Well, I obviously don’t understand the Republican MAGA base as well as I thought I did. It seemed to me that “Vivek The Fake” had successfully positioned himself after the first debate to rocket into second place.
Whoopse!
As far as I can tell, there really hasn’t been any change in the standings. Everyone remains about 40 points behind malignant ding-dong Trump. This does not bode well for the country going forward. The Trump cult of personality is so absolute that not even dangling a younger, more organized Trump replacement that makes all the right people angry is enough to cause the MAGA base to give up on Trump.
So, at least at the moment, it seems that it’s going to be Trump V. Biden 2.0 in 2024, for better or worse.
Something Big would have to happen to change that, something so big and unexpected that it would be historic in its magnitude. At the moment, it seems as though the political forces are locked in and there’s no going back. Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee and either we have a civil war when he loses or we slide peacefully into autocracy when he wins. (Even though I talk lot about it, I just don’t think Blues have it in them to do any sort of Resistance Revolution if Trump wins in 2024.)
Anyway.
We’ll see I guess. But I will again say that late 2024, early 2025 is shaping up to be the most monetu span of time since between Election Day 1860 and Lincoln’s swearing in in 1861.
The American Left and Right continue recede from each other at an alarming rate. The Right is so consumed by the culture wars and “owning the libs” that they are oblivious to once were really big concerns for them. So, all the talk about how Trump added trillions to the national debt just don’t mean jack shit on a political basis.
And, of course, the Left doesn’t do itself any favors by fixating on the very things that alarm and enrage the Right (or, more specifically, the Centrists who win elections.) The Left screams at the top of their lungs about “protect trans kids” when, as far as I can tell, there aren’t really all that many trans kids to “protect.”
One thing that has to be noted is the thing that MAGA people love about Trump is he’s a fighter. He has no ideology other than ranting about, in the stupidest way possible — a pretty complex macro issue: a lot of white Christian (men) are enraged by what’s going on in America.
Trump’s “magic sauce” is he’s a fighter. White Christian (men) feel put upon for various reasons, disenfranchised and so they love the “idea” of Trump. They could care less about what he actually believes or does — hence they ignore all the trillions of dollars he added to the national debt.
Having said all that, it’s clear that Vivek Ramaswamy has figured out enough of Trump’s winning formula that I believe he is going to soon be the second place “placeholder” that will exist solely for the purpose of being the nominee should something happen to Trump to make no longer politically viable.
From the clips I’ve seen of Vivek, he seems like just the sort of guy that the MAGA base would love. He’s post-truth, makes people like me angry and alarmed and so there you go — Trump 2.0.
That’s the thing about Ron DeSantis — he totally misses the point of what attracts people to Trump. He thought that by running to the Right of Trump on culture war issues that he could at least by the guy the party turned to if something happened to the Dear Leader.
But DeSatanis is to weird, off-putting –and humorless — to pull it off. Vivek, at least, has a big goofy grin on his face all the time. And Vivek knows the MAGA base well enough to know that they just don’t care about issues. They see them as white noise.
All the MAGA base wants is to “own the libs.” They hate liberals so much that many of them can’t even use the word “liberal” for any fucking reason without getting fucking triggered.
This is a “not great” situation for a lot of reasons. But it’s the political world we live in at the moment and it’s only getting worse. The big unknown of all of this is, of course, how far things going to go? Are we going to reach a breaking point where we turn to political violence because our political system finally collapses?
That is a question I don’t have the answer to and worry about a lot. At the moment, it really could go either way. We could descend into civil war (Reds) / revolution (Blues) or we could simply slide peacefully into autocracy.
Last night, Vivek Ramaswamy gave off serious Trump 2015 vibes and I think the MAGA base is going to eat it up. The thing about Vivek is he has managed to come up with a viable way to stake out a position as a placeholder, backup plan in case something happens to Trump and he can’t the Republican nominee.
The key issue is that Vivek has a very Trumpian vibe that DeSantis can’t pull off. As such, I suspect that Vivek is going to surge in the polls pretty quick to the point that I don’t know if DeSantis is even viable anymore.
The key issue is smug Twitter liberals don’t “get” what MAGA wants and so they totally miss that Vivek taps into the same populist rage that Trump has used to great success.
There is issue of race, of course. Given how fucking racist most of the MAGA base is, it does make you wonder if they can look past the fact that he’s not white and not Christian. And, yet, any study of history will tell you that generally history takes the most ironic path possible.
As such, yes, of course Vivek has a real possibility of being what DeSantis thought he was going to be — Trump without Trump. Vivek is young and smart and yet also gives the populist base all the fucking fascism they they expect in a presidential candidate.
Vivek seems well verse in all the paranoid, bizzaro talking points that the MAGA to the point that I just don’t see DeSantis being a viable candidate anymore. The key thing that seperates Vivek from DeSantis is Vivek has, well, some sort of personality. It may be grating, but at least it’s a personality.
DeSantis, meanwhile, just seems…there.
Anyway, I just don’t think we should underestimate the potential power of Vivek going forward. That’s my hot take for the moment, at least.
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