[AnthonyMouse]

It isn't that both parties are the same on all issues, it's that there are important issues that no viable candidate would actually address.

Do you think President Clinton would end NSA mass surveillance? Reduce copyright terms? Meaningfully reform Wall St? Meaningfully reform the tax code or social spending?

Republicans won't either. That's the problem.

You get enough people frustrated enough and they vote for whoever they think will shake things up, even at the risk of burning it all down.

[grey-area]

Actually no, none of your stated problems are important to trump supporters or reasons for him to be elected. America first appeals to them, in spite of, or sometimes because of, all the nasty implications of it and the racial and social revolution it requires.

Trump will not stop NSA surveillance, reduce copyright terms, meaningfully reform Wall St (he hired Goldman Sachs alumni), meaningfully reform the tax code or social spending. He is a nationalist not a globalist, that's his agenda not the points you raised.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/goldman-i...

[AnthonyMouse]

America First and protectionism is how Trump won Michigan, not how he won the Republican primary (and thus Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, etc.)

He got nominated by being the candidate most resembling a middle finger to the establishment.

The existing system has been systematically destroying the middle class, and the people see it happening but don't understand why or how to fix it, but they know that voting for establishment candidates from either party hasn't fixed it.

Therefore Trump. Make America Great Again. Exactly what people want to hear. Actual method unspecified.

[grey-area]

I honestly don't think he has promised anything to address the points you raised, or has any intention to.

[AnthonyMouse]

They're not examples of things Trump would do, they're examples of things neither of the major parties give you a choice over.

Nobody knows what Trump will do. Make America Great Again could mean anything. Compare "Hope and Change" -- Obama was the first attempt at this when he defeated Clinton. Change didn't happen so people chose an even more radical option.

It isn't that voting for the protest candidate is especially effective, it's that frustrated people don't know what else to do. They weren't given any good option so they picked the wildcard bad option over the known bad option.

[grey-area]

We now have a very good idea what Trump will do - literally what he promised to do, which was all about autarky, closing the country off and bringing industry back to the US, and of course to be the most important man in the world (he was on the cover of time magazine 15 times you know). He has been very clear and consistent in his words and actions. Americans first and I think Trump first amongst Americans in a nation of men, not of laws.

Re a protest vote yes I think there was a certain rage expressed but I genuinely think a lot of people looked at the solutions he proposed and liked them. Listen to Trump supporters talk - they are proud of the wall, proud of banning muslims and their hibbi jabbis and want to bring industry back to the US (doomed as that is for manual workers in this second industrial revolution).

This is the mistake people like thiel and musk are making - they think Trump is playing some clever long game and lying to people, that people can't really take all those crazy policies literally, or worse that they can manipulate him - wrong on all counts.

[AnthonyMouse]

> We now have a very good idea what Trump will do - literally what he promised to do

But we don't. He promises things like "repeal and replace Obamacare." That's fine, except that the important question is replace it with what? If it's a substantially similar bill that still includes expensive subsidies to private health insurance companies with poverty-trap-inducing means testing, that is not going to help people.

The people who heard "repeal and replace" are presumably expecting some kind of meaningful yet unspecified improvement in their situation. In practice that means somehow causing there to be more money in the pockets of patients/working-class-taxpayers and less for medicine-adjacent companies. The current politics doesn't allow that because those corporations have too many lobbyists. You can imagine people holding out hope for some strongman to come in and lay down the law -- certainly that's what the left wanted Obama to do with single payer.

A free market alternative might be putting a stop to the games medical companies play to evergreen patents and generally thwart competition through regulatory capture. But Congressional Republicans may be too corrupt to let anything like that go through, and it would be all too easy to interpret "repeal and replace" as just cutting back the insurance subsidies (i.e. means testing them even more) so they can use the money to give investment bankers a tax cut.

[AstralStorm]

The more important part of this is: what if Trump fails like Obama did despite fulfilling more than half of the mandate.

Suppose Trump bans all Muslim countries from entering US and somehow (dubious) it does not affect American businesses negatively while improving local hiring. What if that is not enough? (it likely isn't)

Whom will the electorate choose next? A full on warmonger perhaps?

[sfifs]

None of these problems you state are why Trump seems to have won actually - which seems to symptomize the problem in the US. To people like me on the outside, it appears that a majority of the population is losing hope of bettering their life... and they voted for the person who promised to change the system that made them lose hope.

We had a chief minister in India once like this... darling of the educated classes, highly progressive, deploying technology in eGovernance, attracting Microsoft and Google to open campuses in his state. He lost by a landslide in the next election because during his term, the monsoons failed and farmers fell deep into debt and started committing suicide while he was deploying his middle class focused efforts.