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I genuinely think this kind of activity is the way to increase Trump's popularity. There's no way he should be running for a second term, but right now he barely has to campaign because the media is doing it all for him and the actual party debates are being reduced to "this is only to decide who is gonna be his VP".
Ridiculous, but the mania over 'Orange Man Bad' really has led to this. He didn't put the gays in concentration camps, so why is he seen as such a threat to American democracy? And don't "Jan 6th!" at me, this kind of hysteria was in full flow before ever that happened. I have had to come to the conclusion that the rage was all over It's Her Turn Now - how dare anyone take the right, proper, and just transition of power away from the woman and the party destined to possess it in perpetuity? How dare some grubby populist overturn all the pundits who knew it could never, ever happen? And the fearmongering just got stoked higher and higher over the years.
There were warning signs before the 2016 election. At the time I didn't take them seriously, but someone who was better calibrated than me could have done, as could someone who was looking for excuses to hate on Trump. But with hindsight, I think it should have been obvious that Trump was more likely than most other Republicans to do January 6th.
Trump was a transgressive candidate - for many of his supporters, that was the whole point. The people who said that this transgressiveness was a threat to American democracy were right, for the right reasons - as confirmed by the events leading up to Jan 6th, even more so than by Jan 6th itself.
Immediately after the 2016 election, everyone knows that Trump is publically badmouthing America's democratic institutions. The Orange Man really is saying Bad things. The question is whether he means them, or whether this is just his schtik. "Orange Man Bad" and "Trump Derangement Syndrome" are memes used by the right (and by the centrist punditocracy which is on its last legs before finally being booted out after George Floyd ODs near a cop) to imply that taking him seriously is cringe. But Trump was serious.
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His contempt for democracy was already pretty evident before Jan 6th. Pre-Jan 6th anti-Trump feeling wasn't unjustified because Jan 6 hadn't happened yet; Jan 6 was Trump 'hysteria' being proven right! To embrace Godwin's law, this is the equivalent of saying that anti-Hitler sentiment was baseless before 1933 because it was only then that he was able to make any effective attack on democracy. People warned that Trump had no respect for democracy, and they were right. This was 2016;
This is trivially disproved by the number of people who hate Trump who also dislike Clinton, from the Democratic left to the Never Trump Republicans. The former is obvious but it's also true in the case of the latter; McMullin called Hillary 'terrible' in 2016, French wrote a piece in July 2016 harshly critical of Clinton on the emails and saying Comey should charge her etc. etc.
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