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>He has built no ideological framework for future policies

Sounds like a positive thing

Not when you are getting strong-armed by the likes of Putin. I can only imagine how Trumps "business-sense" will fail him upon entering Beijing, much like Bush and Clinton failed to keep their resounding statements of "strategic competitors" and "butchers of Beijing"[1] after arriving during their respective terms. Trump has even less foreign policy acumen than the other two and I can only imagine he will bow down to both Russian and Chinese demands. The manufacturing jobs he claims China has taken from the US have moved from China to cheaper nations like Bangladesh and Vietname [1].

Obama made a push to conserve the rapid "manifest destiny" of China into the pacific. I can only imagine how Trump will shirk at any sign of conflict, much like he failed to condem the well-documented wrongdoings of his most xenophobic supporters. We can only hope that good people with a foreign polic background will understand how unprepared Trump is for foreign policy relations and will volunteer their service for the betterment of the country.

[1]: WSJ November 10th, 2016 China's World: In Trump Win, China Hopes for U.S Retreat by Andrew Browne

> I can only imagine he will bow down to both Russian and Chinese demands

My worry is the opposite.

Trump's style is furious counter attack at the slightest provocation. That's obnoxious when you're a jerk billionaire. It's more serious when you control the deadliest military machine in history.

An NPR politics podcast had mentioned that Trump always responds to the last statement from the other side, even if it's irrelevant to the rest of the statement. Clinton leveraged that during the debates.

I can imagine foreign diplomats quickly catching onto this and using it to their advantage in discussions.

I still dont see why people refer to Trump as some negotiating savant. Time after time, its been shown that hes notoriously thin skinned and easy to rattle. During the 3rd debate he was not doing terrible until Hillary commented that he's only successful because daddy gave him money. Trump's inherent identity and belief that he was responsible for all of his own success being under attack in a public forum caused him to become apoplectic. You could see the anger rise, his face turned beet red, he saw red, wasn't thinking clearly and it was then that he went off the rails and his performance suffered. It was clear he had been rattled and veered far off message.

I imagine this is his personality. Whatever the case, it has been a constant since I became aware of him from Howard Stern during his playboy years in the 1980's. New Yorkers are well aware of this, his ego and his compulsive need to settle scores with reporters and others for any perceived slight whether imagined or real when he was a fixture of Page 6. Someone like Putin or anyone else with a poker face and on even footing could play him like a fiddle, alternating between awe/flattery and hurling passive aggressive insults.

Fair enough, he might be a hot head. Hopefully the Russians realize this and also realize we vastly outspend them, militarily.

I didn't vote for either of the two majority candidates but I'm excited to see what will happen. His first 100 days plan is all over the board, nothing has been seen like this before with such drastic changes. I don't know what the outcome will be if he does implement them all.

> Hillary commented that he's only successful because daddy gave him money.

Well to be fair that was a pretty low blow. Tons of people inherit a lot of money. Not everyone becomes Trump.

> Tons of people inherit a lot of money. Not everyone becomes Trump

Trump inherited his father's wealth AND his father's business.

I'd argue that other modern reality TV stars are more successful then he is. Paris Hilton never received an inheritance (hefty allowance not withstanding) and built her own business. Kim Kardashian inherited less than him and is on her way to becoming richer. Both built their own business empire, not inheriting daddy's.

Choosing not to build an ideological framework because you want to sort of wait and see what happens is different from not building one because you are too ignorant to do so. I'd agree with you that this is a positive thing if it was the former but I think it's pretty clear that it is in fact the latter.

I'd probably add "duplicitous" to "ignorant". Of course, there's also a tenable argument that absence of an ideological framework is an improvement on the ideological framework of some of the alternative candidates that could plausibly have won the election if he hadn't announced his candidacy. But it says something about a president when the nicest thing you can say about most of their stated intentions is that they're a mountebank without the integrity or ability to actually follow through.

Thinking is impossible without ideology. You need some principles, otherwise you're just floating in empty space with no way to decide anything, because you couldn't even judge outcomes.

His ideology is mostly "might is right". That's actually quite convenient, because it sanctions any outcome. Grandmother robbed at night? Why did you leave the house? Grandmother killed at home? Shoulda worked harder – winners can afford better locks.

what is the point of this. When one says he doesn't have much of an ideology, they mean he's not operating with a battleship of ideology like Marxism. He's not running events through a historical realism filter (and throwing errors when reality doesn't compute.) He seems closer to situational ethics. He knows he cares more about what's close than what's far, he cares more about how things affect where he lives than judging things according to some universal standard. If he doesn't see evidence that something is tangibly good for people he's around, he questions its value. I can see why this confuses the hell out of people, look at how he answers hypothetical questions and what people do with the answers. I'm not even saying this is a good thing, just that all these WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich people have convinced themselves he's some kind of alien because he doesn't get his values from a pedigreed abstract universal code that must explore every corner of the universe's decision tree and be able to prove its philosophically consistent, or it's shit.

Trump is probably gonna fail, if you want to stick it to him hold him accountable by his own standard. At the end of his term, you look at America and say Did you do it, Donald? Where are the jobs? Are people happier and more secure? Do they have better health care? The answer is probably going to be no. There's no internally consistent excuse he could give to this that wouldn't entail his own failure, because results were what mattered. so the only thing he could possibly say, and we already know this is, we could've won but we were sabotaged. So get ready for it, but remember it's gonna be hard to argue against because people will have fought against him, and what's worse they will have fought against him _on principle_, yet again caring more about the "integrity" of the system than the people the system was supposed to protect. Even if he loses and it can clearly be chalked up to his own bungling, he'll be able to point that out and sufficiently mask his own failures because of it.

I mean, this is a really bad situation, same as the election itself was: if he wins, then well, he wins, maybe he'll accomplish some good, but it's gonna come with a lot of bad. If he loses, it's still a sufficient indictment of the system that his criticism still stands. You people don't even realize how fucked you are. He is America's Destroying Angel. By the time he arrives, it's already too late.

Why?

I find ideologies in general a huge impediment to solving problems. It erects imaginary barriers around potential solutions. We can all agree that universal health care at an affordable price is a good thing. Whether that is by market based solutions or by single payer doesnt matter to me. Whatever is most efficient and provides the best health outcomes is what matters, not some belief based upon... faith

Ideological leaders (on the left and the right) were responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths in the 20th century, for a start.

More generally, no ideology can actually capture reality. While they all contain some truth, they are all also fundamentally untrue if you drill down far enough. I'd rather grade someone on results (human happiness) than adherence to an ideological framework. I don't mean this in a simple utilitarian sense, either.

Ideologies more often exist to build teams/coalitions than to solve real problems.

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