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Comment by user837387 | Hacker News Reader

>>[1]John Steele gleefully threatened opponents and Paul Hansmeier famously sneered at the defamation defendants "welcome to the big leagues." It was those actions that drew much more attention to their cases. Character is destiny. Not only are Steele and Hansmeier wanton crooks, they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall.<<

But the part that I really find interesting is this:

>>Character is destiny. ....they're spiteful, entitled, arrogant douches. That led to their downfall

I say bullshit. Just look at Trump. The guy has fucked over so many people and sexually assaulted many woman by his own words and we still elected him.

It let to their downfall because they were not powerful enough.

[1]https://popehat.com/2016/12/16/the-prenda-saga-goes-criminal...

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We have to ask that you please do not introduce political (or otherwise) controversy into unrelated threads like this. It so predictably trashes the discussion that it's indistinguishable from outright trolling.

I don't think I can take these impromptu rants for the next eight years.

You've inspired me to write a Greasemonkey script to filter out any comment with the word "Trump" in it. Thanks.

Well... I just reread Roger Zelazny's Amber series, and recent political events did lend a certain surreality to the Amberites' magical fast travel system (named after certain playing cards).

So you'll be missing out on some things.

(They're good books. Read them.)

Eight years? We're assuming the incumbent will be re-elected in four years?

At that point we might as well just assume they abolish the two-term limit and crown him king.

This guy is being downvoted, but he's right, although he put it in a very antagonistic way.

I don't see Trump making it to a second term, especially with all the missteps he's taken so far, and he's not even President yet.

Frankly at this point I'm not sure of anything. I'm just waiting to see what happens next.

Incumbents almost always win their elections. Who knows where we'll be in 4 years, but in general, an assumption that a new President-elect will serve two terms is reasonably safe.

In the last 50 years, seven incumbents have sought re-election and five were successful - 71%. That's a good hit rate, but hardly "safe".

And one declined to seek re-election because he knew he would lose, making it 5 of 8, 62.5%.

Ok, so I'd never actually tallied the numbers. This does indeed indicate that Trump has a roughly 6/10 prior chance of winning reelection.

Mind, I think that prior is moved by the fact that he's a historically unpopular president-elect already, but we will indeed see over four years what he manages to make of himself. Or whether he manages to collapse capitalism once and for all.

Whatever.

You have to consider the circumstances around the incumbents that failed to be re-elected. Ford lost the election because of his association with Watergate and particularly his decision to pardon Nixon. Carter lost primarily due to the failure of Operation Eagle Claw. George H.W. Bush lost because Perot came in and split the conservative vote.

Stretching back further in the 20th century, Hoover lost due to the depression and LBJ declined to run for a second term because the Vietnam War was so unpopular they knew he wouldn't have a chance.

None of those are conventional political circumstances. So while you're right that it's about 3/4 incumbent races won, it seems that if there isn't a massive ongoing crisis, scandal, or political anomaly, the incumbent's chances are very good.

"In reality," says mathematician John Allen Paulos, "the most astonishingly incredible coincidence imaginable would be the complete absence of all coincidences."

For a job like president, the circumstances are almost always ongoing a crisis or political anomaly. I imagine re-elected incumbents also had to face exceptional political circumstances, just were able to navigate through them with luck and skill.

George H.W. Bush lost because Perot came in and split the conservative vote.

That's been debunked: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-ross-perot-myth/

...and really, in general this is just so much post-facto justification. Whatever the election result, Reasons will always be found in hindsight. If Clinton had lost in '96, you'd be able to say it was due to the Whitewater affair. If GWB had lost in '04, you'd be able to blame the unpopular wars in the middle east (or more specifically, Abu Graib). If Obama had lost in '12, it would be easy to pin it on Obamacare.

That page doesn't debunk anything, it's just a thinly-disguised advertisement for a film.

The entire 10 minute film is viewable directly from that page, that's what I was linking to.

> None of those are conventional political circumstances.

Neither is Trump.

While I accept the thesis that being what some random author estimates to be a bad person is not really tightly linked to either long-term success or failure, I'd advise against using such divisive, sensitive topics as contemporary presidential politics to illustrate your point. It's just baiting that is going to make the conversation devolve quickly.

Suffice it to say, enough Americans reject that narrative about Trump for him to have won the election. There are much better examples out there.

Maybe Trump just didn't have a good enough opponent whereas these guys did.

They made several million dollars seeking settlements generally in the single-digit thousands, so it obviously took them on the order of a thousand opponents till they hit a good enough one.

Of course it may be premature to say that Trump has avoided eventual downfall.

You are right that not everyone gets their "comeuppance". Maybe a better way of saying this is "society has an immune system to deal with habitual bad actors, and in this case that immune system worked".

The Prenda principals has a lot of success before their fall, too, due to an insufficient numbers of people in the right positions penetrating their layers of protective B.S.

It's kind of the same dynamic as a bubble. Screw over people, get money, get intimidation power, leverage that to more power and more personal cachet. If you keep the process going, you can get to a position of president of the largest nation state in the world. If you falter, your enemies will pounce on you.

A lot has to do with luck, with how easily cowed your enemies are, etc.

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