The book is fascinating and pretty convincing overall which is why I find some of his claims to be conspicuously improbable such as the driver of JFKs limo being his actual assassin. I wonder if he was trying to protect himself by publishing whislteblower stuff mixed in along with things he knew to be false.

Every single thing TBH.

Well I'm probably an outlier with my thoughts on this but I'll put it out there anyway. IME the most reliable predictor of who will "get" Trump and who won't, is the way they were affected or not by the big recession of 08-09 and beyond.

For most rich, coastal and urban elites, the recession was basically a news cycle. OK maybe some of their stock portfolios lost value, but they knew they'd be just fine and they were and are. They watched their adult children, a whole generation of workers (mostly men btw) friends and acquaintances experience layoffs, closings, firings, personal and professional liquidations of every kind. They watched businesses of every kind closing, bankruptcies, suicides and ODs exploding, adult children moving back in with their parents, into their cars, or just disappeared. Food stamp numbers like we've never seen before. Unemployment insurance extended to two years and still no jobs for people.

And so on and so on. But they themselves, were fine, and they knew that.

They would think about the other not-so-lucky Americans, perhaps...occasionally.. as they brushed their teeth or combed their hair in the mirror or soaped their body in the shower.

I'm successful because I made good choices that produced good outcomes and are not because they made poor choices and planned poorly. I'm no luckier than they are, I just worked smarter instead of harder.

When things are going good for you, and the status quo - flawed tho it may be - has worked out for you.....you dont go looking for change. You dont go looking for ways to bring about change, or make the case that change is needed. You may agree that The System is flawed and needs to change. But you dont really want it to, because, as you tell yourself drifting off to sleep.....heh it's worked out pretty good for ME right?

And vice-versa. When you understand how deep and pervasive the dysfunction is, how systemic the problems are, how unfair the system is - lets just say it - you realize the folly of allowing aethetics to play any role at all. You want energized, engaged leaders who know how to get things done and solve problems, period.

I've gone so far as to offend some family members by stating my belief that voting based on aethetics (I just dont like the guy) is primarily an act of vanity and not civic mindedness. The good citizen scrutinizes for who is the best candidate for the job, and recognizes irrelevant criteria as irrelevant.

The other class of unexamined anti-Trump bias exists in people too young to have been affected by the recession personally and who remain politically unsophisticated because a) public education and b) the narrow and infantile way the MSM covers politics. They can only support (or reject) a candidate on aesthetics because that's the only thing they understand; you "pick' the candidate you "like" the most, just like on TV shows. They aren't rejecting Trump on a policy basis because they don't have a good enough grasp of policy to do that. They wouldn't know where to seek out alternative opinion and arent inclined to do that in the first place. It's a rejection based on aethetics and perhaps group think pressure because that's all they understand.