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Wow. Trump Derangement Syndrome has killed Tenacious D. On stage in Australia yesterday, when asked to make a birthday wish, Kyle said "Don't miss trump next time."
Today, Jack Black cancelled their tour and appears to have killed the band.
I've found the reactions of intense disappointment that Trump wasn't murdered to be really disappointing but unsurprising. My parents (who I was with when it happened and I broke the news to them) immediately expressed disappointment that he was still alive. Watching people post these sentiments publicly online as if they are completely unaware that advocating for the assassination of your political opponents is really bad and completely unacceptable has left me amazed. How can people not realize that it's a bridge too far? They're literally saying that to preserve democracy, they need to assassinate the leading candidate, a level of cognitive dissonance beyond anything I've seen.
That said, I also find the current cancelations hilarious. The very people who are calling Trump "literally hitler" are now pearl clutching that it's not okay to try kill Hitler. The catastrophizing wasn't acceptable before either - maybe this snapped people out of their delusions?
I was surprised by my own reaction, too. I was a lot happier that he survived, and a lot more impressed with his immediate response than I expected to be. Trump grew in my esteem a lot.
In a way I think Gass’s response is somewhat rational. If you truly believe that Trump is a unique threat to our political system, why wouldn’t you want him assassinated?
I think there is also some meat here in that if Trump had been assassinated, most of the rest of the GOP would just have adopted his policy positions but dispensed with the insane hysteria and backlash Trump the Character generates. You don’t have to be Trump to win this election and maybe even the next election when the democrats are this incompetent. Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.
Hot take but it might have been better for people who believe in his platform for him to have actually been assassinated. Not only would it give the platform a sympathetic halo but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics. His job is done, he’s stamped the GOP in his image and realigned them, but I think his personality is holding them back at this point.
This is preposterous. The GOP never gave up trying to stick the knife in Trump's back, along with his policies. They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms, and hung that failure around Trump's neck. During his administration his own Republican appointees passive aggressively hamstrung much of his MAGA agenda, often to the jeers of the liberal media who greatly enjoyed writing headlines like "Even the Republican appointed judge/bureaucrat/cabinet member agrees that Trump shouldn't secure the border/pull out of Afghanistan/etc". And even up to this convention, major Republican donors and top party members were hoping to hang some albatross like Nikki Halley around his neck as VP.
The GOP is treating MAGA like an insurgency they must defeat just the same as they treated the Tea Party during the Bush and Obama years. If Trump were killed they'd make public mouth sounds about how terrible it is, and they will embrace Trump's winning agenda moving forward, and then they will quietly return to losing on every major issues their base cares about like it was 1996 again.
One of the big reasons Vance won his Senate seat at all was because McConnell drowned Ohio in NRSC money.
You're stuck in the same oppressor-oppressed mental dynamic the Left has. Trump is the GOP right now. All of the party establishment positions are filled with his people. Pretty much everyone who ever opposed him speaks glowingly of him at the Convention (or they've left the party).
Stop playing the victim.
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