[quote=@Buddha]
[@Vilageidiotx] Fair criticism, but nothing major that would show to me how Trump is going to fail as a politician/president.
[/quote]

For a lot of why people are so uncertain about Trump, you have to remember who exactly he has been to Americans until now. There are people comparing this to if Kanye West became president because, to us, it sort of looks like that type of thing.

You get this billionaire playboy who becomes famous in the seventies as a sort of walking rich-guy stereotype, like we needed him around as a metric to measure new-money in the same way you might imagine an attractive celebrity setting your idea of what a "10: is. That's the schtick he plays, and he plays it until he's more celebrity than businessman. It's not like if Warren Buffet, or even a Koch brother, ran for president, because those are traditional dignified rich guys. They make predictive statements on money markets. Trump lives in a golden penthouse and writes books about how rich he is. When I was little, that is who Trump was, the guy who shows up on morning talk shows just to sit there and, like, be rich.

Then he gets a reality show to milk off of this. The first season of the Apprentice is actually the only time I ever watched an entire season of a reality show beginning to end. It's like a carnival, he comes down an escalator and tells some yuppies to do something like sell lemonade in Manhattan, they act silly and backstabby about selling the fucking lemonade, and at the end he brow-beats them and fires one of them. Later he does the same schtick with third rate celebrities. I dunno, I didn't see that one, I just know it had Gary Busey in it, who for context is an actor who is famous for having got in a motorcycle accident that gave him serious brain damage. 

That's about the time he tried to put his name on a bunch of random shit and it all failed. All the Trump Steak and Trump Water came from this time.

Then he sort of disappeared. I guess he got married, or maybe he was just so boring I didn't notice him? Until, shit, about 2010 he randomly hits the news in this big name-calling spat with Rosie O'Donnel. That was it. They just insulted each other back and forth for a month. It was dumb and we all watched it because watching celebrities be dumb is something we do. 

Then when that dies down he grabs onto the Birther thing, and that's what I think is the birth of whatever he is doing now. He spearheaded the movement declaring Obama a secret Kenyan, then he ran in the primaries in 2012, failed, and we sorta thought that was that.

Everything that has went on since, whether it is his policies, or his weird debate performances, or his comments about women, have to be taken in the context of this being a guy who we all associated with yelling at Rosie O'Donnel on tabloid tv just five years ago. 

To add to this, though I don't think this is as well known, there are only four prior presidents to have never held elected office: Zachary Taylor, a general and hero of the Mexican-American war, who was elected, promptly turned against the exact people who elected him, and died in office; Ulysses Grant, the general who more or less won the Civil War, and who's Presidency is considered one of the most corrupt in American history; Herbert Hoover, a business man who served as secretary of commerce, and who's presidency is basically defined by the beginning of the Great Depression and his failure to act; and finally Eisenhower, the commander of the allied forces in WW2, who's presidency was actually pretty good, and he's liked by both parties even today. Trump, by being a real estate mogul turned reality tv star, is safely the least qualified president in American history. Considering he makes his own party nervous (the elected parts at least), and the democrats are guaranteed to despise every breath he takes (albeit they don't have any ways to express now), he's got a helluva time ahead of him. 

This is to say that he is an inexperienced president with unusually high unfavorability going into his presidency (both candidates were historically unfavorable) and a congress that isn't comfortable with him, and whom he himself has plenty of scores to settle among, and he has to do something to dispel the massive cloud of doubt hanging over his presidency in two years before congress can be turned blue. Because in 2018 we get to vote again, on some senators, and all of our congress.

So we could talk about the policies of course, but this is an uphill battle for him. It's going to be a very weird four years.