Now that it’s become obvious even to Donald Trump that he really did lose in a massive way during the midterm elections, he’s predictably begun to sulk and fume angrily at his aides in the White House, to the point that they’ve become afraid to have any interactions with him.
A White House aide said that Trump is nervous about the new Democratic House and the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
“He’s furious,” an administration official said. “Most staffers are trying to avoid him.”
The official said that Trump is “trying to decide who to blame” in light of all his failures.
Trump has also missed multiple public events and instead sent other officials in his place. Even on Veterans Day, Trump took a low profile and decided not to uphold a traditional ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
Additionally, Fox News has turned on Trump by filing an amicus brief in support of CNN’s suit to restore Jim Acosta’s press credentials, and it’s driven his remaining cult members off the deep end.
The time has come to find a new voice for Republicans. FOX news has lost its focus. If I want to hear CNN, I know where to find them, and the rest of the left-wing liberal biased media. Say it ain’t so, FOX.
If the Supreme Court decides Trump must accept Acosta I hope he closes down all press briefings. Famous quote Andrew Jackson... The Supreme Court has made their decision let them enforce it
So now Fox is insufficiently partisan for them. Coupled with the midterms, this just might mark the beginning of the long-expected GOP meltdown in the wake of Trump. Are they slowly breaking up and splintering into opposing pro-Trump and anti-Trump factions?
Clearly Trump still has his rabid fans, and he knows exactly how to pander to them: with fear and bigotry.
A reporter for Right Side Broadcasting (RSBN) asks one of the gathered Trump supporters what she’s hoping the president will talk about later that evening.
“The caravan,” she blurts out, with no hesitation. “I would like to know a little bit more about what he’s going to do, ’cause that’s an invasion of our country.”
(Fact check: it is not an invasion.)
She adds that they’ll “see what he has to say tonight,” but admits it won’t matter: “I love everything that comes out of his mouth.”
Another woman, dressed in a red MAGA hat and red MAGA sweatshirt jumps in. “It doesn’t really matter what he says, we’ll support it.”
The man next to her interjects: “Vote Republican.”
“I’m a Trumpette,” the woman in red adds. “I’ll support anything.”
And then there was the woman who said she didn’t care if Trump showed up with “three penises.”
The reporter presented the Trump-backing woman with a short list of the president’s most frequent falsehoods, but she said she was not interested in determining whether he would lie during the rally.
“I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there,” she said.
She declined to explain how many penises she believed the president already had.
Another woman at the rally, Jennifer Petito, agreed to give her name, but was similarly unconcerned with proof that Trump had lied repeatedly about a number of issues.
“I don’t believe that,” Petito said. “I don’t believe he would lie like that.”
Then there were the supporters who cooked up a theory of George Soros bombing himself as a distraction from the caravan. Frank Gaffney said the bombs were planted by Democrats to deflect attention from the left’s mobs. It was suggested that George Soros controls “all of these voting machines,” and then conservative Alice Stewart accused Jim Sciutto of supporting "cop killers” when he questioned the bigoted and racist nature of Trump’s Luis Bracamonte ad.
Even after the #Magabomber and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, who were clearly inspired by racist rhetoric that has been repeated many times by Trump, they stay with him.
They simply don’t care how ugly Trump gets. As Joe Scaraborough pointed out, the more racist his speech, the more many Americans like him.
“A lot of Americans decided to go out and vote, we saw it there,” Scarborough said, “to support a man who spent the last month of the campaign not making subtle appeals to racism, but making overtly bigoted, racist statements, attacking brown people, attacking black people, attacking people who were the others.”
“And you could look at the lies,” he added. “Again, this is — what was he lying about? The answer? Everything.”
Psychologists have tried to break down exactly why Trump’s most devoted fans continue to support him, and most of the 14 reasons they list aren’t racism—
although some of them are.
- Practicality Trumps Morality
For some wealthy people, it’s simply a financial matter. Trump offers tax cuts for the rich and wants to do away with government regulation that gets in the way of businessmen making money, even when that regulation exists for the purpose of protecting the environment. Others, like blue-collared workers, like the fact that the president is trying to bring jobs back to America from places like China. Some people who genuinely are not racist (those who are will be discussed later) simply want stronger immigration laws because they know that a country with open borders is not sustainable. These people have put their practical concerns above their moral ones. To them, it does not matter if he’s a vagina-grabber, or if his campaign team colluded with Russia to help him defeat his political opponent.
- The Brain’s Attention System Is More Strongly Engaged by Trump
According to a study that monitored brain activity while participants watched 40 minutes of political ads and debate clips from the presidential candidates, Donald Trump is unique in his ability to keep the brain engaged.
- America’s Obsession with Entertainment and Celebrities
Essentially, the loyalty of Trump supporters may in part be explained by America’s addiction with entertainment and reality TV. He keeps us on the edge of our seat, and for that reason, some Trump supporters will forgive anything he says. They are happy as long as they are kept entertained.
- “Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn.”
Some intelligent people who know better are supporting Trump simply to be rebellious or to introduce chaos into the political system. They may have such distaste for the establishment and democrats like Hillary 3f that their support for Trump is a symbolic middle finger directed at Washington. These people do not have their priorities straight, and perhaps have other issues, like an innate desire to troll others, or a deranged obsession with schadenfreude.
- The Fear-Factor: Conservatives Are More Sensitive to Threat
Science has unequivocally shown that the conservative brain has an exaggerated fear response when faced with stimuli that may be perceived as threatening. A 2008 study in the journal Science found that conservatives have a stronger physiological reaction to startling noises and graphic images compared to liberals. [...]
Some would say this list indicates that racism is only a small portion of what motivates Trump supporters, but back when Hillary Clinton said that half of Trump’s fans were a “basket full of deplorables,” Reuters revealed some polls that showed that she was actually low-balling it slightly.
Supporters of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump are more likely to describe African Americans as "criminal," "unintelligent," "lazy" and "violent" than voters who backed some Republican rivals in the primaries or who support Democratic contender Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll.
[...]
Nearly half of Trump’s supporters described African Americans as more “violent” than whites. The same proportion described African Americans as more “criminal” than whites, while 40 percent described them as more “lazy” than whites.
[...]
For example, 32 percent of Trump supporters placed whites closer to the top level of “intelligence” than they did blacks, compared with 22 percent of Clinton supporters who did the same.
This poll was also covered on RedState via Huffpo.
This is not exactly news to anyone who has spent more than about five minutes on Facebook or Twitter in the last year, but Trump's supporters are more likely to self-identify as racist, and a new poll proves it. Now, this is not a matter of saying, they say and think things that most reasonable people would agree are racist, this is a matter of saying they flat out told the pollster that they like white people way more than they like Hispanics or black people.
Overall, Trump supporters on average responded that they felt 75% warm or positive about whites (as opposed to 70% for all respondents), but only 60% warm about blacks (as opposed to 68% for other Republicans and 67% of all respondents total) and only 55% warm about Hispanics (as opposed to 69% of other Republicans and 67% overall). Here's the full survey results:
During the election, Trump supporters clearly didn’t think using the n-word is a clear indication that someone is a racist.
An overwhelming majority of Donald Trump voters don't think that using the n-word makes white people racist and less than half think the slur is offensive, according to a new poll.
A combination of two polls conducted over the past two weeks found that only 18 percent of Trump voters believe using the racial epithet makes white people racist and just 42 percent find the term offensive. On the other side of the aisle, more than three-quarters of Hillary Clinton voters said that the n-word is offensive and racist.
Over 70 percent of Trump supporters indicated that they would still cast their vote for a political candidate even if they had said the n-word. By contrast, nearly 90 percent of Clinton voters say it would deter them from supporting a candidate if they had used the slur before.
So, um, exactly what the frack does it take then to prove someone is racist—a burning cross on the lawn? A lynched man hanging from the backyard avocado tree? Having your entire junior prom make the Nazi salute all at once? Beating up anti-Trump protesters on camera while wearing #MAGA gear and laughing about it? Shooting up a synagogue or a mosque after strategically harassing the congregation for months? Inspiring a racist terrorist to send more than a dozen mail bombs to your political and media enemies, then lying about your poll numbers among black people? Repeatedly trying to block minorities from being able to vote? Having neo-Nazis hail you as the “Master Race President” because you call for an end to birthright citizenship?
All of this together led to a reported 17 percent spike in hate crimes during 2017. This isn’t just coming from a “few people on the fringe”: it’s thousands upon thousands of people.
An annual report shows there were more than 7,100 reported hate crimes last year. There were increases in attacks motivated by racial bias, religious bias and because of a victim’s sexual orientation.
The report, released Tuesday, shows there was a nearly 23 percent increase in religion-based hate crimes. There was a 37 percent spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes.
Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker says the report is a “call to action.” He says the offenses were “despicable violations of our core values as Americans.”
It’s been recently said that while some consider Trump’s personal racism to be in doubt, it’s quite obvious and undeniable that he thinks that his own fans are largely racist. Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner told an employee that Trump doesn’t really believe in the birther conspiracy: he’s just saying that he does to ingratiate himself with Republicans who do.
“When I was the editor of the New York Observer, Kushner and I were going back and forth about how the paper should cover him,” Elizabeth Spiers wrote in a post on Twitter.
“I told Jared that I was particularly appalled by his father-in-law’s birtherism stance, which I viewed as cynical and racist.
“He rolled his eyes and said ‘He doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it’”.
It’s now clear that he was right: they did buy it. They’re still buying it. It’s also clear that the last thing they’re ever going to do—like Trump himself—is admit to their bigotry and racism. Each time they’re confronted with it, they’ll lash out just as he did with NPR reporter Yamiche Alcindor, accusing her of racism for asking him about the links between his claim to being a “nationalist” and the wider white nationalist movement. Or his claim that he's “never made racist statements" in response to a question about Michael Cohen’s extensive list of accusations.
“I told Trump that the rally looked vanilla [full of white people] on television. Trump responded, ‘That’s because black people are too stupid to vote for me.’” [...]
After Nelson Mandela died, “[Trump] said to me, ‘Name one country run by a black person that’s not a shithole,’ and then he added, ‘Name one city,’” [Name one of those countries that wasn’t dismantled by Colonialism?]
“We were going from the airport to the hotel, and we drove through what looked like a rougher neighborhood [In Chicago]. Trump made a comment to me, saying that only the blacks could live like this.” [Show me a neighborhood like that that was artificially created by racist red-lining and economic abandonment?]
During season one of the Apprentice: “Trump was explaining his back-and-forth about not picking [Kwame] Jackson,” an African-American investment manager who had graduated from Harvard Business School. “He said, ‘There’s no way I can let this black f-g win.’” [Kwame has since responded to this statement with: ‘Not today, colonizer!’”]
Jack O’Donnell, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, has since written a column for Politico calling B.S. on the claim that Trump never disparaged minorities with racial slurs. He treated his black employees badly, complained when there were too many black customers in the casino, and had been angered by a limo driver wearing clothes that he said made him “look like a fucking Puerto Rican.” So there’s all that, then.
In the end, arguing with them about whether they are or aren’t specifically “racist” is like arguing over a distinction that makes no discernible difference. When you repeatedly support policies that disadvantage and harm people who are of a particular ethnic or social group, the exact rationale of why doesn’t much matter. It is exactly what it appears to be: racism and bigotry.
There are many reasons besides racism to be a big fan of Trump, but it would be a fallacy to assume that they are all mutually exclusive. A person can be legitimately concerned about trade with foreign nations and national security issues, and still be a narcissist and a conspiracy theorist and also a bigoted racist, all at the same time. A Trumpster may have one or two legitimate arguments for supporting him, and they can also have one or two completely bogus and self-serving bigoted reasons, which is part of why it’s so difficult to completely understand and isolate one particular motivation from another. There are multiple issues at play.
Trump embodies a combination of malignant narcissism, self-delusion, and a particularly virulent strain of confirmation bias. At his core, Trump displays all three of these traits in combination and in tandem. He is constantly attempting to reconstruct the reality around him in a manner designed to endlessly boost his ego, while denigrating his perceived enemies. He constructs literal fantasies on the fly, all of which are designed to confirm the biases he’s already had for decades, regardless of the facts. Just as Bob Woodward wrote in his book Fear, Trump throws tantrums when confronted with truth that he doesn’t agree with.
“I think the key in examining Trump is actually what will he do when people present him with facts?” he said. “For instance, it sounds a little esoteric, but the World Trade Organization, which the United States is a member of — very important, allows us to file complaints of unfair trade practices — and there’s a meeting in the Oval Office and the president says, ‘Well, the World Trade Organization is the worst organization ever. We lose all of our cases.'”
Trump’s advisers presented him with data that showed the U.S., in fact, won 85.7 percent of the cases it brought before the organization, and he simply rejected their data.
“He says, ‘No, that’s not true,’ and the people are saying, ‘Look, call the U.S. trade representative, your guy, and he will confirm this,'” Woodward said.
Woodward said the president simply refused.
“‘I don’t want to hear it,'” Trump said, according to Woodward. “‘I don’t want to call him, I don’t want to deal with it.'” [...]
“At some point, he gets literally where the aides ask him, ‘Where did you get these ideas?'” Woodward said. “And he will say, ‘Well, I’ve had them for 30 years, they’re right and if you disagree, you’re wrong.'”
We’ve seen this ourselves in real time, when Trump lashed out at CNN’s Jim Acosta for asking him why he repeatedly and wrongly called the migrant caravan an “invasion.” He was physically spinning in his spot, enraged at having his blatant lie exposed and questioned. He literally couldn’t handle the truth.
Another example came this week when he claimed that people have to show their ID when they go to the grocery store to buy cereal. It wasn’t his first time making this asinine claim.
Trump, without evidence, blamed the string of recent Republican losses on “potentially illegal votes,” claiming that there are people out there – somewhere – literally making rounds to the polls despite not being registered to vote.
“The Republicans don’t win and that’s because of potentially illegal votes,” Trump complained. “When people get in line that have absolutely no right to vote and they go around in circles. Sometimes they go to their car, put on a different hat, put on a different shirt, come in and vote again. Nobody takes anything. It’s really a disgrace what’s going on.”
The president then falsely claimed that voter IDs are required to by cereal.
“If you buy a box of cereal — you have a voter ID,” Trump continued. “They try to shame everybody by calling them racist, or calling them something, anything they can think of, when you say you want voter ID. But voter ID is a very important thing.”
This is a conspiracy theory which is conveniently constructed to absolve the GOP and Trump of all blame for their losses while at the same time vilifying Democrats as cheaters and liars who have no legitimate issue when they complain about oppressive voter ID and suppression laws.
It’s a perfect delusion, like the time travel paradox/delusion from the original Terminator. Being a paranoid delusional conspiracy theorist means that anyone who tries to tell you the truth is all part of the conspiracy and the delusion.
Doctor Silberman: This is great stuff. I could make a career out of this guy. You see how clever this part is, how it doesn’t require a shred of proof? Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this is brilliant.
Reese absolutely believes he’s right about this fantastical story (because he is), but Trump supporters see the rest of us like we’re Dr. Silberman: we’re the deluded ones, because we just. don’t. get. it. They truly think Trump is a hero who has saved the nation from the evil Muslim lover Barack Hussein Obama. Sometimes they are, like Trump, just trolling liberals, and sometimes they’re not. It’s all become a game to them and they are endlessly amused by it. Sometimes they say things which are suggestively racist just so when people shout racism at them, they can counter-claim “race card” just to have another grievance to complain about. Clearly, to them, the rest of us are blinded by the globalist mainstream (Jew and Soros-controlled) media. As far as they’re concerned, the real truth can only be found on Infowars, or Breitbart, or the Daily Caller—outlets that aren’t afraid to defy the leftist political correctness that stifles people “telling it like really is.”
These are the kinds of delusions that Trump thrives on, from birtherism, to his idea that our NATO partner nations are somehow “ripping us off,” to phantom voters with their Kroger ID cards, to the Scaravan invasion that requires we take 15,000 troops away from their families on Thanksgiving in order to “protect” our borders. These are the same delusions that his followers feed on, and he knows that.
It’s all about what’s convenient for their own point of view. Otherwise, they would have to admit that their outrage over the alleged bias that was shown by former FBI Agent Peter Strzok was really conjured. They don’t care if new Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker have bias, as long as it’s a bias that they agree with. Their position doesn’t have to make sense, as long as it’s convenient and as long as it feeds their grievance.
As Amanda Marcotte has argued at Salon, the Trump supporter is now completely out of reach of reason or logic. So how do we even talk to them?
Watching smart people fruitlessly insist on arguing evidence and facts with conservatives who clearly have no respect for either got under my skin. I took to Twitter to point out that no one actually believes Acosta did something wrong, but that many Trump-supporting conservatives are simply faking that belief in order to troll the left and distract the media. I wrote a whole book, "Troll Nation," about the way that "triggering the libs" has become the single most important goal of the modern American right. And how better to do this than to pretend to believe something obviously false, and then laugh at liberals as they drive themselves nuts desperately trying to get conservatives to see reason?
These tweets went viral, which I suppose shows that many on the left have finally decided that it's time to accept that your average conservative fancies himself to be Hannibal Lecter masterfully trolling Clarice Starling. (Buy my book!) In truth, it doesn't actually require much in the way of grace or wits to gaslight liberals. All it requires is a shameless willingness to say obviously false things, and then watch your opponents -- still romantically attached to the idea of reasoned debate -- grow increasingly desperate in insisting that objective reality should inform one's opinions.
The simple answer to that is that we don’t. We don’t really have to. Just like you can’t force an addict to quit a habit he still enjoys and doesn’t see a problem with, you can’t make a Trumpster quit their drug of choice. They are addicted to bullshit. They have to come to that realization entirely on their own, just like David Weissman, a self-described former Trump troll, recently did.
“I used to be a Trump supporter, even a Trump troll,” Queens, NY resident David Weissman wrote in The Forward. “But in the past several months, my eyes have been opened to the true nature of President Trump’s base — and of President Trump himself.”
Weissman said he’s had to learn “to decipher the news” for himself — and in doing so, discovered that “you shouldn’t take a pundit at their word.”
At a certain point, the former Trump troll said he “started to ask myself why there were so many more experts cited in most traditional media outlets than ever appeared on Fox News or in other smaller conservative outlets.”
Conservative news outlets, Weissman noted, often demonize “liberal values” — but he realized reality is different than those portrayals.
“I have also learned that a lot of liberal values do match Jewish values, which surprised me. I have also learned that the majority of liberal Democrats fight racism and sexism and fight for basic human rights without an agenda,” he wrote in a community post on the Jewish magazine’s website, “regardless of what conservative outlets say.”
Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and Special Counsel Robert Mueller
were all working together and planning mass arrests of everyone from Hillary Clinton to liberal financier George Soros to members of Congress, for their role in a massive, world-spanning criminal child sex ring enterprise that has included every former U.S. president — and that people should prepare martial law and orchestrated mass riots to protect those marked for arrest. Q’s believers have
claimed that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is a CIA plant, that former Democratic staffer Seth Rich was assassinated by MS-13 on the orders of party leadership, and that Republicans intentionally lost the special election for Jeff Sessions’ Senate seat in Alabama to build evidence of voter fraud. At its height, QAnon broke into popular culture, with disgraced TV star Roseanne Barr
promoting it on Twitter.
But now, the ongoing failure of Q’s predictions to come true has started to fragment the community, and two major events in particular smashed the credibility of the movement for many believers.
The first event was the result of the midterm elections, where Democrats decisively won control of the House. Q had previously assured supporters that, contrary to the polls, there was a “red wave” coming:
The second event was Trump’s decision to fire Sessions, who in the QAnon narrative Trump was only pretending to hate, and was the mastermind behind all of the impending mass arrests that were supposed to be right around the corner. This was a particular blow, as many supporters were already trying to rationalize losing the House with the fact that, any minute now, Trump was going to declassify huge swathes of intelligence that would result in House Democrats going to jail and a series of special elections that would give it back to Republicans:
The end result, according to conspiracy theory debunker Mike Rothschild, is that tons of QAnon believers now realize they have been grifted, while the rest, who have been gathered on the social network Voat after the community was banned from Reddit in September, are at each others’ throats and frantically spinning ever crazier ideas to explain away why nothing Q has said has come true.
So that didn’t work out as planned.
Two weeks ago before the midterms I wrote an open letter to fair-minded Republican voters. At the time I questioned whether there really were any such people, and wondered if the entire effort was a waste of time. In the wake of the midterms, it seems perhaps the letter wasn’t really needed because just about all of the “fair-minded” people who used to be in the GOP, or those capable of it like Mr. Weismann, may have essentially left it to escape the baying rabble that Trump attracts. They didn’t need me to explain what’s wrong with Trump and his agenda: they already know.
Just as former South Carolina governor and now former House Rep. Mark Sanford has said: the party is being held hostage by Trump.
“As Republicans, we’ve drifted from our roots. The party, in fact, has a remarkable legacy on conservation and the environment — and this race suggests we should recommit ourselves to it,” he wrote.
He explained, “One of the underpinnings of the Republican Party has long been financial responsibility, but here, again, the party has drifted. The president has done very little to trim the size of the federal government or entitlement spending, even as he asks for more money for corn farmers hit by his tariffs.”
“The Republican Party that so many of us care deeply about continues to be held hostage these days, and what I saw last week in a district I grew up in and know well is that there is a half-life to insults, bullying and an embrace of a post-truth world,” he said.
And he’s pretty much laid out the case that the GOP needs to change, or else it just might not survive as a viable party in the future.
“This is a temporary blip on a radar screen,” he said.
“Is it?” asked a skeptical CNN host John Berman.
“I hope so,” Sanford said. “If not, we’re in real trouble. The roots of the Republican Party run much deeper. A lot of people work for years, generations even, in the traditional components of conservatism. I’m simply saying we have to go back to our roots going forward — if not, we are going to find ourselves in something of a no man’s land in political ground and in policy ground.”
It is a good question: What will be left in the vacuum of a hollowed-out GOP once Trump takes his final fall? What will rise to fill the void?
We’ve also had Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband George loudly criticizing Trump, and now even forming a splinter group inside the Federalist Society called Checks and Balances. They may agree with some of his policy decisions, but they stand firmly against his attacks on the media and the rule of law.
“We believe in the rule of law, the power of truth, the independence of the criminal justice system, the imperative of individual rights and the necessity of civil discourse,” the group said in a statement. “We believe these principles apply regardless of the party or persons in power.”
“There’s a perception out there that conservative lawyers have essentially sold their souls for judges and regulatory reform,” Mr. Conway said. “We just want to be a voice speaking out, and to encourage others to speak out.”
Although Conway is not in office and has little actual power, Sanford is leaving Congress—just like Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake and Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, all outspoken Trump critics. The reality shown in the midterms may just be the fever dream needed to break the rabid Trump support at the heart of the GOP.
Fear of Trump’s cult has been what had turned former #NeverTrumpers like Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham into his total lapdogs. Fear of being primaried by someone further on the right has caused them to completely pretzel themselves into backing the Trump play on everything, no matter how disgusting or despicable. For example, there was that time when Lindsey Graham said that there would be “hell to pay” if Trump fired Jeff Sessions in order to stop the Mueller probe. Well, now that that just happened, what does he say? Not much.
Back in July 2017, Graham said there would be “holy hell to pay” if Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions to quash the Robert Mueller probe and warned it would be “the beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency.”
On Thursday night, Fox News asked Graham about his old comments, making him visibly uncomfortable.
“When was that?” Graham said. “What year?”
“July of 2017,” said anchor Martha MacCallum.
“Hehehehehehehehe,” Graham said. “So… Hehe. Yeah… So, what I’ve been saying for months is that every president deserves an Attorney General they have confidence in, and they can work with.”
Like so many other Republicans still in power from Paul Ryan (for now) to Mitch McConnell, Graham deeply fears Trump’s raging base and will happily prostrate himself to seem more Trumpy than even Trump.
Still, over the last couple years we’ve had more than just Conway and Sanford move away from Trump. There’s been Bill Kristol from the Weekly Standard; Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post; conservative luminary Max Boot; former Bush ethics czar Richard Painter; former McCain advisors Steve Schmidt and Nicole Wallace; and former RNC chair Michael Steele, all of whom have basically left the Republican party in the dust, mostly because of Trump. You can hardly find stronger or louder critics of Trump than Republicans such as Joe Scarborough, Ana Navarro, S.E. Cupp, and Rick Wilson.
Especially Rick Wilson.
“They read tweets like today—which I’m sure sounded better in the original German- and they’re not taking it as some sort of joking Trumpism,” Wilson said. “They take it as marching orders. Maybe it’s only a tiny fraction, but it only takes a tiny fraction to march into a synagogue and kill 11 people.” He also blamed last week’s rash of mail bomb attacks targeting Democrats on the president.
Scarborough asked Wilson how the president and his party could harbor such a deep sense of victimhood despite controlling every branch of government. Wilson responded with a torrent of invective about the president’s authoritarian tendencies.
“The guy is a quivering blob of man baby of goo. He’s just a child,” Wilson said, adding that Trump feeds his base’s “sense of alienation”.
“They love being reminded that certain people can read and they don’t read so good,” he said, referring to Trump as a social media arsonist. “And they love that sense of somebody who’s going to be their champion and stoke their anger and tell them all their resentments are justified.”
There are a growing number of ex-Republicans, ex-conservatives, ex-QAnoners, and ex-Trump supporters. More and more of them are becoming independents who are opening their eyes and their ears to all voices and wider viewpoints than simply those repeatedly slammed down their throat by Fox News and the fever swamps of Reddit and Gab.
Some of those people actually voted for Democrats during the midterms. Those people are currently driving Trump literally up the wall in a way the liberals never could and never will. They truly scare him because they prove he’s losing control of parts of his base.
We need to welcome those people back into the rational world of reason. The children are our future, so treat them well. And as that happens, albeit slowly, we are likely to continue our gains from 2018 into 2020 and beyond, which is the upside.
On the other side, those who support Trump for economic reasons, or trade reasons, or national security reasons will increasingly fall away and shrink the central pool of remaining Republicans until only those who either support or are willing to continue to ignore his increasingly erratic behavior, his racist dog-whistle/bull horns, and his growing authoritarianism and neo-fascism are left.
Eventually those will be his only supporters: the truly deplorable. And they’re going to be apoplectic as he (and they) continue to lose influence and power. They’re likely to lash out with more vicious rhetoric and then with fists, probably bullets, and eventually bombs—again.
But we know what they are now, and we know more and more exactly who they are. We’ll be ready, because we have to be. By that time Trump will have finally accomplished his greatest achievement, which is reuniting the vast majority of Americans in one singular goal: opposing him and his alt-racist thuggery and crackpot neo-fascism.
And it couldn’t have happened without Trump’s own shining, shambolic example of what America should never become.
