... Trump makes a deal with his friends "Chuck and Nancy." Is this a harbinger of things to come? He's forced out the Breitbart wing of the White House, and gotten thoroughly fed up with Ryan and McConnell. Or maybe it's just a leverage play, to make the GOP respect him a little more. We will see.
I chuckled along with you on dodging the Islamophobia bullet. You're right, we probably don't want to go down that rabbit hole. I think you'd be surprised where it took you though. We're probably on a very similar page with regards to Islam in the modern world... my issue with Trump is his general disinterest in acknowledging the difference between healthy and unhealthy Islam, and the atmosphere of racial/cultural tension that he obliquely condones. The real issue here is that once you let the religion cat out of the bag, I don't want to start saying things about Christianity that I can't take back. I'm a bit of a militant secularist agnostic in my heart of hearts, and I've learned that its best to keep my views on the subject well away from my religious friends. Theists are great people, but on that subject we end up talking straight past each other. I'll just leave it at that, I think.
As for the implications of Donald Trump, Pretend Conservative, they are fascinating. I try to imagine the shoe on the other foot, where the democrats have a president whose personality I detest, who gives the constant impression of corruption/despotism and whose foreign policy behavior is worryingly erratic, but who dutifully enacts all of the home-front policies I support. Now I imagine that my alternative is a republican I find as detestable as the right found Hillary (I can't even say who that would be, which really tells you something). Would I vote for the Pretend Progressive, or steel my stomach and vote for the alternative? I would like to think I would be brave and principled enough to vote across the aisle, but maybe the math would seem different then.
The one thing that always got me during election season, the same thing that got the Bush's and Mitt Romney, was how embarrassingly unpresidential Trump is. Jonezie opines that if Trump does nothing but narrow the microaggression gap, it will have been a vote well cast. Personally, I would argue that if Trump does nothing but represent America to the world with a petty, corrupt (more blatantly than usual, of course), immoral, vaguely totalitarian face, voting for him is wrong. We will survive all of his policies, whether I like them or not (well, except maybe climate change...). But will the office of president survive the damage he may do to it? We're lucky to have rebounded from Nixon like we did. I worry that Trump could do far more damage to the credibility of the Executive Branch, all while setting the precedent that we are willing to elect a reality tv star with zero public service experience. If this leads to a world where Kanye gets invited to the first annual presidential rap-battle, I'm moving to New Zealand and not looking back.
Also, serious question: does the way Trump is handling North Korea not worry everyone, at least a little. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he's just posturing to look tough in the hope that the adage "some people only respond to strength" will hold true, but damn, that's risky. At this point I'd prefer to leave them mostly alone and let them mismanage their country however they see fit. It's messed up that they've enslaved and brainwashed millions of people, but the problem looks intractable and trying to untie the Gordian knot could get a lot of people killed. I figure our chance of getting into a nuclear exchange is what, like 2% over the course of the Trump presidency? Maybe it would have still been 1% under Clinton... but personally I find any avoidable increase in the likelihood of nuclear annihilation unconscionable. I suppose people who lived through the Cold War may weigh those priorities differently.