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Trump punishing people who he thinks wronged him would do more for the rightwing and American politics than anything which has happened in 50 years.
If you believe that, can you name one, single, specific punishment that trump is likely to do and would materially benefit the right wing? What does that sentence even mean?
stop mitch mcconnell's handpicked replacement (thune) when mitch retires
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Trump punishing and gutting establishment GOP leadership would do wonders for the rightwing and the GOP. Trump won because he saw a winning hand on the ground on a bunch of issues which were wildly popular but which both political parties were doing nothing about, e.g., Trade, Immigration, Wars. He was able to win because the GOP had been talking about those things-ish, for years and have done nothing at all to make them more in line with their voterbase.
Ridding the party of and making an example of cowardly backstabbers like Pence or corrupt out-of-touch derps like Mitch McConnel would be a huge boon to getting the GOP to actually align with their voterbase. Half the reason the GOP is such garbage is because GOP leadership have an army of entrenched allies in polling and consulting which strangles the appeal out of any potential candidates. Everything is structured in such a way as money is controlled by heavily centralized committees which then doll it out to candidates it likes which they exercise to their own benefit, the 2022 disaster being a good example of their strategy of preserving their own power at the expense of the GOP generally and the GOP voter. Removing these people or making them fear they could be held accountable would be huge benefit to bringing vitality back to the party.
No other GOP candidate has even the slightest chance of doing any of that. What they would do is kick the can down the road doing nothing (at best) and taking up time the GOP doesn't have. The GOP base is old people and boomers. Boomers' time is ticking and each year that goes by means fewer boomer voters and smaller voterbase. Every cycle wasted on some status quo dork like desantis will just mean the GOP voter or their issues is on even worse footing to mount anything resembling a "march through institutions" or at least gimping them in a way which makes them realize they could bleed too when they exercise their power on others.
He barely won. And, as others have said in this thread, it was arguably the case that any Republican candidate had an advantage on the ballot at the time.
Trump absolutely blazed a new trail.
But, truth is, we don't know how a neolib, "we love migrants now" (this was the suggested shift in the GOP's 2012 post-mortem iirc) would have done.
People can hold their nose and vote party line. Look at the Democrats; a lot of people prefer someone like Bernie but I think Trump putting three judges on the Court has broken a lot of sore loser/third party-adventurism.
simply writing "it's arguable" isn't an argument
Oh? Trump only barely beat the Clinton-Obama political machine?
Despite Biden's 81,000,000+ totally real and definitely legitimate votes, he "barely" won in 2020, too.
we've seen those ryan-romney-bush candidates crash and burn since then so we have a guess
and we just watched yet another GOP candidate shy away from Trump in Dan Kelly in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election and lose badly
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