David Coates

Posts Tagged ‘Donald Trump’

December 9, 2016

Reflections on the Obama Presidency: (2) The politics of gridlock

  (The second of a series of four reflections observing the Obama presidency in real time; for the first, see ‘The gap between promise and performance’i) It was never going to be easy to govern America in a progressive fashion, given the scale of the economic crisis left in place by the Bush Administration and […] read more »
November 15, 2016

Second Thoughts on the Victory of Donald Trump

(First posted on the blog site of the UK Political Studies Association) You were good enough to let me share with you my first thoughts on the Trump victory, and I am hoping that you might be equally kind a second time. But this time, I want to share thoughts not about those who supported […] read more »
November 10, 2016

First thoughts on the Trump Victory

(First posted on the SPERI blog site, in the UK) There are times when being right is a luxury too far. This is one of those times. It was possible to see Trump coming,i but it was also possible – until about midnight on November 8th – to hope that his coming would be aborted. […] read more »
October 27, 2016

Minimizing the Legacy of Donald J Trump

When Elizabeth Warren was campaigning with Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire last Monday, she expressed a wish that so many of us now share, when she promised Donald Trump that “on November 8th, we nasty women are gonna march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever.”1 […] read more »
September 30, 2016

Treating Donald Trump as Just Another Republican Presidential Nominee

  Just because Donald Trump is so unconventional a presidential candidate, it does not automatically follow that we should immediately abandon our conventional criteria for judging his adequacy for the position. On the contrary, the reverse is more likely to be true: that the more unconventional he attempts to be, the more determined should we […] read more »
August 25, 2016

Donald Trump: the Politics of Fear and Violence

American presidential politics is always a contact sport. The stakes are invariably so high that being polite to the opposition is normally difficult, and is often honored only in the breach. The 2012 “there is a village in Kenya that is missing its idiot” bumper sticker offended me at the time for its ongoing birtherism […] read more »
March 19, 2016

The Democrats and the Donald

People of all kinds of political persuasions are rightly horrified by the violence erupting at Trump rallies,1 and by the demagoguery of the candidate himself.2 People of a more progressive predisposition are often equally disturbed by the hold that Donald Trump appears to have on the support of at least sections of the white working […] read more »
December 9, 2015

Questions that go unanswered as we drift to a State of Permanent War

As the main US media outlets report and amplify each and every outlandish assertion by Donald Trump and his fellow contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, major damage is being done to the underlying quality of the dominant political discourse in the United States. That damage has two main characteristics. By giving so much airtime […] read more »
October 4, 2015

Challenging Republican Premises: On the Cutting of Taxes

One of the great dangers of the seemingly never-ending media coverage of the Republican presidential circus is that it facilitates the steady drip into the popular consciousness of a set of problematic conservative assertions that any serious progressive politics needs to question and refute. This media-induced steady slippage of Republican cliché into received truth was […] read more »
September 4, 2015

Taking Donald Trump Seriously

The initial response to Donald Trump’s pursuit of the American presidency, certainly among many more moderate members of the Republican Party, was to wait for his pursuit to implode. It seemed to many seasoned observers of such campaigns that this one was not serious; or that if it was, it was inherently flawed. There was […] read more »