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Notes -
A moderately interesting interview with Eric Trump just dropped in the FT. (Limited-use gift link - the article is paywalled but may also be accessible on a 5/month basis with free registration)
The headline is "Eric Trump opens door to political dynasty." It isn't explicit, but applying bounded distrust it looks like the FT reporter raised the issue and Eric responded mildly positively. It is consistent with the Trump family's general approach of keeping the idea of an illegal 3rd term and/or a dynastic successor in the public eye while maintaining plausible deniability about actually doing it.
I don't find Eric's denials that the family is making money off the Presidency interesting - the Mandy Rice-Davies principle applies. Eric is lying here and the FT makes this clear to a reader who is paying attention while avoiding words like "lie" and "falsely". It is an interesting example of a political reporter trying to write about a lying politician without engaging in either hostile editorialising or "opinions about shape of earth differ" non-journalism.
If I had to guess, Eric is positioning himself, personally for a future move into politics. Over the last few years Eric has been running the Trump Organisation while Don Jr and Barron support their father's political operation. With Barron taller and more talented, but still a long way off 35, Don Jr is the obvious dynastic successor at the moment. But the bit of the interview about a Trump dynasty is explicitly about the idea of Eric and not Don Jr being the politician.
You can just post the archive link for people who don't want to pay. I don't know why more news sites haven't cracked down on it yet, but it's a trivially easy way to pirate most articles still.
I don't see what's particularly interesting about the article. The family is obviously directly profiting from the presidency, and here Eric gives non-arguments that the family would be richer if it didn't get into politics (perhaps true, but not a germane rebuttal). As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism, and that almost certainly dies with Donald. Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.
The cultism, indeed. Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming, and deifying him in art, or admitting that you wept with joy when he was elected. That'd be crazy.
Well, okay, so that was Obama, not Trump, but still. Pretty crazy! Or do you perhaps mean something different by 'cultism'?
When Obama was elected I met an older white woman who wept tears of joy and said he'd come to do the work of Christ.
I'm sure there's old people who wept for Trump, too, but Obama's religious significance was a core part of his campaign and presidencies; the left worshiped him.
Any claims of MAGA "cultism" fall on deaf ears without a good explanation for why MAGA -- who routinely argue with Trump, even publicly -- are cultists without addressing the Obama elephant in the room.
Even Biden, to a lesser extent, but mostly due to relation to Obama as VP.
Maybe for a short while but left-wing opinion turned cool on Obama surprisingly quickly, and the 'anti-imperialist' Chomskyite left never liked him. As early as 2009 not-exactly-radical-lefist Bill Maher said that:
More importantly, I think the election denial/J6 clearly puts MAGA a class apart from any other modern American political movement in terms of cultishness.
I definitely know a few hard leftists/socialists who were quick to go cold on him as well. But in general Dem normie-sphere, he was a gold standard POTUS who reigned without controversy, and his photos were posted wistfully in the Age of Trump.
I sense that too has been fading, though. Although I think that's more due to aging out of relevancy than a reappraisal of the man and his admin.
You could say they're not the real Left, but they're the one that matters.
And as a big Obama supporter for both his terms... yeah, there was a 'culty' (generously described as enamored) vibe going on. Even the Daily Show poked fun at this, with John Oliver even going to the DNC in 08 and getting little more than 'Obama will fix everything' from the crowd attendees.
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