Great stuff. Since this is a series I may be jumping the gun on something you’re planning to delve into more deeply tomorrow, but when looking at Trump’s takeover of the GOP it really can’t be overemphasized how seismically *traumatic* Obama’s election (and re-election) was for so many white conservative voters. It literally violated their sense of the natural order. Both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer have spoken to this. So the GOP rank and file were primed for a racist like Trump who would not only say the quiet part out loud but would scream it for the cheap seats.
Indeed. The Black man in the White House broke their brains. But more importantly, Obama's election got them circulating all kinds of racist shit on the intertubes--photoshopped pictures of Obama in a grass skirt, watermelon and chicken at state dinners, etc. And THAT was a revelation for all of them: A revelation that HEY! the GOP really IS the home of racists, and there's a awful lot of us!
There was that. There was also "sure, Hillary has been exonerated in every investigation. But she's been investigated sooooo many times that there has to be SOMETHING she did!" (Actual quote from someone who ended up voting for Jill Stein.)
And then my all-time favorite that I heard from so many women: "I really want to vote for a woman for president, but not THAT woman!" First heard with Hillary as candidate, and then heard being applied to Warren, Klobuchar, and Harris by turns.
As I said at the beginning of Trump's 2016 campaign and have reiterated many times since then:
Donald Trump is the Republican id frolicking naked in the fields.
He is everything they have ever wanted in a president: Wildly ignorant on all subjects, yet absolutely certain he knows more than any expert. Aggressively stupid. Greedy and openly corrupt. Demanding of absolute loyalty, yet utterly incapable of being loyal to anyone not his own offspring (and even then . . .). He's everything they want to be.
Very good! They really love seeing someone who embodies their values who is also rich, famous, and powerful. Usually someone like that would be the villain of our collective fantasies -- rapacious tycoons, Nazis, the Red Skull, et alia. And I guess he's the villain in theirs, too -- a villain they embrace and identify with.
It’s like Hemingway’s retort to Fitzgerald’s claim about the very rich being different than the little people (actually belied by Tom Buchanan): Donnie’s as pathological as the unhinged wing of the GOP; he just has more money.
Red Skull, et al, always have hordes of nameless minions ready to be killed off while the evil master battles the forces of good. With COVID-19, the analogy is apt.
Before T****'s election, I never imagined that there was a sizable contingent of people who were fervently rooting for the villains in every eighties movie. That is some unsettling shit.
They don't see Trump as a villian. He's Rambo, Harry Callahan, Bernie Goetz. He's the guy John McCain was pretending to be when he said his solution to the crash in 2007 was to get everybody in a room and tell them to cut the crap.
Trump 's supporters see the world as a simple place: you work hard, you stand up to bullies, and you know your place. People who don't do those things are the villians. Of course, they have their own definition of those 3 things.
Well, of course they don't SEE him that way, but he is--Biff Tannen was explicitly based on T****. They are explicitly celebrating the values--bullying, belligerence, cruelty--that Biff and such figures represent. We instinctively dislike such people, and for good reason. The question of how wingers' brain circuits got so fried is...above my pay grade.
What they want (because they think it will keep their taxes low) is a guy who will say "Fuck off and die" to the widows and orphans when they come begging for a handout. That's villainous behavior to normal people, but heroic behavior to Republicans.
Lacking any trace of empathy, they can't imagine anyone else is empathetic, so they just figure it's all insincere "virtue signaling" and a guy like Trump is the only one honest enough to admit that none of us really give a shit about anyone but ourselves.
Even the most basic appeal to human decency they see as trickery. "You don't really care about the poor, or about refugees, you're just pretending to so you can make me look bad! Well, the joke's on you, I'm going to adopt heartlessness as a badge of honor!"
I love that clip, because it emphasises the extent to which those three—especially Andrew whose fantasy it is—are, beside being to one extent or another evil little fucks, such _kids_. I loathe the 'Menʼs Rights' people, but I think they're stopped-clock–correct on boys' often not having good adult, male, models to grow into—I differ from them in that where M.R.ons say that the consequence is that they're effeminate, I (correctly) say that they can grow into Louts and Apatovian Guys. The Louts worship the Über-Lout. (German speakers: „Überflegel“ oder „Überstoffel“ oder ein dritter: Welchen besten war?)
Trump's pretty Warren-ish—Warren's much smarter, but still not nearly as smart as he thinks he is (this five-time washout from Google's and Amazon's hiring processes recognises his own)—but no Trumpist of which I've heard, with the exception of some far-right January 6ers who felt betrayed by him, ever quit him as defintively as Jonathan. (Jonathan felt betrayed, but he'd always been the most moderate of the three). Andrew, even all homophobic (and so detestable) stuff aside, has the strongest parallel in Lindsey Graham, repeatedly denouncing Trump and returning to him, though I strongly doubt Graham's ever heading toward any sort of genuine repentance.
Ezra has his moments and is actually insightful on occasion. But by definition, the good that can come from a mainstream media pundit is severely limited. Now, what it says about the Times that their opinion side is much better on important, substantive issues than the reportage side... (Obviously, editorial relies on who the pundit is.)
As a defective human being, my POV is, like, skewed, so while parsing a 2016 GOP primary debate, I thought "Holy shit, he's crossing a line there, opening Pandora's box" when Donnie essentially normalized conservative media's crazy ass spews of insanity. Which is to say, more or less, that Trumpism isn't so much any change in subrange but in selling the same old GOP shit to the masses.
That media poobahs all along the spectrum have any problem (or I guess reluctance) treating Trumpism as at little as it is, well, gets to make regular rant that there's literally little more than a handful of pundits in mainstream media of any worth.
That said, what else Trumpism is is a cult of and for losers led by a huge, historic loser.
"Loser" is interesting. They think he's a winner. My fantasy (indulged in as recently as yesterday) is to say to one of his fans, "It's not winning if you cheat. And he cheats at everything. Meanwhile, even YOU know he owned casinos--which is the Italian word for 'machine for printing money'--and declared bankruptcy four times. If that's not failure, what is? It's like striking out with the bases loaded, in a World Series game, four times. All you have to do is let the ball hit you, and you 'drive' in a run. How do you defend that?"
I know: cult, yes, so they come up with something. It's like Catholicism!
I can! Sort of. It's...see, money only works if buyers and sellers agree that it works. So a bunch of tech geeks said, Hey, what if w...Ah, never mind.
But in their minds he's still a winner because he's never had to face the consequences of his action. I really hope that changes SOON. Donald Trump needs to go to prison as an example to all enemies of democracy.
True. But they'll always find a way to explain away his guilty verdicts, the overwhelming evidence, his signed confession, etc. As an example to others, yes, it's essential. But his base, I think, will never repudiate him.
There were a couple articles getting into the details of who went to the Capitol and mostly took selfies: in many cases, tried to run their own business, divorced at least once, bankrupt at least once...in other words, what Donny would have been without an extremely rich and successful daddy. For the ones who truly believe, he's an avatar or a mirror.
As with anything conservative/reactionary, there's a hunk of projection: they just ignore the shit out of those absurdly inconvenient class issues. Donny's got a 5D chess plan to have the government pull them up by their bootstraps, but only them because they DESERVE IT.
Well, Lindsay Graham was right. The Republicans can't win without Trump. Especially in an environment where the Democrats are offering free education and child care (even free dental and vision coverage for seniors!) the traditional Republican message becomes "No, you can't have that... or that... and no, not that either", and who wants that shit?
Is there anyone as studiedly clueless as Ezra Klein? I know his heart seems to be generally in the right place, but how does a person wake up day after day, year after year, dewy-eyed and puzzled as Cindy Lou Who on Christmas morning to discover what the Republicans were really up to?
It's finally turning to autumn here (thanks, Global Warming! for the extra days of summer), so I did my annual heating system tune-up and, whaddya know? my Honeywell programmable thermostat was set to switch votes from Biden to Trump! Somebody in China fucked up. I always thought Old Handsome Joe won the state by a lot more than 20,000 votes - hell, I voted for him more times than that myself. When the old judge, Garbleman, finally learns that "elections" are about "people" "casting" "votes," and not making Bingo at the Tuesday Family Night at the American Legion Hall, there's going to be some serious rewriting of the election laws here. Until then, I need to order a new thermostat.
I may have a snazzy new meta-theory on Douthat, Brooks, etc. It's not that they're conservative columnists--that would require them to acknowledge reality but present a conservative interpretation of it. No, I think their approach is, "Let's say the New York Times had a conservative columnist. This is maybe something he or she might write." Not only is it not personal, it's not actual. It's hypothetical.
Some primo shit, Mr. Edroso. Conventional liberal wisdom is that the Republican Party is riding the tiger by appeasing the programmable meatballs (h/t Mr. Driftglass), but I think embracing Trumpism is a proactive choice. Vote suppression and court-packing are long-term cons they've been running for decades. You focus on cheating as your strategy when you know you can't win. I can only assume their number-crunchers have been warning them for decades, Karl Rove's plan to court conservative Hispanics was the same response to that problem, but it was the base and Party activists that rejected it, not the leadersbip.
Various Republicans have attempted the role: Pat Buchannan was an unlikable scold, Sarah Palin had no interest in the work of wielding power, Ted Cruz is unlikable period. But the conditioning that professional politicians (Buchannan was a speechwriter, so he thought his ideas mattered, the idiot) must ensure to receive Party support prevented them from saying the quiet parts out loud.I
Trump didn't break the Party the way Obama did, he steamrolled it. His celebrity gave him a platform and insulated him from any disapproval from the Party, and he showed the Party they were cowards and idiots. They built his audience and gave it to him for free. At most Trump just accelerated the schedule. One of the freshman crop of Republican Congressional lunatics would have assumed his role eventually. Give Madison Cawthorn a guitar and he's Bob Roberts.
Given this history, the embrace of magical realism was inevitable. They said that as we watched, they would create a new reality, and they're doing it now.
Great stuff. Since this is a series I may be jumping the gun on something you’re planning to delve into more deeply tomorrow, but when looking at Trump’s takeover of the GOP it really can’t be overemphasized how seismically *traumatic* Obama’s election (and re-election) was for so many white conservative voters. It literally violated their sense of the natural order. Both Ta-Nehisi Coates and Adam Serwer have spoken to this. So the GOP rank and file were primed for a racist like Trump who would not only say the quiet part out loud but would scream it for the cheap seats.
Indeed. The Black man in the White House broke their brains. But more importantly, Obama's election got them circulating all kinds of racist shit on the intertubes--photoshopped pictures of Obama in a grass skirt, watermelon and chicken at state dinners, etc. And THAT was a revelation for all of them: A revelation that HEY! the GOP really IS the home of racists, and there's a awful lot of us!
I think the threat of a woman in the White House was even more traumatic. I was IBEW in 2016 and " Bitch ain't the boss of me "was everything.
No doubt. A woman President violates the natural order, too.
There was that. There was also "sure, Hillary has been exonerated in every investigation. But she's been investigated sooooo many times that there has to be SOMETHING she did!" (Actual quote from someone who ended up voting for Jill Stein.)
And then my all-time favorite that I heard from so many women: "I really want to vote for a woman for president, but not THAT woman!" First heard with Hillary as candidate, and then heard being applied to Warren, Klobuchar, and Harris by turns.
"There's no smoke without fire!" from a bunch of professional arsonists.
The old “I don’t like the direction this country is headed in” lament I mean screech.
To coin a phrase apropos those true snowflakes, fuck their feelings.
As I said at the beginning of Trump's 2016 campaign and have reiterated many times since then:
Donald Trump is the Republican id frolicking naked in the fields.
He is everything they have ever wanted in a president: Wildly ignorant on all subjects, yet absolutely certain he knows more than any expert. Aggressively stupid. Greedy and openly corrupt. Demanding of absolute loyalty, yet utterly incapable of being loyal to anyone not his own offspring (and even then . . .). He's everything they want to be.
"Donald Trump is the Republican id frolicking naked in the fields."
That's some damn fine poetry there.
"Donald Trump... frolicking naked in the fields."
EEEYEWWW!
Naked, eye-searing and blindness-causing self-interest.
Very good! They really love seeing someone who embodies their values who is also rich, famous, and powerful. Usually someone like that would be the villain of our collective fantasies -- rapacious tycoons, Nazis, the Red Skull, et alia. And I guess he's the villain in theirs, too -- a villain they embrace and identify with.
It’s like Hemingway’s retort to Fitzgerald’s claim about the very rich being different than the little people (actually belied by Tom Buchanan): Donnie’s as pathological as the unhinged wing of the GOP; he just has more money.
Red Skull, et al, always have hordes of nameless minions ready to be killed off while the evil master battles the forces of good. With COVID-19, the analogy is apt.
Before T****'s election, I never imagined that there was a sizable contingent of people who were fervently rooting for the villains in every eighties movie. That is some unsettling shit.
They don't see Trump as a villian. He's Rambo, Harry Callahan, Bernie Goetz. He's the guy John McCain was pretending to be when he said his solution to the crash in 2007 was to get everybody in a room and tell them to cut the crap.
Trump 's supporters see the world as a simple place: you work hard, you stand up to bullies, and you know your place. People who don't do those things are the villians. Of course, they have their own definition of those 3 things.
Well, of course they don't SEE him that way, but he is--Biff Tannen was explicitly based on T****. They are explicitly celebrating the values--bullying, belligerence, cruelty--that Biff and such figures represent. We instinctively dislike such people, and for good reason. The question of how wingers' brain circuits got so fried is...above my pay grade.
What they want (because they think it will keep their taxes low) is a guy who will say "Fuck off and die" to the widows and orphans when they come begging for a handout. That's villainous behavior to normal people, but heroic behavior to Republicans.
Lacking any trace of empathy, they can't imagine anyone else is empathetic, so they just figure it's all insincere "virtue signaling" and a guy like Trump is the only one honest enough to admit that none of us really give a shit about anyone but ourselves.
Even the most basic appeal to human decency they see as trickery. "You don't really care about the poor, or about refugees, you're just pretending to so you can make me look bad! Well, the joke's on you, I'm going to adopt heartlessness as a badge of honor!"
“We are as gods!”
https://youtu.be/CnYDLHUwRKc
I love that clip, because it emphasises the extent to which those three—especially Andrew whose fantasy it is—are, beside being to one extent or another evil little fucks, such _kids_. I loathe the 'Menʼs Rights' people, but I think they're stopped-clock–correct on boys' often not having good adult, male, models to grow into—I differ from them in that where M.R.ons say that the consequence is that they're effeminate, I (correctly) say that they can grow into Louts and Apatovian Guys. The Louts worship the Über-Lout. (German speakers: „Überflegel“ oder „Überstoffel“ oder ein dritter: Welchen besten war?)
Trump's pretty Warren-ish—Warren's much smarter, but still not nearly as smart as he thinks he is (this five-time washout from Google's and Amazon's hiring processes recognises his own)—but no Trumpist of which I've heard, with the exception of some far-right January 6ers who felt betrayed by him, ever quit him as defintively as Jonathan. (Jonathan felt betrayed, but he'd always been the most moderate of the three). Andrew, even all homophobic (and so detestable) stuff aside, has the strongest parallel in Lindsey Graham, repeatedly denouncing Trump and returning to him, though I strongly doubt Graham's ever heading toward any sort of genuine repentance.
This is excellent! Now we need to figure out why Young Ezra makes a fuckton of money doing the same thing except it's stupid and shitty.
I wonder if Jonah Goldberg liked to think of himself as the Megatron of Reformicons.
Ezra has his moments and is actually insightful on occasion. But by definition, the good that can come from a mainstream media pundit is severely limited. Now, what it says about the Times that their opinion side is much better on important, substantive issues than the reportage side... (Obviously, editorial relies on who the pundit is.)
His spelling seems good.
As a defective human being, my POV is, like, skewed, so while parsing a 2016 GOP primary debate, I thought "Holy shit, he's crossing a line there, opening Pandora's box" when Donnie essentially normalized conservative media's crazy ass spews of insanity. Which is to say, more or less, that Trumpism isn't so much any change in subrange but in selling the same old GOP shit to the masses.
That media poobahs all along the spectrum have any problem (or I guess reluctance) treating Trumpism as at little as it is, well, gets to make regular rant that there's literally little more than a handful of pundits in mainstream media of any worth.
That said, what else Trumpism is is a cult of and for losers led by a huge, historic loser.
"Loser" is interesting. They think he's a winner. My fantasy (indulged in as recently as yesterday) is to say to one of his fans, "It's not winning if you cheat. And he cheats at everything. Meanwhile, even YOU know he owned casinos--which is the Italian word for 'machine for printing money'--and declared bankruptcy four times. If that's not failure, what is? It's like striking out with the bases loaded, in a World Series game, four times. All you have to do is let the ball hit you, and you 'drive' in a run. How do you defend that?"
I know: cult, yes, so they come up with something. It's like Catholicism!
Now he's off the Forbes 400 list. They'll blame Bitcoin.
LOL. I'd love to hear them explain what bitcoin is.
Can *anyone* explain what bitcoin is?
I can! Sort of. It's...see, money only works if buyers and sellers agree that it works. So a bunch of tech geeks said, Hey, what if w...Ah, never mind.
A digital fiat
I can explain it too. The house always wins.
But in their minds he's still a winner because he's never had to face the consequences of his action. I really hope that changes SOON. Donald Trump needs to go to prison as an example to all enemies of democracy.
True. But they'll always find a way to explain away his guilty verdicts, the overwhelming evidence, his signed confession, etc. As an example to others, yes, it's essential. But his base, I think, will never repudiate him.
There were a couple articles getting into the details of who went to the Capitol and mostly took selfies: in many cases, tried to run their own business, divorced at least once, bankrupt at least once...in other words, what Donny would have been without an extremely rich and successful daddy. For the ones who truly believe, he's an avatar or a mirror.
As with anything conservative/reactionary, there's a hunk of projection: they just ignore the shit out of those absurdly inconvenient class issues. Donny's got a 5D chess plan to have the government pull them up by their bootstraps, but only them because they DESERVE IT.
Well, Lindsay Graham was right. The Republicans can't win without Trump. Especially in an environment where the Democrats are offering free education and child care (even free dental and vision coverage for seniors!) the traditional Republican message becomes "No, you can't have that... or that... and no, not that either", and who wants that shit?
"No, you can't have all that stuff -- but the blacks can't have it either, and isn't that the important thing?"
Douthat: “Bloombergist”
Anyone using such pretentious, made-up nonsense words should be given a wedgie so tight they collapse into a singularity.
May I use that line?
Please have at it!
Is there anyone as studiedly clueless as Ezra Klein? I know his heart seems to be generally in the right place, but how does a person wake up day after day, year after year, dewy-eyed and puzzled as Cindy Lou Who on Christmas morning to discover what the Republicans were really up to?
He's the David Brooks of Thomas Friedmans.
Harsh but fair.
Anyone who relies on the mainstream media to know what the Rs really do would be clueless, ignorant.
Great piece. Never saw the base ID'd as smallholders before, but that's the perfect word.
It's finally turning to autumn here (thanks, Global Warming! for the extra days of summer), so I did my annual heating system tune-up and, whaddya know? my Honeywell programmable thermostat was set to switch votes from Biden to Trump! Somebody in China fucked up. I always thought Old Handsome Joe won the state by a lot more than 20,000 votes - hell, I voted for him more times than that myself. When the old judge, Garbleman, finally learns that "elections" are about "people" "casting" "votes," and not making Bingo at the Tuesday Family Night at the American Legion Hall, there's going to be some serious rewriting of the election laws here. Until then, I need to order a new thermostat.
I may have a snazzy new meta-theory on Douthat, Brooks, etc. It's not that they're conservative columnists--that would require them to acknowledge reality but present a conservative interpretation of it. No, I think their approach is, "Let's say the New York Times had a conservative columnist. This is maybe something he or she might write." Not only is it not personal, it's not actual. It's hypothetical.
Well, it’s really just pandering which pretty what nearly all pundits do.
Two words: Fox News.
Trumpism = conservatism = fascism
The transitive property applies.
Some primo shit, Mr. Edroso. Conventional liberal wisdom is that the Republican Party is riding the tiger by appeasing the programmable meatballs (h/t Mr. Driftglass), but I think embracing Trumpism is a proactive choice. Vote suppression and court-packing are long-term cons they've been running for decades. You focus on cheating as your strategy when you know you can't win. I can only assume their number-crunchers have been warning them for decades, Karl Rove's plan to court conservative Hispanics was the same response to that problem, but it was the base and Party activists that rejected it, not the leadersbip.
Various Republicans have attempted the role: Pat Buchannan was an unlikable scold, Sarah Palin had no interest in the work of wielding power, Ted Cruz is unlikable period. But the conditioning that professional politicians (Buchannan was a speechwriter, so he thought his ideas mattered, the idiot) must ensure to receive Party support prevented them from saying the quiet parts out loud.I
Trump didn't break the Party the way Obama did, he steamrolled it. His celebrity gave him a platform and insulated him from any disapproval from the Party, and he showed the Party they were cowards and idiots. They built his audience and gave it to him for free. At most Trump just accelerated the schedule. One of the freshman crop of Republican Congressional lunatics would have assumed his role eventually. Give Madison Cawthorn a guitar and he's Bob Roberts.
Given this history, the embrace of magical realism was inevitable. They said that as we watched, they would create a new reality, and they're doing it now.
"becomes"
or else as in "That shirt becomes you"