TwilightZone
TwilightZone's JournalHe didn't round up 12 million of them.
There's simply no comparison. It's not even apples and oranges. It's like apples and hand grenades.
12 million is a scale that dwarfs anything he did in his first term.
The consensus is that it's not logistically possible. The infrastructure doesn't exist and would have to be built on a massive scale. The government has no clue who most of them are or where they live. Hiring would need to be done on a massive scale, probably at least tens of thousands. Coordination with the countries to which they're being repatriated will be extremely complicated, and it's very likely some won't cooperate. Only eight of the top ten have any kind of agreement with the US to do so: Mexico and Venezuela. For the other eight (and any others), repatriation would need to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
Aside all that, the scale is almost certainly unworkable.
It would be the equivalent of deporting the entirety of New York City and the entirety of Los Angeles.
Or the equivalent of deporting the entire populations of:
Chicago
Houston
Phoenix
Philly
San Antonio
San Diego
and Dallas, seven of the top ten cities in population in the US.
We don't understand voter motivations anywhere near as much as we think we do.
They're not always rational, yet we try to apply rationality to them.
We insist that many are voting against their own best interests, but assuming that we know best what those interests should be is just presumptuous.
Voters and groups of voters aren't monolithic, and they don't all have the same reasons for voting. We try to make them fit in nice, neat boxes, yet every voter has their own unique combination of motives and issues they use to decide for whom to vote.
Making an attempt to better understand those motivations rather than just assuming we already know what they are should be a first step to better understanding the big picture.
We have a deep core of a lot of irrational beliefs.
Sexism and racism, of course, but a lot of people have lost any ability they ever had to think critically, reason deductively, or separate reality from fantasy, on a wide variety of issues and topics. They just consume whatever media they're exposed to, regardless of how fake or ridiculous it is, and social media has made it exponentially worse.
People actually believed that a child sex ring was being run out of the basement of a building that didn't have a basement. They still believe it.
There was a study recently published that said that Trump supporters were more likely to believe a debunked conspiracy theory *after* it was debunked than before they were provided proof that it was false.
"The two times Trump ran against women.. he won.. the one time he lost, it was to a man"
I had this exact conversation with my partner last night. I don't want to believe that it's this simple - and I'm fairly certain that there's more to it than that - but it's an undeniable fact.
Trump's level of support rarely varies.
Except for a relatively short period after January 6th, his approval ratings have been historically stable. They're also historically low, on average, but his support just doesn't change, to the frustration of us all.
It's definitely possible that adjustments since 2020 or 2022 have introduced a bit of flat-lining, but the fact that Trump's support varies so little is certainly a factor. There just isn't much movement available, contrary to what many assert. His current floor and ceiling might be as little as a couple % apart. If so, that's not enough for the polls to show any significant movement.
The wildcard is turnout. If one side or the other - preferably our side - shows up in higher numbers than the polls anticipate and in higher relative numbers than the other side, the results may be very different from what's expected. Many have asserted that this is going to be the case.
Trump is unique.
Massive understatement, I realize.
It's impossible to consider Trump's rise to the presidency and the de facto leader of the GOP in a vacuum, of course, and I'm sure you're right that he's partly, if not primarily, a product of his environment. That being said, I'm not sure anyone else in the GOP currently in the public eye could have pulled off what he was able to. He is uniquely (and inexplicably) able to engender loyalty and devotion, not just from the voting public, but from his staff and other politicians. People to this day continue to throw away their lives and their careers for the guy, for reasons I can't begin to fathom. He's uniquely able to withstand scandal after scandal after scandal that would have almost assuredly doomed any other candidate. After everything everyone has thrown at him, his approval ratings are near three-year highs. He's basically the leader of a nationwide cult, but even Jim Jones had people bail out when the writing was on the wall. He's like Charles Manson, if Manson was a mob boss.
Trump was also an instrumental piece in his own rise. He jacked up the birtherism claims, working through Michael Cohen to conspire with the National Enquirer to push them. He re-ignited his decades-long feud with the media. His disdain was further ramped up by the 2011 Correspondent's Dinner when Obama made him look like the tool he is. He would spend years relentlessly hammering on both, tapping into his and others' resentment over Obama's presidency.
The sense that bipartisanship was important to the GOP was handed a death blow when Obama became president, though the seeds probably date to Gingrich or Reagan. Since then, all bets are off, with McConnell (and now Johnson in the House) stalling everything and eventually stealing a SCOTUS seat.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that it's hard to know if Trump could have done this without the decades of propaganda and disinformation on the right. Likely not, but he was, as noted, a key piece in how we ended up here.
As an aside, the right's (and Trump's) incessant anti-media campaign has been so successful that even many on the left have fully bought into it. As someone posted in another thread, if one looks at what's often posted on DU about the media, one would think that there are no valid sources of news left at all. The line has became a circle. Mission accomplished.
Not everything.
I think he's being honest when he says he would be a dictator.
I think he's being honest when he says he'll pardon 1/6 defendants and his cronies.
I think he's being honest when he calls for police brutality.
I think he's being honest when he insinuates that he's out for revenge.
I think he's being honest when he says racist, misogynistic, bigoted, and sexist things.
His truth-telling is highly selective, but just as much can be learned from it - if not more - than the endless false things he says.
The ends justify the means.
Lots of voters are generational partisan voters. They're going to vote for the R, regardless.
Lots of voters agree with his racist, sexist, bigoted attacks on "others". He harms the people they want him to harm.
Lots of voters agree with the agenda they know Trump will pursue.
Lots of votes agree with his SCOTUS and other judicial appointments.
Lots of voters agree with Trump's anti-government nonsense.
We too often fixate on the individual things that Trump says and does and completely miss the big picture. To many, what he says and does is irrelevant. They'll put up with all of that to get what they really want.
"Weird" works because it's vague.
It's fully open to interpretation, and almost anything can fit under that umbrella. It's even more effective if no examples are provided, leaving it entirely up to the voters' imagination.
The GOP figured out a long time ago that vague accusations can be some of the most difficult to counter, especially in terms that defy easy definition. Liberal, leftist, inclusive, diverse, etc. They managed to make all of them slurs even though there's nothing inherently wrong with any of them. The "wrong" often exists only in one's mind.
Trump also hates to be mocked, and there's little he can do to counter the accusation. In part, of course, because he's undeniably weird.
I find it funny that a seemingly effective tool seems to have emerged from nowhere. It's like things that go viral -- no one can easily predict what will work and what won't. Sometimes, the best are happy accidents.
(Yes, that's a hat-tip to Bob Ross. 
)
It's unlikely to be in play for a few reasons.
Mail-in voting is highly restricted: over 65, sick/disabled, out of the county for early voting and election day, giving birth within three weeks, or in jail. Everyone else votes in person.
Voter apathy and turnout are serious problems here in Texas. We're working on them, but they're a big challenge.
Texas is also a relatively young state, 3rd lowest median age in the country. Younger voters have lower turnout, of course.
Polls can be misleading for all of these reasons. "Likely voters" aren't as likely to vote as in most other states. The lower the turnout, the better it is for the GOP.
This article from 2018 is a good summary, and the circumstances haven't changed significantly since then, with the exception of further restrictions put in place by Abbott in 2020.
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/02/23/texas-voter-turnout-electorate-explainer/
Yep.
DU is hyper-focused on Trump, Trump, and more Trump. People act as though attacking him would be something new, instead of something that Democrats have been doing constantly since 2015. They're convinced that if we just beat voters over the head with how bad Trump is for the 4,000th time, this one will definitely be the one that sinks in.
It has to be more than that, because that's clearly not working. We need to balance calling out Trump with getting across to voters exactly what we'll do to improve their lives in myriad ways. The focus needs to be on the latter, because we need our side to get out and vote way more than we need to spend endless resources trying to court the tiny fraction of the populace that's still (inexplicably) undecided. If our message reaches them, great. But the focus needs to be on motivating Democrats and left-leaning independents to get to the polls.
I'm confident that Democratic leadership understands this and will act accordingly. The VP's speech today was a good balance, and she's just getting started.
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Gender: Do not displayMember since: Fri Oct 1, 2004, 09:32 PM
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