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I think that in reality if elected Trump would probably just spend all day tweeting and failing to implement his promises. However, to many Democrats it is almost as if Trump is a Lovecraftian god the mere mention of whom leads to insanity. Such Democrats view him as some sort of annihilating force the very presence of which in the universe warps and endangers the sane, wholesome building blocks of existence itself. Meanwhile I just see a fat old huckster sociopath who talks a lot of shit but is effectively restrained by checks and balances. Not a savory person, maybe even a rapist, pretty certainly a bad guy, but not some sort of fundamental essential threat to the entire being of American democracy or to sanity.
It is not that I do not believe in evil. But I do find it odd when liberals perceive demonic evil in Trump, yet make excuses for vicious violent criminals (at least, as a class if not always individually) who are enabled by Democrats' soft-on-crime policies.
Would Trump do many harmful things in office? I am sure. Harris would as well. Which one would do more, who knows? I do not see a clear-cut answer to that question. He certainly would be no angel, I am sure of that. But it also seems to me that often, vehement anti-Trump sentiment has little to do with a clear-eyed assessment of the possible harms that he would cause.
What explains the particular mind-shattering power that Trump somehow inflicts on so many of his political opponents? Interestingly, it largely do not seem to be his actual political counterparts among the Democrat elite who view him as an eldritch destroyer of worlds... the Democrat elite may hate him, may despise him, may say that he is a threat to democracy, but I don't think I can remember any time that any of them acted as if he was a threat to one's very psychological foundation. Maybe their power and their close understanding of American politics generally inoculates them against such a reaction.
Lest someone think that I come only to shit on the Democrats, unfortunately no. Would that I actually supported either of the two main parties... my political life would be easier. But the Republicans, too, deserve some questioning on this topic. Republicans' reaction to Bill and Hillary Clinton, at one point, was a sort of precursor to the mental shattering caused by the concept of Trump. Interestingly, despite often being accused of being racist, from what I recall Republicans did not actually react to Obama quite as hysterically as they reacted to the Clintons. Sure, there was a lot of vitriol against Obama, such as Birtherism, but it was probably half as vehement as what was thrown at the Clintons.
Yet even though Republicans were in many ways mind-melted by the Clintons, including to the point that Republican forums back in the day teemed with theories about the Clintons literally being a murderous and pedophilic crime family, I still do not think it quite matches up to the new standards of psychological devastation that Trump has wreaked. That might sound weird, given the murderous pedophile thing, but to me supporters of those theories generally just seem like they are stupid and prone to weird fantasies and LARPs but have always been that way, whereas people who are existentially shattered by Trump seem like they might have been different at one point, but then suddenly Trump appeared in the corner of their reality and traumatically inverted it into some new configuration of dimensions.
Why does Trump have this effect? Is it just that there is a large number of people in this country who fail to agree with me that Trump's chances of becoming a dictator are extremely small, that a man who has most key institutions against him, has the top military brass against him, and lives in a country where the military rank and file are probably not about to try to overthrow civilian authority, has very little chance of ending American democracy?
I am not sure. The idea of Trump being the curtain call on American democracy is certainly one of the main things behind his psychological impact on people, but I have seen plenty of people who seem existentially horrified by him for completely different reasons. Some people seem to be driven out of their wits' ends just by the very fact that Trump is crude and vulgar rather than sounding like an intellectual.
This epitomizes general differential expectations of conservatives and liberals. Conservatives are regarded (and to a shocking degree, regard themselves) as lacking in agency to the point of being almost animalistic. When a conservative raves about cities are shitholes full of degenerates and criminals, that's just how they are. FEMA death camps, Birtherism, Jewish Space Lasers, etc... They're dumb, they're ignorant, they can't help themselves and we shouldn't expect anything of them. We practically talk about Trump supporters in anthropological terms with all these fucking Ohio diner ethnographies. It's on the rest of us to manage them.
Liberals, though. They're supposed to be better, smarter, more accountable. Apparently. When they think a guy who says he wants to be a dictator wants to be a dictator, they're supposed to exercise some critical thinking and realize he's not serious, that's just him being bold and masculine. They're not supposed to say West Virginia's a shithole full of drug addicts even though it objectively is. They're supposed to be adults in the room.
I’ve always seen that as a perception of social class. The left sees itself as the upper class ruling elites and the conservatives are seen as lower class. They’re “the help” the kind of people who fix your toilet, or install your new energy efficient air conditioner, or the ones who cook in restaurants or make stuff in factories or raise your food. They’ve called it Flyover country for decades because they see it as the places where the losers live.
I think at least half of the conspiracy theories started as jokes. They know that their ruling class sees them as idiots, and they might well choose to have a bit of fun pretending to believe in weird stuff just to annoy their betters. Jewish Space Lasers is certainly a joke — I know of no one anywhere who believes that the Jews have space lasers.
The left sees itself as a mix of hard-working urban middle class + discriminated minorities, while they see conservatives as a bunch of bigoted country club members.
I know an unfortunate number of people who think Obama is a secret Muslim, that the government is trying put them into camps or controls the weather, that the 2020 election was stolen with millions of fake votes. Let me be blunt: both parties have more than their share of cranky stupid people, but the major difference is that the Dems have (correctly) corralled their idiots and generally have more of a problem with the galaxy-brained wing of the party. The GOP, meanwhile, has been taken over by the morons and wishes they had enough smart people to have a galaxy-brained wing. Saying it's just an act is cope.
You are correct about the GOP, but dead wrong about the Democrats. Sheila Jackson Lee, who was until her death this year a long-serving Democratic congresswoman and a member of several important committees, was shockingly stupid. She recently claimed that the moon is made mostly of gases. She asked, at a 1997 visit to the Mars Pathfinder operations center, whether the Pathfinder rover had taken a picture of the flag planted by Neil Armstrong. In 2010 she asserted that North Vietnam and South Vietnam are still separate countries.
Meanwhile, Brandon Johnson, a police abolitionist and black racial chauvinist, is the elected Democratic mayor of Chicago. Maxine Waters, an extremely politically powerful Democratic congresswoman, is a long-time associate of Louis Farrakhan. The Democratic party is full of dim-witted and politically radical black officials, and is powerless to sideline them because of the stranglehold their constituencies wield over the party.
Don’t forget Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, who famously worried that the island of Guam might tip over and capsize.
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Look at the democrat ticket. Two mid wits. Very unimpressive people who are kind of dumb. Maybe even knuckleheads.
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