I think, I have identified Trump's biggest political nemesis.

[DetlefK]

It's the republican voter.

Nonononono. Wait. Think about it.



It started with the Tea Party. They were "economically anxious" that a black man was now in the White House.

The GOP took that "anxiety" and whipped their voters into an extremist, partisan frenzy to pilfer them for votes and donations. (There are numerous tales of Tea Partiers being scammed by fellow Republicans.)

Soon, anybody who wasn't extremist enough in the GOP lost their primary-races. The surviving GOP-politicians where either full-on racists or spine-less, power-hungry, amoral opportunists willing to say anything.



Now there's President Trump. With a democratic-controlled House, he was finally boxed into a situation where he has to make more policy than writing headlines and catchphrases.

Trump must negotiate something, somehow. The Republicans must negotiate something, somehow.

But they can't.

As soon as Trump and the Republicans move away from their extremist positions, those very same republican voters will punish them for not being pure enough. Because the GOP has taught them that anybody who isn't pure enough must be punished.






https://www.axios.com/government-shutdown-daca-green-cards-jared-kushner-e438872b-af64-4675-81d5-6a8bdde6b62f.html

"Trump can withstand Ann Coulter. He can't lose Hannity and the rest," the senator said.

[saidsimplesimon]

1. The entire Republican party is headed over a cliff. imo

[olegramps]

10. I hope that you are right. It has been a disaster dating from Nixon's criminal enterprise.

[Dave in VA]

15. How can I help push

in order to speed this up?

[saidsimplesimon]

33. Dave,

It's a slow motion train heading down a slope, off the rails, no help needed at this point, other than to rescue the survivors.

[PatrickforO]

20. Let's hope so.

These people are slime. They seem to want to tear down everything as opposed to governing.

But if you tear it down, what will you replace it with?

As our faith in the institutions that support our society and our government is systematically shaken by Trump and his wreckers, burners, liars and haters, I cannot but wonder what hideous monstrosity will arise from the ashes.

[DownriverDem]

23. How long?

Will we be in shutdown until 2020?

[Yeehah]

27. I've been saying that ever since they nominated AWOL Bush

There's too many stupid people in this country and the republi-nazi party will be a bane for many years.

[sharedvalues]

2. Hannity, Fox, Limbaugh control the Republican Party and Trump

[Initech]

29. Hannity's head is so far up Trump's ass that he can feel the next Big Mac being digested!

And I'd hate to be on either end of that!

[JHB]

3. Started long before the teabaggers...

Conservatives, including every "NeverTrumper" who made a career of Republican messaging or conservative media, have spent some 40 years building that base, the one that's so hypervigilant for "betrayal" and primed to punish any backsliders.


They scare-mongered and scandal-mongered and played to all the bigotries and pet peeves, and called it "playing hardball". They wanted to get conservative Republicans elected, and there was no part of that job that involved "dialing it back." They painted Democrats as supervillains: utterly-corrupt, moral degenerates out to destroy the nation and all that's good and holy to get their voters all hot-blooded and into the voting booth.

But the drawback is: When you paint the story that way, it's supposed to end with you bringing the bad guys to justice. They rot in jail, or better yet get hanged or fried. Blow up the Death Star. Drop the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. The Enemy surrenders unconditionally and their symbols get blown up.

Your audience wants this:

But they never get it.


When you tell that story for decades, continually amping it up despite its blatant falsehood, you create an expectation that you can never really deliver on. You can justify decades of investigations and re-investigations and re-re-re-re-re-re-re-investigations, but that's not going to hold up in court. So you put yourself into the position of portraying the other side as unbearably evil and an active threat, and then don't do anything about it. The base still has their hot buttons pushed, still believes every word of it, they just start thinking you're ineffectual at best, or more likely are part of the problem.

Conservatives have purposely whipped up this extremist frenzy to give them the margin of victory. They've been punishing any Republican who didn't fall in line since the 70s when they started ousting Rockefeller Republicans.

Just because the foam is whipped up to new levels of frothiness doesn't mean we should lose sight of the fact that they've been whipping it up for so long that what counts as "whipped up" keeps getting redefined.

[Whiskeytide]

4. Incredibly well said. That's it in a nutshell. n/t

[underpants]

6. ✅

Well said.

[cab67]

9. it's starting to really hamstring Republicans.

Politicians always have to walk a tightrope between the primary and general elections. The base is always somewhat further to the right or left than the party as a whole, but they're more likely to vote in the primaries, so candidates usually try to appeal to the base for the primary and then moderate their positions a bit for the general election.

The Republican base has been moving further and further to the right since Nixon. This worked well (especially between around 1990 and 2012), but by now, it's so far to the right that moderation for the general election is very hard.

They're stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't win their primaries without the base, but they have a much harder time winning general elections with it. I think this is part of what caused their collapse in the 2018 midterms.

For those of us who like schadenfreude, it's actually gratifying to see.

[Whiskeytide]

13. Traditional political science theory and conventional wisdom...

... support what you’re saying here. And I have always agreed with it.

BUT - trump defied it. He NEVER shifted back to the middle after winning the primary. Instead he pushed his rhetoric even more to the far right. And he AND his party won. Bigly.

Backlash against a successful black president;
Gerrymandering;
Mass communication conditioning via fox/AM radio;
Flipped votes;
Russian/Saudi interference;
Defunded education system;

And ... let’s face it ... A lot more of us are assholes than we thought...

There are dozens more “reasons”.

But, fundamentally, something has shifted on our political landscape. Their numbers analysis on their base against the general election is working for them. They figured out that most republicans will NEVER vote for a Dem due to tribalism. They have the moderate conservative votes no matter what. Then they realized that there was a whole underground of disengaged racist assholes out there that could be whipped up into a frenzy. They tapped into that. You combine those two groups, along with evangelicals (who generally fall into one of those two groups anyway), and you get just enough electoral college votes to win.

It’s a scary time when you think about the next few election cycles. I suspect it’s going to get a lot harder to predict what’s going to happen.

[Texin]

17. Well, because tRump faced no negative consequence for his rabid, extreme rightism.

Because he had impunity to stoke the racial and ethnic hatred on the right, its constituents felt emboldened to act on their extreme beliefs. Observing the consequence of this is a akin to watching a physical melee in a madhouse.

[Whiskeytide]

22. I certainly forgot to include...

... a complicit media as one of the reasons as well. It was supposed to be their job to vet a candidate like trump, but they failed miserably. Ratings rule.

But you’re exactly right. The normalization of his behavior is perhaps the worst consequence in the whole shit show.

[cab67]

26. I don't disagree.

But the Orange One's victory owed much to the Electoral College system. His team was able to plot a strategy that targeted the right disaffected groups in the right states to ensure a victory.

State elections are different. I completely agree that the results of the 2018 midterms arose from a lot of factors, but the increasing gap between the base and everyone else was one of them.

[scarytomcat]

14. that is why they have resorted to cheating

all of their tricks to get elected backed by big money
they know the numbers are against them

[olegramps]

11. Excellent commentary.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. +1 and +1 to the OP. . . . nt

[2naSalit]

16. +1

[calimary]

18. Yes. Since the 1970s. They've been building this since the Powell Memo came out.

It was Lewis Powell, high-profile attorney/later Supreme Court justice, who was commissioned by the head of the US Chamber of Commerce to write up a guide to a better America through unfettered business forces.

No regulations, or as few as possible. Massive strategic MESSAGING - designed and aggressively pushed by a carefully (and intentionally)-built, nurtured and lavishly funded CONservative infrastructure: an ARMY of right-wing pro-business institutions, think tanks, fellowships, and CONservative foundations, AND delivery systems, like new kinds of friendly media outlets.

They built havens for their own influencers: “thinkers” and “experts”, and “credible” and “legitimate” platforms for people who wrote editorials and position papers to spread the Gospel of CONservatism to an unsuspecting and naive general public and malleable policy-makers; and groom spokespeople and upcoming apostles who could fan out over the American media landscape like a cancer to spread this worldview even farther. Like invading platoons, attacking ALL THINGS LIBERAL-LEANING. By any means available. And if there were none, then such should be constructed.

It was in reaction to what the business community viewed as an assault against them and their perceived dominance by what they saw as a rabble that had been agitating for progressive change, like civil rights, women’s rights, students’ rights, workers’ rights, voters’ rights, renters’ rights, and gay rights since the 1960s. The CONservative business establishment and its friends in government found this to be tremendously threatening to their own sense of Dominion Over All. They didn’t like this revolutionary leveling of the playing field (THEIR playing field) so “the little guy” had a bigger place at the table (THEIR table).

They didn’t like all this social change. And they wanted something done about it:

http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/

[Hermit-The-Prog]

21. needs to be read and understood by all

[ooky]

25. Indeed, Powell provided the blueprint, Buchanan was the architect.

Here's another great read for people tracing the roots of the conservative movement.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/

[Whiskeytide]

28. Great post. What concerns me is that there are fewer and fewer ...

... people who understand the significance of what you're posting here. We who witnessed it are aging out. No one is teaching it in schools (not accurately). Anyone who wants to dig it out of the internet is just as likely to run down one of their rabbit holes instead - the truth has simply been buried in all the noise.

They're not going away. They have massive influence, nearly unlimited resources, and a very effective delivery system. They are essentially preying on society, and will continue to do so until society collapses. The alien scientists that study our fossil record 10,000 years from now are going to have to learn how to say "What the fuck?"

[Hermit-The-Prog]

19. well done!

The cult is in the danger zone after being under a positive feedback loop for decades. Something is bound to blow up.

[Rabrrrrrr]

24. splendid analysis.

[calimary]

32. The really sad added point to what you posted here

Is being reminded of something I read about trump. That he kept a copy of Mein Kampf by his bedside.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-adolf-hitler-books-bedside-cabinet-ex-wife-ivana-trump-vanity-fair-1990-a7639041.html

[The Wizard]

5. The politics of elimination

will turn into sharks on a feeding frenzy, eventually devouring each other into extinction.

[Moostache]

7. This is why we MUST hold the line on Trump's shutdown

No quarter can be given to terrorists who take hostages and make demands without conscience, period.

If the Democratic Party caves on this expect non-stop use of shutdowns forever by the GOP...once they know something works for them, they never stop trying to exploit it.

No $ for a wall or anything else with a closed government.

[underpants]

8. For the "perception is reality" crowd the MAGA hat is a nightmare

The Parkland murderer - MAGA hat
The bomb mailer living in a van - MAGA hat.

They've done a really good job at pushing those stories down or at least blurring them a bit.

Then the Covington boys - MAGA hats galore. They had to come out viscously fighting this. The optics were just too bad. Still that image for all but the full blown believers is etched forever. For all the talk about "the old days" and "pull your damn pants up" etc. the young punk being so clearly disrespectful to an old man was horrible for them. The spin machine and how effective it's been with their followers is chilling to witness but they've had control over their masses for quite a while.

[Honeycombe8]

31. Republicans show up to vote...and they vote Republican.

Even if they have to hold their noses. All those who didn't endorse or support Trump? They showed up on election day and voted for him. That's why Republicans win often.

They fall in line and vote the party...reliably. A lot of older voters are Republicans, and they vote reliably.