Woodbutcher wrote: ↑Sun Oct 29, 2023 11:43 pm
When Trump was first running for president, I was curious to see how he would act, so I watched him at one of his question and answer appearances. I was surprised to see and hear that he was the same twit as he was on the apprentice. He never answered factually to a question, instead dismissing it with a couple of sarcastic statements. The only time he spoke at length was when he was able to expound on how great he was. I couldn't believe it when he was elected! I thought people were more intelligent than that in The States, but apparently I was wrong.
Now, if elected, he will believe he can rule like his idols from North Korea and Russia. Any dissenters will be imprisoned or will have unfortunate accidents, and there will be monuments in his image and songs and poems recited in public schools and marketplaces, or else.
Trump and Bernie were making very similar noises: appealing to the squeezed middle classes with insecure jobs, mounting debt, and an overall falling standard of living. Both were talking about how the machinery of the state was broken, how it wasn't working for ordinary people - and hadn't been working for a long time. The Democrats went with somebody who represented the same-old-same-old, and so when Trump gained the GOP nomination he looked the only one who really understood middling just-making-do America.
But then Trump went on to place the blame for America's woes on Mexicans and Muslims, and easily punchable targets like that. Where Bernie might have turned his attention to structural matters, regulating the markets and the corps, taxing the asset-rich to support the public services ordinary people rely on, creating/strengthening democratic institutions etc, Trump did history'd biggest tax cut for corps and the rich, slashed public spending, and undertook an all-out assault on democracy. This only exacerbated the very issues on which he'd fought the election - and then he just ramped up the blame-game rhetoric accordingly. Now it wasn't just Mexicans and Muslims, it was antifa, and BLM, and the trans, and even though the GOP had control of all three branches of government it was the evil radical-left Democrats which were making everyone's lives harder than they needed to be.
Trump and other right-wing popularists are the natural consequence of post-2008 austerity politics, and their only real response is to blame the powerless to justify more of the same. Down here in the real world we know that things aren't working as well as they used to, that the systems we relied on to support and secure our communities are broken in a very real and fundamental way. that our kids are going to have a much much harder time of it that we did, but people who put their faith in the Trumps of this world are reluctant to accept that the messages they've been primed and triggered to respond to, and the values those stories represent, are exactly what's squeezing the life our of their communities and making their lives evermore chaotic and uncertain.
People are desperate enough now that even the cruelty of a police state seems like something worth thinking about, because they've been led to believe that being strong and hard and heartless is the only way to restore the old order, and that it will only be cruel, and hard and heartless to those that really deserve it - and they've already been relentless drilled about who's on the list of the people that need to be rounded up to make that happen.
So we might dismiss Trump as an profoundly unserious politician and a useless human being, but at least he has a story a lot of people can relate to, and a plan that appears to address the issue people are facing - even if it's coming from the same kind of self-entitled wealthy arseholes that deliberately created the conditions which gave birth to those problems in the first place.
