Oh, heck. It turned out Trump is a far right authoritarian? Who could have guessed?by digby
Apparently a lot of people thought Trump (Trump!) was a moderate.
More voters viewed Trump as liberal than any incoming GOP president since at least Ronald Reagan, and fewer voters viewed him as conservative than any Republican since at least Reagan. That stood in stark contrast to Clinton, whom the clear majority of voters saw as liberal. Trump’s ideological positioning relative to Clinton’s may have been one of the reasons he was able to pull off a slim Electoral College victory against her.
Before Trump moved into the White House, he took a mix of liberal and conservative positions. He was, for example, vehemently against illegal immigration but in favor of infrastructure spending. He was against gun control, but he claimed to be stronger than Hillary Clinton on LGBT rights. When you totaled up Trump’s ideological score on economic and social issues from the website OnTheIssues — which assigns an ideological grade to politicians’ statements and votes on a scale that we’ve converted to go from -5 (very liberal) to +5 (very conservative) — he came in at +42.5. His score was closer to 0, perfectly “moderate,” than any incoming president of the past 40 years except George H.W. Bush.
This proves that these ideological compasses are completely useless. And a lot of voters have the analytical power and human instincts of doorstops.
All you ever had to do was listen to his violent, authoritarian, racist, xenophobic, ignorant demagogy to know that he was no moderate. He is a right wing fascist. (I know I’ve said it before, but Hitler was a big infrastructure guy. He built the autobahn…)
I’ll never understand in a million years how anyone could listen to this man’s rhetoric and think he was “moderate” about anything. Or frankly even ideological about anything. He’s just id. Nothing more.
The good news is that a majority of people have now wised up and understand him as a conservative. Better late than never I guess. But please, regardless of the “issues” which he only had the thinnest of even when it pertained to things he was allegedly passionate about like trade, it’s clear that he had developed a rap like the drunk guy at the end of the bar some time in the early 80s and he just kept recycling it year after year. There was never anything there, one way or the other except celebrity, chutzpah and narcissism.
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