(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



"Trump Broke the Law!" "We Don't Care!" [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-08-16

Taggan Goddard’s Political Wire picked up a couple of seriously concerning articles this morning. First up is: The New Era of Political Violence Is Here, by Tom Nichols (In The Atlantic behind a paywall). Specifically:

Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.

The first consequence of Trump is that, while he broke the law, while he admits (sort of) that he broke the law, and while his followers agree he broke the law, they don’t care. In fact, they admire him all the more for it.

I [Tom Nichols] spoke with one of the original Never Trumpers over the weekend, a man who has lost friends and family because of his opposition to Trump, and he told me that one of the most unsettling things to him is that these same pro-Trump family and friends now say that they believe that Trump broke the law—but that they don’t care. They see Trump and his crusade—their crusade against evil, the drama that gives their lives meaning—as more important than the law.

Second article, from the Intelligencer: Why Every New Trump Crime Just Makes Republicans Angrier at the FBI But the Feds have not treated him unfairly, by Jonathan Chait:

[T]he weirdest thing about this trust heuristic is that it assumes the more credible party to this dispute is serial lawbreaker and pathological liar Donald Trump rather than the lifelong Republican he appointed to lead the agency. But the deeper and more twisted belief system being expressed by Trump’s allies is the premise that the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political bias against their party since the Clinton saga.

Chait concludes:

The underlying cause of this pathological dynamic is a right-wing propaganda bubble that pumps conservatives full of rage, cordens [sic] them off from any information that would mitigate their sense of persecution, and primes them to be led by demagogues who feel free to act with impunity, knowing their base will stay loyal regardless. This dysfunction produced Trump’s rise in the first place. And now every new instance of Trump’s misconduct simply confirms to the Republican Party that he was right all along.

Trump, following his mentor Roy Cohn, has always looked at the law as a nuisance and a challenge. His pitch to his followers is that the law is keeping them from their rightful position in society. He’s not entirely wrong there; powerful interests have long shaped the laws of this country to work for their benefit at the expense of everyone else. Trump is no different from them — but he has managed to mesmerize his base into believing that he is the one, the only one, fighting the law on their behalf.

In fact, he is using, misusing, ignoring, and breaking the law solely for his own benefit.

We may be able to pick away at the margins by making that argument, but the bulk of his base has been made impervious to that line of reasoning. If there is any way to reach those people, it will have to be by way of showing that he is hurting them.

That’s hard to do, we already know. Trump has very cleverly — like many Republicans — crafted immediate short-term benefits for his base while pushing the long-term pain down the road and blaming the Democrats. He tried to do that with Covid, but failed, which is almost certainly why he lost his re-election. That is the key to keeping from winning the next one.

It’s possible the revelation that he seriously damaged our security with his casual (at best) handling of our nuclear secrets will be one thing his base will have enough trouble with that they will edge away from him. There are already some signs that Republicans who rushed to defend Trump from the FBI are toning their rhetoric down, or hiding from the press, as his theft of nuclear documents becomes impossible to look away from.

“Trump will get us all killed!”

This is a slogan we need to start promoting. It won’t help with the fundamentalists who are looking forward to precisely that — they expect to be raptured out of the way when the apocalypse happens. But, played right, it could peel enough Trump supporters to make the difference. They may not care about the law, but they do care about living.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/16/2116966/--Trump-Broke-the-Law-We-Don-t-Care

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/