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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38856 thread views

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.

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.

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