Nov 23, 2021
Why The Democrats Love Trump
Donald Trump is going to wind up in the White House again for a single, simple, overriding reason:
The Democratic Party needs him there
Want proof? Below is a screenshot from a recent The Atlantic piece that — predictably for that elitist rag — lays out in bald-faced terms how Democratic Party leaders really think about Trump and America.
The real big lie of the Trump era has always been that Democrats represent the “Resistance” to fascism.
What a sick joke.
It is the Democratic Party itself that paved the way for Trump all the way back in 2015. The party never resisted — it colluded, like it always does and will so long as the two party system lasts.
Because of the Democrats, the world can look forward to four more years of Trump starting in 2025.
Leading Democrats lie and spin with every breath. Resistance? Hah!
At any point in Trump’s administration the Democrats could have organized a national strike. A short shutdown of the national economy to show where the real power lies in any nation.
They never did. It took a Black man being murdered by the police in full view of a crowd over the course of nine minutes to spark an uprising that shook the nation.
That was the Resistance — and the Democrats sold it out at every turn.
All that Trump did, all the pain he inflicted — at every step of the way the Democrats were there to decry him as un-American while sending him legislation to sign.
The idea that Democrats and Republicans are destined to hate each other is not grounded in reality so much as it is a deliberate political narrative deployed by people like James Carville to protect their career. These people don’t even rise to the level of “strategists” because they have none.
Existing as the eternal opposition to the other side isn’t real strategy. It’s nothing more than being a willing participant in a scripted dance.
The primary reason leading Democrats so vehemently oppose Trump is not because of anything he did, but because he doesn’t play the game the way they want him to. He exposes their hypocrisy — for that they oppose him, dream of a kinder, gentler version rising that won’t break the fourth wall of the weird game.
To the average American, Trump often comes across as more trustworthy than most politicians and pundits. His entire stage act is designed to win the trust of Americans who feel — correctly — that the national political system is rigged against them.
Mainstream Democratic strategists have been consistently wrong about Trump for a reason. They are so out of touch with the lived experiences of regular people they can’t understand them.
Most theories of why Trump holds such appeal for so many people are reductive, blaming either racism or economic stagnation when the reality is that the two are utterly intertwined. Economic fears lead people to look for a scapegoat because that’s how America works — everything bad that happens is assumed to be the fault of someone doing something immoral in this weird culture. America’s original scapegoats are Black and Indigenous people.
If everyone in America were wealthy, racism would be less of a problem because the people most subject to it would have the resources to fight it. Lacking them, they have to rely on the goodwill of other Americans and the broken two party nightmare to survive. Poor white Americans see another group getting help and instinctively understand that the way America works someone has to be oppressed, so they fear it’ll be them.
This basic dynamic system underpins bigotry nearly everywhere it is found. But accepting the complex reality cuts against the entrenched interests of those with power — the ability to be the oppressor rather than the oppressed.
Which is why the leaders of the Democratic Party are so invested in preventing the two explanations from merging under a single theory of power. They want Americans to believe that all problems can be simply solved by backing their party, they need them to avoid working out alternative options.
Their money, prestige, and authority depends on America never changing.
You get now why leading Democrats are so invested in enemies, villains, and fear?
Why they seem to want Trump to return to an active role in American politics as quickly as possible?
If on January 7th, a day after a Trumpist mob attacked the Capitol, assaulting and killing Capitol Police personnel, you had said out loud that Democrats need Trump to stay in the public eye plenty of people might have punched you. Even Twitter and Facebook, which profited immensely from his rise, saw the way the winds were blowing and banned him.
And so was Trump saved. In 2016 his plan was to claim fraud and spend four years preparing for a rematch against Hillary — but he actually won, something I saw as a real possibility based on systematic polling errors in the Rust Belt I’d detected where most observers predicted an easy Clinton victory.
His fraud claims in 2020 were intended to lay the groundwork for the Constitutional shenanigans his people ineptly tried, defeated by the refusal of Republican elected officials in swing states to go along with. I predicted exactly what he was going to do — also, that the Rust Belt polls were off again, which very nearly gave Trump another surprise win.
This is because Trump is eminently predictable, if you understand the nature of his appeal. His bond with his followers is and will remain strong, being banned from social media made him into an icon they can worship without being presented regular evidence of how disgusting he is as a human being.
The tactics used to oppose him have proven his claims in the minds of his supporters. They are and will remain the majority of Republican voters, so he can easily win the GOP primaries despite the recurring fantasy of someone like Cheney or Christie rising to unseat him.
Meanwhile a substantial chunk of lukewarm Biden voters are now permanently turned off, feeling like turning out in 2020 accomplished little or nothing. Covid is still raging and now the economy is experiencing inflation unseen in decades with Democrats trying to convince people it’s not a big deal.
Only a miracle will bring Biden back to a point where he could credibly hope to win reelection. Trust, once lost, is most difficult to regain. Under the surface it is clear that leading Democrats know, for all his insistence otherwise, that he’s not running — this is why the Harris and Buttigieg rivalry is being played up.
Democratic Party leaders are making bets and testing the waters, preparing to put their support behind a successor in what we have to expect to be a tough primary. If a major war breaks out in 2022 or 2023 — chances are growing as Biden has chosen to act tough by provoking Russia and China, which both have a strong incentive to teach America a hard lesson in power while they can — things could change… maybe.
But I doubt it. Trump’s return can now only be prevented through death, disability, or Americans finally getting some sense and guts and forcing their federal government to reform before someone decides to play President-For-Life with a nuclear arsenal.
It has become absolutely clear since the 2020 Election that Joe Biden was only barely able to win. Among Democrats it has become critical to repeat the lie that his victory was a landslide — sadly, the popular vote doesn’t count, and in the electoral college 2020 was even closer than 2016.
Had the Covid-19 pandemic not pushed states to expand absentee voting, Trump would have won. In fact, the country was probably saved from the sight of armed right wing thugs menacing Black-majority neighborhoods suppressing enough votes for him to win by this awful plague.
Nature did what Democrats couldn’t on their own: put together a coalition capable of proving, as they asserted all through the Trump years would happen, that Trump and Trumpism did not represent America. Enough people simply wanted Trump gone that Biden cleared the bar.
More people turned out for Trump than any other candidate in American history save Biden. Despite everything, millions more people voted for him in 2020 than in 2016, while fully a third of Americans didn’t vote at all despite Democrats insisting the election was about saving American democracy.
Not only that, but the Democrats almost lost their House majority and came up tied in the Senate. Before the election, this was seen as close to impossible.
But a whole lot of Biden-Harris voters either didn’t vote for other Democrats or split their ticket. A substantial chunk of apparent pro-Biden votes were in fact merely anti-Trump — they just wanted the country to stop feeling so out of control.
In short, Biden only won because he wasn’t Trump. This shouldn’t be a surprise — there is a reason he was getting creamed in the primaries until the pandemic started slamming Europe.
Few are willing to cop to it now, but the Democratic Party manufactured an early end to their primary. In March of 2020 all inter-party conflicts were more or less put on hold, and powerful people pushed nearly every centrist or moderate candidate to pull out before most votes were cast.
Biden was in effect installed as party leader because he had name recognition and appealed to senior voters who were turned off by Trump’s callous disregard for their safety. To this day, his strongest support comes from Boomer Democrats, senior citizens like him.
I’m not saying this was necessarily a bad decision — but it had consequences. A key one: people didn’t get to see Biden in action outside of a few stage-managed debates and rallies.
They didn’t realize how much of a bumbling, inarticulate, paternalistic old liberal he sounds like. It wasn’t clear just how much control over their candidate Biden’s inner circle had.
The result was a candidate whose image was driven by pure marketing. It turned a lot of people off — it was Trump’s daily prominence, his cruel response to the pandemic and Black Lives Matter, and expanded voting access that enabled Biden’s win despite the extreme shortcomings of himself and his staff, comprised largely of old Democratic hands like James Carville.
Covid put off a reckoning in the Democratic Party that lasted until Biden made his inevitable public mistakes. He avoids the press and is shielded from questions by his staffers because everyone knows he’s his own worst enemy, a politician who relies on glad-handing other elites to get things done.
This disconnect leads straight to groupthink, which has been evident in everything Biden has done since his polls started crashing. The pandemic was always going to have far-reaching impacts on the economy and migration and society — this administration’s clear lack of preparedness speaks to the hollowness of the Democrats as a whole.
Only weak politicians have to rely on fear to succeed. It is notable that leading liberal pundits are openly moving to embrace Trumpesque fear tactics in their desperation to avert a bloodbath in the 2022 Midterms — and beyond.
The simple fact of the matter is that Joe Biden’s administration was hamstrung from day one by a lack of vision. The Democratic Party is divided against itself, obsessed with marketing the brand to its voters.
Democrats seem to think that all they have to do is get the messaging right and the polls will turn in their favor. This is all pseudoscience spouted by self-interested hacks — the same kind of bad thinking that makes big companies try to advertise and market their way out of a bad reputation.
Hard truth about people is that they:
A. Don’t much care about politics until they have to vote
B. Vote mostly according to how their friends and family do
C. Blame politicians when prices go up or jobs are scarce
The smartest thing Trump ever did was lose the 2020 Presidential Election. So many ripple effects from the pandemic can be expected to wash over the world in 2022 and 2023 that it was inevitable that whoever became President, their life would be hard.
If someone were in office with a coherent theory of what’s happening and ideas on how to apply force to fix what can be salvaged, the Democrats might have a chance. But the fact that Clinton-era hacks like Carville are still sucking up media attention shows the party can no longer course correct.
The hard reality of America’s future is that it is so functionally corrupt and inflexible that the majority of Americans believe it has to be totally reformed. Of course, how to do that is always bound to be a difficult political question.
Democrats now find themselves in the rotten position of being the defenders of a system that most people know doesn’t work. Biden lost all credibility with the majority of voters by downplaying Covid-19 over the summer, right as the Delta wave was pummeling Europe. The debacle in Afghanistan amplified this loss of trust, and when liberal media pundits at The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine tried to downplay what was happening that damaged their credibility as well.
Democrats now exist in an echo chamber where its factions look for any excuse to blame someone else for the party’s troubles. Carville and young Chosen Ones like David Shor (Which Boomer’s protege is that guy, I wonder?) insist it’s the fault of Progressive activists for embracing unpopular slogans like “Defund the Police.”
Of course, these high-and-mighty Democrats of the establishment never mobilize their marketing power to define slogans the right way ahead of time. They prefer to let the Progressives draw fire from the right, giving Carville-ites the ability to disclaim anything they do that’s off-brand.
The tactic is idiotic, alienating potential allies while doing nothing to stop the hard right from co-opting the terms and turning into them bogeymen. But Democratic Party elites do it again and again, justifying it by pointing to polls without acknowledging the limitations of polls.
After all, people can only respond accurately to a poll if they understand the questions and issues it covers. Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police — the meaning of each depends entirely on who you ask, because Democrats run from anything they think might prove too controversial or hard to define for a general audience.
It’s ironic and perfectly on brand for the Democrats to obsess over narratives while failing to understand that people’s taste in narrative changes with time. Young people and non-voters are turned off by politics precisely because they know they’re being told tall tales.
Leading Democrats love Trump because he makes their job easy. Since leaving office and being kicked off social media, Americans previously paying attention to politics only because they were afraid of what crazy thing he’d do next tuned out.
Democrats and the news media suddenly lost a huge chunk of their audience. But in the post Citizens United world of team-sports politics, the game can never take a break, the struggle is eternal. Profit depends on keeping people engaged — and nothing engaged Americans with the fear-mongering of politicians and the news like Trump.
Reading between the rhetorical lines and looking at vital trends in America over the past ten years shows that the two party game is just that: a game.
One with very real consequences for the world at large.
Unable to deal with their own internal conflicts, the Democrats are always going to turn to Trump or whoever one day succeeds him. They need an enemy, and so will convince anyone they can to be afraid.
Just like the Republicans they oppose
What’s sad is most people who lean one way or the other mostly do so because they feel like they have to. Americans love to shame people for not voting or paying attention to the news, despite most of the so-called “high information” types themselves being terribly ill-informed, American media being as myopic and nationalist as China’s or Russia’s.
So Americans of all stripes —there are not just two sides in any country or debate — are pushed to fear each other. That’s all either party has left — fear.
Ironic, isn’t it, that the party holding FDR up as its mythic hero has forgotten his most important words?
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
Exactly. Trump is the odds-on favorite to return to the White House because all the Democrats have left is fear. They can’t achieve anything, lack the courage to take risks or threaten the system as it stands.
They want and need Trump to return.
So he will.
And the world will suffer.
