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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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How far do Trump’s ratings have to fall that they are no longer afraid of retribution?

There is no realistic number at which this is true. Trump only needs to maintain a majority of the primary voters, not a majority of the country, or even a majority of Republicans.

The nature of Trumpism is that a GOP revolt is going to look more like various advisers being ousted and Trump having new handlers put in. I don't think open confrontation will happen. The GOP establishment has consistently shown that they lack either the ability or the courage to do so.

Trump's problem is that a big chunk of his passionate supporters are retirees with 401ks. These people have something to lose. Up to this point, Trump's suck-it-Libs style hasn't come with a tangible cost. It was all pwnage and upside. My Trump-loving family has fallen conspicuously silent in the runup to RV season. I guess we'll see.

Trump's problem is that a big chunk of his passionate supporters are retirees with 401ks.

A 30% drop in a retiree's 401k is "it's going back to 2019 levels" due to the massive amount of inflation (also 30%) the previous government caused protecting this particular group at everyone else's expense.

And I think a lot of shy Tories Trump voters know that. And no, that doesn't make paying back taxes any less fun; I believe that Trump made it as fun as such a thing possibly could have been. But the missing money needs to come from somewhere, and if it doesn't come at the sole expense of the youth of the country for once that's the biggest step forwards for this country in almost 60 years- bonus points if they remember that.

Perhaps, but I genuinely believe that most Trump supporters will not blame his tariff policies for resulting economic damage. The stock market is fake anyway, the woke (((financiers))) are manipulating prices to make Trump look bad. Reports of inflation are either fake or price gouging by greedy businesses. Unemployment numbers are fake or just lazy people who don't want to work.

I think maybe you underestimate how normie a lot of these people are and how often they check their portfolios.

We're both guessing.

80% of voters don't vote in midterm primaries as compared to 63% in the 2024 general. Assuming that all of the primary voters did vote in the general, essentially 1/3 of the general election voters voted in the midterm primary. So within that slice of voters in Republican primaries, as long as Trumpists maintain 50% control, you can't win a primary. Even if the anti-Trump candidate would do better in the general, or even among R voters who don't show up, it doesn't matter because they'll lose the primary before any of those people get a vote.

There’s certainly a never-say-die subset of true believers but I doubt that’s even the majority of the coalition that elected him in November. I think most people were voting against democrat incompetence on inflation and illegal immigration in that order.

If trumpflation ends up being even worse than Biden’s and comes with stagflation and layoffs to boot, I can easily see a new GOP coalition that unites around “Trump but minus tariffs”. And there’s a very clear and straightforward process to make that happen, just need the veto-proof majority in congress to take away tariff powers and let Trump do whatever else he wants

You're confusing units of analysis. We're not talking about the coalition that elected him in the presidential general election; they only need to be an effective majority of the Republican primary voters in the midterms. Which is a much smaller and more motivated subset. It doesn't even need to be a true majority, just a sufficient plurality that you'd need to run the table otherwise to win the primary.

I don’t think you can talk about ‘handlers’ in Trump II. Trump I had handlers of a sort, in that Trump was new to politics and there were seasoned veterans who just flagrantly hid documents from him and ran things while he postured. Trump II doesn’t have handlers. Surely (?) there are still some ultra deep state CIA types in Langley with things that never get shared with Trump, but that’s not the same thing.

The old-guard GOP establishment helpfully defenestrated itself when Liz Cheney led her failed useful-opposition ploy with the post-Jan 6 hearings. That may have been courageous by a certain standard of courage, but it was also foolish by the standard of remaining politically relevant within the GOP, and led to both a direct diminishment and further party-base skepticism of the neo-liberal wing that she was a part of.

If Trump's attempted coup wasn't the time for her to stand up, what situation would be more fitting?

After an actual coup attempt would probably have been more fitting.

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