No place for a president who will not defend the constitution

[Philo Sofee]

So why not move to California? Why do you choose to be surrounded by and governed by losers?

A more telling and relevant question to me is why you foolishly and stubbornly continue to support and vote for someone so demonstrably corrupt, pathologically dishonest, incompetent, hateful, deliberately divisive, purely self-serving and immoral as Trump?

That you could even pretend to believe in and support a monstrous, would-be tyrant like him is incomprehensible to me!

He's only waiting for Trump to declare himself Pope, and then after that Jesus....then..... THEN he will be winning by gum!

[Gunnar]

Their understanding of any related topic is abysmal. It comes with the territory. Right-wing discourse has taken on a life of its own that precludes rationality. Weirdly, it also precludes humor and a whole lot of other things, and seems stunted emotionally perhaps more than intellectually. Intellectually, there is no Res Ipsa* of right-wing thought. There is nowhere on the Internet I can go and find a sane and Intelligent person arguing for Donald Trump coherently. It probably can't happen because it's impossible. You literally need to be a boring fruitcake, a weird achievement of its own, to be on the team.

On this board, there is probably only one Trumper (over the time of the board) who with some discipline could do better, the others simply don't have the aptitude to learn any academic subject well enough to discuss it.

That doesn't mean there aren't Trump supporters intelligent in the usual sense. It could be engineers who don't appreciate 'soft' disciplines, and combined with conspiracy thinking, precludes them from coherency. It could be high IQ low education types who get trapped in cults and conspiracy easier than just about anybody else. You could have brilliant but corrupt lawyers, but even those aren't very plentiful due to the credibility lengths they need to go to make their defense, and they probably aren't Trump supporters per se, but riding the gravy train.

Scott Bessant and Stephen Miran could be suggested, but Miran has distanced himself from the whitepaper he wrote on tariffs that got him tagged, and all he can do when it comes to Trump now that he's the guy, is evade the subject. It would be quite astounding if he were an actual Trumper (I can't rule it out) rather than a fellow grifter, or if not a grifter, and opportunist who -- I hope to God -- is very carefully trying to be the voice of reason without getting fired. But, you will find no Stephen Miran on the Internet defending Trump at a level that a first-year econ student can't see through. Bessent in public discourse sounds like an absolute fool. The right-wingers who do speak somewhat intelligent on tariffs (but not nearly intelligent enough for a serious discussion) are those pushing back on Trump, like Ben Shapiro. But he is probably a fellow grifter, not ever a Trumper per se.

*since Res's absent others have stepped up admirably.

Many excellent points as usual, Dean Robbers. Stupid, ignorant, or amoral. We are dealing with a perfects storm of sociopaths, grifters, racists, anti-intellectuals, ignoramuses, narcissists, and the deceived in the MAGA extremist movement. I am willing to believe that a very big chunk consists of those who are ignorant and/or deceived, and that among them not a few have high IQs.

I don't think many people ever fully grasped that sustaining our constitutional democratic republic requires a lot of effort, a lot of vigilance, and a lot of concentration. Knowing the Constitution is an essential place to start. The Constitution is the set of ground rules for how we operate. Once you let go of it, you are involved in an entirely different enterprise. Many MAGA folk have cast their lot in with Trump against the Constitution.

I can't really blame people for forgetting the crucial nature of the Constitution. It used to be that your average conservative had a better command of the Constitution than people on the left. And, that may be true today, but this knowledge did sometimes travel with a concomitant burden of fringe constitutional theory, which, in the end, could easily compromise commitment to the Constitution itself. Now we are definitely in a place where that view has got the upperhand. Oh, sure, the Constitution is important, as long as you read in the special fringe right stuff along with it. If a mainstream view of the Constitution gets in the way, it can be dismissed out of hand because obviously these normies are not reading the Constitution in the right way.

It's hilarious that they dismiss us as merely being victims of TDS when they have repeatedly, utterly failed to come up with any coherent rebuttal to these excellent points brought up by you and Dean Robbers, et al. Every time, all they succeed in doing is further embarrassing and making utter fools of themselves!