Make the US Politics Thread Great Again

God no.

Nothing for or against Oprah as a person, but the presidency is a JOB. A really complicated and demanding job requiring expertise in law, policy development, diplomacy, international affairs, and the structures of governance. It is NOT the place for well-meaning celebrities with no political experience whatsoever.

If Oprah wants to be president, more power to her. But she should learn the business of politics and governance in a state legislature or something first, if she wants to be any good at it

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Gorka - what a strategist

Could not agree more as proven by the current incumbent. My fear is that anyone with a semblance of respectability will appear as a more viable alternative. The Dems would do well to avoid that trap.

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Which is why they’ll go with The Rock

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Yep, put significant time in somewhere else before making a run at the most challenging and highest stakes political job going around. You won’t miss your opportunity. Reagan gets talked about as the first celebrity President but he was in politics from ‘67. Thoroughly separated out the actor from the politician for the benefit of the public when it came time to decide on his merits as a potential commander-in-chief.

He’ll be VP

OPROCK 2020

Oprah is responsible for the anti vax movement getting promotion, thanks to her giving airtime to idiots like Jenny McCarthy as well as promoting quacks luke Dr Phil.

She’d be a horrible choice.

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I am hoping for the most boring politician of all time to appear on the scene. Then I can go back to obsessing over AV equipment.

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If it were the other way round it’d be cool.

RockOprah 2020. :smirk:

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If your doing it right it has to be both a celebrity and a troll. The right doesn’t care about qualifications it’s just about how much it annoys the other side. In that light it’s got be,

Meryl Streep

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rawstory.com

Robert Reich: Seriously, how dumb is Donald Trump?
Robert Reich08 Jan 2018 at 08:36 ET
5-6 minutes

For more than a year now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.

I figured they couldn’t be right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his campaign and then his White House.

Several months back when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar terms.

Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House staff members.

In it, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”

Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”

When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”

Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted last Saturday. As he earlier recounted, “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”

Trump wasn’t exactly an academic star. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest god-damn student I ever had.”

Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.

But hold on. It would be dangerous to underestimate this man.

Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.

There’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”

Emotional intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.

Mayer and Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”

Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive. As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism.”

Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the emotions of others?

This is where Trump shines. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.

To put it another way, Trump is an extraordinarily talented conman.

He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them and then stiffed them.

Granted, during he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.

By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.

But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.

And he’s still conning many of them.

Political conning is Trump’s genius. This genius – combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – poses a clear and present danger to America and the world.

The 25th Amendment must be invoked before it’s too late.

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I’m not very comfortable with the pushing of the 25th amendent.

I don’t like that path.

Not going to happen. It’s the nuclear option for the Republicans who support it. All they care about is the dope signing their agendas into law and protecting their seats in 2018. Getting rid of the moron demolishes that.

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He will serve his term. Hard to imagine he would get a second term but he won the vote. It’s a democracy and the country made its choice. As stupid as that choice seems.

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The repercussions would be immense and destructive if pursued, I’d imagine.

But I didn’t mean to convey that I thought it was likely. Just that I don’t like the idea.

I think AB has the right of it. The ballot box is the healthiest and best path.

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The focus being only on the least salient point & wind up throw away line in that article is fairly odd.

It’s the final line of the article so obviously intended to be significant.

The fact that it’s extremely unlikely to happen, and any rational person would know so, renders it obviously superfluous and as I said, a standard “Throwaway”

All that came before it is the point of the penning.

I take it folk know who the guy is/was?

I don’t really agree on the throwaway characterisation. If I accept your argument however then it has been used as a throwaway line more than once lately, and that is what I was responding to. It perhaps read as being solely about the article you posted, but my poorly conveyed initial intent was a response to that wider phenomena. Not a qualitative statement, whether for or against, on the rest of the article.

If you also think it is extremely unlikely, then we are both happy and in agreement.