Jon Chait at New York Mag thought DeSantis would beat Trump in the 2020 primary but admits now that possibility looks remote. He says he underestimated “the elemental bond…between the Republican base and the candidate it seems determined to nominate as president for the third straight election.”
To illustrate that bond, Chait quoted a letter from a listener that wingnut pundit/podcaster Mollie Hemingway shared about why candidates who criticize Trump are failing in the GOP primary:
Keep in mind that supporting Trump came with costs never associated with supporting Bush, McCain, or Romney. Trump supporters lost friendships. Brothers and sisters stopped talking to each other. There are parents whose children disowned them, and grandparents who will never see their grandchildren again because they stood by Donald Trump.
Every Republican has these stories. Every Republican knows Republicans who have these stories.
Attacking Trump was effectively telling every Republican who made real sacrifices that they were stupid for doing so because Trump was just a poser.
Those supporters were stupid to value Trump more than friends and families, and Trump is just a poser. But as we’ve observed around here, it’s humiliating to admit you’ve been conned. That’s what they can’t bring themselves to do — maybe even precisely because the con cost them relationships they valued.
Chait again:
It would be flattering to my prognostication to blame the failures on small things like DeSantis’s messaging choices. But I think the truth is that I made the larger error of analyzing the primary as though it were a normal party nomination, when in reality DeSantis is attempting the far more difficult task of displacing the leader of a personality cult.
In 2016, Trump dumbfounded prognosticators, who assumed the conservative base was motivated by conservatism, by adopting a series of heterodox positions without suffering the customary penalty. The apparent lesson was that Republican voters cared more about confrontational affect than policy substance. DeSantis, absorbing this conclusion, served up relentless hostility against the left, which he promised to humiliate and destroy, using authoritarian methods if necessary.
But it wasn’t mere pugilism that Republican voters turned out to crave. Trump had redefined the party’s identity around loyalty to himself. That loyalty could mean posing as a champion of gay rights and posing with a Pride flag, as Trump did just three years ago, praising China’s response to COVID, flattering Democratic leaders, or any other act that would normally be evidence of betrayal. Trump has regularly described his own appointees, whom he once lavished with praise, as pathetic losers. His fans have grown accustomed to altering their beliefs about everything and anything to conform to their leader’s ever-changing line.
DeSantis built a following in Florida based on lib-owning, which I dreaded he could replicate nationwide. But Chait makes a sound point about Trump’s frequent reversals. He senses where crowds are and reflects their hate and fear back at them — Trump’s comments on trans issues are an example of this. He admitted at one rally that it wasn’t an issue that riled people up in 2016 but does now.
DeSantis tried to turn that johnny-come-hately-lately stance against Trump via the Nazi/incel-themed video, suggesting DeSantis was hating on LGBTQ people back when Trump was welcoming Caitlyn Jenner to the ladies room at Trump Tower and posing with a Gays for Trump pride flag. But it didn’t land, and not just because the Nazi/incel memes put people off. Maybe the turnoff was related to what Hemingway’s correspondent said — it made Trump supporters feel like chumps (which, of course, they are).
Chait on what he got wrong:
The Trump cult is hardly a new development, of course. How did I miss it? My error was to assume the cult could be manufactured by political elites. George W. Bush enjoyed a robust cult following in his heyday. Conservative media figures routinely described him in terms that bordered on the religious, or pornographic, or both — he was the swaggering, clear-eyed Good Man sent by God to lead America through a decisive struggle.
The most striking aspect of the Bush cult phenomenon was how quickly it disappeared. In 2006, after the Iraq War and his failed attempt to privatize Social Security had tanked his popularity, Republican elites quickly and ruthlessly cut Bush loose. Conservative media suddenly sent out the message that Bush was not the true son of Reagan after all, but a heretic who had betrayed conservatism. Some combination of right-wing elites — Rupert Murdoch, the Republican groups convened by Grover Norquist — seemed to have its finger on the button that could turn the cult on or off.
What I took away from the experience was the belief that Republican loyalty to a single leader could be transferred quickly and easily from one object of worship to another. But what may have been true before 2016 seems to no longer hold. Murdoch spent a year overtly trying to build a DeSantis cult through his media empire, only to find the button had stopped working.
I think Chait’s making an error even now by conflating whatever Repubs felt for Bush II with a cult. I remember the gross slobbering over Commander Codpiece too, but it wasn’t in the same universe as what we’ve seen with Trump, at least not on as massive a scale. I don’t know what’s behind it, but the personal investment — the “elemental bond” — is different for reasons I will never fathom.
Open thread.
trollhattan
Meanwhile, at West Point, Geraldo Rivera in da house!
Maybe next time, do it quietly while cameras are running…just in case.
Jeffro
Not remotely in the same universe, I agree.
Hey Chait, the shorter version is “you can’t beat X with X-lite” (or with a charmless X, or or or)
Someone should have stood up and laid the wood to that corrupt MF and not worried about sounding like a Democrat in doing it. Too late now.
bbleh
Was referred from somewhere (another BJ post? I dunno) to this article at Salon about the nature of the cult and the bonds between Trump and its members. I think it gets at a lot of it, and in particular that it’s not just “hate and fear” that he reflects but also longing. Worth a read.
https://www.salon.com/2023/08/28/we-call-that-kind-of-love-a-cult-experts-on-the-latest-disturbing-poll-of-supporters
ETA aha yes Quinerly at 14 in WG’s previous post.
Jackie
In other 😂 news, apparently Eminem sent Ramaswamy a cease-and-desist letter to stop rapping to his music and using his songs on the campaign trail!
Betty Cracker
@Jeffro: Do you think that would have worked? I see no evidence that it would. It’s the theory behind the Chris Christie campaign, and he’s having no luck with it. I think Hemingway’s correspondent may be onto something about the “sacrifice” angle. Maybe there’s a sunk cost fallacy at play here.
I don’t know.
laura
I don’t know that there is a useful analogy in American history. The People’s Temple didn’t begin as a cult. Maybe the Unification Church is a more apt comparison. But whatever ‘it’ is has really done some damage on both a small scale with friends and family estrangement and large scale lawlessness and violence.
Old Dan and Little Ann
@Jackie: OMG. I saw that awful rap from Iowa a few weeks ago not knowing who it was. Now after the debates and your comment it all has come full circle. Yikes.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
I’m sure that mindset exists. But I think they just connect with the open, unvarnished hatred he spews.
Steven Colbert did a focus group of Dump voters in 2020 to see if there was a way to deprogram them. The amount of hate pouring out of their mouths was staggering.
bbleh
And another thing:
Attacking Trump was effectively telling every Republican who made real sacrifices that they were stupid for doing so because Trump was just a poser.
Talk about Murc’s Law in action! The poor cultists can’t be blamed for their blind devotion and their shame spiral, no no! It’s the people who are criticizing Trump (note not even the cultists themselves!) who are causing the cultists to feel wounded and retreat ever further into their bubble.
It follows logically of that the only possible way out of the situation is for people critical of Trump — who of course are the only ones with agency — to stop criticizing him. “You’re hurting their fee-fees, so it’s all your fault!”
Mealymouthed “centrist” twaddle imo.
laura
@Old Dan and Little Ann: Choking on a Mid-west state fair corndog would be preferable to hearing him attempt Lose Yourself. It was as pathetic an attempt to be hip and cool and edgy as Pat Boone’s short heavy metal recording career.
Yarrow
Is it? I don’t get that. You make an idiot mistake. Own up to it. Why is that so hard?
JaneE
Cults demand everything from their members.
People who are poor are sending their money to a billionaire. If they go hungry, that is just the price of devotion.
If their families stop speaking to them, that is just another sacrifice they are called to make.
I doubt if any of them will quit Trump until he dies. And a good chunk of them probably expect their “god-emperor” to resurrect himself.
eclare
@Jackie:
What is it with Republicans and that song? Ben Carson used it in 2016, although he had a gospel choir perform it. Which surprisingly kind of worked.
clay
I think Sarah Palin was the intermediate step between conservatism’s worship of GWB and it’s outright kool-aid drinking devotion to Trump.
They loved her/lusted after her with a devotion that belied her actual talent and accomplishments, just like they do with Trump. And it was blindingly obvious to outsiders that she was a grifter at heart, just like Trump.
But she faded from relevancy sooner rather than later. And I think the main difference is that it takes a lot of energy to keep yourself as the center of the party’s attention. Palin had all kinds of distractions — mostly family stuff — which occupied her time. She couldn’t keep up the grift.
But Trump… this is all he cares about. Family? Unimportant. Legal problem? Use it for more grifting. 100% of his time, energy, attention, and resources go towards trying to make his actual image match his self-image. And he’s been doing this for decades, well before he entered politics.
So no one will be able to redirect Trump’s cult, because no one can out hustle him (on this one thing).
cain
@trollhattan: Luckily it wasn’t the Ark of the Covenant.
OverTwistWillie
Your father gave all our extra money to the Reverend’s telethon, Otto.
Zzyzx
I think I know what it is. It’s a celebrity parasocial relationship. These people think they know Trump from the years of him being on their TV so they trust him in the way that they wouldn’t some boring politician.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
I said it was a cult in 2004 when, three years after the horror of 9/11, they voted for the guy that couldn’t catch Bin Laden. I still think it was, but the intensity wasn’t quite there yet because Bush didn’t say the quiet parts out loud the way Trump does. Trump reflects his followers’ belligerent stupidity back at them and validates it in a way that Bush never could.
Bush also hadn’t conditioned people to never trust anyone in any kind of news media who criticized him, so when Katrina made Bush’s uselessness so obvious that the news media could no longer ignore it, people believed the negative coverage. So he didn’t isolate his followers as effectively as Trump does.
UncleEbeneezer
George W Bush was horrible but there was, at least, always a slight glimmer of decency that you could see every so often. Trump’s appeal is in being completely reprehensible at all times but doing so with a weird charisma that we all find repulsive but gives MAGA people intense feelings of excitement. DeSantis has the reprehensible part but not the charisma. He doesn’t have the carnival barker swagger and never will.
CaseyL
There is a lot about human behavior we either don’t know or don’t want to accept. I had a conversation with a co-worker today about things I’ve been thinking about for a very long time.
One is that humans are coded – genetically, epigenetically, and FSM knows how many other ways – to be who they are. It’s Nature v. Nurture, but with a whole lot of Nature in the mix. My understanding of this – after a lifetime of watching other people make boneheaded choices, and making no few of them myself- really clarified after some close friends had a child. She was absolutely nothing like her parents: she loved girly-girl things, she was cheerful and gregarious, and rather bossy – practically from the moment of her birth. It was exactly as if her personality, preferences, and relationship to the world were in her code from the start.
Two, humans really don’t decide most things consciously. Some of us make honest and diligent efforts to do so, to weigh our value system and preferred outcomes, to look at rationally analyzed pros and cons. But in the end, particularly if we’re stressed or it’s an emergency, we tend to react and decide based on primal instinct. And there are many, many people who never develop the capacity for rational analysis, who always go on “gut instinct.” But gut instinct is hindbrain stuff (I know we’re not supposed to use the terms hindbrain or lizard-brain anymore, but I don’t know what else to call it).
There was a twitter thread posted today by a pastor who watched his congregation fall into what he calls Trump idolatry. He kept trying to hold them back, to invoke the teachings and sayings and lessons from Jesus they were all raised to believe in, and it was like talking to a wall. They would not be moved from their worship of someone who violated every tenet they professed to believe in.
I think what happens is, Trump appeals to an extremely powerful, extremely primal appetite in some people. It may be a primal urge to dominate the environment for one’s own protection; it may be a primal need to subsume into a collective that provides a sense of protection and comfort. But it is impervious to rational analysis or appeals to moral/ethical standards. It’s like trying to keep lightning from striking by arguing with it.
bbleh
@Yarrow: because there’s both positive and negative reinforcement at work. The post mentions the negative side: if you do admit you were wrong, you’re admitting it to people who’ve been critical all along — many of whom are eeeevil Demo-rats — that they were right and you were wrong, and that’s embarrassing. But there’s also the positive side: you’re surrounded by people who encourage you NOT to admit it, who think it’s right not to admit it, and who admire and accept you for not admitting it. Admitting you were wrong means losing all that reinforcement and “belonging,” and belonging is really important to those folks.
Elizabelle
I hate to sound like the one-track Christian detractor here but:
I don’t see this changing until you take Fox News off the air, and its copycats. You have to remove the source of the contagion.
No one is writing articles like “CBS stole my grandparents.” It is Fox News, and particularly Fox News since it is the gateway drug AND maintains a figleaf of “respectability” that it does not deserve. It also yorks up halfcocked stories that mainstream outlets then look into, because it’s “in the news.”
We have always had know nothings and aspiring John Bircher types. They were kept pretty much under rocks, though. They did not go mainstream, and poison everyone else.
Germany, Canada, and several other countries do not allow this amount of swill on their airwaves. We should not do so, either.
This rightwinger audience needs separation from its toxin, and deprogramming. This is not a First Amendment case. It is ignoring what Joseph Goebbels and Rwanda’s Radio Milles Collins helped foment.
Starting with the US military bases. Get Fox News off their programming.
hueyplong
Is anyone else kind of put out by the acceptance as a given that the actual goal was to find someone as shitty as Trump in the hope that such shittiness was fungible? How is that a fix/improvement/whatever?
It’s basically an open acknowledgement that they are soulless. How did we get to the point where the only objectional part of a soulless cult is the cult part?
Betty Cracker
@bbleh: I assume the person who wrote that — who listens to Molly Hemingway’s podcast — is a wingnut, not a centrist. But otherwise, I agree.
It’s similar to the Gary Abernathy column in WaPo recently that we discussed here. In effect, they’re asking for deference for people who militantly believe stupid and destructive lies because they believe it really hard. The answer is no. They don’t get to demand that.
Jeffro
Just knocking him around – no. Some of the lessers tried it in 2016 and it didn’t work. But not taking him on doesn’t work, either.
As loathe as I am to worry about it much, for the trump cult, it would likely have taken someone with nearly as much star power/fame/reputation (earned or unearned), pointing out relentlessly how trump does it, how he has no real convictions (other than, “trump first”), is a mockery of success and likely makes fun of his own supporters’ values in private. “You know he’s just using you, right? Look at this putz – what is ‘Two Corinthians’, anyway? Make him answer the question! 5,000 lawsuits? Does that sound like someone you’d want to deal with?”
Like, say, Obama at the WHCA dinner, on steroids, every day all day. =)
Or some barely-right-leaning celebrity who could play wrestling hero to trump’s wrestling heel?
In the end, the GOP did this by delivering absolutely nothing for their base while stoking their anger to the nth degree, and now they’re all-in. So…good luck with that, Repubs!
cain
I think Chait’s point that these people are all in because their worship of Trump has personally lost them a lot of relationships or even jobs. So, I can see that they are now in the radicalized part. They will do everything for him because otherwise they will have to face the fact that they threw away their most precious things for a conman.
Jeffro
This is a significant part of it. Good point.
Elizabelle
@hueyplong:
These people are empty vessels. Not merely “listless vessels.”
And: why do we never hear how well Biden is doing, and that a lot of Americans are doing well economically?
Because you cannot go authoritarian in what people perceive as good times.
When Germany’s economy briefly improved in the 1920s, the Nazis faded. But they awaited their next opportunity, which the Depression served up.
HumboldtBlue
Yes you do, you know exactly what’s behind the Trumpers blind loyalty — hate.
What Trump has done is bring hate to the forefront in a way no politician, right or left, has ever done in this country. It’s not coded. It’s not subtle. It’s not apologetic, EVER, for being hateful, angry, hurtful.
They want the people they hate to hurt and Trump, through word and deed, hurt those people, and it made his followers feel special, fulfilled, because they want to exercise those emotions — wherever they originate from and however they are formed — on the people they consider beneath them.
That’s what unifies them. As has been said here dozens of times, they hate what we support, what we stand for, what we aim for, who we literally are, because in general it’s aspirational, and it includes allowing everybody to enjoy the full measure of freedom to live as one wishes, and they fucking hate that.
Fags and coloreds, wetbacks and slant-eyes, towel-heads and hippies, they fucking hate you and me and everyone else that isn’t THEM, and they hate, in part, because they know, deep down, they have been suckered, the hate train only goes so far before it runs off the rails because there are too many of us and not enough of them to maintain the needed steam to power the hate train.
But they also hate out of sheer spite, a lack of critical thinking, a desire for a simple black and white world, and we keep throwing out rainbows and colors and shades of this and dollops of that, and they fucking hate the nuance and thought that goes into being a decent human being.
Hate drives them, and Trump feeds them what they want.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@clay: I think it might have been sexism as well. She was a woman. She validated their hate the way the cool mean girl talking to you in school validates you (if you’re a guy, hey, she thinks the same way you do; if you’re a girl, she isn’t bullying you, she’s bullying people you hate, so you’re cool by association).
But she’s still a girl, and ultimately girls, no matter how mean, are weak. Male bullies project strength.
cain
@Elizabelle: Unfortunately, any move to stop them is met with resistance from all the other 24 hour news channels. The thing is – that model is how they all make money. You have to destroy “News as Entertainment” by licensing news by providing a higher bar to be called news. Otherwise it’s just info-tainment. We need to make Fox News declare itself as entertainment and force them to label their stuff as such.
It might be too late given that younger folks just watch their stuff online through influencers. In fact, that’s where the next battle is going to be. But only older age groups watch cable.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@Zzyzx: Yep, a lot of this.
UncleEbeneezer
OT but one of the only upsides of my FIL’s passing is that now we can actually do something cool for my 50th Birthday. So we have decided to do a trip in January (everything is too $$$ on my Birthday, 12/23 so I decided I’d rather celebrate it in January) up to the North Coast to stay in Gualala, CA for a long weekend. It’s been ten years since we went there for our epic trip from LA to Klammath Falls and then back down through Mendocino. And we did so much driving on that trip that we really didn’t get a chance to really enjoy Northern California. This time we will fly up, rent a car in San Francisco, see one of my wife’s favorite co-worker/friends and then drive up for 4 nights in a really great house in the redwoods. We are super-excited. It will also be during a new moon, so hopefully we will have some killer star-gazing on the chilly nights :)
bbleh
@Zzyzx: I give this most of the credit for his election in 2016. He won as the guy from The Apprentice.
trollhattan
@clay: TBF Republicans transitioning to voting for a boob after voting for boobs seems natural.
Elizabelle
@cain: It would be great to carve back the 24/7 cable news yaw.
It serves up controversy and too much false stuff. (Repeating rightwing garbage before or on the way to refuting it. People remember the garbage; not the correction.)
smith
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA): She also passed her sell-by date as a woman who could inspire starbursts.
trollhattan
@UncleEbeneezer: IDK of Perlstein will write Bush TWO Boogaloo, but am nevertheless curious if it’s the case that Dubya eventually shut down the Cheney arm of his administration during the second term. He did not go to war vs. Iran.
His remark about Trump’s inauguration speech does stand the test of time.
Roger Moore
I think the core is that a cult requires active participation from the leader to work. W was a bad president in so many ways, but as far as I can tell he never wanted to be a cult leader. Some of the people around him tried to build a personality cult around him, but it didn’t and couldn’t work without him being on board with it. I think the core was that W actually had some political principles that conflicted with the Republican base, and he wasn’t willing to compromise on them just to be an object of worship.
Trump is different. He has a few core principles, mostly centered around bigotry, but beyond that he wants to be worshiped. He’s more than happy to say whatever he thinks will please the crowd in front of him to get that hit of adulation. He will do whatever it takes to remain the cult leader, and that’s exactly what the cult loves about him.
UncleEbeneezer
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA): She was absolutely perfect for meeting their feminine ideal: physically attractive, without any intelligence or empathy and hates all the same people they hate. The men wanted to F*** her, the women wanted to BE HER. But there was still something a little embarrassing about her (probably rooted in misogyny), so she never got to cult status.
Then Trump came along and perfectly fit their masculine ideal. A blowhard, ignorant bigot and bully.
MissionCult AccomplishedElizabelle
@Zzyzx: You make a good point. It is appalling to see how much TIFG recast himself with the help of that dreadful Apprentice show.
But TIFG was all over the place as a media reference, for years.
Watched American Psycho (on a big screen) a few weeks ago. Parodying the greedy 1980s. Two references to Trump in the movie: the investment banker, Patrick Bateman, to his fiancee, while riding in their limo: “Hey, isn’t that Donald Trump’s car?”
Later in a restaurant, to others: “is that Ivana?”
Suzanne
@HumboldtBlue:
Yes yes yes.
Right after the 2016 election, I said that Trump represented the primal scream of the white moron. They hate hate hate other people, and none more so than those who don’t give them the fealty they believe they deserve.
Trump grosses us liberals out. Not just his “policy positions”, not that he has those anyway. But his demeanor, speech, appearance…. everything about him is just utter trash, and it pisses us off deeply, and so the MAGAts LOVE HIM! The funnest thing to do — if you can’t actually outdo the people you hate — is piss them off!
rikyrah
They have their Orange Jesus.
They will accept no substitute.😒
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Said it before and I’ll say it again, the – only – way Twotone Tinyhands was going to be split from his cult was the old fashioned way; take all of his failures, the many policy failures (where da wall at?) and his long litany of failures to stand by the people who stuck out their necks for him (where da J6 pardons at?) and fucking hammer him with them all day, every day, relentlessly, shamelessly and absolutely cynically, starting at least a year ago.
If someone with lots of donor funds had done that, centring their attack entirely on Trump the Failure and his selfish betrayal of the wider Movement, and kept on doing that louder and louder with each Trump humiliation, the cult could, possibly, maybe, through repetition, have been re-educated to see their falling for Trump’s con not as their failure, but as his, and dumping him for this new, better, more hateful figurehead as welcome proof of their own well-seasoned patriotic savvy.
But there was no one capable of doing that (certainly not RoDS the Alien breadstick colony) so it didn’t happen and Trump was left unopposed. It may not even have worked, but it was the only plausible route to get from A to B.
Subsole
@bbleh:
This.
I am so goddamned sick of being asked to spare the feelings of people who have never in my life shown anything but raw, seething, white-hot contempt for everyone else’s.
Fuck – and I cannot stress this enough – Chait and his idiotic nonsense.
RevRick
I vividly recall what I would term as a totalitarian mood that descended on our country post 9/11. All those flags flown from car windows. It was patriotism on steroids. The whole boo-rah , in-your-face belligerence.
In 2004, Bush held a campaign event in the park behind my house, and I was part of a small group picketing his appearance, and as his supporters streamed toward the park, they voiced a nasty menace toward us. It wasn’t just they disagreed with us. They conveyed the message that we weren’t to be tolerated.
Afterwards, when the event had concluded, I watched the crowds pass by my house (which had a Kerry/Edwards sign), and they shouted curses at me and a couple actually walked up toward me, giving me the finger.
Trump only tapped into the fascism latent in that crowd.
Geminid
I thought Trump’s attraction would fade over time. The analogy I used was that of an unstable, toxic isotope with a half-life of one or two years.
But Trump’s hold on people seems more like that of a prion disease that has infected a large portion of Republican voters, and Republican elites have no way to treat it.
The elites are in a real bind now. Even if they had a good candidate to beat Trump- which they don’t- they might not be able to pull it off. And if they did, there is a portion of their voters who wiould stay home in November, 2024. Republicans are losing the numbers game already and if just 10% of their voters stay home, it would ruin their chances in purple states and districts.
I think that’s why Republican leaders aren’t trying to beat Trump. They are hoping Trump voters will vote for Republican candidates down the ballot. Then, if they can get Trump-hostile Independents to split their tickets, Republicans could still salvage some House and Senate races.
Suzanne
They tried to warn me of my evil ways
But I could not hear what they had to say
I was wroooooooooooooooong!
trollhattan
@RevRick: Yes, the Middle East post 9/11 mess is still with us, only it’s sprouted new heads, hydra-like.
I wandered over to the state capitol Tea Party rallies here in Sacramento and the “spirit” you describe was honed and amplified, what with a blah mooslim in the White House. They were rarin’ to go come January 2021.
Chip Daniels
We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that cults thrive on people who are looking for a cult to join.
That is, people who join a cult are already lost and desperately seeking the things a cult offers.
Maybe they are aimless adolescents, or tramatized divorced adults, or former addicts, but almost all cult members were already that way before the found the Dear Leader.
Meaning that if Trump keels over dead tomorrow, the cultists will find a new Leader to rally around.
This is what Arendt got right about the fascists- they WANT the drama and suffering of a cult and crate one if they need to.
I don’t see any scenario in which the Republican Party becomes a normal political party again, for at least a decade or two.
Baud
Dems nominated Williams Jennings Bryant three times in a row, but he never won.
ETA: I don’t believe he had foreign help.
Citizen Alan
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA):
It was worse than that! The simple bastard gave an interview in which he said he didn’t even consider catching Bin Laden important and that he rarely thought about him! And then, when Kerry rightly tried to make it an issue of it during a debate, Bush denied he’d ever said it! AND THE MEDIA LET HIM GET AWAY WITH IT!
laura
@UncleEbeneezer: strong recommending for stopping by this lovely tiny jewel: https://www.thesearanchchapel.org/
trollhattan
@Baud:
Big shoutout also, too, to Wendell Willkie.
eclare
@trollhattan:
That quote by W about TFG’s speech was perfect. No need to go on for paragraphs when one blunt sentence will do.
Ripley
Some of us want to watch “Idiocracy” for the laughs on a rainy Sunday afternoon, and some of us want to live “Idiocracy” – and demand that everyone join them.
UncleEbeneezer
@laura: Well we are considering getting a psilocybin chocolate bar during our tip, lol
Another Scott
Eh?
W was ignored after January 20, 2009. They didn’t send out the word that he was a heretic to Reagan (I’m old enough to remember when Reagan was attacked for not being loyal to Reagan – “Let Reagan Be Reagan”, for crying out loud) – they just dumped him because he was no longer useful. He became a non-entity and not even worth attacking. They wanted to forget about him because he blew up the world economy and did the stupid wars and all the rest.
It seems like I’m still not missing anything by never reading Chait’s stuff.
Cheers,
Scott.
rikyrah
@Subsole:
👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
trollhattan
@laura: And people say hippies never did anything great.
Another recommendation is the restaurant at St Orres.
Cameron
@Betty Cracker: Sincerity in the defense of stupidity is no vice?
Noah Brand
I think the key to Trump’s appeal is that while a lot of GOP dickheads are willing to pretend to believe whatever lies Fox News is selling this week, they still maintain an awareness that there is something called objective reality, somewhere. That, to the MAGA crowd, is heresy.
It’s not that Trump believes the ludicrous, ever-shifting lies he repeats, it’s that the concept of belief is alien to him. For him, on a deep level, there is no such thing as truth or untruth. Statements about reality are either On My Side, or On The Other Side, and that is the *only* characteristic they possess. And if you look at the dumb shit his supporters pass around to each other, that’s how they approach reality too. Trump speaks their language in a way no other presidential contender does, and that is absolutely a condemnation, both of him and of them.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@Suzanne: None of those things really piss me off. If he had actual empathy and policies that helped people, he’d just be a disheveled eccentric. (Of course, he’d also have no political career, because demeanor, speech and appearance matter to people who view candidates as job applicants rather than mouthpieces for their hate.)
I just can’t stand who he is as a person.
Tim Ellis
One thing that struck me in 2016 when I was canvassing in New Hampshire was how every time I came across canvassers for Jeb or any of the other “normal” Republicans, if you could get them talking, it was always paid operatives from some Super PAC or other. But Trump people were almost always actual, grassroots people. They really felt like they were taking on an evil machine on behalf of the people. And they loved to talk about it, and they were very friendly about it! Unless/until you made yourself known as an active Democrat, at which point things changed fast.
Similarly, at the door, there was a remarkable number of people who were on the fence between either Trump… or Bernie. It wasn’t the specific politics that they particularly cared about, just that they felt the system was broken and they needed somebody from outside the system (I am aware you could argue that both Trump and Bernie were very much inside the system, but they were both perceived as outsiders by many folks on the ground in NH in 2016).
With that dynamic operating, every heterodox position he took only *solidified* the core value proposition for Trump – that here was someone different, who didn’t answer to the machine, and who was willing to blow up the machine if need be.
I think a lot of people really missed just how bad things had gotten out there for folks. I think these voters were aware that blowing up the system to make things better was a real longshot, but with Trump they got the chance to take that longshot and then even if it didn’t pay off, at least he’d *take the system down with them*, which was a decent consolation prize.
And I think from there it’s metastasized into outright fascism as a result of both Trump’s personality cult (he is an entertainer first and foremost, which is an incredibly valuable skill in modern politics) and from the grievance politics that has long underlain Republican party views.
Citizen Alan
@CaseyL:
Well, of course. Once you’ve taken the Mark of the Beast, it’s never gonna scrub off. At the risk of summoning eversor, the last seven years have virtually destroyed the moral authority of Christianity in this country because the majority of Christians and the overwhelming majority of politically active (i.e. evangelical Christians) have made it clear that they will reject Christ in favor of Donald Trump.
Citizen Alan
@hueyplong:
On the bright side, maybe it’s a positive that we can all agree that MAGA Republicans are soulless.
SuzieC
@Jeffro: The Bush family loathes Trump. Barbara stated before she died that she voted for Hillary Clinton. I think George Sr. did too. The one person that might have the star power to really go after Trump is George Jr. But he has descendants and relatives who might have futures in the R party, so I don’t think he will. And he lacks the moral courage of Liz Cheney.
Her father did a righteous act by organizing all the living Defense Secretaries to publish that op-ed in The Washington Post warning against military intervention in the election.
But the Cheney family’s defection from MAGA did nothing to discourage them.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: I think it’s too late; someone with a lot of money and credibility and rightwing media access needed to do it in 2015. They were so terrified of turning off voters to who like Trump that they just decided to ride the lie.
At first, they thought that Jeb! would squeeze through like Romney in 2012; then they thought that Trump would implode and the horrors of a Hillary Presidency would teach the rabble a lesson in voting your “heart” (let the Democrats do the hard work of taming our base for us), and then Trump slouched over the finish line in 2016 and the cult learned that if they just clapped loud and hard enough, Tinkerbell truly can come to life and fuck up the whole country, just as they always dreamed. And they’ll never let that feeling go.
They doubled down once and were richly rewarded, so they’ll keep chasing that thrill until they’re bankrupt and in prison.
Ivan X
Chait’s takes have been awful for as long as I’ve been aware of him. His prognostications are wrong, his insight is middling, and I don’t feel enriched by his words. I usually feel like he has wasted my time. Now I just don’t bother with him.
I’m such an empath, though, that I’m afraid that he’ll somehow read this, and his feelings will be hurt.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@Chip Daniels: I’m thinking at least a generation, if they even want to be a normal party again.
RevRick
@trollhattan: It’s been a gathering storm ever since Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, and that was further juiced by Newt Gingrich and Fox News. But 9/11 really broke us.
Elizabelle
@Tim Ellis: Very interesting comment.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
@Citizen Alan: Oh, yeah, I remember. That shit was burned into my brain and it’s still smoking.
It makes me sick to see people who should know better saying “at least Bush was [whatever positive thing].” No. He wasn’t. He was Trump with better table manners. (Not good, but better than Trump.)
RevRick
@Baud: No Democratic candidate topped his 1896 vote total until Wilson did when he was re-elected. He ran in 96, 00, and 08. The only other non-winning three-time candidate was Henry Clay.
Jess
Trump channels their id more than any other political figure. He is them on a deep, visceral level, and it has nothing to do with politics, really. He is the one who liberated their inner monster that Murdoch and others thought they controlled, and now they can’t stuff that monster back into the lab cage in which it was nurtured. I’m just hoping the monster devours itself without taking too many of us with it, and we’ll be able to move on the way Germany was eventually able to do so after the WWII (although they’re still struggling with fascists, I know).
prostratedragon
@eclare: Never before had thought he’d get an “Amen” from me …
Suzanne
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA):
Of course not. But I also can’t stand Ron DeSantis as a person, or Ted Cruz, or Vladimir Putin, or Pablo Escobar, or Sarah Palin, or Liz Truss, etc etc etc. And yet I hate Trump more, he activates my disgust more than any of those people. Because he’s fucken transparently grotesque and stupid and lies so badly and is completely unfit for the role, and it’s fucken insulting and humiliating that the MAGAts forced him into my daily awareness. The MAGAts hate me as a person (and my son and many, many others) and they wanted to embarrass me and make me feel badly. So they elected Trump.
HumboldtBlue
@Citizen Alan:
We have to stop excluding Catholics from this the US church is filthy fucking rich — no matter how hard they try to hide assets or declare bankruptcy for raping kids — and Catholic leaders have heavy influence on the GOP. Evangelicals get the press because they have snakes and daughter-daddy dances and shit, but that Catholic money plays a huge role in what we are currently seeing from the GOP, and the decisions coming from the SC are of that same opus dei Catholic bullshit.
Evangelicals could not have given a flying fuck about abortion until the Catholics made it their signature platform plank, and then, seeing how well it worked as a wedge issue, jumped fully on board.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Here’s a guy who was living paycheck to paycheck, yet he pretended to be worried about the taxes of people making a comfortable living. Lee Atwater infamously said you can’t use the N-word anymore because it hurts republicans in the suburbs so “now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites“. [note how Atwater admits cutting taxes for the rich hurts the working class]
Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher is a perfect example of a MAGA. In 2008 he couldn’t openly say the N-word so he talked about “cutting taxes”, but after years of Dump’s racist rants, he felt comfortable in ditching the Jesus and taxes talk and call for the murder of brown migrants.
Subsole
@cain:
And, according to our media betters, we lesser beings are supposed to just graciously and gratefully accept the fact that we were less valuable to them than their hatreds and fears and whiny, petulant, obnoxiously-arrogant white-trash sobbing about the world not giving them everything they deserved by virtue of their birth and station in life, and let them keep right on trampling us with nary a murmur of protest or outrage.
Fuck that.
I will not defer to people whose petty, smooth-brained need to be perpetually-aggrieved victims of the world was more valuable than their own grandchildren. I refuse.
No, really. Fuck them.
They spent twenty years repeating Limbaugh’s rot about how we were stealing their country from them. I never stole shit. They walked away from America because they couldn’t stand the thought of it including us.
Nobody stole their birthright. They SHIT on their birthright because looking down on us is more important to them than fucking breathing, apparently.
Literally. They preferred choking on Covid to admitting we had a point. They would rather march lockstep with actual, factual, goose-stepping Nazis than consider us equal partners in our nation. There is no combination of words the Media can put to paper that will make that okay.
From the soles of my feet, fuck them.
waspuppet
@Betty Cracker: I think the “sacrifice” angle is correct (although a MH correspondent likely thinks it’s a good thing).
But also—and I didn’t come up with this myself—I think what DeSantis misjudged was that he thought “I’ll actually DO this stuff Trump just sits around complaining about.” He thought that would work for him, when in fact somewhere underneath even their stupidity people know that trying to F with Disney, or outlaw actual teaching in schools, are really stupid ideas.
He didn’t realize conservatives WANT to just sit around and complain, is what I’m saying.
Michael Bersin
@Ripley:
We knew that Idiocracy (2006) was fanciful mass entertainment and not a prophetic documentary at the time because in the movie the ignorant cult of electrolytes was broken by the prospect of starvation. We, however, still live in the alternate ending reality where Brawndo triumphs.
Jess
@Subsole: That was a beautiful rant
Roger Moore
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA):
Loser stink, also, too. She would have had a much easier time maintaining the cult if Obama/Biden hadn’t wiped the floor with McCain/Palin.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Right. If Hillary had won, would Trump have had any juice against her in 2020?
Interesting question.
Suzanne
@waspuppet: DeSantis is really just a normal evil piece of shit. We know how to deal with normal evil pieces of shit. That’s not exciting enough.
Michael Bersin
@Subsole:
Exactly. This.
delphinium
@Subsole:
Exactly. And as you said, fuck them.
HumboldtBlue
Will Bunch has written a very cogent piece on Trump and his base and what the media keeps missing about the dynamic.
Journalism fails miserably at explaining what is really happening to America
Elizabelle
I wish the FTF NY Times would stop changing their headlines once it’s up there. I think it is sleazy.
Op ed by GOP pollster Kristen Soltis, was initially titled something like “GOP Voters do not wish to be rescued from Trump.”
Now the Sulzberger/Joe “Staples heir” Kahn FTF NY Times headline is “The Thing is, Most Republicans Really Like Trump.”
Incidentally, the website this morning had, once again, no photos of Biden, and at least a few of Trump. Fuck that nasty paper.
From the op ed:
She also brings up Biden’s “stumbling” and gas prices. Really?
Republicans live in a fucking bubble.
Falling Diphthong
I think it’s a cogent observation that people who gave up seeing their grandchildren to show how deeply loyal they were to Trump don’t think they can back up now and admit they were wrong. Every time they sacrificed a personal connection, or their dignity, of some other important thing in the name of loyalty to the orange one, they made it that much harder to say “… Or maybe I’ve been wrong all along. That could be true.”
Roger Moore
@Baud:
No way. They would have gone looking for the next object of worship. The interesting thing about Trump is that he managed to achieve such a strong hold on the party that losing in 2020 didn’t manage to dislodge it. Normally, that kind of loss would be enough to destroy his credibility within the party, but he managed to maintain his stranglehold instead. I think it’s because he spent so much of his presidency breaking the party elite to his will. There’s nobody in the party who can offer a credible alternative because they all declared their fealty to him when he was in office.
HumboldtBlue
@Roger Moore:
Yup.
Elizabelle
@Jess:
Since Germany forbids display of the swastika, do you know one particular symbol many rightwing Germans use for identification?
Yep. The Confederate flag. Heritage not …. you know.
Quinerly
@Elizabelle:
Take a peek at that Salon piece about it being a cult. Specifically references Limbaugh and Fox for being part of the root of this.
Betty Cracker
@HumboldtBlue: Hate is a powerful motivator, but if that was 100% the explanation for Trump, the logical move now would be to move on to someone like DeSantis, who is probably more electable since he’s not under 91 felony indictments, has demonstrated how to deliver on the hate agenda and can legally serve two hate-filled terms. And yet they seem poised to nominate loser Trump again. So, it’s not just hate — there’s something personal invested there.
different-church-lady
Chait, it’s not a party base anymore, it’s a CULT OF PERSONALITY. Are you dense?
different-church-lady
@hueyplong: nominated for comment of the year
Dan B
@Elizabelle: I heartily second your take on propaganda media. It’s invisible to m9st people. It’s very slow but deadly.
Bill Arnold
@OverTwistWillie:
I have drunk beer out of a can labeled “BEER” in black and white, from a case of such cans.
Elizabelle
@Quinerly: I will.
Do you have a WSJ subscription? Hugs to JoJo.
Elizabelle
@HumboldtBlue: Thank you. I emailed that to several of my buds.
Roger Moore
@Jess:
Germany did not just decide to confront their past. They were thoroughly defeated in WWII, and the occupiers forced them to confront it. To their credit, the lesson took, and they’ve made confronting Nazism a key tenet in their national identity, but they only started on it because they were forced to. Otherwise, they would have done what every other country has done and buried their past misdeeds.
Subsole
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
Wasn’t he NOT actually a plumber? Or am I mistemembering that tidbit?
Quinerly
@HumboldtBlue:
This is an excellent piece. Thanks for the link.
craig
@OverTwistWillie: great movie, or greatest movie?
cckids
@Subsole:
Now that’s a rotating tag.
Subsole
@waspuppet:
That is an incredibly apt observation.
Quinerly
@Elizabelle:
No subscription to WSJ.
JoJo might be getting a brother. I’m still debating. Second dog changes the dynamics with travel and roadtrips. I’m not sure the FDR Room at La Posada is big enough for 2 dogs and me at Christmas.😉
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Funny, but I despise Trump LESS than those you mentioned (DeSantis, Cruz, etc.), because with Trump you can see the maladjusted child and the personality disorder. He is a pitiable figure, albeit still plenty dangerous. And criminal. Trump is a criminal. About to finally get his comeuppance.
Slightly_peeved
The Republicans say Trump is the only legitimate leader of the US. That any election process that does not coronate him is a conspiracy against him.
They are now surprised that their own members are unwilling to accept anyone else other than Trump as their leader.
I believe the current internet tradition is to refer to this as the “finding out” phase.
I think a significant number of the Republicans who didn’t support the Jan 6th autogolpe did so not out of loyalty to democratic principle but because they, unlike these Republican leaders, could actually imagine what happens if you disagree with the tyrant you’ve installed.
Subsole
Then again…maybe the fault is mine.
I think what I find so galling about the media’s constant, synchronized burbling about Conservatives deserving another chance from their victims because they are In Pain(tm) is that I do not see their pain. And even if I did, I simply do mot see jow their pain justifies the sheer, writhing agony they inflict on so many people across the world.
Every morning on my way into work I pass at least three people who have more reason to shoot up a public gathering than some snot-nosed turd like Kyle Rittenhouse will ever have. And yet, somehow, they DON’T.
We keep hearing over and over and over from all these comfortable centrists in comfortable jobs in safe blue neighborhoods nestled in safe blue cities nestled in safe blue counties nestled in safe blue states about how those poor, downtrodden, defenseless Conservatives are just in So. Much. Pain.
And I look at them and all I can think is, “What the fuck do these people know about pain? Like, describe the components of their pain to me, block by block, using simple English.”
And somehow, these Ivy League-educated, seven-figure-paycheck wordsmiths
Just.
Cannot.
Manage.
Anyway. Enough ranting from me. My shift is over. I am getting a fucking beer.
Y’all be sweet.
sab
@Subsole: As I remember he did plumbing for a living but he wasn’t properly licensed.
feebog
Last week I observed an interesting conversation. I play golf once a week with a couple of republican friends. One is a guy I have known well over 40 years and worked with as a manager for several years, The other is a retired engineer from Northrup-Gruman. This was the day after the Republican debate and one asked the other if he watched it. I said nothing during the conversation, as I was very interested in their reaction. Both thought Nicky Haley did very well. Both thought Ramaswamy was a dick. But neither one mentioned Trump, even though I’m sure both voted for him in 2020. Quite obvious they both wished Trump would go away and things would get back to “normal”. Fat chance there.
BellaPea
@Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA): I remember when Trump took his entire family to England for a state visit (grift, of course) and how embarrassed I was that they were representing our country. I know a lot of people don’t like the royals, but I respected Queen Elizabeth and Dump was rude and looked like a total fool in that tux he stuffed himself into. Melania and the other Dump women broke all kinds of court rules on proper attire. No class at all.
steve g
Jonathan Chait, the lame pundit, trying to explain why Ron DeSantis, the lame candidate, is so lame. Sigh.
DeSantis has been a zero from back in the days when Trump was still president and DeSantis got a picture of himself in Trump’s plane, or whatever that was. He knows nothing about being president. No sense of foreign policy or diplomacy. No sense of working with the House and Senate on legislation. No friends in Washington. He would end up appointing guys he knows in Florida to all the positions in government. We could even have Ladapo as surgeon general.
He was never a contender.
Jess
@Elizabelle: Ha! Thanks for the reminder–I had forgotten that.
Jess
@Roger Moore: Well, the younger generation had a lot to do with it as well. I hope GenZ will do the same here.
Gvg
@Falling Diphthong: or they never really cared about those grandkids anyway.
Paul in KY
@Zzyzx: That’s alot of it. His TV persona helped him out sooo much.
Paul in KY
@UncleEbeneezer: Hope y’all have a great time!
Paul in KY
@Roger Moore: He has one core priniciple: Do/say whatever helps TFG at that moment in time and fuck everyone else.
PJ
@Citizen Alan: Can you refer me to a poll of people identifying as Christians who say they support Trump vs. those who don’t?
Citizen Alan
@Roger Moore: I disagree that they would have abandoned trump. Because I think the plan was for Trump to lose to Hillary, scream about being cheated out of the election for the next 4 years, and use outrage over that to build a media Empire that would make Fox seem progressive. Then, they fucked up and won.
Paul in KY
@HumboldtBlue: Good point re Catholics and anti-choice politics.
Paul in KY
@Subsole: Right on.
Paul in KY
@Elizabelle: I think DeSatanis is more ‘evil’ than Trump. Trump is just raging id doing anything he thinks he needs/wants to do in service of himself. DeSatanis loves to hurt people.
unctuous
@Yarrow: They lack the maturity to do so.
It’s obvious for a long time how shockingly immature they can be. The words they use, the insults, the level of discourse (if one could call it that), it’s all reminiscent of children. We’ve all seen this, in Trump and his followers.
Mature adults will acknowledge their mistakes and accept the consequences. The immature can’t and won’t.
Eta: just googled “immaturity vs insecurity” and found this.
“Emotional maturity is, in essence, the ability to deal with reality”.
Which the right in general and trumpers in particularly are notoriously unable to deal with.
Manyakitty
@UncleEbeneezer: sounds dreamy 😍 Enjoy!!
Manyakitty
@Elizabelle: he’s like freaking Zelig. Turns up EVERYWHERE. Blanche mentioned him on Golden Girls ffs. 🤮
BruceFromOhio
Nothing is as dangerous as a person convinced they have nothing left to lose, and some one else to blame.
unctuous
@Subsole: Righteous, and co-signed.
MaryLou
@HumboldtBlue: I don’t think that relighting the bonfires of nineteenth century anti-Catholic hatred is really the way to go in 2023. Just today Pope Francis called out the ultra-conservatives in the US Catholic Church as ideologues, not truly followers of Christ. Sadly, some of what has infected the US Catholic Church is that people whose grandparents were despised immigrants got educated, became upper middle class, and turned into Republicans. And yes, many of them are rich and contribute to Catholic charities.
akita
In 2000, being a Reaganite was still in fashion in the Republican party. In 2016, being a Reaganite was the equivalent of being a RINO.
agorabum
@HumboldtBlue: Yes, the Hate part was important. I think I see how things worked in the old Greek polis when an oligarchic faction or tyrant took over – there would be a group that really hated the old leaders and once they got in charge, there would be executions and purges. Which many Trump fans long for (just look at the Q fantasy they have).
AnonPhenom
@Baud:
I see the similarities. Not between the men, but the followers. Particularly the Bryan of post 1915’s Prohibition, religious revival and anti-evolution. I see in both cases the followers projecting onto their ‘leaders’ and the men reflecting back what they think the cult want to hear.
I hope it ends the same way with Trump as it did with Bryan, with the cult declaring politics “a dirty business” and retiring from public participation for half a century, giving the rest of us a chance to fix what’s been broken.