The open secret that’s been obvious to everyone paying attention is that Trump simply does not give a shit about LGBTQ issues or abortion. Every time he talks about them you can just tell, he speaks in platitudes and never goes into more detail than he has to (compare this to, say, trade, which he cares about a lot). They barely showed up in his campaign book IIRC. I think that was part of the logic of picking Pence as his VP, it was a signal to the Christian right that he’d go along with their pet issues.
In retrospect, this probably actually helped him in 2016. The majority of the public was in favor of gay marriage by 2012-13, but mainstream Republicans still had to run against it in 2016 because the religious right still felt very strongly about the issue. Trump’s refusal to care put him closer to the true “median voter” on that issue than almost any other GOP candidate. It also probably helped build the (obviously false) idea in the public’s mind that Trump was relatively moderate
@sivavakkiyar Exactly right. That comment made it really clear that he’s joining the anti-trans brigade in 2024 purely because he knows some of his fans want to hear it
Making a political cartoon – Donald Trump standing paused before a curtain with two openings, each with a framed portrait besides, one of Grover Cleveland and one of Adlai Stevenson – to send back to the 2006 APUSH DBQ, as part of a warlock’s curse
So fairly little of Donald Trump’s presidential term was totally unprecedented, a lot was the kind of stuff one President had pulled before, but it was all kinds of different stuff and different ones.
So the ultimate question is, will that include Grover Cleveland’s trick of getting elected to nonconsecutive terms, having lost an election in the interim?
At this point I would be satisfied with either a Biden or DeSantis win in 2024 as a positive consequence of the subplot that began in 2015
@centrally-unplanned said: While i don’t view DeSantis as a disaster or anything I find it hard to think what he would improve over Biden, curios what positives you think he has?
I think he would complete the culture war project Trump started, putting the 2010s to bed without supper.
Trump connected with that popular impulse but didn’t really implement it with any consequence while being shit at placeholder stuff, so “more of this but harder” was an easy nah, DeSantis has proven baseline competence to run a government, and to leverage the actual powers of office to put that government to service of particular ends
Biden represents a steady hand on government operations, with a Democratic instinct to rebalance the socioeconomy back towards something like the industrial unionism Golden Age if you squint, a spell of that is appealing right now. He seems quite unlikely to take up with wild-eyed factions or give them free reign, but doesn’t seem positioned to do a 90s Clinton-style purging of paraparty culture that would render the Democrats safe going forward in his absence.
It’s not clear what course yields what outcome. If DeSantis wins pitching “anti-wokeness” does that give Dem centrists a Mondale-like mandate to purge the party, or does it renew efforts to tie together a pussy-hatted #Resistance in opposition?
Of course, a DeSantis administration crackdown would have real costs! It might go too far! It might hurt people!
Yes, these things concern me. I am also concerned that a lame-duck Biden administration might not go far enough with calling an end to silly season out of concern for the sensibilities of Democratic stakeholders.
But as with DeSantis, I do not expect he would err so far as to be uncorrectable under future administrations. I would be satisfied with either.
