Some Schmo wrote: ↑Wed Jul 17, 2024 8:03 pm
If someone talks about Trump realistically, everything is going to sound like an insult and motivated by hate to someone who wants to think highly of him. Speaking facts about Trump makes MAGA sad.
So true!
And this is what is so mind boggling to me.
Imagine the following . . .
A bully of moderate intelligence who is the son of a slumlord and managed to seize control of his father's disreputably acquired millions spends his life building an image of garish opulence in the mode of a Bond movie or Hugh Heffner wannabe while his business empire, such that it is, lurches from failure to failure, leaving bankruptcies, broken contracts, and unpaid bills in its wake.
The propaganda arm of a major political party gives this joke of a human a platform to shill a conspiracy theory against the first black president, a conspiracy that plays on nativistic fears and racism. Through this attention, he becomes the focus of the political hopes of a lot of similarly gullible, fearful, racist, and fringe voters who look to propaganda to give them most of their "information."
Because the rest of the field of potential candidates in this party is so lackluster, and people are so disillusioned, he manages to win the nomination of that party by bullying and blustering his way through the primaries. His support is a giant middle finger to the mainstream political establishment. Against the odds and the polls, he defeats the technocratic but dismally uncharismatic first female candidate for president. During the race, he tries to intimidate his opponent, he calls on the help of a foreign power against her, they actually comply and give him the damaging information he was seeking, and he defeats her by grabbing just the right thousands of votes in the right swing states.
Right away he ostentatiously refuses to conform to certain traditions of the presidency, like stepping away from his business empire to turn his full attention to the task of the presidency. He welcomes some political extremists into his administration who facilitate his extreme and inhumane actions against Muslims and immigrants. He tries to blackmail the government of a country that has been invaded by a foreign power he has already proven to be in bed with because that victimized nation is resisting digging up fake dirt on his presumed political opponent in the next presidential election. When the country is hit with a global pandemic, he shambolically fails to provide a firm, unequivocal, sane, and successful plan for fighting the disease, instead flouting the advice of medical experts and suggesting ineffective and dangerous cures that lead his followers to do dumb things like drink bleach. Under his "leadership," the GOP becomes the party of death, treating the pandemic as something it would be irresponsible to take precautions against.
The confusion, fear, and failure that follows in his wake results in the loss of his bid for re-election, and, instead of accepting that defeat with some grace, he does everything he can to hold onto power, including threatening to confiscate voting machines and trying to stop the count of electoral ballots by manipulating his vice president and mobilizing a mob that stormed the Capitol with weapons, violence, and a plan to capture key members of Congress.
Four years later, this entire bonkers ride of destitute character, serial failure, and unrepentant criminality is a breath away from recapturing power, and its followers can't see why anyone should be concerned about their plans to remake their government in the Trumpian image of Project 2025.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
