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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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It seems like Trump is getting his twitter back. The weird thing is I think red tribe doesn’t want him to get twitter back. I don’t. Blue tribe will put up a big fight over it but actually be very happy if he got twitter back. Then they get his tweets to rally against. For now Musks says he’s thinking about it. From a free speech absolutist view he does have to approve it. But I still want him to say no.

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=46&t=o4yJPOOQnQoAxYXvJuPdlQ

Man, I have such mixed feelings about this.

I really want Trump to get out of the fucking way. He had his shot at being the hero of the populist right, he failed comprehensively. Somehow his enemies were stronger than ever after his tenure, with an even tighter grip on the culture, the levers of power, and the minds of our youth than ever before. His entire presidency was the perfect examples of one step forward, two steps back. He simply was not the guy.

Is Desantis the guy? 70% chance he's not in my estimation. But I'm willing to give him a shot.

I'd heard some talk that after so many Trump backed candidates ate dirt in the midterms, and Desantis fucking cleaned house, that meant America was "over" Trump. But that doesn't necessarily mean he'd lose a Republican Primary. Especially not with a crowded field, and a 30% cut of the base that's ride or die for him. Republicans will have to pull the same shit the DNC pulled on Bernie, and keep some Trump adjacent candidate in the race to try to split his base, while every other nominee falls in line and endorses someone else chosen behind closed doors.

With my luck, Desantis will be the Trump adjacent candidate they use to split the base, and fucking Jeb Bush will be the anointed insider candidate.

Anyways, Trump getting back on twitter is step 1 to growing his reach again. Right now he's so marginalized only that ride or die portion really gets his messages anymore. He doesn't go viral. Barely anybody even knows what he's saying anymore, beyond second hand accounts of his "melt downs" on Truth Social. My only hope is that he has too much pride to come slinking back to Twitter without Elon issuing a personal apology for the terrible way Twitter treated him, and begging him on his hands and knees to please grace Twitter with his genius and insight again. I guess I have to further hope Elon doesn't then go and do just that.

As much as I'm a free speech guy, and thought his banning was patently ridiculous, now that he's gone, I wish he'd just stay gone. But it's looking like he's going to take the RNC down with him every bit as much as Clinton took the DNC down with her in 2016.

I really want Trump to get out of the fucking way. He had his shot at being the hero of the populist right, he failed comprehensively. Somehow his enemies were stronger than ever after his tenure, with an even tighter grip on the culture, the levers of power, and the minds of our youth than ever before. His entire presidency was the perfect examples of one step forward, two steps back. He simply was not the guy.

He appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others. I would not call that a failure. Did other stuff too. Did he make the left worse? Possible, but correlation not causation. Of course, this was not contingent on Trump per say.

Is Desantis the guy? 70% chance he's not in my estimation. But I'm willing to give him a shot.

He seems even more of an 'establishment guy' than Trump.

My only hope is that he has too much pride to come slinking back to Twitter without Elon issuing a personal apology for the terrible way Twitter treated him, and begging him on his hands and knees to please grace Twitter with his genius and insight again. I guess I have to further hope Elon doesn't then go and do just that.

Why would he ask or expect an apology when both he and Elon know it was the old management who banned him.

He appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term

That's congress's doing, not Trump's. All he did was sit in the chair. Any old stooge could have done that, and for less!

What do you mean? The president does nominate the person.

Right but any conservative president would have done the same. It's congress that made sure he got to nominate three instead of two.

any other "conservative president" would have lost in 2016 making this whole point moot anyway

"if only Trump didn't have X, Y, Z, and was A, B,C, he would be great" or "he just did stuff another GOP person would have done" counterfactuals as reasons to discount things he did or put space between things you like and things you don't like aren't strong arguments because other "conservative" president or GOP nominee would have lost in 2016 and the US would have been in the 2nd term

you would prefer a nicer, polished Trump? you think another guy in his place woulda done something he did you like anyway? okay, well that guy would have lost and it would be the 2nd term of Hillary Clinton right now

any other "conservative president" would have lost in 2016 making this whole point moot anyway

I disagree. If Trump hadn't run, we could have ended up with a boring normal republican who would have almost certainly won against doomed candidate Hillary Clinton. Of course no candidate in 2016's primary was equipped to deal with his shenanigans or frankly live in the meme economy at all.

you would prefer a nicer, polished Trump?

There are things I wish he'd done differently, even adjusting for our obvious political differences. I wish he'd kept turnover lower and cultivated effective leaders he could delegate to. I wish he'd handled Covid differently rather than deferring to states and letting the CDC go off on adventures. I wish he'd had a more pragmatic plan to deal with China. I wish he'd thought more carefully about his responsibility as a leader to set the stage for future leaders who aren't him.

A boring normal Republican would have been railroaded and lost because he wouldn't fight, just like Mitt Romney did in 2012 and John McCain did in 2008. And just like Mitt Romney was so mediocre the GOP couldn't take the Senate despite maybe the best metrics and seats to do so in decades, a normal Republican would not have won healthy majorities in Congress either.

If you look at the other likely Candidates in the absence of Trump, they would have lost the midwest. If they lost the midwest, they lose the election. Which one do you think would have turned unlikely voters who voted Obama in 2008 and 2012 into GOP voters? Certainly not Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush.

I wish he'd handled Covid differently rather than deferring to states and letting the CDC go off on adventures.

Trump was being impeached at the start of covid. He was regularly being threatened by his own party with removal if he changed the leadership at the CDC. Because of that, what he did was create a parallel group which oversaw stats reporting to stop the CDC from lying about it.

You may wish he did X, Y, or Z, and I certainly do, but we must remember what really happened during the COVID hysteria.

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Trump's polling and performance in the midwest, something which was necessary for the GOP candidate to win, and something with which every other candidate in the heavily contested primary did far worse in

Trump captured just enough Obama voters in the midwest to win. Which of the other likely candidates was going to do that? Not Cruz, not Rubio, not Jeb, not Kasich outside of Ohio. And that's assuming they would have performed as good as Trump did in other states outside of their "native" regions. Trump, alone, was the person pushing polices which most Americans cared about but which the other candidates were doing their best to ignore (immigration and trade being the main ones).

Disagree, other establishment conservative presidents have made worse (especially in retrospect) selections. Remember Harriet Miers?

Isn't that shift a result of the work of the Federalist Society, which basically picked every conservative SC justice after Miers?

Partly, but no they do not pick them. Trump picked them from their recommendations. So far he is the only Republican president to commit to doing so and follow through. It's just too tempting to play patron with them.

And yet Trump managed to not fuck it up where other establishment Republicans have, by wanting to nominate friends of friends or reward political favors.

Nobody is saying that the Senate wasn't involved. They obviously are. @pusher_robot was pointing out that it's untrue to say that Trump wasn't involved, and that it was all Congress' doing.

Trump was given a curated list to pull names from.

Mitch held a seat and Trump did what he was told. The one, huge, unequivocally great thing he did wasn't him, because you have to be delusional at this point to think Trump is good at doing anything but trolling the hell out of the libs.

We're evaluating Trump as a potential "leader of the populist right", and Supreme Court nominations are entirely unrelated to one's competency in that role, as Evinceo notes.

Except to the degree that you can get yourself elected as President, in which case just say that, instead of how he "appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others".

We're evaluating Trump as a potential "leader of the populist right", and Supreme Court nominations are entirely unrelated to one's competency in that role,

I disagree.

The alternate explanation is that Trump (and more broadly the Tea Party) accurately identified one of the most significant in terms of attack surfaces in terms of actual damage dealt and flipped it, which is why so0 many blue/grey tribers are now desperate to paint it as a nothing-burger.

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