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Notes -
I'll grant that you only live once [citation needed], however Americans have presidential elections every four years, with dozens of grifters to choose from in the primaries, and there is such a thing as the optimal stopping theorem. Stopping too early can be catastrophic.
I understand the desperation. Trump was the only one in a long while who threw the right-wingers a bone. But 2016 anti-establishment sentiment, roused by decades of cruder deceit, was demanding meatier concessions.
The thing is, the regular state of those elections is choosing between red puppet and blue puppet.
Trump and populists in general represent an alternative to that. The possibility of a drainage of the swamp, if you will.
Those are not supposed to be available in "democracy". By design. So people will cling to the rare opportunity, however doomed it was from the start
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