Agreed. I’ve seen a lot of evidence supporting that. He has done “stunt” campaigns in the past. If you see his facial expression and body language in the video where he learned he won, he did not seem to celebrate; rather he seemed stressed out, like, “Oh shit, I won? That fucks up my plans.”
According to one of his daughters-in-law, it was because he didn’t believe it at first, and was cautious.
But Trump said her father-in-law didn’t want to believe it just yet.
“He didn’t want it to be said until we knew, because he said, ‘Don’t tell me that if we haven’t really won yet. I want to know for sure,’” she said.
I call bullshit. He is overconfident to the point of extreme hubris. I’m sure people were asking why he wasn’t celebrating like everyone else, and she (or someone coaching her) concocted a cover story.
My reverse-conspiracy theory has long been that he ran while figuring someone would offer him a straight cash bribe to drop out and endorse them, and he remained genuinely surprised as each day passed and nobody offered him one.
That is one of the things that is going on. But, in 2024, could the base have been conned into accepting a transgender Latina as leader? A 35-year-old Wiccan housewife from Boston? I don’t think so. There are certain identities, characteristics, and traits that simply are outside of the bounds of what a base, conned or not, will accept as leader. In the 20th century, being a stupid man and a poor speaker would have been disqualifying in a way that they no longer are. People weren’t conned into THAT aspect of things, though I agree there’s a lot of conning and grifting here.
I see the gateway idiots beginning with Reagan, thought not as him being personally an idiot/senile (some arguments though), but as enabling the post-rational phase of the Republican party.
For all the power that forming the Religious Right brough him and his successors, it absolutely enabled the Right vs. EVIL flavor of conservatism that has now evolved into out-at-out alternate realities of Trump 1.0. And this did contribute (IMHO) to Bush (W) being easily led and controlled by his advisors.
A strong + 1 for gateway idiots being the whole Tea Party - where the learned that a sufficiently obstructionist minority could absolutely be the tail that wagged the dog, and made splinter factions disproportionately powerful, and further wounding any efforts at bipartisanship.
All that said however, Trump is the one who was the threshold as it were - he is the epitome of post-rational political idiocy, the one who was able to say “Don’t believe you eyes, just believe me!”
But again, I tie it back to the Reagan era of faith before facts, one I am sure he thought he could control, the same way Republicans of 2015 were sure they could control Trump.
I understand where the OP is coming from. I told my MAGA mother I didn’t know what was more embarrassing; That so many Americans want an autocrat or that the autocrat they chose was a weak, know nothing man like Trump. Even in 2016, it was obvious to anyone who paid any attention to Trump that he didn’t know anything about anything. Maybe having an idiot in office was part of the charm?
Quayle drew a ton of mockery from Democrats. I think the mockery itself was a big part of the catalyst, it was just a huge humiliation after the romp they had during the Reagan years that they thought would be a shoo-in thousand-year reich. From Quayle up through W, that rage simmered and induced them to double down on the idiocy wherever possible.
It’s oppositional-defiance disorder. If liberals say Trump is an idiot, then Repubs are going to pretend as hard as they can that he’s a genius. Democrats don’t get to define normalcy, even if it means embracing rank abnormality as normal.
I mean, Barry Goldwater hit the nail on the head when he described the issues he foresaw with the “preachers” getting too much power in the Republican Party. And it went down pretty much exactly like that.
When a big part of your party’s philosophical underpinnings are based on the idea that experts aren’t any smarter or more knowledgeable than some ignorant rube, then it’s not surprising that the candidates who would be popular would not exhibit a large degree of intellectualism.
I mean, I keep hearing the phrase (or something like it) “Parents know what’s best for their children” in the context of vaccinations, books, sex ed, etc… from the Right in school board elections, state politics, and national politics. The sort of person who would actually believe that and choose to vote based on that is far more likely to be swayed by a Sarah Palin than a Condoleeza Rice.
That’s the problem here- the GOP leaned into the notion that rural/suburban ignorance and religion is just as valid as scientific knowlege, inquiry, and logical thought. When they did that, they pretty much guaranteed themselves candidates who basically espouse that. Even the intelligent and educated ones will keep it under wraps for fear of looking too brainy or elite.
If I had to pick just one person it would be Newt Gingrich.
Around the time of Tip O’Neill there was still a fairly strong (though far from universal) undercurrent of civility within Congress. A politician from one party could still socialize and occasionally get things done with their opposite number. I think Gingrich made it OK to act like a jerk and make politics an all-or-nothing scorched earth affair, with the bodies burned and defiled afterwards. If that’s true, someone like Trump was inevitable.
For me, it seems like the Tea Party movement (on to which Palin latched herself) was the turning point. The Hurr Durr faction of the GOP had been growing in power since at least the Gingrich era, and probably going all the way back to the Nixon era. But with the rise of the Tea Party, the GOP establishment felt it could get a lot of mileage out of giving a platform to the loudest, crassest voices in its coalition. The mistake it made was assuming that it could keep a tight rein on those voices, and that the business elites would retain the true power behind the scenes. Trump would prove them wrong.
But Trump’s rise was really a symptom of the rot which had, at that point, been eating away at the GOP for years. If Trump had never decided to run for president, the GOP establishment might have been able to keep the crazies from taking control of the ship for another election cycle or two, but by the time the Orange One rode down that escalator, the party had become ripe for takeover by a loud, obnoxious, bullshit-spewing clown. In Trump’s absence another clown would have taken charge - perhaps it would have been Tucker Carlson, maybe Steve Bannon, perhaps someone else whose star failed to rise with Trump on the scene.
That’s not really a counter example. Joseph MacCarthy was born on a farm in Wisconsin and dropped out of school at 14 before serving in WW2.
The surprising thing about trump was not that the GOP could find someone who could convince the GOP base to vote for a fascist. It’s how easy it was to convince them to do so. No one thinks Trump’s was the fifth of nine Irish siblings born on a farm in rural Wisconsin. Trump never tried to convince anyone that.
That’s what Bush taught him. You don’t need to try to that hard, or at all.
Ok he probably didn’t teach Trump personally but it did influence the people that convinced him to run
He went the other way. He convinced people that he was rich and successful and that’s why you should listen to him.
The truth is that most of his money was inherited, and the vast majority of what he’s tried to do in legitimate business has failed. He profits mostly from grifting.
This is what I disagree with. He can’t be taught. He’s a natural born asshole. Full Stop.
He wants to continue to bully and order people around like he has somehow done his entire life. How that piece of shit is threatening to anyone is the question.
Okay, I see I misunderstood your post. You were talking about how a politician can lie about their background. (Although that one goes back to William Henry Harrison.) I thought you were talking about how a politician can convince the base that there’s an enemy attacking them (communists, immigrants, terrorists, black people, liberals, catholics, jews, muslims, hippies, flag burners, satanists, freemasons, feminists, gays, atheists, intellectuals, organized crime, pet cannibals, etc) and they need to vote for the politician to protect themselves.
Not even that, he didn’t need to lie. Bush pretended to be a Texas cowboy, but very unconvincingly, everything about him screamed “stupid rich heir who failed at everything but succeeded because of who his dad was”. That’s why he’s a step on the road to Trump. If W’s unconvincing cowboy impression convinced the GOP base, maybe the trick is not convincing the GOP you are a cowboy but just saying racist stuff?
Yeah but that bit was always obvious. The bit that was surprising to most people (myself included) was that to take that and turn it an actual fascist president in the oval office, didn’t take someone who did a good (or at least passable) job of convincing the GOP base they were some downhome church loving patriotic good ole boy.
Let’s be real - Trump didn’t fool anybody into thinking he was a regular fella.
People might have claimed they bought it, but there were two more important features they didn’t want to admit out loud:
He is a “he”, unlike Clinton or Harris
He is white, unlike Barack Obama
The folks who claim they’d rather “have a beer” with him already know he’d never have a beer with them. But he looks like the sort of person they’d rather have a beer with than any of those people. At that point, they just needed a convenient alternate explanation. Don’t be fools and buy into the idea anybody actually thought he was some kind of average Joe
I can understand getting fooled. I actually believed George W. Bush when he said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. One of the reasons I believed him was because the idea of such a bold lie was simply ludicrous. He couldn’t keep up such a lie for ever and when discovered people would be pissed! I was wrong. But unlike MAGAts, the evidence Bush lied about WMDs became undeniable and I had to admit to myself I was wrong.
You’re right about Republicans not being the victim. I could accept in 2016 the possibility some of them were duped, but by the time 2020 rolled around, anyone still supporting Trump was either evil or a fool. They either knew who he was and didn’t care or willfully ignored the mountains of evidence revealing his character.