The roots of the issue go back before the US won independence.
But in more recent years? Remember the Southern Strategy? Welfare Cadillac Queens? Jim Crow? Abolitionism?
The base could always be conned. The current idiocy is a difference of degree rather than of kind. Pointing at one person or event as “the” tipping point for any of the rest is itself rather dumb. Sure, some contributed more than others, but as a general mindset and philosophy, it’s something that’s been deeply ingrained in American culture for centuries.
Totally, totally disagree. McCain picked Palin for the sole purpose of putting a female on the ballot in an effort to pick up some woman votes. That tactic backfired spectacularly when Palin revealed how stupid she was, to the point where the GOP ticket lost to a Black (gasp) man. Then Romney ran a decent campaign and picked up a few more votes than McCain, but ultimately lost to a popular incumbent.
When nobody on the GOP side showed that they could lead the party, the door was open for Trump to step in.
It’s not only revisionist history for 2008, it revises history for 2016.
People were figuring Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Kasich or Rubio or some other establishment GOP figure would take it. Trump was a joke candidate who’d eventually fade. Until he didn’t. The base took to him almost immediately but it took a while for the party itself to fall properly in line.
Palin in ‘08 as a trial run for Trump ‘16 just doesn’t make sense except in a “just-so” story sense and only after ignoring what actually happened 10 years ago.
This is exactly right. Reagan was of course not thought of as an academic or intellectual heavyweight like Woodrow Wilson, but he was sufficiently smart enough that trying to cite him as some trailblazer for Trump is silly.
I do agree that it’s like the Republican base has been groomed over time to accept someone like Trump. Trump didn’t learn anything; he has been grifting the same way for decades, it’s just that now he found his BS works on voters and was enough to get him to POTUS.
Prior to Trump, I was a Republican. I wasn’t a far-right guy, but I felt at the time (swallowing a lot of their rhetoric and not seeing what they were actually doing) that they were closer to my values. But as Trump was embraced, I looked around and realized, holy shit, I have nothing in common with these people. This is fucking madness. And for the first time, in 2016 I did not vote Republican. By the time 2020 came around, I had gone fully Democratic. I was an enthusiastic supporter of Biden, in fact.
But a lot of people did not do that. They were the opposite of me; they looked around and said, oh yeah, these are my people. Either that, or they figured that the Democrats were bad enough that they still needed to support the Republican platform (sunk cost fallacy) and if that meant embracing this shit, well, give me a stupid red hat.
Without relitigating the 2008 election too much, McCain had no choice. The old white guy was badly trailing in the “interesting/exciting” department to the young black guy. By football analogy, McCain was trailing by multiple touchdowns in the fourth quarter; only desperate and bold gambits were going to give him any chance. If he picked a boring white guy as his running mate, he’d be toast.
I do agree that McCain should have picked a better bold and aggressive woman than Palin as his veep. But he was absolutely right to pick a woman.
But anyhow, back to the topic, I maintain that Republican politics were still relatively sane and mature until Trump came along. Even 2014 was still a normal decent midterm election.
In 2016 the GOP establishment (the Reagan/Bush people) wanted NOTHING to do with Trump. His success can totally be attributed to Limbaugh, FOX News, the Tea Party and all the other far right loudmouths on cable, radio and social media.
No he’s the voluntary choice of the GOP voters. Trump is a manifestation of what Republican voters have been wanting for decades. It’s taken them decades of planning and work and finally they have the one person they needed to implement it.
Republicans voters weren’t tricked into Trump, they created him.
And losing twice with the conventional candidates (McCain and Romney) led to the ascension of Orangeface Anusmouth. The unbearable peace and prosperity under Obama drove the mouth-breathing population damn near insane. They needed an outhouse Jesus and by God they found one.
I irony, of course, is that Obama was a rockstar and Hillary Clinton was not. Another conventional candidate like the two previous would have most likely prevailed in 2016.
I think it’s a feedback loop. They were told that they wanted the kinds of things he was offering after consuming years of right wing media, and then he filled that want.
One of the biggest things he has sold in both elections, and is continuing to push today, is how he is going to solve the immigration crisis (both at the borders and within). The reason why people think there is a crisis in the first place is because they’ve been told that there is one for decades. It doesn’t matter what they have all personally experienced; they know it’s happening elsewhere, and it will eventually hurt them. Or, whatever problem they are experiencing (high prices, trouble finding a job, just a naturally changing culture making them scared of the world) can be blamed on that crisis. And someone needs to fix it. Trump will fix it! We will finally have a wall! (Okay, there is no wall, but it’s the Democrats’ fault.) Let’s send ICE goon squads out to save us from all the criminals! A new utopia is around the corner if we just support Trump!
They didn’t come up with that on their own. It was spoon-fed to them. I’m not saying they’re victims; on the contrary, it’s bigotry that they already had in them that is fueling this (whether they embrace it or it’s in their subconscious), but if it wasn’t for people lying to them about a crisis, they wouldn’t have cared enough about it to make it such a massive issue.
That said, apparently Pence called him right before January 6 and asked him whether he should go along with Trump’s request (to declare that he counted the electors and Trump won, or to declare that there was no clear winner and toss it back to the House to decide [by a vote of state delegations, and there were more red states at the time]) and Quayle told him “Don’t do it, it’s clearly not within the intended powers of the Vice President” which was a major factor in Pence’s decision not to go through with it.
As such, I think Dan Quayle saved democracy (or at least got it a stay of execution) and we should stop making fun of him as a small token of our appreciation.
Wait, am I making fun of him by linking the Civ IV leader rankings? Oh, well.
I don’t know. I remember a lot of right wing people I knew who said it was now unthinkable to vote for McCain; he had chosen a woman as his running mate and that meant it was possible a woman might become President. Obviously, these guys weren’t going to switch over and vote for Obama. But many of them decided that this proved McCain was no better than Obama and they weren’t going to vote for either of them.
Let’s not ignore several decades of Republican-led voter suppression. I feel that a big factor in Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 is that our electoral system is now rigged to favor Republicans. Trump was probably the only Republican who could have lost in 2020.
I think the vast majority of the blame lies on Rush Limbaugh (this just in, Generalissimo Rush Limbaugh is still dead) and Fox News. They create the “topics” that become important talking points to republican voters and the candidates that get elected are the ones that best encapsulate that agenda. I think that might be why we see some similarities between Palin and Trump. They both just floated to the top of the cesspool like the shit they are. And they attract the most flies.
Yes, but conning the base is separate from the OP. The question is, how did we come to accept a stupid man as leader? I don’t think Palin qualifies, because she wasn’t in a national leadership position, nor Quayle because he wasn’t that dumb. Bush Jr sort of does, but he was never stupid: he wasn’t smart, but he knew how to work with smart people, and how to act around them. What he tried to evince was an air of being the common man, which didn’t really work but did succeed in disguising his connection to the East Coast elite.
We’ve had populist leaders and leaders who weren’t very smart and / or not very well educated since the beginning. I do think Trump is the first genuinely stupid man we’ve had as President, and that while some of the names above paved the way, none of them were actually as publicly and demonstrably ignorant and unable to manage complex words and thoughts as Trump. I’d rather blame the internet, social media, and other things that have democratized access to information. People who aren’t trained in discerning source quality have access to more bad information than ever before, and it shows.
I don’t understand. Trump is accepted as leader because the base was conned. I don’t know who the “we” is in your statement otherwise; it’s certainly not someone like myself (and I assume you) who accept him. I can only assume that the “we” just means “enough of a majority in the US to elect him”, which means the base, and those who might not be the base but are still convinced enough to vote for him because some of the arguments that have conned the base work on them as well.
The premise in the OP I believe just isn’t valid, because there was no “gateway”.
That is absolutely, 100% part of it. I’d actually say that it has savagely exacerbated the problem that has been festering for years before such things were ubiquitous. I remember old Rush Limbaugh episodes (yes, I grew up on them) where he was promoting Compuserve, because back then home internet access was a new, magical novelty.
I’m still convinced Trump never expected to win in 2016 and he was just as surprised as everyone else on election day. The Republicans didn’t choose Trump, his ascension wasn’t a conscious choice on the party of the GOP as a whole, at least not initially, rather he’s the product of an unhealthy political environment. There’s no way someone like Trump could have gotten elected in 1992. But these days Republican politicians as a whole are feckless cowards and tens of millions of American voters are fools.
