I honestly do not understand how so many Republicans can look at men like Ron DeSantis and Trump and see what transparent phonies they are. I simply do not understand it.
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Fuck these fucking interesting times.
Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.
The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.
Republicans do not pay their debts.
T R E 4 5 O N
The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.
Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.
With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.
Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.
Giving up is unforgivable.
We’re watching the self-immolation of the leading world power on a level unprecedented in human history.
Republican speaker of the house Mike Johnson is the bland and smiling face of evil.
They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.
I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.
GOP baffled that ‘we don’t care if you die’ is not a winning slogan.
When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.
There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.
The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.
In my day, never was longer.
Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.
Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.
The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.
Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.
Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.
RandomMonster
I don’t understand how gullible people are.
Rick Taylor
Yeah, I agree. I didn’t believe a transparent con like Trump could win the Republican nomination, I certainly didn’t think he could get enough votes to be president. It boggled my mind.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I don’t really get it either. The closest I can figure is some kind of combination between them being authoritarian followers/tribalism and believing what they want to believe, reality be damned
NotoriousJRT
There is something very real to see in both of them. It’s vile, repulsive, and devoid of basic human compassion. Do Republicans see that? Me thinks many do and are excited by it.
Matt Smith
I just said this to my dad last week. We’re from Ohio, and not big-city Ohio. Having grown up there, I’d really expect everyone to see straight through a huge bullshitter. I can’t understand what happened to the Midwest I knew.
Baud
Republicans see them as actors playing a role, and the only question is how well they play that role. Do they make the libs mad, and do they inspire audience (the base) participation. Being sincere or phony has nothing to do with it.
Earl
They don’t care that they’re phony.
What’s actually going on is hero worship. Every Republican would love to run around grabbing pussies, being racist, mocking the disabled, etc. Except most of them fear the consequences from spouses / jobs / community.
So they just watch their heroes act out the lives they wish they had the money / power to live.
Same reason a bunch of fat scrubs wearing stained tshirts, making $18 an hour, with a 30-day beards that are pissed that super attractive women with the kind of bodies that cost an hour a day in the gym plus an hour a day of grooming aren’t jumping at the chance to be their bang maids. They’re pissed, and they look at Trump and his “model (with no visible means of support before meeting Trump… hmm. It’s an old, if not particularly honorable, profession) wife and are jealous. But they can’t afford one, and their personalities ain’t getting them anyone they want either.
Mike in NC
I never watched The Apprentice but understood it was a shitty reality TV game show where some self-important asshole fired people for not living up to his high standards. In real life lots of us have suffered working under a rotten Trump-like manager who took credit for our work and generally had the personality of a puddle of vomit.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Before you know it Republicans will be voting for an actor
Splitting Image
You could try re-watching Bergman in Gaslight.
If Charles Boyer’s character restricted himself to telling plausible lies, he wouldn’t have been able to drive his wife crazy.
RandomMonster
@Baud:
This nails it.
Bupalos
You’re kidding yourself if you think they are “fooled.” It’s really not that simple. Sure there are plenty of people simple and angry enough to literally fall for this bad act. But that has always been true, and it’s nothing like a dispositive number. The real difference is the number of people NOT enthusiastically on the other side. And the number of people just flat refusing to do their duty, and instead looking at the common enterprise that is The United States as something foreign, to which they are either indifferent or hostile.
And some part of that is that we really have done a bad job of contextualizing in global history the very real shortcomings and failures of the United States- as the failure of a political entity that needs to do better and is going to do better… but has generally and in the BIG picture been on the forefront of expanding human freedom. To be sure, this is a smaller part than the masses on the side of indifference or hostility who got there because they are freaked out that they could become OMG A MINORITY!!!
steve g
I would be wary of either one of them as the manager of a car dealership, let alone as mayor of a city. I wouldn’t trust either one with my money. There are millions of people with more integrity than those two. Not even student council president material.
Turgidson
@Earl:
This is more or less how I see it. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense to me at all.
They’re wrong about every policy issue. Their politicians are liars and hypocrites and creeps (and quite often all of the above). They stand in the way of other members of our society getting a slight boost from government policy. And on and on.
the only explanation that makes *any* sense is that they just want politicians to reflect their anger and prejudice and make them feel good about it.
Lyrebird
Glad I am not the only one!
Suzanne
Ehhhhh. They like that Donnie Two Scoops and Puddin’ Cup piss off the people they hate the most. That overrides all else.
To be fair, I enjoyed watching how triggered they were by HRC.
I told you all that I’m an asshole.
Poe Larity
They also lurved Rambo, The guy who went postal and littered the mountains with blue lives that apparently didn’t matter.
Liberals just can’t grok people who can Cognitively Dissonate.
Gvg
Death of a salesman. A lot of people believe advertising and games and movies are real to them. They actually get invested in characters in stories and confuse the actors who play them with real people. They are not good at seeing through it.
I think it’s also related to how extreme many of them take their religious views. They get really completely absorbed beyond what others in the same religion do because they …go further? Can’t stop?
Anyway Death of a Salesman is what keeps going through my mind. They sell it but they also believe it, just because it’s advertised, it must be true.
Really wish more people had had my 4th grade teacher Mrs. Barnett who taught us deliberately how advertising worked and how to notice it and resist it. Also taught us about balancing checkbooks with a field trip to a bank.
Possibly I had an advantage in that I remember all the Trump bankruptcies and the laughing new stories when I was a kid. Plus I thought he was vulgar and had bad taste when I was about 13 years old and never changed that opinion.
Chetan Murthy
Why is this surprising? People fall for con artists all the time. The trick is to make the mark think he’s in on the con right? But he’s going to get something other people won’t. That when the real victims get robbed, he’ll cash in! It’s an old old story. As someone once said: you can’t con an honest man.
Betsy
Patriarchy (the global system of domination and oppression).
That’s it. That’s all of it. Everyone who sees the world in terms of domination and oppression, likes exactly what they see in Desnacktis and trump.
H.E.Wolf
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair.
Alison Rose
It’s simple, really. They hate the same people, and moreover, TFG and DeSatan tell them they’re RIGHT to hate them, that their hatred is a virtue and they don’t need to change. These people feed off their bigotry and have nothing else to them but that, and they’re terrified to let it go because they think they’d be nothing without it. And many of them are right. That’s why so many evangelicals voted for Trump. Abortion, yes, but also the fact that they knew he would legitimize (in their eyes) their prejudices and would do everything he could to write them into our laws. They excused all the sleaze and sin about him because of their number one sin, seething and spiteful hatred.
Phony? They couldn’t give a fuck.
Steeplejack
@Cole:
“I honestly do not understand how so many Republicans can look at men like Ron DeSantis and Trump and not see what transparent phonies they are.”
Fixed.
Ohio Mom
Don’t underestimate how many people walk around so completely stressed out by the circumstances of their lives that they can’t think or see straight. Which includes not being able to see what phonies Trump, DeSantis and the like are. These are the same people who can’t see their mega church pastors ripping them off.
That’s only some of them, others are hateful S.OB.s who enjoy seeing cruelty embodied in the flesh. And others are simply team players, loyal beyond understanding to their ancestral party.
Sister Golden Bear
Hero worship. Trump and DeSantis are the people they wish they could be, grabbing pussies, being immense assholes without consequences,
just telling it like it isbeing openly sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc., etc.Lots of people get conned, especially when they want to believe in the con.
Others recognize the keyfabe and don’t care as long as it owns the libs.
And most importantly Trump and DeSantis hurt the people they want hurt (as one Trump supporter once said).
Ruckus
People who want to go backwards in time will look at anything that reminds them of the past. People, places and lifestyles. Think of them as the people that walk backwards through life. Or people that wear a funny hat with rear view mirrors. They hate forward. Either they don’t see a way or they are blinded by the past. Libraries have lots of books with stories that tell us that yesterday was better than tomorrow, because we know how good or shitty it was. It’s a known. BTW this describes a lot of conservatives, who want the “simpler times” or think they will be worse off if say black people get ahead at all. They have zero concept that the future can be better than the past. Some might say that they live with their heads where the sun don’t shine
Some might say that religion is part of the problem. At least some religions or some religious people. Because the past is what is “known” and celebrated. The future scares some people and always has.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: Also too. Many of their supporters are fundamentalist Christians who’ve been taught from childhood that The Word is the only truth and reality is a pack of lies thrown up by Satan. So if Trump says he’s a zillionaire it must be true, and any evidence to the contrary is just another example of Satan trying to deceive.
Likewise, there’s simultaneously a recognization that Trump was very un-Christian even by their standards, but it’s rationalized the God uses imperfect tools to achieve their ends.
sdhays
@Mike in NC: I watched it once (and I barely knew who Trump was at the time) and was appalled. I took “apprentice” to mean something, like the rich fuck who’s supposedly brilliant since he’s rich would be, like, involved as a “mentor”. Or just “involved” at all.
Instead, people were given some vague task that Trump himself couldn’t do, and then there was some stupid ceremony at the end where he said, “You’re fired.” to some unfortunate contestant. I still don’t understand how that “performance” convinced anybody that Trump himself was successful or knew anything about running anything.
dmsilev
@Suzanne:
I think that’s most of it. Also, Trump, thanks mostly to carefully-edited TV episodes, represents the fantasy of being the Ultimate Guy In Charge, firing all the lesser folk and bestowing his favor on the few chosen elect.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Because they too are transparent phonies or True Believers. They all know that it’s all a bunch of shit and they’re determined to make everyone eat it. Assimilate or die is their final goal and dying is just fine as long as it’s their enemies who are dying.
Guns, incivility, hatred and death are all they have to offer those who stand in their way.
RaflW
There’s a decent sized slice of these folks who think that Biden etc are just as much play acting their liberal roles as they see / think their guy(s) are.
On some earlier thread, there was talk about how Trump in office wanted to just use indictments as power plays, disconnected from the actual intent or practice of law enforcement and criminal investigations. And that therefore he assumes Biden/Garland do the same. To him.
A lot of Republican voters think Dems abuse their power to benefit ‘our team’ so why shouldn’t they just get their corrupt boss re-installed? They’ve utterly lost trust in systems or really any people. So being phony is irrelevant.
sdhays
@dmsilev: Trump and DeSantis have a different relationship with the Republican Party base. I think they like Puddin’ Cups because they’ve been told to like him by Fox News. He apparently spends as much time on there as he can. That’s pretty much it. Everything he does is to keep Fox happy.
If Fox cuts him out (and maybe they will since he snubbed them on his campaign launch and he’s doing such a good job of making himself a laughingstock and trying to prove without a doubt that he’s going nowhere), whatever support he still has is gone.
Trump doesn’t need Fox to win the primary. At least not anymore.
Ruckus
A lot of good answers here.
There are, because humans, a lot of reasons that some people can’t see the possibilities of the future being better. A lack of current knowledge is one. Being scared because life isn’t as simple as it used to be. Being scared because of con men. Being wowed by con men. Being conned by con men. Being told that life sucks. Having life suck. Wanting simple because they can only understand simple. Living in an area that actually has a bleak future. Being told that racism is normal and women are inferior then seeing a black man run for president and winning, seeing a white woman run for president and being scared shitless. Seeing an older gentleman win the presidency and having a black woman for his vp. Having a shitty public school system that doesn’t prepare kids for the future. And never did. Having your crappy job go away because some company from another state took over the company and closed down the one reasonable job site in the area. And no one else wants to bother.
OK I’m stopping now…..
mrmoshpotato
Yup. Back in 2015, I’m looking at all of this Trump trash, and saying “Don’t you dumbfucks know he has a decades-long reputation as a conman? You put him in power and he will fuck you over too!“
eclare
@Steeplejack:
Thank you!
UncleEbeneezer
White (Cis/Het/Xtian/Male) Supremacy is a hell of a drug. Playing along is the price of admission.
Ruckus
@sdhays:
I still don’t understand how that “performance” convinced anybody that Trump himself was successful or knew anything about running anything.
He “had” far more money than them. Everything else makes no difference because they have no idea how to have the amount of money that SFB said he had. He was always lying about the money because other than putting his name up on signs he’s been pretty much a failure at actually making his money count. If the size of his ego had any relation to reality he actually could have been a lot richer. But he’s always been an egomaniac and a loser.
CaseyL
It’s been generations in the making.
The Deep South has always been a lousy place to live. Many areas didn’t even get municipal electricity or indoor plumbing until, what, the 1940s? Later? Some areas still don’t. Bad schools, bad healthcare, local and state government one corrupt grifter after another. And a tradition of doing nothing new, thinking nothing new, never going “beyond the sayings of [their] fathers.” It was good enough for Pappy, it’s good enough for me.
People, young people, any people (and especially non-white and non-male people) who wanted something more… they left and never came back.
So all that remained were people who were ignorant, angry, and unwilling to change, unwilling to learn, unwilling to think any differently than previous generations had done. Distilling over multiple generations into pure poison.
That’s the Deep South, anyway. Places like Ohio, Nebraska, Montana… I don’t know what their excuse is.
danielx
The will not to believe. It’s a powerful thing.
Jackie
@Mike in NC: I never watched The Apprentice either. One big thing I observed re TFG’s famous line of “You’re Fired” was in *reality* he never fired anyone as president himself – face to face. It was through someone else, usually via text or a tweet. He never had the cajones to fire anyone directly. His entire *tuff guy act* is pure baloney. In reality he’s a chicken shit.
West of the Rockies
I think it’s a bit like fans who root for dirty players and dirty teams. As long as they win (own the libs, der-herrr), they don’t care about honesty, integrity, honor.
The Moar You Know
It’s the sparrows and curtain rods. They don’t give a shit if he rapes their kids and steals their money. That’s totally OK, just so long as he kills all of us first.
The phoniness is the point, Cole. They know. It’s a redeeming value to them.
mvr
Wishful thinking?
I moved to NJ in 1984 for grad school. Everyone who read NYC papers knew Trump as a fraudster. There was a time Dems (not all or most Dems) were trying to recruit that bastard and it made me sick.
Why the part of the country I now live in can’t see it bewilders me. But then my legislature just passed an abortion ban, anti-trans legislation, 100% tax credits for private school donations, a 14 million dollar raid on the state Environmental Trust, tax cuts of unsustainable proportions, and a bunch of other bad stuff is in the pipeline.
Mike in NC
@Jackie: Correct. A chickenshit who thought he and Putin deserved to be the twin dictators who ruled the world. As if!
Who could ever forget the time somebody told Trump that when the dictator of North Korea gave a speech, his people sat there at attention to listen? Trump actually believed he could do that and not be mocked as a fucking cretin.
Soprano2
People like TFG and DeSantis hate the same people their supporters hate, and give them permission to hate them openly. I’ve always thought that was TFG’s main appeal, and that he seems to get away with everything. Their supporters know they are odious people, but they don’t care because “owning the libs” is more important to them. I hope TFG getting away with stuff is coming to an end.
something fabulous
I am sincerely asking this, no snark: I thought at the time that Shrub was as phony as could be (as well as infuriating and the rest, but CLEARLY phony!). At the time, you, I think, did not. So the non-snark question is: can you put your mind back to then, and what about him/the times/whatever, spoke as true to you then? What made him so resonant to you, then?
Sincerely curious! It’s such a change, but you had to me, an example in your own past. I wonder how you think about it now?
eclare
@Soprano2:
Yep. It’s all hate. I believe people when they wear “fuck your feelings” t-shirts.
Kent
Aside from their common border…
Ohio borders Kentucky, West Virginia, and Indiana
Pennsylvania borders New York, New Jersey, and Maryland.
That geographical fact alone probably accounts for the 5% or so difference in their voting behavior. Southern Ohio is really part of Appalachia. Eastern PA is really part of the DC to Boston eastern seaboard corridor and greater NYC metro.
Yutsano
I think we might be overthinking this.
They have that (R) next to their name. That means they aren’t those evil Demoncrats the TV and radio says are evil socialists. Plus the pastor says Democrats murder babies, so they must be good people.
Also they make good noises about bringing back traditional roles like their grandparents had, and they were good folk, so that’s good.
The news tells us how scary those big cities are, so they must be total hellscapes. They promise to crack down on all that, so that’s good.
So yeah. That’s enough reason right there isn’t it?
C Stars
My guess: the majority of Trump/DeSantis supporters just aren’t very deep thinkers. Sure, some of them are craven opportunists and see some benefit to themselves in living under a corrupt autocracy. But yeah, my guess is that the majority are just idiots.
Super Dave
They are almost entirely descendants of Tories and Royalists. They believe in inherited position and wealth just as their ancestors did. And of course, many are also descendants of slaveholders. It’s not that much of a mystery. Many are not the brightest bulbs on the tree. Or sharpest knives in the drawer. Or pick your favorite “moron” metaphor.
toine
@Yutsano:
add in the most obvious, that they are simply incurious imbeciles, and that pretty much nails it…
James E Powell
@Baud:
Exactly. The Trumpsters I know never talk about anything but the show. They not only don’t care about policies, they believe caring about policy is a sign of nerdy weakness.
jonas
They’re not phonies in the sense of being red meat-tossing lib-pwners. That’s all that matters to Republicans these days.
Sebastian
I have no idea if this is real or not but it’s hilarious
The Pale Scot
To paraphrase an urban philosopher from back in the day;
(some) White people be kray kray yo..
cckids
@Super Dave:
Many are not the brightest bulbs on the tree. Or sharpest knives in the drawer. Or pick your favorite “moron” metaphor.
My mother used to say “Dumber than a bucket of hair”.
Which is pretty goddamned dumb, and describes MAGA perfectly.
Mai Naem mobile
I remember during the 2016 campaign an interview with a guy who had been screwed in the Trump University scam and he was still going to vote for TFG. Explain that one to me.
Rebel’s Dad
Just got home from work (hey, those dishes at the Mexican restaurant won’t wash themselves, especially when people order food at 9:59pm) but earlier today I got the news: I got accepted to Rutgers for my masters in education! I’ve dreamed of going there for 23 years now, I was supposed to go there for my BA but life had other plans. But a dream deferred tastes so much sweeter than one which comes easily. Thanks for everyone’s well-wishes, thoughts, prayers, encouragement, etc.
Rebel’s Dad
@cckids: That depends, is it a bucket of real hair or a bucket of Dolly Parton wigs?
Rebel’s Dad
@Mai Naem mobile: Apparently, W was wrong when he said, “Fool me once shame on you– fool me twice, can’t fool me again!”
Rebel’s Dad
@Sebastian: That was beautiful.
Did you see this one that popped up underneath that? https://twitter.com/GuntherEagleman/status/1661516252076990467
Noskilz
I think it is often the case that many of them are essentially inhabiting a parallel universe of nonsense peddled by the GOP. Fox News, Newsmax, OANN, and the like. They’ve found a narrative that suits them – those nice folks on Fox can’t say enough wonderful things about how tough, clever and effective their various political honchos are – and they sure as hell aren’t going to take anything coming from outside the bubble seriously.
Of course, they’re not all misguided, and I feel pretty comfortable that there is a sizeable chunk that are just malicious sons of bitches who don’t care how much damage is caused as long as they get something they want. The I’ve always found the tax-cuts-uber-alles folks particularly loathsome, but there is a non-trivial chunk of the GOP base that I think knows exactly what people like Trump or DeSantis are, but just imagines the damage will be someone else’s problem or the harm is a feature not a bug. It often doesn’t work that way, but they don’t seem to care very much.
Overall, it reminds me of those ridiculous scams where the outlandish claims function as a filter: people who point and laugh or walk away aren’t the target audience; anyone who goes for it is easy money who is also likely too goony to cause much trouble for the scammer. And boy howdy, do the MAGA crowd seem to be put through the wringer on a regular basis by scam artists in general and Trumpco in particular.
We’ve had at least a good thirty years of the GOP just becoming increasingly depraved. At this point – without exaggeration – that supposed Big Tent of theirs includes self-identifying nazis, and even the supposed “GOP moderates” don’t seem particularly bothered by this or inclined to actually do anything other than drift along with the Freedom Caucus lunatics. I think most of the people with any inclination at all to bail on that dumpster fire already have and there just isn’t much left other than the oblivious and the complicit.
Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but the ones I cross paths with seem to be either off in a propaganda-land they really don’t seem to want out of or are just awful people.
Rebel’s Dad
@Noskilz: I don’t think you’re being pessimistic, you’re being realistic. My father and my aunt are victims of propaganda. My uncle is just a racist asshole. So the way I deal with my dad and aunt is different than how I deal with my uncle.
BlueGuitarist
@Rebel’s Dad:
I think that was a (rare) moment when W’s mind worked faster than his mouth: he realized as he said the first part, that if he finished the quote, a/v of him saying “shame on me” would be endlessly repeated and be more harmful to him than anything else he could say to finish that sentence. However, I don’t think that he realized how ashamed he should have been.
Sebastian
@Rebel’s Dad:
I didn’t but he sounds like a Trumper, no?
prostratedragon
@Rebel’s Dad: Congratulations and best wishes!
Frankensteinbeck
Many good points here, especially about hate, but let me offer one more:
Facts keeps telling them they are wrong, so fuck the facts. This sentiment has been building for a long time, and now they’ll swallow any lie that assures them they’re right and we’re wrong, they’re heroes and we’re villains. They are angry at the truth so it must be a lie. That’s what the ‘fake news’ phrase means, and Trump did not invent it, only put the latest words on it.
Elected officials tend to be concentrated versions of their voters, and you see it clearly there. Every time there’s a mass shooting that proves they are horribly, children-are-dying wrong? Fuck you, more guns are the solution!
EDIT – @Rebel’s Dad:
Oh, and huge congratulations! That is so, so wonderful!
Roberto el oso
@BlueGuitarist: I think he actually ended with ‘you can’t get fooled again’, which may have been his brain’s attempt to latch onto something coherent and ended up being a weird paraphrase of Pete Townsend.
Amir Khalid
@Rebel’s Dad:
Congratulations!
Tony Jay
@Rebel’s Dad:
Fantastic!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Ten words can encapsulate the mindset of the people who will gravitate to a Trump or a DeSantis:
“He’s not hurting the people he’s supposed to be hurting.”
They want to hurt Those People. And they want their politician proxies to hurt Those People on their behalf.
mrmoshpotato
@Rebel’s Dad: Congratulations! 🎉🎉🎉
HeartlandLiberal
There is a story on RawStory this morning about a woman who is a district level GOP official, who is pushing her flat earth theories. she has a campaign bus labeled “Jesus, Guns, Babies.”
I rest my case.
Gvg
@Super Dave: no. Most of them have no idea of their ancestry that far back but frankly it is too much full of more recent immigration. Even most white American known ancestry doesn’t go back that far and it doesn’t explain very much.
In Florida, I have never known one person who could claim slaveholder ancestors. There are some. A nearby county has some families settled by descendants of Robert E Lee after the Civil War presumably because his estates were confiscated. Lee county. However, Florida was flooded with settlers mainly after air conditioning. Population wise we have swamped the earlier bloodlines. Our reactionaries seem to have been recruited in a way by tax policy and partly due to migration from the south. Failed so called socialist dictatorships caused multiple waves to settle in Florida that are reflexively right wing. That is down in the other end of my state so I haven’t seen much of it and have only heard of it, however it is evidently impacting elections.
PaulWartenberg
Because Republican voters don’t care how phony and broken those men are.
Because Republican voters only care to inflict cruelty and suffering on those they fear and hate, and these phony men promise to deliver that cruelty to them.
bbleh
@Earl: concur, with the addition/qualification that the “hero” each sees is not the same as the “hero” others see. They have traits in common — alpha-male affect, white resentment/nationalism, etc. — but there are also differences — more or less misogyny/overt bigotry, more/less militancy, interventionist/isolationist, etc. The point is, they project onto those guys what they want to see, and they hear — selectively — enough to confirm it.
citizen dave
What I don’t get is why the Republican Party civil war is not Hot AF. If you are one of the old school, country club/Chamber of Commerce Repubs who is actually functional at making government operate (my red state has such a governor), how do you just stand there while these idiots and con artists and religious nuts and god knows what all take over your Party? ‘Course I also don’t understand how the lot of them vote for the idiot brigade…
Butter Emails
@citizen dave:
Tax cuts and deregulation today, tax cuts and deregulation tomorrow, tax cuts and deregulation forever. Plus the leopards eating faces caucus would never eat our faces.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ruckus: Right. If Trump really had the money he said he had, he wouldn’t be appearing on a reality TV show.
EarthWindFire
@citizen dave: I used to wonder about that too. Then I got to see the country club types in their natural habitat. Behind closed doors, they don’t think any differently. It’s a respectable facade. The civil war won’t get hot until the “anxious working class” turns against their tax cuts, or the 12th of never imo.
SW
In the early days of the internet, I used to think it was promising because in my naïveté I thought that all humans are endowed by their creator with a bullshit detector. That if someone hears two arguments about an issue, one truthful, the other bullshit, it would be obvious to the audience which is which. But I learned to my utter disappointment that this isn’t true. People believe what they want to believe and they trust people who tell them what they want to hear. Truth doesn’t have anything at all to do with it. Who could believe George Bush the second as a cowboy? Who could believe Donald fucking Trump as a genius?
stinger
Remember “The scariest sentence in the English language is ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’ “? Thanks, Reagan! Conservatives have been conditioned for decades to think of government as useless at best, and expensive and damaging at worst. Their synonym for “politician” is “crook”. But pols used to try to hide behind an oily, glad-handing facade. When somebody comes along who is openly a racist, incompetent grifter, the right thinks that at last someone’s being “honest” about it. Which gives them leave to be open about their own worst attitudes.
That, plus everything everybody upthread has said. Many factors at play here.
And congratulations, Rebel’s Dad!
Gravenstone
Because a lot of Republicans in general are transparent phonies. SATSQ
RevRick
@RandomMonster: They aren’t gullible. They know exactly what they want, which is confirmation and affirmation of their belief in hierarchy and order. They don’t care if Trump and all the rest of the GOP parade are hypocrites.
When did DeSantis rise in popularity? It’s when he made a big deal of opposing COVID restrictions, which set GOPers ears tingling, because if there’s one thing they believe it’s that nobody tells them what to do; they get to tell others what to do. Couple that with the fascist impulse of hero worship (I’m no mask-wearing sissy, I spit in the face of death!), and its attendant contempt for women, and all that matters is the action, not the motive.
RevRick
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I don’t think that they have to be hurting THOSE people. They just need to be reminded of their place. But, no doubt, there is a slice of the GOP with sadistic impulses.
Gavin
When you ask why, John.. Today’s MAGA republicans are the people Lincoln was talking about in his Cooper Union speech. Lincoln’s words were true then, accurately represent R views today.. and most likely will always be true.
ChicagoPat
Imagine being so weak that you can look at someone like Trump or DeSantis and see strength…
RevRick
@RaflW: Conservatives generally have a bleak view of the world and their fellow human beings. They tend to believe others will take advantage of them or hurt them if given the opportunity. Hence their fanatic attachment to guns and voter suppression. And since they think this way, they can’t imagine others not. So, they feel that since whites screwed over blacks, if blacks ever got the power, they would automatically screw over whites.
Rachel Bakes
My brother runs a landscaping company in CT. Years ago he did tons of work for a lawyer and major property owner in our hometown. The lawyer paid for some of it over the years and then stopped, owing thousands of $, so brother took him to court and won. Don’t think he ever got paid though.
how he can’t see the similarities between cheapskate lawyer and TFG is beyond me, but he’s Republican and very anti-Biden. Not like our dad who hated Tfg but was old school R.
We don’t talk politics.
Citizen Alan
@Poe Larity:
I suspect the maga crowd literally does not remember that fFrst Blood existed. They just remember rambo going back to vietnam and retroactively defeating the combies single handedly.
Sasha
Because Trump & DeSantis are transparent phoneys who desperately want to believe themselves to be (and have others believe them to be) men of great substance.
To their devotees — most of whom are also hollow men in empty suits themselves — they either see only the projection or they view them as aspirational models of phoneys who faked it to unearned success.
moops
It is more than just GOP politicians offering to hurt the right people. The right is very much invested in zero-sum thinking. Most could care less about any specific benefit a minority might get, but the very existence of a right or benefit to the wrong people means there are less rights and benefits for the Right People.
Tax and benefits? yup
Voting rights? yup
Reproductive rights? yup. This one makes no sense, of course, but hey, zero-sum. The right to an abortion must be hurting others, somehow.
gay marriage? oh my yes. Gay marriage is hurting Real Marriage…somehow.
Immigration? oh my yes. Those refugees and immigrants lives are improving coming here, which must mean some of the Right People in America are losing something.
and on and on
So they vote for the Men that are willing to take the rights and benefits AWAY from the wrong people. Thus through the alchemy of zero-sum logic, the Right People will gain benefits and more rights.
SomeRandomGuy
Please tell me you have strongly considered the possibility that they *see* it, and simply don’t understand how bad it is to run the world’s largest economy on bullshit and hope.
But hey, look how bullshit and hope worked for Russia in their invasion of Ukraine… no, I mean, *REALLY*, look at it, guys!
dearmaizie
I don’t understand it either, but I’m guessing it has something to do with those people perceiving the rich as perfect and therefore superior to the rest of us. They must know something we don’t know or possess some quality we don’t have. Otherwise they wouldn’t be rich. Who knows. No doubt trump and musk believe that, too.
Paul in KY
@HeartlandLiberal: That has to be performance art…or her relatives really, really hate her and love seeing her make a fool of herself.
grubert
Love ya John, but I can’t understand how it is anyone like yourself can *not* understand…
The core virtues of Conservatism are loyalty and obedience.. they are raised to accept BS from authority figures. A lifetime of believing or pretending to believe obvious BS kind of destroys the ability to detect the character of authority figures.
Those who refuse the BS early in life, who rebel.. become liberal atheists or at least more like that. And they learn to distrust authoritarian BS, and the authoritarians who spew that BS.