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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.
The whole point of the Trump era is that literally no one else would touch those ideas, because the media meaning-making machine made them anametha. You could not be anti-illegal immigration or anti-NATO or whatever without inherently drawing earth-shattering criticism. This is why no one else tried it. You have to pass through the wall of overwhelming media coverage, hostile donors funding every manner of opposition, prosecution, lawfare, and pushback. Literally no one else would do this.
Exactly, expressing the idea that maybe unlimited immigration from absolutely anywhere, or unlimited free trade from absolutely anywhere are not unalloyed goods is, or was, outside the overton window regardless of who said it. Anyone who would express it would have gotten the same treatment. Trump noticed a majority of people still largely held that opinion even if they could not express it, saw an opportunity there, so he went and stood outside the window, drawing all the aggro to him. And since he's a legendary tank, to keep the MMORPG allegory going, he's somehow doing fine, and now the overton window is a bit wider than it was before. Outside of the specifics of his first and presumed second presidency, of whether he's too pro-Israel or too close to Russia, or of whether he's capable of wielding the executive bureaucracy effectively, at least his ability to take the slings and arrows is unmatched, and his forceful widening of the overton window was probably a necessary first step for any actual move to the right (or neutralisation of leftward drift).
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The GOP was ready to fold after 2012. It's unclear that anyone without the independent profile of Trump (and the catnip it represented for the mainstream media) would have gotten the same attention for swimming against the tide like that.
A less agreeable person, or someone more beholden to the donors and party might have ended up like Bernie or Cruz, even with the same policies.
That said, now that you have people like Tucker and Vivek and Vance maybe the movement no longer has need of Mohammed.
IMHO this is a crucial period for whether an America first ruling principle takes root, or it doesn't. Trump needs the mandate of heaven and four more years to cement his legacy. Otherwise, as amazing as Tucker, Vivek or Vance may be, they will be relegated to cult crank status like Ron and Rand Paul. Sure, a Freedom Causus exist, and even has some extremely marginal influence in outcomes on the fringe, but otherwise completely feckless no matter how obviously correct they are, or how much their fans really truly love them.
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