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I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
Y’all are overcomplicating this. @Corvos got closest.
He can’t keep getting away with it.
That’s the sentiment behind almost every controversy from Trump I. Whenever he said something racist, or mocked a disabled journalist, or bragged about fingering models, blue-tribers expected him to lose status. But he didn’t. When he hired his family members and funneled money to his own businesses, his followers were supposed to recognize him as a grifter. But they didn’t. And when he took a mob to the U.S. Capitol to contest the election, Congress was finally going to stop trying to ride the tiger. But, of course, they didn’t.
Same for the intertrump period. By the time he was accused of sexual assault and collaborating with Russia and selling state secrets and daring to do business in New York, dedicated Trump haters were salivating for him to finally get some sort of comeuppance. Even when the case was terrible. He was supposed to be cancelled, disgraced, away from the levers of power. Possibly in prison, possibly dead. I’ve seen gentle, empathetic liberals seriously wishing that the Butler shooter had been a little more accurate.
Instead, Trump is back in office. He’s learned how to actually staff his administration and he’s actively purging his critics. The institutions are more favorable to him now than they were in the past ten years. Everything that might be considered an overreach is justified by his supporters because at one point, a Democrat did something similar. Congress has consistently declined to rein him in; the Supreme Court has likewise been permissive. There are no more obvious routes to keep him from doing what he wants. @Dean calls this “lack of control.” I’d call it “getting away with it.”
I’ve spent way too long trying to make this convincing. Given our userbase, I expect most people reading it will grin and think about how cool it is that their guy is getting what he deserves. Or, worse, pick one of the points I’ve mentioned and launch into the standard Trump apologetics. It’s infuriating. It’s pervasive.
I want those people to understand that what they’re calling “TDS” isn’t realpolitik or delusion. It is a deep-seated frustration at someone getting away with it. The same frustration that you feel when the government refuses to deal with rioters, or senatorial insider trading, or catch-and-release for illegal immigrants, multiplied over ten years and concentrated into one man. One guy who has proven above the law, above public opinion, and above the checks and balances which make up so much of our national mythos.
He’s getting away with it, and that’s not a good thing.
A lot of things shouldn't have happened prior to Trump doing the things he did, but they did happen and here we are. I can empathize the frustration from an intellectual standpoint, and I'm not saying the things he's doing are all good, but this country went through some radical shifts over the past 15-20 years leading to a massive cultural schism. The 2008 financial crisis, the explosion of social media, Trump's first term, and a global pandemic all played a big role in the gradual loss of faith in our institutions, for both sides.
The left's aggressive cultural takeover starting in 2012 and then peaking in the early 2020s served as my gradual, and then sudden psychological/philosophical turning point. There's plenty of blame to go around on the right side of the aisle, and I know for others (maybe you) it was Trump's brazen disrespect of our political norms and law breaking that served as their turning point. Going back to me (and millions of others) it was the coordinated takeover perpetrated by progressives in literally everything we interacted with when it came to the society we all shared. News, academia, entertainment, social media, social norms, even the definitions of words were all hijacked and rapidly moved into a new progressive framing that none of us agreed to. And yet, we were aggressively "encouraged" to comply or face the new social penalties, most of which involved formal and informal versions of ostracism and cancellation. We were subjected to it for years.
The people who supported all of that, who sat deep within all of these institutions, who literally could not distinguish between an actual Nazi and someone who wanted stronger borders and less critical theorizing all over the place, made their policy positions moral positions that could not be argued against. They couldn't help themselves from hating and othering and ostracizing. They still do not see themselves as part of the problem, and now, to whatever extent they do, the time for "I fucked up. Let's make a deal." has come and gone. I mean, I'm certainly happy to accept any mea culpa from a recovering progressive, but many others won't. Not now when they have the advantage. There are economic issues, and health issues, and birthrate issues, and AI issues, but underneath it all is an ideological issue that seems irreconcilable at this point; and even if they don't realize it, progressives started that fight.
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I think that's a definite correlated result. But it seems like the 'TDS' step must come at some point before that, in order for someone to interpret those things in your first 3 paragraphs with maximum uncharity. A Sam Harris for example, definitely does feel an extreme version of frustration that "he can't keep getting away with it". But that's down the line from his extreme TDS where he treats every little thing uncharitably as pieces of an obvious whole, even though he can agree on any individual piece (when litigated) having completely benign or subjective interpretations available.
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It's fine if you don't like The Drumpf, I just don't get how you get chastize people for pointing out that you already got away with it, while also chastizing them about how he's getting away with it, and that’s not a good thing.
I haven’t gotten away with shit.
Assuming you mean my guy, fine, I guess Biden is getting away with some bullshit. I’m mad about that too. Thanks to living in Texas, he’s about the only national official I’ve ever voted for, and he fucked it up.
In that case why so much sympathy for people who don't like to see Trump getting away wity it, and so little for people who don't like to see the Dems getting away with it? It's even weirder when you claim to be an outsider to both groups.
At least in my case, because I believe Trump's norm violations are bigger, more frequent, and with worse justifications.
Debatable, and I asked the question spefifically because he was asking us to take Blue Tribe greviances without litigating the details.
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Not your guy, though that's part of it. Your party.
Don’t have one.
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I think you’re right. Twenty years ago, though, he wouldn’t have got away with a lot of the controversies he’s had.
What happened IMO is that the sheer unilateralness of reputational attacks (and the increasingly obvious willingness to manufacture them) became so clear that people stopped going along with it.
The same process is not quite as advanced in the UK which is one reason why Boris Johnson was brought down by IMO a largely confected scandal: Cakegate.
In an ideal world, we would all retrench and agree on what compromises we need to see and what rules we’re seriously willing to hold in common, but people don’t work like that and neither side believes they’ll gain more from peace than war.
A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate
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Hence, TDS.
These are conservatives, and their conservative media, whinging about the loss of their social credit. (Blues/Ds are, make no mistake, fundamentally conservative- they are everything they once claimed to criticize. They pretend they aren't The Man and purposefully evade the label of "obsolete, entrenched, and corrupt" by defining those things away from themselves, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.)
That's why they have to blast out misinformation (and why the new South Park episodes are just... lame). Just like Fox News (and something the new conservatives- that is, Blue voters- complained bitterly about the old conservatives' version of this), the goal is to keep
America dividedthe moral outrage machine hot enough that they can convince voters that way.This is why they use words like "corrupt". It's not actually a complaint about physical corruption- though one could claim their opponents don't care, people always make their strongest arguments all the times and there's barely anything there so I draw my conclusions accordingly- but about moral corruption [in the eyes of those who believe they're in charge of what 'moral' is].
Moral people worship Safety, Equality, and Consent. Trump is therefore an icon of sin, an avatar of the sinfulness of an age rejecting the Goddesses.
Remember, it was immoral to end slavery, too.
That's our criticism, just of conservatives in general. Of course, it's fine for them to do that because it was popular, and what's popular should always win no matter what the law actually says, right?
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This is the sort of thing that makes me not take arguments like this seriously. It's been a long time since this supposed incident, but I recall it being pretty conclusive for anyone who spent more than thirty seconds listening to the outrage bait of the day, that he wasn't trying to mock a disabled journalist, and it was just the press once again seizing on an opportunity to claim Trump was the worst person ever. I don't recall the details, but it seemed clear (I thought at the time) that he was just doing one of his normal mannerisms. It's crying wolf and it makes me not take other claims seriously.
He was trying to mock a disabled journalist, but he probably wasn't mocking his disability. But then, that's a pretty standard SJ conflation.
Haha yes, that's fair. I really don't remember the details, I just remember that when I looked into the details 7 or whatever years ago, it was another straw on my personal "Believe Trump's Critics" camel's back.
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Thank you for your cooperation.
I really, really don’t want to litigate how bad any one of these actions is. That’s why I included the Russia and New York circuses. The opposition has done all sorts of shameful things in response to Trump.
The point is that polite (blue) society sees this and goes, “damn, reminds me of uncle Ricky telling jokes about the short bus.” It’s low-status. It’s decidedly not supposed to appear on national TV. If an ingroup politician did something like this they’d be groveling for months. Aaaaaaaannd none of his supporters care. They chuckle and move on. Reality has failed to meet expectations.
Many such cases.
If somebody thinks Donald Trump should have lost 1 point of social credit for telling a rude joke, she probably would have deducted more for the “grab ‘em by the pussy” comment. Or the “bleeding out her wherever,” or “I like veterans who weren’t captured,” or any number of his greatest hits. Curiously, his balance never seems to go negative. From this perspective, he’s consistently avoiding his just desserts.
Of course not, because that involves getting BFTO most of the time. Not that it'll ever matter. The defining trait of TDS is the antimemetic effect where the afflicted form an angry conclusion, lose the argument on the details, and then immediately forget that step two ever happened.
Let whosoever among you never repeated the Fine People lie for years after it's thorough debunking retain a shred of credibility here.
No, it's more venal than that. It appears on national television 500 times per day - but there's a removal. It's not supposed to be the politician making the jokes. It's supposed to be the legion of Colberts and Kimmels and media flacks, etc, etc who gin up clapter and Two Minute Hates while the "respectable" politician laughs in the audience.
Well, the right doesn't have that (aside from shitposters on the internet) so Trump (the OG shitposting king) just makes the jokes himself. It's truly something watching progressives pretend to be Maude Flanders while Stephen Colbert is nervously trying to pretend his audience doesn't want Trump dead.
I truly, sincerely do no understand how anyone over thirty can take it seriously. The whining, prissy fussiness about muh respectability standards from the same people who brought us Piss Christ and That's My Bush and Samantha Bee. If I say "Fuck your norms, fuck your pearl-clutching, fuck your traditions, I piss on all your self-righteous, self-serving bullshit"... where on earth could I have learned that except the last 60 years of blue tribe culture? They're like mean girl bullies who throw a crashout fit whenever they catch some flak back. It was all fun and games until the right grew a sense of humor. Have you seen the new South Park? Shit's fucking hilarious.
I call bullshit. That particular one might, because it triggers a blue tribe sacred cow of ableism, but I bet even that would be waived if the target were a Red. And I don't even have to bet, because I've been hearing progressives call Abbot "Governor Hotwheels" for years. Oh, remember when a congressional meeting devolved into Jerry Springer? Far from groveling, Ms. Crockett's star rose. I can't really think of an example where mockery of the other side triggered an internal backlash. I mean, they're all sister-fucking, illiterate white trash nazis with meth mouth, right? The insults just sting because they're true, no?
No one cares, Maude. His immunity to social criticism is his biggest drawing point. Because if he hadn't said any of those things, they'd just be making them up, like the hundreds of other examples that never seem to die.
Learn to take a joke.
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I have to go a little ways back... but not THAT far... to find Lyndon Baines Johnson. And not so much further back was "Give 'em Hell" Harry Truman.
I say this not just because "A Democrat did it", but because these particular norms simply didn't exist.
I'd wager most people most vehemently opposed to Trump aren't very familiar with Lyndon "Big Dick" Johnson. Those I've made aware have immediately pivoted to it being a matter of policy instead.
Thus, the crassness argument turns out to be another soldier. (And LBJ was worse on policy )
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I'm not engaging in standard Trump apologetics. I'm trying to tell you why he doesn't lose the social credit, at least to someone like me. It's because I can't trust anyone when they say these things about him, because everything for the past 10 years has been an exaggerated character attack, even the things that don't remotely deserve it. Time and time again I hear "Trump is Hitler for having done x", and then I look at x and I see that if you squint at it the right way you can see that, or not. Repeat for 10 years (or even 1 year), and I get my own form of epistemic learned helplessness.
So fine, the mechanism by which Trump is punished is dead. Because leftists killed it.
What do you think the standard apologetics are?
“That didn’t happen. And if it did, it wasn’t that bad. And if it was, you deserved it.”
In this particular case, I happen to think #2 is correct. This really isn’t that bad. I included it in the list as an early example of the kind of weak evidence that liberals were cataloguing.
But you had to pick it out, since you knew it didn’t apply to you. So he wasn’t trying to mock the guy. And if he was, it was exaggerated by a hostile media. And if it wasn’t, well, the leftists started it.
…therefore you should never trust anything they say about Trump, and you still can’t take any of the examples seriously.
I think this is unreasonable.
I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.
I do not think your skepticism is unreasonable.
I do think that you were illustrating the “standard Trump apologetics,” which consist of denying something as fake news, downplaying it, and then deciding it was actually a good thing.
I find that particular pattern frustrating. There’s nothing wrong with believing any of the steps. Combined, though, I think they’re bad practice.
Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.
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I wonder if this is just a general human behaviour, and we would have seen exactly the same pattern discussing the Dreyfus Affair in 1894.
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I mean, I know this just falls under "Everything that might be considered an overreach is justified by his supporters because at one point, a Democrat did something similar." but... uncritically yes? Like why does this just fall under immediate dismissal? Some sort of throw away line said with a sneer to dismiss the argument just 'cause?
Why shouldn't Red Tribers finally rejoice that one of their guys is finally just doing things like mass deportations, fighting crime and pulling school funding, in the way Democrat's "just did" lockdowns, and vaccine mandates, and eviction moratoriums, and trans kids in schools? Why should they care about the naked corruption when for my entire adult life the corruption was already pretty out there and naked? Did Trump rip off the last fig leaf? Maybe, but it was a pretty damned wilted and decayed fig leaf already. Also I'll gladly take a hospitality industrial complex over a military industrial complex any day.
And I mean... the cherry on top is Trump is a New York City Democrat. He literally learned all this from playing with the other team for 60 years. He just lost the protection of the respectability cartel which covers for that side relentlessly. Your sneering "a Democrat did something similar" is our lived "Democrats have done this to us for our entire lives, my business was bankrupted, I've been ethnically cleansed from my home town, and now my kid wants to get sterilized because of what they were taught in school."
You have it lodged in your brain that there were rules, but when "Democrats did something similar" it didn't count. It all counts, and now there are no rules.
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