I’m not in America (I appreciate this thread is about American politics, and I am an outsider) I am aware of Alex Jones only because of people ridiculing him on the internet (and of course everything that came after). To an extent, we get an imported version of some of the lies of American politics, especially comparatively recently.
I do recall our own government in the UK being on board with the WMDs thing and jointly invading Iraq, but this whole post-truth politics thing seems to be, in general, an export of the USA - but the point is, it’s really spilling over to the whole world, and more so recently than ever before.
The WMDs in Iraq, and Bengazi were the normal sort of lying that Magetout was alluding to where there is an underlying factual basis that is then spun and exaggerated. I firmly believe that W, deluded by confirmation bias, actually believed that Iraq had WMDs, and there really was an attack on Bengazi on Clinton’s watch even though it wasn’t her fault.
And while conspiracy theories such as birtherism were touted by the right wing media, with maybe a handful of exceptions Republican office holders distanced themselves from them. It wasn’t until Trump that the crazy became a mainstream Republican doctrine.
Yeah, it used to be: if [politician] said the sky was blue, I’d still look outside to check.
Now it’s: If Trump says the sky is blue, I need to check if there is even such a thing as ‘the sky’.
She has a point. People have for decades been afraid to speak honestly about Republican extremism, which is one reason they’ve gotten both more powerful and more extreme; it created an incentive system for them where the more extreme they became, the more immune to criticism they became. And here we are.
That’s more than a little hyperbolic, but I do think the right, or at least the professional political right, wants to see alternative lifestyles discouraged and repressed. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is LGBTQ, but what constitutes an alternative lifestyle could spread to such things as being childless by choice, and the new VP has, in the past, suggested a way to do that, namely allowing parents to cast their own votes plus further votes according to how many children they have. Quiverfull, anyone?
Wait. A good many people will lose interest by 2026.
The undecided voters, the ones that flipped to Trump the last month, are pretty much average. They do not really follow politics well, are not your main group 20% MAGA and only make some kind of mysterious bond with the candidate. Mainly the president. They show up for presidential elections if they hear a lot of people talking about it. A good portion of them are the 90-110 IQ types. Not your creative types, just simple folk. Now we have Trump. And they are the ones out of touch with most of America. Somehow they felt they had to vote. Then forgot all about it. They might hear during the week that Trump pardoned the Jan 6 crowd. That’s all for politics for them. They have no idea if there are tariffs or not. They will notice the price of things. Or the loss of an insurance they had. So these people cannot approve Trump if they feel worse off. They will stay home 2026. Out of a vague feeling. There is no excitment in non-presidential years anyway. No funny stuff on TikTok. Just politics. Boring.
The common clay of the New West…
Seriously though, Elon just gave a fascist salute at an inauguration today (and pretty much everyone did a “so what” or “whatcha gonna do”) - it’s making the ghosts of all the missing European family branches shriek “get out” or at least “get more ammo”.
The first is night impossible financially, and the second I’m desperately keeping in check (as said before, I have enough short of an actual military/paramilitary assault and boy do the pardons make the second look terrifyingly real). And sadly, I think @TeroSunbear is terrifyingly optimistic: if prices go down at the grocery store, those low information voters are going to become enthusiastic Trump supporters, because they’ll blame just about anything else (losing coverage, jobs, as “politics as usual”). And if Trump just says, deregulate everything sure, a lot of prices will drop - people will get food-based illnesses they shouldn’t have, a pandemic will become orders of magnitude more likely, and safety margins will be gone, but eggs will be cheap! For a while.
They won’t. Not if he puts in tariffs and evicts a significant percentage of the farmworkers.
Well, I did specify some things may go down in price, specifically due to deregulation, at a cost in food safety, but beyond that - Terobear’s comment was specifically directed at moderate to low intelligence and information voters, the “simple” folk:
These are the sort of people most vulnerable to demagogues. If prices don’t come down, and a Democratic representative sticks to the usual, rational “things are complex, we need to do XYZ and focus on ABC” they’ll balk. If Vance, or what have you say “WE did 123, but those craven, cheating Demonrats blocked it all” those same low info voters are very likely to buy the bullshit again, ESPECIALLY now that they’ve got sunk costs.
Late to this thread. Didn’t read the whole thing.
Wanted to share Paul Krugman’s substack this morning.
Paraphrased: “Do not go gentle into Trump World.”
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Today, however, I’m going to make an exception, and offer three words of advice to Democratic politicians and MAGA opponents in general: oppose, oppose, oppose. And make noise. A lot of noise. Don’t make conciliatory gestures in the belief that Trump has a mandate to do what he’s doing; don’t stay quiet on the outrages being committed every day while waiting for grocery prices to rise. I can’t promise that taking a tough line will succeed, but going easy on Trump is guaranteed to fail.
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But was Trump’s awfulness actually obvious to voters? Not to the low-information voters who provided his margin of victory. And was it even that obvious to voters who followed the news, but only somewhat superficially? The mainstream media heavily sanewashed Trump throughout the campaign.
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Many voters believed that he could do just that; the most recent surveys show Republican voters on average believing that Trump can magically reduce inflation to zero over the next year — and since that’s an average, many of them apparently think he can actually reduce prices, which he indeed promised to do during the campaign.
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But Democrats can’t just sit around waiting for Trump’s promises to fail. They need to constantly challenge him on the issue, keep reminding voters that he lied about it all through the campaign, and hang rising prices around his neck every step of the way.
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A few paragraphs…read the rest.
I’m somewhat optimistic about the news that Ken Martin has been picked as the new DNC chair. He’s done wonders in Minnesota and he seems to have the right ideas about focusing on working-class issues and pursuing a 50-state strategy.
I agree that’s important.
Wisconsin’s Ben Wikler impressed me more, but Martin seems not-terrible.
The Trumpites are getting away with being the party of “disrupting the status quo” and of selling that as something that will be good for the 99%. We know better—today’s stooopid tariffs, alone, will make things worse for the 99%.
But the Dems need to take away the ‘disrupt the status quo’ selling point that Trump has been benefiting from. It’s bringing Trump the youth vote, among others.
I hope Martin is on top of that.
The fundamental question of Democrats and Republicans running for office has changed since Citizens United. Because campaigns run largely by advertising, the Democrats need to take money from the same lobbyists. And they need to propose compromise laws that do not leave out health insurance, pharma, wall street and all that. There can only be a few Bernies or AOCs from districts that are very sharply blue anyway. Or they have a long term relationship with their voters.
I have not read the whole thread so someone may have already had this idea. Trump does not need to be beaten (and indeed, this is not something the Democrats excel at regardless). He just needs to be fought to a standstill. He may control every commodity touched by the US government but the one commodity he can never control is the flow of time.
Trump’s current strategy is to “flood the zone” or in other words to pump out nonsense at such a prolific rate that it can’t be fought. Trump is not the only one capable of this. It can be done to him just as easily. The objective is not to win. The objective is to make every moment of his life miserable. He may live to be 100 years old and he may be President for that entire time. Make it painful. Every single second of it. Stretch that time out to an eternity for him. Waste his time. Waste his energy. Waste his focus. Yes, he has control over everything and is basically immune to laws and rules. But he’s not immune to being led around by the nose by things that piss him off. Keep feeding him a steady diet of recreational outrage to prevent him from starting any more fires, literal or figurative.
I was with you all the way until this bit at the end. He thrives on our outrage and the more we feed him the bigger his ass grows, and that’s where he keeps all that “knowledge.”
There will be polls. Polls bad for Trump. Already at the Superbowl, people will boo him.
The Voters
Trump voters look really bad now. They will make excuses, exclaiming what kind of awful people are in the Democratic party. If nothing else, they will claim they are honest hard working Americans. Democrats are lazy bums. Get a job!
The Trump coalition did include some ethnic groups. Those people will have to evaluate things for 2028. For now, they are making excuses as well.
Democrats are a coalition. We need to tolarate a large range of opinions and focus on the ones we share. It all looks really awful from our point of view. We have a good chunk of the educated people in our country supporting us. We try to focus on a future we can achieve with some long term planning. MAGA folk lack education and only think about the next paycheck. We have a problem with this unified “stupid” group. Who are proud to be…stupid. They do not use that word, but that is what it is. They claim to have common sense.
Trump, with a 1-2% majority, will suppress all opinions that make him look bad. That in itself looks awful. A petty dictator wannabee taking his revenge on evey one of us in the 50% that does not approve him. Trump disapproval is at 47-51%, depending on the poll. But the average will soon get to 55% when a few more planes fall out of the sky and when Musk does more stupid things.
That’s right. Up until any Big Event that (he thinks) will let him get away with declaring himself Supreme Leader (fully ending all influence of Congress and the courts), he will flood the zone.
Whatever will outrage decent people will be spewed from him daily. For example, he just declared himself Chairman of the Kennedy Center, and will no doubt use the Kennedy Center Honors to ignite a firestorm. Technically the Honors are supposed to go to people in the entertainment field, but that limits Trump to people like Kid Rock, James Woods, Hulk Hogan, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight, Kelsey Grammer, Kevin Sorbo, Roseanne Barr, and of course Kanye. Basically people whose success happened decades (or at least years) in the past.
Trump may go for that, by selecting from the has-been list. Or he may try to maximize outrage by honoring non-entertainment figures like the convicted-then-pardoned leaders of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, convicted war-criminal members of the military, and figures like George Floyd’s killer Derek Chauvin and 2020 killer Kyle Rittenhouse.
Those last categories are almost certainly going to be honored by Trump in White House ceremonies (with Presidential Medals of Freedom). But the Kennedy Center honors get a bigger audience, and Trump would like to get that.
That’s the kind of flooding we’re going to be seeing. Note that 99% of it will be intended to divert our attention from Trump’s looting of the government.
Well, not quite as easily. Democrats in Congress can’t declare some outrageous group of people to be recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal, for example–they don’t have the votes, and they wouldn’t be willing to honor people who’d get the kind of press that an honor for a convicted war criminal would get.
The left is hampered both by a lack of power and by a lack of will to do things shocking and despicable enough to get the kind of attention that Trump is getting, and will continue to get.
I’m not arguing that people on the left shouldn’t try to get mass attention for the cause and its arguments—they should. It’s just that inherently there is less opportunity for those on the left to do so, at least with the level of success that Trump is having.
On Trump’s Kennedy Center takeover:
Executive orders are not laws. Many can be blocked. The birthright citizenship will be. Unless SC wants to take it up and debate Trump’s lawyer John Eastman. Lisa Needham explains the origin and practice of executive orders: