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Notes -
I want to talk about the AI video that Trump reposted, where he is flying a plane with 'King Trump' on the side, wearing a crown, dumping a payload of feces on a crowd of No Kings protestors in NYC.
Frankly, I keep thinking I can't be surprised anymore by the depths which Trump (or more realistically, his social media team0 will stoop too, and yet here we are...
Ultimately as a Christian, I find this sort of blatant hatred and mockery of the outgroup quite disturbing. I understand that staid, boring, conservatism has lost majorly over the last few decades. I understand that the right needs some vitalism, some dynamism, some sort of way to act in an agentic way that isn't just mindlessly opposing whatever progressives are doing at the moment, and then slowly backing off and letting progressives have what they want over the course of a few years.
However, I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze. At this point, while Trump definitely is effective at rallying the base, I simply find his aesthetics to be revolting. It's hard to countenance not just the outright hatred of the outgroup, but the sheer crassness that is presented here.
Not just that, but why would he egg on this idea that he wants to be king? It makes zero strategic sense from my perspective, all it does is fan the flames. I suppose if he wants to fan the flames of the culture war, fine, but that's also not something I'm behind.
Anyway, the current coalition of the right, where Christian or even just classical conservatives are sort of holding their nose and voting for Trump, seems increasingly unstable to me. I suppose we'll see how things end up.
This video is obviously stupid, crass, and does nothing good for anybody. But if you’re upset about trump’s moral character might I gesture to, just picking something at random, stormy Daniels? Nobody thinks he’s a good Christian along the lines of Bush. Cruz and Santorum were the high water marks of personally devout politicians in recent years- and they couldn’t win Republican presidential primaries.
Santorum also, notably, still has his last name associated with shit on a google search.
And Ted Cruz is the zodiac killer.
It’s interesting that in ‘12 and ‘16 the primary, for the republicans, turned into a Christian conservative vs secular conservative duel, but as far as we can tell this far out, the ‘28 primary definitely won’t- the name Donald Trump might have been surprising in 2013, but the basic contours of ‘big field of people, most of them having no business running for President, coalesces into a duel between a basically-secular conservative candidate and a strongly Christian candidate with history as a conservative hardliner’ is what most people would have predicted.
IIRC people were still predicting at least one competitive pro-establishment candidate right up to the day before Super Tuesday. (Kasich was never competitive, he was just well-positioned to go the distance with a doomed campaign).
The behaviour of the not-Trump candidates in Q1 2016 (which was the decisive period of the primary) was consistent with the theory that they expected the race to shake out as a pro-establishment candidate (Rubio, Christie, or Jeb Bush) against an anti-establishment candidate (Trump or Cruz).
It took a very long time for the so-called liberal elites to understand that conservative Red Tribers in the country saw George W Bush as just as much of a miserable failure as they did, and therefore just how bad things were (and still are) for the pro-establishment right.
I mean it seemed patently obvious to me that an establishment candidate wasn't competitive enough to get to 1v1 territory. It seemed like everyone knew it was going to be a fistfight for who could be credibly anti-establishment after Romney's failure.
The establishment candidates didn't think that, which is why they kept attacking each other rather than attacking Trump or Cruz. Establishment commentators were aware of (and aghast at) the prospect of Trump making the last two from about January 2016 but they were expecting it to be at the expense of Cruz - as, presumably, was Cruz given that he spent most of January going after Trump in a way no other candidate did.
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