The democratic governor in NC won by a 15 point margin, but the state went to Trump by a 3 point margin. The GOP candidate had a lot of flaws (he was also black which didn’t help with his GOP support).
I get the impression that character flaws damage other republican candidates, just not Trump. Roy Moore lost a very easy election in Alabama due to being a sex offender. But republicans are perfectly fine with Trump’s endless sex offenses and sex crimes.
I just am honestly confused. Does this total lack of concern about morality in the president (but not other GOP politicians) go away when Trump dies and a new republican takes over the GOP? Or will the new GOP head be immune to any moral or legal consequences like Trump is?
At the current stage where I’m looking for any hope, even if it’s false hope… I am thinking that no, not everyone is as teflon as Don. And since loyalty has no business anywhere in Republican circles anymore, if Trump dies soon, everyone is going to fight over who is the next Trump. Which could do a great deal to mitigate the damage the new administration and legislature will do if it happens soon enough.
That’s a lot of ifs, hopes, and maybes. Let’s also be clear, Trump’s ability to weave and dodge is not only because the Right seems to think he’s the perfectly entertaining crazy uncle that you’d otherwise not want at Thanksgiving, but that Fox and it’s ilk have made sure that anything that could possibly stick is shown to be false, made up, or just “humorless” lefties blowing things out of proportion.
Though, and turning yet darker, Trump and the trumpy candidates have proven that whipping up hate against the other is infinitely easier that delivering on anything else. So that’s all they do. A Democratic candidate, who actually wants to do things, no matter how minor on the scale of things, has a much harder hill to climb against a candidate who promises easy answers and shifts all blame to “The enemy.”
IE, we’re moved to pre-WW2 Germany, and Nazis are already picking their scapegoats, while the (D) team keeps trying to play the old game, build alliances, and run the country. And plenty of the (D) coalition are too busy fighting for their sub-set of demands and sabotaging the center by putting their priorities or “ethics” ahead of the greater good.
In short, if there isn’t a big disruption on the (R) side like Trump hamberdering himself to death soon, we’re F***ed.
We’re the same Americans who prolonged slavery, reconstituted slavery v2.0 in the aftermath of Reconstruction, clung to racial segregation through two world wars, persecuted queer people, and incessantly published lies about political opponents in 19th-century yellow journalism. And we’re also the same Americans who resisted all those things.
There have always been huge numbers of Americans who have been tyrannical and unscrupulous in hogging power and disregarding truth. It’s just that a lot of middle-class straight white liberals in the past half-century or so have been comparatively sheltered from the effects of that phenomenon.
And now that the Big Sort has largely cemented itself, the latter will be held hostage to the former for the foreseeable future. At the national level, this is what America is now. There will be local exceptions, but they will dwindle as the activist authoritarians stamp out dissent (cf. Texas’s far-reaching regime of prohibitions against cities diverging from state law, which we should expect to see enacted at the national level).