MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It's an honor to be a recognized name enough to make this list. I don't comment that often but I like to think that I have a pretty good AAQC-to-comment-ratio to compensate. Actually AAQC as shorthand should probably also make the list.
This. AAQC nominations are an important part of the culture of this forum, something that noobs won't necessarily be aware of, and involve a non-obvious process to nominate. Should definitely be in the glossary.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Just because you’ve been psyopped into believing it, doesn’t mean it’s “true”.
The problem with the view that ethno-nationalism is "truer" than civic nationalism is that French ethnogenesis is something that actually happened. The France of Louis XIV was a dynastic-religious state where elites had to speak French in order to communicate with the Court, but Louis didn't care what his Breton, Norman, Gascon etc. subjects spoke or identified as as long as they paid their taxes and were good Catholics. The France of Emmanuel Macron is a nation-state where everyone (except unassimilated immigrants) speaks French and identifies as French. This change happened because someone (mostly Napoleon) made it happen.
And the way it was done was the way IGI-111 says it was done, which is why IGI-111 thinks about his Frenchness in the way he does.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.
GHW Bush was Blue Tribe and everyone knew it - in 1988 that was perfectly compatible with being a conservative (to the extent that he was) and a Republican because the party system had not fully aligned with the culture war, but the Red Tribe ultimately rejected him - the 1992 presidential election was the last time a Republican underperformed in the South.
GW Bush became Red Tribe by religious conversion - he left the (predominantly Blue Tribe) Episcopal Church and joined the (mixed-tribe, but he was in an evangelical-aligned congregation) United Methodist Church, announced that he had been through a born-again conversion experience, and generally said and did the things that Red Tribe Christianity requires of its adherents with visible sincerity. (He also bought and lived on a dude ranch, but that wasn't decisive.) Jeb Bush didn't, so the Red Tribe treated him as outgroup and decisively rejected him in the 2016 primary.
Mormons are neither Red nor Blue Tribe - they are their own tribe. They are political allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it (just as African-Americans are not part of the Blue Tribe). Romney was only able to win the 2012 primary because Gingrich and Santorum split the tribal Red vote, allowing him to pick up a lot of delegates with narrow pluralities in winner-takes-almost-all states.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
22d ago
Russia waited until after the pandemic, then waited a bit longer because the Chinese wouldn't support an invasion that could disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics. I don't think we can draw any conclusions about their preferred timing via-a-viz US domestic politics. Pre-pandemic conventional wisdom among the "Trump will let the Ruzzians invade NATO because Putin owns him" crowd was that the best time for Putin to start shit was after the 2020 election.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Banging on a door for the purpose of threatening the occupant is absolutely a crime in most jurisdictions. (In England and Wales, it is legally an assault).
But even that isn't necessary. The point of banging on the door is to claim escalation dominance by sending a credible signal that if she escalates to calling for a tow he can counter-escalate to a beatdown. The appropriate response by the authorities is to send a cop to the guy's house to politely inform illegal parking guy that actually the Westphalian State has escalation dominance round here and that if he escalates to a beatdown the cops will counter-escalate to a jail term, felony record etc. If that threat is credible, then it doesn't need to be followed up. And if the cops tell the unfortunate lady what they have done, then she now has escalation dominance in the original dispute. This is easy police work that a rookie cop could handle.
In a place with minimally effective policing (which, for example, included 95% of the UK in the nineties and 99% of the UK in the noughties, and in the present non-ghetto neighbourhoods of most Continental European or Australian cities, and all of 1st-world Asia) a threat of a beatdown by one adult neighbour against another is empty. I haven't seen the Reddit post that the OP is referring to, so it isn't clear to me if this was a case of a place where there is no effective policing (far too much of the US because the US is, for reasons that are not clear to me as a Brit, shockingly bad at basic police work) or whether this was a case of a woman scared into submission by an empty threat (in which case someone who knew the local situation should have told her to call the cops).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
crushing anti-development rules on the North
This is incorrect. Both conventional wisdom and the linked article say that the government imposed crushing anti-development restrictions on greater Birmingham (which is in the Midlands, not the North) in the false belief that this would benefit the North. These policies worked, in that Birmingham's economy was levelled down to the point where you can now lump the Midlands in with the North and not look like an obvious idiot. The 1950's governments also tried to level down London in the same way (again - click the link), but it only partially succeeded (they did ensure that the population of Greater London fell by 1.5 million between the 1951 census and the 1988 nadir) because office-based knowledge economies can work around building restrictions by repurposing existing space, whereas building-based economies can't. But the success story that is modern London doesn't kick off until Thatcher repeals these kinds of policies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Joe Biden was VP to a politician who emerged from the universe of big-city political machines run out of Black churches, and won the Democratic primary against several progressive candidates who were both more charismatic than him, largely based on the support of those same machines. Black Christians worship on Easter Day in the same ways as white ones, except given the increase in evangelical self-ID among white Republicans who wouldn't darken a church door, they are probably more likely to show up.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
It is worth noting that the liberal elite/centre-left establishment/Deep State/Blob do not have the same kind of hate-on for Reagan that they do for Bush Jr and Trump (and, as far as I am aware, never did - although I was too young to be following US politics when Reagan was in office.) For example, Reagan usually comes slightly above average in historical rankings of Presidents by academics.
The anti-establishment left hate Reagan because he successfully claimed the moral high ground for the US at a time when the anti-establishment left had been rooting for the Soviet Union with varying degrees of plausible deniability for decades. The pro-establishment left are broadly pro-Reagan because he gets the credit for achieving two long-term uniparty goals - winning the Cold War and working with Volcker and the congressional Dems to clean up the Nixon/Carter economy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
25d ago
I don't know why Russia attacked a nuclear-armed NATO member with WMD, twice, but they did.
You go to war with the enemies you have, not the enemies you would like to have. In particular, we are facing an enemy whose tactics include psyops with the basic theme of "I have escalation dominance because I am a nuclear madman and you are not." Compared to the considered effort that the US and Soviet Union put into not doing that during the OG Cold War post-Cuban Missile Crisis, or the US and China put into not doing that now, I don't trust Putin to make risk-reward calculations about nuclear escalation that I would consider rational.
If Putin really is a nuclear madman and his enemies are not, then French and British nukes don't deter a Russian invasion of Poland, and probably don't deter a Russian invasion of Germany. Unless Russian policy changes, NATO has the choice of nuclear brinkmanship or massive nuclear proliferation. (Polish nukes probably deter a Russian invasion of Poland under any reasonable assumptions). The Russians have involved us in a game of high-stakes iterated chicken whether we like it or not, and iterated chicken 101 is that you should defend Schelling points like, well, a nuclear madman.
From a realist perspective the interesting question is which Schelling point do you defend, and how. The two big options are "Rules-based International Order" - i.e. you defend Ukraine once it becomes clear that Russia is waging an aggressive war of conquest (which it was by 2022, if not earlier), and "Article 5" - i.e. you defend NATO countries only. The "lesson of Munich" is that the stronger but less crazy side should defend the first Schelling point, not the most defensible one, because every Schelling point you fail to defend makes a promise to defend the later ones less credible. We can have an argument about whether the lesson of Munich applies to this conflict - it might even be productive in a way which arguments about who started it are not.
Ackman is still a nominal Democrat (he is backing Dean Philips in the primary) and Jamie Dimon is not Jewish.
If education-based polarisation is the driving force behind the Trump-era party divide, then the fundamentals are going to push Jews (as the most educated and formal-education-valuing demographic) further into the Dem camp. For example, looking at the names in Hanania's Tech Right, the Silicon Valley elites moving right look less Jewish than the Silicon Valley elites staying on the left. Hanania wants a big Jewish move to the right over Israel because the existence of a smart right gives him a chance at influence. But the reason why it won't happen is that the MAGA right has adopted (what Hanania and most Jewish elites, for the same reason, would consider) stupid as a tribal value.
It wouldn’t shock me if in a generation Jews and southern redneck culture begins sharing memes.
The defining feature of non-Hasidic Jewish culture is the embrace of book learning taken to a sometimes-ridiculous extreme. One of the main defining feature of southern redneck culture is suspicion of book learning. This is a big gap to bridge.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
I remember the Nyberg story at the time, and a large part of the pushback was that some of the evidence proving that Nyberg was a paedophile was posts it had made under its previous male identity, which made it easy to shout about gamergaters "outing trans people".
Something similar happened with Aimee Challenor, except on a grander scale.
The serious point here is that "trans people deserve to have their pre-transition identities memory-holed under penalty of strong anti-discrimination laws and norms" and "people can self-identify as trans" implies that anyone can memory-hole their past. And this is particularly attractive to paedophiles and other scum.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Upvoted for capital-T Truth.
We can argue about the allegorical meaning of Genesis 2 and how it relates to human sexuality until we are blue in the face, but you should always start with the literal meaning.
The literal meaning of Genesis 2, if you give it its usual context in the Christian story (as, for example, represented by its use as the first lesson in a standard Christmas carol service), is that the original sin was independent moral discernment. Satan's promise is not money, or sex, or power - it is to possess the moral wisdom of God. There are plenty of other scriptural passages reinforcing this. And certainly when I was taught Christian morality, both as child in nominally-Christian schools in the UK and as a potential convert in university, the key message was that the only real sin is rebellion against divine authority, and the drinking and sabbath-breaking flows from that.
All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally about total submission of human will to God's. Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism all have a tradition of religious scholarship where all moral wisdom that humanity will ever have is already written down in a closed canon of fundamental works (either directly from divinely-inspired authors, or preserved commentary based on lost divinely-inspired sources) and the work of religious scholars is just to interpret it. Catholicism and Orthodoxy both claim that there is a still-living tradition capable of generating new moral wisdom, but that there is no access to God outside it.
This is why "Abrahamic religion bad" comes so easily to non-religious Americans - the great American social experiment is fundamentally about allowing independent moral judgement at the lowest possible level.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
So this is a SPAC deal. SPACs are an alternative way of taking companies public (i.e. turning a company owned by a small group of shareholders who all know each other into a company owned by stockmarket investors) which became popular during the pandemic for reasons which are not clear to me, but may be something to do with COVID and associated government policy making a conventional IPO harder. The basic idea is:
- A financial sponsor (the bank, hedge fund, or private equity shop organising the SPAC) launches a company whose only asset is the cash the investors put into it. Typically the sponsor gets 20% of the equity in the SPACco but only puts in a small amount of money to cover operating expenses (this acts as a fee for the sponsor). The outside investors put in the money to fund the acquisition (usually hundreds of millions, sometimes low billions) and get 80% of the equity. The SPACco is a public company and may be listed on a stock exchange (DWAC was on Nasdaq). At this point investors are investing based on their confidence in the sponsor's ability to do a good deal.
- The sponsor has two years to find a company to buy. (If they don't, the investors are reimbursed with interest and the sponsor is out of pocket for operating expenses and any legal/banking fees associated with failed deals). The shareholders in SPACco must approve the deal, and there is usually a provision for dissenting investors to pull their money out.
- There are various ways of structuring the deal, but the usual end state is that the merged company ends up with the assets of the business being taken public and most of the SPACco cash (companies going public are almost always seeking to raise money to fund further expansion) and owned by a combination of the SPAC investors, the sponsor, and the former private shareholders in the target company.
- The merged company either takes over SPACco's existing stock market listing, or seeks a direct listing if SPACco didn't have one. In either case the share ownership is sufficiently dispersed (among the SPAC investors) that there is no need for an IPO to create a liquid market.
- Usually, the sponsor and target shareholders are subject to a 6-month lockup, but the SPAC investors can sell immediately.
Looking at EDGAR filings, DWAC was incorporated in May 2021, listed on NASDAQ in September 2021, and first agreed in principle to buy Truth Social in October 2021 (before Truth Social launched). So since then, DWAC shareholders knew that they were likely to end up owning Truth Social, and the shares traded on that basis. In other words, the original DWAC investors have had the chance to sell at a profit to people who actually wanted to own Truth Social for several years now. It isn't clear how many of the new DWAC investors were people who wanted to give money to Donald Trump for nefarious reasons (the largest single shareholder in DWAC apart from the sponsor was TikTok investor Jeff Yass who invested around the time Trump flip-flopped to oppose requiring ByteDance to divest the US business of TikTok). and how many were hoping to make money flipping a Trump-themed meme stock. (I find it unlikely that anyone involved actually values Truth Social this highly as an ordinary business).
When the merger finally closes after two and a half years of malarkey, we expected to see a small bump in the stock (because of reduced uncertainty), but we have seen a much larger bump (>50%). This is pure meme demand - anyone who know what they were doing could have bought DWAC stock at much lower price than they are now paying for DJT stock. The $3 billion (now $5 billion) is the value of Trump's 58% stake in the merged company (which owns Truth Social plus about $300 million of DWAC's cash), based on the price at which DWAC investors are selling small numbers of shares to meme-stock buyers in the public markets. The other 42% is owned by DWAC shareholders - roughly speaking 8% by the sponsor and 34% by the outside investors.
How can Trump get this money out? For the duration of the 6-month lockup, he can't. (He can't even pledge the shares to secure a loan). After that, he can sell shares in the market, but if he sells more shares than the demand from meme-stock buyers the price will collapse. The cash would come from meme-stock buyers. He also has the option of selling a large block of shares to someone who is willing to overpay as a way of bribing him. There is no way he can get billions in cash out of DJT honestly (unless the underlying business of Truth Social takes off in a way which would justify the valuation). Any cash he does get out will come from investors who were happy to lose money, either because they wanted to give money to Trump or for the lulz.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
“God created men, Richard Stallman made them equal” —new motto of the Free Software Foundation, probably
And Eric Raymond merges the Coltian and Stallmanian concepts of equality. Which is more dangerous to the irresponsible user is left as an exercise to the reader.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
is it the rule that's bad?
Given that the rules Sabatini violated include not only the Whitehead Consensual Sexual and Romantic Relationships Policy but also Exodus 20:14, and "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned" and "Don't shit where you eat" form part of the Copybook Headings of Gnon, I don't think "Sabatini did nothing wrong" is a defensible position. You can defend "Geniuses should not be held to the same rules as plebs", but that fell out of fashion for good reasons after it became clear how much damage sociopathic elites could do by abusing it.
What was the point of all this sexual liberation/free love if it's only for anonymous strangers to have casual sex?
There wasn't any. Free love isn't. The only dispute is about whether Blue Tribers should doublethink this in order to avoid giving aid and comfort to the hated Red Tribe by straight up admitting it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Recursive link-following from the above Forbes post says that the 210 trillion is an estimate by a cabal of right-wing economists of the NPV of future federal deficits out to an infinite horizon (as of 2015). In other words, it is a voodoo number - it is sensitively dependent on assumptions made about demographic and technological change in the 22nd century.
The up-to-date equivalent number out to the 75-year horizon used in the official Financial Report of the United States Government (see Cato commentary) is $80 trillion
The 213 trillion on the Debt Clock is given by debt ($34 trillion) + unfunded Social Security benefits ($27 trillion) + unfunded Medicare benefits ($41 trillion) + unfunded federal employee pensions (including veterans' benefits). The debt clock doesn't give a number for the employee benefits, but the official number is about $13 trillion. It looks like the reason why the numbers don't add up is that the debt clock people are using the 75-year horizon for the SS and Medicare numbers given in isolation, but the infinite horizon numbers (which, for those two programmes only, are official US Treasury numbers) as part of the grand total.
Those big scary SS/Medicare numbers are not "liabilities" in an accounting sense - the debt clock misleadingly describe them as GAAP numbers, but a private-sector organisation with underfunded pension liabilities would account for them very differently under GAAP. They are just NPVs of future cashflows - in the case of Medicare parts B and D which are funded on a PAYG basis, the "unfunded liability" is just a projected NPV of gross spending. A private sector GAAP analysis would only count a liability for accrued benefits - i.e. benefits that were "earned" through taxes paid in the past that will be paid in the future. An NPV analysis includes pensions that will be paid to people who haven't started working yet. In particular, the SS projections assume that people who are now under 15 or not yet born will get more out of SS than they pay in to the tune of $17 trillion, and include that as a "liability".
If I am correct about the debt clock methodology, the two numbers are similar because the largest component of both is infinite-horizon projections of SS and Medicare spending, where they both use the same official Treasury estimates.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Tolkien's presentation of Minas Tirith is similarly idealised, but nobody writes about Tolkien as a promoter of classical (or any other) principles of urban planning. Tolkien clearly did have an idealised view of a traditional English rural life which was being rendered obsolete by industrialisation, but when he tries to put it on the page he falls into the classical historical-nostalgist trap of writing out the reality of peasant life. The only working-class hobbits we see are the two Gamgees (and we don't see much of the old Gaffer), who enjoyed the favour of their aristocratic patron. If I use race as a metaphor to explain the English class system to Americans*, this is like writing the Antebellum South from the perspective of three planters and a house slave, which is what Gone With the Wind does, and is widely panned for in the current year.
In the world we live in, the dominant demographic trend of the last 250 years (in England - it is more recent in other places) is people voluntarily and knowingly moving from the Shire to Minas Tirith for a better life.
In so far as the Shire is paradise, it is because it (for reasons not explained) remains rightly-governed and unaffected by the rising Dark despite Arnor falling around it. (Rivendell and Lorien are similar, although the reasons that they are unaffected are more obvious) The implication of the appendices is that once Aragorn (and his heir Eldarion) consolidated the Reunited Kingdom, the whole Kingdom enjoyed this level of peace and prosperity.
* Something I feel entirely justified in doing given that the traditional English class system is fundamentally about oppression of the indigenous population by Norman settler-colonialists.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Among upper class people (including the nouveau-riche with a bare minimum of socialisation to upper class norms), anything that can be bought in a store is not an effective conversation starter. Admittedly Dubai is a magnet for rich people with no pretensions to class.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics. The 9-11 recruitment cohort is dead, dead, dead. If you look at age averages, the vast majority of US service members were born after 9-11. If you joined just after 9-11, you are that tiny minority of people who serve a full 20 (for a pension) or go beyond. That means people who joined during the Bush years, have gradually and progressively lost during the Obama years / saw the Trump years / are back in the Obama 2.0/Biden years. There's any number of things that could justify a feeling of disenchantment, from perceptions of futility of the wars, to the progression culture war aspects into military culture/life, and so on.
AARGH. I have lived longer since 9/11 than I had lived before 9/11. I am OLD. I will DIE. NOOOOOO. Why did you have to point this out?
Seriously, middle-aged people underestimate how long ago the worldview-forming events of their youth are. The Boomers used to be the main culprits - Vietnam is about equidistant between WW1 and the present, let alone WW2 - but it is starting to hit Xers and Millenials like me. I work as a risk manager, and my number 1 piece of advice to noobs is "The next Great Crash will happen when the people who remember 2008 look like old fogies. And I am part of the youngest cohort who remember 2008, so be very careful if you think I am an old fogie."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
If you are cis-gendered male, I'm curious if you feel that you had any good male progressive role models growing up. Even non-famous ones like a teacher or family friend.
There is no shortage of men with progressive political views who possess the classical masculine virtues, and are therefore appropriate role models for young men. As an existence proof, we can look at male leaders in progressive politics. If you look at Barack Obama's engagement with his faith, family, community and career, it is obvious that he is good at being a man. Unless you think progressive politics is per se wicked, he also appears to be a good man. The same is broadly true of Joe Biden (he may be old, but he isn't effeminate), Justin Trudeau, Keir Starmer etc. Pajamaboy didn't become a meme because all left-wing "men" are like that - he became a meme because Team Obama chose to make Pajamaboy the public face of a campaign. If they had shown Obama (or most of his male cabinet members) lounging on a couch in pajamas, he would have looked louche rather than soyjack.
Given the political demographics of the community I grew up in, I can assume that almost all the older boys and young men I looked up to as a teenager were either Lib Dems or centrist Tories who would go on to back Remain. There were the usual number of men who met the requirements of a good role model.
So why do we say there are no good male progressive role models? There are multiple reasons, but in my view the most important is that the status-conferring institutions that boys and young men use to determine who is good at being a man are not working in the way society wants them to. There are environments (particularly if you are a black American teenage boy) where there are no available role models who are both good men and good at being men, but most of the young men who are looking up to Andrew Tate (or other bad men) have chosen him as a role model over good men because they think he is much, much better at being a man.
How did that happen? There are bottom-up and top-down factors. The main bottom-up ones are:
- Mass media now treats outlawry as high-status, not low-status. This was a left-wing thing for most of the back half of the 20th century, but is increasingly a right-wing thing too. In a sane world, getting arrested would have done a number on Andrew Tate's social status and his continuing male fan-base would be the butt of jokes about their idol being some gypsy's prison bitch - even among Red Tribers. In the world we live in, he is seen as a brave rebel Fighting the Power.
- The life script among Blue Tribe members and PMC Red Tribe members is that you shouldn't be on the relationship escalator until you have completed your education. This changes the way girls function as a status signal. Back in the day, having an 8 from a good family making puppy-dog eyes at you and telling her girlfriends she wanted your ring was higher status than banging half a dozen slutty 6 goth-girls in the back of a beaten-up Ford Focus. In a time when getting engaged as an undergraduate is slightly weird and creepy, the opposite is true.
But the easiest thing to fix is the top-down issue. The top-down status-conferring mechanisms in progressive spaces are not conferring the status on good men which would make them good role models. And the reason for that is that it is that said institutions are using all their authority to praise women who display the classical masculine virtues for reasons which are good and sufficient if you are a feminist. When the physics textbooks portray Albert Einstein and Marie Curie as the two greatest physicists of the 20th century, they are stealing Richard Feynman's rightful status as number 2. The same thing happens on a smaller scale with girls in STEM, girls' sports, girl leaders etc.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
You have to feel for him, ever so slightly, in that he was elected on a peace platform of negotiating with Russia and the breakaway republics... and then was forced into the war by the Ukrainian ultranationalist in the Ukrainian perma-government who would have 100% assassinated him if he'd actually negotiated agreeable terms or peace the Russian tanks rolling across the border and the associated demands for concessions from NATO that Zelensky wasn't in a position to make.
FIFY
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Slightly more subtle than that. The meme driving this study is "the elites screwing you over are schoolteachers in Manhattan, not the multimillionaire CEO who times your toilet breaks." This is a meme that the GOPe uses to keep the mainstream right and the nationalist right in the same tent - Oliver Anthony and his supporters in the country are perfectly happy hating both sneering Manhattanites and arsehole bosses, so to get him to vote for the bosses' candidate requires advanced lying skills. (Getting Oliver Anthony to vote for the Manhattanites' candidate would also require advanced lying skills, which the Dem establishment don't have.)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3mo ago
I think if I was an opposing politician and had to pick some kind of insult for Trump it would just be calling him “fatty” or something. Just go ultra-low, “shut up fatty” in the debates tier. People might laugh, who knows? The second you go from “moron” to “orange moron” you become le epic cheeto cringe etc.
I would go for "Deadbeat Don". Four bankruptcies and all that. "Deadbeat Donnie" if I was taller than him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
It's more that the OG Bill of Rights was only enforceable against the Federal government, not the States.
It is more likely than not that the Reconstruction Congress intended the privileges and immunities clause of the 14th amendment to make the Bill of Rights enforceable against the States ("No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States") but the corrupt pro-South Supreme Court ruled otherwise in the Slaughterhouse Cases. Rather than doing the sensible thing and just overruling Slaughterhouse alongside Plessey as bad Jim Crow law, the Civil Rights era SCOTUS used substantive due process to enforce these rights - as late as 2010 SCOTUS rejected the argument that the 2nd amendment was directly enforceable against the states under the privileges and immunities clause. So there is a whole line of silly doctrine that takes the 14th seriously while claiming not to.
In my view, there is a good originalist argument against incorporating the 2nd amendment against the States. The corresponding argument against incorporating the Establishment clause of the 1st amendment has been endorsed by Clarence Thomas in some of his dissents and concurrences. Based on the text, the original purpose of the 2nd amendment was to protect the State militias against Federal interference. (This is perfectly compatible with the idea that the 2nd amendment created an individual right enforceable against the Federal government - State militias were not required to and often did not keep membership rolls at the time, so many militia members were "just private gun owners" on paper). Incorporating the amendment against the States takes away the States' right to regulate their own militias, so it changes the nature of the right protected, whereas incorporating a right like trial by jury only changes the scope of the remedy available. Similarly, the Establishment clause was intended to protect State-level established religions (like Massachusetts puritanism) from Federal interference, not ban them.
Obviously nobody is going to make that argument, because it gores both sides' oxen.
I don't think he even did that (at least not in the general - I think the case that he successfully executed a Sailer-like strategy in the primary is quite strong, but Steve Sailer presented the strategy as a way for Republicans to beat Democrats, not each other). Trump was the second least popular major-party Presidential candidate in my lifetime, and Hilary was the least popular. Even so, Trump only won because Hilary's e-mails turned up on her secretary's kiddie-fiddling husband's laptop shortly before polling day. It is reasonably clear from the opinion polling that either candidate could have walked the 2016 election by putting up an empty suit.
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