History Tropers / PeaceAndLove

Identity: Bi trans woman\\
Age: 23\\

Name: Gary\\
Sex: Male\\
Age: 19\\

Let's list some tropes about me!

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* {{Acrofatic}}: {{Downplayed|Trope}} since I'm not exactly ''fat'', per se, but I'm surprisingly flexible.
* {{Adorkable}}: Well, I try to ''appear'' cool, ''buuuuut''... it doesn't always work.
* BiTheWay: Though I mostly prefer women.

* BiTheWay: Though I mostly prefer women.
* BigEater: I can put away a whole pizza and think nothing of it.
* HugeGuyTinyGirl: Compare my 6'2" to my (now ex-)girlfriend's 5'1".

* HugeGuyTinyGirl: Compare my 6'2" to my girlfriend's 5'1".

Name: Gary//
Sex: Male//
Age: 19//

Name: Gary
Sex: Male
Age: 19

* A week into office, President Creator/DonaldTrump ran into trouble by enacting one of his own campaign promises, an executive order banning people from several Muslim countries from entering the U.S., including refugees from Syria. The ban even extended to people with valid visas and green cards. This KickTheDog moment was a bridge too far for many people, with even more protests at several major U.S. international airports where people in transit when the order was signed were being detained at customs. The ACLU managed to get a stay on some parts of the order, with a later court order blocking the ban and reinstating the visas that had been canceled, but the move could very well be the last straw for whatever was left of Trump's goodwill, with Democrats and ''even most Republicans'' decrying the order.
** To make it more hurtful, the decision was largely based on Trump's own words too, where he called the thing a ''Muslim Ban'', effectively sealing the measure's coffin via the 1st Amendment. Had Trump not had been so bombastic about the whole thing, the Executive Order might have lasted longer.
** On March 15th, his attempt to resubmit the Executive Order in a somewhat more legal form was stamped down due to the words that an aid of his said, saying that the EO had the exact same purpose. To add insult to injury, it was blocked before it could take effect.
** It should also be noted that Trump has been hoisted thanks to his attitudes of the courts effectively acting like a check against his plans, insulting them and declaring that he will not be merciful. Because the courts don't take too kindly to this kind of talk, it has likely caused Trump to face nothing but hardships for his lawmaking.
* Not long after the Travel Ban incident, the upscale department store chain Nordstrom dropped Ivanka Trump's line of clothing, citing lack of sales. When Donald got wind of this, he immediately went to Twitter to bash the company. What he didn't realize was that what he said is technically the words of the sitting President of the United States, not as the angry father of a spurned girl, which meant that he was now using his presidential powers to promote a private business (which is illegal). More hilariously, he urged people to boycott Nordstrom, hoping to tank the business. Instead, it [[NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity gave Nordstrom unprecedented advertisement]] as an anti-Trump company and briefly caused its shares to double, as well as give unintentional free advertisement to the Grab Your Wallet movement (a movement that advocates boycotting of Trump-related products).
* During Holocaust Remembrance Day, Trump's team tried to be inclusive in remembering the victims as not just Jews, but also Roma, disabled people, and LGBT people. Unfortunately, it was instead widely decried by liberal groups as an attempt to downplay the Jews as the central victims of the Holocaust.
* When Trump passed a bill to ban openly transgender people from serving in the military, the ACLU ''almost immediately'' took him to court, for it was unconstitutional.
* Since the passing of the Affordable Care Act, the GOP had called it a failure, due to concerns about government's over-intrusion of patients' personal lives, strict regulations on the medical market, and the rising prices of drugs and premiums, and attempted to sabotage it at every turn. This came to bite them in the ass as when they unexpectedly had undisputed control of the government thanks to [[DarkhorseVictory Donald Trump's unexpected victory,]] they realized that they had [[DidntThinkThisThrough neglected to make a health care plan replacement of their own,]] forcing them to create a plan quickly. Not helping matters for Republicans: with anti-Trump fervor sweeping the nation despite his victory, Democrats were able to turn opinion of the long-maligned law in their favor by shifting focus away from the issues and towards the threat of people losing coverage upon repeal. Indeed, the end result was made FromBadToWorse when the [=CBO=] said that a whopping total of '''24 million people''' would lose their insurance as a result. It was promptly blasted by everyone, including some of their favored news media, such as Fox and Breitbart, and polls for the bill's favorability went as low as ''17%''. To further make them nervous, Trump threatened that if it doesn't pass, they risk getting primaried, only to then say that they will [[MasterOfTheMixedMessage lose their positions if they do.]] As if that wasn't bad enough, it turns out that a not insignificant amount of their base has the very insurance that they demonized, meaning that if they pass it anyway, they might lose their base to either angry voters, or their base dying off. [[ScyllaAndCharybdis Plainly said, the GOP are suddenly in charge of health care with many ways to screw themselves over, and no way without compromising their ideals.]] Eventually, the measure was withdrawn, dealing a humiliating defeat for the House and Trump, the former for being unable to pass legislation in spite of controlling the House, the latter for being completely unable to swing the votes needed to pass, making him look ineffectual. The New York Times [[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/24/us/politics/house-republicans-health-care-paul-ryan.html?ref=politics&_r=0 invoked this trope]] with the headline, "Republicans Land a Punch on Health Care, to Their Own Face."
** In July 2017, the Senate tried once again to repeal Obamacare. But unfortunately for them, three Republicans went rogue and voted against the repeal, dealing another major blow to the administration.
** Part of the reason why the measure failed was due to the Freedom Caucus' generally flippant nature of the ACA, as they wanted a full repeal of the bill, instead of a repeal and replace that most of the others wanted. By failing to compromise, they ensured that the ACA would still be in effect.
** Another petard in this case was the Speakership of Paul Ryan. Elected to the Speakership largely as a figurehead, when Ryan was called upon to provide actual leadership for his party, he was shown to be incredibly ineffectual.
** The House eventually was able to get the Freedom Caucus on board and narrowly passed the bill early in May, and finally celebrated the long-awaited achievement, with chants of "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" sprouting from Capitol Hill. Except the chants came from Democrats, who were certain that by ramming a hugely unpopular piece of legislation through Congress would doom their chances of retaining the House in 2018. Indeed, the left-wing response was intense, with 2018 Election forecasts being quickly moved to the left and record donations funneling in for Democratic House candidates.
* After the 2016 election gave the Republicans control of all three chambers of Congress, they've been taking advantage of this as an opportunity to pass controversial legislation that they couldn't pass under Obama (and wouldn't have been able to pass under Hillary). However, some of the ''really'' controversial bills they passed (such as a bill [[ParanoiaFuel allowing third parties to sell your internet history]] and a bill [[CruellaToAnimals letting people kill hibernating bear cubs and wolf pups on Alaskan wildlife reserves]]) have proven extremely unpopular, causing the GOP major public backlash. It doesn't help them that the bills were passed completely along party lines.
* It has become clear that while opposing Obama on everything was something the GOP agreed on a lot, it has some consequences when he inevitably left office in 2017, namely, [[WeAreStrugglingTogether the fact that none of them really agreed on anything else.]] This led to the above Health Care fiasco and as well as a near government shutdown that forced certain GOP congressmen to compromise with the Democrats, leading to a lot of concessions that ultimately was more liberal than a GOP led Congress would've been expected to make.
* In an example that cuts both ways, James Comey's firing from his position as head of the FBI is a result of this from Comey himself, and a cause for Donald Trump and his administration.
** For Comey, his actions on focusing on Hillary Clinton's e-mails (see below in the 2016 Election subsection for more information on that) led partially to Donald Trump reaching the White House, where it became apparent that some of Trump's team had Russian connections. While investigating, there were subpoenas for Flynn's associates, which led to the administration to fire him in an attempt to distract everyone from it.
** For Trump, his firing was unexpected and extremely poorly timed, and [[DidntSeeThatComing no one expected the Democrats to react negatively, completely under the assumption that their hatred of Comey would have made them happy,]] leading to many GOP senators and representatives to turn on Trump, and potentially have the FBI focus a lot more on Trump's potential ties with Russia. As if that wasn't enough, the letter being sent had Trump admit that Comey, on three separate occasions, assured Trump that he wasn't being investigated, making him seem more guilty. The aforementioned subpoenas also weren't ignored either.
!!2016 Presidential Election
* Late in the 2016 Republican primaries for the party's US presidential nomination, Texas senator Ted Cruz was trying to best Creator/DonaldTrump, a political [[OutsideContextProblem outsider]] who was the [[DidNotSeeThatComing surprise frontrunner]]. After Trump won a huge majority in his home state of New York, and then all the so-called Acela primaries elsewhere in the Northeast, by outright majorities, Cruz realized he could no longer catch Trump in the pledged-delegate count and would have to keep it close in the hope that he could deny Trump enough delegates to win the nomination on the first ballot, then pick up the ones who would be released from their obligation to vote for Trump on the second ballot and instead vote for Cruz. So... he announced that he and John Kasich, the distant third-place candidate, had made a nonaggression pact of sorts in which they divided up the remaining primaries in the hope of denying Trump delegates. But that deal was exactly the sort of back-room politics that Trump had been winning voters running against, and [[http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article74549052.html many of them who might not otherwise have voted for Trump did so as a protest]]. Trump triumphed in the Indiana primaries by another majority, and Cruz quit the race.
** And then when conservatives who never supported Trump cast about for a possible third candidate to support, they were stymied in getting one on the ballot in all 50 states because the deadline for getting a third-party candidate on the ballot in Texas was the week after the Indiana primary. This was part of a "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sore-loser_law sore-loser law]]" in that state passed by Republicans themselves to make it harder for the Libertarian Party to run viable candidates.
* UsefulNotes/HillaryClinton made a few mistakes which, coupled with her ties to the contentious and controversial legacy of her husband Bill Clinton, ended up taking down her party's chances. As it stands, she won the popular vote by a margin of some 2.8 million votes but lost the Electoral College in key states by a very small margin. So her approach wasn't ''entirely'' wrong and these crucial mistakes proved tragic:
** Her first was the private e-mail scandal, in which it was revealed that Hillary had been using a private e-mail server to do official work. Prior to taking up the Democratic Nomination, she had been under investigation to make sure she hadn't been sending sensitive material through it. She was cleared of any wrongdoing a month after achieving the Nomination, though admonished by FBI chief James Comey, for her careless acts. This became Trump's major rallying cry, proclaiming that the system is corrupted and geared to protecting "crooked" people like Clinton. This flared up again two weeks before Election Day when FBI Director James Comey revealed that there were ''more'' e-mails while investigating fallen Senator Anthony Wiener. While she was cleared again, this reignited Trump's calls. This, combined with the already ravaging Benghazi incident, was extremely hurtful to her chances and according to observers such as Nate Silver tipped the election in Trump's favor, despite his own serious Access Hollywood gaffe (which led to prominent Republicans jettisoning their support as opposed to Hillary who still had the support of her party through her scandals).
** Another was ignoring the Rust Belt, filled with the white working and middle class voters that Trump appealed to in this region. Hillary didn't campaign in these regions because it was solidly Democratic and she didn't stop in Wisconsin once in her campaign. This lead to a number of states who have been traditionally Democratic to lean Republican in 2016, including Pennsylvania, who hadn't voted Republican since George HW Bush in 1988, and Wisconsin, which hadn't voted Republican since Ronald Regan in 1984. Apparently, Bill Clinton advised the Clinton campaign to actively try to win them over, but her campaign didn't heed this suggestion, which is fitting. As George Packer noted later, it was Bill Clinton who despite appealing to these Rust Belt white working class, ultimately passed NAFTA and moved the Democrats to a party of "the professional class". And early in the primaries, Hillary was criticized for supporting mass incarceration which increased under Bill Clinton's tenure (albeit Bernie Sanders also voted on the same bill)[[note]]None of this affected her standing among African-American voters who voted for her heavily in the primaries and in the general election[[/note]]. This coupled with the fact that Trump's supporters invoked the DoubleStandard of Democrats ignoring Bill's sex scandals while supporting his overall policies to justify why they voted for Trump despite his more blatant and obvious sexism. This ended up making 2016 a referendum on Bill Clinton's legacy which Hillary, despite being a popular senator and Secretary of State couldn't disassociate herself from.
** Bernie Sanders managed to not only screw himself over in the election, but the whole party with him. While Sanders did have a sizable and devoted base, it was clear early in the primary that he couldn't catch up to Clinton. Bernie stayed in the race however, either out of an honest belief that he had a shot or as an attempt to make the democratic party adopt his socialist platform. While he never really made any headway against Hillary, he did convince a large group of people that the mainstream democratic party wasn't going to do anything to help them. When Bernie did admit defeat he made it clear that Hillary was a far superior candidate than Trump but by then it was to late, and many of Bernie's supporters voted for Trump. This essentially canceled out the Republicans Trump had alienated with his "un-conservative" and populist agenda, allowing Trump to win the election despite his failures.
*** Speaking of Bernie Sanders and Republicans dissatisfied by Trump, Hillary also really didn't take advantage of the split in the Republican party. Rather than advertising herself as the moderate candidate, she tried to win Bernie supporters back by running ads about making "big corporation pay their fair share." In the end many Anti-Trump Republicans decided to let America's checks and balances keep Trump's personality in check rather than let Hillary jeopardize their livelihoods.
** Critics argued that the entire ''party'' was responsible for their own downfall. Republicans and moderate Democrats were sick of the endless peddling of "identity politics" which they saw as PoliticalCorrectnessGoneMad that made people sick of hearing people being called (or having themselves be called) "racist", "sexist", "transphobic", "Islamophobic" etc. for simply having dissenting opinions caused many voters to choose other candidates because voting Clinton would only worsen the situation. When the actual election came, minorities and people of color overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton, but Donald Trump got the vote of 53% of white women, some of whom were middle-class and college educated which to some vindicated that a stronger economic message over social policies had to be emphasized.
** Many of Trump's rivals in the campaign are probably in denial about the massive number of eggs on their faces for making a sensation out of Trump's infamous line about him accusing the votes to be rigged if he didn't win; after Trump won seemingly every single week something came out of the woodwork to either demand a recount of the votes, to call the Electoral College to be rigged, or to say that Russia rigged the elections. In essence they're doing the very thing they mocked Trump for. As the cherry on the sundae, several electors did in fact try to alter the result in the Electoral College, and while Clinton herself never actually backed this, the end result was that a whopping seven of Clinton's ''own'' electoral voters refused to vote for her (three voted for Colin Powell, one for Sanders, and a further three had their votes disallowed and reassigned to Clinton under state laws), while only two of Trump's own electors rebelled, and even then not until after it was clear that the result could not be altered. This therefore gave Clinton the MedalOfDishonor of being the presidential candidate to have the most "faithless electors" in history, beating out UsefulNotes/JamesMadison, who had six of his electors rebel in 1808.
* Donald Trump doesn't get out of this unscathed, though. His LooseCannon ideology, effectively boasting his "I do what I want, screw the establishment" and blowing away his other GOP opponents to win the Republican Nomination, began to wear thin on many people. His inability to control his mouth had turned many people against him with his ultimate mistake being the revelation of an outtake video from entertainment news program ''Access Hollywood'', where he boasted about performing sexual harassment on women, something he never really apologized for, going so far as to blow off women who have come forward to tell their own stories of abuse and trying to bring back former President Bill Clinton's own problem with women. Even more, his anti-Clinton stance reached outlandish levels when he began proclaiming that the entire election was rigged to "protect" a "crooked" woman like Clinton and attempted to coerce people to essentially be vigilantes towards voting. He even threatened to have her arrested if he won during a debate. These sorts of actions ended up turning virtually the entire GOP against Trump, especially those who were up for reelection, and also turned his own ''running mate'' against him. While both candidates were unpopular, Trump's actions initiated an EnemyMine situation - now that Trump [[DarkhorseVictory has won the presidency]], he'll have to deal with a Congress comprised of Republicans, several of whom Trump publicly insulted, who are trying to rebuild their image and Democrats who are more than willing to make his time in the Oval Office either quite short or very impotent. Not only that, but his win prompted large liberal-led protests against him in several cities in the days immediately following the election and after his inauguration, in support with the Democrats' agenda. The protests actually managed to dwarf Trump's inauguration in attendance.
** The transition to Trump's presidency has already had several bumps as many popular Republicans (John Kasich, Marco Rubio, etc.) have refused to become part of his cabinet because they don't want to tarnish their political records by working for such a controversial figure. This has left the Trump camp scrambling to find people to fill positions and resulted in controversial figures such as Steve Bannon being appointed because they're the only ones willing to take the jobs. Keep in mind that Trump's key to success[[note]]according to his books[[/note]] is being able to hire the best people for the job.
** Donald Trump is is the only president in four decades to experience a decrease in popularity between his election and his inauguration. While this was true from immediately after the election, given the massive protests that sprung up, and the fact that Hillary's 3 million popular vote win weakened his claim to a mandate, but Trump's own behavior made it worse. Most presidents take the time as president-elect to reassure voters from both sides that they will be an effective president for all Americans. Trump's spent this time getting into Twitter wars, rallying his base, and generally acting un-presidential, alienating moderates who voted for him and not making liberals any less hostile towards him. Trump had an approval rating of ''40%'' a week before inauguration. By comparison Barack Obama's approval was a whopping ''81%'' during his transition, and George W. Bush, who was from the same party and also owed his victory to a controversial electoral college win (one that unlike Trump's was in dispute for a month), managed to elevate his approval ratings to 63% percent before his inauguration.
*** What's more impressive is that his party's approval rating never dipped below 50% during this time. Usually a president's approval rating is well above their party as a whole.
** As an addendum, Billy Bush, the journalist who conducted the interview the incriminating clips were outtakes from and who joined Trump in treating his gleeful admission to serial sexual harassment as a joke, [[RoleEndingMisdemeanor lost his job due to the fallout]].
** [[http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/13/13848794/kentucky-obamacare-trump Many of Trump's voters were beneficiaries of Obama's policies, chiefly the Affordable Care Act]] (colloquially called Obamacare) which was adopted in red states, [[SerialNumbersFiledOff under different names]]. Trump campaigned on repealing Obamacare and has staffed his cabinet with people who not only want to end Obamacare (which covers 22 million Americans) but also the very popular Medicaid and Medicare policies of Lyndon Johnson. When seeing that Trump was planning to erode social security, Trump voters started [[MyGodWhatHaveIDone expressing regrets and fear that they had been made to vote against their best interests and have their futures and retirement affected by a candidate that they had backed]].
** Trump campaigned on his skills as a clever business mogul and the profits his businesses brought him. However now it's revealed that it's against the law for the sitting President of the United States to own international corporations (specifically because of possible bias for those corporations), Trump might end up losing control (or possibly ownership) of much of his livelihood because of this tiny oversight.
*** Many business that supported Trump and his super-PAC's have already started to see sizable boycotts against them, and Trump's own brand stands to be chief among these. While it's far from atypical for businesses to support political candidates, in this election season most wisely decided to abstain from supporting Trump, if not outright oppose him, after he began making sexist and racist remarks, and several otherwise neutral or right-wing companies supported Hillary Clinton for the purpose of opposing Trump. This makes the corporations that supported him stand out more.
** While Trump's populist message did attract working-class Rust Belt voters who had voted for Obama in past elections, the votes that swung to Clinton that season were also largely his doing. Yes, virtually all of the leftward swing were people fleeing him rather than flocking to Hillary. The main group that swung left was the highly-educated population. Many of them who voted for Romney over economic issues moved to Clinton's camp because of concern's over Trump's moral behavior.
** Trump's surprise victory must have been a repudiation against liberalism, right? Nope: given that he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes and there are clouds of legitimacy surrounding his victory due to allegations of Russian interference, his victory was largely seen as a fluke carried out by the electoral college. Trump essentially accomplished something that no actual Democratic politician could do: he brought the two fractured wings of the party together to oppose him and made them a united force.
* An odd casualty in the election was pollsters, the majority of whom lost credibility by making vastly wrong predictions about the election. Trying to determine which way a state votes is massive undertaking that involves polling thousands of people and hiring professionals that determine how relevant the samples are. As a result, many surveys focused their efforts on "swing states" and barely focused on Red and Blue states. When some polls predicted that Trump could win by flipping the rust belt, most poles predicting a Hillary victory refused to consider this or take surveys in the rust belt. After election day, no one would take them seriously.
* Ben Carson's post-medical career as an inspirational figure has been largely based around his personal narrative of growing from a poor black kid with a supposed bad temper to one of America's most celebrated surgeons. When he decided to campaign to become the Republican candidate for President, naturally, the media decided to look into one of the more sensationalist parts of his story - his supposed attempt to stab a classmate, the failure of which precipitated his transformation into a devout Christian. What the media found was... nothing. None of Carson's boyhood acquaintances recalled him being violent or temperamental; some of them described him as a nerd. Carson soon found himself with the unenviable choice between admitting that he embellished his story (and thus damaging his career on the inspirational circuit) or sticking to the narrative and losing his credibility as a political candidate. He chose the latter, stalled in the primaries, and got bailed out by Trump, who appointed him the Housing and Urban Development Secretary.