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This just clarifies the system is broken. We need Trump to expose all the flaws. Peoples eyes were shut before. Now we can have the election on lawfare.
It will get more people fired up to do something. Pick Desantis to be VP. He can be like Stringer Bell - your get shit done street boss.
That being said I got this case wrong. Somehow I thought we could find a hung jury.
Erm, can you clarify how this works?
The US needs Trump to 'expose all the flaws'... how exactly? What specifically does Trump do that another populist Republican couldn't?
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How so? It seems to be working just fine at what seems to me to be its primary purpose — keeping the Blue Tribe elite solidly in power, and protecting Our Democracy from the horrible populist threat of the voters getting what they vote for.
It seems to me that it's worth bearing in mind that Trump lost the popular vote both times. 'The populist threat of the voters getting what they vote for' doesn't seem like a good description of Trump, since both times he ran for office the popular majority was against him.
There are cases where I think you can convincingly point to a Blue elite stepping in to overrule the clearly-expressed democratic will of the majority - Proposition 8 is an ageing example but a good one - but Trump, a candidate who has never commanded majority support, seems like a bad example of one.
Politicians campaign under the system as it exists. If the popular vote elected politicians, Trump (and Hillary) would have campaigned differently, and Trump could very well have won the popular vote in 2016.
Sure, it's possible that in a different system the results might have been different - but then you'd be hanging a claim about what the voters want, or what the voters voted for, on a pure hypothetical.
Something I've tried to be very conscious of recently is the way that ideologues construct 'the public' or 'the people' or 'the voters' in ways that agree with them, but in the absence of convincing evidence about what the people actually want or believe. This can be a communist believing that everyone will support the revolution, or a MAGA person believing that Trump in some way represents the popular will, or the way postliberal texts like Regime Change are premised on the assumption that most people on some level support the author's politics.
This is often just not plausible. We have polling on Trump over time as well, including from when he was president. He never broke 50% approval, and right now he clearly does not enjoy anything like majority support.
Like I said, there are issues where I think you can show an elite class stepping in to overrule the democratically-expressed will of the majority. But Trumpism specifically isn't an example of that. Majority popular support is something the man does not have and has never had.
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