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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.
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.
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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