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NYT has a primer on all the corruption that Trump has been engaging in:
Beyond this article, you could probably add a bunch more, like how White House aides are buying and selling stocks suspiciously timed around tariff announcements to make big profits.
The response to all of this from MAGA has been next to nonexistent. A handful of people have implied that maaaaaaaybe Trump shouldn't be doing this, but none of them remotely push the issue. When the left try to criticize this, most of MAGA either retorts with the broken record of Shellenberger arguments, or otherwise claims something Biden did was somehow worse, and Trump's corruption is implied to be good, actually. Isn't it wonderful living in an era when negative partisanship is the only political force that matters? Scandals and corruption used to be a thing that allowed the other party to come in and try to do better, but now they're used as a justification for the other side becoming even worse.
I agree and have for some time agreed that Trump is an abomination and embarrassment to conservatives. The problem for actual conservatives is what is there to actually do here? Join the Democrats? There are some rational positions where that is the greater of the two evils. Perhaps this abundance agenda is the invitation they need to throw behind a Democrat side of the aisle that disavows a lot of the leftie fringe that the rest of the Democrats have been a little too beholden to.
Invent a time machine, go back 80 years, and convince the “real conservatives” to not spend the next eight decades constantly losing.
"Don't lose" is not the most clear or transparent piece of advice.
What should conservatives have done starting from 1945?
My point is, the Republican Party as of 2015 was dead in the water. If you look at the 2012 election internal postmortem assessment, the Republican strategy was basically “give up, concede all cultural and immigration positions, become slightly more corporatist Democrats”. The landslide defeat of ¡Jeb! to Hillary Clinton in 2016 would have been the final loogie on the grave of American conservatism. People like @aqouta bemoan Donald Trump’s hijacking of the Republican Party and the demise of REAL TRVE CONSERVATISM, when Trump is only reason any kind of conservatism, or the Republican Party itself, still exists at all.
If conservatism is when you refuse to address entitlements, blow up the budget deficit, tarrif our allies because you don't understand trade policy, behave like a petulant child in every possible situation and fall for lowest common denominator X slop posts then what even remains of conservatism? What is Trump conserving exactly?
I mean, Trump is clearly far more socially conservative than the alternative, and he’s definitely preserving space for social conservatism to continue to exist.
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Every post-war conservative seems to think it is.
The population composition of the country, the definition of "woman" and "racial discrimination", children's genitals, classical architecture...
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