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Comment by alphonsegaston | Hacker News Reader

All these comments about Trump changing his mind or being swayed miss the obvious indicators that he's just following the Putin/Surkov strategy for creating a managed democracy. You destabilize the narrative coherency with opposing, even random, signals (meet with Al Gore, then appoint Rex Tillerson, add Kanye for good measure). As your opponents scramble for some logical imperative along the lines of received political/economic narratives, you dismantle the institutions that oppose you(both literal and civilly constructed), so you can rob and rule however you see fit.

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My read is that Trump doesn't have any particular plan beyond fame and feeling important. If that means holding completely opposing views one day to the next, so be it.

This is dangerous, don't get me wrong. And he's absolutely going to get used as a tool in smarter people's schemes. Let's just hope the good smarter people can get control of him instead of the bad smarter people...

He may be an incompetent businessman, but he is not an idiot. After near bankruptcy his current wealth is based on connections and an aura of competence. Basically, he puts his name up but not any wealth while getting a cut of a deal. But, his stick of saying things and then retracting them as 'not serious' statements is a very useful tool.

Over time people notice they heard what they wanted to hear and his words are meaningless signals. But, there is a really long line of suckers ready to believe anyone that says what they want to hear. Making a moonshot for the presidency viable in ways where a career politician would have a long line of failures to follow though using the same approach.

>After near bankruptcy

He declared chapter 11 bankruptcy 4 times.

Edit: his businesses filed 4 times

His companies declared bankruptcy, but he personally did not. I recall some clip where he references walking with his son past a homeless guy and say "that guy has a billion dollars more than I do." referencing his at the time negative net worth. However, he continued to service or refinance that debt without declaring bankruptcy.

PS: This is actually fairly common with real estate fortunes. They are based on leverage so dips can erase fortunes, but if they keep making payments they can get past that and end up positive.

Here, failure and bankruptcy is normally celebrated as part of the process of building successful companies.

That seems more true of small companies than large ones. Pet's.com style failure tends to be ridiculed, but failure at the early stages is viewed as reasonable experimentation.

IMO Theranos, get's all kind of hate in part because it scaled without a real product.

He filed for chapter 11 as an individual? I don't think that's correct, is it?

That seems pretty naïve to me. Remember he is not (solely) acting as an individual but as the front man for interest groups (Army, Exxon etc, not dissimilar to the Cheney gang)

Yes, a major part of Trump's success is convincing both his supporters and opponents that he is the sole conduit through which power will operate. To his supporters, anything untoward among his underlings will be checked by the great man himself, while simultaneously, to his opponents, his obvious character flaws will be his undoing. Both create a false of impression of the need to withhold judgement/action, which allows his agents to continue their work unabated.

> he's absolutely going to get used as a tool in smarter people's schemes

This is already happening. Just see how the president of Taiwan played him, calling him up without going through the state department, in the full knowledge that he was probably not aware that he shouldn't take the call. She essentially forced him into a position where he had to say that changing the relation with Taiwan was his plan all along.

If anyone's playing him, it isn't the President of Taiwan.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/bob-dole-trump-taiwan-...

http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/henry-kissinger-meets-china-...

I want to bookmark your comment, because I think you are so on point with what is happening.

The greatest threat to the moderate people of this country is our insistent on believing that everyone is good, and that everything will be ok.

We want to believe that so much we don't see the veil that has been pulled over our eyes.

All his cabinet picks, all the things he has done with his businesses are a clear factual indicator of the kind president he will be, yet everyone in these high-minded forums, educated journalists, still want to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It saddens me greatly that so many educated people continue to believe they can work with him, when it's clear that he has no intention of working with anyone, for anyone, but himself.

I think this is because most of us have lived in relatively peace and prosperity our entire life.

I hope I am wrong and that my stupidity will be laughed at in the coming months.

I think that you're overestimating Trump's ability to dismantle institutions, even if we stipulate that he's a machiavellian schemer who's successfully sowing chaos among his opponents by "destabilizing the narrative coherency."

Institutions in the United States, because of our size and emphasis on Federalism, have always existed in a tenuous position from the beginning. Throughout our history, we have seen the large parts of the judiciary, criminal justice system, and in practice, whole state governments collapse in pursuit of things like racial and economic inequity (robber barons, civil rights era south, populist leaders like Huey Long, Mafia control of Providence). By fanning the flames of racial and religious intolerance, as well as economic populism, Trump has set the stage for a similar collapse under whatever local conditions most conveniently serve his interests. Maybe in Arizona, we have to suspend the rule of law because the immigration situation is out of control, in West Virginia it's because of economic conditions, New York is at risk from terrorism. All of these circumstances have some truth to them, which is why the make great pretexts.

And yet, Joe Arpaio lost re-election, New York is still reliably and deeply blue, and it is still the case that nobody at all cares about West Virginia.

If the US is in fact constantly on the brink of collapse, it sure is a wonder we made it this far.

Well, his chief strategist is Steve Bannon, whose stated goal is to destroy both sides of the establishment in a Lenin-esque uprising through misleading narratives and clever media manipulation.

Neat. My stated goal is to have my current stock options be worth $20 million+ in the next three years. It's possible that both Bannon and I will be disappointed.

Well, you're just a dude on the internet, while Bannon got a Trump elected so I'd say his odds of success are a little higher than yours.

His goal is also a little more ambitious than mine. And it's far from clear that Bannon was anything like dispositive in getting Trump elected.

Having a stated goal doesn't mean that you have the means to make that goal happen.

Also: You're just a dude on the internet, but you've apparently deciphered the evil scheme of this master of media manipulation. Are we supposed to believe that you're uniquely talented, or what?

> but you've apparently deciphered the evil scheme of this master of media manipulation.

Uh. He paraphrased, but could've just copy-pasted for same effect. Jeez man, just do a search before you challenge...

> “I’m a Leninist,” Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying by a writer for The Daily Beast who met him at a party in 2014. He later said he did not recall the conversation. “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal, too,” the site quoted him as saying. “I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/stephen-bannon...

Okay, so here's the deal:

Bannon shot his mouth off at some point and made some grandiose claims about his goals. There's no particular reason we should believe them, and no particular reason we should think he's capable of those goals even if he does actually hold them, rather than being something he said to sound cool at a party.

But, if we accept for the moment that Bannon really is going to destroy the state by manipulating the media, and that we should take seriously for just one second that he might be capable of that, we find immediate direct evidence that he is in fact not capable of directing a secret conspiracy to manipulate the media after all: because he told people he was going to do it, got quoted by the media, and ended up in the crosshairs of people like you, who are now presumably going to be watching his sinister schemes and warning other people.

What's with this belief that the only way something can work is if it's kept secret? It's not a "sinister scheme": it's a plan. And it works not because of deception, but because plenty of people believe in it, or are willing to follow it. "Warning" people about manipulation doesn't stop manipulation at all, especially not when the goal is simply to reduce trust all around.

Dismantling institutions will not be done secretly, it is being done openly (which is what you initially seemed to doubt.) There's no secret conspiracy. Secret conspiracies are not the only thing a person could possibly be worried about.

You should proofread your comments before you hit "reply" to avoid easy downvotes and flags.

> stated goal

and

> deciphered the evil scheme

very directly conflict as concepts. The above poster did not have to "decipher" anything because the goal is "stated."

This is probably what they said about many other of the world's worst dictators and human rights abusers until they actually did dismantle all the institutions that opposed them.

But he doesn't have to do any of the dismantling work himself. He's just installing the loyalists and sycophants who already understand that the mission is to raid the institutions/country of riches and integrity. He doesn't even need to openly give them instructions, just nod and say "Fantastic job."

You don't feel like your rhetoric is a little overblown? How does one "raid the institutions of integrity"? Even if that were your explicit job? Do you visit in the dark of night and go to their integrity safe, crack it, and then bring your stolen integrity home to add to your family's integrity store?

At any rate, I wasn't saying that Trump is personally incompetent (I'm agnostic in that respect), and thus that he will not succeed in dismantling institutions. I'm saying that he's a figure within a Constitutional democracy with limited power, who does not have any kind of enormous political support, in a country with a long, stable government, and going up against entrenched interests.

Might he do some damage? Of course. But in general, Presidents break against the entrenched powers in Washington, not the other way around.

Four years from now, we'll have another election and probably Trump will be gone. Eight years from now, he'll definitely be gone. There's no sign that Trump has the ability to dismantle the government in the way that Putin did in Russia.

> You don't feel like your rhetoric is a little overblown?

I hope it proves to be! Also I lol'ed at the integrity safe metaphor.

>I'm saying that he's a figure within a Constitutional democracy with limited power, who does not have any kind of enormous political support, in a country with a long, stable government, and going up against entrenched interests.

But to be serious, I think this response is making a number of dangerous assumptions, which I hear from a lot of moderate voices urging hope/non-alarm/give him a chance. To address them point by point:

- The power of the executive branch relative to the others has steadily risen in the modern era.

- I think he does have significant political support - the senate would likely have flipped if not for the party line support he generated.

- Our "long, stable government" is only 238 years old, not really that significant on any timescale, even compared to other governments in recorded history. And has already included a catastrophic civil war that almost ended it. It's a hard cognitive bias to buck, underestimating our society's fragility.

- Who are these entrenched interests he's going against? The "entrenched interests" of the left, well they may be entrenched, but they don't have trillions or even billions of dollars in their war chests. The actually powerful ones are all going to be represented on his cabinet.

Like I said, I hope I'm being wrong and alarmist, but it seems like the prudent side to err on.

I agree that the executive branch has gained in power recently, and I hope probably against hope that the next time the Democrats are in power they do not continue their long-standing tradition of waving off concerns about the imperial Presidency because probably nobody they despise will ever be President.

Trump is the incoming president with the worst approval ratings in modern history, who lost the popular vote by a considerable margin, and did so after a lengthy public fight with the Republican leadership. He doesn't have "no" political support, certainly. But he doesn't have the kind of overwhelming popular support that might allow him to bend or break the rules that govern him with impunity, certain that his political enemies are too cowed to make a fuss.

238 years is a pretty long time by governmental standards. Our government is much older than Russia's, China's, France's, Germany's, Japan's, etc. Older than essentially every government in South America or Africa. The UK hasn't had an actual revolution in the last 238 years, but 238 years ago it was a genuine monarchy, and now it's not. Etc.

The entrenched interests of Washington are the government itself, and Congress, and they do have all the money they need. Also, money, it turns out, is not actually as big a deal as people would have you believe. Clinton's campaign outspent Trump's about 2:1.

I agree somewhat, but I don't think that it's going to be Trump specifically disrupting institutions, so much as everyone else round him.

They said that about GWB too. No institutions got dismantled. Despite the rhetoric, there is broad, bi-paratisan support for our big institutions: http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/201....

87% of Americans think there is a "major role for government" in ensuring safe food and drugs. 75% of Americans think the same about protecting the environment. 70% think the same for education. 61% think that about healthcare. The FDA, EPA, Dept. of Ed., DHHS aren't going anywhere.

Americans don't dislike our institutions. They dislike the people running our institutions (74% think politicians put their own interests ahead of the country's).

Exactly. I feel like some of this rhetoric is a little overblown.

That said, there are, I feel, realistic causes for concern. Although GWB didn't "dismantle institutions" he did get us into an unnecessary war with Iraq. Similarly, I'm getting a little afraid with Trump's appointments about what's going to happen in Iran. (That said, had Hillary won, I'd be feeling the same right now, probably, but towards Russia.)

Exactly. The disheartening thing is that he's so persuadable it's conceivable that damage could be prevented, but anyone half decent abandoned and denigrated him during the campaign, and he cares about loyalty, so his inner circle is already self-selected for maximum sycophancy and valuelessness.

All autocratic rulers are some form of a cipher, both for the cabal that does their dirty work and the totalitarian masses that enable them. It's irrelevant whether this is done by Trump directly, his administration, or thugs on the street. You can employ whichever tool accomplishes your aim, then reign it in to give the appearance of political normalcy.

Seems like a sound strategy, but there's nothing preventing people Page, Musk, Gore, Bezos and others from walking out and speaking out in the future.

"We know the man, tried to work with him, but he's a danger to society" sounds better than "we think he will be dangerous".

Page, Musk, et al are the figures at the front of massive economic/political organizations with inertia far beyond their individual moral compunctions. So while you might see superficial defections, the collaboration will continue unabated by the larger forces that drive them.

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