Reagan too was called a total clown during his first election campaign and in his first term (he's in a good company, so was Lincoln). He was a much better public speaker, I'll give you that, but Trump is almost certainly a better negotiator, just from experience alone. I took some classes on negotiation, and did a bit of that myself, and I routinely see people misinterpret bog standard negotiation plays he does as his "missteps". Literally any book or course on negotiation will walk you through all of the techniques I've seen so far. It's getting tiresome. That's _the standard way_ of doing this shit, literally everyone who has successfully run any kind of business will see these tactics for what they are immediately.
As to "degenerate", that's the label you use when you've lost the rational argument. All I see is a talented businessman with a bit of Aspergers, strong Twitter game, and a profound lack of public speaking skills. None of that disqualifies him from the job he was elected to do.
No that’s not what I mean by degenerate. I mean someone who says Mexicans are sending their rapists, their daughter is a “piece of ass,” that they like soldiers who weren’t captured, that pays off porn stars to cover their affairs, that tells foreign leaders to investigate their political opponents, etc. There are plenty of people who can get tough on immigration, China, and NATO without being a degenerate... perhaps a four star general. Yes, one can make the argument that a degenerate can be an effective President, and there is precedent for this (e.g. LBJ, Clinton) but I think that welcoming degenerates to the office is a bad long term idea.
Litmus test time: does this look like degenerate behavior to you? This is a presidential frontrunner and (at the time) an acting VP. He got his cokehead son $1.5B in Chinese money, too, for his "investment" firm, how that continues to escape the front page of WaPo and NYT is beyond me.
Or are your morals selective enough to remain blind to this? Because it seems that the mainstream press is trying their hardest to not cover the story, and if it wasn't for Trump's "whistleblowing" (which I believe he orchestrated himself), nobody would know.
On the Washington-calibrated President degeneracy scale, bounded by George Washington at 0 and Donald Trump at 10, I’d give this a 5, Bill Clinton a 7, and Lyndon Johnson a 9.
As to "degenerate", that's the label you use when you've lost the rational argument. All I see is a talented businessman with a bit of Aspergers, strong Twitter game, and a profound lack of public speaking skills. None of that disqualifies him from the job he was elected to do.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/05/ronald-reagan-was-onc...