Comment on Seriously, what the f*** is keeping Donald Trump in this presidential race?
Chocrates@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Why is he still in the race or why are his supporters?
For him I think it’s obvious. Narcissism and the fact that he has a lot of federal crimes in the courts that he can stop when he is elected.
His supporters are more complicated. He pretty decently still owns the GOP so even if they are getting cold feet, they don’t seem to have a plan to overthrow him. I feel like they are planning on just stonewalling for 4 more years and then try to win the next one and cut the checks to the billionaires then.
I got nothing on his base though. I haven’t understood them for 10 years now. Not sure I ever will.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Part of the checks cut get reinvested in the propaganda that gets more checks cut. It’s a whole corrupt system, as attested to by this list of think tanks backing someone like a Jordan Peterson:
reddit.com/…/jordan_peterson_and_the_think_tanks/
…you can research most rightwing media and personalities and make lists and connections (some if Trump’s for instance run through Roy Cohn, the original red scare and the mafia for instance).
It’s likely the same for some leftwing individuals to. It’s the reproduction of this culture, and the economic loops that perpetuate the toxicities of the current systems.
…and it will keep going long after Trump is gone.
AA5B@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m not buying it this time around. Sure, that was the explanation for 2016, and I’m sure a bunch of people who thought like that got done good laughs. But surely they could see what happened. Surely they lived through the following four years.
Surely they saw our liberal outrage was directed at how easily they were manipulated into making their own lives worse? Surely they saw further divisiveness as “liberal elites” just shook their heads in sadness. Surely they see those same cities they wanted to wreck are doing better than ever while they’re stuck with the consequences of their votes?
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The billionaires behind the think tanks are doing better than ever, that’s the point of the think tanks. None of this is going away even if ut lulls. It’s a sustained effort.
Tim Pool, David Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro (whose daily wire was started with fracking money from Dan and Ferris wilks), Andy Gno, (whose post-millenial was started by an Israeli real estate billionaire)… They all made money, huge amounts of money. Tim Pool was making $400,000 an episode twice a month for years… And these are thevlow level defenders of the billionaire Libertarian think tanks.
Trump officials probably made so much more.
So it doesn’t really matter what happens, we can be sure efforts will not go away. Dwindle, but this is what they know how to do, and they’ve been handed massive wealth in the process… They’ll use that wealth to continue thier efforts.
You can “not buy” that viewers would be that dumb (many are) but that’s not the point. The machine has been paid, the political apparatus to produce the far right media will continue in many different forms.