Y'all keep acting like "but that's not rational" is any kind of defense and then getting salty when the other side refuses to see reason. The whole party - the entirety of conservative political thought - is here's how you should feel about this. In looking for the New York Times quote I want, I discovered that the editorial board used some variance of "America is governed by laws and norms and Trump doesn't care about norms" like four times. I'll go deeper than that - Liberals believe "norms" should be whatever changes to culture they've managed to win while Conservatives believe "norms" are the things they've recently lost. The Russia watchers like to point out how negotiations with Russia have gone since the time of the Tsars: (1) Offer something reasonable (2) Russia demands the stars (3) Offer something with serious concessions (3) Russia demands the Moon (4) offer something with unreasonable concessions (5) Russia accepts, calls you a patsy for negotiating like such a simp, signs your document and then pisses on it five years later. It's a fundamental tenet of Chinese culture: you don't have to honor contracts with dogs because they are dogs, and by "dogs" they mean anyone who isn't Han Chinese. And yet here we are, pointing at Lucy and insisting she pulled the fucking football. Again. The only way this changes is with people going "no mas tequila". You're not going to argue anyone out of the Republican Party. They have to detox. And every indication is that they are: every poll I've seen is big on how self-professed Republicans are 100% on board with this shit but self-professed Republicans are an endangered species. I've recently strapped on Invisible Hands. It's aiiight. At this point these books have to be pretty fuckin' out there to teach me new shit. One thing Kim Phillips-Fein's book makes clear, however, is that the New Deal existed because of the groundswell uprising of a "we're sick of your shit" coalition of people who rarely voted before, rarely got politically involved, and were hell-bent on knocking the crony capitalists out of office. David Simon recently wrote that we're having to fight every 20th Century battle over again; he's not wrong, but he neglects to note that the overwhelming majority of the country is pretty content with this shit being settled. Kind of a bad mood to be taking money from Harlan Crow in, if you know what I mean. McDonald’s “data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end,” says former US Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “We saw this in 2018 when Republicans lost the House; we saw it in 2020 when they lost the presidency and the Senate, and we saw it in last year when Republicans were supposed to have big gains in both chambers and [did not]. All of these failures can be attributed to Trumpism. These data just confirm what is visible to the naked eye.”
It’s pretty fascinating that Republican sentiment about the Court has taken a nose dive, as well. I guess it’s because they said that treaties with Indians are still treaties and that, no, you can’t just let state legislators just say that republicans win…you have to disenfranchise the old fashioned way, but even that has its limits. All things that can only be read as “liberal” in the most bizarro of worlds. It’s hilarious to read the WSJ comments screaming about Karl Rove, John Roberts and Christopher Wray being RINOs.