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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38168 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.

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.

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