Blackbeard

Not only that, but the clickbait media-sphere has slowly eroded "news" outlets to the point where they no longer cover things like "healthcare", "taxation", or "education". Now they cover polls, donors, polls, primaries, rallies, polls, conventions, polls, elections, exit polls, approval polls, disapproval polls, etc, pretty much non-stop from election to election. The incessant drone of horse race journalism is drowning out any even remotely meaningful coverage of actual things that are happening in people's lives. Long form and investigative journalism has been displaced by low effort politics-as-sport commentary.

Is there any wonder, then, how one of the major political parties was completely overtaken by a man who's singularly obsessed with "winning" against "losers"? We've been fed a 20-year diet of who-beats-who monotony, and all the actual issues in the country are glossed over as boring and irrelevant. They fed people non-stop infotainment, and then people fell in line behind a vapid, loud-mouthed reality TV billionaire.

I mean, you're not wrong. I think Trump's ascendancy represents the collapse of the neoliberal consensus of the late 20th century. Where we go from here is anyone's guess, but the fact that both the left and right are screaming about the evils of neoliberalism means that there's now a bipartisan coalition willing to dismantle the institutions that arose out of that consensus. It's a loose coalition, to be sure, and each wing is arguing for fundamentally different futures, but they're still targeting the same players, and new economic models are now en vogue and within the realm of possibility. Just sucks that one of them is outright fascism.

It's also worth noting that the Court here is saying states cannot impede the ability of the federal government to exist and function (pages 8-10). Consider that if a state were empowered to disqualify federal officers, then it could interfere with the ability of Congress to do its job on a fundamental level either by a) forcing Congress to remove the disqualification before state-run primaries and elections even began, or b) controlling the outcome of a federal election by tilting the Electoral College in their favor. McCulloch v. Maryland made clear that “States have no power...to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress”.

Imagine what Greg Abbott would do if we gave Texas the ability to dictate the outcome of federal elections. It would be absolute chaos.

The supreme court just ruled that either the 14th amendment somehow doesn’t apply to presidents, trump didn’t engage in insurrection, and/or Trump is just simply above the law.

That's quite literally not what they argued, even if you try to read it that way. You really should read the opinion before you tell people what it says.

edit: LOL! OP deleted the stupid argument and replaced it with one that sounds less stupid. My quote was lifted verbatim, and the stealth edit speaks volumes.

He's a fighter. He fights everyone, about everything. I think that's the crux of it.

Over the 1990s and 2000s these people were completely and utterly forgotten. Textiles, mines, manufacturing plants, they shuttered over and over and over and over again, and their children moved to big cities en masse. Their small cities and rural towns went from being on a growth trajectory (everything was on that trajectory between WWII and NAFTA) to being on a path to contraction and decay. Over that time they got madder, and madder, and madder, and madder, and they watched the Republican party (the one who at least paid lip service to "small government" and "traditional values") lean harder and harder into corporatism. They were promised good things over and over and over again, and they were constantly pandered to, then lied to, and then ignored. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Well, Trump was the first one who didn't talk, act, and think like the other guys. He wasn't a politician, and that's a great thing because (as they'd all come to agree) politicians are lying scum. So then not only was he willing to fight ferociously for them (and only them), he was willing to spit in the face of the people who lied to them all those years. And those political figures started to look like whiny little children when they stepped up and started saying, "hey, he's lying to you!" The voters' response was, "yeah? so the fuck what! you did too!"

He flips the system on its head, and he exposes politicians for what they are, because he's exactly like them but he doesn't give a fuck about playing the political game. To them, this is a godsend (literally). It's the first crack in the political system that gave them any kind of sustained, meaningful authority to push back both politically and culturally, and he delivered a court system that'll now push the entire country to the right over the next few decades. They simply don't care about the democratic institutions he's destroying, because they never helped the rural folk anyway.

Note: I don't personally agree with much of this nonsense, and I think it's a lot like shooting yourself in the face to cure a hangnail, but I'm just giving you a sense of how they look at it, and why he's so weirdly transcendent to them. He's a rich, connected insider, who decided to burn the system down from the inside.

It is time to reopen the mental institutions and throw them back in, along with the ACLU clowns who let them out to begin with.

My gods y'all say some legitimately evil shit sometimes.

True, but at the same time we have to remind ourselves that blindly following Trump hasn't really hurt them yet. Not in any real, tangible sense, that is. As far as they can tell, the economy felt pretty good while he was in office, lots of the democratic norms he trashed had no impact on their lives, and most of the negative consequences the left has warned about haven't yet materialized.

Covid "wasn't his fault", and all his crimes mostly amount to more political theater to them. Then when Biden took office two wars started, and illegal immigration skyrocketed. Even if none of that were his fault, he's easy to blame for it.

Even supporters of the Third Reich followed blindly for a while because it put them on a cultural pedestal and stabilized their economy (kinda). Even when they watched trains carry millions of Jews to their deaths, they still shrugged and kept believing things were at least on the right track. It wasn't until the fascist noose started closing around the necks of non-traditional enemies of the right, and until the hell of war showed up at their doorsteps, that they were shaken out of their slumber.

Trump simply hasn't backfired on them yet, and until he does, they'll continue to push the envelope into oblivion. I'm afraid he'll have to burn the whole thing to the ground before his supporters will realize what a terrible mistake they made. And by then, it will be too late to recover.

If we had a democracy in this country we wouldn’t have to give a shit what rich weirdos who live vastly different lives than most of us think.

You keep using that word. I do not think you know what that word means.

Gosh, I can't for the life of me figure out why progressives have such a hard time winning friends and influencing people....

Good for you. I know people whose very wealthy California family has been deeply connected to the Clinton apparatus for decades, and who are dyed-in-the-wool third way Democrats, and they have said they'd seriously consider Haley over Biden. It's amazing what kind of diverse people you encounter outside of social media echo chambers.

I wish she'd realize she does have leverage, even if it's not much. She could a) launch an independent bid or b) campaign for Biden in exchange for a cabinet position with him. Either way she'd become a MAJOR problem for the GOP, and I think it stands to argue she could effectively guarantee a Trump loss. The one caveat is that she'd have to agree to effectively turn her back on her party (which she says is committing suicide anyway), and I have absolutely no faith that she'll discover enough moral fortitude to ever do such a thing.

Worth noting that his successor will likely control the Senate come 2025, as Democrats have a snowball's chance in hell of holding it after Manchin retires.

edit: Not sure why y'all are knee-jerk downvoting a statement of fact that the 2024 Senate map is awful. Democrats would have to win all toss up races to keep 50 seats, so I'm not expressing some kind of personal judgment here, and downvoting doesn't make that truth go away. Do something more productive with your downvote fingers.