Why Donald Trump is winning the Republican nomination now?
It's a combination of two factors: 1) Everybody underestimated him 2) His enormous appeal to the Republican BASE (not the Tea Party crazies)1. UnderestimationWhen he first came into the race people just thought of him as a circus show. They thought he was just a buffoon out to get more ratings for his TV show (which was the initial plan actually: How Trump did it). They didn't take him seriously as a candidate. The GOP establishment and others thought they'd see this act before with candidates like Michelle Bachmann and this sudden Trump fever at the start of the election would run it's course. They were wrong, and they are going to pay for it because Donald Trump has so much momentum right now that I doubt Rubio, Cruz, or Kasich are going to catch up. According to the Rolling Stone, every Republican who has won the New Hamphire and South Carolina primaries has gone on the win the nomination. If the GOP had the wisdom to rally behind a single candidate early, they may have been able to beat Trump. They let months go by where Trump was the only candidate getting major media attention, and with most Republicans (well most Americans really) being low-information voters, what they hell did they think would happen?2. Appeal Donald Trump is winning because he has his finger squarely on the pulse of what the MODERATE Republican base wants. See a lot of people, particularly my more naive liberal friends, think Trump is appealing to the super-conservative religious nuts in the Republican party. They are dead wrong. For America's religious extremists, Ted Cruz is the candidate of choice. Trump's base are actually the moderate, working class Republicans. They're the type of guys (and gals) who would typically vote for Jeb Bush. They think Trump is their politically incorrect messiah, here to free them from the endless torrent of cookie-cutter politicians they've had to deal with since Reagan. His tasteless remarks, his boorish attitude, his ridiculous "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" promises, everything liberals like me hate about him, THEY LOVE IT. It's a real Bandwagon effect, once you get on the Trump train, there is no getting off.
How does Donald Trump’s economic impact compare with the Obama administration??
Question actually answered (lightly edited for coherence):Obama did not add 235,000 jobs to the economy, how did Trump do it?I hope everyone saw Sean Spicer’s presser yesterday where they asked him about the jobs report. You’ll recall during the election Trump said these reports were lies. He said the real rate was “I heard” 42%, not 4.8%. Of course now, when the same people at BLS using the same methods as they always have just got a result of 4.7%, Trump says he believes it. Spicer and the reporters in the room had a good chuckle over this. Our president is a liar and a joke and everyone knows it. If you don’t, you should.For the record, President Obama presided over 75 consecutive months of private sector job growth, according to the same reports that Trump now believes. That’s 75 months in a row of reports similar to this one, some months more than 235K, some months less, but positive for almost all of his two terms. Even the months before steady positive numbers were impressive. When he took office we were losing 800,000 jobs a month, and that number started getting better quickly as a result of the Obama stimulus. As for the market, the S&P 500 closed at 805.22 on 1/20/2009 and 2,263.69 on 1/19/2017, a gain of 181%, not counting dividends. In time we’ll see if Trump’s numbers are anywhere near this good.The other news of the day is Mike Flynn, Trump’s first National Security Advisor, had to retroactively register as a foreign agent! Flynn’s already made history by lasting only 24 days in the job. He was being paid by Turkey while he was campaigning for Trump and sitting in on national security briefings, probably during the transition and possibly while in office as well. It was a crime to do the work for Turkey without registering; are we going to hear chants of “Lock Him Up” from you hypocrites?Not only has Trump denied he knew this, so has Pence. The Flynn story was in the headlines many times during the campaign. In case they missed the news, which of course they did not, Mike Pence in his capacity as head of the transition team was officially informed by a member of Congress, the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.I have no idea why they’re lying about this stuff. The evidence is very clear that they are, though.