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I’ll agree to a point. I think these are absolutely crimes, however, I don’t believe that anyone else of his social status would have been prosecuted on them. And I think a lot of it is that he doesn’t really fit the culture of the Washington Elites. He’s a Clampett, more or less. He’s the guy who talks in braggadocio, eats steak with ketchup, and does political theater in burlesque. He’s a White Trash President. He’s supposed to be understated, nuanced, culturally sophisticated, prefer Professional Managerial Class food, clothes, music, and entertainment. He’s not supposed to mock political opponents on Twitter like a 4chan troll, he’s not supposed to openly kill our enemies with drone strikes (although a plausibly deniable death carried out by the CIA that nobody knows about is fine, there are rules to kanly).
Had Trump had the demeanor of Desantis, I don’t think they’d have lost their minds, they’d have opposed him, but it would not have been as much of an open scorched earth warfare as it is with Trump. Desantis would have to deal with more quiet opposition, more subtle, and more fitting of another PMC cultured politician. He wouldn’t be investigated with a breathless “is this long nightmare finally over?”
It's not social status which made him vulnerable, but his lack of political protection. You think people didn't want Bush that bad? But he had cover from his family and the deep layer of political allies and hangers-on built up over decades.
Remember the people moving behind the scenes are sharks. They don't operate on hate. They are dead eyed U-boat commanders with a battleship in their sights with no anti-sub destroyers getting in the way. Trump is being moved against because it is rationally the best political way to beat him. He loves a close in knife-fight, he has big guns, his populist support gives him armor, but he is weak in real political operative allies. His staff picks turn on him or go down in flames, his lawyers turn against him. His weakness is below the waterline not above it. That is what separates him from other modern presidents.
You don't sink the Tirpitz with another battleship, its too risky. If it lacks cover you send planes or subs. You only need a couple of good hits to take it out with little risk. If you lose a few planes or even a sub, who cares? It's a good trade.
Why move against Trump in ways, you didn't against other presidents? Because you CAN.
Interestingly, a Democratic nominee Trump would have less of this weakness because the DNC is very good at using its connections for the benefit of their candidates while the RNC is either less capable of this, or somewhat ideologically opposed to it overall (or both).
This is a self-created problem, and downstream of his social status. Trump doesn't have useful allies and the political protection they afford because he doesn't know he needs them, he doesn't know how they work, he doesn't know how politics works -- he just knows that as someone of low social status, he's suspicious of how the high-status system work -- and he's disloyal to the allies he has, losing them quickly.
I was watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest last night and it dawned on me how much of a McMurphy Trump is. He's a wildly charismatic rule-breaker, but he mistakes his charisma for substance and doesn't really understand why he breaks the rules. He has a child's idea of how things should work. He just has a resistance to the authorities, he gets off on poking them, and he mistakenly thinks he's smarter than them. He makes an instant connection with the discarded people that he thinks have been unfairly beaten down by the authorities, and he lifts their spirits by thumbing his nose at their oppressors... but he never really understands the true dysfunctions of his followers, and as an egotist, he's unconscientious about how he uses them in his own self-service. He also never really understands the system he's bucking, and by the end, he has made vulnerable and destroyed the weakest of his comrades and the system crushes him. He thought he was a righteous agitator, but he made everything much much worse in the short term, and didn't really matter in the long-term.
Of course, OFOTCN was a product of 1960s anti-authoritarianism (young people may not know that Boomers were fleetingly anti-authoritarian before they become the authorities), so we are supposed to view McMurphy as a tragic hero and Nurse Ratched as a fascist monster. We are also supposed to buy in to the popular counter-culture idea that "mental illness" was a social imposition on unfortunate people who are really no less crazy than you or I. But now the OFOTCN dynamics look very different to me: McMurphy is a fool; Ratched has control issues, yes, but she also has the near-impossible job of connecting with severely troubled people who are easily led to extremes by disruptive behavior. Compared to the Titicut Follies, this mental hospital is an ideal of order and serenity before McMurphy shows up. But because of Titicut Follies and OFOTCN, most of the people seen in this movie would soon be living in tents in downtown Portland, shitting on the sidewalk, and randomly attacking passersby. (Fittingly, Oregon, where the movie was set and filmed, recently declared OFOTCN its official state movie.)
There is merit to this analysis. On the other hand, you need some way to distinguish between "hey, it turns out rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable, who knew", and "rules, structure and hierarchy are valuable to the exact extent that my side controls them." The former could conceivably result in a positive outcome. The later cannot.
I'm not optimistic that such a distinction can be drawn, in the present case.
That is always the tension in centrist/civic politics. Trump is not a centrist/civicist though -- and, importantly, neither are many of his opponents; I don't see Trump as wholly unique problem, except for how he doesn't bother to cloak his extremeism -- he's a bull in a china shop that gets cheered by people who resent the mean owners and the social implications of the china shop. Rather than finding some way to ignore or replace the china shop with something more useful, they choose destruction. I have a good friend who, though he has soured a little on Trump recently, loved that about him, loved January 6, loved that he insults Elaine Chao for being Chinese, because he shares Trump's contempt for "the system" and all of the proprieties that make the system work. I don't think anything better than the current system comes out of that style of destructive performance, however.
I'm not an adherent of centrist/civic politics any more, because I've lost faith in the solutions on offer. At some point, you need a positive claim for your program, something beyond "anything else you try will be worse." You need this because politics is, in its most essential nature, about hope, about belief that action can lead to positive outcomes. If you can't offer that hope, if policy starvation has hollowed out your platform's credibility, people will find an alternative to invest their hope in, even if it's as simple and short-sighted as a riot. Even if you're right, they'll prefer learning the hard way to simply giving up without trying.
At the end of the day, it's too easy to claim that what has been delivered is the best possible. It's too easy for the establishment to claim, like an abusive spouse, that their corruption and mendacity, bad faith and petty malice must be eternally overlooked, lest terrible consequences result. At some point, it's on the establishment to either deliver on their promises or get the fuck out of the way. That point, for a lot of people on both sides of the aisle, arrived sometime around 2015. Destruction is costly and wasteful, but sometimes, rarely, it really is the only way forward. Sometimes compromise doesn't work, and you have to fight. And in the present circumstance, what alternative is there? What's the Grand Compromise this time around? What concerns of Trump's supporters or even of his opponents could plausibly be addressed, under the current conditions? What bright future can be plausibly projected?
The best I've ever come up with is that Musk gets Falcon Heavy running, and we get too busy asteroid mining to worry about all this nonsense. Maybe AI and automation materially alter peoples' living conditions for the better?
I mean, the alternative is usually, people die out, and so do their views. Like, there used to be a major Anti-Masonry party in many states in the US. Nothing was really done on a national level to appease those people. It's just that their kids and grandkids didn't really care.
Same thing w/ interracial marriage. Well, there were obviously some shifts by people, if you look at Gallup polling, which goes back to World War II, you see a steady rise until the 80's, then a big jump during that time. Which makes sense - a lot of people who would've been in their 40's by time Civil Rights were a live issue (post-World War II/Humphrey convention speech/Truman desegregation) were dying off, and being replaced by a bunch of Gen Xers who were like 95/5 for interracial marriage.
Ironically, the only issue where the win condition has happened because of actual shifts in people's views, as opposed to generational rollover is gay marriage. Obviously, there was some bit of 85-year old gay marriage opponents being replaced by pro-gay marriage 18 year olds, but the shift happened too quickly to be that.
But yeah, in another generation and a half or so, most of the current Fox News audience/Trump base is going to be worm food. At that point, just like the Right stopped with the overt racism, sexism, etc. in the 70's and 80's to win over younger voters (including winning the youth vote in '84 and '88), the GOP will either have to figure out how to appeal to a largely currently Democratic voting-base (again, yes, Millennial's are voting at lower rates for Democrat's than they did in 2008, but if I remember right, it's about D+8. That's still death for the GOP if the largest voting bloc is even D+4 or D+5, when the smaller, younger voting blocks are even more D-leaning), or they do actually die, outside of the Senate seats they'll hold in depopulating states, and then things get interesting.
It's a nice story, but I think if Blues collectively had the patience and discipline for this strategy, the world would look very different than it does. Also, it would probably help to have kids; I get that this is what big tech, social media and the educational system are for, but... eh. I'm skeptical it plays out the way they're hoping.
The more immediate problem is that Progressives want the future they've been promised, and there is absolutely no way it can be delivered. I think that's going to be a problem for them going forward, and increasingly more so as even their most extreme solutions simply fail. Meanwhile, trust in institutions erodes, and the tighter they squeeze with the consensus machine and social norms, the more society slips through their fingers. Trust in media, academics, elites, Science itself continues to erode, as does social cohesion generally.
In any case, we pays our money and we takes our bets, no? Maybe you're right after all. Time will tell.
I mean, I'm somebody whose to the left of like, 95% of the population, and while I'm obviously not happy with the current situation, it's far better than it was ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. Now, when I was twenty, I was more upset, just like 20-year-olds are now. That's the job of 20-year-olds. But, you get older, and you don't change your views, you just get smarter about implementing them.
The kid gap is somewhat overrated, and even then, we'll just bring in more immigrants (totally legal and unionizable), who will end up voting left-leaning for a few generations because the Right's voting base will require their politicians to be mean to them.
Now, I don't think it's going to be a KO win for us on the left, just like radical abolitionists didn't get everything they wanted, nor did socialists in the 1910's, MLK or Malcolm, or various other left-leaning leaders. But, I think while everything is dangerous in the short term, in the medium and long-term, everything you just listed makes it incredibly difficult to actually have a unified political movement.
On a purely political level, I'll take the trade of 3 high-propensity middle to upper-middle class voters in the suburbs over a rural low propensity low to moderate-income voter not only because they're far more likelier to turn out, but because in 2023, they're far more likely to actually be more left-leaning on economics and social views. Hell, there are thousands of those voters that just made sure abortion will be legal in Wisconsin, and there might be something resembling legislative democracy on the state level as well, whom previously might have voted for Scott Walker a few times.
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