Ah yes. Orange and foul.
Nope. Taken away ranting incoherently about the revenge he will wreak upon his enemies. He never begs for forgiveness because in his eyes he never does anything wrong.
I think it’s a mistake to rest the whole analysis on MAGA. There’s a huge bloc of Republican voters who aren’t MAGA per se, but want a Republican president no matter what, and broadly agree with the Fox storyline that whatever Trump’s faults, Biden is worse (and they’re not that concerned about Trump’s faults).
These folks are more than happy for us to blame MAGA for Trump and focus all our fury in that direction. But make no mistake, your typical lifetime republican is going to vote Trump no matter what they say publicly about him.
That may be the case. They may think, “Better just to remain consistently behind Trump no matter what than try to finesse this disaster.”
They will of course act in their self-interest, but it may be difficult to determine where that interest lies.
They won’t admit any mistake. They will blame Democrats for a “political persecution” of Trump, forcing them to make a “tough decision,” etc. etc.
Trump will always have his core supporters who won’t abandon him no matter what. But those supporters weren’t enough to win him the 2020 election. Even in 2016 they weren’t numerous enough to win him the popular election. Though at this point in 2024, I cannot fathom how anyone could be on the fence one way or the other. Nor am I 100% confident that Trump will lose this next election. The very idea that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee is ludicrous. But MAGA has completely taken over the Republican party and that’s just the reality we live in.
I don’t, but your points are good.
Yeah, I think they’re basically called “old people” (my mom fell into this category). “Erm, Trump’s a Republican, and Republicans are OK, so Trump’s OK!” Cultural inertia can be a bitch.
Here I disagree, because these people are, in essence, low-information voters who, through the aforementioned inertia, are going to vote R until they die. They are not “happy for us” or any such thing; they are not thinking at all.
I don’t think it’s just old people though. My mother…okay, she’s old, was what I would have called apolitical prior to 2010. She had the attitude that the Democrats and the Republicans were essentially the same in that they were all liars and crooks. She still maintains this is the case, but in actuality she feel down the Fox News rabbit hole years ago and pretty much parrots MAGA talking points. I had to stifle a laugh when she told me she was an independent who did her own “research.”
But aside from senior citizens like my mother, there are people like Ashli Babbit who jumped on the Trump train even after she had voted for Obama in at least one election. Something has happened to radicalize a lot of people here in the US.
My mom too, sadly.
But radicalized people are MAGA. They are not just people voting R because they always have.
I had an online friend who also voted for Obama but on 1/6 wanted Trump to declare martial law. He was an authoritarian through and through. To me the bigger mystery was why he ever voted for Obama.
“old people” is a decent description, but I would lean more toward “rich people”. Rich-people politics is extremely predictable.
You can have old-rich people who vote out of inertia and ignorance like other old people, but I think rich people who are not old and set in their ways tend to know what they are doing. Some are MAGA but many are like the industrialists who supported Hitler.
I implore you to come down here to Arkansas and marvel at all the “rich” people who are supporting Trump. A few years back, a friend of mine lost her father to COVID. He was a COVID denier and of course full blown acolyte of MAGA. Anyway, it’s not like he was living in poverty, but at the same time he lived in a mobile home not too far outside of Pine Bluff. Dude was not rich and you’ll find people like him all over Arkansas.
The Concord Fallacy for politicians?
As I said above, I wasn’t speaking about MAGAs. Rather I was pointing out that most Republicans vote exactly like MAGA. There are a lot of rich people who don’t want to be associated with the cult or aesthetics, but will vote for literally anything and anybody if it helps their financial interests.
It’s a mistake to think Trump voters are all flag-waving hicks. They’re around you everywhere, invisible. The dentist who’s trying to retire a year early, the car-dealership owner who’s trying to get a second boat. Not billionaires, not neo-Nazis, just the haute-bourgeoisie who put their own material interests above every possible political concern.
And some say it was all Antifa. 
My apologies, I misunderstood what you were communicating. Yeah, I agree. I imagine there are a good portion of Republicans who are willing to throw the nation under the bus for their own interests.
No idea why, but at first glance I’d have sworn you said Atlantis.
Thousands show up for his rallies (even at their most popular, it’s declined significantly this year), but millions will watch a debate, and tens of millions will vote. If even 10% of the people who watch the debate see through the BS to recognize how deranged and demented Trump has begun, anything could happen.
they do not understand that this is what they’re doing. They think that they are the nation. In their ideology, they are the job creators, all good things flow from them, what’s good for them is good for the country. If parts of the nation are collapsing, well, that’s not really America, it’s just bad people tearing things down and disregarding job creators. Such a tragedy, they’re only hurting themselves, but they’ll get with the program when they see the truth.
In cases where reality challenges that dogma, it’s the fault of Democrats for not meeting them in the middle. It’s not the fault of Republicans who voted for Trump, or the ones who voted for him, it’s the fault of Democrats for not giving the job creators a better choice.
Rich-people politics.
Well said. My WAG is about 70/30 denier/embracer.
The opponents were dull and projected a less dynamic, less energetic image, and were not promising “Change”. (Heck, down deep he may have not minded if Obama staged a takeover to shove Hope and Change down everyone’s throat.) And as we have bandied about elsewhere on the boards, many of the Trump base fans confuse being agitated with being energetic, and see tearing down the establishment with extreme prejudice as a sine qua non prerequisite for “change” and we’ll figure out what to replace it with afterward.
That are in turn endorsed at the ballot box by middle- and working-class people who are fully bought the narrative line that “If parts of the nation are collapsing, well, that’s not really America, it’s just bad people tearing things down and disregarding job creators” (or, law and order/traditional values/Jesus/American Identity/whatever).
The big risk the “Rich People politics” players are taking is what happens if the “base” decides that the “tear down the establishment” part of the campaign is to be taken seriously as the priority.