this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2025
58 points (93.9% liked)
United States | News & Politics
2320 readers
1418 users here now
Welcome to [email protected], where you can share and converse about the different things happening all over/about the United States.
If you’re interested in participating, please subscribe.
Rules
Be respectful and civil. No racism/bigotry/hateful speech.
Post anything related to the United States.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So, establishment Republicans,who everybody hates, including most right leaning voters, made sure everybody understood that they hate Trump. Gosh, that almost seems like something that could backfire.
Being hated by the political establishment is Trump's entire brand. Americans loathe the political establishment. Were it not for Trump's bungling of COVID, he would have won with Biden's help in 2020. People thought I was crazy to say we might ultimately wish he had won, but I think it's pretty clear now that it would have been better.
If attacking Trump was going to help Democrats, it would have happened a long time ago. For a lot of voters it might as well be an endorsement. All the worst things Trump actually did in his 2016 term were standard Republican shit. Biden should have called that out and tied them to each other. Trump is an anchor on establishment Republicans, and establishment Republicans are an anchor on Trump. That's how you use narrative to win elections. Voters don't work the simplistic way Democrats seem to believe.
Yes. We certainly do loathe Traitorapist Trump and his billionaire oligarch clique.
I don't contest that Trump is an oligarch. Whether he is part of the establishment is (or rather was) a matter of definition. If, by establishment, we mean the specific cliques that run the two party system, then he was an outsider. He had the cash to run in their circles, but they despised him. Thus came Hillary's "pied Piper" strategy to encourage the media to pay attention to Trump in the Republican primary. She never even dreamed he could beat her in the general.
If we are being more general and referring to both the moneyed and political establishment then, yeah, he has always been establishment. He might not have been allowed to sit at the establishment cool-kids table, but he was one of them.
Still, none of that is relevant to his brand. He successfully positioned himself as an outsider breaking through the walls of power. That's what has made him so politically invulnerable. The more the political establishment and their talking heads talk about how bad Trump is, the more voters liked him. The list of things that Trump did or said that would have destroyed an establishment politician is a mile long but, in every case, it helped him.
Traitorapist Trump is by far the most "insider" there is in the GOP right now. And also its chief oligarch.
He has successfully positioned himself as a pathological liar in a party that has loved dishonesty for many decades. He has successfully positioned himself as a fascist in a party that increasingly despises democracy and freedom. He has successfully positioned himself as a dumbass in a conservative movement that has been anti-science for centuries, opposing not just climate change but evolution and the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun and that the Earth is round and not flat. All Trump did was figure out how decadent and depraved the GOP had become before others did and got in front of it.
Trump is the most despised politician in the history of America. Ordinary Americans hate Traitorapist Trump way more than any "political establishment" ever did. The Baby Trump balloon and the Naked Trump statue weren't created by any "political establishment". What you are really saying is that a certain class of voters LIKE TO BE LIED TO by politicians, and LIKE POLITICIANS WHO ARE CRIMINALS, and WANT POLITICIANS TO BECOME MORE CORRUPT than they were before Trump.