All joking aside, I disagree with that last sentence.
trump, like all populist despots and dictators before him, despite the fact that they have many, many failings, both as leaders and as basic human beings, have some sort of twisted charisma for a certain subset of the population.
To dismiss trump as ‘eh, it’s just a moron leading morons’ is to ignore history and let it repeat itself. As many others have warned, now that trump has shown just how flimsy so many guardrails in politics turned out to be, there will be others who learn from trump’s ‘bull in a China shop’ example, but are far smarter and more competent. Unless, that is, we take trump and trumpism as the serious threat it is.
I wasn’t dismissing Trump or the dangers of his cult at all – just explaining (IMO) the legs of this Lecter thing, which in and of itself (again IMO) merits very little analysis.
This is what I will NEVER be able to wrap my head around. He’s a moron and an asshole. That does not add up to charisma.
What this ‘charisma’ is, I think, is that his supporters would like to be just corrupt as he is and get away with it like he does.
This points directly at judges like Cannon, and the current SCOTUS. And of course certain members of congress. Same idea. They all want a piece of the pie. No, they want the whole pie. To hell with everyone else. That should be the GOP motto.
I heard something like, “He is what a fool thinks a wise person is like, what a poor fool thinks rich people are like, what stupid people think smart people are like, etc.”
You’re missing it. Trump has charisma, but it is not being a moron and/or an asshole. or being corrupt. His charisma got him in a dressing room alone with E. Jean Carroll and in a hotel room with Stormy. He can talk a beggar out of his last dollar quarter.
As his cultists would tell you, “If he’s a moron, why is he so rich?” or “I want assholes like that working for me.” Maybe that’s how he was able to get a stranglehold on Congress so easily. As politicians, they know it is better to have the asshole being your friend than your enemy.
I mean, you’ve got to admit that he’s got something that enabled him to be elected President. Sure, you can say that a major fraction of the American electorate wanted a crass evil idiot, but there’s no shortage of crass evil idiots in the nation. What did he have, that elevated him above all of those other crass evil idiots? Whatever that was, “charisma” seems as good a word to label it with as any.
Oh, it’s not hard to understand. Even JD Vance acknowledged years ago that Trump identified and benefited from the fact that Republicans were not meeting the needs of their base.
Unfortunately, their needs were tapping into bigotry, anger, racism, etc. People like Mitt Romney or John McCain, despite their flaws, weren’t really up for being so horrible and deplorable.
Trump was and he’s able to pretend to be right-wing and even pro-life(which he definitely isn’t) and he’s even dropped his pro-gay mentality.
Two answers; he started out rich because he inherited it, and he’s not so rich now because he flushed it all down the drain. Because he’s a moron.
Of course, the response would be that you’re a liar and that’s fake news because Donald said so.
Trump has the charisma of your friend’s older asshole brother who drives an old Thunderbird and brags about getting women all the time and likes to pose while drinking cans of cheap beer before he crushes them on his forehead. A total tool but very inspirational to certain people.
And he isn’t even that guy (since he’s a privileged spoiled rich kid from New York), but does a really good job of pretending to be that guy.
This is something that is constantly put forth. But Trump’s not the first of his kind. If it was so easy, we’d all just be slaving away under one demagogue after another, because it’s all just Pavlovian etc.
I think that Trump is a unique personality. Most people I would consider “media whores” get tired of it at some point, have some reserve where they want a private life. Trump simply has never gotten there, he has nothing else other than what he is. He has been tirelessly promoting Trump for going on five decades now. Only death will stop him.
I find this unusual and I don’t think that there are going to be thousands that can simply copy the formula to great success. These sort of future copycats are always put forth, times change and they really don’t happen the way you say they will.
Timing? He came into a ridiculously large field of Republican candidates, and got an early lead on the pack with his evil idiot routine. Once he was on the ticket, Republican party loyalty worked in his favor, and the cult of personality formed around him by the Republicans largely ignoring his actual personality.
He also benefits from an ability to lie without shame. It’s trivially easy to support any one person’s pet cause, if you’re willing to just lie your ass off, without regard to contradictions or other such limits. Traditional politicians used to try to keep their lies self consistent, which is a more difficult thing.
It looks like he thinks that cognitive decline involves telling stories about unicorns or fairies, not “real” people like he does. What he doesn’t get is that telling the story itself is the weird thing, not what it’s about.
Isn’t that, from a global perspective, what has happened more often than not throughout history? Our country was supposed to be different, but trump has shown that our Democratic ideals and institutions may be more fragile than we had thought.
Well, since you brought up Germany and Hitler, there are parallels there that support my point that democracies can be more fragile than we think and can turn to dictatorship if we are not careful.
Ooh, what a classic strawman. That’s not what I said at all; my point is that people like trump show that our Democracy may be more fragile than we think, and it’s dangerous to underestimate or discount his influence.
I don’t disagree, but you have to realize that people and countries also respond to these developments. Nothing’s permanent anyway. Weimar wasn’t permanent, Hitler wasn’t permanent.
Wannabe dictators don’t like to cede their own power, make plenty of their own enemies. It’s not just some template that’s going to be slapped down worldwide to automatic success, any more than anything else ever has been. People have competing interests, and wind up opposing fascism for many reasons.
Yeah, we’re not at the end of history. The Great War wiped out 75 years of progress or whatever. Old people had to deal with this shit, we will too, boo hoo.
In Trumps case, he will let Europe fall to Putin. What could happen is another civil war. That is how divided the country is. It would be strange. There are not any North/South demarcations, really. It could end up being neighbor against neighbor.
In that case, democrats are probably screwed. While we have plenty of guns, but we have fewer. BUT while I see republicans ‘organizing’ sort of like they did on Jan 6 , The mob did get turned back, and I think lessons have been learned. But on both sides. Yes, there are sides.
I, for one, wish some one write a list out of how Trump isn’t what his particular breed of supporters think he is.
Add some rules how they should act in public, no road ragers, no crazy Karens or BBQ Becky’s being racist to the youngest of us, no people going nuts on camera at stores. No big ass 4X4 trucks with giant Trump signs, showing their ass on streets. Quit being racist, entitled and reprehensible.
Some one truthful and smart needs to do it. They need spell it out in simple block letters, no flourishing, easy words.
He’s not for them, he doesn’t give 2 shits. Will not work for them. Would cross the street if he saw them coming down the sidewalk.
The only person Trump cares about is Trump.
The scales are gonna come off their eyes. If Trump gets his wishes. He’s using them. Playing them like a piano.
It would be a funny comeuppance if it wasn’t so scary for the rest of us.
Trump’s charisma (if that’s what it is) comes from his loud chaotic ravings. It’s not even understandable. It’s nonsensical.
He could get on a stage and just scream the key words and get big responses. Why does he even try to make it into a speech. Waste of words.
, The mob did get turned back, and I think lessons have been learned. But on both sides. Yes, there are sides.