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He’s definitely a good salesman. People already distrusted the elites and the `deep state` and he marketed himself as the outsider who’d fix things.

That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

>People already distrusted the elites and the `deep state` and he marketed himself as the outsider who’d fix things.

Q: If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate? Wouldn't that make them stupider than the Donald for such an obvious oversight of the electorate?

>That still isn’t sufficient evidence in his favor, given everything happening now.

Managing to become president twice is insuficient evidence?

> If this was such an obvious slam dunk on how to win the presidency, why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

The Democratic party in it's current state is ineffective & incompetent in many ways.

> Managing to become president twice is insufficient evidence?

Yes. You are ignoring the damage he is doing now, which is direct evidence against him being a good “systems thinker”

"Good system thinker" was obviously meant in a self serving way that benefits himself and his cronies. I assumed that was obvious since we're talking about world leaders here, not nurses. Presidents aren't there to make YOUR life better.

All world leaders are cut from the same self serving cloth as you don't get to become a presidential nominee if you're a genuine threat to the establishment.

These kinds of selfish policies backfire when they cut the ground out from under you. Trump and his cronies live in the US and are predominantly invested there, and undermining the US in the long term also undermines them and their interests. The stability of the US correlates with the stability of their power, I would consider this to be basic systems-thinking on the scale of a nation.

>These kinds of selfish policies backfire when they cut the ground out from under you

How? They keep giving themselves more tax breaks. Sounds like their ground is just fine.

> why didn't the Dems come up with such a candidate?

For one thing, the GOP have had a successful campaign over the last 50+ years to win the framing war. They're now able to present themselves as the plucky outsider who'll come in and fix things, even when they're not. Likewise, the Dems are *not* able to do this, even when they are.

Also the Dems are incompetent boobs.

Grifters are systems thinkers but in a limited short sighted way. Their answer to the prisoner dilemma is to betray their partner.

The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy

>Grifters are systems thinkers but in a limited short sighted way.

For the average voter, the grifts are irelevant since all candidates do it anyway, they just want a candidate that executes on their dissatisfactions with the system and that turned out to be the Donald.

Just follow the portfolios of those who funded the campaigns of the presidential winner, it doesn't matter if it's Clinton, Bush, Trump or Obama, all politicians are grifters, since once elected they need to pay back via grifts those who funded their campaigns as that's the main reason wealthy elites spent million for their candidate to win, to get into grifts with the government that make them even richer.

>The morons who support them dont see why this is not the optimal strategy

What IS the optimal strategy? I think MAGA base is getting what they voted for (mass deportations and shit) so for them IT IS the optimal strategy.

Right. In 2019, I was like, I am worse off than 4 years ago, the Trump Presidency sucked. But in 2024, I was like, I'm worse off than 4 years ago, the Biden Administration sucked.

If you know both sides are going to leave you worse off, it's probably pretty understandable that I'm always mad at the last guy to take a strip off my ass.

They are gonna be sad about the health care cuts, and the hit to the economy from tariffs and kicking out the folks who do all the shit jobs, though. We'll see how they feel in a year or so.

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