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In my bubble, all my Democrat friends went from fear and loathing and despair to a sudden surge of optimism. Now they think they can win again and they are all-in on Kamala, as if they've always loved her.
Me? I despise Trump. I think he was a bad president before and will be a bad president again. I cannot bring myself to vote for him.
I also cannot bring myself to vote for Kamala, and I might just not vote for the first time. Democrats actually think it's cute for the Harras campaign to be embracing the "Kamala is brat" meme? No, it is not cute. It's infantilizing and embarrassing. Harris is an unaccomplished nobody, but I don't really hold that against her, nor her alleged trading of sexual favors during her climb to power. Historically, most vice presidents have been also-rans picked for whatever advantage they are believed to offer during the campaign and for being relatively unobjectionable compromise options in the event that they become an "accidental president." Harris was picked for her demographic attributes and because people didn't really have strong feelings about her otherwise. What I hold against her is being an intellectual lightweight with a cringey demeanor. But more than that, what I hold against her.... is her followers.
I fucking despise the hivemind that has taken over almost all the social media spaces and groups I am in. "Trump is Hitler, if he becomes president it will be The End of All Things" (even though he was, and it wasn't), and there is just... no discussion. No debate. No disagreement. Just such smug self-righteousness.
I can't say I will be happy if Trump wins, and it's remotely possible Harris could convince me to vote for her in the next few months. (For Trump to convince me to vote for him, he'd pretty much have to stop being Trump.) But if Trump does win, I'm gonna buy me a big bowl of popcorn and enjoy me some schadenfreude.
I know these are not noble sentiments or sober political thinking. But damned if I won't enjoy watching some epic meltdowns.
I'm reminded of something a friend of mine said in the lead-up to the 2016 election. He was much further along the curve than me of what the MSM would probably call right-wing extremism, and what I would call anti-wokism. At the time I still clung to notions of "decency" in politics. But I asked him how he could vote for Trump. The man was a blithering idiot. He was crude, and he represented no right-wing values whatsoever. He had no political experience which meant his first term was doomed to failure. He had no ideological positions other than "democrats bad" for reasons which were unclear.
So my friend quoted Lincoln.
It is 2024. Trump is a blithering idiot. He is crude, and represents no right-wing values whatsoever. His lack of political experience meant his first term was doomed to failure from the start, and its failures will haunt his second. He holds no ideological positions other than "democrats bad" for reasons which I still do not understand.
But I cannot spare this man. He fights.
Fights for what? His own ego? I see what appears to me to be a lot of denial from right-wingers. From the evangelical Christians who convince themselves that Trump is sincere talking about how the Bible is his favorite book to the nationalists who think he's actually going to make America great again (remember "We're going to win so much you'll get tired of winning?"), it's all nothing.
The only real reason to vote for Trump seems to be "He makes my enemies really mad." And yes, he does that. I admit it, some of the people I despise having meltdowns over Trump winning is, as I said, not enough reason for me to vote for him but enough reason for me to have a dark place in my heart that chortles a little at the thought.
But to the degree he has any policies that appeal to me, I see no concrete plans or any reason to believe he can actually accomplish those things.
The things he said during the debate with Biden about curing cancer, restarting the space program, making our enemies respect us, and stopping illegal immigration sure sounded nice! Unfortunately, I believe he can do any of those things about as much as I believe that he reads the Bible every night.
It doesn't matter what for. He fights my enemies, and sometimes he beats them. I don't care if he fights for his own glory, his own ego, his name in the history books. I don't care if he fights for chocolate sprinkles on bananas. He fights. And when he fights, he forces others to fight with him. Before Trump the Great Republican Hopes were Romney and McCain. Both of whom died whimpering deaths on the blades of a media that hated them. Because Trump was willing to fight tooth and nail using every dirty trick the mainstream Republicans considered beneath them, he won. He beat the Anointed Champion. Could Cruz have beaten Hillary in 2016? I doubt it. In 2016 Cruz was just as unable to handle a hostile press as every other mainstream Republican. A fact which boggles my mind considering how long the press have been hostile to Republicans.
Who else is left from the 2016 primaries? Trump and Cruz. Nobody else. Nobody else had the staying power and the only reason Cruz stayed is because he started to fight like Trump. In 2024 Cruz is a pitbull. He doesn't give a damn what the papers say, and I've watched him tear apart some of Biden's judicial appointees on live television. Where is Marco Rubio? When was the last time his name came up? He's a Senator for God's sake and he does nothing. His name was halfheartedly floated as a VP pick for Trump but nobody took it seriously. Ben Carson? Founded his own think tank where he sits and does nothing. John Kasich? Endorsed Biden. Jeb? Retreated from public life.
Trump has managed to remind the Republican party they are supposed to fight god damn it. They are more than Progressives in the slow lane. They are the goddamn conservative party and I want some conservatism. Is he the One True Conservative, destined to bring honor and glory back to the halls of the Grand Old Party? Of course not. I'd be shocked to learn that he believes in anything other than the Cult of Trump. He is a Manhattan real estate developer who voted Democrat like every other Manhattan real estate developer until he decided to throw his hat into the ring in 2016. I don't particularly like Trump. I don't like what his presence says about the state of the country I love.
But I see progressivism as the cumulative effect of memetic weapons deployed by the Soviet Union. I am utterly convinced that Gramscian Damage is real and McCarthy was right. And nobody else was willing to get down in the mud and fight it out. So I cannot spare this man. He fights.
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You don't vote for a president, you vote for the set of people who're going to get there. True, it's not at all certain that Project 2025 is going to play a significant role and it's rumored people like Pompeo would be back because of course the would, however, the mere fact that it'd be a Trump admin would mean lower migration and probably less insane cultural policies.
I don't see how anyone can just ..stand aside and not vote, when the alternative is clean lunacy of more pointless migrants, more trans* related insanity, more cultural revolution.
Yeah, dude, I know how voting works. It's not just my personal disdain for Trump (though there is plenty of that), it's that I saw no evidence that he's actually good at much and a lot of stuff he'll do is bad. I'm not primarily a culture war voter, so while I guess it might be amusing to see him fire Rachel Levine (I don't think he will, actually), I don't think he's going to retUrn us to some pre-trans, pre-DEI golden age.
You don't think he will ? A) They tried to have him shot. Even if he won't be able to go after the people who tried that, he's no doubt going to take out his rage on a whole range of soft targets, and Levine who is making US the punchline of a joke is very high on that list.
B) if you haven't noticed, this time it's not just Trump. Microsoft disbanded their DEI team, iirc. Google fired a bunch of activists even earlier. SV as a whole seems to be having second thoughts about the cultural revolution.
Then there's Musk who seems pretty irate and is probably in the world's top 1% of most single-minded people. With people like Rufo and Musk on board, odds are a Trump admin could change a lot of things. Unless, of course, he staffs his administration with neocons like the last one.
I honestly don't know but I'm slightly more positive than I was last time, because there's a lot more people invested into things changing. And also, yeah, a near-death experience and what they put him through re: the criminal prosecution etc probably changed a lot.
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Was January 2017 to January 2021 notably free of these things?
I do remember a whole bunch of executive orders that Biden rolled back on day 1. Anger that the destructive diversity grift was no longer allowed on taxpayer dime due to an EO..
Migration was lower despite state and cities being uncooperative on this, and this situation nowhere near as dire.
Now I don't believe Trump will, this time, get useful people into his admin, but at the very least someone who isn't 100% on board with importing more future democrat voters is going to be less likely to promote just that.
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If you feel that the first-past-the-post system that marginalizes third parties results in two candidates that are worse than they should be, as I do, you should vote third party as a protest vote. A third party vote in a safe state like California matters more than a vote for either red or blue, I would say.
(Compared to how they do it in Europe with run-off elections and ranked choice voting.)
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