Originally published at: Trump's ability to get away with shooting somebody in the middle of 5th Ave is likely waning | Boing Boing
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I hope the Rubes who pick increasingly-right candidates in their district’s gerrymandered primaries continue to press for the same thing during presidential primaries. If Trump ends up as the nominee in the general, he’ll get comprehensively clobbered by any halfway competent Dem.
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It’s always nice to see his popularity take a hit but I’m not seeing any kind of sea change moment here. If you go by polling averages his popularity still remains well within his historic range. He’s actually more popular now than he was immediately after taking office in 2021.
Hoping for the opposition to go so far to the right that it somehow flips the country to the left is a terrible strategy for several reasons.
- The so-called “unelectable” extremists often win. (See: Donald, MTG, too many others to mention)
- Even when the fascists lose to the “competent” Democrats, allowing them a voice in our political process shifts the Overton window ever farther to the right. When you’ve got some candidates talking about putting LGBTQ+ people in death camps then the ones who are “only” proposing banning trans people from athletic competitions have a way of coming off as “reasonable” by comparison.
- Anyone who is paying even a tiny amount of attention can see what horrors the increasingly-right-wing candidates have wrought in real time: women’s reproductive rights repealed, violent white nationalist movements gaining ever more power, entire library systems are getting shut down to prevent children from reading books, anything that looks even a little bit like gender non-conformity is being criminalized, and it’s accelerating.
I cannot emphasize how terrible an idea “more extremist right-wingers, please!” is for the future of our society. Fuck that idea. Fuck that idea all the way to hell.
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I am increasingly of the opinion that the reason Trump and others of his ilk get into office is because the vast majority of their supporters think of politics and the news as entertainment, and vote for whoever they think will be the most entertaining. The point of virtually every news show and channel is to sell eyeballs to advertisers, after all, and the zany antics of Trump, the GQP, and the deep-red legislatures of Tennessee and Wisconsin appeal to a kind of person who will, as MyPillow shows, buy what’s presented to them between the insurrection and trial coverage.
I hope this isn’t true, but if both the presenters and viewers of news are going for the entertainment value over actual content, I don’t see a way out.
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Or… and this is crazy I know… they believe in their fascist agenda! Shocking! but maybe start believing the people trying to eliminate trans people, make women second class citizens, take away the vote from minorities, and banning books, etc…
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Unless he dies, Trump will be the nominee. None of the other GOP candidates will speak against him, and the rest of the party treats him as the One True God. Even DeSantis is clearly terrified of him.
He’ll have more of an uphill climb in the general election, though. More recent elections, including the midterms, indicated that there were fewer people willing to vote for the clown candidates. Doesn’t mean the GOP can’t still win, of course…
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I agree. As you point out, he’s now more popular than he was, and his lead over Ron DeSantis has actually expanded. I’m all for optimism, but I’m also for taking reality as it is and then acting based on that.
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I read “Rubles”, meaning no change in how or by whom Republican nominees are chosen.
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As a northerner, I still find it shockingly incomprehensible that a malignancy such as T***p could be elected President of the USA after making his Fifth Avenue claim. Then to have that sociopathic & homicidal mindset play out though his actions and inactions over the course of his term in office. And yet he continues to hold his party faithful enthralled.
Blows my mind.
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i’m assuming you mean the northern part of the US? Maybe ask your conservative neighbors who voted for him? I hear he’s popular in some places in western NY, among other places up there.
Also, GA did not vote for him this last time… so, you know… it has little to do with where you happen to reside. Right wing politics are a national problem.
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You’re right, and that’s not really what I was thinking; but I wasn’t thinking clearly enough.
I just figured it would serve the moderate Rs right if, after keeping quiet about their own personal qualms about Trump as a candidate in 2016 and even 2020, that their party got saddled with the boat anchor that would be a Trump candidacy in 2024 due to the increasingly off-kilter forces they unleashed to get and stay elected themselves.
But of course schadenfreude is a bad reason to hope for a successful Trump candidacy.
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Clearly, those Rubes have decided that what they really, really want is a government exactly like that of Germany and Italy circa 1939.
Be very, very careful what you wish for: in other words, fuck around and find out!
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Oh, I meant north of Buffalo. Although I have American cousins in Ann Arbor who feel dislocated from reality, surrounded by a sea of mostly red.
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And of course in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter if they believe it or not anyway, it only matters what they do.
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Nach Hitler kommen Wir.
- Ernst Thälmann
How did that work out 90 years ago?
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Your title denies the most obvious target.
I’d like to think that, but experience proves otherwise. He was just told by the judge to specifically NOT inflame violence, and he DID exactly that, just a few hours later. He even said that the judge was a “Trump hating Judge, with a Trump hating wife!”, which basically puts an even bigger target on that judges back than Trump had already put there.
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If he were to die, a great number of his cult members would simply deny it, scream “FAKE NEWS”, and vote for him anyway. Hell, they are going to vote for him if he’s not on the ticket. I hope.
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First as tragedy - then again as tragedy. Though the recipient changed.
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