A phrase I don’t use often: I agree with Velocity.
While it looks like Biden is going to win the election, it was not the massive sweep that the polls were predicting, and presuming he does win it looks like he might have a Republican-majority Senate to deal with which will absolutely cripple his administration. It’s just not the case that a small hardcore ‘always Trump’ group has just stuck with him through everything but the rest of the country peeled off because of his handling of COVID and all of the rest, it’s clear that there is a strong and active group of voters that fully support him and the Republican party’s shenanigans in support of him.
Trump himself will likely not be around much longer - without the office of the presidency to protect him from prosecution, there’s a lot of criminal and financial heat that’s going to come down on him, and he’s an old mam. But it’s clear that all that he’s done hasn’t poisoned his family name in politics, and even if no one latches on to his actual progeny, it’s clear that there is huge support for ‘act tough, own the libs, fuck minorities’ candidates for the future.
I suspect that Trump is going to become our Berlusconi. He’ll never go away and keep rabble-rousing and plotting his return to power. He’ll spawn a new generation of neo-fascists who appeal to the worst instincts of the public. This election proves that this kind of politics has staying power, even if Trump loses. We’re going to have to deal with populist authoritarian racist fascism for some time now.
The center and the left is in a similar position to the center and the left in Weimar-era Germany. It is unable to speak with a unified voice and it is unable to effect a unified strategy to keep fascists out of power. It’s going to be very difficult.
You may be right. My hope is that we get to find out.
I concede the point that Trump loves rallies and adulation, so it’s possible he may want to continue fomenting after he loses. But he won’t have the infrastructure behind him to support it. Who is going to pay for all of it? Who is going to do all the advance publicity, find halls to rent, print up signs? There may be good answers to those questions, I dunno - time will tell. But I do think @erysichthon’s point about how he’ll be preoccupied with legal and financial problems is a good one.
For me, this shows just how effective foreign operators have been in disrupting both our political system and how we think as a people.
It remains to be seen whether the Russians have been meddling behind the scenes, but IMHO the whole mess is purely domestic. Trump may have links to Russia, but he keeps it out of sight, so I don’t buy that theory until I see more proof.
Seen from a distance, Trump is all-American to the point of parody, given that he represents currents in US society that have always existed but did not get into the political mainstream in recent years.It is not the sort of America that people want to boast about, unless they are Trump supporters.
I had thought beforehand that Biden might win with a moderate large majority, but well short of a landslide, while also wondering if it might en up as a cliffhanger. I considered that Trump could muster up enough rubes to avoid a clear and obvious defeat, which is a pity, as only that would have sent a message to him and the Republican party. The Republicans will view a result this close as a vindication of Trump and his policies, and they won’t go through the soul-searching to ask what they did wrong. If Trump is just the symptom and the expression of a deeper malaise in the party, this is not the election to show it up and result in calls for action.
The analyses so far seem to indicate that people voted in much the same way as 2016 and with no major shifts. I take it to mean that the battle lines have long been drawn.
Jim Jordan waltzed into victory lane. Ohio is Trump country, and Jordan was a Buckeye wrestler. The only thing he could have done better would be to play football…
I’m sure that if there was some sort of outside threat, some sort of thing that threatened all of us equally, the we’d all stand together.
Oh wait, the Republicans took the side of the virus that has killed a quarter million of their fellow citizens, nevermind.
Not likely. It is more likely that it will be one more sign of those nasty liberals persecuting their messiah.
Massive deficits.
More people dying from work accidents and from noxious pollutants.
You have McConnel to thank for making SCOTUS a partisan arm of the Republican party, really.
Ah yes, their hatred of their fellow citizens, that truly is what motivates them.
Trumpism, not Trump himself, necessarily. And yes, anything less than a true stomping on Tuesday shows that there is quite a bit of support for that movement as a whole. That hatred of your fellow citizen is a winning strategy.
Yeah, who either covers for his subordinates sexually assaulting their students, or was too stupid to see it happening right under his nose.
Assuming Biden wins, what does the Republican Party do moving forward? Do they pretend Trump never existed (like how they forgot about George W Bush after he left office)? Do they explicitly repudiate Trumpism? And how do they win back Trump’s fanatics?
My guess is that Trump will spend the next four years publicly toying with the idea that he should run in 2024 so he can hear his base egg him on. In the end he’ll decide he has more important things to do.
I totally disagree with this. Trump has been playing his game for decades and he doesn’t actually need to be president to keep doing it. He’ll become a political cult leader, similar to what he was doing during the Obama years, but with an even larger and more virulent following. He’s going to curse us so long as he is physically able to continue doing so.
I should add that if Democrats had won by a landslide, Trump would have a much harder time today claiming that the D’s were cheating in swing states and calling for recounts or filing lawsuits. The election result would have been far more emphatic.
Instead, now the process is being dragged on for days and perhaps weeks, even though by this point the eventual outcome is clear. It’s much more muddied than a 400-Biden-electoral-vote landslide would have been.
A lot of Trump supporters are slavishly devoted to Trump himself - they love his “stick it to the man” outrageous refusal to follow any rules of decorum. While their politics may tend toward the right end of the spectrum, I don’t think they’re fiercely devoted to any particular cause or policy. Without Trump, they don’t exist as a political movement.
Evangelicals, on the other hand … they do support Trump for specific ideological reasons. And without Trump they will continue to press forward with their agenda. But I don’t think it will be “Trumpism,” it will just be the same old religiously motivated conservatism we’ve always had in America.
We won’t know for sure until the final count, but right now it looks to me like a mixed bag – that this really is the country rejecting Trump himself, but not overwhelmingly, and ISTM that this has more firmly cemented the GOP as the party of Trump.
I don’t know where to post this, so I’m going to do so here. I was thinking about how divided the country is; that the states that went blue were mostly on the coast, and densely populated and the ones that went red were mostly interior and more rural. (To the extent that Nebraska went entirely red except for the district around Omaha, which went blue.) In movies like Independence Day, everyone unites around an external alien threat. So it seemed to me that we had the perfect external threat around which we could unite, in the form of the pandemic. A good president might have been able to bring the country together in responding to the pandemic, making mask-wearing the thing to do for everyone’s sake, producing PPE domestically and setting up a system nationwide to track and trace infections. But we have a president who used the pandemic to further divide the country.
I used to think that in times of great crisis, we would band together to fight it.
Now I see the Republicans side with the virus against their fellow citizens and human beings.
Trump’s speech in Independence Day would have been a bit different. “They are attacking the failed democrat cities. These cities are terrible, just terrible. The aliens are doing a fine job.”
Your comment about Jim Jordan… I could not possibly agree more. Sadly, I live in a different, sadly similar district. My vote went for a different Dem rep…who also lost. Stivers has a stranglehold on this district, thanks to gerrymandering.
I am disappointed in our country, and VERY disappointed by my state. How, on God’s green Earth could ANYONE stand behind THAT ideology, snd think anything like “yeah, I care for my fellow man.” It’s shocking. That should be a bedrock principle for any free-thinking human, at this point. SHOULD be.
Yup, I mentioned this months ago. If he had done this, he would have saved 100k lives and cruised to victory. He got a bump early in the pandemic, when people were trying to rally around, and then blew it.
Pretty much. The No. 1 reason for America’s horrid pandemic was that Trump failed to see the pandemic as an opportunity to shine, rather than an annoying speed bump that stood in the way of his hot economy. He kept ignoring, downplaying and denying Covid because he saw the economy as his ticket to reelection.
If someone had convinced him to see the pandemic as his ticket to reelection, he’d have clamped down harder on the virus than China/Wuhan itself. All it took was someone to sell him on that idea.
That is overly optimistic, in my view. It would require keeping focus on the problem for more than a week, plus it would have required real effort on his part, and patience and hard work are two things Trump has never been good at.