Going back to the Reagan era to tell American conservatives that investing so much charisma in Donald Trump as avatar of the American spirit of the ‘80s is actually a really load-bearing part of the program
kwarrtz said: Don’t worry, intelligence and knowledge of American politics are about as corellated with accuracy in predicting elections as the length of winter is with some groundhogs mood
in 2016 the smart money was confident that Hillary would beat Jeb.
The election of Donald Trump taught me two things:
1. In one sense, American presidential elections are actually far more democratic than anyone thought. This man, almost uniformly opposed by everyone in every single major center of power in the country—corporate, military/intelligence, academic, media, bureaucratic—was somehow able to fucking win despite it. Deeply undermines the notion that elections are just for show and the candidates are pre-approved in smoke-filled rooms to both be someone acceptable to the Elites™.
2. No one has any fucking idea what they’re talking about when it comes to like history or politics. Literally no one would’ve predicted something like the Trump presidency would happen. No smug asshole who acts like they’ve figured out the formula for American history and already know how the next 50 years are going to play out predicted something like this would happen.
I think both (1) and (2) are wrong, or at least extraordinarily overstated. In 2016, the economy was okay-but-not-great and we’d had a Democratic president for two consecutive terms. A fundamentals model would predict that Generic/boring Republican Senator would have narrowly won the popular vote and easily won the electoral vote. Instead, even against a Democratic opponent who was also uniquely hated by much of the electorate, Trump badly lost the popular vote and just squeaked out a win thanks to narrow electoral vote wins.
People didn’t predict the realignment of voting patterns that would allow Trump to win the upper Midwest while badly losing the popular vote. That’s pretty much the extent of what people got wrong.
It’s interesting that, having won the primary, Trump did only a little worse than a generic Republican. But the fact that he won the primary instead of a generic Republican is what suggests that US democracy has real effects.
(… although one could argue he did then just kind of implement generic Republican policies, so who’s the real winner there?)
I predicted it, by 2014 at least I knew what would have to happen (but the GOP didn’t have anyone lined up right), which is how the day after Trump came down the escalator I was insisting to one of the more influential staffers on Capitol Hill, the guy who made “Cocaine Mitch” happen (, who I went to college with) that he was gonna be the next president.
So I guess now we wait to see if the irony turned out to be that no one saw Trump coming the first time but everyone did the second time or that no one saw him taking power in 2016 but he did and everyone did in 2024 but he didn’t
crazy to think that if donald trump hadn’t become president he would be warmly remembered as a legendary poster who was racist and probably also a sexual harasser (things that do not stop you from being warmly remembered as a legendary poster)
Future scholars are gonna find The Onion’s “Joe Biden” from the Obama administration pretty baffling
as long as we preserve Know Your Meme’s Joe Biden page for posterity it’s all good. if KYM is lost it’ll be like burning the library of alexandria tho
It’s really important to preserve that memory! It’s the context of the beginning of his campaign! Just like how contemporary reactions to The Apprentice are important to political history now.
You know, I had honestly forgotten Donald Trump was on The Apprentice.
Awkward for the Dems still trying to make hay out of Jan 5 6 that Biden’s central platform plank was “the national plot will no longer revolve around the fates of Donald J. Trump”
Very little of President Donald Trump was completely unprecedented but honestly there was a lot of stuff that like one guy had done before and it had been his thing, which is in the back of my mind ahead of a potential run for a non-consecutive term
I think the best part of recent American politics was when Trump had COVID and was just making the most completely insane statements imaginable from being pumped full of like steroids and tiberium or some shit.
I miss this
I honestly am gonna miss how people were constantly reminding you of totally insane things you had forgotten from a few months ago
Reading about the impeachment stuff… you realize the thing about Donald Trump, all along, was he does this Drunken Master thing where whatever he does, no matter how bad you think he fucked up this time, in the end he somehow comes out ahead in spite of himself
One of the things that’s always stuck with me from first reading about Trump all the way back in 2016 was how he ran his businesses. Because the Trump Organization is pretty big, you might assume that it’s run like a generic Big Business, with a large bureaucracy and so on. The sort of arrangement which at least superficially resembles government bureaucracies. But the truth, as I understand it, is that Trump runs things much more like an extremely large family firm, without clear chains of command, etc. The result is apparently chaotic, since his Organization is basically a family business which has been scaled up to the absolute breaking point of that model, and is perhaps only sustainable with the outside subsidies Trump gets from his semi-separate (and more successful) status as a celebrity.
For a long while, I just thought of this fact as another mark against him. Trump was using his status as a “famous businessman” in order to con voters into thinking that he had the appropriate sort of experience to run a government, when really his business was run completely differently, and not that well. (And it’s very clear he tries to run the White House the same way, with even worse results.) But reflecting on it now I think there’s an important point I missed back then. Lots of people have pointed out the connection between the petite bourgeoisie (small business owners, basically) and fascism, or right wing authoritarianism more broadly. When I wrote that series of posts on Trump’s support in 2016 I found something similar in his voters. (For a quick sketch of some of these people, you can read this by Patrick Wyman.)
From the perspective of smaller business owners, I think you can see why Trump’s particular management style might be seen as an advantage, rather than an obvious weakness for someone trying to run a bureaucracy with millions of workers. He’s one of them! He shares their concerns, or at least he shares their mindset, localist and paterfamilial. He doesn’t run some vast conglomerate, he runs a specific set of properties with his name on them, just like they do. He is at the apex of their world, at the limit of what can be achieved without transforming your business into something else. And the fact that he didn’t do that is further proof that he’s innately one of them. You could imagine a different Donald Trump inheriting that same business and deciding to expand it, to try to make it into this big corporation competing with like Hyatt. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, make that leap. And so Trump could easily become the avatar of a certain class of business owner - not necessarily “small”, but rooted, and less dematerialized/managerial.
The other sorts of business owners might be willing to support him for the sake of tax cuts and other typical Republican priorities, but there was always condescension at Trump’s uncouthness - a union of convenience, not love. Others have pointed out that Trump’s offensive behavior functions as a proof of his opposition to the current order. He’s burning his bridges with them preemptively, so there’s no chance of him later selling out, which appeals to voters who feel like their leaders keep selling them out. I would suggest Trump’s limited business acumen functions similarly, as evidence that he’s the right sort of businessman, not the unwanted “elite” kind. For a counterpoint, you can think of Mitt Romney, who is clearly a superior manager to Trump, but whose business experience was in like consulting and investment, the exact opposite, so it’s no surprise that his constituency (and his personal mindset) was totally different. Differences which tend to get obscured when “business” is talked about as a single entity.
also means he doesn’t just have a different relationship with the voters but a different relationship with capital.
In this state as long as he has some channel of communication to the outside world the pardon power is probably the most effective one Trump still controls, but I don’t expect him to recognize that and figure out how to leverage it with enough speed before he could be outflanked.
Even the tweets that seemed like they had to have been sent in a fit of rage with no forethought whatsoever sometimes were actually the result of careful planning and workshopping with advisers. For instance, when Trump accusedMorning Joe host Joe Scarborough of murdering his constituent services director while serving in Congress, a senior member of the White House staff told me they were upset with the president not over what he said, but that he’d fucked up the delivery. The version of the tweet he’d worked on with staff had been much funnier, according to the staffer.
Trump asking a kid “Are you still a believer in Santa? Because at 7, it’s marginal, right?” a few years ago is maybe the funniest thing he’s said during his time as President
To hear the right’s triumphalism of recent
years, you’d think that only smug Democrats were appalled by Reagan
while Republicans quickly recognized that their party, decimated by
Richard Nixon and Watergate, had found its savior.
The Republican elites of Reagan’s day were as blindsided by him as their counterparts have been by Trump.
A typical liberal-Establishment take on Reagan could be found in Harper’s,
which called him Ronald Duck, “the Candidate from Disneyland.” That he
had come to be deemed “a serious candidate for president,” the magazine
intoned, was “a shame and embarrassment for the country.”
A strategic memo by Carter’s pollster,
Patrick Caddell, laid out the campaign against Reagan’s obvious
vulnerabilities with bullet points: “Is Reagan Safe? … Shoots From the
Hip … Over His Head … What Are His Solutions?” But it was the strategy
of Caddell’s counterpart in the Reagan camp, the pollster Richard
Wirthlin, that carried the day with the electorate. Voters wanted to
“follow some authority figure,” he theorized — a “leader who can take
charge with authority; return a sense of discipline to our government;
and, manifest the willpower needed to get this country back on track.”
I have been pushing the Trump/Reagan thing. How many people on Tumblr were alive then, I wonder. How many people on Tumblr are alive now, even.
I think it’s really significant that Reagan was shaped by the movie studio system, where you as the principal would do the projects the studio boss said, or at least the ones your agent said, in the way the director said, and you were just responsible for the charisma gap
And Trump coming from 80s NYC tabloids AND ‘00s reality TV, the first is a lot about politicking with the players and the second is just the principal drawing on his personality to throw whatever at the wall and the editors pick out and polish the jewels after the fact
Current US budget going to expire December 11th and barring legislation which Trump could veto we’re going to have a gov shutdown. I can see him trying to create a crisis here if he’s set to lose but I’m not sure he’d force it here.
If you look at his business deals and bankruptcy, he’s been pretty good at playing losing hands out to the point the counterparty decides they’re better off calling it settled and over with, wouldn’t be surprised to see some of that brinksmanship in the lame duck
