this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I take your point, but Trump is the culmination of 40 years of austerity, wealth inequality, and dog whistling. To extend the visual metaphor, we first noticed the ship listing during Trump, but we'd been taking on water since Reagan.
we were taking the ship apart before trump causing it to sink while others tried to fix it but under trump he is trying to get rid of the water by drilling as many holes as he can so it can drain out.
It was all about shifting the Overton window. The establishment, corporate Republicans realized that if they just go a little farther and pull from the full on Nazi side that the middle would be very close to what they actually want.
The thing about creating a movement like that is that you bring on True Believers, and it becomes hard to tell the difference. They didn't intend for that contingent to actually drive, but they paved the path and all :shocked Pikachu: when he grabbed the wheel.
I still hold that he gets absolutely nowhere without Putin's help. I watched r/the_donald from the start. It was a brilliant demonstration of the mix of humor and censorship as propaganda.
Yeah, more or less. I don't think the Republican elites ever disagreed with the racist resentment politics they'd been peddling, but they intended them to be a means to enact tax breaks for the wealthy and wage wars. They never expected the base to elect someone who made racism the focus.
Not sure I agree. Russian interference certainly helped, but the economic conditions in the country are ripe for fascism. He might have won without foriegn interference, and if he didn't, we might be facing a more popular, more competent fascist right now.