The best thing that ever happened to Bush the younger was Trump. I thought Bush was the worst! Nope. Then I thought Romney might be worse (dodged that bullet). Then we got Trump who is truly the worst. But is he? DeSantis is on the sidelines and arguably even worse than Trump (basically Trump but not as stupid…maybe).
I’ve long since given up on hoping that republicans can’t get worse. They continually outdo themselves when it comes to being awful.
You are thinking about this all wrong. They tried “normal” conservative candidates like McCain and Romney, that had some crossover appeal, but lost. Then they thought “hold my beer” and reached way down to the bottom of the latrine and came up with Trump, who had little appeal on the left, and low and behold they won! The playbook is forever changed and now it’s to find the least acceptable person to the libs, because trying to run “normal” people doesn’t work.
As mentioned, one of the problems with “stopping Trump early” is that none of the candidates dared to be the one(s) who stepped forward from the start saying “NO, dammit, this guy is NOT representing your values, sit gown and shut up Donald, you’re just in for the Twitter likes”. Because they were all counting on his obviously dropping out early and then harvesting his voters by having treated him kindly. In that sense, Trump was right, they were all “weak”.
And the thing about these people, is that when the village is in flames and they have lost their hat, they’ll say it is all the fault of the establishment types who tried to apply the brakes.
“And any plan where you lose your hat is…?”
“A bad plan?”
“Right again!”
Nitpick:
Much as I love the phrasing “Low and Behold!” when referring to Trump, the phrase is properly Lo and Behold!
Yeah, it’s all about what you mean by “The Republican Party”. Those insiders who do the day-to-day running of the party, collecting money, buying ads, and that sort of thing, don’t have the power to do anything. But the candidates did have a choice.
But the problem is, this would require almost all the other candidates being willing to sacrifice their own personal ambition to support someone else, for the good of the party and/or the country. And “Personal sacrifice for the greater good” is pretty much the exact opposite of everything the GOP has come to stand for over the last 40+ years. They propagandized themselves into a situation where they literally cannot work together to stop someone like Trump, no matter how awful they think he is.
Nutpick:
Much as I love the phrasing “Lo and Behold!” when referring to Trump, we have more than enough evidence that Trump is not as low as the Republicans can go.
Let’s start using “Limbo and Behold!”
I used to think DeSantis was smarter, and maybe he is, but given the stupid fight he picked with Disney I’m not sure he could actually get things done any more than Trump could.
Yeah DeSantis comes off as a petty, vindictive little prick when it comes to Disney. For a guy who’s been running for president for about three years now, you’d think he’d have better judgment about what fights to pick.
A big part of not stopping Trump early was the news media. That includes the media that’s perceived as left or center, maybe more so. Trump was awful in the debates. Like them or not, other candidates had thought out answers and positions. Trump talked much less than any of them. His answers were stupid when he even attempted to answer. If you didn’t sit through the debates and just watched the news coverage you would think Trump dominated the debates. He got 90% of the coverage showing his insults to the other candidates. It was good for ratings and bad for the country
To understand things you have to look at right wing media. To many of those likely to vote in a republican primary Disney is the enemy and the biggest symbol of wokeness in the world. The Fox Facebook page has at least one, sometimes multiple anti-Disney stories on a loop everyday. This a campaign strategy. It’s not supposed to work on you. You are not the target audience.
For sure. His dumfuckery du-jour was a never ending bonanza of airtime filling material for the media, and a shite load of free air time for DJT that another candididate would have to pay for ad spots.
I remember still a quote from some news media figure regarding the coverage of him during the runup to the 2016 elections. It was ( IIRC ) “He’s been great for our ratings but I worry if we are complicitous in electing the 4th reich”. Nice of them to shed crocodile tears for the end of civil discourse in political coverage.
I remember sitting in a pub for lunch in 2015. When we sat down, the tv was on with a video of a lectern with « Trump » on it. The CNN trailer said « we’ve been told Mr Trump will be speaking in a few minutes. »
We ordered our meal. Same shot while we waited for it to arrive. Same trailer about Trump « soon ».
Our meal arrived. CNN switched to two talking heads about how they expected Trump to speak in a few minutes.
We ate and paid. When we left, same shot of the lectern with « Trump »
He just got close to an hour of free advertising from CNN.
Played them like the rubes they were.
And then there was his policy statement at Trump Washington Hotel.
Trump was in the lobby of his brand news Washington Hotel, going to give a major policy statement.
The news media send people to cover it.
Once they arrived, Trump said something like, “Glad to see you’re all here. Really excited to be making this campaign statement at Trump Washington Hotel.”
Then he started walking down one of the corridors, talking all the while about his great new hotel. The media followed like sheep, broadcasting shots of the gaudy lobby, the gold ceilings in the hallways, and so on.
Trump wandered on for about 10 or 15 minutes, talking about looking for a good place to make his statement, pointing out the features of the different rooms.
Then a staffer came up to him and said, “Mr Trump, there’s that other appointment now.”
And Trump says, “right, thanks for coming, everyone” and walks away without ever making a policy statement.
But he got 15 minutes of free advertising for his hotel from the gullible news media.
This is the/a thing, like Trump’s Georgia indictment thing. Did we really need coverage of a NJ and a GA motorcade? On one hand I am entertained by his vulgarity, but on the other hand I am complicit in the advertising for him.
Who seemed to be under some sort if impression that at some point they’d catch him saying the thing that would be too much.
Joe Scarborough treated him respectfully, interviewed him on several occasions, loaded him down with publicity, and then after Trump turned on him (and Mika) with his typical casual contempt, only then did they start criticizing him and the other media for paying too much attention to him. “Hey, as long as he’s not treating me personally like I’m a piece of shit on his shoe, he’s entitled to be taken seriously on my air.”
There was nothing the GOP could have done. Trump is entertaining. People are bored and want to be entertained. It’s a simple as that. All the other reasons for his success stem from that one aspect.
The best the GOP could have done, as others have suggested, is to get all but one mainstream candidate to drop out. Except it wouldn’t have worked. The mainstream candidates all had their turn in the spotlight and the primary voters judged them boring and moved on.
Social media has completed what talk radio and comedy news programs started: the transformation of politics into entertainment. Everyone has a strong opinion on politics now; that simply wasn’t the case before.
Conservative are entertained when Trump ‘owns the libs’, or says what they have been thinking, or suggests a useless, simple solution to a problem. They don’t care if he follows through – that’s not entertaining. But what is entertaining is to believe he didn’t follow through because of some ridiculous conspiracy.
And liberals are entertained too. We’re getting our dopamine hit from doomscrolling, participating in the endless threads about Trump, hijacking any thread tangentially related, making up funny insults for him, intimating his childish speech patterns. It’s why I think it’s scary to hear Jon Stewart as a dream candidate.
Of course the media loves him too. He gets endless free press just for saying something ignorant, insulting, or out-right racist.
Politicians from both sides love him because he is a fund -raising dream.
This is the secret to his success. I suggest that his lowest point in popularity was after the 2020 election, after the Twitter boot, and before the raid. He stopped being entertaining and people moved on to new crazies.
I liked Denis Leary’s take on this which was long the lines that since JFK got shot on live TV, everyone has been afraid to change the channel in case anything else exciting happens. With the Trump plane and motorcade, it’s not so much that it is interesting in and of itself, it’s more that if it gets interesting they want to be broadcasting live when it happens.