Yes, you are correct. My bad.
If only somebody will make the same comment regarding the pre-insurrection meetings.
These days, everything, everywhere, all the time, is on camera, much of it with audio even.
The head honcho of Proud Boys meeting with the head honcho of Oath Keepers, secretly, in an underground parking garage? Got it on video! So many of the clips we saw were things you would never have expected to be on some camera somewhere. Yet, there it all was.
These days, it’s all Butterfield, everywhere, all the time.
(ETA: Except, apparently, in the Trump White House. No taping of secret meetings there, as far as we know. That meeting he had with Russian Ambassador Whats-His-Name where he gave away top secrets? No tape of that. How did anyone even know about it?)
Who knows. They were speaking to the American people, but IMHO there’s only two people in the audience who mattered. Joe Biden and Merrick Garland. That they need persuading is a sad commentary on the state of the Democratic Party.
IMHO what makes it different is the severity of the crime. To use a sports analogy, what Nixon did was throw spitballs. What Trump did was attempt to bribe the scorekeeper to show that he won, regardless of what happened on the field of play. IMHO the latter is far worse. That alone should make this way bigger. Unfortunately Biden and Garland have decided not to do anything about it. My guess is out of some misguided notion of “being the bigger man” or some such thing.
There has to be something more to it than “he gives me permission to be a racist asshole”. How such a stupid fucker can get and keep people in his thrall is amazing. It’s like they’re hypnotized. All through both his campaigns he constantly said and did things which would sink any normal candidate, and got elected. It would have been logical, given what he is, if his popularity started to ebb as his term went on, but it never did.
I assumed she wore a blue suit because she felt it would make her look better on camera.
The only people in the audience who matter are however many thousands are on the fence concerning whether Trump goes too far.
FoxNews understands this, which is why they gave up their advertising income in a bid to deter channel switching:
I hear ya about Garland, but what is it that you expect Biden to do?
Likely. If she’d wanted to signal she’s a closet Dem, she’d have worn a tan suit.
Both.
For years, beginning with Newt Gingrich really, the GOP has been pushing one message: “the other side is bad”. Not “We disagree with them but acknowledge that we can meet in the middle” or “we agree that both sides want what’s good for America, we just have different visions of what that looks like.” No, the GOP has been telling their party members that democrats are the literal enemies of America and they literally want to see the country destroyed. That rhetoric really was ramped up post-9/11 when it tied to mindless patriotism: the GOP told America that they were the only true lovers of America and that Democrats were just domestic terrorists. Remember GWB’s “If you aren’t with us, you’re against us”? That became the GOP philosophy in a nutshell. See how today the word patriot is a lable for extreme right-winger. This is a direct consequence of that post-9/11 rhetoric.
As a result the GOP slowly but surely became a cult.
And then Donald Trump came along and tapped into the racists, the haters, the xenophobes. Rank and file republicans thought he was a joke… a joke that suddenly started winning primaries. And then he became the presumptive nominee.
So what was the GOP to do? Abandon him? Admit that their new standard bearer was an illiterate bloviating clown and that maybe, just maybe the woman who had decades of public service and political experience, who the GOP had spent the same decades vilifying mercilessly, might just be the better choice to run the country?
Of course they couldn’t. They had spent 8 years clutching their pearls every time Obama took a breath, and then promptly shouted to every person who would listen that the good ol’ U.S. of A. was in great peril due to the Muslim Kenyan terrorist usurper then in the White House. Lather, rinse, repeat.
The presidency was up for grabs and whether they liked it or not Donald Trump was their only hope. So the GOP had no choice, they had to back Trump with mindless fervor and unlimited enthusiasm. Everything he did, said, or suggested was the epitome of perfection because to admit to anything otherwise would be to admit that decades of messaging on their part had been wrong.
And the rank-and-file, who had been happily gobbling up the purulent feces that Fox and Rush and all the rest had been spewing for decades, just continued to gobble. The man who was the very physical embodiment of the 7 deadly sins was the greatest Christian since Jesus himself. The man who first came to national prominence for racial exclusion policies in his NYC real estate business was the best representative of all Americans. This man who was both too stupid and too lazy to understand the Constitution of the United States was the only man qualified to defend it. They believed all these things because right-wing media and the GOP told them these things. They made Donald Trump their savior because they had no choice. To admit that they had been wrong about democrats all these years or that they had made a mistake in selecting Trump as their leader would be unconscionable.
In fact, I think the hate against Liz Cheney perfectly exemplifies this. She is conservative to her bones: she always votes for the most extreme right-wing, conservative bills. She voted against everything else. If someone has actual conservative beliefs and principles and wants to see those beliefs reflected in policy and law, Liz Cheney is the person they want in congress. But since she dared speak out against Trump she’s become a pariah: for the GOP devotion to Trump is paramount, following the chosen leader is more important than adhering to a political or social philosophy. The rulebook of Jim Jones and Charles Manson has been followed closely.
Yup. To get the nomination Trump tapped into the hate that was (is) festering in the hearts of a lot of rank-and-file GOP voters. A lot of PoliSci types were blindsided by Trump but really, they shouldn’t have been. As I noted the GOP messaging machine had feeding these people anger and outrage since the Reagan years, to be surprised and that an angry, hateful man would be appealing to them seems very naïve.
Didn’t a number of posters here predict Tan the Conman would chuck family members under the bus?
What does Biden need to be persuaded about? <Confused>
Outstanding post.
Thank you.
If she had worn a red suit, she would have been accused of trying to be the center of attention. Lord only knows what she’d be accused of if she had worn a tan suit.
The only possible “win” for Liz Cheney among far-right nutjob knuckle-draggers would be to show up at the hearings ranting about Jewish space lasers and Gazpacho police stealing the election from their orange hero. Then she could wear a deceased orange marmoset on her head (like their hero) and they wouldn’t care.
Put me in this camp, too.
I laughed at him every time I saw him on the tube up until this country somehow elected him president in 2016.
I assume Flik is one of those who thinks that that the highest levels of government have reluctance to prosecute Trump, the rioters, and/or complicit congresspeople as they deserve.
Aye.
I don’t think I did, but I know others predicted it.
I still don’t understand it, but you explained it very well.
I disagree with @Lancia. I think that the issue is that once you’ve done something horrible, your choices are either to own up to it or go into denial.
Fundamentally, a lot of the people warning everyone against Trump are and were Republican. Just yesterday, Betsy DeVos came out saying that the guy was crazy; Mueller was a Republican; Bannon was arrested for cheating Republicans out of money; Trump proudly admits to lying and cheating as frequently as possible; and so on. That’s a short list of the thousand clues that the guy can’t be trusted around a baby with a lollipop and I would gladly go down the full list.
Sure, some people really are that stupid, but 40% of the country isn’t.
Everyone knows that Trump lost and that he’s not fit to be in office. It was, assuredly, immediately obvious to everyone that they’d fucked up by voting for him. At that point, the options were, again, to own up to making a mistake and screwing over their own country - really for no greater reason than to “put it to the man” - or let Fox and OANN and Epoch Times lay out flimsier and flimsier excuses, and eat that up.
When your daughter tells you that her step-dad is molesting her, some mothers kick the guy out. Others tell their daughter that she’s a lying hussy and, at best, accuse her of seducing him.
That is human nature. If you had a whole TV channel devoted to helping you make that decision, it would be a lot easier to choose that direction.
A little of column A, a little of column B.
Conservative media is incredibly powerful now. They’ve realized that a massive proportion of the US public is willfully ignorant, and you can sell any narrative, as long as you can dress it as being consistent with what they want to believe.
But, Trump needed to show them the way. He needed to show them that you can throw away every principle, norm and decency. Be openly intolerant, bigoted and selfish, and it wouldn’t matter. In fact, they’d love you for it. He took it all to the next level.
Now though, Conservative media are the kingmakers – if Trump disappears, “Trumpism” will continue. But without the backing of conservative media, Trump would lose his supporters pretty quickly.
Yep, likewise.
I’ve never been sat next to a Trump supporter when Trump was making a speech, and I still wonder how that would play out.
Like, when he was reading “I know nothing! I know nothing!” that he’d written in sharpie on a scrap of paper…how could anyone not immediately recognize that as a fucking idiot?
He made it work. It was long time ago though, people were a little more used to it. Thompson is doing it skillfully thus far.