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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'?
The cult of personality around Obama didn't hold a candle to Trump's. Obama was regularly attacked from both the left and right within his own party. You could be a Democrat in good standing and also an Obama critic. Meanwhile, in Trump's GOP absolute fealty is the bare minimum. Criticism, where it exists, is either of the 50 Stalins variety or carefully suggesting that perhaps the Tsar is being poorly advised.
Where was there criticism of Obama from Democrats that was not of the 50 Stalins variety?
From the right of the party and from the left of the party. (Of course Sanders is technically not a Democrat, but in practice, he was and is.)
Manchin is actually quoted as saying he's doing this "not as a Democrat", and I think this counts as saying that the Tsar is poorly advised:
Sanders is claiming that Obama isn't left wing enough, which is a 50 Stalins criticism. And it's not actually hard to find conservatives criticizing Trump.
This is very silly. On this basis it is impossible for a left-winger to give anything but 50 Stalins criticism to those on the centre-left. Obviously Sanders will claim Obama isn't left-wing enough, because he's... to his left.
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So? He's still a Democrat.
That's not what 50 Stalins means. As it was originally used, it was "Okay, back up. Suppose you went back to Stalinist Russia and you said “You know, people just don’t respect Comrade Stalin enough. There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country! I say we need two Stalins! No, fifty Stalins!”"
It's supposed to be a completely facile pseudocriticism, not an actual criticism that is simply coming from a different direction than where you yourself are coming from. If we loop back to actual Stalin, it was just as dangerous to attack him from the left (like Trotsky did) as from the right (like Bukharin did), originally even considerably moreso. The only way to stay say would have been not to attack Stalin at all but "attack the system" while praising Stalin, like the 50 Stalins example guy does.
This is someone obscure enough that I have never heard of them before you linked this, and the whole piece starts with him taling about how his criticisms of Trump get him constantly attacked by dozens of readers. Not a particularly worthy example, this.
I understand a 50 Stalins criticism to be that someone's positions aren't extreme enough and he should lean into them even more. Claiming that a Democrat is not left-wing enough would be a 50 Stalins criticism. (And likewise, something like "Trump isn't doing enough to stop illegal immigration" would be a 50 Stalins criticism of Trump.)
It's true that it would be dangerous to do this to actual Stalin, but that's not how the metaphor works.
It was the first one I found by googling that sounded good enough.
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