Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn’t stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.
And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party’s pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn’t afraid to say it in public.
The difference between Trump and Harris isn’t policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone’s common humanity.
Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn’t stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.
And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party’s pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn’t afraid to say it in public.
The difference between Trump and Harris isn’t policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone’s common humanity.