The chair of the UO Faculty Club’s Refreshments and Entertainments Committee has asked me to post this message:
Dear UO Faculty Club Members:
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will be speaking at the Lane County Fairgrounds on Friday. His campaign organization has sent the Faculty Club 100 free tickets for this important event. I think it’s a shame that no one has yet taken me up on these free tickets, despite my repeated emails.
Good faculty turnout might give us some much needed goodwill should Mr. Trump be elected and then appoint Dr. Ben Carson as Secretary of Education, as is the conditional expectation.
UO Board of Trustees Chair Chuck Lillis gave $5,000 to Carson after Carson went on Meet the Press to argue that the Department of Education should encourage students to report professors with extreme political biases for investigation. The video is on youtube here.
I know some of you are not entirely enthusiastic about Trump or Carson, or for that matter Lillis, but zero faculty turnout is just going to give them another story to use about how tenured deadwood extremist liberal professors won’t listen to mainstream political views. This is not going to help UO’s brand.
And yes, I did ask, and I’ve been promised that Trump’s pitch for those Florida time-share condos will be brief. So please email the club’s Refreshments and Entertainments staff at [email protected] if you are interested in attending.
Thanks.
I hope I’m wrong, but I think these guys https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/Eugene_Anarchists.jpg are going to mess things up.
Will they give out Trump Steaks?
If I had time, I might well go, if only to understand better the people who support him. After all, I completely misunderestimated him. And his telling political correctness to shove it has a great understandable appeal.
I would not bet against him being the next President, like it or not.
What, you really want to understand the people that support him? In my view, Trump has merely awakened our myopic tendencies towards quick, stupid and brutal solutions. Us academics don’t think this dormant nature really exists as widespread as it does, since we never get out …
But hey, at least its a nice day to get Trumped ON
Yes, I really would like to understand them.
Good luck – when you achieve this understanding, please present it here.
It’s not hard “to understand them”, as though they aren’t your neighbors.
There are several basic topics that have been around for years now which deeply concern Trump supporters: loss of jobs due to global treaties, loss of opportunities for upward mobility, loss of wages and benefits, loss of healthcare due to the now Unaffordable Care Act, illegal immigration, senseless foreign interventions, and the political elites of both parties who can find ways to line their own pockets, calling it “governance”, while the majority of Americans wonder how they’ll encounter future hardship should they get sick again, get laid-off, or discover retirement has been postponed by years.
The frustration is palpable, and Trump and Bernie have openly addressed it in ways that touch the hope “those people” have that things can be changed… really changed. What will continue to fuel their anger is the growing realization that their Republican vote doesn’t count as far as their own party goes….that the heads of “their party” would much rather see Hillary elected–you know, the one they all say should never be elected–than take a chance on Trump and the change he’ll attempt to bring. The likes of Ryan, the Bushes, Romney and McCain are demonstrating their real self-serving, top elite colors to the very voters they have courted, counted on and then dismissed until the next election. They know Trump will bring them down.
Also, an article from the NYT last week:
“How the Other Fifth Lives”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/opinion/campaign-stops/how-the-other-fifth-lives.html?_r=1
Chuck Lillis is looking rather prescient with that early support for Carson. Trump has given him the same job W gave Cheney: finding his VP. Maybe the club should rethink that honorary membership for Lillis, just in case?