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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Trump's tax cuts for the rich weren't especially great for rank-and-file Republicans. His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.

I definitely agree that Trump made other Republicans better though, as their MO before him was essentially "chain-surrender on cultural and social issues in order to fellate transnational corporations as much as possible". Trump wasn't as much of a break with that as some people imply, but he at least moved in the right direction.

His SCOTUS appointments could have been accomplished by any R president with a heartbeat. The fact that they're more reliably conservative is more thanks to McConnell and negative partisanship leading to fewer compromise candidates. Trump actually seethed about how "disloyal" his SCOTUS appointments were, as he would have preferred lapdogs rather than principled legal scholars, but thankfully McConnell outmaneuvered him.

This is one of the great ironies of the religious conservatives on the Trumpist right. They hate McConnell for not being a loyal Trumpist and for being a DC insider, while also praising Trump for not fucking up the culmination of McConnell's patient long-term project of assembling a philosophically anti-Roe court. The way Roe was overturned is why we need systemic politically savvy game-players like McConnell. Trump just happened to be there when it hit the tipping point (to Trump's credit, he stayed out of the way).

Now, it looks like Trump might have one more problem on this front, with his squeamishness on the issue raising the hackles of at least one venerable pro-life group: https://nypost.com/2023/04/23/trump-touts-pro-life-record-to-iowa-voters-after-criticism-from-anti-abortion-group/ If this creates a schism in his base, DeSantis looks like a safer pro-life bet.

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