Officially he isn’t, at least not yet. So far Nikki Haley is the only prominent Republican who has publicly declared an intent to run against Trump.
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… convict him, in the subsequent impeachment trial
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I dunno - but it’s pretty hard to avoid that reality. He has to have at least a vague sense of who his base is, and that they don’t actually like him (as he’s being so careful not to further inflame them); he’s got to see his poll numbers, which are pretty damning. He may be delusional, but the level of delusion necessary to ignore all that seems downright Trumpian.
If he doesn’t run, all this would be even weirder. (He’s pretty much explicitly said he’s considering running, which at this point amounts to the same thing, I suppose, even if he never ends up “running.” For his purposes, whatever they are, maybe he never actually has to declare. Although… no, it’s still weird. It’s not like declining to run and instead throwing his support behind another candidate is actually something anyone else would want - it would likely be more of a liability than gift… so it doesn’t improve his position if he did it, either.)
What does Mother think?
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and he’s surely not delusional enough to think he’d ever win any election at this point.
This is a man who thought it’d be OK being Renfield/VP to a pussy grabbing Nazi, and still position himself as a religious conservative. He doesn’t make good decisions, delusional is not a bad description. I’m sure the Republican candidates are hoping Trump is arrested and destroyed as a candidate, and in the inevitable horse race, he’s taller and whiter and more Christiany than Desantis and Haley.
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And yet understandably the “left” including myself still sticks up for him for doing the right thing that day and his life being threatened by his very own. We stick up for Liz Cheney for christ’s sake too. No agreement in anything other than I guess to see shit not get burned to the ground. It’s not because “we won”. There were no winners in any of this dabble with the still clear and present danger of fascist chaos.
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All valid points, although I would think one of his biggest problems is that he has the charisma of a lukewarm glass of tap water. I would have completely forgotten he existed as this point if it were not for articles talking about how he was actually pretty O.K. with Trump wanting him to be executed by insurrectionists in a plywood gallows.
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he could also just go away, shut up, and never be heard from again. that would be cool.
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Well his base is the evangelicals. And they are a smaller percentage of the GOP than is generally realized. Trumps support was strongest not with regular evangelical church goers, but with people that identified as Christian, but didn’t attend church regularly. The kind of people that are offended by “happy holidays,” but have no idea what the Nicene creed is. It’s not like he and Trump were buddies. Pence got the nod because Trump’s support in the Evangelical community was weak. It was a marriage of convenience on both sides, but of course Trump has no loyalty whatsoever.
I would be curious to see what Pence’s support level is among actual evangelical church goers, but they are not enough to get him the nomination, much less the general election.
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Remember when we were all worried about Pence as “the real threat” in that administration because he was “as evil as Trump but also competent”?
I’ll go on record for myself at least that I could not have been more wrong about it all.
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Given that the religious conservatives were embracing Trump before him, he was right - inasmuch as he’s had a fall from grace in religious conservative circles, it’s due to not being enough of a Nazi lickspittle. Desantis knows how to be a real fascist, how to do performative cruelty, so he’ll always be more appealing to Republican voters than Pence. Pence surely knows he hasn’t had a base since it collapsed in his own state - on the national level he rode Trump’s coattails as a big nothing. He’s seen the hatred he’s engendered in the very people who put him in the VP seat, up close and personal, so he’s got to know he’s got no real supporters at this point.
I think that was the early presumption that “religious people” wouldn’t vote for an adulterous pussy-grabber (because people fall into the trap of seeing “Christian conservatives” as concerned about moral issues, when the reality is that polls show their primary concerns are patriarchy and white supremacy).
The idea may have been to use Pence to shore up Trump’s Christian conservative bonafides originally, but I’d say it turned out he was not just superfluous, if anything it worked the other way around (at least until he went against Trump’s directives). The reality is that Christian conservatives want to vote for a fascist (so Desantis has more appeal to evangelicals than Pence), they don’t really care if he’s actually a Christian. Everything I’ve read suggests even - in fact especially - church-going, self-identified evangelicals (and their leaders) supported Trump significantly through both elections.
E.g.
(I recollect reading something during the Trump presidency that indicated that more conservative Christians had started identifying as evangelicals based on their support for Trump himself. Trump was changing not only what it meant to be a “Republican,” but to a lesser degree “evangelical.”)
Yeah, but that’s… almost all Christians in this country, church-attending or not, in my experience. Conservative white evangelical Christianity in particular has little interest in doctrine, as it’s a folk religion based primarily around conservative issues.
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oh, he is actually a threat… just ask the people of Indiana. He’s a Christian Dominionist, and he’s hell bent on imposing his faith on all of us… he’s just also as dull as dishwater and a terrible politician. But we should not underestimate the threat he and his movement pose to those of us who are not of their movement.
not really no. We’ve come to believe that right wing Christians are the dominant strain of Christianity in America, and that almost ALL Christians are right wing, but that’s not the case. Just because the media gives them the lion’s share of the attention doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of Christians (likely the majority, I’d say) who oppose theocracy and embrace diversity and pluralism.
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Yeah absolutely, sorry, I spoke unclearly - my point was that most Christians aren’t really up on specifics of doctrine (particularly what those specifics are called) and religious history, but white evangelicals in particular have little interest in, well, what everyone else calls Christianity, as they follow a folk religion premised on right-wing political beliefs that only sometimes has points in common with other Christian beliefs.
My personal experience is that very, very few of the Christians I know who grew up with the religion (unless they went to Catholic school), really know much about Christianity itself, independent of political beliefs. (Though the people who grew up in conservative religious traditions were outright shocked by the gulf between what they were taught as children and the actual history and doctrine they learned, in academic environments, as adults.)
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Thanks for clarifying! The whole “white evangelical Christians represent the whole faith” really annoys me… it’s like saying Islamic State represents all Muslims…
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Sadly, there seems to be a lot of truth in that assessment.
Yeah, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Like the rest of the GOP what they lack in numbers, they make up in VOLUME! (And the threat of violence)
One is reminded a bit of Ireland during the troubles. The conflict between Protestants and Catholics was a political/class/ethnic struggle, and not one of doctrine. Even though they identified each other by religious labels, it really wasn’t a religious conflict per se.
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