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It's easy to forget that before the Trump fan/TDS dynamic, a prototype of the same was already being sketched in Obama followers vs. what should in hindsight be labelled ODS. In the same way in which Trump inspires his adherents but inspires revulsion and a resulting willingness to cling to any smear that makes this feeling of revulsion rationalisable and communicable in his opponents, everything about Obama also clearly elicited visceral disgust in his detractors, who were then just searching for a justification to allow them to continue modelling themselves as sensible people who believe things for good reasons. Why does this president elicit such antipathy in me? Ah, right. He is not who he claims he is, and can't even legally be the president. He is a foreign deep cover agent and secret lovechild of Malcolm X raised to be the perfect political cult leader. His wife is also a man. No wonder I disliked him so much. I always had a good intuition about people.
The Trump counterpart are stories like Russiagate and piss tapes. Both of these are much more compatible with the smart critic's self-perception than "I am disgusted by his outgroup mannerisms and the idea of being subordinate to someone like that makes my lizard brain convulse". From the outside, both seem like extremely flimsy rationalisations to reject an elected president - like, so what if he does not meet some technical condition? It's a democracy, and more than half of voters voted for him. Even if Obama is foreign-born or Trump has to go to jail or whatever, people hypothetically should have been able to get the same politics by voting for a stand-in who promises to exactly implement the original's policies but is not encumbered by the gotchas, in the style of Thailand politics.
Thats a reasonable idea, but I dont think they could have. Maybe they could now, but I doubt it still. Trump has viable successors, in many ways better then him, but theyre clearly not Trump.
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While Obama was likely a turning point in these dynamics, I think they clearly go back much further. The phrase "[President] Derangement Syndrome" was invented for Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, and at the time it was referencing dynamics generally acknowledged to have already existed under Clinton. Reagan and Nixon stand out as facing similar, and it seems entirely likely that Carter got the same at the time and it's just faded in his post-presidency. Johnson? Kennedy? Maybe this is just how people treat presidents.
JFK is today remembered as a mythical ‘good president’, but he had not-otherwise-insane haters too.
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While the specific derangement syndrome indeed originated with W, there was the concept of Clinton crazies before it.
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I was going to say, Hillary was the subject of absurd slander when I was in elementary school. I remember hearing even back then, that Monica was no big deal because you should hear what Hillary does to the men AND THE WOMEN on air force one!
She’s still the subject of absurd slander.
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Wasn't that the era when they had to close down the high school congressional page program because everyone in congress was doing coke and fucking them?
I only remember because one of my friends was in the last batch.
Excuse me what? Is that another rumor or did your friend confirm that was the reason?
Oh no, it's all on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says there was a sex-and-coke scandal in 1983 (uncovering a 1973 incident and a 1980 incident), then a sexting scandal in 2006, and yet the discontinuation of the program (ostensibly because the House was finally sufficiently computer-savvy enough to obsolete "kids running around with documents") was in 2011. Was there an additional scandal they're missing, or is the inference that they wanted to shut down the program in 2006 (or 1983?) but just took 5 (or 28?) years to do it?
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