There’s been talk in comments about an opinion piece by Robert Kagan published last week in The Washington Post. The title of the piece is “Our constitutional crisis is already here,” and it’s hard to sum up, but I’ll try. One of Kagan’s premises is that if Trump remains on this side of the dirt and is healthy enough, he’ll definitely run again in 2024.
I don’t know if that’s true, but if it is, Kagan’s second premise comes into play, which is that the Trump cult has already successfully undermined faith in elections* for millions and may have put enough state-level levers in place to at least cause massive chaos and potentially violence if he loses again. The evidence for that is solid already, IMO.
Kagan says reform is needed before the 2022 election and that we’re running out of time. He says it will require every Democrat and a small handful of Republicans to act like patriots to address a metastasizing threat of an authoritarian takeover and/or large-scale social upheaval resulting from state legislature fuckery around election results.
Kagan says this must be done to uphold constitutional order, even at the cost — gasp! — of ditching the filibuster rule, which appears no where in the US Constitution. Sadly, that seems extremely unlikely.
One thing I found compelling about the piece is that it lays out what makes Trump a uniquely dangerous threat. People who say he’s a symptom not the disease, that the road to Trumpism leads back to Nixon, Reagan, Bush II or wherever they draw the line aren’t wrong. But they aren’t capturing the full story either, IMO.
I don’t get it, and I never will, even if I live to be 1,000, but Trump is the center of a cult of personality. As Kagan says, Trump doesn’t need to “deliver” on an agenda to keep his followers loyal because Trump being a giant, shouty, self-pitying asshole is the product.
Those of us outside the cult don’t see the appeal, but it’s undeniable, and it doesn’t seem to be waning as we’d hoped after the last election. In that time, tens of thousands have died because they refused to take the pandemic seriously — all because Trump and his disciples told them not to. It’s still happening.
Who else has that power in the Republican Party? In any party? (Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, etc., are trying, but IMO, they’re still riding Trump’s coattails.) So, as much as we’d all like to stuff that shit-bag Trump down the memory hole and speak his accursed name no more, doing that right now would be disastrously premature, according to Kagan, like the dummies in slasher films who let down their guard because they think they’ve neutralized the killer.
Anyhoo, it’s a thought-provoking article and well worth burning a free click and discussing here, IMO. Otherwise, open thread.
*The best of all possible worlds, IMO, is Trump drops dead or otherwise declines to run again, and millions of Republican voters don’t bother to turn out because they don’t trust elections and they hate the institutional Republican Party for disrespecting Trump, even though with few exceptions, Republicans groveled before him. The schadenfreude would be unbearably delightful.
Starboard Tack
Some people find it just too hard to figure things out for themselves. Conformity is a lot simpler.
J.
Thank Mark Burnett for inventing — or reinventing — Trump and making him a cult figure. If it hadn’t been for Burnett and “The Apprentice,” Trump would be a broke nobody. (He was a laughingstock in New York by the ’90s if not before.)
On a related note, it’s amazing to me that Hitler got to be as powerful as he was. But that’s the thing about cult leaders, you never know where they’re going to come from. But once they achieve a certain mass, they are largely unstoppable.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Yeah … the threat of Trump isn’t over until he’s a disgraced reviled corpse.
The same goes for the threat of the GOP, which I will never again see as a legitimate political party after what they did this past January.
Patricia Kayden
Kay
Thanks for continuing to beat this drum, BC. I (obviously) think it’s important and I think the “bigger picture threat” gets lost in the daily outrage.
prostratedragon
For me personally talking about him very much is not healthy –real hatred ain’t good for ya– so not doing so isn’t a sign that my guard is down. Better for me to think about what seems to me important for we the people, and be aware of actions for and against those things. Just using myself as an example.
And wow do you guys talk a lot.
Jerzy Russian
The appeal of Trump for me is about 1000 times harder to understand for me than fantasy football, which itself if totally opaque to me.
Also too, I am not sure undermining the faith in elections is a good idea for any party, since there is a possibility that that party might actually win, in which case the other parties call your election into question. Anyway, the TFG cultists are not known for their intellect, for the most part.
Barbara
Um, I think I could bear my delight quite comfortably. No disagreement with Kagan, I just don’t know how it will ever be beaten into the consciousness of enough people, or even enough politicians. I guess we just need to keep trying.
dr. bloor
Uh huh.
ETtheLibrarian
Relying on enough Republicans in Congress and state houses to be patriots is a very, very big lift.
For decades Republicans have been lying to themselves about who they are and those that are left are either hard core trumpers or are beat down and/or cowardly.
Many Republican voters are fully onboard the crazy train but there are many – thinking my family – that really don’t pay all that much attention to politics but bought into the Republican mythology of themselves. They will likely continue to vote GOP because they is what they have been conditioned to do but I would never say they are hard core trumpers. Until the average GOP voter not on board with the crazy either out of temperament or because they don’t pay attention, punishes the GOP and stops voting for them, nothing will change. Beltway Republican prognosticators and those that have left the party don’t seem to be the norm.
eclare
Around a thirty year old song, and it still sounds great and is more relevant than ever.
Mallard Filmore
When the Arizona fraudit got rolling, the DOJ let them know that their reporting must be backed up with court quality evidence or they will face prosecution. If states claim “confusion”, “chaos”, or “fraud” in upcoming elections to simply declare a GOP victor, can the Feds do the same? Prosecute anyone that participates, including “winning” candidate or even electors? Would the GOP states be conspiring to commit a fraud on the USA?
Here is my doom porn: If the GOP succeeds, China is gonna win.
oldster
There are many things that I do not understand about Trump’s appeal.
But one thing that has become clear to me is that he has a very powerful effect on the people around him, the people with whom he works closely. Although he naturally attracts the depraved and corrupted, he also has a frightening ability to corrupt people who come into his sphere. We joke that his hold on Lindsay Graham involves some sort of blackmail, but I actually suspect that it is based on a powerful force of personality. You can see it in those pictures with Romney, too — Romney is daunted, unnerved, beaten down by proximity to him.
This ability to spread moral corruption, to subdue the wills of those who know better, to suborn otherwise decent people, was a key feature of Hitler and his effect on the German military (which held out against him longer than many other parts of the society). It’s a kind of demonic energy, a positive evil, that many decent people are incapable of combatting. Nothing in their experience prepares them for the depths of his selfishness, vanity, and malice, and they find themselves caught off guard, and soon succumb.
In this regard, I think he is different from the Nixons and Reagans who came before him. Yes, they were extremely bad, and laid the groundwork for him in many respects. But I think he is a uniquely malicious figure in the American experience. And we should not underestimate his ability to continue doing evil.
I never thought I would compliment any of the spawn of Don Kagan, all of whom have blood on their hands from the Iraq War. But that article by Robt. Kagan really is good. Perhaps their father’s death liberated them, at least a little bit.
Starboard Tack
Best case: Republican Nominee Trump dies on stage from massive heart attack at a rally in July 2024. Republican voters boycott November elections. Democrats get majority in House and filibuster proof majority in Senate. Biden/Harris elected with 20 point margin. Dream big.
Uncle Cosmo
Democracy asphyxiates behind bazillionaire Jeff Bozos’s fucking paywall. I guess I’ll have to dig up a deadtree edition at the libe.
Jeffro
trumpov acts out and says the things that his cult members would love to do and say, from the racism to the misogny and to the rule-breaking/norm-flouting of all kinds. That’s the appeal, I think. He tells them they’re perfectly right and fine and never have to change…and certainly not for any librul eleetz!
the constant doubling-down. the constant barrage of BS. The rubes love it. I don’t think DeSantis or Abbott can replicate that, but hoo boy they’re sure trying.
Fair Economist
Trump isn’t the main driver of the current antivax nonsense. That is being driven by social media disinformation, being paid for (both in design and amplification) by those who benefit from it – foreign enemies and snake oil sellers. Bad faith agents have been behind antivax lies all the way back to Wakefield, trying to scare people off the then standard vaccine so he could sell his own.
Trump even made that half-hearted attempt to get off the antivax crazy train, probably because his handlers recognized it will be an electoral liability going forward. But a fake billionaire like Trump can’t successfully oppose hundreds of millions in profits for fake cure sellers backed by Putin’s troll farms. So he gave up.
eclare
@Starboard Tack: I don’t understand how he has survived so far, doing these ninety minute screamfests in the heat, while wearing a suit. Does he have portable A/C’s on stage?
Kent
I could see a lot of best cases. Including that Trump runs again in 2024, clears the field, then absolutely tanks in an utter landslide and brings the GOP down with him across Congress and the states. Every day that goes by, more old MAGA Trumpers die, and more 18 year old progressive voters come of age. The electorate is continually changing and not in Trump’s favor. 2024 will be a MUCH different electorate than 2016.
Roger Moore
While I think there is a Trump cult, it also seems clear to me that there’s more going on than just love for Trump. The cult seems to have picked up on ideas and beliefs that Trump himself has tried to go against. The most obvious is that Trump has shown an interest in pushing vaccination, if only so he can get credit for the vaccines, but the cult has absorbed the idea that vaccines are the worst thing ever. Trump has done a good job of putting himself at the center of the cult, but there’s obviously a lot more going on here than just people worshiping Trump.
burnspbesq
It will be interesting to see if Trump can mount a serious campaign from prison.
JoyceH
@J.:
That always baffled me as well, because to the outside observer, he seemed dumb and unattractive. I always thought that for a person to gain that sort of following, they needed to be persuasive and attractive – I thought Hitler was an anomaly. But Trump made it clear that ugly and stupid is not a deal breaker.
But whatever he’s got, I don’t see anyone else in the GOP who has it. They’re not leading the base anymore, they’re following it.
And for that matter, Trump wasn’t really ‘leading’ the base. They only did what he said when he was telling them what they already wanted to do. Look how quickly he dropped urging vaccinations when that got booed. He looks like a great leader because he stands up there and tells them ‘do this thing that you’re just itching to do’, and then they march off and do it and the media gasps about the Hold he has on them.
Kent
@Fair Economist: Trump has never actually been a leader on any damn issue. He simply puts his finger up to the wind and gets blown along in whatever direction the winds are blowing. He doesn’t give a shit about any partisan issue at all, only what generates applause from the MAGA faithful.
The Thin Black Duke
Meanwhile, Johnny Depp is yelling about “cancel culture”, God help us. Ever since Trump crawled up from his gold-plated sewer, asshole white guys won’t shut up.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I read the Kagan piece once, and a couple of responses to if since, so I may have forgotten or jumbled things around in my head, but I thought the part that Kagan didn’t hit hard enough is that all the things the state Republicans are doing will make it easier for trump if he runs– and I think given his ego and need to dominate I don’t think any thing short of all the McDonald’s catching up to him will stop him– they aren’t doing for trump. I’d bet many of those state legislatures are all in for him, but De Santis, Abbott, Kemp… they’re thinking of their own, they hope, post-trump runs.
In a similar vein, McConnell seems to despise trump, he views trump as a useful idiot who showed all the others how to be shameless, to his (McConnell’s) benefit. Trumpism is impossible without McConnellism, and Romney and Collins, whom Kagan names with more than faint but less than strong praise, are all in on McConnellism.
burnspbesq
The makers of Ivermectin seem as horrified by the abuse of their product as all of us.
Kent
@JoyceH: Hitler basically came to power because so many conservative vested interests in Germany thought they could control him. Until it turned out that they couldn’t. Trump is basically the same. The GOP wanted its tax cuts and deregulation and judges and thought they could control Trump. Turns out they were wrong too.
scav
Just ran across Lin Yutang’s “When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.” Seems apt, although we’ll hope in this case it’s just a tottering floor lamp. Generally QI cheers me. (Still did, on the whole.)
Jeffro
@eclare: it’s a great album! (as was their follow-up)
Betty Cracker
@Fair Economist: & @Roger Moore: I don’t disagree that disinformation is playing a huge role in so-called “vaccine hesitancy,” and that sort of thing tends to take on a life of its own independently of the originator. But IMO, there’s no way we’re in our current situation without Trump’s catastrophic decision to play down the pandemic to save his ass and all the stuff that followed, including contempt for masks as a mitigation tool, the “liberate Michigan” nonsense, etc. He killed those dumb fucks as effectively as if he shot them himself.
prostratedragon
@JoyceH: Your last paragraph, yeah!
MisterForkbeard
@Fair Economist: The problem isn’t that Trump was anti-vaxx, he was anti-Expert, because the experts were telling him he was doing Covid wrong.
He spent a long, LONG time telling people that doctors, the FDA, CDC and others have no idea what they’re doing and they should keep doing whatever the fuck they want with regards to masks, lockdowns, etc. He told them that Covid wasn’t a big deal. He did all this as an electoral strategy.
All of that pushed and amplified the small group of people that would have fought vaccines really hard into a standard position of the republican party. Because covid wasn’t a big deal (and never was) so therefore the experts are full of shit and trying to do something to you.
So yeah, I still blame Trump for all this. Unintended consequences, but that’s one reason why we’ve been constantly aghast at what Trump was doing. He not only fucks up the present, but the future as well.
Kent
Another best-case scenario that occurs to me.
Trump decides to run again, and sucks up all the conservative energy and fundraising through 2023 and into 2024. Sometime in the fall of 2024 when he is taking in the polls, he decides to do a Palin and walks away from the election with his $2 billion in campaign funds in his pocket and leaves wreckage in the wake for whoever the GOP tries to quickly put up in his place.
It has always been about the grift. The mistake he made in 2016 was sticking out to the end instead of dropping out in late 2016 with all his campaign cash in pocket. He won’t make that same mistake in 2024.
Major Major Major Major
Open thread? More fun than thinking about things I can’t control…
Apparently I am running a session of Monster Of The Week (tabletop RPG) tonight! I learned this uh, this morning. This is good, because we haven’t had a session in a while, but now I need to remember all the game mechanics, and the story I wrote… this is what I get for not using a premade adventure… a lot more fun this way though, after a fashion…
Starboard Tack
@eclare: Maybe he has ice packs in his corset.
JoyceH
@Kent:
Basically how Trump won the nomination. Pretty much any one of that host of candidates could have finished him off if they’d gone full throated against his obvious incompetence and corruption. But every candidate wanted to inherit the Trump supporters, so they stood back waiting for someone else to finish him off — and then it was too late.
smith
The Big Lie is the modern version of the Lost Cause. The Confederate monuments have finally started to fall and POC have steadily gained political power, so the Traitor Party needed another angle to undercut this country’s second attempt at a genuine reconstruction.
I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that, contra the popular saying, our history has been written by the losers. The myth of the Lost Cause was kept going for such a long time in part because of the complicity of “respectable” historians and pundits who were willing to go along with the lie that the Civil War was fought over state’s rights and not slavery, and that it was a temporary unpleasantness, not widespread treason.
Now, we seem to be seeing it again. The just-released Eastman memo, a smoking gun if there ever were one, has been completely ignored by the “respectable” press. They want to keep telling the story that the attempted coup on 1/6 was just a bunch of scruffy Goobers getting over-exuberant, not a serious if inept attempt by a president to overthrow the legitimately elected government. We have an unknown number of senators ostensibly on our side who don’t seem to be alarmed by laws that would allow state legislatures to simply set aside the results of elections that don’t go in their favor. We know we can’t trust those legislatures not to do that if laws let them — they already tried it in 2020.
So it’s deja vu all over again. The losers somehow get to set the agenda and dominate the conversation, while the winners can only look on in dismay.
Ruckus
Betty
Ask yourself how many of his brain dead followers actually are similar with the exception of having a household name and a supposedly largish bank account?
Yes he is the product and also the description of the problem.
How many of his followers are saying the same as he always has – “I am special, you have to listen to me!” He managed to convince enough people of similar ilk but not with enough position/money that he should be their leader. Making him that justified their lives of being something, something, because of some trait of their birth made him an example of them but supposedly an actually successful example. It’s like the quiet kid with a D average in school, who wants to be a bully but can’t quite pull it off, gets elected class president and king or queen of the prom. It’s not a believable story, but that’s what makes it an even stronger issue for them. The person who has never earned or won anything, gets the brass ring.
ByRookorbyCrook
Best case scenario, god help me for what I have become, TFG dies right before the Iowa Caucus in 2024. The Republican party scrambles to rally behind an ersatz Lord Little hands and fails hard enough to give us the trifecta. There will be rumbling from the 3%ers and Boogaloo Bozos but without a figurehead to attach their aspirations to, they will remain rumblings.
John Revolta
@oldster:
I don’t know about anybody else but I am not joking when I say this. Graham did a literal 180 after a little game of golf with TFG.
Sure Lurkalot
I’m finding myself aligned with David Rothkopf, questioning where is the DOJ while TFG continues to foment conspiracies and broadcast his law breaking, past and present and plans for the future.
eclare
@smith: Unfortunately, very well put.
Fair Economist
@MisterForkbeard: I agree Trump got the crazy train started. But he’s not driving it anymore, and the switch to an antivax track is one he didn’t want. He certainly deserves blame, but he’s irrelevant to stopping it now.
Starboard Tack
@The Thin Black Duke: Their volume is in direct proportion to the impotence they feel to stop the changes that threaten their privileges.
Matt McIrvin
I assumed that was basically wishful thinking on never-Trumper neocon Kagan’s part. The party of 9/11 can’t possibly be responsible for Trump because Robert Kagan was deep in the middle of that.
Starboard Tack
@Kent: But then where would he get the adulation he craves? It seems to me that Trump doesn’t really care all that much about money, except that it brings/buys him attention.
Wvng
Here in WV it seems that Trump filled a deeply felt need in many, in some strange way he completed them. I will never understand this but it is clearly true.
Kent
@Fair Economist: He didn’t get it started. It’s been going for decades. All he did was jump aboard an an opportune moment and then drive it off a cliff.
Unfortunately we are at the Wiley E Coyote point in the story where all the passengers still think they are going full speed ahead and don’t realize that the ground under them has vanished. The coming train wreck is going to be epic, but will cause a lot of collateral damage as well.
Suzanne
Not at all. To use the language of marketing, Trump is an aspirational brand for ugly and stupid people.
Trump makes people feel good for making stupid choices. He promises a return to a higher social status for the deplorables.
Through a lens of ressentiment, keeping in mind Tyler Cowen’s statement that all politics are about relative social status, Trump makes perfect sense.
Kent
@Starboard Tack: What he really wants is another TV show. If he can scam enough campaign funds he can turn those into MAGA-TV.
Elizabelle
Still have to read the Kagan piece.
I don’t see how we make permanent progress with Fox News and its ilk in the mix. The propaganda; the purposeful disinformation. The utter threat to democracy, which depends on an informed citizenry, not an incited one.
It does not seem right to me that the only party that has (apparently) a strong case against Fox is Dominion Voting Machines. For monetary loss, of business and business reputation.
It seems that we should value the safety of our democracy more.
We will have to figure out some carveout whereby Fox and Facebook and other purveyors of disinformation — which exist to tear our democracy apart — cannot hide behind the First Amendment. It’s past the fire in a crowded theatre moment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are dead of this coronavirus, and the majority did not need to be.
We are dealing with propaganda and brainwashing. Of content designed to incite and inflame and polarlize. This is not an instance of providing better information, because the very nature of the propaganda informs its listeners to trust no other sources.
I am sick of our media betters talking about how our society is so polarized. It did not get that way by accident.
Frank McCormick
Something that is isn’t brought up often enough (at least not anymore): the danger of star-making “reality” shows like “The Apprentice”.
Before “The Apprentice”, Trump was rightly perceived as a puffed up buffoon. It was Mark Burnett and NBC that painted Trump with an undeserved layer of tough competence that stuck in the minds of way too many in the US.
Elizabelle
@Sure Lurkalot: David Rothkopf is a treasure.
Suzanne
@Wvng:
Hey, I kind of get it. Representation matters. We get that when we talk about what it means to see minorities or women or disabled people rise to the top of things. Trump was the first deplorable president. Probably not a nice thing to say, but true.
In all seriousness, this kind of illuminates why a racial lens doesn’t capture Trump’s allure precisely enough. If it was purely about race, there wouldn’t have been a clear demarcation between Trump and Biden voters. Trump’s voters are a different kind of white people than Biden’s. It’s a bit of a category error.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
What’s scary is that they still seem to think either they can control him or the tax cuts and judges are worth letting Trump do his thing.
Ruckus
@Starboard Tack:
He cares about money, but in a different way than normal, money gives him stature that he would never, ever get, based upon his earned stature or even his holdings. That’s why he had inflated his value to be 3 to 4 times his actual worth and no one of any stature actually ever looked, he was too small time to bother.
Anyway
The phenomenon is bigger than Trump — it’s a reflexive opposition to anything tied to Dems. It’s going to be very hard for Dems to govern if they manage to win … yes, I’m a gloom’n’doom-er — these last few weeks have got me down.
J R in WV
@Mallard Filmore:
I’ll fix this for you: If the GQP wins, China and Russia will have already won.
Mai Naem mobile
@Starboard Tack: i don’t even think him dying of a heart attack at a rally held outside during the summer somewhere in the south would work. There would just be a million conspiracy theories of how Kamala Harris had him killed or Hunter Biden shot him with some poison or whatever. The only thing that might work is Donny caught on tape doing something heinous(child pron/ rape) and belittling his followers in a really nasty way calling them chumps etc.
Starboard Tack
@Kent: I don’t think MAGA-TV would work because Trump would insist on being in charge like at the Trump Organization. The Apprentice worked because it was run by media professionals and Trump was basically an employee. After being president, I don’t think he would take direction anymore.
Kay
So she’s probably lying, whatever, but why would she specifically point to Alito? Because of this:
This new far Right legal theory could be endlessly expanded. Would they do it at midnight without a full hearing and with an unsigned order? Oh, hell yes. Just look at Texas.
Lapassionara
I just remember so many people saying “he says what I am thinking.” In other words, he tapped into the id of the American people, and uncorked all the racism, misogyny, and fear of “foreign invaders” that lurked there. A competent press corps would have done something to unmask his incompetence and venality, and to keep those attributes front and center. But somehow, he kept side stepping the manure. Things that would have killed any other candidate went down the memory hole after one or two news cycles.
I keep thinking about the revelations in Woodward’s book, last fall, before the election. Trump’s disdain of soldiers, his failure to lead during the pandemic, all of these seemed like bombshells for a minute, then forgotten.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: I can’t speak to Kagan’s motivations, but I don’t think he’s wrong when he says Trump is sui generis as a political figure in America. I’ve been an involuntary observer of American wingnuttery for decades through proximity and family structure, and I’ve never seen anything like this.
That’s not to say the Republican Party is innocent: as an institution, that party was rotten and hollow enough for a dumb thug like Trump to kick it over and scoop up the goodies. Neocons played their role in making it so, and now they’re either too weak and/or cowardly to fight back or depraved enough to be all in. Neither is a good look.
Omnes Omnibus
@Lapassionara: He may have tapped into the id of some Americans, but let’s not go too far.
Ksmiami
I still think we should start thinking about multiple outcomes/ from smoking crater to a National divorce or a complete Balkanization and realignment. Nothing seems out of bounds
Roger Moore
@Kent:
That might have been enough for him in 2016, but it isn’t now. He’s had the presidency, and he’s not going to settle for something less.
Kay
@Lapassionara:
I think they really fail on timeliness. The information is released months or even more than a year after it happened, and that affects the public perception.
It’s kind of sadly amusing, right? We supposedly have near-instantaneous information transmission but the public only finds out what really happened in these giant fucking meltdowns MONTHS after it happened. We were better off with “Extra!” editions of newspapers. It was faster. Now we’re waiting around for a fucking BOOK.
Kay
@Lapassionara:
I think they really fail on timeliness. The information is released months or even more than a year after it happened, and that affects the public perception.
It’s kind of sadly amusing, right? We supposedly have near-instantaneous information transmission but the public only finds out what really happened in these giant fucking meltdowns MONTHS after it happened. We were better off with “Extra!” editions of newspapers. It was faster. Now we’re waiting around for a fucking BOOK.
Ksmiami
@Kay: we are going to have to handle this inferior court one way or another
Geminid
My Atlanta friend texted me today about his fear of a successful trump rerun in 2024. He’s a very bright man who was a fairly nonengaged Democratic voter until trump beat Clinton, whom he really admired.
I texted back that I did not fear trump so much as a Pompeo or DeSantis who pushed trumpism without trump. trump may still retain his hold over his followers, but I think there is trump fatigue among many of his voters. The only two trump voters I know did not really like him, and were voting against a distorted caricature of the Democratic party and Joe Biden. An example of what political scientists call negative partisanship.
I may be wrong in taking trump lightly. But given the preparations Republicans are making to steal elections, trumpism scares me a lot.
J.
@JoyceH: Yup.
no comment
@Starboard Tack:
I’m not sure that is the best scenario. The strongest supporters are willing to believe Q nonsense and whatever Fox News or OAN is telling them. There would definitely be a murder conspiracy if TFG dies before the 2024 election. That might get R voters to rally around an R candidate and go to the polls. Especially when the mainstream media doesn’t roundly deny the conspiracy. “Some say that his death is due to the combined damage of a positive Covid diagnosis in 2020, poor diet, lack of exercise, drug use, and poor stress coping skills. Others say cause of his death is Kamala Harris poisoning his hamburders.”
ETA: Mai Naem mobile beat me to the point.
Starboard Tack
@Betty Cracker: Republicans left their party parked at the curb with the doors open and the motor running. Then Trump “stole” it. Best case is he drives it off a cliff.
Roger Moore
@Lapassionara:
Not quite. It wasn’t “he says what I am thinking” but “he says what everyone is thinking”. They’re sure that everyone- or everyone who matters- really agrees with them but are to afraid to speak up for fear of the PC police. They can’t imagine that White people might not be white supremacists.
Kay
@Ksmiami:
Just REALLY interesting that Justice Alito’s 12th amendment interpretation that he pulled out of his ass wound up being Sidney Powell’s favorite theory. Alito couldn’t even get that court to go along with it, but Barrett recused or was not part of it- now they have Trump’s favorite judge on board.
UncleEbeneezer
@Lapassionara: This. He’s a racist, sexist etc. bully and that has tremendous appeal to 40+% of Americans. His venality and incompetence only make him MORE appealing to those people because that is part of their fantasy/identity too. They don’t want to be decent or excellent. They want to be shitty and be applauded no matter how incompetent they are.
Geminid
@Kent: Self-described independent conservative M.D. Russ concluded his excellent Bearing Drift article titled “Trump is the Republican President,” by writing, “Trump did not hijack the Republican Party…he just answered the casting call.”
Kent
@Starboard Tack: Oh, it would be a complete train wreck on one level. But also compelling TV on another. Kind of like Trump’s former twitter feed.
Roger Moore
@no comment:
I think the best case isn’t Trump dying but him melting into incoherence under the scrutiny of another campaign. Him dying could be spun in all kinds of ways. Him being obviously incapable of dealing with reality daily on national TV would be harder to avoid.
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
I think the sexist appeal is partcularly rough to deal with because he gets more votes from sexists than he loses from people who are not sexist. Hating women is affirmatively a draw, while NOT hating women doesn’t have the same intensity, even among women voters.
Starboard Tack
@Kent: True. It wouldn’t succeed as a media organization but the debacle would be mesmerizing. That WOULD feed Trump’s narcissistic needs.
Kay
Do they realize they taken a position on the Biden plan?
Jonathan Allen
@jonallendc
You can excitedly claim you’re going to spend $3.5 trillion on the biggest safety net expansion in decades — focusing on the number — then decide it’s bad messaging and passionately insist you’re spending $0 on it. You can’t make others do that.
Just like they were aggressively and passionately pro-Afghanistan war they are working against this bill. That’s twice in 6 months.
Roger Moore
@Starboard Tack:
This. The Republican Party has been a cult in search of a leader for as long as I can remember. There were a lot of party leaders who didn’t want to be cult leaders, and plenty of would-be cult leaders who couldn’t take over the party. Trump was just the first person who was capable of taking over the party and willing and able to act as cult leader. You can argue about why that is, but it’s the basic truth you have to deal with.
smith
I’ve always thought that what scared the bejeezus out of the Goobers about the BLM protests was seeing how many white people joined in.
trollhattan
Pretty much this. “He may be an asshole but he’s our asshole.”
{ring-ring}
“Yeah, I gotta report the asshole has escaped the ready room and is out roaming on his own. Repeat, roaming on his own with no escort and a month of medication.”
“Uhhh, get my broker on the line.”
And, scene.
Suzanne
Once again, Rachel Bitecofer:
“Now, IDK if its just that I’m one of fewer academics that come from the real, unpolished, bottom 50% world, and not the romanticized bullshit painted by J.D. Vance of working-class America- the real one where people have 3 kids from 3 different women and get angry when 1 of them is reticent to let them visit their kid when they get out jail. AGAIN. In THAT working class, sexism, racism, xenophobia, and bigotry run rampant: and not only are these “isms” prevalent, there is a belief that they shouldn’t have had to be buried (see how that relates back to their culture war champion?) That the old days were far superior bc they could just call someone a f&g or slap their female co-worker in the ass is they were in the mood. There was a hierarchy, a caste as @Isabelwilkerson notes, and they were at the top of it. Everything else might be a shit sandwich, their job, their house, their marriage, their debt, but that hierarchy & their place at the top of it- as Wilkerson notes in her book, that shit was SOLID. And now its gone. And do you know who took it? The Democrats.”
smith
It became distressingly clear to me in 2016 that misogyny is well-distributed across the whole political spectrum. It does not delineate the parties nearly as clearly as racism does.
eversor
Part of the problem with stopping Trump is we aren’t willing to point the finger squarely at one of the big, if not the biggest issues out there. We can blame Trump, we can blame the Republican party, we can blame conservatism, we can blame racism, we can blame sexism, but what we refuse to do is blame Christianity. And it’s Christianity that is the real cancer at the heart of all this.
If you go read The American Conservative and look through the authors and the comments you’ll see a few threads. You can’t trust experts/science/elites on COVID because they deny the gender binary and traditional gender roles as true. They think gay marriage is a marriage. They think trans people exist and that LGBTQ is not a mental illness. They support abortion. They don’t allow prayer in schools. They support Trump and fequently openly call for not only an American Orban but an American Franco to bring back traditional families and gender roles and also to enforce Christianity.
The larger reality is we have been in a cold religious civil war for some time now. Each loss Christian American takes they get more violent, more desperate, and more willing to use any means to win. And until we are willing to say “Christianity is not only a problem, it is the biggest problem we face” nothing is going to change. What’s worse is we are going to have to do something about it, and that means going after the Church full force. The younger generations are wising up to this, nothing can be fixed while Christianity has any cultural or political power or any sort of respectability. So getting rid of it must be the first thing we do.
...now I try to be amused
@Geminid:
Someone called Trump the Republican Party’s Remington Steele. For those not familiar with the show, here’s the backstory.
A private investigator finds few clients are willing to hire a young woman. She invents a “boss” named Remington Steele and names her firm after him. Business picks up and everything is going well until one day a con man shows up and tells everyone he’s Remington Steele. The PI can’t say he’s lying without blowing up her own con, so she goes along with it.
The Thin Black Duke
@Suzanne: God, that’s so deep.
Ksmiami
@Kay: I still think we need to put the fear into them from economics to their daily lives- blockade the Supreme Court or pave it over..what difference does it make?
Roger Moore
@smith: The thing that’s really obvious is that sexism is a serious problem within the media. It’s terrifying how many of the men who made decisions about how their networks were going to cover the 2016 election were hit by Me Too allegations since then. But nobody in the media wants to talk about this. They absolutely don’t want to admit that their own bias might have been a factor in the election.
Jeffro
We can think about it all we want – I know I do, sometimes – but let’s work hard to keep, and improve, the democracy we’ve got. There’s a lot of good folks in ‘red’ states’ and a lot of good to be had by sticking together.
debbie
I didn’t know about Kagan’s op ed, but I was thinking about MAGA today and wondered if any of them had been impacted by any of TFG’s six bankruptcies; and if they had, did they not care about getting screwed out of their hard-earned money? It seems impossible Trump hasn’t hurt even one of his cult members.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Kent: Your scenario won’t happen. He can not be a loser. He cant. He will do anything to prove he isn’t. ANYTHING.
Omnes Omnibus
@eversor: The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and a good number of souls to the polls voters would disagree with you.
debbie
@eversor:
Bogus. This is totally Trump’s doing.
Jeffro
@Lapassionara:
@UncleEbeneezer: see comment #16
Geminid
@Suzanne: Bitecofer has an outsider’s point of view that I think adds value to her analysis. She also has a sound base of social science knowledge. Her New Republic article titled “Hate is on the Ballot,” February 2020, gives a good exposition of the dynamic of negative partisanship.
eclare
@Roger Moore: Especially NBC and Matt Lauer.
Jess
There is a surprisingly large number of people who hate excellence and goodness b/c it is such a threat to their self-esteem. Trump was the first president to embrace those people and openly celebrate that hate. The more he was exposed as an incompetent shit, the more they identified with and supported him. HRC was right to identify them as “deplorables”–they truly are the banal evil of society. They’re always with us, but I think the only thing that kept them in check before was that they didn’t have any single cause to rally around. But now they do, and it’s going to be nearly impossible to stuff them back into their baskets. I consider their refusal to vax a blessing in disguise; even if enough of them don’t actually die, a lot will be left struggling with long covid, medical bills, and unemployment. I’m hoping they’ll become disheartened and disillusioned enough to lose momentum. I just hope they don’t destroy us all in the process.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@eversor: I’m not Christian myself, but I’m pretty sure that Christianity is less monolithic and more diverse than your argument implies.
...now I try to be amused
@eversor:
The Spanish Republic did, and they got Franco for it. I’m not disagreeing with you, but that’s the history.
Roger Moore
@eversor:
I think you’re wrong. The problem is not with Christianity, per se. It’s with a specific school of political Christianity that gives a respectable cover to the racism, sexism, and authoritarianism that’s poisoning the body politic. It has little or nothing to do with the actual teachings of Jesus and everything to do with preserving the specific social order its adherents believe in.
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus: So would Rev. William Barber in NC with his Moral Mondays.
Poe Larity
It isn’t all Trump. Remember that there was a huge anti-mask movement in the US during the “Spanish” Flu. There has been a persistent anti-vaxx movement that is not alt-right for decades. There are large segments left, centrist and right who feel or believe they’ve been swimming against the economic tides since Ross Perot got 19% of the vote.
Swirl all that together with Fox and FB and it’s a wonder it took until Trump ambled along for this to take off. Trump was smart enough to realize he didn’t need a party platform, he needed twitter and a media that would willingly amplify his message for free.
...now I try to be amused
@Geminid:
One thing I took from Bitecofer’s article is that as long as negative partisanship sustains the Republican Party, the Democratic Party needs it too. It’s like an arms race.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: I think Bitecofer adds to the dialogue, but I am very wary of suggesting that anyone may have the answer.
Cacti
Short of Trump dying, he will run in 2024, and will do so with the either a majority or a large plurality of Republican voters.
If he wins the nomination, there will be violence when he loses again, or an outright coup attempt by state level Republican parties, rather than the soft coup attempt we saw from them last time.
Biden winning in 2020 just staved things off for a few years. Bad times are coming.
Suzanne
@Geminid: Agree. But she’s hitting the nail on the head here, IMO: a lot of people are shitty and they are drawn to Trump because he makes them feel that their unearned place at the top of the social pyramid will be restored. He makes them feel that their lower status is an outrage.
People around here are mostly very rational and look for things that are measurable and observable, but feelings and grievances are intangible and inchoate. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. That’s why the “relative” part of Cowen’s “relative social status” argument is so critical: these people are not looking for a rising tide to lift all boats. They’re looking to lift their boats only. Trump got that. He spoke to those people incredibly directly. Again, in marketing, they try really, really hard to speak to being that closely. It is hard. Trump is a very good marketer. It is the only thing he is good at. And many people around here don’t appreciate how critical that skill set is to some people, because (I’d wager) most of us don’t have that mindset. Visual culture kind of predicted the rise of Trump, even when political science didn’t.
Starboard Tack
@…now I try to be amused: That sounds like a Nash Equilibrium.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Cacti:
Let’s make it happen!
Cacti
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Fixed my typo, and I agree.
However, I think there is going to organized violent insurrection if Biden wins again.
If Trump somehow wins again, the Republic is dead.
Suzanne
@…now I try to be amused:
Oh, for sure. But that’s the silver lining, for us, anyway. The GOP is now thoroughly the party of the deplorable class. They’re gross. They’re not aspirational. That’s not to say that conservatism is dead and gone, but that the Republicans are now stained by Trump and January 6. Thoroughly and unequivocally the party of dumb, unattractive, uneducated people.
Dorothy A. Winsor
White men are 31% of the US population. If you exclude women and POC, you wind up dipping far below the mediocre to fill the places of people in charge.
Jess
@eversor:
As an atheist, I don’t disagree. But there are enough truly good religious folks (however misguided they may be) that this just won’t be feasible. It might be possible in the future to do a better job of separating church and state (and taxing the church), but freedom of worship is too near and dear to people’s hearts to ever challenge it.
Persecution would make it more attractive, not less. This is why so many churches claim to be persecuted even though they so obviously are not; it’s the only thing that would make it appealing to the youngs. The best we can do is let it die a natural death by providing better alternatives and denying it artificial props.
Roger Moore
@eclare:
It’s way more than just Lauer. If you look up media figures and Me Too, the list is very long. And it only takes a few important people to completely change the way a newsroom covers the issues. Worse, when one outfit takes a particular tack, others tend to follow along. It’s sad to think about how different the coverage in 2016 would have been without that gang of sexists in charge.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Roger Moore: I think Trump empowered his voters with his grievances in one way he didn’t expect and his followers were truly looking for: That they were the people who truly knew what was going on. I see this in Trump supporters all the time: I saw a post on Facebook from one about how we never needed fact checkers until people started saying what was really going on. Trump fed into that need of theirs to be the real American experts so well that they turned it against him with the vaccines. I don’t know how that dynamic will play out.
chrome agnomen
@eversor: i’ve said it for decades: the country was ‘founded’ by religious fundamentalist bigots and misogynists, and we still have not gotten out from under that.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Uncle Cosmo:
Try right-clicking and opening it in a private window; that should work.
Roger Moore
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
I think you’re right, but not for the reason you give. Yes, you wind up with mediocre people if you choose to draw only from white men. But that’s not because 31% of the population is too small to provide all the great thinkers we need to run the country. You could find plenty of outstanding white men to fill every important office in the country. But when you make excluding women and minorities the selling point, you drive a lot of the best white men away, too. You wind up with the kind of mediocrity who can only succeed by keeping the competition down.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
https://www.thedailybeast.com/britains-brexit-panic-buying-gas-freakout-has-europe-saying-we-told-you-so?ref=home
jeffreyw
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
Let us recall that Her Nibs had enough residual power to stave this off, yet declined.
Eolirin
@Omnes Omnibus: He really should have been more specific, because I think that argument can be made for most sects of white Evangelical Christianity
But it’s not like there’s a singular church to go after there either.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore:
Well, yeah, because white men who aren’t ugly and stupid don’t want to be associated with those who are.
Another Scott
I haven’t read the Kagan piece. Michael Lind took him down in a 2019 piece – Robert Kagan’s Big Wrong Idea.
All the stars aligned for TFG in 2016. They didn’t in 2020. I’m confident they won’t in 2024 either. Why?
1) Because the courts – even the SCOTUS – didn’t roll over. The Kraken are continuing to lose. Biden is getting judges appointed quite quickly.
2) TFG was running against Hillary who had 30+ years of press demonization, and Comey, to deal with. Biden-Harris won’t.
3) Our voters are energized. Good things are happening in Congress with Democratic majorities.
Even if GQP states manage to gerrymander their states, we still have the Constitution and parts of the Voting Rights Act to fight suppression. We have shown that we can turn motivated voters out even in a pandemic, even without canvassing, even with all the dirty tricks.
Yes, it’s not easy, and we won’t win everything, but we’re not doomed. The GQP is weak, and TFG even weaker. And we haven’t seen the epic battles once TFG is no longer active…
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@Eolirin: If that is the argument they want to make, they are free to do so. It isn’t the one they made.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: Hear, hear!
Geminid
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: Who is suggesting this? I’m not, and neither is Bitecofer.
PJ
@Another Scott: The problem is that, if the end result is close but for the Democrats, the GOP will again try to disqualify all of the close results, and they are likely to do better at it this time. If they do a better job, they will also have the Supreme Court to back them up.
PsiFighter37
Of course Trump is going to run again in 2024. No other party in modern history has kowtowed so openly to an ex-resident of the White House in such a manner.
Part of me is worried that without Biden, we could very easily lose this race in 2024 (put me on the side of the skeptics that says that Kamala Harris would be tarred in the exact same way Hillary was, but with the added bonus of being a person color), and part of me also knows that, even without Cheeto winning, he would likely bring a big enough lift to the GOP to flip Congress – there is an undeniable effect that there are enough morons who usually don’t vote but will answer the siren song of the con man. But I also think that the fucker being on the ballot for a third time would absolutely cement our hold on the suburbs for good, and that it would cement the trends in GA and AZ (and, hopefully by that time, NC) so that we could make up for losing states like Iowa and Ohio for the foreseeable future.
Sigh. God, what a depressing election that might be – a fucking idiot child masquerading as a 78 year-old man against an 82 year-old Joe Biden. I love Uncle Joe and all, but Christ.
Geminid
@…now I try to be amused: Negative partisanship among Democrats is a fact, and not just on this forum. But it is relatively well grounded in a realistic view of what Republicans are now. I think the other side’s negative partisanship is based on propaganda that paints the Democratic party as much more radical and threatening than it really is. I base this assertion on listening to talk radio and discussions with the few Republicans in my social orbit, who have swallowed the propaganda whole
Jeffro
@Another Scott: co-signing most all of this and adding that I think once indictments start to fall and/or His Orangeness makes even more deranged/violent public statements (hard to imagine, but he really does have room to further devolve) the GQP will be hard-pressed to figure out what to do…and its various factions are not going to agree on a solution.
Omnes Omnibus
@Geminid: Okay, maybe I overestimated the extent of your Bitecofer advocacy. You push her fairly hard and fairly often. If I am wrong, I apologize.
Kent
@Jess: I’m in my mid-50s and I grew up with a shitload of these people who at one time when we were young, were pretty a-political. But now have mostly become raging MAGA assholes. I grew up in the suburbs outside Eugene OR, and despite it’s liberal reputation, every damn guy I knew in HS who is still on FB is a raging MAGA asshole. Mostly they post hunting and fishing photos and MAGA memes.
I think it mostly comes down to resentment of those who made good, which in OR mostly means leaving your insular smaller town or city, and creating a new life somewhere else. Every smart kid in my circle of friends left home at age 18 and never looked back, and are scattered across the larger cities on the west and east coasts. Those who stayed behind know they are getting left behind as the are mostly dinging around in jobs like construction or are bookkeepers or mangers for local small companies, or own shitty small businesses. One guy I went to school with owns a roter-rooter business. Another dings around in real estate and flipping houses. One is a bail bondsman. One or two have been in and out of prison for domestic violence type stuff. They all seem to utterly resent those of us who left to make good elsewhere and we represent a case study in what they did wrong or why they have shitty lives. Rolling the F250 out for the Trump Parade is a way to give a big FU to all of the rest of us.
LongHairedWeirdo
While I agree with the hair-on-fire regarding the law, there’s an even more important part of the puzzle.
If someone tries to kill you, and isn’t punished because they only *tried* to kill you, “our institutions” are not protecting you from would-be murderers.
If the people who launched the attempted insurrection aren’t punished, “our institutions” didn’t even protect us from an attempted insurrection, they just caused people to chicken out of some of the particularly desperate additions to the attempt.
Geminid
@Omnes Omnibus: No apology neccessary. I advocate for this person because she is an upstart without the clout of a Silver or a Sabato, but maybe has a more perceptive take than many commentators and political strategists with established reputations.
Alison Rose
@J.:
Everyone already hated Jews. He told them they were right to do so, because we were to blame for everything bad in their lives. So many German citizens wanted to act all wide-eyed and innocent after, “We had no idea!!!!” when really they were thrilled to be given carte blanche (or whatever the fuck that would be in German) to dial their bigotry up to 11. So they gave him the power because they liked what he gave them.
Sounds pretty familiar.
Another Scott
@PJ: Yes, if elections are close, then there are issues. Witness FL 2000; witness Virginia 2017:
Fair and square, right? Maybe not.
BlueVirginia.US:
(Emphasis added.)
Simonds was elected in 2019.
tl;dr – We defeat their trickery by keeping the margin too large for them to cheat and steal the office.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Geminid: I find Bitecofer more perceptive than most. The more established/traditional pundits really do not do a good job climbing outside of their own heads/social cohorts. No one (who is not deeply ideological and/or Very Online) gives a shit about policy. She is able to do that much more successfully.
This is the real limitation/bias of our legacy media, I think. Not really left/right, just deeply provincial.
pat
@smith:
That is the best analysis I have ever seen. Thanks.
Benw
@PsiFighter37:
The big question is will the tech giants replatform him if he does. I can’t picture running a modern campaign where the candidate has 0 internet presence, and I’m certain TF fucking G can’t figure it out.
Mike in NC
Sadly, millions of Idiot-Americans want nothing more than a shouty, vindictive, white supremacist to lead them back to the Promised Land of the 1940s.
Geminid
@…now I try to be amused: Bitecofer definitely advocates more aggressive messaging by Democrats to exploit the dynamic of negative partisanship. She thinks that centrist “conversion” messaging tactics yield little result, and that base mobilization is where resources should be focused.
Bitecofer points out that people tell pollsters that they dislike attack ads, but data shows that negative messaging in fact works. She approved of the Newsome recall campaign’s use of what she called “threat-emotion-stakes” framing in their ads.
Obviously, none of these ideas were discovered by Rachel Bitecofer. She just expresses them clearly in her longer writings as well as in her interesting twitter feed that includes the obligatory pictures of her dog Hammie.
Cacti
@PsiFighter37: Harris has more natural charisma than Hillary, but she would absolutely get the same playbook thrown at her. It worked once, why would they change it?
It would be an endless stream of Willie Brown, why doesn’t she have any biological children, etc.
janesays
@burnspbesq: I think it’s pretty clear that AG Garland feels no sense of urgency about putting him there. Unfortunately.
Suzanne
@smith:
YES. They thought everyone saw BLM the way they did. The fact that their Social Betters in fact largely see BLM as a positive thing is an indication that they are, even more than they thought, not aspirational.
Everyone wants to be aspirational. Everyone wants to be pretty or handsome or have a nice car or hold the esteem of others in some way.
Tony Gerace
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that his cult loves him exactly because of all the reasons why I hate him. He is everything they are — stupid, lazy, selfish, hateful — yet he is famous and (supposedly) rich. He is what they are — magnified. If he had an ounce if intelligence or decency they wouldn’t love him
Suzanne
@Geminid:
This is because she deeply, deeply understands that most voters do not give a shit about policy.
Roger Moore
@Alison Rose:
I think a huge part of what let Hitler come to power was complacency. The powerful people on the right thought they were really in charge and Hitler was just their catspaw. A lot of people on the center and left thought he was dangerous but likewise thought the serious people on the right would keep him under control. My grandfather was lucky that he was one of the few who didn’t think Hitler would be reined in, and he was at the stage of his life where he could relocate to another country because he was scared of the political environment at home.
smith
We keep forgetting that TFG did have his own very bestest in the world blog, and nobody came. Also, as far as I know, there’s nothing stopping him from spouting off on Parler or Jabber or whatever the Goober next big answer to Twitter is. They’ll flock to him if it’s convenient, and if it’s where everybody else goes, but they won’t follow him to lonely corners of the web. Sometimes I think he has been reduced in their minds to a mere symbol, with as much substance as a statue of Stonewall Jackson
Barbara
@Geminid: Just like they tell you when you call them how much they hate being telephoned (I know! I hate it too!) but evidence shows that telephone banking works to get people to the polls.
artem1s
I get why there is concern about 2024, but 2020 was TFGs best chance. He had control over the GQP fundraising apparatus, large swaths of the the federal government and potentially state legislatures and failed epically to produce a win. His brand is significantly diminished with donors and the people who paved the way for him in 2016. Despite the media’s obsession with Cletus safari’s, anti-vaxing, secession leaning loons, the truth is the MAGA cultists aren’t a majority in their own party. And the GOP is losing voters every day on top of that. I think it’s a stretch that the GOP will let him anywhere near the money in 2022 or 2024. Yes, they’ll trot him around to rallies as long as he’s not a threat to the party retaking Congress. But no way are they going to let him run apposed in the primaries like 2020 or let the media make a circus out of the debates like 2016. I doubt TFG ego will allow him to chance another loss like 2020. if they offer him the trappings of a former POTUS, I think he’ll grab it just for the attention.
@Kent:
I could see this being the outcome if the GQP allows him to be the nominee. But IMO it’s not likely they will be willing to pull the same strings on his behalf again – if only because the other power hungers assholes smell blood in the water now. No way TFG outlasts the Bush/Cheney apparatus. If he doesn’t accept a ceremonial position in the primaries, they will burn him just like they burned McCain in 2000 to clear the way for W.
Imagine if you will a GOP primary debate schedule with TFG as the moderator, Apprentice style, declaring each week one of the GOP candidates FIRED! For a paycheck and the attention, he’ll follow whatever script they give him. Far safer for him to be the Kingmaker than chance another humiliation like 2020.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Same thing happened with the 1918 Pandemic. Were was Trump?
Same things are happening in Europe. Were is Trump?Same thing is happening in Russia, against the will of it’s own strong man dictator, were is Trump?
The only thing I see common in all three of the above is the MSM so of course they would blame an outsider for situation they help create with their damn bothsiderism. Just like they pointed the finger at radio, TV and social media. And for those you who think history begins in 1930, no the current MSM easily dates back the to the middle on the 19th C.
Mike G
@Patricia Kayden:
Ever wonder how Australian police could figure out in 1987 that Trump had too many mob ties to operate a casino in Sydney but USA has yet to connect any dots with his criminality?
Because NYC is corrupt AF. Their sleazy culture of impunity for the rich is a major reason this rancid troll doll never had his fame derailed by a well-deserved stint in jail.
The Trump hotel on the Vegas strip is one of very few without a casino; management claim they “didn’t want” one (yeah, right).
Another Scott
@Suzanne: I’m not sure what to make of Bitecofer as a whole. Yes, she was right in calling the 40-seat pickup in the House, and that’s big.
But she also does things like praise Cheney in her 60 Minutes interview. And approvingly post some meme about W being re-elected.
She was on the Lincoln Project’s list of notables for a while. And why did she set up a PAC??
She’s worth listening to, but I don’t know how realistic her strategery is (which doesn’t seem all that out-of-the-ordinary in many ways):
I guess she has an infinite budget?? Of course Team D would do that too with enough resources – it’s not rocket surgery. TFG had billions in free press, airtime, web time – even when he mocked them and had them put up empty lecterns for hours. Team D doesn’t have that pull with the media.
:-/
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
jonas
That’s pretty much my take as well. He’s an absolute tornado of narcissism, cruelty, and assorted delusions of grandeur that would have landed normal people in a special facility long ago. The fact that ca 40% of the country looks at that and goes “now there goes a *real* leader” scares the shit out of me.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: It’s a good thing your grandfather did not underestimate Hitler. The man had a cunning understanding of the risk averse nature of elites. He used this to co-opt Germany’s business establishment and military, and to bluff the British, who were still trying to buy him off just weeks before Germany invaded Poland. Chamberlain hoped that billions of pounds of offered credit would induce Hitler to turn on the Soviet Union, which many in Britain’s upper class regarded as their gravest enemy.
Hitler made a deal with the Soviets instead. Stalin understood that Hitler still intended to attack Russia some day, but thought he could buy needed time to prepare. But Stalin did not forsee how easily France would be conquered, and then, uncharacteristically, let himself be surprised.
Roger Moore
@artem1s:
I think you’re making a category mistake by talking about what the Republican establishment will let Trump do. If there’s one thing we should have learned from the past few years, it’s that the Republican establishment has very little power to tell anyone what they can and can’t do. Or rather they can tell people what to do, but they have no power to make anyone do it. In 2015 and 2016, Trump repeatedly ignored what the establishment wanted, and all they could do was to sputter in indignation and eventually acquiesce. They aren’t going to have any more power over him as an ex-president than they did over him as an ordinary candidate. If Trump chooses to run, there’s very little the establishment can do to stop him.
Ksmiami
@Tony Gerace: anyone who supports Trump at this point is a shit-human. Sorry I really really wish we could strip them of their citizenship
Jess
@Kent: Yep. I’m about your age and grew up in Madison, WI, another liberal jewel of a city surrounded by white trash. I was bullied constantly by the kids whom I’m sure are MAGAts now. I never quite understood why I was targeted for so much nastiness until the Trump era. And then I got it. It was political, not personal.
Ruckus
@oldster:
Remember Nixon was a piece of work and his boys did a lot of very nasty stuff to keep him in power. trump’s followers far outnumber Nixon’s bad guys but seem to be barely amateurs compared to Nixon’s. And Nixon had the personality to have been involved and to hire bad guys to do his bidding. trump is so in love with himself that while he might be capable of nothing but crappy at best, his planning, organizing and carrying out complex plans abilities are sketchy at best. He thinks the world of himself, far less of everyone else. He does trust some but as the old saying goes, seemingly only about as far as he can throw them.
Roger Moore
@Geminid:
I think people underestimate Chamberlain. Like most politicians, he had a tendency to say what he thought would sell well to the public and kept his personal opinions closer to the vest. I don’t think he believed that selling out Czechoslovakia to the Germans would buy peace; he just thought Britain was behind Germany in rearming and needed more time to catch up. That’s why British rearmament didn’t slow down when he was announcing “peace in our time”. He still made a grave mistake- Czechoslovakia was actually a more valuable target for Germany than Poland was, so letting the Germans have it put Britain further behind in rearming- but it wasn’t in thinking he could buy Hitler off.
Sam
Trump is doing rallies in places like Perry, Ga. I hope he runs. He will get crushed. After all, he lost by 3M in 2016 and 7M in 2020. That says he loses by 11M in 2024. The Trump model needs to be crushed at the polls, there is no other way it goes away. LA is not going to be ruled by Pierre, ND, no matter how fervently the rurals desire that outcome. I say bring it on, I’m ready.
Geminid
@Another Scott: Democrats must have spent upwards of a billion dollars on political campaigns last year. If Bitecofer thinks she can make efficient use of resources, why shouldn’t she set up a PAC? If you read her output in total, you would have a hard time showing how she is any less ardent a Democrat than you (albeit with a deeper base of knowledge).
Trying to dirty up Bitecofer with her association with the Lincoln Project is specious guilt by association. Those people just recognized talent when they saw it. She and fellow “Senior Advisor” Tom Nichols both say they were unpaid advisors, and I don’t think either would make such an easily disproven assertion were it not true.
Ruckus
@burnspbesq:
They know it does nothing for Covid except redirect idiots from the main thing that does. And that’s not a plus for them.
Ruckus
@MisterForkbeard:
I’m not sure I’d call unintended consequences on trump, maybe unintended means to get his way, because he’s not all that great at planning, preparation, carrying out process. He’s good at hate/racism, pretty much everything else is self promotion and he’s really not that good at that. He started with enough to end up with 12-14 billion with little effort more than investing in a major fund, but he was only capable of about 25% of that and failure at most everything he’s tried to get more, complete any project well. The only thing he’s ever won was president and he did that by selling hate and the concept that he was far wealthier than reality. IOW lying and BS.
Geminid
@Roger Moore: The “buying off” of Hitler I referred to was detailed by Anthony Read and David Fisher in The Deadly Embrace: Hitler, Stalin, and theNazi-Soviet Pact, 1939-1941 (1988). The authors describe an offer, made through Chamberlain’s fixer Horace Wilson, of £8 billions of loan credits to Germany. This was about a month before Hitler invaded Poland.
The Deadly Embrace is gripping history, and I believe it was well researched. It was the basis of a BBC documentary, and contains a lot of material about public and private diplomacy, and character studies of actors like Chamberlain, Daladier, Polish Foreign Minister Beck, as well as Hitler and Stalin. The book traces the genesis of the Molotov-Ribbontrop pact, from the first tentative signals to it’s swift consummation at the end of August 1939. It then covers the period between then and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. A fascinating book.
...now I try to be amused
@smith:
Yes, the TFG blog flop showed that the greatest part of Trump fandom is the community, not Trump.
I think Trump has always been a symbol to them. Witness the meme posters of Trump with a muscular body and other unrealistic stuff.
Robert S
@Ruckus: On that same note, I point you to this podcast interview with historian Timothy Snyder: https://www.npr.org/2021/01/20/958828047/the-anatomy-of-autocracy-timothy-snyder
He talks about the big lie, and our wanna-be fascists. He points out something interesting: Unlike other fascists, the MAGAts have no vision – Usually these people have some sort of vision for the future. The Trump people simply don’t.
Geminid
@Kent: Next year’s Georgia elections will tell a lot about trump’s political strength. My Atlanta friend thinks that trump’s power is essentially negative, that his efforts to control the Georgia party will succeed in the primaries at the expense of general election prospects. My friend acknowledges that the Republicans might lose but still steal the election.
The Georgia Senate and Governor contests are problematic for that state’s Republicans. Trump appeared in Perry on Saturday with an almost complete ticket. He had Secretary of State, Lieutenant Governor, and Senate candidates. He obviously wants to take Governor Kemp down, but so far no Republican of substance has volunteered for the job. Trump did signal that he would rather see Democrat Abrams win than the disloyal Kemp.
Herschel Walker will be a weak Senate candidate, I think. There is nothing in Walker’s history since his football career that suggests he is up to taking on a strong opponent like Raphael Warnock, and there is a lot that suggests he is not.
The success or failure of Walker and other trump-endorsed candidates across the country will condition the attitude of Republican leaders and some voters towards a trump 2024 candidacy. But trump showed in 2016 that Republican elites can’t control a majority of their voters. So trump can still win nomination, but I don’t think he can gather much support beyond his hard core of supporters, and will lose the general election by an even larger electoral vote margin than last year’s.
Of course, if the nation’s economy goes south, all bets are off.
Another Scott
@Geminid: Biden by himself raised over $1B.
OpenSecrets says the total 2020 election cycle cost $14.4B:
(Emphasis added.)
She’s got her work cut out for her.
Cheers,
Scott.
Librarian
@Another Scott: “free reign”
LadySuzy
@Roger Moore: He’s obsessed by revenge against Joe Biden and democrats.
Let’s hope he is also obsessed by revenge against McConnell.
Sam
@Geminid: I’m with you on this. Republicans setting up to steal elections because they know a Trumpy party is going to lose more fair elections than it will win.. Poor candidates, because no self respecting person would debase themselves. Limited appeal. In the end the policy nihilism coupled to owning the libs just doesn’t do much for most people. And the coup de grace, a twice impeached, mentally and emotionally wrecked octogenarian at the top of the ticket. Nope, it will be bad for them, and honestly I think many understand this. It is only the Trump mafia tactics that keep them in line.
Ruckus
@Robert S:
Having any kind of vision for the future would mean they aren’t the people they act like, because they only see life in a rear view mirror.
Conservatives generally always look back, their entire world is about what was, not what is and making the future that again. They are the backasswards political party, always seeing life as better in a rear view mirror, never being able to see the possibilities, especially the possibility of better for all, only what they think it was and actually almost never was. trump is their leader because that’s all he is, backasswards.
RaflW
@dr. bloor: Right.
Liz Cheney is not going to save our democracy. She is out there this week calling Biden’s policies “dangerous.” It may seem mild compared to TFG and others.
But it’s the same authoritarian bullshit, just soft-peddled a bit. The claim that what Joe is putting forward in his agenda as a danger to America is functionally not different than all the Republican noise about Democrats being illegitimate.
She isn’t doing a “we’ll get our turn, and our ideas are better” that signals agreement that elections have conserquences. She’s saying “get rid of this guy, he’s a commie.”
Fuck her. I don’t care if she was never Trump for some iota of time.
Morzer
We like people who behave and talk in ways that we find congenial. That’s why the Trumpzis adore their Death Cult leader – they look at him and see themselves in diarrhea orange saying their inner monologues out loud. They don’t care about dishonesty, ignorance, incompetence, inconsistency, racism, stupidity, greed and all the rest of the shitshow. They applaud them, because those are the qualities that they themselves possess and have been defending against a disapproving world all of their repulsive lives.
Another Scott
@Librarian: [ snort! ]
Wrong thread!!
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
burnspbesq
@janesays:
Garland is the least of Trump’s worries. Keisha Bottoms has him dead to rights, and Cy Vance isn’t far behind.
Hellbastard
Blazing solo by Vernon Reid, btw.
Uncle Cosmo
Unfortunately it doesn’t – the “Subscribe to continue reading” page continues to block access. Thanks anyway.
May one of Jeff The Bozo’s rockets land on his head.
dww44
@Kay: Just now reading, this and so agree with it. The problem, as it ever was and is, is too much money polluting the political system and a for profit model for media. Journalists pay for access and then get paid back by writing a book after the fact.
Have just been reading Rachel’s Bagman about Spiro Agnew’s fall from grace and power and although I remember that time I was a new Mother and my attention wasn’t focused on it so much. I do remember that Agnew was a rabble rouser but I didn’t remember how enthralled the Republicans were, especially the women, by Agnew. The GOP has always been enthralled by strong talking men with low character and ethics and morals.
Uncle Cosmo
In the short run – the next 162 weeks – she may very well be right. Although IMO it is critically important for Democrats to verify this by digging down deep into the stratum of votes left on the table in the last few years, and not just working out how to get them, but also how to immunize them against Global Oligarchy Putschist shenanigans. And not just the quasilegal maneuvers to delay, deflect, and ultimately deny their votes. Democrats ought to set aside significant resources for deeply vetting any and all candidates for office and defending them against the scurrilous crap that’s sure to come vomiting out too late in the election cycle to counter.
The problem is that in the long run this may not be sustainable. With ~40% of the electorate embedded in a tribe of bigotry and resentment it’s tightrope-walking over the abyss. The continuation (or restoration!) of civil society requires “peeling off” – slowly, patiently – enough of the tribe to shrink the remnant down toward the “crazification factor” and render polite society overwhelmingly unfriendly to what’s left. Treating all of those folks like The Other bids fair to massively complicate the process – if not render it impossible.
Uncle Cosmo
Once you secure the necessities of life, everyone wants significance and agency – to matter (to someone[s] they believe are worth mattering to) and to have the ability to affect the conditions of their existence. And these are precisely the things that those people believe pre-Trump US society stole from them and handed over to the Others – who don’t look like them, talk like them, worship like them, love like them, etc. etc. etc., IOW aren’t members of their tribe. And the people they really hate aren’t those Others but those who came (or claim to be) from their own tribe who, instead of perpetuating the tribe’s privileged position in society, turned traitor.
Anyway, that’s the narrative that seems to have been foisted off on them – the explanation for why their ancestors’ lives were so great back in the 1950s but their lives are so miserable.
I’d like to see the Democrats counter with a narrative of their own explaining how they’ve been systematically robbed of the fruits of their toil by the super-rich who deflected the blame onto The Others. Sadly, Democrats do policy, not narratives.
Pro TruckingCompany
For me personally talking about him very much is not healthy –real hatred ain’t good for ya– so not doing so isn’t a sign that my guard is down. Better for me to think about what seems to me important for we the people, and be aware of actions for and against those things. Just using myself as an example.
And wow do you guys talk a lot.