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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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pretty pathetic

DeSantis would be better inside the Trump tent. Not as VP, but as AG.

Trump, DeSantis and TBD VP campaigning together would be, the best campaign ever.

I don't think Trump as president for a second term would be a good idea, but yeah - the campaign is going to be amazing for the amount of frothing, sneeding and hysteria it will generate. The entertainment value alone will be fantastic.

I wonder who the Dems will run? Biden has definitely said he's going for the second term, will they break precedent and have an open contest for candidates instead of letting the sitting president have the second nomination uncontested? I think they're probably hoping Trump and DeSantis will attack each other so badly that neither of them will survive for the nomination and it'll be some nobody who they have a good chance of painting as "second coming of Hitler, no really we mean it" against Biden.

Hasn't the DNC already said no debates too? I can see why if Biden is the candidate, but still.

I'd like to see a Trump and DeSantis bromance. Like a mismatched Jack and Bobby.

I think they're probably hoping Trump and DeSantis will attack each other so badly that neither of them will survive for the nomination

LOL, do they expect a literal duel? Trump and DeSantis pummeling each other rhetorically won't reduce the chance that at least one of them gets the nomination.

Trump is almost guaranteed to appoint Ken Paxton as AG as a reward for his last minute attempt to change the results of the 2020 election.

If conservative policy victories are your priority, this is not bad news. He’s arguably more competent and more hardline than Desantis. He just happens to be unusually corrupt by the standards of American politicians.

Wouldn’t work. Trump’s ego is too big to work with genuinely competent people long-term. Same problem with Boris Johnson: ultimately he couldn’t bear to share the stage with Cummings. (Other problems too, but that was a biggie.)

If you want to work with good people, I think you have to be able to give public credit where it’s due, and you have to tolerate some genuine pushback from your advisors.

I have never been impressed by the claims for Dominic Cummings being Really, Really Smart and if, as by all accounts seems to be the case, he was relying on being Boris' Pal to get away with pissing off everybody else, including the electorate, then he should have known by BoJo's track record that it always came down to Number One for Boris and that he too would be thrown to the wolves when and as necessary.

He wasn’t that smart but he was certainly smarter than Boris.

Getting more general, I think that having a charismatic showman front for intelligent advisors is often proposed as the ideal combo but rarely works because the love of the spotlight that produces showmanship doesn’t allow you to recognise that your advisors know better than you.

Trump also needs Bannon as his chief of staff.