I mean, if they want to go back to the original Constitution, they do realize they’d lose their guns, right?
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No, no they don’t realize that.
As a woman, if we’re talking national history, I wouldn’t want to go back any further than, say, the 1970’s at most, so I could at least get credit and sign financial documents on my own. Even though things are so effed up now, in a lot of ways, they’re the best they’ve ever been. 
These people have no sense of historical conditions or the progress made.
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It’s almost like we are shitty at teaching history in America…
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For sure.
That is/was one of the things that most frustrated me during the whole T campaign, trying to get anyone of his supporters to answer when it was that America was so great that they wanted to revisit. Because, guaranteed, anytime they mentioned would’ve included a lot of downsides, too, for most everyone, including them.
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Thanks for linking these. TIL that there are parts of DC that the DC Code treats as outside Washington!
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Okay, I’ll give it a shot.
He’s got a set of interlocking talents that nobody who could have stopped him recognized until it was far, far too late. First, he’s very good at a kind of self-aggrandizement that is plausible to a large number of people. He’s a failed businessman who has nevertheless become, for a large number of people, the symbol of what it means to be successful in business. He’s (by most accounts) less rich than many “elites,” but he has nevertheless become, again for a large number of people, a symbol of what a rich person looks like. Despite the fact that he is apparently very bad at negotiation, before his presidency he was lauded as the dealmaker.
Second, he has a talent for cutting his sheep out of the flock. I don’t know enough about his pre-presidency background to know whether this was in evidence earlier, but during the campaign and especially while he was president, he knew what he had to do and say not just to keep his supporters happy but also to play on and expand their confirmation bias.
Third and relatedly, he has a talent for branding by coopting a phrase or slogan and turning it to his advantage. “Make America Great Again” isn’t his, and when we first saw it on a baseball cap, I’m sure most of us thought it was dumb as fuck and unlikely to become a marketing phenomenon and political shibboleth. “Fake news” isn’t his, and as I’m sure y’all recall, when it was first introduced into the political lexicon, it meant almost the precise opposite of what it means now.
Fourth and very similarly, he is very good at anticipating future attacks and defusing them by using his branding talent to brand his opponents with undesirable traits he also possesses or as guilty of things that he has done. Hillary Clinton, for all her faults, could never have dreamed of being as “crooked” as Trump. But by calling her “crooked,” he converted any comparison with his own multidecade history of blatant corruption and crooked business dealings to a he-said-she-said dispute.
And fifth, partly as a result of all the above and partly because he’s either willing to look stupid or doesn’t know how stupid he looks, he converted himself to must-watch TV by sheer braggadocio and buffoonery during a presidential-election campaign against a far more competent but far less media-savvy opponent.
In a better person than Trump–a category that includes the vast majority of Americans–at least some of those talents could have been (and have been) wielded for better governance or for the common good. Trump, though, seems to operate at the level of unbound and self-serving id, directing them toward nothing but self-aggrandizement. That doesn’t make them non-talents; it just makes them more dangerous.
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If you indulge the wacky 19th president thing though, how does Trump somehow end up as a legitimate president?
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Not like he ever was to begin with.
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I’m guessing the thinking is that he knows this one trick constitutional scholars hate and by being the first president to be sworn in on the correct magic date he automatically becomes legitimate and there is nothing the (((globalists))) can do
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Okay, but he wasn’t originally sworn in on that date, and he missed it already so …? I guess it’s not too rational to expect internal consistency from a set of incoherent beliefs.
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I’m not even sure what to do with these people. Where would you start?
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I’m not so sure; Trump is popular because he gives his followers permission to be their worst selves and reject any information that doesn’t support their prejudices and worldview. How could that possibly be channeled into something positive?
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Write them off, try to offset each of their votes with two of ours, keep an eye on them so they can’t surprise us with more insurrections and political violence.
Also, bad actors will urge us to extend understanding to the positions of the Know-Nothing 27%, to respect their views, to compromise with them. They’ll lament it when we make fun of these Know-Nothings. Don’t fall for it.
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At the end. Whatever energy you have for organizing, education, anything, is much better spent on people who are not this far gone. It sounds harsh to say they’re a lost cause, but they are.
But I still want them to have access to affordable healthcare and education and healthy food, which is more than I can say they want for many of us.
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Ignorance is Strength.
Trump has always been President.
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