Old Trapper
Verified User
All they have are the tactics of the likes of Saul Alinsky (Rules for Radicals), and Hitler (The Big Lie). Nothing new, just a repetition of the failures of the past. One thing they do rely on is rigging the rules in the States they control to insure fewer people can exercise the right to vote. So far all that has done is encourage others to vote, and then they lose. Mary Trump wrote an excellent article abut her uncle Donald, and there was one part I found to be even more exceptional. I don't expect the low IQ right winger to read it, however, for the intelligent people it is still a good read:
"It’s impossible to understand the appeal Donald has for his followers if we try to do so from the perspective of people who value honor, decency, empathy, and kindness in their leaders. It isn’t that they see things in Donald that aren’t there. They identify with what is—the brazenness of his lies, his ability to commit crimes with impunity, his bottomless sense of grievance, his monumental insecurity, his bullying, and, perhaps most intriguing, the fact that he is an inveterate failure who keeps being allowed to succeed. Donald is their proxy and their representative. And their ardor has only seemed to grow since his loss. We need only look at data from North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd’s campaign to see how complete this identification is. When Republican primary voters were told that Budd had been endorsed by Donald, there was a 45-point net swing in his favor, skyrocketing him to a 19-point lead over his primary opponent. The idea that any other one-term president (George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter) would have had the same kind of influence is laughable. On the other hand, though, neither one of them would have tried.
By the same token, elected Republicans, Donald’s chief enablers, see Donald as a means of perpetuating their own power. But they aren’t just putting up with the worst of him simply because they see him as a means to an end. He is them. They value his mendacity and his name-calling and his autocracy because these work for them as well.
Republicans counter truth with absurdity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now a party of fascists, they call Democrats socialist communist Marxists, which is effective in part because it is so nonsensical and in part because they are never asked to define the terms. They cover up their massive (and successful) efforts at voter suppression with wild claims of widespread voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes cast, a number so vanishingly small as to have no meaning.
The main mechanism by which they can successfully carry out these sleights of hand is fear. Whether it’s drug dealers from Mexico or caravans from Central America or Democratic presidents coming for your guns, abolishing religion, or letting gay people get married, they need to keep their voters afraid.
Mr. Lockwood, the frame-narrator of Wuthering Heights, describes a feverish nightmare in which, during a blizzard, he sees a child outside his window begging to be let in. He is so undone by the appearance of this wraith that he drags its wrist across the broken pane of glass, until its blood soaks his bedsheets. “Terror made me cruel,” he says. Fear is a deeply unpleasant emotion, and Republicans have become expert at stoking it, on the one hand, and transforming it into anger on the other. This state of affairs makes it much easier for their followers to become comfortable with the cruelty of their leaders—whether of policy or of action—as long as it is directed at groups they’ve been told they should fear. It also makes it easier for the Republican rank and file to be comfortable with their own cruelty—it feels better than fear, and it allows them to delude themselves into thinking they have some measure of control, because they have been granted permission by the powers that be to express their cruelty with impunity."
https://newrepublic.com/article/163115/donald-trump-plot-against-america
"It’s impossible to understand the appeal Donald has for his followers if we try to do so from the perspective of people who value honor, decency, empathy, and kindness in their leaders. It isn’t that they see things in Donald that aren’t there. They identify with what is—the brazenness of his lies, his ability to commit crimes with impunity, his bottomless sense of grievance, his monumental insecurity, his bullying, and, perhaps most intriguing, the fact that he is an inveterate failure who keeps being allowed to succeed. Donald is their proxy and their representative. And their ardor has only seemed to grow since his loss. We need only look at data from North Carolina Senate candidate Ted Budd’s campaign to see how complete this identification is. When Republican primary voters were told that Budd had been endorsed by Donald, there was a 45-point net swing in his favor, skyrocketing him to a 19-point lead over his primary opponent. The idea that any other one-term president (George H.W. Bush or Jimmy Carter) would have had the same kind of influence is laughable. On the other hand, though, neither one of them would have tried.
By the same token, elected Republicans, Donald’s chief enablers, see Donald as a means of perpetuating their own power. But they aren’t just putting up with the worst of him simply because they see him as a means to an end. He is them. They value his mendacity and his name-calling and his autocracy because these work for them as well.
Republicans counter truth with absurdity, rendering the truth inoperable. Now a party of fascists, they call Democrats socialist communist Marxists, which is effective in part because it is so nonsensical and in part because they are never asked to define the terms. They cover up their massive (and successful) efforts at voter suppression with wild claims of widespread voter fraud, which essentially doesn’t exist—31 incidents in over a billion votes cast, a number so vanishingly small as to have no meaning.
The main mechanism by which they can successfully carry out these sleights of hand is fear. Whether it’s drug dealers from Mexico or caravans from Central America or Democratic presidents coming for your guns, abolishing religion, or letting gay people get married, they need to keep their voters afraid.
Mr. Lockwood, the frame-narrator of Wuthering Heights, describes a feverish nightmare in which, during a blizzard, he sees a child outside his window begging to be let in. He is so undone by the appearance of this wraith that he drags its wrist across the broken pane of glass, until its blood soaks his bedsheets. “Terror made me cruel,” he says. Fear is a deeply unpleasant emotion, and Republicans have become expert at stoking it, on the one hand, and transforming it into anger on the other. This state of affairs makes it much easier for their followers to become comfortable with the cruelty of their leaders—whether of policy or of action—as long as it is directed at groups they’ve been told they should fear. It also makes it easier for the Republican rank and file to be comfortable with their own cruelty—it feels better than fear, and it allows them to delude themselves into thinking they have some measure of control, because they have been granted permission by the powers that be to express their cruelty with impunity."
https://newrepublic.com/article/163115/donald-trump-plot-against-america
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