My prediction: DeSantis ekes out a victory over Trump in the primaries. Trump, enraged, declares the primaries were rigged against him. Trump runs as a third party against DeSantis and Biden, splits the Republican vote, Biden wins handily.
Anything else is to assume Trump will back down or do anything that puts someone else over him. When has Trump ever done anything in the best interests of the Republican party? Republicans exist to debase themselves before Trump, not the other way around. He has no loyalty to Republicans beyond what they can do for him.
I agree with 100% of your cunning plan except this part:
How does somebody who’s such a crappy campaigner defeat Trump at campaigning? Trump is a right master of campaigning. He spent from 2015 to 2020 doing nothing but campaigning and did quite well with it.
DeSantis would make a much more effective President, if by effective we mean “accomplishing his goals in government”. But first you have to win the game of campaigning.
Yeah, I agree that’s the least likely part of my prediction. I’m betting on a significant number of Republicans who are done with Trump and happy to vote for a fascist who is less openly a conniving womanizing heel. Not enough to win DeSantis the white house, but enough to unseat Trump as King of Shit Mountain.
The other side of it is ultimately the Republican Party won’t mind, because having Trump and Desantis both at the top of the ballot will drive Republicans to the polls, and regardless of who they vote for they’ll be voting the standard Republican ticket the rest of the way. Biden getting a second term with both sides of Congress under Republican control is a bigger win than Trump or DeSantis as president.
He doesn’t need to do this, and he probably wouldn’t as coming in third would make him look weak. He can accomplish the same thing by simply bitching about it loudly enough and telling his voters to stay home. Like he did in the Georgia runoffs in 2020.
That’s a very interesting idea. With a lot of meat on its bones.
Ultimately Trump was a master pitchman for hard-right values. Whether he holds them himself is almost immaterial. Metaphorically speaking, he sold their schlock on late night TV and he sold the heck out of it. Business has been booming.
The question that the dishonorable representative from Pennsylvania doesn’t quite address is that given the highly emotive nature of most Trumpie’s political enthusiasms, will they be as excited to have the same story told to them by somebody far more boring?
She is surely right when she indirectly says that the bulk of the R party has shifted pretty far right vs, say, 2012. But will they turn out when and where it matters for a candidate that, compared to Trump, has all the charisma of an old shoe? Which is about what everybody else has.
Not sure where to post this… but I didn’t want to start a new thread. I hope this is a gift link-- not sure. Really long article that expands each of the four points a lot– I’ve tried to capture the essence. Not a pretty or optimistic picture. “Trumpism will outlive Trump.”
The question I’ve been asked more than any other during the Trump era is how Trump supporters—including tens of millions of evangelical Christians and Republicans who have long viewed themselves as champions of “family values” and “law and order”—justify their enthusiastic support for the former president.
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I’m intentional about trying to better understand the mind of Trump supporters. I read their articles and social-media posts, listen to their interviews, and track the findings of focus groups. I engage them in conversation and reply to their emails, less to debate than to listen. I think I’ve come to understand their perspective, even though I profoundly disagree with it.
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First, Trump supporters deny the worst things he has done. Jury verdicts against him are always unfair; impeachments are unjust partisan acts. Investigations of him that have found wrongdoing, all of them, are “WITCH HUNTS.” That is true in perpetuity.
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Second, Trump supporters catastrophize the threats of the left. It’s one thing to believe, as some of us do, that the progressive movement includes dangerous, illiberal elements that need to be opposed. But that is quite different from believing that if Democrats gain or maintain power, calamity follows and America as we know it dies.
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Third, Trump and his supporters are frantically trying to portray President Joe Biden as more corrupt than his predecessor. If Trump is an innocent man forever being framed, Biden is the head of a “crime family,” according to Trump, who labeled a set of unproven allegations against Biden as “Watergate times 10.”
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A fourth justification that supporters of Donald Trump have constructed is that his presidency was an unqualified success, that Trump did practically everything right.
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At this stage, though, for Trump supporters to call him out would be to call out themselves, and that’s too painful for too many people. The greater the ethical compromises we make, the fiercer our justifications become—and the angrier and more frustrated we get at those who won’t go along for the ride.
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And if Trump is dethroned as the leader of the Republican Party, whoever succeeds him will have modeled themselves after him. Trumpism will outlive Trump. It’s the cost of the lies we sometimes tell ourselves.
The second point is the most important. And has been the whole thrust of Fox, QAnon, NewsMax for years. Namely that
The Democrats are not simply another political party with which we disagree.
Instead they are an existential threat to everything the USA has ever stood for. And they are this close to succeeding forever, and snuffing out the USA you hold dear. They must be stopped at all costs and stopped right now or you and your children will live was slaves in some weird, new, and decidedly non-brave world.
Once somebody has gone through the looking glass far enough to buy this nonsense, there is literally no going back for them. Or at least not for most of them.
But I would not call this idea Trumpism. I think it’s really Murdoch / Kochism.
This question rests on an underlying assumption: does Trump endorse or oppose the somebody far more boring? He endorses him or her for the reason stated above: he works out a deal to get a pardon for everything, and in GOP tradition “put our long national nightmare behind us.” If you assume that he screams like a stuck pig about fraud when he loses the GOP nomination, I don’t think enough of them come back. Some, not nearly all.
Did it turn out that that IS a gift link? Or do you have your own subscription to The Atlantic online. Just curious.
I agree that those things aren’t exactly Trumpism, but the whole thing will live on as Trumpism. Trumpism is a fatberg, a fusion of nasty, discarded, useless, refuse that flows together and sticks in one big, obstructive blob and blocks any growth or forward motion.
I read your excellent summary. I have no access to The Atlantic and assumed your link would not work for me. So I never clicked it.
Fatberg indeed. Apt.
Funny but the word “Fatberg” reminds me somehow of the word “Blofelt”. Trump as blustering base cartoonish Bond villain. Now that’s an image. And Fatberg would be a perfectly plausible name for the screenwriters to pick.
I think maybe that should be his new Dopername: Fatberg. Replaces TFG, PAB, and all the rest. He’s certainly not a svelteberg.
That’s assuming that the Senate and House races are not as vitriolically divided amongst the Republicans as the presidential race is. In 2020, there was a lot of split ticket voting where people voted for Biden for president but voted for Republican congressional candidates. The 2022 midterms may be an indication that the down ticket Republican voters feel they may have got burned.
I’m well familiar with Trumpism, because I heard it coming out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth on AM radio decades before Trump moved to the white house. It’s not a new concept, conservatives have been pushing a regressive agenda against “Feminazis” and “Bleeding heart liberals” for decades. The important thing is that who is speaking the agenda doesn’t matter. Limbaugh was a puffed up windbag but he didn’t truly center himself, he just served as the mouthpiece of the regressive agenda. His successors, Beck, Carlson, Shapiro, are all the same way. They enjoy the grift but they’re not making it about them.
I think Trump is unique in that he didn’t just put on that regressive cloak like Kathy Barnette believes. He turned conservative aggrivation into “MAGA” and “Trumpism,” he turned it into a cult of personality around himself, because that’s what he’s always done. Kathy’s wrong, Trump didn’t just align his values with aggrieved conservatives, he assimilated those values and centered himself as the only one to champion them. DeSantis is the right’s hope to break that spell and return to the pre-Trump GOP grift where everyone can get a thumb in the pie, and I expect them to shun Trump and champion DeSantis as much as possible. So far they’re doing a terrible job, and if Trump takes a early lead in the primaries they will absolutely line up behind him again just like last time.
Remember 2016? Trump was just one of a large number of potential candidates. Folks were divided and many Republicans were against Trump until he became the obvious front-runner. I think Trump’s most cultish followers make up a minority of the Republican party and if given the chance to vote for a more acceptable fascist they will, so much of this hinges on if DeSantis can maintain acceptability on a national stage. So far, he seems to be going for MAGA Minus Trump which is not a winning strategy. He’s not going to peel Trump supporters off Trump, he should be going for the more moderate Republicans that never liked Trump. It will be interesting to see if he pivots in that direction. It’ll be a hard pivot but hardly the most whiplash-inducing pivot a candidate has made.
While I would love to see the Republicans get absolutely destroyed in a general election, I’ll believe it when I see it. I cannot imagine Republican voters not marching in goose step behind the (R) candidate.
I think she’s in denial because she doesn’t want to admit how fragile their house of cards is, and how much the Republican Party has been riding on his orange coattails for the past 6-7 years. It’s far more comforting for her to insist that it’s the other way around, but it definitely isn’t.
Concur and ISTM that the “traditional” or “conventional” Republicans with whom we’ve been familiar up until the 2000s are now those who Trump refers to as “RINOs”.
This is an interesting suggestion, but how does DeSantis thread the needle to accomplish that? What are the driving issues for these “moderate” Republicans that would abandon TFG? Maybe DeSantis returns to sanity with the whole ‘lower taxes, less regulation, strong military, pro-business, smaller government’ thing, and eases back on all the hateful and divisive rhetoric in favor of “I will serve ALL Americans, and ALL Americans are welcome in my camp!”? He has a lot of rhetoric and actions to walk-back if he wants to distinguish himself from TFG, but could also pick-up a number of dis-satisfied, conservative Biden voters.
I don’t see how he’s supposed to scoop up the moderate Republicans (all three of them, at this point) after trying to put the Mouse in harness and banning books by the carload. How that appeals to those who pay more than lip serve to the ideals of The Business of America Is Business and Small Government, is beyond me.