Yep. I’m much more reluctant to make an predictions since 2016. I was utterly and completely flabbergasted. I don’t know if I already posted up-thread, but I, for one, knew in 2016 that he was an embarrassingly inept buffoon. But he was worse than my expectations. And the party’s embrace of him still befuddles me.
I can see him getting elected, what gets me is how the hardon for him didn’t wilt as his presidency wore on and it became obvious to even the most oblivious he was just a bullshit artist. His support grew the worse he revealed himself to be. People were actually willing to die for this cocksucker. FOR DONALD FUCKING TRUMP!!!
Those “most oblivious” include tens of millions of voters living in an alternate reality – fed by Fox News and Russian trolls – in which Trump was the one person fighting to save them from servitude to the brown socialist hordes. What seems obvious to you and me is simply fake news to them.
Because he openly hates the people his supporters secretly hate, and this permits them to let their hate flags fly. They love him for that.
No, no, he was not bullshitting the MAGAts, he was bullshitting the unfaithful, the libtards, the SJWs, the BLMs, the Antifas and the pelosi-worshipping demonrats. The MAGAts were all in on the whole thing. Like good little pigeons.
And they say, if your hardon lasts for over four years, see a doctor promptly ! ! ! But no, his hardon hordes of anti-science followers wouldn’t listen, and now they’re all dying of Covid.
Are you saying the MAGAts know it’s all bullshit? Their leaders do, for sure, but the ground troops actually believe all the crap they’ve been (and are being) fed – from tracking chips in the Covid vaccine to the Big Lie and all the way back to 2015.
It has been compared to the classic “pigeon drop”, where the mark believes they are in on fleecing that other guy (who is often a secret associate of the con artist). The MAGAts believe that they are all in on the job and will get their cut, or even if they fail to get a cut, at least the bad guys will get a proper sodding.
I think it is a literal cult and so no amount of evidence can get through to them.
So your average red hat MAGAt knows the Big Lie is a big lie – i.e., knows Biden won – but just goes along with it because he or she thinks that it will help elevate them to some GOP paradise?
I don’t think so.
I always thought that Trump was a blustering idiot, but I felt that there were enough sane, commonsensical Republicans to hold him in check. Boy, was I wrong!
It’s complicated. My brother is anything but a bigwig in the GOP. He volunteers for stuff and used to be on some committees at the county level of the party. He got uncomfortable with the anti-immigrant racist shit (he’s a South Asian immigrant) for a while but by 2018 or so he seems to have convinced himself that he was a native born American white person!
He doesn’t really believe there was any election fraud. But he believes the country is going to hell if we don’t stop the wrong people from voting. He thinks he’s ginning up the rubes to that “higher” purpose.
Hell, he OFFICIATED a same sex marriage and has queer friends but publicly supports outlawing SSM.
He thinks he’s just using the ignorant. But of course it’s a hard line to walk.
My sister is much the same way. She will go on and on about abortion in public, but she actually has no problem with it in private. She was one of the people who brought me round to the pro-choice side as a teenager!
It’s not complicated. Forgive me, but your brother is a scumbag.
Nothing to forgive. On 1/6 I called him a motherfucker on a group text that included our mother. And she said I was fully justified.
My mother who says “darn” instead of “damn”
Ain’t family fun?
Be that as it may, people like him make it hard to know who is fooling who, and who thinks they are fooling others but are being fooled themselves.
Yes, you’re right. But there still must be a critical mass of MAGAts who believe damn near everything.
I knew how bad Trump was. In some ways he really is the most transparent person in the world. It’s hard to imagine what people could have expected of him after the election other than exactly what he is. I mean, even if you didn’t know who he was before the campaign, just the debates alone made it abundantly clear. Every news story just filled in the specific horrors about general character traits that you knew were what he was.
I actually think his presidency was much less bad than I expected, all things considered. Not that anything he did was good, or that he didn’t do many catastrophic things. I just thought it would be worse. I just think I was imagining, in November of 2016, that there would be multiple Covid-level crises, and that he would handle them all in the way he managed Covid. That didn’t really pan out. The crises, as many and as bad as they were, were all much worse in their implications than in their actual material consequences, except for Covid.
So from that perspective, looking back to how bad I thought this was in 2016, things turned out not to be quite that bad. He was as bad a president as I expected, but the damage of his presidency was not as much as I expected.
There is certainly a hard core Q-annon bamboo ballots from China component to Trumps supporters, but I don’t think that that is the majority. I think the majority probably don’t think too much one way or another about actual “Truth”. They know that Trump is a bullshit artist, but then again so are all other politicians, and Democrats are worse.
If they were actually pushed on whether or not they believe specific allegations of electoral fraud, they would probably equivocate. “Well no there isn’t any real proof that that happened, but there isn’t any proof that it didn’t, and its just the sort of thing that the Democrats would do. Besides that there were lots of other (unspecified) shenanigans going on, so we can’t really be sure who won. So we need an audit to make sure.”
This is what I thought. I think it was perhaps easier to see from the outside. From the inside, and particularly with a country like the USA that has such a high opinion of its own democracy, it was perhaps easier to have the “it could never happen to us” mindset. Perhaps also I have some educational background in just how fragile (and somewhat illusory) are the checks and balances that are supposed to keep things in balance in a Westminster style government.
To me, Trump ticked every box as someone who would not be merely a bad president but a president who could damage the very system itself. He had a long tradition of being someone whose only personal boundary was precisely what he could get away with. I never had much hope the broader R’s would keep him in check satisfactorily - it almost never works out that way when the rot is at the very top.