After nearly a decade of being forced to take Trump seriously, Democrats increasingly call BS on the whole charade
Sure, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy — a would-be dictator on day one who has called for terminating the U.S. Constitution so he can hold onto power even after losing a free and fair election. But while draped in the rhetoric of populism, Trump and his MAGA movement are not actually popular; the man himself has never won more votes than the person he ran against, a majority of Americans twice rejecting him and his off-putting cult of personality. That he was ever president is more or less because a few thousand swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania thought it would be fun.
President Joe Biden won in 2020 largely by promising to a return to normalcy and baseline competency. In 2024, Democrats are making a similar argument but more forcibly: They’re pointing, laughing and dismissing Trump and his circus as a total freak show to which we can’t return.
Maybe not overtly, but there are TONS of *wink wink, nudge nudge* rhetoric about the Aryan race, they just couch it in dog whistles and have for decades. Here’s the famous Atwater quote from 84 where he admits it:
I would agree that it’s a lot of nudge, nudge, wink, wink, underlying white supremacist ideology.
I don’t even think it’s a secret. They just refuse to say it overtly because of the social impact of it. A portion of people who voted, and will vote for Trump, might have a problem with them being very obviously racist/Nazis.
I don’t think that’s a majority, but those that now or less stay out of politics, and are just habitual Republican voters (maybe they’re subscribed to the party or something? A “card carrying Republican” type thing), would see the overt racist/Nazi themes and reconsider their position instead of blindly doing what they’ve always done.
Instead it’s about making things “great”, an overly broad and obtuse term to use as a focus of your political goals. With vague and ultimately meaningless talk about what that means, without any actual hard statements.
They’re avoiding any commitments to do a specific thing or achieve a specific goal, and it’s all a smokescreen. Anyone paying attention knows that you can’t have your cake and eat it too, which is essentially what they’ve promised at every turn. The horrible fuckery of the medicare system comes to mind. They were going to make it “great” and affordable… How? Nobody knows. They didn’t even know. What did they deliver? Not that. It’s not great. Affordable? That is debatable. It’s not just Medicare. It’s everything.
They only other time I’ve seen this phenomenon is at work. Sales people will sometimes promise clients that a product will do everything for them. Well beyond the abilities of that product. I’m not in sales. I’m a technical support/implementation person. I have to give the end user/client the bucket of cold water to say, no, it doesn’t do that, and it’s not able to do that. When I approach management about it, the response is inevitably “make it work”, aka, find a solution, and don’t bother me about it. I tend to quit jobs that put me in that kind of a position, so it’s rare that I end up in it.
What Trump, and a lot of what I’ve heard from his party lately, does is entirely the same. He’s acting like a shady sales person, telling you everything that he thinks that you want to hear, then foisting the task of actually accomplishing any of his wild statements onto implementation people who basically tell him that his promises and statements about what we can do, or will do, cannot be achieved. They’re told to “make it work” and they do their best, but it ends up making things fucking suck. I don’t blame anyone except the sales person telling me that they can do something that I later find out, cannot be done.
My main problem is that, this isn’t just his own business that’s going to suffer and fail as a result of his insane ramblings. We’re talking about the country of the United States of America which will suffer immense damage if he is allowed to continue this circus.
I don’t believe anything he says.
I generally don’t believe politicians. I also don’t believe most sales people. As for a politician with the approximate credibility (or lack thereof), of a sales person? You do the math.