In a twist that will shock nobody with even a minimal attention span, the most recent “Trump said” (“Trump told Russia to attack a NATO country”) turned out to be a lie.
I wonder if the anti-Trump people realize how many Trump supporters aren’t that into Trump but simply are appalled and disgusted by this endless stream of lies. The only reasonable conclusion a person can reach when seeing all this prevarication is, “ah, if every criticism of Trump is a lie, then the truth must be that you don’t have any real criticisms. If you did, you wouldn’t have to invent all these stories.”
And the reason why nobody can express any real criticisms of Trump is that all of his mistakes are being repeated by the Democrats but to a much larger extent. As a result, we are stuck in this cycle of lies on top of more lies, and with each one more people get disaffected and decide to vote not so much for Trump but against the dishonesty of his detractors. For me this started with “Trump mocked a disabled journalist” lie all the way back in 2015. I thought, “hey, of this is untrue, then I wonder what else is.” It turned out that it was all untrue. Every single “Trump says” scandal. Trump has many defects but they are all the opposite of what we are constantly told.
Clarissa's Blog 
“many Trump supporters aren’t that into Trump”
The political culture of the US is so degraded that he’s all that’s holding it together. I’m reminded of the case of a family with a schizophrenic member. When the schizophrenic member started to get better the family started to dissolve…. so he stopped treatment because the family could only function if he was very, very sick….
If Biden disappeared tomorrow…. who’d even notice? I can’t think of a single high profile figure in either party, apart from Trump who would leave any kind of unfilled gap.
His public outrage-generating statements and the response are all that either side has. Neoliberalism isn’t really about generating or acting on ideas and the more neoliberal the political system gets the more vacuous and inconsequential the figures operating within it will become.
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That’s a really apt analogy. Trump is our national bête noire that unites us in a shared feeling.
This is a good thing. It means we want to be linked. We want to keep the family together.
I didn’t think of it this way but it’s a very good insight.
You are smart, dude, as my daughter would say.
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In SA, the president mostly just tells people what they want to hear. This is very difficult to counter since most people aren’t interest in hearing how things really work, and the current system is working great for elites.
https://dailyfriend.co.za/2024/02/11/we-know-how-to-undo-the-ancs-disastrous-policies/
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This article could be written about the US if you do a context search for proper nouns. This, for instance: “Most South African children have appallingly low levels of literacy, and maths and science, thanks entirely to deliberate ANC policy.”
In the state of Illinois, there are many schools where exactly zero students are proficient in reading and math. Zero. This is the result of several decades of “anti-racist”, “equity-based” policies.
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Well-spotted.
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Anyone else here remember those halcyon (or Halcion?) days during the Reagan regime when James Watt would shoot his mouth off?
That infamous description of four people in his Department of the Interior … know it?
If Clarissa is unaware of it, I’ll merely state that you will have found it when you also find the follow-on: “And we have talent”.
The scandal back then was a Republican appointee talking DEI back in the 1980s before anyone had a term that helped to normalise it.
Back then the prevailing view, especially within the GOP, was to promote meritocracy.
And so the real scandal roughly 40 years since James Watt is that political discourse has become a fake meritocracy of loudly expressed banal sentiments that do not even rise to the level of an opinion.
The only reason I can see for supporting Trump would be that it brings about the likelihood of the disestablishment and tribunal phases that much harder.
As for the modern day Talleyrand, the guillotine of the future will be an electromechanical hybrid … powered by nuclear energy, of course. :-)
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Trump WIN ’24/47.
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