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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match. Desantis's campaign so far has been pretty pathetic. He's been afraid to really push back against Trump despite Trump lobbing almost daily attacks against him. Desantis is great on paper, with his victories against woke institutions in Florida, but he's failed to appeal to the Republican id so far. Many Republican voters care far more about appearance and physical vigor than policy positions, good governance, intelligence, etc.

I don’t think Trump can lose a Republican primary at this point. But if I were giving DeSantis advice, it would be to do the opposite of what Abernathy suggests. Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Rubio and Cruz tried rolling around in the muck with him and failed, Rubio’s most vicious personal attacks in 2016 didn’t come until after Trump had won the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, that is, pretty late in the game. And Rubio wasn’t the guy to do it.

Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male. He’s the loudest, most obnoxious member of the tribe, and his power depends on the degree to which other apes are afraid of him and give him symbolic displays of respect, which in this case has meant saying, for example, that he actually won the 2020 election. What could break this spell? Not reasoned arguments, but signs of weakness. And no, not weakness in the sense that he might not be the most electable candidate — that’s counting on a level of thinking that is far too abstract for this population.

Rather, one needs to emphasize literal physical weakness. Notice how obsessed Republicans have been with the real and imagined physical and cognitive shortcomings of figures like Biden and Hillary. In many corners of right-wing media, “our opponents are old, fat, ugly” seems to get at least as much attention as actual issues, especially during election season. In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news, but also how obsessed they are with physical and physiological correlates of health.

The Dylan Mulvaney hysteria is another demonstration of the red tribe being driven by the most base and primitive instincts. These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy. Good luck explaining to them the importance of going after higher education accreditation agencies.

You might think it’s strange for a group like this to have chosen Trump as their leader. But when he posts memes of himself as an Adonis or says things like he’s in better shape than Obama or Bush were while they were in office, and no one corrects him, that serves to only cement his dominance over the party. Trump’s perfect body is like the unreliability of Dominion voting machines. Shirtless Putin has a similar effect in Russia. Educated Westerners roll their eyes at his primitive demonstrations of vigor, but I suspect that, like Trump, he’s a much better student of human nature than they are. The conspiracy theories might have been false, but the Trump-Putin bromance was real, and no accident.

This means that DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous.

DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.

DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch. Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.

Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place.

There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong, and it probably wouldn’t work. But I think people are still yet to truly understand that, if things proceed as normal, Trump is going to be the nominee. Making sure he’s not would require meeting Republican voters where they are, instead of continuing to wish they were something else.

I can’t believe this shit. The front running candidate is probably going to be in jail on election night, and the challengers are scrambling to find an angle of attack. It’s right in front of you ya imbeciles.

It’s right in front of you ya imbeciles.

What good is hammering Trump for being the victim of obviously politicized prosecutions?

According to supposed experts interviewed in radio shows I listen to, these court cases proceed so slowly that Trump will very much not be behind bars as of the upcoming presidential election.

You may well not buy it, but many of the people that will be voting in Republican primaries (me included) regard prosecution of Trump as a purely political act and jailing him would increase my likelihood of voting for him. This may sound insane to you, but consider what your position is on leaders that have been made into political prisoners. Should the people on the same side as the political prisoner attack him and embrace the regime, or are they in a bit of an awkward position?

Look, I get it. The prosecution seems unfair and you want to struggle against it and fight back. Here’s the problem:

It’s a trap

They want you to vote for him in the primary. You really think the best case they can come up with is misreported hush money payments to his mistress? No. They’re hoping the Republican base bets all their political capital on Trump, secures him the nomination, and then they’re going to drop the hammer and make Republicans look like treasonous buffoons for supporting the guy again instead of adopting any meaningful policy platform.

You don’t have to throw Trump under the proverbial bus (like he did to his supporters on January 6), you just have to not nominate him to be the Republican candidate for President of the United States.

EDIT: Well well how the turntables. I suspect that these charges are at least legally sound, if not "fair". The argument that, "Everyone does it. These felony charges are bullshit." would be a lot stronger if we didn't all see over the last 8 years how differently Trump acts from normal politicians. You don't have to nominate this guy. DeSantis can run on an, "I'll pardon Trump, but he shouldn't be president," platform.

You really think the best case they can come up with is misreported hush money payments to his mistress? No.

Actually, yes. They didn't come up with anything better in 2016 or 2020, why would they suddenly become good at muckraking now?

They’re hoping the Republican base bets all their political capital on Trump, secures him the nomination, and then they’re going to drop the hammer and make Republicans look like treasonous buffoons for supporting the guy again instead of adopting any meaningful policy platform.

I don't believe anything the swamp creatures tell me, they're not going to make themselves more credible by being more lurid.

Obviously. I'm currently hoping for DeSantis. But the Democrats are having Trump arrested and indicted, banana-republic style, to try to get Trump as the primary challenger. If it works, I can only hope it works so well it propels him through the general election as well, in which case whatever retribution Trump is able to dish out will be 100% deserved.

Listen, I’m all for the American electorate switching to effective candidates instead of the loudest ones. That’s not going to happen because of some nebulous kompromat. Why wouldn’t they have deployed it in the first election? Or the impeachments, or the second election, or the three-ring circus of hearings after the Capitol riot. That last one is the closest we’re going to get to “dropping the hammer.”

I've got to say, the idea that there are some powers that be that actually have the goods and they're just waiting for the right moment to spring them is the most Muellerpilled take I've heard in quite some time. My alternative explanation would be that the reason the actual charges look pathetic and political is because the only available charges are pathetic and political.

the goods

These don't have to be some new case; it just has to be enough drip-drip-drip of legal proceedings, bureaucratic reports, and other assorted smears to convince "independents" to vote Biden instead of MAGA. (Oh by the way, Alvin Bragg has set Trump's goofy-ass Stormy Daniels trial for early 2024. Oh by the way, Jack Smith, the Mar-a-Lago documents special counsel also will be releasing a report justifying his charging decisions, and I'll bet any amount of money you care to name it'll be at a politically-advantageous time).

The Democrats' goal here is not really to have Trump executed or whatever; it's to get and keep power so they can push their policies and reward their friends. The point of persecuting Trump is that the Dems can use his unpopularity among their base as a pinata for heightened turnout numbers and negative press about the GOP they can wave in the faces of status-conscious moderates and independents. They also happen to get the perverse side benefit that the more they target Trump, the more popular he gets with the core GOP base, locking them into a candidate who the Dems are confident they can beat.

I understand why this is viscerally frustrating - the Dems are pulling a lot of really nasty lawfare stunts on Trump (though he is also bad at avoiding unforced errors and bad at defending himself), and it feels extremely wrong to abandon him and let them get away with it. But tactically it is playing into the Dem's hands more than a bit.

It's an uphill battle to manage to attack him while not managing to keep yourself firmly out of being perceived as part of the outgroup. Attacking Trump needs to be in ways that don't look like you're left-leaning, and the past 8 years have immunized Trump to whole classes of attacks, as they're often considered (not necessarily unjustifiably) to be politically motivated, and maybe lacking substance.

Attacking Trump for his legal troubles is a sure way to lose the Republican primary.

I don’t think “he’s a loser, and he deserves to be in jail for being a pathetic loser who failed so badly his enemies could send him to jail” is a terrible argument. But agreed, it’s probably above the median GOP primary voter.

I think given how closely Trump's supporters have identified with his rhetoric, attacking Trump's legal cases would amount to alienating some sizable chuck of his constituency.

The legal issues related to Trump don't seem particularly troubling. Trump has always been in a legal gray area with stuff like the Russia investigation, but Mueller cleared Trump of collusion when most of the media thought he would go down for sure. Counting on a legal issue to bring down Trump seems like a bad bet unless he does something particularly egregious.

I might be surprised, and this could turn into the speediest trial ever, but I'm guessing this is unlikely to end up in a conviction quickly enough to "bring Trump down", at least in terms of preventing him from getting the nomination. However, what is the argument for the various indictments swaying folks who would have otherwise voted for him? With the NY indictment, paying off a porn star for an affair was already baked in to at least his 2020 results, so that part won't do him much worse (and that election was quite close). The actual business records/campaign finance charges are ticky tack, strained, and at best barely technically supported. Regular Joe is barely going to be able to understand what the big deal is supposed to be. With this latest indictment, I think a lot revolves around, frankly, demographic change. 2016 was eight years ago. Most rightists who were politically mature back then are going to remember "but her emails" and remember how the narrative shifted on classified information and prosecuting political candidates, so it might not shift them much.

...and right as I was about to write the next sentence, I had a change of direction. I was going to say that Republicans are still more traditionally pro-nat-sec/military/etc. and would be more concerned about classified information. It would make sense politically that this issue would have more of a chance to sway some of those folks. However, I realized as I was writing the above, that the older righties will likely remember the "but her emails", and while the younger righties might not remember, they're generally much more skeptical of the nat-sec/military/etc., uh... "industrial complex". They grew up on the narratives of Assange and Snowden and think that a lot of that is bullshit anyway. So, maybe it won't really sway any of the right's voters, but perhaps for different reasons.

I might be surprised, and this could turn into the speediest trial ever, but I'm guessing this is unlikely to end up in a conviction quickly enough to "bring Trump down", at least in terms of preventing him from getting the nomination

My question here is, even if they pulled it off, could it backfire if Trump went full Prisoner 9653 for President?

The media in no way was some innocent or indifferent spectator, or had any impartial interest in the case. 'Russiagate' was a media driven campaign that was false, and people on the inside, in particular those like Rachel Maddow knew they were peddling bullshit from the get-go.