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In a way I think Gass’s response is somewhat rational. If you truly believe that Trump is a unique threat to our political system, why wouldn’t you want him assassinated?
I think there is also some meat here in that if Trump had been assassinated, most of the rest of the GOP would just have adopted his policy positions but dispensed with the insane hysteria and backlash Trump the Character generates. You don’t have to be Trump to win this election and maybe even the next election when the democrats are this incompetent. Trump ideas packaged in a more media and PMC-friendly face would be a political juggernaut, I think.
Hot take but it might have been better for people who believe in his platform for him to have actually been assassinated. Not only would it give the platform a sympathetic halo but let’s be honest here that Trump the Character is uniquely toxic for American politics. His job is done, he’s stamped the GOP in his image and realigned them, but I think his personality is holding them back at this point.
The whole point of the Trump era is that literally no one else would touch those ideas, because the media meaning-making machine made them anametha. You could not be anti-illegal immigration or anti-NATO or whatever without inherently drawing earth-shattering criticism. This is why no one else tried it. You have to pass through the wall of overwhelming media coverage, hostile donors funding every manner of opposition, prosecution, lawfare, and pushback. Literally no one else would do this.
Exactly, expressing the idea that maybe unlimited immigration from absolutely anywhere, or unlimited free trade from absolutely anywhere are not unalloyed goods is, or was, outside the overton window regardless of who said it. Anyone who would express it would have gotten the same treatment. Trump noticed a majority of people still largely held that opinion even if they could not express it, saw an opportunity there, so he went and stood outside the window, drawing all the aggro to him. And since he's a legendary tank, to keep the MMORPG allegory going, he's somehow doing fine, and now the overton window is a bit wider than it was before. Outside of the specifics of his first and presumed second presidency, of whether he's too pro-Israel or too close to Russia, or of whether he's capable of wielding the executive bureaucracy effectively, at least his ability to take the slings and arrows is unmatched, and his forceful widening of the overton window was probably a necessary first step for any actual move to the right (or neutralisation of leftward drift).
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The GOP was ready to fold after 2012. It's unclear that anyone without the independent profile of Trump (and the catnip it represented for the mainstream media) would have gotten the same attention for swimming against the tide like that.
A less agreeable person, or someone more beholden to the donors and party might have ended up like Bernie or Cruz, even with the same policies.
That said, now that you have people like Tucker and Vivek and Vance maybe the movement no longer has need of Mohammed.
IMHO this is a crucial period for whether an America first ruling principle takes root, or it doesn't. Trump needs the mandate of heaven and four more years to cement his legacy. Otherwise, as amazing as Tucker, Vivek or Vance may be, they will be relegated to cult crank status like Ron and Rand Paul. Sure, a Freedom Causus exist, and even has some extremely marginal influence in outcomes on the fringe, but otherwise completely feckless no matter how obviously correct they are, or how much their fans really truly love them.
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This is preposterous. The GOP never gave up trying to stick the knife in Trump's back, along with his policies. They starved MAGA candidates of support in the midterms, and hung that failure around Trump's neck. During his administration his own Republican appointees passive aggressively hamstrung much of his MAGA agenda, often to the jeers of the liberal media who greatly enjoyed writing headlines like "Even the Republican appointed judge/bureaucrat/cabinet member agrees that Trump shouldn't secure the border/pull out of Afghanistan/etc". And even up to this convention, major Republican donors and top party members were hoping to hang some albatross like Nikki Halley around his neck as VP.
The GOP is treating MAGA like an insurgency they must defeat just the same as they treated the Tea Party during the Bush and Obama years. If Trump were killed they'd make public mouth sounds about how terrible it is, and they will embrace Trump's winning agenda moving forward, and then they will quietly return to losing on every major issues their base cares about like it was 1996 again.
One of the big reasons Vance won his Senate seat at all was because McConnell drowned Ohio in NRSC money.
You're stuck in the same oppressor-oppressed mental dynamic the Left has. Trump is the GOP right now. All of the party establishment positions are filled with his people. Pretty much everyone who ever opposed him speaks glowingly of him at the Convention (or they've left the party).
Stop playing the victim.
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Don't assume this is a consensus feeling. It is absolutely not.
What does "toxic" mean? I hear it all over the place. "Toxic masculinity," "Toxic work environment," "Toxic relationship." But what does it mean besides "bad ++" ?
What makes something toxic in my mind is the idea that it spreads. One person being a dick at work can lead to people being more likely to act that way and everything gets dragged down.
I don't think so. That would be 'virulent'. 'Toxic' is immediately poisonous at point of contact. It damages others directly. Probably it's closer to 'dysfunctional' with overtones of 'makes it difficult for others to function well'.
But mostly, like 'fascist', it's just 'things the left doesn't like', so yeah, doubleplusbad.
I understand that’s not the literal meaning of the word toxic. I’m merely observed it seems to be used when the behavior drags other people down. I’ve definitely found myself behaving in ways I don’t like in what most would call a “toxic” workplace for instance. If it were up to me that wouldn’t be the word used.
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People use the word in a political context to mean both things. I've heard phrases like "David Duke is toxic to the republican party", which is more or less your framing (and the traditional one), but I think Tacherus is using it in the more colloquial and current way. It's what I thought of first, and I believe what most millenials and younger mean most of the time. With this connotation, a "toxic" friend is not bad because they are a bad person, in fact they might have a few really good qualities that you love, but the worry is that overall they rub off on you or interact with your life in a way that is harmful and spreads and you think you're better off without them. In other words, it's possibly a two-way street, but most of the time it's more the notion of entanglement and prompting negative reinforcement loops/patterns.
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I take toxic to mean "bad in a way that encourages people to relate to each other in increasingly unpleasant ways".
If someone shouts "Fuck you!" and walks away, that's rude. But it's not "toxic" in the sense that it's not a part of an ongoing relationship that's being degraded into ever higher levels of spite and resentment.
Seems like it takes two (or more) to tango in the land of "toxic." Is this correct?
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